by S. A. Hunter
She couldn’t worry about the unknown patient right then. She couldn’t do anything to help him. She had to watch out for Gran, who, she was pretty sure, had fallen asleep by now. Gran had a flashlight, too--a small one tucked into bed with her--but if she were asleep when the Shadowman came, she might not wake up to use it. She might not wake up at all. Mary pushed that thought away. Gran knew what she was doing. Everything might seem up to chance, but she often had things all figured out.
She let out a long, silent sigh. The waiting was killing her. She settled back into the closet and tried to relax. She wished she had something to do. Chowder continued to gently snore.
It was dark. Too dark. Mary jerked and realized her eyes had been closed for more than a blink. She’d dozed off. Heart pounding, she looked through the slats of the closet. Everything looked the same. She was about to push the folding doors open to check Gran when there was a soft chittering sound. She froze and listened harder.
The chittering sounded like insects or electronics. It was hard to decide which one. It made her ears feel itchy. Her eyes scanned the room back and forth, but she couldn’t see any change. The chittering grew louder. She gave Chowder a little shake. He snuffled a bit.
She caught her breath when a dark form rose up between the beds. It shied away from Mr. White’s bed and leaned over Gran’s. “Chowder, wake up!” she hissed. Goosebumps erupted up her arms as what she could only describe metaphorically as a shiver dropped from the stuffed dog. A low growl sounded at her feet. Chowder was awake.
The Shadowman was rising over Gran’s bed. Mary cradled Chowder’s body as she hefted the flashlight. She could do this. She grabbed the edge of the closet door and wrenched it open. She clicked on the flashlight and aimed it at the Shadowman. The light showed wispy tendrils like steam rising from Gran. The Shadowman jerked when the flashlight beam hit it. Its red eyes met hers.
“Get away from her!” she harshly whispered, feeling stupid for having to keep quiet and afraid someone would hear her.
Chowder began barking loud and harshly, like dogs do when they know something threatening was in their territory. She’d never heard him bark like that. He sounded twice his size. It was a good thing only she could hear him.
The Shadowman swooped up the wall and across the ceiling. She flinched and almost fell back into the closet. Her beam shot wildly around the room as she tried to keep up with it, but it was moving too fast.
She felt panic start to creep up on her. They’d expected the Shadowman to flee instantly, like before, but it was only dodging her and going around the room. It swooped from ceiling to walls. It was coming closer and closer, but she had trouble keeping up with its erratic movements. Its weird chittering sound was getting louder and deeper. It was setting her teeth on edge. She had the suspicion it was trying to get behind her. She didn’t want that. Neither Gran nor Mr. White had stirred.
“Gran!” she cried hoarsely. Maybe if they hit it with two flashlights, it would finally go. Chowder was still snarling and barking. His small, vicious presence was comforting, but she didn’t know if the ghost dog could touch the Shadowman, let alone bite him.
“Gran!” She took a chance and flashed the light across her face, hoping it might rouse her. She was afraid to move from the closet’s entrance. The Shadowman moved too quickly.
Mr. White roused with a snuffle. “What’s going on?” he said, blearily looking around.
“It’s here. Can you wake up Gran?”
The old man stiffened, and his eyes shot to the ceiling where Mary’s flashlight beam was streaking back and forth after the Shadowman. “Helena!” he shouted. Mary winced. He was going to draw the nurses.
Gran jerked upright and then winced as her foot shifted in the sling. “Get your flashlight out and zap that thing!” Mr. White ordered. Gran snatched back the covers and whipped the flashlight out. She aimed it at the Shadowman, and two beams of light were now darting around the ceiling. That seemed to do it. The Shadowman slid down the wall.
“He’s gone into the duct! Chowder, go get him! Get him!” Gran said sweeping the light toward the grate. The ghost dog ran, and Mary heard the tapping of paws in the vent.
“Well, go after them!” Gran said, pointing with her flashlight at the wall.
Mary froze. “What?”
Mr. White’s eyebrows shot up, and his jaw dropped. “Helena, be reasonable!”
“How else are you going to follow them?”
“I thought Chowder would come find me when he tracked the Shadowman to its hiding place.”
“And how were you going to get there? If any hospital staff sees you, they’ll stop you.”
“But, but…” Mary’s eyes darted back and forth from Gran to the vent. Go in there? After the Shadowman? Seriously?
“Is it even big enough for her to get through?” Mr. White asked.
“Yes, I looked. She should be able to squeeze in.”
Mary went between the beds and crouched down to look at the vent. It was smallish, but she could probably squeeze through. Gran couldn’t have, though. When had she been looking at the vents and judging who could fit?
“I need a screwdriver to open it,” she said with a sense of relief. She did not want to go in there.
“Oh give me my purse,” Gran said. She sounded irritated. Mary shot her a look. Mr. White had said those touched by the Shadowman became irritable. Gran appeared to be proving that fact. Mary retrieved her purse and handed it over. She rummaged inside it and pulled out a small screwdriver.
“See if this will work,” she said.
Mary took the small screwdriver unhappily. Her eyes met Mr. White’s. He was shaking his head. “Helena, what are you doing?”
“Helping Mary track down the Shadowman. What does it look like?” she snapped. Mary ducked down and set to work on the screws. She wasn’t sure if Gran was in her right mind or not, but she wasn’t willing to question her in her current mood. Mr. White, however, was.
“Because I wonder if you’re helping her track this thing down or forcing her to.”
Gran ignored his comment, though it seemed to have soured her mood more. “Mary, how much longer?”
“I’m almost done.” She could faintly hear Chowder still going through the vent. The third screw came out, and she set to work on the last.
“Hurry up. You’re taking too long.”
The last screw fell out, and she tugged the vent loose. She started to climb in.
“What do you think you’re doing?”
She paused, her heart lifting. Maybe Gran hadn’t really meant it. Maybe this was all some sort of weird test or lesson, and she’d call off the pursuit and tell Mary that she’d never ask her to do something so dangerous and foolhardy.
“You need to take Chowder’s body to let him keep up with the Shadowman and a flashlight to ward off the fiend. Really, Mary, where’s your head?”
Her face felt tight as she took the two items and set them in the vent. “Sorry,” she mumbled.
“Helena!” Mr. White shouted.
“Will you shut up! You’ll draw the nurses. Mary, get a move on.”
“I’m moving.”
It was with a small sense of relief that she wiggled into the duct and away from Gran. As she set the vent back, she wasn’t sure, but she thought she heard Gran say, “Be careful.”
The caper movies always made climbing through air ducts seem easy. With upbeat music and a humorous montage, the movie dare-doers would scamper through the ducts with ease. After going ten feet, Mary could sagely say that crawling through air ducts was not fun, that she’d highly recommend knee pads, and she wished there was a montage to speed things along. She didn’t like it in there, not one bit.
The vent wasn’t very tall. Instead of crawling on her hands and knees like a baby, she was on her stomach, pushing and pulling herself through the duct. There wasn’t enough room for her to turn around, either. If the Shadowman stopped and waited for her, there was nothing she could do. The more
she thought about the whole situation, the worse it seemed.
She passed vents into other rooms. Most were dark and silent-- plenty of places for the Shadowman to hide or feed--but she knew it wasn’t in any of the darkened rooms. Chowder was still ahead of her.
Even after seeing the Shadowman feed a couple of times now, she still didn’t understand what it did. She figured Gran had been affected by the Shadowman, at least she hoped that’s what had made her so snippy and cranky. She'd rarely seen her that way before.
That thought made her pause. Mr. White may claim to never have been attacked by the Shadowman, but how would he know? Gran seemed to accept his attitude as normal, but maybe he’d been a victim, too.
The possibility of Mr. White having been a victim without anyone having noticed reminded her of Kyle. He'd been extremely confrontational with her when they'd first met. When she'd asked him why he'd hated her at first, all he'd been able to stammer out was that Vicky had said some stuff and obviously the cheerleader hadn't liked her, and he'd wanted to get in good with Vicky, so he’d been mean to her. And then he'd been possessed by a homicidal ghost and no one had noticed.
There was a moral in there about being nice and caring, but Mary didn't put much stock in it. If everyone was sickeningly sweet to each other, the world would implode. Anyway, it didn't matter, because even if someone was the vilest form of human being, there were still suckers who would climb into ventilation ducts to help them.
A distant bark broke into her downward spiral of thoughts. Chowder was still out there, and he couldn’t be that far ahead of her. He couldn’t roam more than ten yards away from his body, which she still carried. She started crawling again and eventually came to a vertical duct. She could not imagine lowering herself into it but peered down anyway to take a look. It was pitch black. She shined the flashlight down. The beam bounced off the aluminum walls without skimming over any shadows.
“Chowder!” she whispered.
There was no answer. She slithered backwards to the nearest vent and pushed on the grill. It was screwed in from the other side like Gran’s, but it looked like it opened onto a supply closet. She pushed with her hands as hard as she could, but it didn’t budge. She maneuvered herself so her boots were aligned with it and tried kicking instead. The duct was too narrow to build up any sort of swing, though. After a few halfhearted kicks, she pressed her feet against it and pushed with her legs. With a terrible protesting shriek, the vent popped out from the wall. She scrambled out, scraping herself a few times. The scrapes hurt.
This was such a stupid idea. She should’ve just snuck down the hallway instead. It wasn’t like Gran could’ve done anything to make her go into the vent. She kept expecting the supply closet door to open and for someone to appear who would escort her out of the hospital. She actually wanted that to happen. She was tired, she needed sleep, and she had no clue what she was doing. Being sent home would be a blessing, but she couldn’t give up and just leave. Gran would have her hide. The whole situation sucked.
“Arf! Arf!” Great, Chowder was back. At least, the Shadowman hadn’t eaten him.
“Where have you been?”
The next bark she heard was from the other side of the supply door. Funny how he didn’t seem to expect her to crawl through the ducts. She peeked into the hall. It was empty. Chowder barked again, and she heard his paws tapping toward the stairwell. She followed him down three flights to the basement. At the bottom of the stairwell, there was a metal door with a sign that read “Authorized Personnel Only”, but when she tried the handle, it opened. She wasn’t sure if that was good or bad luck.
The door led into a narrow passage. It was dimly lit, and the walls here were made of cinder block. Chowder barked from the end of the passage, where it opened up. She walked forward and found herself in a machine room. Pipes snaked up to the ceiling and large air handling units grumbled all around her. It wasn’t well lit. There were lots of shadows.
She turned on the flashlight and started aiming it into all the dark corners. “Chowder?”
He began growling and the chittering began again. “Chowder, come here!”
She was supposed to just check out where the Shadowman went and see if she could find out anything else about it, but Chowder seemed to have a different plan. By the sounds of his growls, he’d really like to find out if ghosts could bite Shadowmen.
She crept further into the mechanical room. She wished she could see ghosts, because trying to track Chowder’s growls as they reverberated off the metal pipes was not proving easy. She circled round a dark boiler and came to the back corner of the room. She aimed her flashlight into the corner, and red eyes flashed in the beam. She quickly dropped the beam to the floor.
“Chowder, come here.”
The ghost dog kept growling.
“Chowder, get in your body. Get in your body now!”
She set the dog’s body down on the floor. It was a punishment measure at home. When he became too unruly or hyper, she would send him to cool off in his body. It was the incorporeal version of being sent to the dog house. Chowder whined. “Body,” she repeated, pointing at it.
Chowder whined one more time but went into his body. She picked it back up and tucked it under her arm. The chittering died down and was replaced with a purring sound. If she hadn’t known it was coming from the Shadowman in the dark corner, she would have confused it with the mechanical sounds.
Without the light shining on him, she couldn’t distinguish the Shadowman from the rest of the darkness. All right, what now? She was alone in a room with it. What was her next move? She decided to go with simple. “Hello?”
It didn’t respond.
She didn’t know if the Shadowman could understand her, but talking was all she had. “You shouldn’t be here. You need to go somewhere else. The people here are sick and weak. Feeding off them isn’t right. You’re doing them a lot of harm.” She didn’t know where else would be better. The whole feeding off people thing was bad anywhere, but doing it to the sick and weak had to be worse.
“Do you understand me? Do you think you could go somewhere else?”
Still no response. Should she leave? She wanted to pretty badly, but what about Vicky, Gran, and everyone else in the hospital? They couldn’t leave.
“You’re hurting people here. If you don’t go away, we’ll have to stop you.” Just don’t ask her how. “I mean it. People are getting upset, and they’ll come after you.”
Nothing. The purring sound hadn’t changed while she spoke. It hadn’t understood a thing she'd said. This was useless. It wasn’t human and had never been human; reasoning with it was futile.
Since it seemed content to stay in its dark corner, she panned the flashlight around again. Everything looked normal. There were several large boilers, air-handling units, water heaters, and pipes everywhere. She tried to look for something small that could be an anchor for a Shadowman, if Shadowmen had anchors. They really were flying blind with this whole Shadowman thing. Flying blind in the dark. Nothing could go wrong. Obviously.
Chowder growled in her arms. She turned and stumbled backwards in surprise. The Shadowman had slipped closer to her and had stretched out his dark hand towards her.
“No!” She hit him with the flashlight beam and began backing away.
The Shadowman’s hand dropped and it swooped away, but then began zigzagging back toward her like earlier in Gran’s and Mr. White’s hospital room. The chittering sound started again.
Chapter 9
Ignore the Dead
It was near to impossible to keep the flashlight beam on the Shadowman. The beam was too small, and the Shadowman moved too fast. She decided to make a dash for it, back to the stairwell.
As she ran, she held the flashlight over her shoulder and blindly swept the beam behind her in an attempt to keep the creature back, but the chittering sound kept pace with her. Chowder continued to snarl, but he did so from within his body, tucked safely under her arm.
She reached the stairwell door, but her tug slammed her into it. Locked? She didn’t understand how that could’ve happened. This was definitely bad luck, and she decided that the door being unlocked earlier had been bad luck as well. She should never have gone in. Next time she'd obey the official signs--if there was a next time. She pulled as hard as she could. The door didn’t even rattle. She turned back. The Shadowman was lurking at the mouth of the passage. The weak fluorescent lights began to flicker, and the darkness between each flicker lengthened.
She jumped when a shiver skimmed her leg. Chowder had dropped from his body. “Chowder, get back here!”
The little dog barked sharply, and the Shadowman hissed. She saw its red eyes go to a point on the floor between them. So it could see ghosts. She wasn’t sure if that meant anything, but at least she knew where Chowder was. The Shadowman turned around and began making a grinding sound that must have been its version of a growl. It was focused on Chowder and obviously did not like the ghost dog. She crept back down the passage. Chowder continued barking at the other end of the hall. When she was about six feet from the Shadowman’s back, she aimed the flashlight and hit the power button. The beam hit it square in the back. As it hissed and swooped out of the way, Chowder's barks receded into the mechanical room. She rushed to the end of the passage and peered around the machinery. Where had they gone?
A flash of light caught her eye. She turned and saw the edge of a swinging door as it shut. Chowder barked again. He’d found a way out for her! Scanning the room for the Shadowman, she ran to the hidden door.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw something swoop at her. As she pivoted to avoid it, she lost her balance and fell to the chilly cement floor. Tears sprang to her eyes as her backside hit cement, but she held onto the flashlight and waved it around. The Shadowman swooped back into the ceiling shadows. She scrambled to her feet and swept the flashlight blindly all around her. She pushed through the swinging doors and ran down another corridor. Dim fluorescent lights ran along the center of the ceiling. Another set of swinging door flapped at the other end.
