Her Last Whisper

by Karen Robards

  She shot a sideways glare at him.

  Tony looked unconvinced. “Are you sure?”

  “Yes,” she said, and played her trump card. “I am a doctor, remember. I know when I need medical attention.”

  That seemed to settle it. There were no more protests about rushing for the elevators from him.

  With Tony running along on one side of her, Michael on the other, and Pugh panting as he brought up the rear, they overtook the stretchers bearing Creason and, she presumed, the trustee just as the stretchers cleared the air-lock type security doors and were about to be loaded onto the service elevator beyond them. Besides fighting back against the very real possibility that she could lose her lunch at any moment, Charlie was so afraid that the hunter would reappear that she could hardly stand still. Her skin crawled in terrible anticipation. If she could have shoved Michael ahead of her and onto that elevator, she would’ve.

  Because the warden was with them, they made it through the security doors in record time. With two stretchers and the accompanying paramedics, orderlies, and guards, the service elevator, which was the size of a small room, was a tight fit even before Charlie, Tony, and Pugh (and Michael, who took up no appreciable space) crowded aboard. Had Pugh not been with them, they wouldn’t have been allowed on.

  For that matter, if it hadn’t been for the threat posed by the hunter, Charlie wouldn’t have gotten on. Just thinking about how badly wrong this could go sent cold dread pumping through her veins. If the hunter returned now, they had no chance of running, no room to fight. Plus, there was the whole where-are-the-evil-spirits thing.

  The memory of how Creason and the trustee had behaved in the infirmary remained all too vivid. If the evil spirits were still present inside their bodies, she really didn’t want to find out while she was locked in a metal box with them.

  But under the circumstances there was no choice. The elevator was the fastest—the only fast—way out of the prison.

  Michael must have been having similar misgivings, because the look he gave Charlie as he settled into place beside her was grim. “If something goes wrong, you leave it to me to handle,” he ordered her.

  Yeah, right.

  Of course, she couldn’t say it out loud, but she gave him a look that she was pretty sure he understood, because he said, “I mean it, damn it.”

  The doors were closing behind them. Just before they clanged shut, Charlie caught a glimpse of the third stretcher, the one carrying Spivey’s body, as it came down the hall toward the security doors. With the next run of the service elevator it would be taken to the basement, which housed the prison morgue, for autopsy, she knew.

  She shivered.

  Then she thought about what had happened to the real Walter Spivey, the part of him that still existed, his soul, and shivered even more. Spookville was a horrible place. What waited for Spivey beyond it was, she felt sure, even more horrible.

  She had no idea if the hunter would come back for Michael, or how far it could track him if it did. All she knew was that the more distance they could put between him and it, the safer she would feel.

  “How’s the headache?” Tony asked her under cover of a conversation Pugh was having with the guards, and she looked at him and answered, “Better.”

  “You might want to sheathe your weapon, Van Helsing,” Michael said drily, nodding at her clenched fist, which, she only then remembered, still had a death grip on the horseshoe, which was perfectly visible at her side. It took her a second, but then she recalled that Van Helsing was a monster hunter from the Dracula movies and realized that he was comparing her to that fearsome warrior. Despite everything, she almost succumbed to a smile. “Dudley’s been giving it the eye.”

  Charlie was reluctant to let go of it, but examining Creason required that she have her uninjured hand free. With a quick glance at Tony—he wasn’t looking at the horseshoe right then, if he ever had been, but had instead been drawn into the conversation between Pugh and the guards—she shoved the horseshoe back into her pocket, making sure it was positioned so that she could grab it again easily if necessary, which she prayed it wouldn’t be. Then she pushed her jitters over the possible return of the hunter to the back of her mind—she had to if she was to remain objective—and turned her attention to the victims as the elevator began its descent with a lurch and a groan. It moved slowly, with a grinding sound that might have been worrisome under other circumstances. The only thing that Charlie cared about at the moment was its nerve-racking lack of speed, but that was out of her control.

  Both stretchers came equipped with IV poles. The liquid in the bags attached to them, which Charlie guessed to be saline, sloshed as they moved; a steady drip ran down the plastic tubing into each patient’s arm. The trustee lay as motionless as Creason, but it was Creason’s stretcher that she was wedged in beside and Creason who was her primary focus. Charlie glanced at his blood pressure monitor: the numbers were low, but high enough to perfuse the brain and other vital organs.

  “What killed Walter Spivey?” Charlie asked Pugh, breaking in on his conversation without preamble.

  As she glanced at the warden, her gaze encountered Tony’s. He was frowning thoughtfully at her. She had no idea why, and no time to question it.

  “That’s what I’m hoping you can tell me. The same thing that sickened these men, I presume.” Pugh gestured at Creason and the trustee. “After the infirmary was shut down, a guard found Spivey dead in bed in the locked room they put him in after he attacked you. He was still in restraints. So what we’ve got to account for is two unconscious, one dead—it has to be from the same cause.”

  The thing was, she only saw the newly, violently dead. Ergo, whatever had killed Spivey had involved an act of violence. Exactly what, she had no idea.

  “Not necessarily.” Charlie was finally able to bring herself to look directly at Creason. He seemed smaller than he did when he was up walking around, and infinitely frailer. His eyes were closed. His sharp-featured face was utterly white, as if all the blood had leached from it. The impression he gave was that of a husk, from which a vital inner component was missing. He was breathing, lightly and rapidly, through parted lips that were tinged with blue.

  Cyanosis. She glanced quickly at his hands, which rested on top of the blanket that was tucked beneath his armpits. There was evidence of low blood saturation of oxygen there as well: the tips of his fingers were slightly blue.

  That her unfailingly kind colleague should be lying there like that made her feel sick. And afraid. Very, very afraid. Spirit possession of human beings was something that she had never before encountered. The mere thought was horrible; the consequences to the victims were, she feared, catastrophic.

  A blood-chilling thought occurred: If Michael had not intervened, would she have shared her fellow physician’s fate? Would the second spirit have invaded her body instead of the trustee’s? She had been closer …

  She was suddenly, icily sure that she had barely missed sharing Creason’s fate.

  I’m so sorry, she said to Creason silently. Guilt over what had happened to him washed over her in a wave. If I hadn’t been distracted by the voices in my head; if I hadn’t gone to the infirmary …

  “Not your fault,” Michael told her, and as she glanced at him in quick surprise she realized that he was once again reading her thoughts in her face. “You aren’t responsible for the whole damned universe, you know.”

  Under the circumstances there was nothing she could say to that, so she didn’t. Instead, she started to lay a cautious hand on Creason’s arm—it was bare, his lab coat and shirt having been removed, she presumed to allow for a medical examination in the infirmary after he had fainted—but the paramedic at his side blocked her access with an outflung arm.

  “I’m sorry, ma’am, but until we know what’s wrong with them—”

  “This is Dr. Stone. She’s going to be taking a look at these men for me,” Pugh said curtly, and the paramedic stood down.

  “If i
t’s something contagious—” Tony objected.

  “I’m almost certain it’s not,” Charlie replied.

  This time she was able to put her hand on Creason’s arm. She did it cautiously, because part of her was terrified that his eyes would pop open and he would once again be the terrifying zombie-esque creature that had come after her in the infirmary.

  But he didn’t move or respond to her touch in any way. He wasn’t a muscular man, but the biceps beneath her hand felt almost unnaturally flaccid. His skin was cold: cold as a corpse’s was the analogy that popped into her mind. She barely managed to repress a shudder. Her stomach gave a threatening heave, and this time it wasn’t only because of her recent too-close encounter with an unfamiliar spirit.

  His pulse, like his breathing, was fast and shallow.

  Leaning over the stretcher—“You want to be careful there, babe,” Michael warned, and she knew he harbored the same fear she did: that the evil spirit was still there, to be roused at any time—she pinched Creason’s earlobe to assess motor response to a pain stimuli. He didn’t so much as twitch an eyelash. Then, half-afraid of what she might see, she slowly, carefully, opened an eyelid. The pupils were dilated and fixed.

  Not good.

  “Could I borrow your stethoscope, please?” Charlie asked the closest paramedic, in a voice so calm, so controlled, that no one would ever guess that her stomach was now roiling and her knees were as shaky as Jell-O. The paramedic passed the stethoscope over, and Charlie draped it around her own neck.

  When she listened to the heart, she frowned.

  This was light-years beyond a faint.

  “Well?” Pugh asked impatiently.

  “It’s not a disease, and it’s not contagious.” Charlie handed the stethoscope back to the paramedic, to whom she said, “He needs to get to the hospital as quickly as possible. Tell whoever’s on duty”—it was just after five o’clock, when the hospital dealt with a changing of shifts that could sometimes result in treatment delays—“that these patients need an MRI of the head and chest area as soon as possible.”

  The paramedic nodded. Charlie glanced at the numbered buttons by the door, which lit up one by one as they progressed downward: they were on the second floor, with just one more to go.

  “Then what’s wrong with him?” Pugh demanded.

  “I can’t say for sure. My best guess is, again, some kind of anesthetic or toxic gas such as carbon monoxide. We’ll know more when we get the results of the MRI. And the toxicology reports, but of course they take weeks.”

  “You must have been exposed to the same thing.” Tony was looking at her intently.

  “You have been behaving very oddly, Dr. Stone,” Pugh chimed in. He glanced around the elevator, and she got the feeling that he didn’t want to be too specific in front of the paramedics, etc. “What you were doing in your office when I came in—it was unusual, to say the least.”

  “The ants you thought you saw.” Tony’s tone was carefully neutral. “Might have been a hallucination.”

  “This is where you ask ’em, ‘Do you believe in ghosts?’ ” Michael said.

  “In retrospect, I suppose it’s possible.” Ignoring Michael, Charlie replied to Tony, then glanced at Pugh to include him in the rest of her response. “If I was exposed to anything, I was unaware of it happening and I can’t tell you the source.”

  “You were in the infirmary with the other victims, at approximately the same time they were affected.” Tony said it as if he was seeking confirmation.

  Charlie nodded. “Yes.”

  Pugh said sharply to the guards, “We’re going to be evacuating the infirmary. Only one of you travels to the hospital with the prisoner. The others …”

  “How bad a shape is he in?” Michael asked, nodding at Creason, and Charlie quit listening to the general conversation to focus on him. Meeting his eyes, she gave a slight shake of her head. Truth was, she had no idea what the prognosis was for a human being who had suffered possession by an evil spirit. Going by the physical signs she had just observed, it wasn’t good.

  She didn’t know if Creason would survive. She didn’t know to what degree he might be impaired. She did know that there was nothing she could do for him. Even an exorcism—supposing she knew how to perform one perfectly and could do it there in the elevator with the meager tools she had on hand—wouldn’t work: she was as certain as it was possible to be that the evil spirit was no longer inside him. What she had just examined was the damaged vessel the spirit had left behind. She could only hope that it was strong enough to heal.

  “I’m guessing that the hunter took the spirits that were in these two before he came for me,” Michael said thoughtfully. “That would account for their fainting, and the state they’re in.”

  Charlie’s brow crinkled. She couldn’t ask the question that scenario planted in her mind: So then the hunter went back and killed Spivey? Because something, or someone, did.

  The elevator reached the ground floor.

  Following the stretchers, which had priority clearance through the metal detectors and heavy steel doors, it took just a few minutes to get outside. It was a beautiful late September day, and even in the covered loading-dock area where the ambulances waited, the crisp smell of autumn drifted through the heavier scent of exhaust fumes. She still felt like vomiting from her close encounter with Spivey, but she was managing to control the impulse—practice makes perfect—and she thought she had it under control. Refusing Tony’s suggestion that she go in the ambulance with the victims to be examined at the hospital herself, casting a wary glance all around as she stepped briskly out from beneath the overhang just in case the cloudless blue sky should harbor a terrible surprise—i.e., the hunter—Charlie headed across the gleaming black asphalt toward her car. Feeling hideously exposed now that they were out in the open air, she hunched her shoulders a little in instinctive self-defense. Then she tried to convince herself that there was no way a hunter would attack in broad daylight in such a public spot, but almost instantly gave up: the hard truth was, she had no way of knowing the parameters of what a monster from another dimension might do. For Tony’s benefit, she took a few ostentatiously deep breaths to clear out whatever noxious substance she had supposedly been exposed to as she beelined for her car.

  Wallens Ridge was a huge complex, a level six maximum security private prison with 700 inmates and about half that number of guards. Eight modern, multi-story buildings that looked almost white in the bright sunshine squatted on the blasted-off top of a mountain, where they were ringed by multiple chain-link fences and rows of shiny silver razor wire. Fortunately, her office was in the same building as the infirmary, so she was able to exit with the stretchers and be close to her car. The west parking lot—that was where she parked—was the overflow lot. Today it was full, and busy. Tuesday was visiting day, visiting hours were just about over, and vehicles of all descriptions were backing out of spaces and chugging toward the exits.

  “You feeling better?” Tony asked cautiously after a moment. He was keeping pace beside her, escorting her to her car. She’d been a little short with him after he’d tried to insist that she go in the ambulance to the hospital to get checked out. But she had been so distressed over what had happened to Creason and the others, so unnerved by the continuing threat posed by the hunter, so frightened for Michael, to say nothing of how bad she felt from the physical symptoms associated with Spivey’s appearance and the voices, that patience had momentarily deserted her and she’d ended by snapping out a flat, “I’m not going to the hospital,” thus ending the conversation.

  Even now, she couldn’t escape the extra layer of anxiety that Tony’s presence added. The time was at hand: she had to decide whether she was going with him or not, whether she was going to answer Kaminsky’s call for help or not. Just thinking about the pain Kaminsky must be in made Charlie’s heart shiver. If she could help stop a madman and find Kaminsky’s sister then that was what she absolutely needed to do. But the thought of g
etting too close to another active serial killer made it suddenly hard to breathe. And she had to factor in Michael’s injuries …

  “Yes, thanks. I told you, I just needed some fresh air. If I was exposed to something, it’s out of my system now.” She really liked Tony so much; if only she could get some of the complications in her life straightened out, there was real potential in their relationship. He was exactly the kind of man she had always wanted, the kind of man a woman could build a future with. “I’m sorry if I was cross earlier. It’s been a difficult day.”

  “That’s all right.” He grinned unexpectedly. With his lean dark face and twinkling eyes, he looked so handsome that Charlie couldn’t help but return his smile. “You’re cute when you’re cranky.”

  “That was just fucking lame,” the number one complication in her life observed with disgust. “He’s trying to get in your pants, and that’s the best line he can come up with?”

  He was walking beside her, too. Since they’d exited the elevators he hadn’t said a word: like her, she thought, he’d been busy keeping an eye out for the hunter. She cast him a withering glance, and then her gaze lingered, arrested. It was only now that she got a good look at him in unforgiving daylight that she became aware that he really looked pretty rough. For a man (ghost) with what was ordinarily a healthy tan, the grayish pallor of his face was alarming. So were the new lines around his mouth of what she thought had to be pain, and the deepening shadows beneath his eyes. He looked almost … haggard. The beautiful bone structure of his face was all the more apparent because his skin seemed to be pulled tight over it. His lips were pale. And his eyes were still that disconcerting fathomless black.

  A fresh thrill of fear ran down her spine. For the first time it occurred to her that, even if the hunter didn’t return, there was no guarantee that Michael would be all right.

  “You keep looking at me all big-eyed and worried like that, and I’m going to start thinking you’re crazy in love with me,” he drawled, then as she stiffened in outrage he nodded at Tony. “There Dudley is, waiting for you to say something. You know, about how cute you look when you’re cranky.”