The dead are in no rush. I was, though, so I pulled the Odyssey into the parking spot reserved for emergency vehicles.
Lesson 111: Even when you’re in a hurry, time spent doing recon is seldom wasted. I looked around before I got out of the van.
Nope. No demons. Not yet.
Thunder rolled overhead. The temperature hovered around freezing. Through sheets of cold rain I saw a couple of women across the street hurrying from doorway to doorway.
Theirs wasn’t the sort of long stride running that suggested, “Oh, my God! Monsters are coming! Run for your freakin’ lives!” Instead, their short-steps-in-high-heels urgency suggested cold water was running down somebody’s neck. If demons were chasing them, it’s a sure bet they’d lose the high heels.
I stepped out of the bus with my sword umbrella and, for a change, actually used the umbrella. I’d loved summer and autumn in New York. With winter sweeping in, it was time to start wishing my adventures with ghosts and demons happened in Florida’s heat. On the other hand, adding gators, pythons, spiders and the Florida Marlins to a demon war would be too much aggravation to handle.
Two nurses in light blue scrubs were visible through the front windows of the hospice. They stood at the front desk, chatting and laughing. The Normies suspected nothing and there was no sign of danger. It seemed like a normal Tuesday night. But something had freaked out the misty wistfuls.
I pulled the gurney out of the back of the bus, yanking on the red and black handles to get the wheels to drop. At the hospice’s front door I punched a fat red button and both inner and outer glass doors slid aside.
So much glass. What easy feeding this place would be when the demons arrived.
Or did demons prefer healthy meat? Maybe they’d leave the dying alone in favor of tastier, fresher, free range organic kills. Maybe they’d feast at the yoga centers and juice bars first. I would if I were them.
Maybe, when D-Day finally arrived, the demons would ignore the warehouses for the aged. Instead, the monsters would chase the young doctors and nurses down the street and the patients left behind in the hospice would die of other things: starvation, loneliness, despair, diaper rash and bedsores.
Lesson 112: There are far worse things than dying by the sword and those terrible things are happening every day and every night, right now, in every city and wherever you are. Horrors abound behind closed doors. When D-Day comes, every window will be shattered and every door will open. All the delusions that let us think everything will work out and all will be well? Those hollow lies will be exposed. Flimsy illusions will be shattered.
Lesson 113: Loosen up and have a drink. Relax and dance and have a laugh now. Everything, everything, everything gets worse. All that matters is what you do now because all legacies are quickly forgotten.
With these happy thoughts in mind, I offered up the transfer papers at the front desk.
An older nurse wearing Minnie Mouse scrubs emerged from an office to take them. “My, God, girl! You look like a drowned rat! Didn’t your mother teach you to come in out of the rain?”
“Eldora Clemnan,” I said.
“Yes, yes. Did you have to change a tire on the way over — ”
“I had to change an attitude. With a little violence applied just right, it takes much less time than changing a tire.”
“Um?”
“Mrs. Eldora Clemnan,” I said. “Today, if you can manage it. I’m in a hurry.”
“Um…okay. This way. You are from Castille, right?”
I pulled my ID card from the breast pocket of my suit and followed her, pulling the gurney behind me. “Anything unusual happen tonight?”
The nurse glanced over her shoulder. “No, not really. Should there have?”
“No. Fear the unusual. Boring is safe.”
She looked nervous. I could tell I was freaking her out, but I didn’t care. I didn’t like Choir business crossing over with Castille business. Last time that happened, a bad guy, a good guy and a demon had died. That was the day I castrated the demon and earned my title. I got demon blood in my mouth and that tastes like burnt cauliflower and battery acid.
(Ew. Not that I castrated the demon with my teeth. Gross. Read The Haunting Lessons if you missed that story.)
As I followed the nurse down the hall, her white sneakers squeaked. That brought up some unhappy memories from the mental hospital I quickly pushed away.
I’d been to much nicer hospices that were designed to look more like old people’s houses. The more expensive warehouses for old people are fully carpeted in the public areas with macrame art and framed quilts lining each hallway.
The best hospices look like no one’s home, but they do contain echoes of the familiar: Lawrence Welk pumped over the speakers and old, reassuring movies on the TVs. Retirement communities for the able-bodied have a lighter, high school feeling to them. Old folks homes for people who need more assistance are time capsules, frozen in younger, happier times where news from the contemporary outside world is not welcome.
Medical centers and residences built for kids with cancer are painted with cheerful colors. The reception areas and playrooms of those places are fierce with bright yellows and reds meant to assure newcomers, “Feels like the inside of a McDonalds, doesn’t it? Don’t worry! You’re going to beat the mutated cells in your brain that are trying to grow a liver inside your little skull!”
The treatment rooms for Stage 3s are painted soothing cream colors that make me think of the first cup of coffee in the morning.
Stage 4 rooms are painted calming shades of azure that often include murals of rainbows and unicorns. When I came to pick up those dead kids, the unicorns flying away into a blue sky felt like a metaphor for medicine’s broken promises.
Someone cried out, far down a hall, breaking my lugubrious reverie. “What was that?”
“Oh, the thunder has some of them riled up,” the nurse said. “They’re saying we’re going to have snow and lightning tonight, if you can believe it.”
“That’s a thing,” I said. “I can believe it.”
They, I thought. They are always saying things. Who are They? How many of They know what’s coming? Can They even imagine what demon teeth look like when the fangs snap a neck?
I wondered if the NYPD had a contingency plan for when the demons invade our dimension. Maybe that’s the real reason every police force in America looks like they were ready to ride in a desert war zone.
“The patients don’t like bad weather,” the nurse said. “There are studies that say full moons don’t matter, but I’ve been a nurse for years. I’ve worked nightshifts in insane asylums. People get up and move around more during a full moon. I don’t care what the studies say.”
“I’ve been in an insane asylum,” I said. “I believe it.”
She looked back at me again and cleared her throat. Then she tittered nervously when she decided I was kidding. “Our people can’t get up and wander, of course,” she said. “Otherwise I’d have to have a full staff day and night.”
Mercy’s End still had the drab feel of an old hospital. A fresh coat of a feel good shade of paint couldn’t fix it. The linoleum was yellowed and cracked here and there. Worse, this hospice smelled like every nursing home I’d ever been in. Whoever sells the industrial cleaning products for these places must be a billionaire. That same cloying odor of lemon and bleach mixes with despair and permeates the air. Every breath is like taking toxic sadness into your lungs.
The weather had kept the patients’ families away. It should have been quiet, but as we turned a corner down a corridor, several residents were awake and calling out.
“It’s coming! It’s coming!” an old woman warned.
“Horns! Horns like antlers!” A man called back.
I knew what they were talking about. As always, before any battle was about to begin, I desperately wanted to pee. Public speaking hits me the same way.
Down the hall, red lights flashed over every door.
“Oh, my,” the n
urse said. “They really are riled up. I’ve never seen it like this. I better call the front desk staff back, too.” She pointed to a brown, wooden door to my left. “Eldora is in there. Can you manage, dear? We seem to have our hands full tonight.”
“Has she still got any drains in? Tubes? Catheters?”
The nurse shook her head and disappeared into the first room beneath a flashing red light.
I wheeled the gurney ahead of me to push the door open. Every singer in the Choir Invisible can see ghosts and demons. That’s the first requirement of membership. With the talk of horns like antlers, I knew that, apparently, the dying could spot battle demons, too. That dark thought made me pause to shudder. I hoped my common ground with dying people ended with visions of demons.
The last time I’d faced a battle demon, it had taken several of us to kill him and one of our best was KIA.
I took a deep cleansing breath. Don’t try that in a nursing home or hospice. All I got was a lungful of toxic lemon bleach sadness. I pulled my blades from their hidden sheaths along my forearms.
“I should be home with Mama,” I said aloud, surprising myself.
I burst into the room where Eldora Clemnan took her last breath, ready for action. I chose as my war cry, “I’m not even supposed to be here today!”
Chapter 11
I read somewhere that, statistically, only six of three hundred frontal assaults ends in victory. Whether the throw down is with guns or knives or fists and feet, that ratio pretty much applies. A fight is where you give some and take some. Nobody walks away from battle without a bloody nose…or a bloody stump. Even if you win, you lose something.
My fight that night with the demon of Mercy’s End turned out to be the psychological kind. I’ll tell you up front: I lost. I was outmaneuvered. For starters, when I leapt into the room, ready to go all out ninja, I was alone with a dead woman. No demon. Not quite yet.
Eldora Clemnan met her end in her sixty-ninth year staring up at a blue sky ceiling, a smoke detector and a mobile of little yellow butterflies that looked like it was cobbled together by a slow child. I glanced around the dim room. No misty wistfuls in sight, either.
I couldn’t believe I wasn’t fighting for my life so, naturally, I peered under the bed. No battle demon.
Lesson 114: Battle demons aren’t the type to hide under beds. Battle demons aren’t above dropping on you out of the shadows like an evil Batman with antlers, but they don’t hide under beds. First clue: they have the word battle in their name. Second clue: they consider that sort of tactic unbearably lame, dishonorable and, frankly, weak like a human.
Still, I checked under the other bed, the closet and, to my shame, some drawers.
Lesson 115: When you’re at a loss as to what to do, you often do stupid shit.
I returned the blades to their sheaths and stared at Eldora. “What’s it all about, ma’am?”
The dead woman had nothing to say.
“Did you see a demon run through here before you died? And what the heck kind of name is ‘Eldora Clemnan,’ anyway? Sounds like the name of a hick witch.”
I looked to the death certificate as if that might hold an answer to the mystery. Renal failure. Diabetes. Heart failure. No clues there. I saw those causes on death certificates all the time.
I pulled out my phone to call Manny just as a text from Sam came in: TO FREE RORY, BRING ELDORA TO CASTILLE! SHE’S KEY! VICTOR’S ORDERS!
Wow. Sam texting in all caps. I texted back a quick: ok. Then I got to work.
The body bag on a funeral home gurney isn’t the ubiquitous black body bag you see on the news at the site of a plane crash. Castille’s body bag was green velvet with a little pocket for nitrile gloves. I snapped the gloves on and maneuvered the gurney beside Eldora’s bed.
She was large. Everybody in America is getting larger. Clyde says the job used to be easier and he’s always complaining about his back. Usually, with large corpses, I asked for help from the nursing staff or even the family. However, I was on my own and in a hurry so it was all up to me.
The rule when moving a body is, get the sheet under them first. Alone, this meant rolling her body to one side, stuffing the sheet under her and hoping no brown or yellow or red bodily fluids had left their holes yet. I was in luck. Her body was still fairly warm for a dead body, though the recently dead still feel pretty cold through thin nitrile gloves.
I paused a moment to consider that, though I wore protective gloves, the nitrile gloves ended at my wrists. The cuffs of my sleeves had touched the body. What if my sleeve touched my sandwich later? I wasn’t going to eat in these clothes ever. I also resolved to spare no dry cleaning expense. I’d buy more overcoats and another suit or two so I could switch out and finance the dry cleaner’s kids’ college tuitions.
This was the part of the job that reminded me why I liked to console families at funerals. Working visitations was an opportunity to serve. In the Rose Room, the Tulip Room, the Chrysanthemum Room and the Lilac Room, I held old ladies’ hands. I offered tissues so old widowers could blow their noses. When old people came in for a hug, I hugged them back warmly. Old people hugs are bony, but they’re so grateful for human contact. “Skin hunger,” Sam called it.
Coffee is the universal beverage over which lives are reviewed before waving the final goodbye. When it comes to the funeral business, I’m a front room kind of girl.
As I pulled at the sheet underneath Eldora, her head lolled my way. One eye looked at me forlornly. The other eye stared up at the smoke detector. That eye — the wild, smoke detector eye with the wide, blown pupil — told me Eldora had died in a panic, probably alone and gasping for breath.
We would all prefer to die in our sleep, drifting off peacefully. We don’t want to die in one of those nasty ways where the bodily systems shut down one by one.
When I see someone like Eldora dead in her hospice bed, I picture an old janitor slowly making his way through a building. Sometimes the janitor starts at the top floor, flipping switches and turning off lights. That’s the brain going dark. If the janitor is in a hurry, that’s a stroke. If the janitor takes his time at the top of the tower and lingers, that’s death by Alzheimer’s.
Sometimes the janitor just throws the main power switch and everything goes at once. That’s a heart attack, quick though seldom quick enough.
Sometimes that old janitor goes crazy and backs up all the toilets and sets the place on fire. That’s cancer.
My point is, there is no good death. There is only a good life.
Nobody wants to die in a way where you see the sudden stop coming. We all want to die in our sleep. It’s not common enough. I looked it up. One in eight Americans die in their sleep, usually around four in the morning. For that reason, the hour between four and five is what some call the Hour of Souls.
As a singer for the Choir Invisible, the odds are excellent that I have chosen not to die in my sleep on white sheets. A demon might tear me apart or stab me with a trident or lop off my head. As I struggled to pull the sheet under Eldora Clemnan and she stared at me with one dead blue eye, I thought death by decapitation runs a close second to dying while dreaming.
After I got the sheet under Eldora, the rule is to wrap the legs and use the shroud to yank the feet over to the gurney first. Make sure the gurney wheels are locked because if the corpse falls to the floor between the bed and a rolling gurney, you can’t get that heavy, floppy body up off the floor without a lot of help and humiliation. (Bodies stiff with rigor mortis are easier to move but there’s usually more mess to deal with by the time that sets in, too.)
I moved behind the gurney and reached to gather up a wad of the sheet as a handle. As I yanked Eldora’s body toward me, her head lolled toward me and her jaw dropped open to reveal a web of semi-congealed blood stretching between her blue lips.
That was a horror impossible to erase from my brain. I slipped into my happy mind mantra as I did what had to be done. Playful puppies and cute kittens and dancing bab
y pigs. Playful puppies and cute kittens and dancing baby pigs. Playful puppies and cute kittens and dancing baby pigs!
I strapped Eldora Clemnan to the gurney with two gray belts that look exactly like car seat belts. Out of habit, I looped the belt around her feet twice before cinching her tight and clicking her in. The gurney’s red and black handles can be tricky so if the head or the foot of the gurney drops unexpectedly, a body can slide around. The looped belt ensures the corpse won’t slip out and slide down a flight of stairs in front of horrified witnesses.
I pulled the green velvet up around her body and zipped her into the body bag from foot to head. I slipped the nitrile gloves back into the little pocket last. “Tucked in for the night, Mrs. Clemnan.”
Or so I thought.
Chapter 12
Lightning strobed the city’s skyline. I looked up just as the power went out and the skyscrapers went black. On any other night, New York City would be pretty. That is, as long as you could watch the worsening storm from inside, preferably wearing a big cozy sweater while wrapping your hands around a steaming cup of cocoa.
The thunder struck and the vibration shuddered through my chest. It occurred to me that, for all I knew, the power outage was the first step in the D-Day invasion.
Lesson 116: Don’t underestimate the enemy like I did. Most demons don’t have much to say to humans. They’re all, “Grr. Arrgh.” But a few demons are very clever and chatty.
Sleet cut at me as I wheeled the gurney to the back of the bus and popped the hatch. I positioned Eldora to slide in head first so the Odyssey’s suspension would take the weight, not me. I pulled the gurney’s red handle and its far legs folded up as I pushed it in. I squeezed the black handle and the gurney’s legs unlocked and folded up. An extra two shoves and the gurney was in place on two steel rails. I grabbed the clamp at the end of the rails and screwed it in place so the gurney wouldn’t shift around in transit. A few seconds later I was tearing down Crown Street, heading back to Castille as fast as I dared.
It seemed weird that Victor wanted Eldora’s body back at the funeral home. If there was some magical rite that would free Rory from his trap, wouldn’t it be more powerful if I headed back to the Keep? You can’t tell with magic, though. Some of it works at a distance. Some of it, you need to touch the person you’re trying to change in some way. I didn’t know much about it. The Magicals mostly kept to themselves, mumbling, fondling beads and sacred stones and runes. The few Magicals I’d spoken to at the Keep also insisted on calling themselves magical folk, not magical folks. Maybe that’s proper, but it sounded annoying and far too precious.
The End of the World As I Know It (The Ghosts & Demons Series Book 2) Page 5
