Amber didn’t seem to see the specter at all, but to Miles—whose breath and voice had caught in his throat—the ghost had an undeniable presence. Transparent, yes, but it had dimension and a certain weight, as though if he tried to touch the spirit it might feel like he was pushing his hand into water. He didn’t dare test the theory.
“Professor?” Amber said as the doors slid shut, edging closer to him to make room for the four other people in the elevator with them. “Miles? What’s wrong? Are you feeling all right?”
He couldn’t reply. His palms began to itch and he felt a trickle of sweat run down the back of his neck. Suddenly his clothes seemed too tight. He glanced around, but no one seemed to see the ghost except for him, not even Amber.
Close your eyes, he thought. It’ll go away.
But he wasn’t sure if that was true, and if it was, he wasn’t at all certain that he wanted the ghost to disappear. After all, he hadn’t seen Tim McConville for more than a decade. The kid had been his friend in a time when such a thing had an intensity that he’d found mostly lacking in his adult relationships. The years had flowed by him, or he by them, and Miles had grown older. But, just like his earlier encounters with the ghost, Tim McConville remained an eternal boy, a dead Peter Pan.
“Miles,” Amber ventured again, nudging him.
He tried to give her a relaxed smile, but he knew it must be hideous and pained.
“Something strange is happening,” he said quietly, trying not to draw the attention of the other people on the elevator.
“Really?” Amber said. “You’re just figuring that out?”
“Something else,” he replied.
Now they were all staring at him, listening, waiting for him to explain. But he refused to meet anyone’s gaze—not a stranger’s, not Amber’s, and not Tim McConville’s, though the ghost regarded him with imploring eyes. Instead, Miles watched the numbers above the elevator doors, cursing the age of the rattling old machine.
At last it slowed and the doors slid open. He was the first one off and he stood in the corridor while the others flowed around him. When Amber touched his arm, he flinched.
“Hey,” she said. “Don’t freak out on me. I need you.”
Miles took a deep breath. Fear and loss had made them conspirators now, created an intimacy between them to which he could not help but react. A rush of sudden arousal startled him. Where had that come from? Amber was attractive, but he had never reacted to her like this. The heat racing through him reminded him of the effects of certain drugs, and he wondered if that was it . . . if there was something in the air, getting into his blood.
He shook himself. “Sorry. I’m okay now.”
He hated to lie to her.
The ghost of Tim McConville had not exited the elevator—its doors had shushed closed without the specter emerging—but now it stood just a few feet ahead of them in the corridor, an impatient expression on the transparent face of the dead little boy.
“You’re sure?” Amber asked, still very close to him. Close enough to whisper. Close enough for a kiss.
Miles pushed the thoughts away. She was supremely desirable, no doubt. But he felt sure this rush of intimacy was a symptom of logic and order unraveling in Hawthorne, and in him.
“I’m sure,” he said. “Come on. Let’s talk to your friend Tommy.”
They started down the corridor, looking at the numbers outside the patient rooms and the names scrawled on white boards beneath them. The ghost watched them pass. After he had seen the spirit of Tim McConville as a child, Miles had found comfort in the knowledge that there truly was an afterlife, that the soul continued on after death. But now he tried not to look at the ghost, tried not to think about what it meant that the spirit of his dead friend could still be lingering after all of these years. What did it mean for heaven? What did it mean for faith?
“Excuse me,” Amber said, stepping in the path of a male nurse in blue scrubs. “We’re looking for Tommy Dunne. Thomas, I mean. Thomas Dunne.”
The nurse studied them as though they might attack him at any moment. Nervous, obviously wishing he were anywhere else, he glanced around as if hoping someone else would answer.
“Are you family?” he asked at last.
“I’m his uncle,” Miles said quickly, afraid that if Amber told the truth they might not be allowed to see her friend. Somehow he’d become a liar this morning. It didn’t sit well with him.
The nurse seemed like he might ask for proof, but then his pager went off and he glanced at it.
“He’s in room 513,” the nurse said. “But he’s not really up for visitors. You might not want to see him like this.”
A scream echoed along the corridor, and then someone started to shriek about spiders. The nurse shuddered and brushed past them, apologizing as he went. Miles stole a glance at the ghost of Tim McConville, who waited for them farther along the hall. He had the idea that the ghost knew exactly where Tommy Dunne was, but he did not want to tell that to Amber.
Were other people seeing ghosts today, or just him? Was it just another of a million impossible things playing out in Hawthorne today? He thought it might be.
They had waited in line downstairs to ask what room Norman Dunne was in, only to find out that Mr. Dunne was no longer a patient at the hospital. They had been about to walk away when another woman behind the desk had muttered to the receptionist, asking if Norman Dunne was “the nut who’d run off.” It had taken Miles only half a minute of quiet charm to learn that Norm Dunne had attacked members of the hospital staff and his own son and had somehow—despite the number of police and security guards in the hospital—managed to escape capture. It had been the receptionist’s friend who had informed them, in empathetic tones, that the lunatic’s son was now a patient.
Now Miles and Amber strode toward room 513, where the ghost of Tim McConville stood watch. They passed hospital staff, all of whom looked grim and some shell-shocked. One nurse glanced at them and seemed about to call out, to question their presence, out of habit ingrained in her over the course of her career. But an alarm went off in one of the rooms and she ran, instinct taking over.
Amber passed right through the ghost. Miles averted his eyes and walked around it, following her into Tommy Dunne’s room. The lights were low and the room was suffused with the gray of the storm, the only sound the pelting of that slick rain on the window.
“Oh, Tommy,” Amber sighed, and rushed to the side of the bed.
Norm Dunne had done a hell of a job on his son. Tommy’s face and head were bandaged, spots of blood soaking through, and an IV needle pumped something vital into his arm. The kid was either deeply sedated or in a coma. Miles saw the chart in its slot at the end of the bed and glanced around, thinking he would have a look and see if he could make any sense of medicalese.
Something shifted in the corner of the room. Flickered like a candle flame. He assumed it was Tim McConville but stole a glance in that direction. All the breath went out of him. His heart raced, growing so loud it was like thunder in his ears.
“My God,” Miles whispered.
The ghost in the corner, insubstantial as twilight, was not Tim McConville.
It was his mother.
“Mom?”
Amber turned and looked at him, the horror of Tommy Dunne’s condition still etched on her face. But then confusion took over and she glanced into the corner to see what had caught his attention.
“What are you looking at?” she asked.
His mother wasn’t alone now. As though the air itself had breathed him into existence there, Tim McConville manifested beside his mother’s ghost. His mother’s expression was filled with such sorrow, such disappointment, that it tore at his heart. Was this her final reward, such sadness?
“Miles,” Amber said. “What is it? What do you see?”
He turned to look at her, sick of lying. “I see ghosts.”
She stared at him. “What?”
Embarrassed, he glanced away. “It
’s not new. I mean, it isn’t caused by whatever’s going on in town. Not entirely. I haven’t seen one in years, until today.”
Someone shouted in the corridor. Miles heard running feet and turned to see one nurse running to an orderly, the fear that had been simmering in all of them rising to the surface.
“You need to get down to the morgue, right now,” she said. “They need help down there.”
Amber slipped closer to the door, eavesdropping. Miles glanced back into the corner and saw that both of the ghosts had vanished, and he wanted to cry out, to plead for his mother to come back. He wanted to reach her heart, and his own.
“What the hell for?” the orderly asked, out in the hallway. “There’s nothing down there but dead people.”
It was the nurse’s laugh that got Miles to focus, a lunatic bark of laughter. He edged over to Amber and peered out. He could see the nurse’s expression in profile, and she wore the kind of smile that was only ever used to stifle a scream.
“That’s what I said,” the nurse replied, her voice quavering. That smile widened. “Apparently some of them aren’t dead anymore.”
The orderly swore, but when he searched her face, he could see she wasn’t joking. Shaking his head, he hurried away, leaving the nurse to tremble and reach up to wipe away tears from her eyes. Someone called her name and she took a deep breath, then rushed in the other direction down the hall.
“Did you hear that?” Amber asked.
Miles nodded slowly.
“It’s not possible,” she said.
“Who knows what’s possible now?” he asked.
Her expression darkened, and then she looked as though she might be sick. “Oh my God. Isn’t your mother . . .”
Miles glanced at that corner again, wishing the ghost would appear. But if his mother walked the corridors of Hawthorne Union Hospital now, he feared it was not as a ghost.
Amber took his hand in hers, squeezing it until he met her gaze.
“Let’s go,” she said.
He didn’t ask where she meant for them to go. If something had desecrated his mother’s remains, he had to do something. But they had come here for a reason. They had to find a way to stop the horrifying changes being wrought on Hawthorne, the hideous abominations that seemed to mount by the moment.
Miles cast a glance at Tommy Dunne’s unconscious form.
“We’ll come back,” Amber assured him. “Tommy’s not talking right now. If he has answers, they’ll have to wait.”
OCTAVIAN stood just inside the hospital room where the serial killer, Wayne Pinsky, had died. Plywood sheeting had been hastily bolted to the wall to keep the rain and wind from pouring through. In several places scorch marks blackened the wall, visible at the edges of the plywood.
He turned to look at Dr. O’Neil. “You said the lightning was blue. I assume you’re not being poetic.”
The diminutive doctor frowned. “Do I look like I’m in a poetic mood?”
“We saw blue lightning last night,” Charlotte reminded him.
Octavian remembered, but he thought it might have been a trick of the light, some kind of shading caused by the storm clouds. If the lightning that had smashed the window and part of the wall here—and according to Dr. O’Neil, arced into the hallway—had been the vivid blue she described, that was something different entirely. He had known the storm was magical, but he had assumed that it had at least a core of natural weather phenomena. Now he realized he had been mistaken.
“Keomany,” he said, “what are we dealing with, here?”
She glanced around, and he understood she was uneasy about discussing her theories in front of an audience. In addition to Charlotte and Dr. O’Neil, their group included Chief Kramer, Officer Tony Moschitto, and the brick wall of a head orderly for the psych unit, whom Octavian thought Dr. O’Neil had introduced as Marlon.
“Go ahead,” Octavian told her. “Anyone who doubts you, or any of this, is welcome to come up with their own answers.”
“All right,” Keomany said. “I had a feeling about this before, but it’s more than a feeling now. The storm is part of the chaos that’s influencing everything in the town. That part is obvious. But I don’t think the storm is even coming from anything in our world.”
“Our world?” Marlon muttered. “What does that even mean?”
“It means there are others,” Chief Kramer said. “Go on, Miss Shaw.”
Keomany kept her eyes on Octavian for a second and then looked at Dr. O’Neil and Chief Kramer. “What a lot of people think of as Hell is actually a potentially infinite number of parallel realities. Alternate dimensions. Some evidence suggests that there might even be . . . let’s call them slices of Hell . . . that are in our reality, but on planets so far away they might as well be other dimensions. The point is, in a lot of these places, magic is like water. Or even air. It fills these worlds like our oceans fill the crevices of our world. This chaos storm . . . it’s coming in from somewhere else.”
“What, like some kind of industrial accident?” Dr. O’Neil asked.
“That’s possible, but I don’t think so,” Octavian said. “The creatures we’ve seen, these wraiths . . . they’re serving someone, or something. There’s a force behind this. But as we told Chief Kramer, we believe there was a trigger. Something started it. If we can’t identify the source, then we need to identify the trigger.”
Dr. O’Neil gestured for them to follow her. “This way, then. I don’t know if it’s going to help you, but there’s someone you should meet. At the very least, you’ll find it interesting.”
Octavian glanced at the chief, who nodded.
“This is what I wanted you to see,” Chief Kramer said.
The group hurried down the corridor, their sense of urgency only increased by the crackle of the chief’s radio and the buzz of his cell phone. He answered, snapped instructions to the lieutenant he had temporarily put in charge of the police force trying to keep order in Hawthorne, and kept walking. The patients in the secure area of the psych unit seemed strangely subdued, or at least that was the impression Octavian had thanks to the lack of any appreciable noise coming from their rooms. It troubled him, reminding him of the way birds seemed to go quiet just before a storm struck.
A security guard stood at the end of the corridor, but he was hospital staff. The Hawthorne police had their hands full. Octavian imagined that soon almost all of the police at the hospital would be gone, leaving the orderlies and onsite security to deal with any outbreaks of violence and the frustration of those trying to deal with the long waits and crowded ER.
The door to the last room on the left stood open, but all was dark inside. Octavian glimpsed another boarded-up window. Dr. O’Neil crossed to the room on the right.
“Gregory Wheeler,” Dr. O’Neil began. “Sixteen years old. Paranoid schizophrenic. His room was also hit by that blue lightning, but it didn’t do him any harm.”
She paused, then gestured to Marlon, who tugged at the key ring on his belt and went to unlock the door.
“Of course, that depends on how you define harm,” Dr. O’Neil added.
“How do you define harm?” Charlotte asked, but her voice was absent its usual sarcasm. She really seemed to want an answer.
Dr. O’Neil gave her a strange look, but did not reply.
Marlon opened the door. The lights were low inside. The teenage patient sat in a cushioned chair that looked as though it did not belong in the room at all, and Octavian felt sure it had come from someone’s office. It was not at all the sort of thing one put in the room of a psychiatric patient who might be in danger of hurting himself or someone else. But Greg Wheeler didn’t look dangerous at all. In fact, he looked alert and calm, even curious, and as Dr. O’Neil led the way into the room, the kid looked past her and blinked in surprise when he saw Octavian, as though he’d recognized him. It wasn’t a surprise, really. If Octavian wasn’t precisely famous, he had certainly earned his share of notoriety over the past few years.
>
The chief came in with them, but Marlon and Officer Moschitto stayed in the hall.
“Greg,” Dr. O’Neil said. “Chief Kramer and I wanted you to meet some people. This is Mr. Octavian, and with him are Miss Shaw and . . .” She trailed off and looked at Charlotte. “I don’t think I caught your last name.”
“Just Charlotte is fine,” the vampire girl said, a glint of pain in her eyes. “I gave up my family name.”
Octavian nodded to the patient. “Greg. It’s nice to meet you. It seems you were very lucky last night, with the lightning.”
Greg gave a small smile, as if to tell Octavian he had no idea what he was talking about, and shrugged.
Then he spoke, and Octavian blinked in astonishment.
“Friggin’ gibberish,” Charlotte said.
“I don’t think so,” Dr. O’Neil said. “It’s a language. I’ve listened to him and there’s structure to it, plus it’s clear he’s saying things that make sense to him. Watch his face and his hands. He’s speaking. We just don’t understand him.”
“I do,” Octavian said.
“So what language is it?” Keomany asked.
Octavian walked over and sat down on the bed, putting himself eye to eye with the boy. Greg Wheeler seemed entirely ordinary. Other than this strange shift in language, nothing about him suggested the influence of chaos or evil. He wondered if that was possible, if the teenager’s schizophrenia—a kind of chaos in itself—could have altered the effect that the chaos storm’s lightning would otherwise have had upon him.
“Peter?” Keomany asked.
Octavian glanced at her, arching an eyebrow. They were all watching him, waiting for an explanation.
“It’s an Old Aramaic dialect that originated in ancient Chaldea. No one’s spoken this language in well over two thousand years.”
They were all staring. Octavian raised his eyebrows and smiled, acknowledging their astonishment. He shared it.
“How the hell does this kid know . . . what is it?” Chief Kramer asked.
Waking Nightmares Page 22
