That was not meant to be. He called twenty minutes before I was expecting him to say that he was sorry, but he'd been pulled into working a double shift.
"I'm so sorry, Violet. I can't tell them no. I promise I'll come see you tomorrow."
"They're supposed to be letting me go tomorrow."
"Oh. That's good. I want to say that I'll drive you home from the hospital, but I'll be at work again. I can come see you at home in the afternoon when my shift is over."
"That would be great. Don't worry about me. I'll get home."
I thought about calling Brian, but I didn't want him to see me this way. I wondered how much of my bruising and scratches would be healed by Saturday. I was almost certain that all of the purple skin and torn flesh would be a mood killer.
The only other person I knew in town, other than my mentally ill stalker the goth guy, was Pierce the lawyer who was named Johnathan. While it would have been really nice to have someone to talk to, I figured Pierce would think I was a nutter if I invited him to visit me in the hospital. Besides, he could be one of those people who would get a smug sense of satisfaction knowing that I'd injured myself doing the exact thing he'd warned me about.
Instead, I resigned myself to spending five hours watching Judge Judy on network television. At least if I'd had my laptop, I could have rented a movie.
Wallowing always goes better with popsicles, so I buzzed Molly at the nurse's station and asked if they had any. A few minutes later, she brought me a grape popsicle and a can of Sprite.
"You can have dinner tonight." She said. "Sorry you only got broth for lunch. Doc wanted to make sure that your nausea medicine held before allowing solid food."
"That's okay. I didn't feel like eating at lunch anyway. Hopefully, I'll be hungry by dinner. Do you know what they are having?"
"You get a choice. I think there is still time for me to send your choice down to the kitchen too. Do you want a hamburger and fries or country fried steak and mashed potatoes?"
"Country fried steak in a hospital?" I cocked my head to the side.
"Hey, don't knock it till you try it, sweetie. It's not bad. I've had it a few times in the cafeteria."
"Sold. Molly, I'll take the country fried steak on your advice."
"I'll let the kitchen know, and I'll bring you another popsicle with your pain meds."
The country fried steak was pretty good. It was basic diner food, but at least it wasn't bland. It came with a biscuit and green beans that tasted like they were cooked with bacon. I had a chuckle and wondered if they let the cardiac patients have that meal. Probably not. They probably got grilled chicken breast and steamed squash. I shuddered at the thought of steamed squash.
I only made it until about eight in the evening before exhaustion took me. Things were quieter in the hospital when the sun began to go down. The doctor had said that I could sleep, so the nurses tried not to wake me when they came into my room to do this and that.
When I woke, the clock said three in the morning. I couldn't help but notice that the hospital seemed like a very different place.
Chapter Twenty-Four
I was fuzzy around the edges, and I knew I was probably stuck in a waking dream. I couldn't pull myself out of it.
Everything was too quiet. It sounded as if I were in the building alone. My IV stand was gone, and there was a bandage over my arm where the needle had been.
The way I saw it, I had two choices. I could cover up my head and hope that I drifted back into complete unconsciousness, or I could get out of bed and have a look around.
I sat up and felt a bit woozy, but my head cleared in seconds. I slowly swung my feet around and scooted off the bed until the soles of my feet made contact with the cold linoleum floor.
My first stop was a cabinet where I found a pair of slipper socks and robe. With my feet protected from the cold floor and my ass covered from prying eyes, I made my way to the door.
The squeaking of the door's hinges echoed through the hall, and I thought for sure that at any moment a nurse would come down the hall and tell me to get back to bed. No one came.
Only half of the lights in the hall were on, but I figured that was so they didn't disturb patients at night. None of the other doors were open, and I didn't see anyone around. I'd been in hospitals at night before. I knew they were a flurry of activity twenty-four hours a day.
"This has to be a dream." I said to myself, but as I'd had more time to wake up, it seemed less and less like I was dreaming. All of the soft edges had come into focus. "Either that, or all of the night nurses are at the nurses' station playing solitaire."
My mission became to find the nurses' station. I looked left and then right. To the right of my room I could see the elevators down the hall. So, I figured I needed to go left.
I walked down the hall a ways and still didn't see anyone. What I could see was the nurses' station. There wasn't anyone there.
A few more steps forward, and the fire alarms began to blare. At that point, I forgot about my search for people. Animal instinct took over. I'd survived a house fire when I was little, but just barely. The sound of a fire alarm filled me with more terror than anything else could. I'd almost forgotten how scared fire made me.
I ran toward the elevators because there was an exit sign hanging from the ceiling in front of them. I knew the stairwell had to be there too. I ran into the door at full force and ended up bouncing on my ass.
The stairwell doors were locked. I stood up and tried again, but the bar that would unlatch the door was frozen in place. I pounded on the glass and called for help, but there was still no one around.
As panic set in, I started to believe that the hospital was on fire and had already been evacuated. Somehow, I'd been left behind. Maybe they'd gotten the fire out and that's why the alarms were off. But, fires could reignite. The fire department had reset the alarms, and the fire had reignited. Now, I was trapped in the hospital and no one knew where I was.
I sniffed the air to see if I could pick up the smoke. I had to know if I was close to the fire. I remembered getting up and the floor being cold, so at least I knew it wasn't underneath me. At least, it hadn't been then. Fire had a mind of its own. I had to get out. If the smoke spread to my floor, I could die before anyone realized I was missing.
All of this made complete sense to my concussed mind. I began to look around to see if there was anything I could use to break the glass on the stairwell door. If I could climb into the stairwell, I had a chance.
Just as I was about to go back down the hall to search for a blunt object, the elevator doors opened.
Chapter Twenty-Five
I knew that you weren't supposed to use the elevators in a fire, but there they were offering salvation. I had a choice, I could stay and wait or take the elevator.
The hospital wasn't huge. I thought I remembered it being no more than eight floors. Even if I was on the top floor, it wouldn't take me long to get to the bottom.
I stepped partway into the elevator and held the door open. I needed to feel for heat and smell for smoke. When I detected neither, I took another step in and let go of the door.
As the elevator slowly closed, one of the patient room doors opened and something that looked almost human crawled out. It turned toward me, and I saw that it was the corpse woman I'd seen hovering over Brian and outside of my window.
She started down the hall toward me, but the doors closed completely and the elevator began to move. The only problem was that it went up.
"Oh, god no." I said. I tried to push the button for the first floor to make sure that it didn't stop on my old floor again, but nothing happened. I tried the stop button, but that did nothing too.
I felt sick to my stomach as I thought of the doors opening to that woman waiting for me. An even worse thought was that the elevator was out of control and I could end up stuck in it while the fire raged on in the building around me. Or, the elevator mechanicals could fail completely, and I could plunge to
my death. If it fell from the eighth floor, I was dead.
Blood pounded in my head and I felt like I couldn't breathe. My vision tunneled, and I could feel myself slipping into shock.
While I was losing control to a panic attack, I hadn't noticed that the elevator had begun to descend. It dinged, the basement light lit up, and the doors opened. Not giving a shit about anything other than getting off of the elevator, I jumped out.
Before me was a long, dim hallway that ended in a set of large, steel swinging doors. I knew what was on the other side of those doors even before my eyes made their way up to the word painted on the wall above them.
Morgue.
There were two offices on either side of the hallway, but I doubted that either of them offered a way out. The morgue, on the other hand, would most likely have another way out. Perhaps there was a ramp that lead to an outside door. There had to be, right? That's how the hospital morgue discharged bodies to the funeral homes. They surely didn't bring them back through the main part of the hospital.
I stood for a couple of minutes staring at the door. I had to decide what I was more afraid of at that moment. Between fire and dead bodies, neither choice was very appealing. But, the fire alarms had stopped. I thought that perhaps waiting would be a better choice. Someone would come.
Chapter Twenty-Six
The chanting began the moment I decided to wait for help. The voices were soft and hypnotic, and they emanated from the morgue.
My feet moved me forward as if I were drifting, and I had no control over whether I should go to the sound or not. That was okay, though, because the curiosity felt like an itch underneath my skin.
Something deep inside of my head screamed at me to stop, but I laughed it off. The only explanation was that my mind had broken. I'd been swallowed whole by madness.
I made it to the morgue door and reached out to push it open. When I'd looked at it, I'd expected it to be cold. It was warm to the touch. The chanting soothed my frazzled nerves, and I barely considered that the door might be warm because of the fire.
Inside the morgue looked almost as I would have guessed. It was clinical and metallic. The main difference being that most of the metal gurneys, and the bodies they held, were pushed against one wall.
There was one in the middle. Around it was a circle of people wearing black hooded robes. They were the source of the chanting. The hoods and the dark kept me from seeing their faces, but I couldn't shake the feeling that at least some of the voices were familiar.
My eyes drifted to the gurney in the center of the circle. There was a body underneath. I could tell it was a woman because the sheet did little to hide the outline of her breasts. Also, long hair hung from the top of the sheet and over the side of the metal slab.
It looked an awful lot like my hair, but that would have been impossible. I was standing right there. I couldn't be under the sheet.
The chanting grew louder and it chased out the feeling of dread that had already tried several times to take hold of my chest. I couldn't tell what the people were saying, but to me it sounded like there was nothing to fear.
One of the figures reached out and pulled the corner of the sheet. A hard tug was all it took, and the white fabric fell to the floor in a pile.
Whether I was hovering above myself as Brian thrust himself inside of me or standing outside of my window draped in the darkness of night, I hadn't recognized myself. But, upon closer inspection, I could clearly see that the corpse woman who had been haunting me wasn't a ghost. It was a vision.
One of the people pulled a long, ceremonial knife from the folds of his robes. He held it to one of my breasts.
I began to scream.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
"Violet!" Molly's voice sounded urgent. "Violet, wake up, sweetie."
I sat bolt upright in the hospital bed and almost collided with Molly. She'd been standing over me trying to shake me awake.
"What's going on?" I asked as I tried to catch my breath. It felt as though I'd been holding it for a very long time. "How did I get here?"
"So, you remember your little trip to the morgue?" Molly asked.
"Wait, what? That was real?" I'd been disoriented when she woke me up, but there was no way that any of that could have been real.
"Well, I'm not sure how you slipped past the night nurses or how you got down to the basement without a code, but yes. Were you sleepwalking?"
"I don't know. I don't really know what happened. I thought it was a dream."
"A morgue tech found you down there standing in a corner screaming. That poor fellow is probably going to be in therapy and on meds for the rest of his life. You should have seen him. He looked like he'd seen a ghost, and I guess he believed he had." Molly chuckled, but then composed herself. "You must have been sleepwalking. This place can do that to people. Lots of weird energy here. So much life, sickness, and death all in one location."
"If you need a code to get down to the morgue, how would I have gotten in?"
"Well, there's a bit of a drug problem around here. People with addictive personalities who are around a constant supply of drugs tend to develop problems. We've got extra security most of the time, but doctors, techs, and some nurses still sneak down there to get high. You might have stumbled onto an elevator with one who was already high out of their mind. They might not have even seen you."
"That's terrifying."
"It is."
"But, you're going home today. That's something to be cheerful about. The doc was thinking about calling in a psych consult, but I talked him out of it." She said with wink. "Do you have anyone to take you home? I can call you a cab if you need it."
"I can take the bus."
"You cannot take the bus. It will take you at least two hours to get home from here on the bus with all of the stops and transfers. Don't you have someone you can call?"
I was still determined not to call Brain. Pierce slash Johnathan had been the family attorney. I hoped that he'd still feel some fealty towards a member of the Stonebridge family.
"I think I have someone."
Chapter Twenty-Eight
"Violet, hello. I was just about to call you. I've got some paperwork I should have had you sign the other day. Are you available to sign it now?"
"I am if you're available to give me a ride home from the hospital." I said hopefully.
"The hospital? What's going on?" Pierce asked.
"I'll tell you all about it if you come pick me up. I'm being discharged soon, and I need a ride. Otherwise, I'm going to have to take the bus home. My nurse said that could take hours." I laid it on kinda thick, but at that point I just wanted a ride.
"I'll be there in an hour. Will you be discharged by then?" He asked.
"I don't know. Let me ask." I said and then covered the phone receiver with the palm of my hand. "He wants to know if he can pick me up in an hour."
"I'll make sure you're ready by then." Molly said with a reassuring smile.
Within a half hour, Molly was wheeling me down to the lobby in a wheelchair. I wanted to walk, but they told me that was against policy.
"Just enjoy it, sweetie." Molly said. "You'll be home and taking care of yourself soon enough. Let us do it for just a little while longer."
I only had to sit on a bench and wait for Pierce for about ten minutes. His big, black sedan rolled up to the front and he got out holding a bouquet of flowers and another bouquet of balloons. I was taken aback by the gesture to say the least.
"You know, you probably would have been on time if you hadn't stopped to buy those." I teased.
"Oh no, am I late? I thought I had time."
"You're not late. I was just having fun with you." I said and stood up.
"Wait, let me come help you." Pierce said before he scrambled to put the balloons and flowers into the back seat of the car. "You stay there."
He came over and took my arm. "Thank you." I said as he helped me into the passenger side of the car.
"You're most welcome. But, you have to tell me something."
"Okay." I said.
"What are you wearing?"
I laughed. "Oh right. So, they cut my clothes off of me when I was brought in. These," I said and pulled at the ugly gray sweats straight from the eighties, "are from a church donation box for people who have nothing to wear home from the hospital. I felt bad about taking the clothes so I took the worst of what there was."
"You should have called me sooner." Pierce said with a stern face. "I could have brought you clothes."
"I didn't want to bother you." I said.
"You're practically family, Violet. You could never be a bother."
It was a sweet sentiment, but I wasn't sure how to take it. Pierce had a close relationship with my family, but he barely knew me. I convinced myself to ignore the alarm bells going off in my head. I reasoned that I was being paranoid because of bad relationships in the not so distant past. A decent man wanted to take care of me, and I needed to appreciate that.
"I had a concussion. I wasn't thinking straight." I said as if I had to make an excuse for not calling Pierce for help, but that's how I felt. It seemed like I'd insulted him by not reaching out.
"I'm going to take you for a meal. You need some decent food that you don't have to cook. But, before we do that, we need to get you an outfit to make up for the one you lost. I'll take you to La Bella. The women I know seem to like that place."
"I can't afford that right now. Besides, it was just a t-shirt and jeans. I can survive without it."
"Fine, but what about Target? Can you afford a t-shirt and jeans from there?" He asked in a voice that challenged my ability to tell him no. I mean, how embarrassing would it have been to tell him I couldn't afford a shirt and pants at Target?
"Yeah, sure. Let's do that."
The Summoning Page 5
