Bunny Call

by Scott Cawthon

  Nothing but his faith.

  “Every man has good in him,” Arthur said.

  “That’s not a man!”

  “Okay. Every living creature has good in it.”

  Nurse Ackerman reached out and yanked the scans from the viewing box. “I knew you wouldn’t listen.”

  Arthur turned and looked at the … man … in the bed. “It’s my job to see the good.”

  Nurse Ackerman only shook her head and walked out of the room.

  Mia pulled a flimsy, beige plastic chair out from one of the round tables in the staff break room. The room contained a small fridge, a counter, a microwave, and half a dozen tables with chairs; it smelled like barbecue sauce and spoiled cheese. If Mia hadn’t been so hungry, the smells would have ruined her appetite. But she’d worked up an appetite so strong she could have eaten her lunch in a sewage treatment plant.

  Mia opened her bag lunch and pulled out the turkey sandwich her boyfriend had made her that morning. He was so sweet! She set up her paperback thriller in front of her and popped open a cola. She took a bite of the sandwich and washed it down with cola, noticing the Dos and Don’ts posters tacked all over the plain white walls. They didn’t make her feel welcome, nor did they make her feel any better about her decision to take this job.

  It was a stepping stone, right? That’s what her boyfriend said. “Keep your nose clean. Do a good job, and you’ll be moving on up in no time,” he said.

  Mia took another bite of sandwich and chewed appreciatively.

  That’s when her new boss, Nurse Ackerman, and the other two bigwig nurses on the hospice wing marched in. Mia immediately dropped her head and pretended to be reading.

  “How long has he been in there?” Nurse Thomas asked, plopping into a chair at the table behind Mia. Mia could smell her lavender-heavy perfume.

  “Father Blythe?” Nurse Ackerman said. “All morning. Moron.”

  Two chairs scraped the floor and Mia knew the other two nurses had sat, too. Nurse Colton was right behind Mia. Already, Mia had noticed several times that Nurse Colton needed a stronger deodorant.

  Mia had already planned on listening to whatever the nurses said, but when she heard Father Blythe’s name combined with “moron,” she tuned in more closely. Father Blythe was the very nice priest who had walked her up here to start her new job. He’d been so kind and patient with her. He was cute, too, not in a boyfriend kind of way but in an adorable old man kind of way. Short and slight with thick wavy gray hair and gentle brown eyes, Father Blythe looked like the grandfather Mia wished she had. She’d liked him immediately, and it made her mad to hear someone call him names.

  Nurse Ackerman was the moron.

  Mia had learned early on in nursing school that not all nurses were nice. Some were so unpleasant Mia wondered why they’d gone into nursing in the first place. But Nurse Ackerman was the worst she’d met so far. The woman was just plain icky. Never smiling, stalking around firing orders, Nurse Ackerman showed immediately that Mia wasn’t going to get anything from her new boss except for criticism and judgment. And what was it with using last names?

  “We use surnames on this wing, Nurse Fremont,” Nurse Ackerman said when Mia had introduced herself with a friendly “I’m Mia.”

  Fine. Mia didn’t want to be friends, anyway.

  And then there was Nurse Thomas. She was nice enough, but there wasn’t much there there. Mia wondered how Nurse Thomas managed to keep her job. Round and sweet looking with curly graying black hair, Nurse Thomas looked like she should be at home baking cookies. She called everyone “Sweetie,” and she loved to pat people on the back, but she wouldn’t remember to bring her feet along if they weren’t attached at the ankles. Already that morning, Mia had spent what seemed like half her shift finding things that Nurse Thomas had lost.

  Nurse Colton was the only reasonably normal nurse Mia had met so far. In her midforties, Mia guessed, Nurse Colton was an athletic-looking woman with brown hair chopped short in a boyish cut, and a great tan. She was nice enough, Mia supposed, but she was too serious, as if she had something heavy on her mind.

  Mia picked up her sandwich to take another bite.

  “What did you tell him?” Nurse Colton asked Nurse Ackerman.

  “What we know. I told him there’s evil inside the man.”

  Mia held the sandwich in front of her face. Evil?

  “He refuses to see it, of course,” Nurse Ackerman said dismissively.

  “Well, we know better, don’t we, sweeties,” Nurse Thomas said. “I can barely think about it without being so scared I want to throw up.”

  “Yes, we know better,” Nurse Colton said.

  Nurse Ackerman got up and plucked a plastic bag of carrots from the fridge. No wonder she’s so skinny, Mia thought.

  “He’s idealistic,” Nurse Ackerman said.

  “I am, too,” Nurse Thomas said, “but when the writing’s on the wall, it’s on the wall.”

  Mia took a bite of her sandwich and willed herself to be invisible.

  “He’s new,” Nurse Colton said. “He’ll catch on.”

  “I’m not so sure. He’s determined,” Nurse Ackerman said.

  “Time will tell,” Nurse Thomas said. “It always does.”

  The nurses chatted for a few more minutes about some of the patients Mia had already met. She wondered about the man with evil inside. Was he a patient? He must be if Father Blythe was here visiting him. Or maybe Father Blythe was visiting someone else. Mia listened, but she never heard another word about the priest. Did she need to find him and warn him? But warn him about what? It sounded like he’d already been warned and didn’t believe the warning.

  Arthur had been sitting in the vinyl visiting chair for over three hours. During that time, he’d accomplished little, except that he could now look at the man in the bed without nearly losing his breakfast. This made him feel slightly better about himself, but the self-congratulation was unearned. Arthur knew his belly was empty now, so he had no breakfast to lose.

  And he had no business being pleased, either. He hadn’t yet been able to approach the man’s bed. He was still completely repulsed not just by the man but by the bloody sheets he lay on and whatever it was that was leaking from the tubes that snaked out from underneath him, attached to heavens-knew-where. Those tubes curled off the bed and ran into bags hanging from the bed’s frame. Arthur could hear the body waste dribbling into plastic bags that were, regrettably, see-through. Arthur didn’t venture a look.

  Ever since Nurse Ackerman had left, Arthur hadn’t said one word out loud. All he’d done was stare and pray.

  Now he decided he had to do something else. What if the man wanted to communicate?

  Arthur had no idea how or even whether it was possible, but he had to give the man a chance. Sitting in this chair, five feet from the bed, was not giving the man a chance.

  Arthur took a deep breath and scooted the chair a foot closer.

  “Yes, that’s very brave,” Arthur muttered to himself. He chuckled.

  One of the monitors let out an unusual beep, or rather a normal beep at an unexpected time. In three hours, Arthur had learned the monitor’s rhythm, and just now that rhythm had varied. Was it because he talked?

  Breathing shallowly through his mouth—because the closer he got to the man, the worse the smells were—Arthur dragged the chair nearer to the bed. It made a screeching sound on the floor, but the monitors didn’t react to that.

  Arthur got the chair to within a foot of the bed, just outside the distance he thought the man could reach. He knew it wasn’t friendly or caring, but Arthur wasn’t ready to risk touching or being touched by the man yet.

  In the three hours he’d sat here, he’d realized that a part of him, a truly traitorous part of him, half believed what Nurse Ackerman had said. Was something evil keeping the man alive?

  Just thinking that disturbed him greatly. How could he be a priest and believe that evil had more power over the body than good? What if somet
hing good was keeping the man alive? Wasn’t that more believable? Of course it was, he told himself.

  It was divine energy that created worlds. Couldn’t that energy sustain life beyond the time when life was viable? Certainly it could. Although, Arthur’s logical side argued, divine energy wasn’t the only kind of energy in the world.

  “Stop it,” Arthur admonished himself.

  And the monitors beeped out of rhythm again.

  “You can hear me?” Arthur asked, scooching the chair closer to the bed in spite of himself.

  The monitor’s beeps stuttered. The man in the bed didn’t move.

  Arthur leaned forward. “My name’s Father Blythe. No. Forget that. My name is Arthur. Is there anything I can do for you? I want to help.”

  The monitors beeped erratically for several seconds.

  Arthur said a silent prayer, asking for strength. Divest me of habitual notions of what is and isn’t good, what is and isn’t possible. Let me see past what my senses are telling me. Give me the strength to see this man as the love I know he is, and help me interact with him accordingly.

  Arthur sat still and took several slow breaths before reaching out and taking the man’s scorched finger bones in his hand. It required every ounce of his heart not to recoil at the dry, crispy phalanges in his hand. He felt like he was holding hands with a tree branch that had just come through a forest fire. No, that wasn’t true. It was worse than that by far. Because, in addition to the knobby hard objects in his hand, he could feel the pulsing slither of the man’s veins beneath the parched skin covering.

  Give me strength, Arthur prayed again.

  He must have gotten it. That was the only explanation for why he didn’t scream when the finger bones and veins he held moved.

  He did, however, drop the hand. He was human, after all.

  Was it because he was polite, or because he was afraid of whatever entity had moved the fingers?

  Entity? What was he thinking? This wasn’t an entity. This was a man in hideous circumstances. This wasn’t a foe to be vanquished. It—he—was a human being, worthy of love.

  “You are loved,” Arthur said. He could feel the truth of his words. Couldn’t he?

  Actually, he wasn’t sure. He usually felt a flush of warmth and a surge of lightness when he said those words. But now? Nothing.

  The man, however, felt something. He must have. Because he began moving his index finger.

  At first, Arthur thought the finger motions were random, reflexes caused by nerves firing indiscriminately. But then he realized the finger motion was purposeful.

  “Could you do that again?” he asked.

  He didn’t let himself wonder how the man could hear him. The man had no ears, and Arthur didn’t want to look into the tortured tissue at the side of the man’s skull to see if his eardrums and whatever else made it possible to translate vibration into sound were still intact.

  Apparently the man could hear him, because the finger repeated the motion. Arthur watched closely.

  “It’s an F!” he said excitedly when he realized the finger had just written that letter in the air.

  The finger stopped. Arthur took that to be affirmation.

  “Just a second.” Arthur dug in his satchel and pulled out a small pad of paper and a pencil. Opening the pad, he wrote down, F.

  “Okay. I’m ready.”

  Would the finger move again?

  Yes!

  This time it traced an A in the air.

  “What in the name of all that’s good and holy are you doing?” Nurse Ackerman yelled from the doorway.

  Arthur fumbled the pencil, and it fell from his fingers. When he bent over to pick it up, he bumped his head on the bed frame. He also inhaled the odor of whatever fluid was draining from the man on the bed. It smelled like a cross between bile and vomit, and Arthur’s gag reflex activated. He stood and backed away from the bed, facing the nurse, trying not to vomit.

  “He’s communicating!” Arthur announced.

  Nurse Ackerman strode into the room. “I can see that!” she said. “And what makes you think that’s a good idea?”

  “Well, it’s a breakthrough! It’s progress. Progress is always good.”

  “If you think that, you’re dumber than you look.”

  Arthur chose to ignore her.

  “Do you even know what he’s communicating?” Nurse Ackerman asked. “For all you know, he could be hexing you.”

  Hexing him? Arthur kept his face blank.

  But Nurse Ackerman had a point. What was the man trying to communicate? Would it ever be clear?

  “Well, let’s find out,” Arthur said.

  “We should have called a different priest,” Nurse Ackerman snapped.

  “Just ignore her,” Arthur said to the man in the bed. He sat back down and repositioned his pencil over the pad. “Give me the next letter.”

  The finger moved again. Nurse Ackerman gasped and began murmuring under her breath.

  Arthur wrote down, Z.

  FAZ?

  “Okay,” he said. “Let’s keep going.”

  Arthur had written down “FAZBENTERDI” by the time Nurse Ackerman returned to the room. This time, she wasn’t alone. She had two other nurses with her.

  Both in the same dark blue uniform, the other nurses also wore similar openmouthed, wide-eyed expressions. They were obviously appalled by what the man was doing. One of the nurses, a round, grandmotherly-looking woman, covered her mouth with a hand. The other nurse, a tanned woman who looked like she spent the weekends mountain climbing, put her hands on her hips and glared at Arthur. He hoped she wasn’t going to get aggressive with him, because she could take him without breaking a sweat.

  They didn’t say anything, though, so Arthur kept going.

  One letter at a time, the man spelled out his communication in the air. When he was done, completion indicated by no further finger bone movement, Arthur had a string of incomprehensible letters on his pad: FAZBENTERDISCENTER.

  FAZBENTERDISCENTER? What did that mean?

  Arthur frowned at the letters, inserting slashes between various sets. He tried several combinations:

  FAZBEN TERDIS CENTER

  FAZ BENTER DIS CENTER

  FAZB ENTER DISCENTER

  FA ZB ENTER DIS CENTER

  “I think I have the CENTER right,” he mumbled to himself. “But the other parts?” He tapped his pencil on his pad.

  Wait. What if he’d missed letters? It had been hard to interpret the motions of the bony finger. “Okay, so what if …” Arthur played with the letters some more, landing finally on: FAZB ENTER DIS CENTER.

  Arthur thought back over “DIS CENTER”—he’d seen that abbreviation before with some of the charities he’d worked with. “Distribution Center!” Arthur shouted. It had to be.

  But what was FAZB ENTER?

  “I need a phone book,” he told the nurses, who remained at the foot of the bed watching Arthur as if he was a live reality show. “I need to look up FAZB ENTER.”

  “Fazbear Entertainment,” the grandmotherly nurse whispered.

  “What?” Arthur asked.

  “Quiet, Nurse Thomas,” Nurse Ackerman hissed.

  Nurse Thomas covered her mouth with a plump hand. But it was too late. Arthur processed what she’d said.

  “Fazbear Entertainment Distribution Center!” Arthur cried out in glee. “This is amazing!”

  He turned to look at the nurses. They were all pale, even the tanned one, and they all stared at him and the man in the bed with obvious dread.

  “This is remarkable!” Arthur said. “Has he ever done anything like this before?”

  “Certainly not!” Nurse Ackerman shook her head. “You don’t understand the forces you’re playing with.”

  “Forces?”

  Arthur decided he’d had enough of the nurses. He turned back to the man.

  “Let’s see. How you can tell me what this place means to you?” Arthur thought for a second. He considered asking t
he man to air-write why he had just given Arthur the name of this place, but that could take hours, and Arthur figured the man didn’t have the strength for that. Given that he should have been dead long ago, lengthy communications didn’t seem like a good idea.

  Plus, as excited as he was, Arthur really needed to leave this room. It seemed to him that the sulfur smell was getting stronger, and now there was a hint of a feces odor wafting up from the bed. Did the man’s bowels work? Arthur hadn’t wondered before, and he wasn’t going to look now.

  “I have an idea,” he said, relieved that he did indeed have an idea.

  He could hear the nurses whispering in the doorway. He blocked them out.

  “Why don’t I make guesses about why this place is important to you? When I get to the right one, you can either raise a finger or just react so the monitors pick it up.”

  The monitors hiccuped, and Arthur took that to be assent. He threw out his first guess.

  “It’s where you used to work.”

  Nothing.

  “You have family there.”

  Nope.

  “You have unfinished business there.”

  No reaction.

  “You hid something there.”

  That guess made Arthur smile. It was a dead giveaway that he loved mystery and adventure books and movies.

  Arthur noticed the nurses had come farther into the room. Now they stood in a semicircle a couple feet from the end of the bed. Arthur wondered why they were still here. If they thought what he was doing was so abhorrent, why didn’t they just leave?

  “It was the last place you were before you got hurt.”

  No movement. No monitor reaction.

  “You need something from there.”

  Nothing.

  “You’ve always wanted to go there.”

  The monitors blipped so infinitesimally Arthur thought he was imagining it. But what if he wasn’t?

  “Is this a place you want to go?”

  The monitors reacted.

  “He can’t go anyplace, sweetie,” the round nurse said. “He can only go, well, someplace other than earth.”

  Arthur stood and walked over to the nurses. “You mean hell?” he whispered.

  Nurse Ackerman gave him one sharp head nod.