Interference

by S. L. LUCK

  Troy said, “They were amazing when my mother had her stroke. She wouldn’t be recovering like she is if she didn’t get the care she had here. One of my partner’s fathers suffered a stroke a few years ago, and I remember the hell that poor guy went through. They discharged him too quickly, and he ended back in the hospital off and on for maybe four months. All the rehab programs were booked up, so they had nowhere to put him. He had a homecare nurse that visited twice a week, but it wasn’t enough to keep him going. He deteriorated so fast that by the time he was able to get into a program, they couldn’t help much.” He looked at William, who was listening intently. “I think there is something to be said for small communities, you know?”

  The elevator doors opened and the men stepped out onto the quiet floor, with Troy following slightly behind William. There! There! THERE! Get her! Get herrrrrrr! His Dark Friend salivated inside his head, and Troy did his best to shield his outward senses to his Dark Friend’s frenzy. He rolled his tongue over his teeth, swallowing the surge of saliva in his mouth.

  “That hospital smell gets you every time, don’t it?” William laughed.

  “I’ll never get used to it,” Troy said, and wiped the corners of his mouth.

  “That was quick,” said a thick-set nurse, smiling up at them from her desk. She eyed Troy delightedly as most women did, and he gave her his most innocent smile. With effort, she peeled her eyes off Troy. To William, she said, “She’s been surfing on her iPad since she woke up. Your wife’s been trying to keep her away from the news, but you know how kids are. Tell them not to do something and it’s the only thing they want to do.” She wrinkled her nose.

  William held up his bags. “This’ll keep her mind off it,” he said confidently, then added, “Our … friend … was just leaving as I was coming in. Mind if he pays a quick visit?”

  The request was unnecessary because since Anabelle had woken up, the Cheever family had the floor to themselves and would continue to do so until the electrification issue was resolved, but William insisted on signaling his respect for the team that had saved his only child.

  The nurse, whose nametag read Tammy, glanced at Troy’s hands. “Tripped over a cat,” he said to her unspoken question.

  “You two go on in, and mind your balance, you hear?” She winked at Troy.

  “Oh!” William said suddenly, turning back around. “Almost forgot! Bacon double cheeseburger and curly fries for you.” He set a bag on Tammy’s desk and removed her food. Avoiding Troy’s eyes, she tucked the items behind her computer screen with an embarrassed murmur of thanks.

  “Enjoy.” Troy tipped his chin to Tammy before William led him away from the nursing station.

  The distance from the desk to Anabelle’s bed was only a few strides, but as they approached the only room that was lit, Troy felt as though he’d just crossed the span of a desert. Outside the glass walls, his heart pounded and his body ached with a thirst he hadn’t realized he was capable of bearing without succumbing to death. When William tapped on the sliding glass door, Troy was struck by a paralyzing fear that he wouldn’t be able to control himself. Before this, he’d always been able to tame his Dark Friend when required, so his inability to shut it out now brought an agonizing worry that made him nauseous. “You all right?” William whispered to him.

  “I’ve never done well in hospitals.”

  “A burger will help that, I think.” William smiled, and then the glass door slid open and Susan Cheever was blinking up at Troy, confused.

  “I was in the neighborhood,” Troy said, holding up his hands with a small laugh.

  Susan’s maternal instincts drew her toward him and into a tight, breast-crushing hug. “Oh! Oh, you poor dear! What is with this city these days? No one can get a break. Come, come in. She’s awake and she’s excited to meet you. You tell him she knows about him?”

  “Yes dear,” William said, entering the room. When he finally stepped aside, Troy’s eyes fell upon Anabelle.

  Though he’d somehow expected his treasure beyond all treasures to present a formidable appearance, the girl was small and birdlike. In the Cheever home, Susan had practically thrown pictures of Anabelle at him. He’d seen her as an infant, white-skinned and cherry-haired, splashing in her grandmother’s tub with plastic farm animals, and again as a toddler with fuzzy pigtails, squeezing a golden retriever. He’d seen her dance recitals, at birthday parties, at school plays, at church. Troy had seen the space of her first lost tooth and the scrape of her first bike ride. Susan had teared up talking about Anabelle’s first slumber-party, last heartbreak, and the pride they’d felt watching her accept her high school diploma at her graduation ceremony the previous year. So he knew to expect large green eyes and a saddle of freckles across her small nose, and he knew that her injury would have emaciated her already thin body. None of this was surprising. What was surprising was that when Anabelle first spotted Troy, he felt her see right into him.

  Rubbing Anabelle’s arm, Susan said, “This is Mr. Baker, honey. Remember we told you about him?”

  “H—” Troy started, then cleared his throat. “Hello Anabelle,” he finally managed. He did not offer her his hand, afraid the contact would prove too irresistible for his Dark Friend, knowing the Cheevers would suspect his injury as the reason. “It’s Troy, actually. Please call me Troy.” He swallowed and watched her eyes follow the slide of his Adam’s apple, then he took a chair William pulled up for him and sat. Anabelle did not take her eyes off him.

  “I convinced him to come up for a snack,” William told his daughter, setting beside her a small box of donut holes, a bag of fries, a cheeseburger, and a personal pizza.

  Susan chortled with laughter. “You’d think she’s a giant, trying to feed her like that.” The relieved parents began nibbling at their food, but Susan’s brows knit with concern. “You okay, dear?” she asked, patting Anabelle’s ankle. “Are you tired? Dad can pack the food up for later if you’d like.” Concern flitted over William’s face as he chewed.

  Anabelle shook her head and finally laid her iPad down on her stomach. "No, I—I’m fine.” Her pinky finger twitched, then to Troy she said, “You don’t have a cat.”

  His Dark Friend squealed. What fun! What fun she will be! Can you feel it, Troy? Can you? Can you? Can you? Take her and take all. Take her and take everything. She’s it, Troy, she’s IT. The one I have been waiting forrrrrrrr! He felt his Dark Friend work through his blood, his veins, his—No! No! Troy squeezed his legs shut and covered his lap with his hands, pressing with his wrists until a jolt of pain deflated him. All this in seconds. Then he fought his Dark Friend’s push with the blocking of his mind. Onto the path that lay between his Dark Friend and Anabelle, Troy shoved the memory of his tax returns and the tying of his shoe. On went his haircuts, his belt size, the color of his mailbox, the final question on his bar exam. He congested his mind—the singular space now a thickened miasma of random thought, anything, anything to keep him calm, keep him sane. His heartbeat a thunderclap in his chest, Troy forced a sympathetic smile.

  “I have two cats actually,” he lied to the girl who had read him, knowing she would know.

  “Brain injury,” William said.

  “But she’s already healing faster than they thought she would,” Susan interjected, as though saying so made it irrevocable. “Show him your head, honey,” she instructed Anabelle.

  Obediently, though with eyes locked on Troy, Anabelle tilted her head to reveal a shortened patch of red hair a few inches slantwise from her ear. Already, there was no discernable scar or bruise or scratch that would have indicated the girl had tumbled off a bridge in a tour bus.

  “Isn’t it incredible?” Susan beamed.

  With a mouthful of burger, William said, “Blows the mind, doesn’t it? Once they figure out the other stuff”—he gestured to the wires extending from her feet— “she’ll get discharged.”

  “Is that right?” Troy remarked, calming himself with great effort.

  “I’ll
be out soon,” Anabelle said tonelessly, her finger swirling around her bedsheet. She bumped the pizza and it fell facedown on the floor. Susan gave a little cry as both she and William reached to scoop it up. And while their heads were turned away from their daughter, Anabelle’s eyes fell to Troy’s lap.

  25

  The fifth floor of the hospital was a nest of quiet. Gone were the percussions of monitors and the whispers of ventilators. Absent were the unconscious sounds of doomed patients; no longer were last rites chanted in haste beside disconsolate mourners. There was a pause in the dispirited procession of the living who dragged themselves past the nursing station, away from the soon-to-be-dead. The temporary reprieve from the loud quiet accorded the two nurses on duty a weightlessness that eased the strain on their shoulders, relaxed the muscles in their necks.

  From Anabelle’s room their chatter was easily heard, and it was not without effort that Anabelle kept from laughing at sexual escapades gone wrong or weight loss ventures gone worse. Her company having departed hours ago, they supposed she was asleep, but Anabelle had never been more awake.

  She felt no pain, nor was she suffering from isolation or what they called survivor’s guilt, though she supposed the curiosity around her survival would accompany her to her grave. If asked, Anabelle believed she could fling her covers away and dash out the doors, such was the rapidity of her recovery. Were it not for the wires, she felt she could even return to college in London, but somehow Anabelle knew she should do none of these things right now. Her time in the fog had told her so.

  The deep-throated belly laughs of a nurse conjured the memory of her grandfather, living large and letting everyone know it beside her on the bus that day. How happy he had been to be showing her off, and how happy her grandmother was, pretending to be annoyed with it. “Let her be, Earl.” Her grandmother elbowed him then. “You’re embarrassing her.”

  And though color had spotted her cheeks and she’d hidden her face behind her hands, Anabelle had felt a hundred feet tall as her grandparents bragged about her to their friends, who then inquired about her relationship status to pass along to their grandsons. She’d celebrated her nineteenth birthday the week before with a party thrown by her parents and a pub crawl organized by her friends, so she was still suffering from a raging hangover when her grandparents surprised her with the casino trip.

  Anabelle wasn’t averse to spending time with her mother’s parents; in fact, she enjoyed their banter. Where her father’s parents seemed to diminish with age, retreating from social and physical activity, substituting friendships with doctor’s visits, Grandpa Earl and Grandma Gingy seemed to expand through time. They gathered people like fridge magnets, accrued experience like passport stamps, welcomed adventure wherever and to whomever it took them. Reflecting now on the enormity of their lives, Anabelle was somewhat consoled that her grandparents had lived that way, but she would give anything to have them back.

  Lying in her bed, listening to the nurses’ overly loud exchange of secrets, Anabelle knew she would never forget her grandparents’ selflessness. When the SUV hit, their quick exchange of fear went to Anabelle, only to Anabelle, and when the wind bashed the carriage and the passengers flailed about, it was her grandmother who shouted, “Help her, Earl!” By the time the semi pushed them over the guardrail, both her grandparents had removed their seatbelts and were cocooned around her, pressing their bodies to hers, frantically shouting their love to each other, to her, their prayers a united plea for help. In that terrible moment, their fear was for Anabelle alone, for she had heard their resigned declarations of love, saw their goodbyes in the steadiness of their eyes as they locked on each other. Then they were gone, and Anabelle was submersed in fog.

  There was no pain when she entered the fog, nor was there recollection of the crash or anything that ever existed before the fog. It was like being born in an underlit room: disorienting in its foreignness but otherwise sedating. Her body, light with movement and exempt from the restriction of gravity, passed through the suspension of space and time as a cell would in an infinite body, going everywhere and nowhere at once. She didn’t know whether her first feelings were instant or if they sprouted somewhere in the ellipses of time, but they came and they were additive, the effect of fertilizer on a plant. Beneath the net of fog, Anabelle bloomed. She became something she hadn’t been, evolved from her human seed into something stronger—and with terrific power.

  Unfolding her new self, Anabelle had pressed the canopy above her until she burst through the protective web and emerged with the knowledge of what she had become. It was then, when she rose above the shelter of the fog, that Anabelle first sensed the existence of otherness that was not human but toying with humanness as cats would butterflies; batting one about until life was exhausted, then onto the next. There were not one of these things, but many sourced from the same evil, and she felt their gaze upon her as she rose from the mist, their individual ambitions now yoked against her.

  As her consciousness flooded back, she worked to retain their memory, fearing that she would forget that she was in danger outside of the fog. Anabelle forced their names through her fingertips, tracing the letters of their names. Pandora. Dark Friend. Flint. Lamashtu. Lilith. Mavet. Azazel. Bael. Pocong. Shinigami. Daeva’s animals, Ariton’s water. Ala’s weather. These and more, her fingers remembered with movement etched into her sheets, and when she finally woke, her fingers did not let her forget.

  Anabelle’s first certainty upon waking was that she had gained something with that crash. Her second was of the peril she faced because of it. She woke in fear not because of the recurring thoughts of her grandparents acceding to death as they hovered over her, and not because of the screams of terror as bones cracked and skin split, but because Anabelle had suddenly become the object of demons. The accident had splintered one of these things like a chip from a stone, severing its power, and somehow Anabelle absorbed its loss. Now they all wanted it, as though Anabelle were some sort of competition and her death was first prize.

  When she’d first opened her eyes two days ago, she’d felt them in her room, fluttering like midges over her skin, touching, testing, and one by one she dug into her new power and flicked them away. But their tongues had tasted and they returned, more, more, until her room was bursting with them, sliding over her body and beating each other back at her bedside. A great compression of terror crippled Anabelle until she understood that the testers and the tasters in her room were only understudies. With their report, stronger, meaner, more terrible chiefs of hell would come, and Anabelle was determined to be free of the hospital before then. Intuiting the need for a measured escape so they wouldn’t realize how strong she was, Anabelle feigned exhaustion to her doctors, to her parents, even alone in her room because she knew they were watching. Watching. Always watching.

  To her doctors, her medical reports were nothing short of a miracle. Her skull had healed. The delicate sponge of her brain showed no sign of past trauma. Her hair had defiantly sped back, its uneven length noticeable only with a close face and the squinting of eyes. They didn’t know she willed her body to heal, and they didn’t know she had worked the job of a conductor, opening and closing the circuits within her body to determine how her new self worked. They thought the surge the hospital experienced late last night and early that morning were issues in the mechanical room, something from the generators, or the unpreparedness of Lakehead Power. But it was not that. It was Anabelle piloting the mechanisms of her new self. She found she could squeeze her energy out and pull it back in. In, out, in, out, in … in … in … but not yet enough to be disconnected from the ridiculous tangle of wires attached to her ankles.

  The whisper of shoes brought Stephanie into her room. “You’re up!” the nurse exclaimed cheerfully.

  “Morning,” Anabelle murmured, drawing a pinch of empathy from the nurse’s face.

  Stephanie’s eyes scanned the monitors. Then she peeked at Anabelle’s healed headwound in case it had s
prung back open, and changed one of her intravenous bags. “How are you feeling today, my girl?” she asked. The endearment was a collective one, for once the ward was cleared of other patients and Anabelle became their sole concern, the nurses took it upon themselves to care for her as they would for their own children. For not only was Anabelle the city’s hope, but a small-town hospital’s triumph, and the nurses shone with pride every time they were near. In the short time since she’d woken, Stephanie had become Anabelle’s favorite nurse, indulging in gossip with Anabelle like an old friend. She reached for the cord to the bed control, and the steady whir of the motor elevating Anabelle’s head broke the silence in the room.

  Anabelle tried to ignore the invisible things lurking behind the nurse, beside the monitor, at the foot of her bed. Flick. Flick. Flick. She warned them away. “I could use a coffee,” Anabelle admitted. “But not the cafeteria crap. I’m too young for heartburn.”

  A smile touched the nurse’s lips. “I hear you,” Stephanie said. “I don’t know what they put in it, but I don’t believe it’s fit for human consumption. Gets the job done, that’s about it. Shift change is in twenty minutes. Want me to get Zadie to pick you up a Starbucks on her way? Your parents must’ve gotten us a hundred so far. This one’s on me.” Things swirled around the oblivious nurse like dark and destructive ozone.

  Clamping her eyes against the nightmares around her, Anabelle said, “I’d marry you for a latte.”

  “I think you’d upset that friend of yours,” Stephanie joked, busy with Anabelle’s urinary drainage bag. “Tammy told me he seemed quite taken with you.” She swiped the air with her hand. “Seems a bit old, but when you look like that, age is just a number, right? I tell you; I haven’t seen a man like that since my friends took me to Vegas for my bachelorette party twenty years ago. Men of Australia, or something like that, I think the show was called. Only those ones had nothing above their necks, couldn’t spell stupid if it were printed for them, there were so many spelling mistakes on these love notes they wrote. I mean, looks or no looks, it should be a crime to sell a postcard that isn’t spelled correctly, know what I’m saying?” Stephanie squealed with laughter. Against her will, Anabelle joined in. “But your guy, that friend of your family’s”—she air-quoted with her fingers— “you see it in his eyes, don’t you? That thing that says he could tear you apart, reciting Shakespeare or even the dictionary the whole time and … mmm! You’d just love it.” Stephanie gyrated her hips without embarrassment while the invisible things around her silently growled.