The main lights went out.
‘She’s here.’
* * *
The Witch’s reputation didn’t come from killing. As far as Ruby knew the Witch had never killed anyone. The fear she invoked was more associated with the sense of wrongness that hung about her, and with her methods.
Hannah Harman had arrived at her family home half an hour ago and lights shone from every window. Police and contract security had begun to arrive already. The former with blues and twos to wake the neighbours, the latter in black vans, carrying heavy bags.
The Witch had taken over the main reception room in the company’s observation house. She’d allowed the lights to struggle back into life but shadows still hung the room, invading spaces where they shouldn’t be.
She had requested a number of items. Everything the Witch asked for was a demand, no matter how it was phrased. Things the girl had touched. Hairs from the girl, left by her in the holding room. Finding those amid the ruin had been near impossible. Ruby hoped the team hadn’t cheated. The Witch would know. And her last request: pieces of the two men who had got closest to her, namely Ted and Tex. Fingers ideally, though tongue or eyeball would serve.
‘They’re not dead,’ Ruby had said, confused. ‘Sorry if there was a misunderstanding. Tex is going to need some bones splinted, but Ted’s not even hurt.’
The Witch had remained motionless and said nothing else. After a long pause Ruby went to issue instructions.
The requests arrived by motorbike courier. The Witch added them to a collection of items seemingly taken at random from a drawer in an antique oak sideboard by the bay windows. As she picked them, a board marker here, a Bic Biro there, a cheap plastic ruler, she named each for an actor in the current debacle. Ruby was the ruler, Miles Harman the Biro, Ted was Ted’s finger, and so on.
She gathered the components into the void of her hands and whispered to them, weaving strands of shadow about their length. The temperature in the room began to plummet and Ruby shivered despite the fires banked within her. She imagined that behind the curtains frost was spreading ghostly tendrils across the window glass.
The Witch threw her collection to the floor. They fell as any loose assembly of such junk might, but somehow the pattern held Ruby’s eye. The Witch bent over it, tracing her silhouette hand across each part.
‘There’s a ghost in the machine.’ Little more than a murmur. ‘A haunting. A web, connecting our players. There’s no point going after the pieces. She’ll just jump from one to the next. The Harman parents are as dangerous as their daughter until you deal with this little visitor.’
Ruby felt a cold malice that didn’t seem to be her own seeping into her mind from the piece of darkness that had long ago been lodged behind her eyes. ‘Point me at her.’
The Witch studied the pattern, touched her own black finger to first one severed digit then the other. ‘The hospital. They met her at the hospital. That’s where you’ll find her.’
* * *
Ruby was still shivering as she emerged from her car in the street outside the Royal London. Krista drove it away. Finding parking at the hospital would be a nightmare. She stood on the pavement staring up at the lighted windows, hundreds of them. The night hung on her, hot and dirty as the traffic growled past in a slow snarl. Her hands trembled. She balled her fists, made as much heat as she could get away with without starting to glow, and the shivering eased.
The Witch had offered Ruby one of the fingers ‘to point the way’ and when she had balked at the proffered digit, the Witch had touched her instead. The same cool, dry touch she remembered from the tiled room they’d kept her in. ‘Now you’ll know the way.’
And she did. Horribly, Ruby knew her path through the hospital as well as she knew the way to her own bed. It meant that something new had stayed with her when the Witch withdrew her hand.
‘Won’t she just take me over too?’ Ruby had asked. ‘And send me back at the company?’ The idea of being someone else’s puppet stirred a deep revulsion in her, while at the same time a small voice told her that she already was one. Money pulled her strings, but something had changed to let that happen. The Witch had made that change as part of the bargain that dialled her pain down to manageable levels.
‘If she tries she’ll get a nasty surprise,’ the Witch had said. Ruby didn’t want to know what was considered ‘nasty’ by someone who thought fingers were a reasonable donation to the cause.
Passing down the long green corridors and climbing flight after flight of stairs, Ruby wondered who she would find at the centre of this puzzle. An ace who’d been working on Harman’s medical project no doubt. Some gifted healer who’d been given the wild card. It made sense. Harman was hardly going to take on such vested interests without a powerful backer. The world doesn’t make heroes and villains, just winners and losers. Harman’s drug wasn’t an act of benevolence, it was a power play.
Ruby found herself at the swing doors to the respiratory ward. She buzzed to be let in. No point forcing the issue before she needed to.
‘Yes?’ on the intercom.
‘I think they brought my mother here. Mrs Smith.’
A click and the door opened as she pushed.
‘I think she’s down this way.’ Ruby strode past reception. The woman on duty frowned and turned to her records, perhaps wondering if they even had a Smith on the ward.
Ruby knew her way. Not as clearly as if she had been following one of those primary coloured lines leading down the corridor to A&E, but well enough to find the door she needed. It just stood out in sharper focus than the others.
She opened the door and went in, ignoring the ‘ISOLATION’ sign. The room beyond was dimly lit, the gloom filled with the whir and pulse of a ventilator and an array of monitors where the patient’s vital signs trailed jagged lines in glowing green and glowing purple.
A young doctor looked up from adjusting the patient’s breathing mask. She wore olive scrubs, latex gloves, and a cloth mask that covered the lower half of her face. Ruby closed the door behind her.
‘Can I help you?’ The eyes above the mask held the question too.
The doctor was tallish, slim, possibly athletic, blonde hair tied back in a serious ponytail. Ruby wondered what other talents she’d been dealt over and above possessing people at a distance. She was strong. They knew that much. ‘Can I–’
‘I don’t think so.’ Ruby pulled her sleeves back as if preparing for an old fashioned punch up.
‘Then you really need to leave. This patient is infectious and very ill.’
‘What’s wrong with them?’ Ruby hadn’t had so much as a sniffle since XTA had its way with her. Bugs couldn’t tolerate her body temperature. She had no interest in what was wrong with the twisted figure beneath the sheets, it was just a distraction as she closed the distance to the bed.
‘That’s patient confidential.’ The doctor’s tone grew exasperated. ‘Will you please–’
Ruby grabbed the doctor’s neck. She could crush all the bones in a man’s hand just by squeezing. She hesitated though. She’d killed before, but not like this, part of her at least needed her victim to fight back first.
‘Double pneumonia!’ the doctor gasped in shock. ‘We’re putting her in a drug induced coma. But it’s difficult. We’re having to do it orally–’
‘I don’t care.’ Ruby cut off the woman’s gabbling. Why wasn’t she fighting back?
Ruby squeezed a little and lifted the doctor from the floor. Immediately the woman began to choke and purple. ‘This isn’t personal.’ A moment later the woman’s struggles stopped and she just hung there, face vacant.
Ruby lowered her, amazed. Had she died? Fainted? She had expected more. She drew her free hand back for the coup de grace. Heat rippled as she made a fist, her skin already a dull red.
‘No.’ The doctor’s head snapped upright, eyes wide, bloodshot, and watery, but with a determination in them that had been wholly absent before.
Ruby g
rinned. This was what she’d come for. This was ok. The ace might have been playing the mouse until now but those eyes revealed her true nature. She threw her punch, flames trailing behind it.
The force of the blow tore the doctor from the grasp of Ruby’s other hand and threw her against the wall, cratering it.
The doctor stepped away from the ruined wall, shrugging broken plaster from her shoulders and rubbing her jaw. A small trickle of blood escaped the corner of her mouth. She tilted her head and gave Ruby a look that was more curious than angry. ‘You’re very strong.’
Ruby lifted both hands, fingers spread, white hot now, buckling the ceiling tiles a yard above her. ‘And you’re interfering with things that don’t concern you.’
‘This is a hospital. They help people here. Why are you smashing it up?’ The doctor sounded outraged, hurt. She sounded like a child, or if not a child then naïve. It wasn’t a world view that survived contact with hard realities.
Without any particular joy in it Ruby advanced swiftly for the kill. The doctor seemed to have no experience of hand-to-hand combat – she just stood there, not even adopting a fighting stance. Ruby reached to take the doctor’s head in her blazing grasp. At the last moment the doctor’s hands caught her wrists.
They struggled and to her shock Ruby discovered that the woman was stronger than her. She even weathered a series of knees to the ribs as she kept Ruby’s hands from her face.
Beneath the white heat of her hands Ruby’s wrists glowed a dull red, and a faint stink of burning rose from where the doctor’s fingers encircled them, but she seemed in no hurry to let go.
The fire started where it always started, right at the bottom of Ruby’s stomach. A rolling inferno rising through her. It felt as though she would be utterly consumed, as though all that would remain was a carbonised statue that would crumble away. It was always like that. The flames roared from her open mouth, setting fire to the air, engulfing the doctor. She screamed and released her hold on Ruby, who stepped back from the swirling firestorm. A cruel end for a worthy opponent.
Ruby hadn’t wanted to. Even trapped and outclassed she hadn’t wanted to. Every time the fire got away from her like this, every time someone died burning in front of her, she saw Kyle, heard his screams not theirs.
Smoke billowed, alarms sounded, the sprinklers began to jet.
The doctor staggered forward. No longer burning. Clothed in soot, her hair gone. Even with the sprinklers in full flood she should still have been burning. The others all had, like awful human candles. Even with the fire out she should have been in unbearable agony. Instead she just stared with wide blue eyes. ‘Doctor Reece is the nicest, kindest woman in the world, and you’ve burned her clothes off!’ She shouted the words like someone unused to shouting. ‘She only tries to help! It’s not her fault she can’t get her needles into me. She’s doing her BEST!’
And with that the doctor lunged forward, shoving Ruby in the chest with two flat hands. The attack sent Ruby flying. She slammed into the hospital bed, knocking the heavy steel frame onto its side and spilling Ruby and the patient to the floor. They both crashed down together.
Ruby was on her feet in a moment, reaching for the gun concealed in her jacket. But the doctor was already falling, crumpling gracelessly into a blackened heap. Her last words finally sunk in. The doctor wasn’t the source, just another puppet. Ruby whirled around wildly, pointing her gun. ‘Show yourself.’
A nurse opened the door and poked her head in, horrified.
‘Fuck off.’ Ruby sent a bullet over her head and the woman vanished screaming.
Realisation dawned slowly. She lowered her gaze. On the floor, half shrouded in a torn, wet sheet a blonde girl lay twisted into an unnatural pose as if every muscle were at war with every other. She was painfully thin, her arms drawn up against her body, wrists bent at impossible angles. Blue eyes stared into the distance above an oxygen mask. Ruby had seen this before, cerebral palsy, spastic quadriplegia, one of her cousins had been born that way. Died of pneumonia aged twelve, a twisted thing, incapable of speech or movement.
‘You?’
Ruby stepped back. The Witch had said this ace needed to touch you, to have touched you. Did they touch? Ruby couldn’t remember, not in the tumbling fall when the doctor had thrown her at the bed.
She understood now. If the dying girl on the floor was as invulnerable as she made those she inhabited become, then how would they treat her? Intravenous antibiotics might save her but what kind of needle would they need? Ruby didn’t know how to kill the girl, but the bubbling wheeze of her breathing said just walking away and waiting twenty-four hours would do it. She didn’t have much time.
Ruby put the gun away. Part of her said this should mean more. She should feel more. She had loved her cousin, played nurse with him, cried when he died. And now … nothing…just a coldness and a darkness behind her eyes.
‘I’m sorry.’ Ruby turned to go.
I’m sorry too. The voice spoke in her mind. I should be invited.
As the visitor moved into her Ruby found she knew the girl’s name: Angela. She tried to fight off the invasion, tried to marshal her thoughts and cling to her body, but instead a dark something unfolded itself within her skull. Ruby’s last thought as she was thrown clear was that the Visitor seemed as surprised as she was.
A moment later Ruby found herself on the floor, her limbs twisted and unresponsive, her lungs sloshing with corruption as she tried to breathe. And worse, much worse, a level of pain that threw the worst of her fever agonies into the shade, a pain that let her understand how Angela had managed to function despite the agony of the doctor’s burns. The girl had lived with worse from the moment she’d been born.
* * *
The thing waiting for her is not the woman that Angela expected. That woman had been a confusing mixture, cold and detached on the surface, angry and hurt underneath. On the rare occasions Angela has battled someone for their body it has been a raw, emotional struggle, with the person clinging to bones they’ve owned their whole life.
But the fiery woman has gone and in her place is a blackness, spider-like, cold rather than cruel. But all the more frightening because of it.
Angela launches herself at the darkness, heart first, she’s lived all her life like this. The only thing that has ever truly scared her is losing the people who love her. Until the wild card dealt her a new hand there were so few of those. Her condition had put a wall between her and the world, a thick one that few had the sight and endurance to scale. But some had, some had seen her, truly seen her, and loved her. Betty, who died in this same hospital, was one such.
The dark thing tears at her with clinical detachment, hitting her weaknesses, hamstringing her, deflecting her strength. It’s a battle of minds, of intelligence, a chess game. And Angela is losing. Ruby’s eyes grow black, darkness bleeding from pupil to iris and into the whites. Angela is hemmed in, torn down, bound tight until she occupies only a corner of the shell they’re fighting within.
The Witch doesn’t speak to her, doesn’t relish her destruction, or even care. The Witch is an emptiness, a cancer, the space left when the virus killed a woman years ago.
Angela’s body is dying on the floor with Ruby trapped inside. Smoke escapes her nostrils, the mask on her face is melting, but she can’t do more than twitch. Angela’s mind is dying inside Ruby, poisoned by the Witch’s impersonal malice.
Angela does what she has done for nineteen years. She endures. She holds on. She looks at the gifts she has been given and makes the most of them. Her resurgence isn’t swift. It is relentless though. It’s the green pressure of the spring that forces new shoots through tarmac, that swells that tree trunk and cracks stone. It’s the advance of glaciers, of tectonic plates. And the Witch has never known its like.
By the time the first fireman is through the doors the Witch has retreated to a black knot buried at the back of Ruby’s brain. Angela pushes her out. Something ugly bleeds from the back of Ruby�
��s skull. It takes on the form of a nightmarish spider no larger than a hand, and scurries away, out into the corridor. It will find the Witch and reunite with her.
Angela falls back into her own body and Ruby in turn is drawn to hers.
Leave and don’t come back. Don’t ever hurt any of my people. Angela’s voice is sad rather than scolding, as if she just wished Ruby could be a better person. Don’t hurt anyone.
Ruby lets the emergency crew carry her out. She’s too deep in thought to struggle to her feet. And in any event her body feels like the ground on which some great battle has been fought, churned to mud, strewn with deep trenches and craters. The pain that the Witch took away as part of their bargain has returned. It still burns. It’s still bad. But after what she felt in Angela’s body. After knowing for a few minutes what the girl must have lived with all her life, Ruby thinks she can live with her own measure.
Ruby knows the girl is foolish, naïve, a child given powers nobody should be trusted with. Angela hasn’t lived the life Ruby has, she never had the chance, she’s not been faced with impossible choices, compromises that leave you dirty, each one a cumulative pollution of the soul. But now that the Witch’s touch has left her … Angela’s innocence tears at Ruby, makes her want to cry, makes her want that purity of vison for herself. Ruby isn’t suddenly a good person but suddenly, for the first time since the Witch touched her, she doesn’t want to be a bad one.
Doctor Reece has first degree burns over fifty percent of her body but she will make a good recovery. The investigators looking at the damage wrought by the fireball are unsure how she isn’t … toast.
Angela has a new bed in a new room. Angela hasn’t been assigned a new doctor. She is past their help. She will not be here long. They are coming to take her away.
Angela’s death could have been averted if Miles Harman’s new antibiotic Bioxin had been rushed to market. And if some way of feeding it through her obdurate flesh into her veins could have been devised.
The Visitor--Kill or Cure--A Tor.com Original Page 3