by Adam Dark
Ben really didn’t know how much he’d be able to use his hands at all after he got out of the hospital, but joking about it always helped to take away some of that awkwardness. And Peter had left looking relieved, both for Ben and for being able to go sleep in his own bed.
* * *
Waking up the next morning put him through an exercise in creativity. No way was he going to call a nurse in to help him pee, even without the use of his hands. But after a wobbly walk to the bathroom and a bit of fumbling his forearms against the hospital gown—yes, his ass was definitely hanging out—he managed to sit on the toilet without making a complete mess or an idiot of himself. The nurse did come in to spoon-feed him a breakfast of rubbery, unsalted eggs, apple sauce, and a dry sausage patty that tasted like dirt, and then he was pretty much left alone for a few hours until his dad showed up around 9:00 a.m. on a Monday.
They didn’t talk much, which had been the norm for them over the last several years, but the fact that his dad was here now when he would otherwise have been working away in his study made Ben ridiculously grateful, even through the little bit of guilt it brought him. After everything his parents had gone through trying to fix what they thought was wrong with their boy, he didn’t want them doing anything else now that he was an adult and could take care of himself—except for eating and drinking and, like, anything that required actual hands and fingers right now.
His dad had brought an old t-shirt, a pair of boxers, and loose sweatpants with paint stains, which were all much preferred over the hospital gown. Ben found it hilarious that his dad’s old clothes were just a little too small, but he didn’t say a thing about it as his dad helped him change. Then he got a hug, a kiss on the head, “Love you, bud,” and his dad went back to work.
* * *
A little over an hour later, as Ben sat staring at the ceiling and tried to think of anything other than how much his hands itched, there came a brief, curt knock on the open door. He straightened in the bed and found himself looking at a man he’d never expected to see again—and never wanted to, either.
Mason Whiteside, MD. The wrinkles around the man’s eyes were way more pronounced, his lips pulled into a perpetual scowl by the weight of loose skin hanging from his neck, and his hair was more gray now than black. But he still wore the same ridiculous bowtie in neon colors, still carried two pens in the breast pocket of his dress shirt, and still had those bright-green glasses perched at the very end of his nose, which had always made Ben itch to either push them back up where they belonged or yank them off and toss them across the room.
“Good morning, Benjamin,” the man said, stepping slowly across the room until he stood at the corner of Ben’s bed, holding his clipboard to his chest like he was waiting for the invitation to sit.
Ben would make him wait a little longer. “Mason,” he said, forcing an exaggerated smile. “Look at you. Still ‘shrinking the troubled boys.’” He couldn’t believe he’d actually remembered that one; Dr. Whiteside had used the phrase when Ben had first started seeing him a year after that night. It had stuck with him, apparently, because being lumped into the category of ‘troubled boys’ had really pissed him off, even at thirteen.
“I’ve always appreciated your biting sense of humor, Benjamin,” the man said, having to tilt his head way back so he could look at Ben through his precariously perched glasses. “It reminds me that I still have so much work to do in this world. Very humbling.”
‘This guy’s a douche,’ Ian said in Ben’s head.
Really? Almost a whole day in the hospital, and Ian couldn’t have come out to kill his boredom with just a little more conversation? Thank you, Captain Obvious.
Ben just stared at the psychiatrist from the bad trip the rest of his childhood had been, and finally, the man asked, “May I sit?”
Ben blinked at him and offered an exaggerated wave toward the chair beside the bed. “Oh, look. A chair.” With most people, he tried to be polite. He really did. This guy, though, had led him on a wild goose chase toward recovery when what the man had really thought he’d been chasing was actually more like the Loch Ness Monster.
Dr. Whiteside stared at the round end of Ben’s cast for a moment, blinked, then grabbed the back of the chair and scooted it agonizingly slowly away from the bedside and more toward the corner by Ben’s feet. Then he practically creaked into sitting and folded his hands in his lap on top of the clipboard. “It’s been a while.”
“Yup.”
“I was a little disappointed when you stopped coming to see me. And Dr. Fillert tells me you stopped taking your prescribed medication in high school. You were doing so well.”
Ben wanted to launch himself out of the bed and pummel the guy’s wobbly throat with his cast-fists. “Yeah, well, things were looking up. I got better.”
The man hummed, flipped through the papers on his clipboard, and said, “That is why I’m here. Just to make sure you haven’t run into any more hiccups.”
Hiccups? Misdiagnosed schizophrenia and multiple recommendations for in-patient psych treatment—three times, to be exact—didn’t exactly qualify as hiccups. Ben blinked and felt his own jaw working silently to restrain any kind of outburst. That wouldn’t help. What he had to do was act perfectly normal; he’d felt perfectly normal before this walking dinosaur had stepped so furtively back into his life. Did the hospital really think bringing in his old psychiatrist would make anything better?
‘We could show him,’ Ian said, tickling the back of Ben’s mind. ‘I have a few little tricks. That would convince him you were never crazy. I don’t like this guy, either.’
“No,” Ben said.
Dr. Whiteside looked up from the clipboard and raised his eyebrows. “What was that?”
“No hiccups.”
‘He really does deserve it for what he put you through.’
Ben just shook his head and willed Ian to shut up for a minute. This whole sharing-his-body thing was going to be a little more difficult than he’d thought.
“I hear you burned your hands trying to put out a fire from a spilled oil lantern,” Dr. Whiteside said.
“Yeah. Raccoons.”
* * *
Dr. Whiteside spent almost an hour in his room, firing all the usual questions. Was he under the influence of any substances? Did he still have nightmares? Did he hear any more voices? When was the last time? The only question Ben didn’t answer with a lie was the first one. Apparently, everyone thought drugs and alcohol were a more likely explanation than the fact that they just couldn’t explain why he’d been unconscious for so long. Ben had had one beer in his entire life and nothing else, and that was after the first time he was grilled like this eleven years ago.
The last question threw him off, though. How did he feel about the house being burned down? How did he feel? He wanted to throw a damn party. But he knew that even showing his relief by what he’d told everyone was an accident—which was kind of the truth, as Ian had technically been the one to start the fire—would bring a lot more suspicion down on him. Right now, all this was just precautionary. If he didn’t hold himself together, that could change real quick, and he’d have to run the looney gambit all over again.
At the end of their impromptu session, Dr. Whiteside stood, thanked Ben for his time, and leaned over the bed to extend his hand. Ben probably wouldn’t have shaken it anyway, but he did very much enjoy the embarrassment bursting behind the man’s eyes when he realized his mistake. So the man just bent down farther and gave Ben’s forearm a few light taps with his hands that felt like tissue paper.
* * *
Ben did get the casts off just before dinner, but he still couldn’t scratch that itch. Dr. Fillert came in to cut them off with what looked just like a pair of his mom’s garden shears. Then he unwrapped the bandages from around Ben’s hands and let Ben have a look while explaining what they’d done.
They looked like Frankenstein hands, blisteringly red, each palm covered with a square patch of skin he cou
ldn’t believe used to be on his leg. Dr. Fillert explained the procedure, that they didn’t use stitches but something called Hypafix that still had to be monitored and reapplied before the healing part of this whole thing was over. His hands, provided he didn’t try to start using them like normal right away, should take less than three weeks to heal, as long as Ben kept them clean and dry and applied the ointment he’d have to pick up at the pharmacy.
Ben went ahead and asked if he could have his own doctor in Boston check on his hands for the follow-ups; he really didn’t want to have to make this drive twice in three weeks, and staying with his parents was out of the question. Dr. Fillert gave him the go ahead on that one too but said Ben should feel free to call if he experienced unusual pain, swelling, or signs of infection. No, duh.
Then the man checked the donor site on Ben’s thigh for the skin graft, which he said was also looking good. Ben couldn’t believe how big it was. He wondered what kind of scars he’d have when everything was completely healed. He wondered what April would think of them.
“As far as the burns go, Benjamin,” Dr. Fillert said, “everything’s looking really good. We’re still going to keep you here for one more night, just until the results from your CT scan come in and I’ve had a chance to look at them. Being in a coma without any real explanation is just a little disconcerting, so I want to make sure we can rule out everything before we send you home.”
They gave him a CT scan? “Sounds good,” Ben replied, but he couldn’t help but wonder if a scanned image of his brain would pull up any more weird medical anomalies. Like, oh, a second person running around in there somewhere.
‘I doubt it,’ Ian said.
That wasn’t helping.
* * *
His parents came by again to have dinner with him that night, and he was mostly able to feed himself as long as he didn’t try to wrap his hand all the way around the fork. That still hurt. He’d been told small amounts of movement to test his range of motion were a part of the healing process, but after the first five minutes, his mom had to help him out with the rest of it.
After that, though, when he was alone and feeling like maybe he’d gotten out of this without any more strange, intrusive questions—or ever having to sit with Dr. Whiteside again—the fact that he could push the buttons on the remote on his own to flip through the TV channels felt like a massive win.
* * *
The next morning after breakfast, he had a visit from the Oakwood Police. Two men in uniform came to question him about the night the old orphanage on Wry Road burned down, and Ben delivered April and Peter’s tale with flying colors. Both of the officers seemed a little on edge when they talked specifically about the house and if he or his friends had seen anything else there he felt they should know about. Ben had a feeling they didn’t really want to know, but asking was part of the job. Then they took down his contact information and said they’d get in touch if they had any other questions or needed him to come in before they put this one to bed.
Around 10:00 a.m., the nurse on duty came in briefly to tell him they were discharging him in a few hours, and after she brought back all the paperwork to sign, along with the countless instructions for how to care for his hands and the donor site on his leg, he’d be free to go. A wave of relief washed over him then; apparently, Mason Whiteside, MD hadn’t found anything suspicious enough this second time around to call for more testing, more counseling, more pills, or more bull. And the police hadn’t returned with an entire squad to come lock him away. If Ben had actually made it to the point where he could lie well enough to keep anyone from thinking he was crazy—while still managing not to actually lose his mind in the aggravating process—things might just be looking up for this demon-attack survivor.
Strike that. He’d very much liked the way Demon Hunter sounded.
‘Woah. Getting a little ahead of yourself, aren’t you?’ Ian asked.
“Can you ever not hear what I’m thinking?” Ben grabbed his cell from the nightstand to text Peter that he was getting out and would need a ride.
‘I told you we’d have to share your body.’
“You didn’t say anything about sharing my mind.” Then he sent the same text to his mom, and she replied with a lengthy response in wildly overeager abbreviations used by teenagers. She’d come get him, and he could wait at his parents’ house with her and his dad until Peter came to get him there.
‘I didn’t say anything about not sharing your mind.’
Ben knew it was just his imagination, but the image of his eternally twelve-year-old-looking friend with his arms folded and delivering a smirk of mock insult flashed in his mind. But Ian didn’t say anything else.
He would have liked to think it was on a whim, but texting April too had definitely been floating around in the back of his mind. He had a feeling Peter might have let her know what was going on with him, but he didn’t want to assume, and he didn’t want to make things any worse by acting like he was trying to ignore her. So he pulled up her number and typed in a message.
‘Hey. Getting out of the hospital today. Peter’s coming to get me. Back in Boston tonight.’
Waiting for her to reply felt like a whole different kind of eternity, and he had no idea what he’d just watched on the TV for the last twenty minutes. Then his phone went off.
‘Glad you’re okay.’
Oh, man. Was that it? He knew she’d never been one for long texts with any actual emotion behind them; heck, he preferred it that way. But now he started to twist himself up with the idea that maybe she was just being nice. Maybe she’d spent all she had left on coming up with this story for the three of them to use, getting him safely to the hospital, and moving on with her life. Maybe she was done with demons and summonings and possessed houses and green fire shooting out of someone else’s hands while they acted completely unlike themselves. Ben understood. He’d felt like that the first time he’d gone through the horrors of the house on Wry Road, and he never thought he’d actually step back into that world again of his own free will.
When he realized he was agonizing way too hard over this, he figured it couldn’t hurt to send one more text.
‘Thanks for taking care of everything.’
‘That’s what I’m here for,’ she sent back, this time without making him wait nearly as long.
Ben let out a deep sigh. That sounded promising. Hopefully.
‘I owe you,’ he sent.
‘Yeah you do. Dinner Friday?’
He laughed.
‘Absolutely.’
25
Three weeks later
“Okay. You’re really gonna like this.” Peter rubbed his hands together as he stood behind his car. Then he popped the trunk and took out a small, black, plastic tub that looked like a giant version of the little containers they had to buy in middle school for all their index cards—which Ben had never used, because they were ridiculous and never fit with everything else in his backpack. Peter closed the trunk again and set the tub down on top of it.
“Nice box,” Ben said.
“It’s not—” Peter turned to glare at him. Ben choked back a laugh. “One of the guys in my Senior Design lab is a welder, so I asked if I could have some help with putting this together.” He opened the plastic box and pulled out … another box.
“You welded something?” Ben asked, glancing briefly up from the metal cube in Peter’s hands to his friend’s face.
Peter looked like he’d just taken a bite of orange peel. “Are you kidding? I can’t mess around with that. No. He did all the actual building.” He lifted the cube a little toward Ben and wiggled his eyebrows. “But I designed it.”
Ben just stared at the thing. “I said nice box already, right?”
Rolling his eyes, Peter shifted the cube—which was about the size of one of those containers of Tang mix with the twist-on lids—into one hand and flickered his fingers over the top of it with the other. “Check this out.” Then he pressed down on the t
op of the box, and some mechanism inside it sprang open. All four sides of the cube fell away, one of them twice as long with the top panel still attached to it, and there in the center was a raised metal setting with a crystal wedged into it that looked remarkably like the one they’d used on the Guardian—only lumpier.
To Ben, the whole thing looked like a fancy display for a not-so-fancy rock set out on a metal puzzle piece. “Uh, cool.”
His sarcasm was completely lost on Peter. “Right? I figured some of the stuff we pulled out of that book was a little outdated, so I modernized it, I guess. But it has all the basic stuff, minus a lion’s pelt and the blood of a black cock.” He turned to smirk at Ben, then lifted the open box closer into Ben’s face. “All there.”
Ben leaned in to see that the exact symbols they’d used from The Lesser Key of Solomon had been etched into the metal insides of the cube with perfect clarity—all the names and cardinal directions they’d drawn on the makeshift belt on the longest double panel; the Pentagram of Solomon across from it; even the Table of Solomon below the crystal’s setting where it had been soldered to the bottom panel. Something like a tingle of excitement ran up Ben’s spine, and he wondered for a minute if it really belonged to him.
“Woah,” he said. Peter grinned and nodded, looking ridiculously proud of himself. “Your welding friend just did this for fun?”
Peter snorted. “Are you nuts? I have to look over every single one of his final projects for the rest of the year. But now, we won’t have to mess with finding more leather and feathers for ink. Or whatever other weird stuff that book has in it.”
Ben blinked at the open box in his friend’s hand, then frowned up at Peter. “Because you still want to keep doing this?” He had to admit he was a little surprised. They’d mentioned it once or twice, like how good it had felt to get rid of the Guardian, even if it was just for a little bit, or how they might be able to help other people who’d gone through what they went through as kids if they could summon demons or banish them or do anything at all to change things. But he hadn’t realized until now how serious Peter had really been about the whole thing.