Her Last Whisper

by Karen Robards

  Still, it hadn’t happened yet, and having him with her even in his present debilitated state made her feel like she had an army at her back. She must have made some small sound encouraging him to keep pace, because he shot a quick, hard glance at her.

  It was then that she noticed with a cold little shiver that his eyes were dead black. Soulless. That place does things to me—she remembered him saying that the last time he’d managed to escape from Spookville, radiating brutality, eyes as black and feral as they were now. She’d understood him to mean it did bad things to him.

  As in, turned him into the lowest, most savage version of himself.

  Oh, God. But even the lowest, most savage version of Michael was preferable to no Michael at all.

  “Go!” he snarled, and she nodded and went. Her hurried footsteps on the smooth terrazzo sounded very loud to her own ears.

  The air itself seemed to pulse with malevolence as she made it through the door and strode out into the infirmary’s main room. There she discovered one of the trustees picking himself up off the floor. An overturned bucket disgorging soapy water plus a dropped mop near his feet made her wonder if he had tripped over the bucket when the lights went out. It would explain the sounds she had heard—

  “Keep moving.” Behind her, Michael kept himself positioned between her and Creason, who had not said so much as a word. Which, it occurred to Charlie, was creepy as hell. In his new, rough voice, Michael ordered, “Get out into the hall,” to her, then snapped, “Stay back,” at the now standing trustee in the same threatening tone he had used with Creason.

  Which was extra-terrifying, because Michael was perfectly aware that in the ordinary course of things no one besides her could see or hear him. Except it seemed that this particular trustee could, because he was regarding Michael with an ugly expression that made Charlie’s heart pound. Or was he looking through Michael, at her? There was no way for her to know, but she did know that his stare was unnerving.

  The other trustee and the two orderlies on duty and the single guard she could see and the inmate/patients waiting in beds for treatment seemed totally oblivious to anything extraordinary happening in their midst. They had resumed what they’d been doing before the lights went out.

  Of course, unless the universe was throwing a really nasty curve-ball her way, nothing had changed for them. They were perfectly normal. They couldn’t see Michael. When they looked at Creason and the trustee, they saw Creason and the trustee and nothing else. But there was no way she could tell for sure that none of the rest of them had been affected, so she dared not trust appearances.

  Stay calm.

  Except for Creason and the one trustee, both of whom kept their eyes riveted on her, nobody paid any attention to her as she walked quickly toward the door. Having converged until they were almost shoulder to shoulder now, those two were coming after her and Michael—slowly, thank God! Although—too slowly? As if their bodies didn’t quite work properly? Feeling their eyes on her made her want to jump out of her skin.

  Were they chasing her? Short answer: I don’t want to know.

  “Hurry,” Michael growled. And despite the buzz of ordinary-sounding conversation and the resumption of ordinary-seeming activity behind her, Charlie could feel her stomach knotting as she hit the intercom button beside the door.

  Hurry, hurry, hurry: the refrain seemed to pulse through her veins.

  “What can I do for you?” came the disinterested voice over the intercom.

  Trying not to sound as panicky as she was starting to feel, Charlie answered, “Could you let me out, please?”

  Security was tight in the prison, and passing from one section to another was not as easy as, say, just walking through a door and strolling down a corridor. After a moment a man’s meaty face appeared on the other side of the door’s small glass window to check her out, as was routine before unlocking the door. It could not have taken long, but her nerves were so jangled that it seemed like forever; it was all she could do to keep from casting quick, nervous glances over her shoulder the entire time, which she was loath to do because she didn’t want to show any more consciousness of something being wrong than she could help. Finally, what seemed like an interminable time later, the door was buzzed open.

  “Go,” Michael said urgently.

  Charlie didn’t need to be told twice. She went through that door like a racehorse charging out of the gate, only to find herself trapped inside the cage apparatus that required she be let out through another, separate pair of heavy wire-mesh doors as a security measure.

  “Stay away from her,” Michael warned behind her, and she didn’t need the quick, scared glance she threw over her shoulder to know who he was talking to.

  The clang of the infirmary’s heavy metal door closing behind her was just about the most welcome thing she had ever heard.

  Until it occurred to her that, like herself, Creason had only to say the word and he would be let out of the infirmary, too. As the prison doctor, he actually had access to far more of the facility than she did.

  He could hunt her down …

  Creason? The sheer absurdity of the thought should have stripped it of all its power to terrify. That it didn’t spoke volumes.

  “The second that damned door opens, move your ass,” Michael told her fiercely. “We need to get out of here.”

  “I can’t just run away,” Charlie protested under her breath while she waited on pins and needles for the second door to be opened. “I—”

  “The hell you can’t,” Michael interrupted. “Unless you want to tangle with Frankendoctor and his buddy back there, that is.”

  “But—”

  “There’s no fucking buts about this. You do what I tell you, and go.”

  “Everything okay, Dr. Stone?” The guard looked up from entering the code that unlocked the airlock-type doors to frown at her. Through the small window behind him, she caught a glimpse of Creason on the other side of the glass walking jerkily toward the infirmary door. The subtle distortion of his face was terrifying. Looking just as abnormal, the trustee was maybe a step behind.

  “Yes,” Charlie replied to the guard, then changed that to, “No.”

  “Dr. Stone?” The guard’s frown deepened.

  “Not the time to stand around and chat.” The gravelly quality of Michael’s voice made her chest tighten. His expression chilled her as he watched through the window as Creason lurched closer to the door. He looked—capable of the most extreme violence. “What part of move your ass are you having trouble with?”

  Charlie took a deep breath. She might be feeling exceptionally fragile. The otherworldly happenings that she wanted no part of but that kept finding her anyway might seem particularly overwhelming. She might want to run straight for the nearest hidey-hole where she could hunker down and ride out the psychic storm until she got her equilibrium back.

  Unfortunately, one of the immutable laws of the universe was: shit happens. Whether she was ready for it or not.

  Running would not help.

  What she needed to do was get a grip. And do whatever she could to make herself and Michael safer.

  Then she could worry about maybe trying to help Creason. And the trustee. And, it sometimes seemed like, the whole fricking world.

  Baby steps.

  “You need to lock the infirmary down,” she told the guard in her best authoritative voice. “I think there may be a dangerous situation developing in there. Dr. Creason … was behaving oddly. So were some of the inmates. No one—not anybody in the infirmary—should be let out until more guards are on hand and the cause investigated.”

  “Whoa.” Michael’s disconcertingly black eyes were impossible to read as they fixed on her face. He appeared slightly more solid now, thank God, as if the more distance he put between himself and Spookville, the stronger he was growing. Then his mouth twisted slightly, and she realized that it was with approval. “Way to think on your feet, babe. That should slow the fuckers down.”

>   How ridiculous was it under the circumstances that she found his approval warming?

  “You sure, Dr. Stone?” Looking worried, the guard glanced back over his shoulder at the infirmary door. “It seems awful quiet in there. And—”

  “Yes,” Charlie replied as the second door, which was more in the nature of a big wire gate, buzzed open at last. “I’m sure. Something odd is going on. Lock the infirmary down. Now. I take full responsibility.”

  The guard nodded doubtfully. “Yes, ma’am.”

  As she stepped out into the long expanse of gray-walled corridor, the guard hit the big orange emergency button that sealed the infirmary exits and sounded the alarm that summoned reinforcements. The blast of the siren hurt her eardrums, made Michael wince, echoed off the walls. Even as she started to move away, an odd, metallic rattling sound made her glance back. She saw that Creason had reached the door and was peering through the small glass window at her.

  His features seemed blurred. His mouth was twisted. His eyes blazed. The power of his gaze was such that she found it almost impossible to look away.

  The intercom buzzed impatiently as Creason signaled the guard that he wanted out. Drawn by the same small metallic sound that she had heard before, Charlie dropped her widening eyes to the doorknob as it rattled and turned.

  Creason’s voice crackled through the intercom. “Guard, open the door.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Charlie’s heart lurched.

  “Move,” Michael barked at her.

  Jerking her gaze away from that twisting doorknob with an effort, Charlie regained enough of her wits to briskly walk away.

  “I’m sorry, Dr. Creason. I can’t do that.” Behind her, the guard spoke apologetically. “The infirmary’s on lockdown. I don’t have the power to override it.”

  Charlie couldn’t hear Creason’s response to that: Michael was urging her along until she was practically running. He was almost solid-looking again, which was a tremendous relief: in her experience, he only ever turned translucent when he was way too close to disappearing into Spookville. She took his increasing opacity to mean that he was growing more and more firmly anchored to this plane again. Despite the fitful glow of the overhead fluorescents, which were still, she presumed, sputtering along on backup power, the windowless hallway was as gloomy-dark as a tunnel. It smelled, as did most of the rest of the prison, of Pine Sol and urine. About twenty feet ahead, guards in riot gear burst out of an adjacent hallway, heading toward the infirmary with the precision of a military operation.

  “Warden Pugh is going to go ballistic about this,” she murmured to Michael as the dozen or so heavily armed guards rushed toward her, their booted feet echoing like thunder as they ran toward the infirmary. She was running herself now, only headed in the opposite direction, her bloodstained lab coat slung over one arm, her low-heeled shoes clattering on the hard floor. “But shutting down the infirmary was the only thing I could think of to do.”

  “That should work.” Michael kept pace beside her easily, of course. What worried her was the way he kept glancing back. What was he watching for? As far as she could tell, they were no longer in any immediate danger. The guards who weren’t rushing toward the infirmary were clearing the area of inmates. Angry male voices and shuffling footsteps joined the jolting clang of doors closing and locks being thrown, to form a nerve-rattling backdrop to the shrilling alarm. No one paid any attention to her (them) as she hurried past, beyond casting her a few cursory glances. “At least, as long as what we’re running away from stays in Creason’s body,” he added.

  Talk about amping up the fear quotient again: Charlie felt an icy rush of horror. “I never thought of that!”

  His grunt clearly said, not surprised.

  Charlie could hear her pulse drumming in her ears. “What is it we’re running away from, exactly?”

  “Trouble.” His voice was hard and clipped. They reached the hallway that led to the nearest exit. When Charlie failed to turn down it he reached out to grab her arm: she felt the mildest of electric tingles as his hand passed right through her flesh and then watched his jaw tighten in frustrated acknowledgment of his physical limitations, which for that one moment he had clearly forgotten. “Damn it. This way.”

  “I have to get my purse,” she said without even breaking stride. He seemed to accept that, because he didn’t argue beyond a quick, classically masculine shake of his head that silently condemned women and their purses. She continued, “So you want to tell me what happened to Dr. Creason back there?” Mindful of the security cameras which were everywhere, and the guards, and the inmates, she ducked her head as she spoke so that no one would be able to observe her ostensibly talking to thin air.

  “Damned if I know. Nothing good. Come on, babe, speed it up.”

  Charlie did her best to focus on making sense of what she had just witnessed. “It looked to me like something … possessed Dr. Creason. And that trustee.”

  “Looked like it from where I was standing, too,” Michael agreed. The pace she was setting had rendered her slightly breathless. He, of course, didn’t breathe.

  “What, though? What possessed him?”

  “Something I’ve never seen before. Best I can describe it, an evil spirit. For my money, one got the trustee, too.”

  She cut her eyes in his direction

  “Oh, my God,” she said faintly. “This is all my fault. I should have been more careful with Spivey.”

  “Ya think? How’s your hand, by the way?”

  “It’s fine.”

  “I’ll just bet it is.” His voice was grim. “You want to tell me how that bastard was able to grab ahold of you like he did?”

  They were nearing the end of the corridor—a left turn would take them to her office—and most of the commotion was behind them. A quick glance back showed her guards massed by the infirmary entrance.

  “Spivey was able to grab me because I got … distracted.”

  “Distracted?” He narrowed his eyes at her. “You were locked in a tiny room with a pervert who gets his kicks torturing and murdering women. What the hell could have—” Breaking off, he swore under his breath. “You were hearing those voices again, weren’t you?”

  Charlie had told Michael about the voices. He’d been with her in the hospital the whole time as she’d recovered from her near drowning, mostly pacing the room or sprawled out in the chair beside the bed, so it had been only natural to confide in him when the eerie whispers had started. She’d been so shaken up, so tired and confused, and it had been such a comfort to have someone to tell, someone who understood that there was a whole universe of unknowns out there and believed what she told him and didn’t think she was insane. When she’d gotten stronger and they’d started arguing about her intention of going back to work what he’d considered way too soon, she’d given him to understand that the voices had gone away.

  “What if I was?” she asked, chin in the air.

  “You shouldn’t be here,” he said, hard. The look he gave her practically blistered her eyeballs. “You realize that once Spivey got his hands on you he could have done anything he wanted to you, right? Break your neck, rape you—”

  “I know, I know. I’ll be more careful in future,” she interrupted hurriedly.

  “Thank you, Michael, for saving my life. Again.” His voice was sardonic.

  Okay, she owed him that. “Thank you, Michael, for saving my life. Again.” As his unsettling eyes continued to gleam unpleasantly at her, she added, “Can we please just drop it? It’s over, and right now we’ve got bigger fish to fry. For starters, I need you to tell me what happened to you. Everything.”

  “You mean after that sicko tried snacking on your hand?” His expression promised way more discussion on the topic later, but as she pounded toward the end of the corridor and he floated effortlessly along beside her he responded to her glare by saying, “What do you think? I got torpedoed straight into Spookville. I’m telling you, babe, you gotta stop messing aro
und with serial killers. You’re gonna get us both killed.”

  “You’re a serial killer,” Charlie pointed out acerbically. “At least, you were. Convicted of being one. And I’m messing around with you. Anyway, I can’t get you killed because, in case you missed it, you’re also already dead.”

  “I’ll give you the already-dead part, but you can’t tell me you still think I’m a serial killer.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Well, truth was, she didn’t. At least, she mostly didn’t. Every instinct she possessed shrieked that he was innocent of the heinous murders of seven young women for which he had been convicted and sentenced to death. Although the whole legal system, a number of eyewitnesses, and every scrap of physical evidence available said he was guilty. Except for his watch, which she touched now like a talisman. As evidence went, it wasn’t much, but it was enough to give her a concrete basis for her growing belief in him.

  On the other hand, there was the whole afterlife in Spookville and black-eyed savagery thing to think about.

  “Yeah.” His lips quirked at her.

  She made an impatient sound. “Could you please just finish telling me what happened to you in Spookville?”

  “A hunter got me.”

  He said that in such a matter-of-fact way that it took her a second. Then, as his words penetrated, her eyes widened on his face. “A hunter got you?”

  Remembering the unblinking yellow eyes of the massive, ten-foot-tall creatures she had glimpsed in the horrible purple fog of Spookville, she shuddered.

  “Yep.” He grimaced. “First time one’s ever caught me. Hurt like hell, too. Actually, when I went through the wall after I jumped on that bastard Spivey I shot right into it, and that’s how it was able to grab me. The claws—they’ve got some kind of poison in them, I think. Once they dug in, I kept getting weaker and weaker until I could hardly move. Fortunately, the … things it had been dragging away when I caromed into it took advantage of my bad luck to escape. They got away and it dropped me and went after them. I was so weak I collapsed where I stood. At first all I could do was just lay there on the ground, but I could feel that rubber band thingy we got going on between us tugging at me and after a little bit I managed to get up and stagger away in the direction it was pulling me. Then I saw the hunter coming back and I took a chance and dove at the wall and made it through. Those things that the hunter had when I hit him—they must’ve been somewhere nearby, because they dove through the wall after me and ended up in that room in the infirmary with us. One of ’em got into Creason. And I’m pretty sure the other one got into that trustee.”