by E. C. Bell
“So, she could be the one who’s killing patients,” I muttered.
“See?” Jasper said. “It’s not that easy telling the good guys from the bad guys, is it?”
“No,” I said. “It isn’t.”
I didn’t know how long I was going to be left in the quiet room, and decided I needed something to do. Which meant I was going to put Jasper to work.
“Do you know where Phillipa is?” I asked.
“I could probably find her,” he replied. “Why? You want to talk to her?”
“I do,” I said.
He smiled. “I’ll be back in a flash,” he said, and then, he was gone. And I was alone. Again.
THE CHAIR ARRIVED. With it came a small table and a new pencil and a notebook and one very frightened-looking orderly. “Nurse Willoughby would like you to write down your thoughts,” he said. “About what happened earlier today.”
Before I could answer, he was gone, so I spent a good three minutes arranging my new furniture and checking out the notebook. Twenty-six pages, but at least they were bound. Then, I sat down and did as Nurse Willoughby had asked. I wrote down everything that happened to me that morning.
Pretty eventful, even for me.
I’d nearly finished when Jasper came back. With him was Phillipa. She was floating just above the floor, and I didn’t think I’d ever seen such a self-satisfied look on anyone’s face.
“How you doing?” she asked. “Can you see me now?”
“Yes, I can,” I said.
“Wish you could’ve seen me earlier,” she said. “I did some great work, if I do say so.”
“I saw,” I said. “Why did you do that? I thought you were going to let me handle him. Get him out of here so he couldn’t hurt anyone else. You remember that big long conversation we had? That was the gist of it. What, did you forget?”
She frowned, and I realized my voice was getting pretty loud. If I didn’t calm down, she’d leave, and I wouldn’t have a chance to have this conversation, possibly forever. There were lots of places she could hide. Places I—and the rest of the living in this place—wouldn’t even know existed. And that would be bad.
She’d turned. She could interact with the living, and she was doing it violently. I couldn’t leave her here like that. She had to be stopped, and I was the only one who could stop her. I just had to figure out how.
“You do realize I saved your life,” she said. “He was going to hurt you—maybe kill you, and I stopped him.”
“She’s a damned hero,” Jasper said softly. I glanced at him, but couldn’t tell whether he believed what he was saying, or was simply trying to suck up to her.
I wasn’t that sure that Rafferty would have killed me. It sounded like he’d used trade as his way of getting sexual favours, which made him disgusting but didn’t make him a potential killer.
But the two ghosts in the room did believe, and since one of them had the capacity to bite a man close to death, I wasn’t about to argue with either of them.
“Thank you for that,” I said to Phillipa. “You probably did save me.”
“Damned straight I did,” she said. She sounded somewhat mollified, so I decided to talk to her about decisions she needed to make. Decisions that would stop her violence. Hopefully.
“You remember we talked about you moving on,” I said. I kept my voice as neutral as I could.
“I seem to remember something about that, yeah,” she said. “And you remember what I said to you?”
“You said that you thought you’d go to hell,” I said. “Because you’re a suicide.”
“Exactly,” she replied. She glanced at Jasper. “Listen to my words, boy. Because this is what’s going to happen to you, too.”
Jasper’s eyes flared. “What’s she talking about?” he asked me. “I’m not going to hell. Am I?”
“No,” I said.
“Only if she tries to push you over. Move you on. Whatever the hell she called it.” Phillipa smiled. “I’m not taking the chance, and neither should you.”
Damn.
“It doesn’t need to be like that,” I said. “You don’t have to go to hell, or even your own version of heaven if you don’t want to. You have the choice.”
“What else is there?” Philippa asked flatly.
“You can start your life over,” I said.
A scornful smile crossed her face. “Like reincarnation?” she asked. “I don’t believe in reincarnation. It’s ridiculous.”
I decided to ignore her for the moment and concentrate on Jasper.
“Or, you can just stop,” I said to him. “You can cease to exist in any form.”
Phillipa mock shuddered. “That’s what a real loser would do,” she said. “Are we losers, Jasper?”
“No,” he said. “We’re not.”
“So, that’s out,” Phillipa continued. When she smiled at me, it was cold as ice. “See?” she said. “Just heaven or hell. Two choices. No, wait.” She snapped her fingers. “There’s one other choice, isn’t there? We can decide to stay here. Just like we’ve been doing.” She smirked. “And we’ll really be able to rip the place up now.”
All right, the conversation had seriously gone off the rails, and I had to do something—anything to pull it back.
“Wait,” I said. They both looked at me, and I opened my mouth, desperate to say just the right thing that would stop Phillipa’s dangerous talk, but couldn’t think of one word. So I closed my mouth, and smiled, hard. At Jasper, not her.
“It’s not as black and white as she says,” I said. Phillipa started to speak, but I glared at her. “You made your point,” I said. “Now it’s my turn.”
“Give it your best shot,” she replied. “But I’m right.”
I turned to Jasper. “Everyone chooses for themselves,” I said. “What’s right for one spirit could be wrong for another. You get to choose.”
“What about sticking around?” Jasper asked. “Like we were doing before? Anything wrong with that?”
“Think about what Phillipa did,” I said. “Do you want to do that to anyone here? Because that’s what she’s talking about, you know.”
He glanced at Phillipa. She smiled. “We all got a list,” she said. “Tell her about yours. Tell her what you want to do to everyone who hurt you in here. I dare you.”
His mouth worked, and when he looked back at me, he looked frightened. “I don’t want to hurt anybody,” he whispered.
“What about whoever’s killing us?” Phillipa replied. “Don’t you want to stop them?”
“I want them arrested,” he said. “Not hurt.”
“But it’s so easy,” Phillipa said. “All you have to do is tap into your rage, little boy. Just tap in, and you can do anything you want. We don’t need them to fix what’s wrong here.” She pointed at me. “And we don’t need her.”
“That’s enough, Phillipa,” I snapped. “It’s my turn to talk, remember?”
She shrugged and turned away from both of us. When I looked at Jasper, though, I could see that what she’d said had made an impression, but maybe not the one she’d hoped for. He looked terrified.
“Forget what she said,” I said. “Tapping into your rage is dangerous. It might be working for her in the short term, but it’s pulling her down a bad road. She’s looking for more people to hurt, and I don’t think she’s just talking about the ones who have hurt her. Heck, for all I know, she might even burn herself out quicker by using her rage that way.”
“I’ve never felt stronger,” Phillipa said.
“For now,” I replied, and then turned back to Jasper. “But soon, all that’s left could be her rage. Just rage, nothing more.”
“Rage burns pure,” Phillipa said. I ignored her.
“And don’t forget,” I said, “if you do something that you think is wrong—I might not be able to talk you out of putting yourself in your own form of hell.”
“Like Phillipa,” he whispered.
“I’m going to hell for kil
ling myself,” she snapped. “Not for what I did to Rafferty.”
“Yes,” I said over her words. “And remember, if you don’t make a choice to move on, eventually you’ll disappear. You’ll still be here. You just won’t be able to interact with anyone, including the dead. So, you’ll be all alone. Completely and absolutely alone. And if you decided to make a choice then, well, I honestly can’t tell you if it’ll work or not. There will be no-one there to help you.”
“But that won’t happen for a long time, right?” Jasper said.
“That’s right,” ever-helpful Phillipa said. “We’d have years and years before we’d even have to worry about that.”
“Maybe,” I said, ignoring Phillipa for all I was worth. “It could be years—or it could be months. Or days.” I shrugged. “There’s no real way to tell. But like I said, once you disappear, no one can help you. Not even yourself.”
“That doesn’t sound good, Phillipa,” Jasper said. “Maybe we need to think about this some more.”
“You think about it,” Phillipa said, her eyes flashing dangerously. “But I’m done. I don’t want what she’s selling, and if you have a brain in your head, you won’t either. Once you finish your little talk, join me. You’ll know where I’ll be.”
She disappeared, and Jasper stared at the spot where she’d been as though willing her to return. When she didn’t, he slowly turned back to me.
“Were you telling us the truth?” he asked. “About the rage taking over, and maybe being stuck?”
“Yes,” I said.
“And this happens to everybody?”
“Getting stuck only happens if you don’t decide to move on. I can help you with that, Jasper. Really, I can.”
I couldn’t believe that I was having the “it’s time you moved on,” talk with Jasper and not Phillipa. She’d seemed so close, before. All I’d had to do was tell her that I’d take care of the perv—and then it hit me. She’d watched him overpower me and probably figured that I had just about as much power in that situation as she had, years before. She hadn’t believed me, which meant she couldn’t believe me now.
I was screwing it all up here. Doing more damage than good, and I didn’t know how to fix any of it.
“I think Phillipa was right about one thing,” I continued. “You need to think about what this all means to you.”
“All right,” he said. “I can think. But you have to make me one promise.”
Not another promise. I was so bad with them.
“What?” I asked.
“Don’t leave until I make a decision,” he said. “After we figure out who is killing us. Please.”
I closed my eyes and sighed, deep. “All right,” I said. “I won’t leave.”
That was actually one promise I was probably not going to have any problem keeping. After Rafferty’s penis hit my floor in bloody little chunks, I figured my shrink would make sure I never got out of here again.
Jasper:
I Have a Lot to Think About
THE CHANGES IN Phillipa since she attacked Rafferty were palpable. She radiated no more yellow. None at all. And she acted like a real bitch around Marie, which freaked me out more than I could say.
All that talk about her and me hanging around the hospital and beating up people who pissed us off was pretty freaky, too. She and I had never really been friends. I thought she was way too pushy for her own good, and on more than one occasion, she’d called me wimp to my face. I didn’t imagine that I’d be the alpha male in that situation, and the thought of it made me tired.
I knew that Marie wasn’t going to be here forever. She wasn’t sick the way so many of us were. She was more like Franklin, to be honest. She’d seen too much, and been through too much, and all she needed to do was get a handle on her sleep and deal with a few of her bigger hot button issues, and she’d be just fine. PTSD was a bitch, but it could be handled.
It didn’t help that she had to watch Phillipa take Rafferty apart that way, and I imagined she was going to need a lot more talk therapy to get it out of her system. But not Phillipa. Phillipa liked the blood and the meat and the screams. She acted like it made it feel like she was alive again. For a while, anyhow. Until she needed another fix, and another. I figured it wouldn’t take much to set her off, after a while. She’d get addicted to it, just like she’d been addicted to crack, while she was alive.
That was the thing with people like Phillipa. They hid their damage behind self-medication and anger, and for many of them, it was too late even before they came to the hospital. They weren’t ever going to get better. Not even after they were dead.
I didn’t know where I fit on that spectrum, but I hoped I was closer to Marie and Franklin than to Phillipa and Miranda. It was like they were made of stone. They couldn’t change, no matter who offered to help them.
That seemed like hell on earth to me and I didn’t want that. I didn’t want that at all.
Marie:
A Nap Should Be Restful . . .
I WAS EXHAUSTED after Jasper left the quiet room and sat at the small table with my head on my arms, hoping I could have a little nap before the staff came to take me back to my room.
But sleep wouldn’t come. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw chunks of Rafferty flying through the air, so I soon gave that up, and grabbed the pencil and notebook. Maybe I couldn’t sleep, but with any luck, I’d be able to knock one or two names off the bad guy list.
I quickly scrawled down the names on James’s list and then stared at them. Was there even one name I could eliminate? Didn’t feel like it. Then I realized, maybe there was one.
Dr. Parkerson was gone when Natalie died. I knew that for sure, because Sylvia Worth had told me that she’d been testifying against me in court when Natalie had her heart attack. Whatever kind of drug was being used to kill the patients, my guess was that it was quick. After all, whoever was doing this wouldn’t want to just make them sick. They’d want to kill them. No fuss, no muss.
So, there was a good chance that Parkerson was not the killer. She was a great big pain in my butt and was doing everything she could to keep me in this place, and it looked like she had a soft spot for Rafferty the sexual predator, but—more than likely—she wasn’t killing anybody.
I put a line through her name and stared at it. I wished I felt better about removing her from the list, but I didn’t. There were still five names left, and even though I knew that two of them were janitors, with no access to us patients, that still left three. Nurse Melodie, Nurse Willoughby, and Julius the jerk Rafferty, who all seemed like perfectly viable candidates. Then I frowned.
“They’d have to have access to the medication,” I muttered. “And I’m pretty sure Rafferty wasn’t allowed anywhere near it.”
I ran an even more tentative line through his name, then stared at the last two names on the list. The two nurses. Both had access to our medication, and both made absolutely certain that we took every pill we were supposed to.
“So, it’s one of you two,” I said. “But which one?”
Which one, indeed.
I WAS RELIEVED when a uniformed cop came to the quiet room a while later. His appearance proved that either Willoughby or Parkerson had finally done the right thing.
His eyes popped around like he expected something to jump out at him. “So,” he said. “You’re Marie Jenner. The ghost girl from the ball diamond. I heard about you.”
“Yeah,” I sighed. “I’m the ghost girl.”
He pulled a small notepad from his shirt pocket. “Tell me what you remember about the attack in your room,” he said.
“Have you seen the video yet?” I asked.
“Video?”
“I was under suicide watch. They have video. It would be better if you just watched that.”
He scratched a few notes into the notepad, then looked at me. “Please tell me everything you remember,” he said.
So, I told him. Straight up, no lies. After all, I was the ghost girl, and I h
ad a heck of a ghost story to tell him.
As I spoke, his hand slowed. Then it stopped and he stared at me.
“You know, this will all go much easier if you talk to Sergeant Worth,” I said. “She’s kind of an expert about me.”
“Sergeant Worth?” He made a quick note of her name and slapped the notebook shut. Said he’d be back if he had any more questions and thanked me for my time. Like I had anything but time in this place.
Then he was gone, and I was alone. Again. Naturally.
DR. PARKERSON KICKED in the door to Quiet Room Two an hour later. All right, so she didn’t really kick the door in, but she looked angry enough to try it.
“Are you taking your medication, Marie?” she asked. “Tell me the truth. Now.”
She looked tired and dishevelled, and if I hadn’t known better, I would have sworn she’d just gotten off a plane from somewhere, called back from her conference or whatever.
That was a lie, though. She’d never left town, because she’d been testifying against me in court just the day before.
“Of course, I’m taking my medication,” I said. “But that’s not the right question, Doctor.”
“What do you mean?” she asked, her eyes snapping furiously.
“I think you should be asking how Julius Rafferty got into my room,” I said. “Since I’d already complained about him. Nurse Melodie said she’d tell you all about my problem with him, and that he’d be kept away from me. But that wasn’t quite the way it rolled out, now is it?”
Her mouth worked. “If Nurse Melodie had this information, she had not passed it on to me,” she said. “That will be rectified immediately.”
“I’m sure,” I sneered. “What I want to know is, why was Julius Rafferty still working here? With access to the patients? The female patients? I’m not the first person to have a problem with that guy. There were others, and you knew it.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The other patients he attacked,” I said. Parkerson opened her mouth to respond, but I brushed her off. “There was Natalie,” I said. “And others.”