by Susan Vaught
Neither guy said anything.
I let out a breath I hadn’t known I was holding. “Come on,” I said. “Let’s go. Now.”
When I risked lowering my hands, Levi turned, walked a few steps farther into the clothing room, and vanished.
Like, poof. Just—poof!
I stared at the place where he’d been, not believing what I had just seen.
Then Decker started to cry.
When I turned toward him, he dropped to his knees, like he was bowing before me.
“Hey, look. It’s okay.” I shoved away the image of Levi vanishing and got down next to Decker to put my hand on his shoulder. Too much weirdness. Too much not-realness.
I was at work. I had to keep working. I needed to take care of crying guy first, then ... there was no way Levi had just disappeared. He had to be in that room somewhere.
“Mr. Decker, come with me to the switchboard, and we’ll figure out where you belong.”
He kept his head bowed like he was terrified to look at me.
“Mr. Decker—”
“Do you know what he was?” Decker looked up so suddenly I almost fell backward, but I held it together, at least until he asked, “Do you know what you are?”
That question struck me like a fist to the chin, and I sank back, staring at him, taking in his perfect skin and his powerful build, and his now-clean clothes. Not jeans anymore, but overalls. Pressed, maybe even new. His shirt was clean.
He looked familiar. Was he—
No. “Do you know what you can do?” he whispered, keeping his eyes fixed on mine—eyes I had seen earlier this evening, gazing up at me from a picture I held in the palm of my hand.
I was talking to the man in Miss Sally’s photograph.
Chapter Three
“An hour.” Arleen pretended to sound sad for me as she wrote me up for being late from my meal break. “A whole hour, Forest!”
Tears prickled in my eyes. I was still breathing hard from running from the clothing room all the way back to the geriatric ward. I didn’t think I was late—I just wanted to get away from ... whatever had happened. Get back to the real world.
But I hadn’t found the real world at all. Just more craziness.
No way was I late coming back, not one minute, not five minutes. I should have been early, but Arleen and the clock said I was an hour past my report time. I’d been working since I was fifteen—odd jobs, then fast food, then stocking shelves at a grocery store, then here, and I’d never been written up. I couldn’t comprehend why it was happening now.
Arleen had her back to me as she filled out the disciplinary action slip, but Decker Greenway was facing me in his clean shirt and overalls, smelling like new denim, grinning and being friendly.
Arleen couldn’t see him.
“You’re losing time because of the thin spot,” he explained. “That’s what they call them, Levi and his grandmother. Lincoln ain’t nothing but a giant thin spot between our world and the other side, and places in this hospital get even thinner due to all the sadness it sees. Time can’t help moving funny around thin spots.”
Arleen was talking about “youth” and “irresponsibility” and “maturity.” Decker Greenway was talking about madness.
All-over shaking made my teeth chatter until I set my jaw. I didn’t want the tears to escape my eyes, but they did. I wiped them away quickly. “It was a mistake,” I told Arleen and my hallucination. “I—I guess I fell asleep. I won’t be careless again.”
“If you were still on probation, you’d be fired for this.” She turned and waved the yellow slip at me. “Even as a full-time employee, a second time AWOL from assigned duty and you’ll be terminated.” She smiled, all teeth and no heart.
I said nothing, because what could I say? I was due back at 2:00 a.m. It was now 3:15 a.m. How had an hour passed? It couldn’t have been that long.
“It’s because you got too close to a thin spot,” Decker insisted. “You really don’t know what you are, do you?”
I kept my eyes on Arleen. Maybe if I didn’t look at him, didn’t pay any attention to the weirdness, it would go away.
Arleen made a few shaming noises, and heat rose to my cheeks as she deposited the yellow slip in the wall box, where the director of nursing would collect it tomorrow, dock my pay for the hour, and enter the disciplinary action on my record.
“You’re distracted tonight,” Arleen said. Then her tone swapped to sickly sweet. “Doubles are hard. I know. I’ve worked a million of them.”
“May I go back to the hall now?” My voice shook like the rest of me, which made me that much madder. I wasn’t one of those totally-scarred-from-foster-care people, but I didn’t bother much with friends or attachments, and I had learned to keep my emotions to myself. When I couldn’t, it scared me and made me want to be alone.
Arleen dismissed me with a wave of her orange Halloween nails, and I all but ran out of the station, leaving her and Decker behind. When I got to the table where night shift sat to monitor patient doorways, Decker was somehow already there, two doors away, gazing in at Miss Sally.
I sat at the table, grateful I was the only one assigned to the hall, and refused to look at him.
After a few seconds, he said, “You need to see Miss Imogene over in records. In the cottage with the bell tower. You know the place?”
My eyes darted up and down the hall to be sure nobody was around to hear before I shot him a look and whispered, “Whatever you are, go away.”
Decker’s eyebrows shot up. His eyes flashed—literally—and his friendly expression gave way to a darkness I associated with foster brothers who lit fires and stuck pins in kittens. The hairs on my arms stood up at the sudden energy in the hallway.
His voice took on an echo as he pointed toward Miss Sally’s sleeping form and said, “I’m not leaving without her.”
The sound made my ears ache, and all up and down the ward, patients whimpered in their sleep.
“Stop that!” I stood and faced him, suddenly more pissed than scared. “You’re upsetting them.”
Arleen stuck her head out of the station at the end of the ward hall. “Everything okay, Forest?”
“Fine,” I told her, sounding harsh even to my own ears.
To Arleen, it would have looked like I was checking on Miss Sally. Perfectly normal. I hoped. She lingered for a moment, then withdrew, no doubt to keep updating her Facebook page.
“Sorry.” Decker pulled back on whatever had made him go all exorcist-devil. “It’s just—I thought I was done for. If you hadn’t stopped that haint, I’d be on the other side right now.” His head drooped. “Probably already forgetting about my Sally. I can’t let that happen.”
Haint. The other side. My pulse accelerated. I had caught Miss Sally’s mental illness.
“I didn’t send anybody anywhere,” I told my hallucination, but he just laughed.
“You got guts, girl. Thank you for what you did. I just hope it don’t bring you a world of hurt.”
When I just stood there with no clue what to say or ask, Decker kept talking. “My Sally’s hours are counting down. That’s why I risked coming out of the tunnels to see her, but they found my bones today, so the haint knows I’m here. He’ll come after me again.”
It must have been clear that I still didn’t get it, still couldn’t pull myself together enough to grasp Decker’s meaning or any of his reality, because he sighed. “If the haint sends me to the other side without her, I might start to forget, Forest. I can’t forget my Sally. I been hiding all this time, ’cause we’ll be going together or not at all.”
From inside the dark room, Miss Sally started to sing—a real tune, with real words. “Swing low, sweet chariot ...”
Her old voice pitched high and quavered, but she hit each note clear and right. “Coming for to carry me hoooooome ...”
Her music made my bones tingle, and I swear it had a scent like lilac, or some flower I’d never smelled before—something purple and sparkling a
nd bewitching to the eyes and nose and fingertips.
“Swing low, sweet chaaa-rioooot ...”
The walls and floors around me turned liquid, and I could see things on the other side of the shadowy water. Big things. Dark things. And they were trying to come through.
“Jeez.” I jumped away from the wall, then got up on my chair when something long and cold-looking slithered past my feet, barely contained under the translucent floor tiles.
“You stop that, now,” Decker murmured, and Miss Sally giggled. She started spluttering on the words, and the walls and floors turned solid again. I couldn’t see the monsters anymore, and the scent of lilac faded back into the more normal hallway smells of bleach, stone, and a hint of new denim.
“Madoc blood gave my Sally the power to make folks see things,” Decker explained. “She could sing any reality she wanted, but the power turned on her and tore up her mind. I couldn’t keep her off the streets, so the law took her from me and locked her up here.”
Madoc? I stood on my chair, gazing first at Decker, then at Miss Sally, who turned over in her bed and snuggled deeper under her blankets.
What did that mean?
Madoc. I pushed it sideways in my head and fixed on the fact that Miss Sally hadn’t been born with her illness. She got sick because she had some special ability, and she couldn’t manage it?
I didn’t believe in special abilities or magic. Or ghosts. Or that I could ever go crazy. But here I was, talking to ... something ... that wasn’t real.
“I was coming to get her that night.” Decker sounded sad now, and he wasn’t looking at me anymore. “Halloween, nineteen and fifty-two. I couldn’t stand being away from her anymore, so I was going to cross us over together on All Hallows’. The blood gave me the power to blend. I could make myself look like whatever was around, so people with no Madoc in them, they wouldn’t see me at all.”
“What does ‘Madoc’ mean?” I asked.
Decker didn’t answer.
I shifted on the chair and thought about getting down, but what if Miss Sally started singing up floor monsters again? I was probably safer where I was.
Decker gazed through Miss Sally’s door, then leaned against the frame. “Part of the main tunnel gave way and trapped me inside.”
He glanced at his fingertips, which turned ragged and more bloody each second. I caught my breath because I could see it happening, him sneaking through Administration, being part of the wall, part of the floor, part of some bookcase until he got to the elevator and rode it down to the level below the basement. I could see him easing into the main tunnel, heading toward her ward, ready to slip up some shaft and snatch Miss Sally away to ... to whatever the other side might be. Then a rumble and pop, some falling dirt, some crashing rocks.
He would have tried to dig himself out.
It would have been terrible.
My stomach heaved as I stared at his hands, at the grisly stumps his fingers had become. “I’m sorry,” I whispered.
He shrugged. “She was worth it.”
His fingers gradually re-formed, but he was frowning, and his eyes were doing that flashy-colory thing that meant he might scare the old folks—and me—again. “When I first died, there was no haint to hunt me. I don’t know why Imogene lets him stay here, except he’s related to her. She took him in when his folks got killed in a car wreck.”
I thought about the bells, the flickering lights, and the Kentucky State Police. “Your bones were discovered tonight, after the explosion. The, um, haint—he knows you’re here now because of that?”
Decker nodded. “He must have gone to the bones and sensed me.”
Images of the guy in the black jeans flicked through my mind. His grim expression. Those creepy blood tears tattooed on his face. So dark. So unbelievably handsome—and callous and cold. Who was Levi, really? What was he?
Haint. Yeah, yeah. I’d heard that word before. It was some kind of ghost who was up to no good, but Levi hadn’t felt like a ghost to me.
“Forest, who are you talking to?” Arleen asked. I regis-tered her voice, that she had come out of the office again, but I ignored her. She didn’t seem important anymore.
“He’ll get me before Sally dies.” Decker looked at me, his eyes nothing but wild darkness that made me imagine caves and holes in the ground. “He’ll come for you, too—even here, out in the world. Haints can go anywhere. You ain’t safe from a haint, no matter where you hide.”
“Forest!” Arleen seemed louder and more insistent now, but even less important. My heart swapped between pounding and flooding. I felt so sorry for Decker and Miss Sally I didn’t know what to do.
Decker hung his head. I watched the hope drain out of him, and with it went his color, his solidity, until he was nothing more than the blurred lines I had seen in Miss Sally’s photograph.
“Wait!” I stood straighter in the chair. “I don’t want to hide. I want to understand.”
“You got to be careful,” he murmured. “You’re my only hope. You’re our only hope.”
And then he faded into nothing, leaving behind only a light scent of new denim.
Heavy fingers closed around my wrist, and I let out a yelp.
“What are you doing on that chair?” Arleen gave me a little shake, glaring at me. Her eyeliner was painted on thick.
“I—uh.” Yeah. I shut my mouth and got down from the chair thought about it a second. “I think I saw a mouse, that’s all.”
Arleen frowned at me, then glanced at the clock.
Time had passed too fast again. My shift was almost over. I realized I hadn’t turned any patients to prevent bedsores or checked diapers or swept or done anything I was supposed to do since I got to the hall.
My insides turned heavy.
“It’s probably best you go home now,” Arleen said, giving me that sharp-toothed grin as she reached into her pocket and withdrew another disciplinary action slip. “You better show up on time for your next shift. If you still work here.”
Chapter Four
Madog ab Owain Gwynedd.
Otherwise known as Madoc.
“Found you,” I whispered. I was staring at the screen of a computer in the Never Public Library, at a thumbnail of an oil painting of a Welsh prince stepping onto American shores. I tugged at the sleeves of my wrinkled blue blouse and tried not to notice that it smelled like the geriatric ward. My jeans were grimy from wearing them for twenty-four hours, and I knew I needed a bath, but I didn’t have time.
Well, I had time. I just didn’t know how long I’d get to keep it.
Wikipedia informed me that Madoc fled violence in Wales to come to America in AD 1170, a full three hundred years before Columbus floated by. Madoc’s crest was a bloodred griffin on a field of gold. I stared at the lion face and huge crimson wings. My heavy lids tried to close, but I jerked myself awake. I had bought a cheap watch at the dollar store on my way here from Lincoln and put it on my left wrist. I never usually bothered with watches, because they always stopped when I wore them. This one was no exception. The hands were frozen at around 8:00 a.m., but the library clock told me it was actually 10:30 a.m., Halloween day. Four hours until my next shift was supposed to start, assuming Arleen hadn’t tried to get me fired. I hadn’t stuck around to find out. The thought made me sick.
I kept glancing from the wall clock to the computer clock, terrified that time would slide past me again. I needed to finish my googling and get more coffee if I wanted to have a prayer of staying awake at Lincoln this afternoon. Clumsily, I clicked through a few more links. Some sites said Madoc’s journey was a legend, with no proof behind it. Other sites carefully detailed the stories claiming that Madoc and his forces came to what would become the United States and settled near present-day Louisville, just over the border with Indiana, in an area called Devil’s Backbone. There was a lot of talk about tribes of “blond Indians” speaking Welsh in that area, and they left behind forts that later explorers discovered.
Devil’s
Backbone. That was about an hour from here. I looked at the clock. Looked at the clock again to be sure time wasn’t moving freaky-fast.
In 1799, six skeletons wearing brass armor emblazoned with a griffin were found near Devil’s Backbone. A dig around Columbus, Indiana, turned up a nine-foot skeleton wearing Welsh jewelry. Then, in the late 1800s, a guy dug up a bronze helmet and shield in a vacant lot on the Kentucky side of the line. Another dig found piles of human bones near Clarksville, Indiana, like some massive battle took out an entire population. Huge floods from the Ohio River in the early 1900s washed away all that proof—but then in 1925 in Walkerton, Indiana, a group of archaeologists discovered another bunch of giant skeletons wearing heavy copper armor. Those skeletons and the armor vanished shortly after, but some researchers swore the breastplates were marked with Madoc’s griffin.
Even though I might have imagined everything that happened at Lincoln, this Madoc thing seemed real enough. What it had to do with me, I had no clue. I was pretty sure one of my parents was Hispanic, since my real name was Forastera, which had gotten shortened and fixed up to Forest to make it easier for me in school. My first caseworker taught me that Forastera was a Spanish white grape that grew in the Canary Islands. One of my foster sisters used to tell me it meant that I’d grow up to be a giant yellow wino.
As for the race of my other parent, who knows. I was average height, average weight. Nothing blond or tall about me, with my dark, curly hair and dusky brown skin.
My nerves jumped, and I looked at the clock. It was a little after 10:45 a.m. I had to force myself to look away, because I was so worried time would move too fast if I stopped paying attention.
One part of this Madoc legend didn’t make sense to me, though. Back in medieval times, nutrition sucked, so people didn’t grow to be so tall. Folks in Europe were usually short and skinny unless they were rich, and then they were short and fat.
I yawned, then muttered, “So what’s with the tall skeletons?”
“They were different,” said a voice from right next to me at the computer table.