by Susan Vaught
Locked in.
Didn’t matter that I had keys. It still felt freaky.
When I turned and rejoined Ms. Miller a few steps down the hallway, Unit C stretched before me like a corridor into an alternate universe. The walls were cinder block, like at a school, but painted a light blue. Everything seemed dull and functional, even the chairs and tables pushed up against the walls on either side of the hallway. A few bulletin boards had cheerful fall decorations tacked to them, but they didn’t help much. This felt like a quiet place. A sad place. It smelled like urine and air freshener. I didn’t really want to be here.
There was one man sitting in a chair, wearing jeans and a sweatshirt. He held his face in his hands, and he was rocking.
Didn’t look like he wanted to be here, either.
Ms. Miller led me to a desk at the far end of the hallway and introduced me to a short woman with black hair and loud yellow scrubs. I didn’t even process her whole name, just sharon and that she was the unit’s RN, and I could ask her for help if I needed it. The nurse pointed out a table where I could be out of the way and “observe,” and she told me the patients would be back from their morning groups soon. Then Ms. Miller gave me a gigantic smile and told me to return to her office at the end of the day with my notes, and we’d go over my experiences.
As she walked toward the unit elevator, I just stood there, not sure what to do. My brain kept refusing to engage.
“Table,” Darius whispered, and I jumped.
Sharon, still only a few feet away from me, stared like she might need to evaluate me instead of working on her charts.
I managed something like a polite smile, walked slowly away, and seated myself in a heavy plastic chair at a plastic table. From my vantage point, I could see the doorway, the nurse at the desk, and the one patient sitting in the unit’s hallway to my left. On my right were the seemingly empty chair where Darius sat and a few doors leading to bedrooms on either side of the hallway.
“Should have looked before you touched that furniture,” Darius mumbled. I heard the pat-pat of his massive hands as he examined his own chair, then eased his big frame into it. “Probably hasn’t been cleaned in a month.”
Before Levi and Forest made him vanish, he had been wearing jeans and a black T-shirt with a Lincoln Psychiatric emblem. Must have gotten it during the brief time he worked here as a security guard, before he got charged with murder and lost his eye. I imagined him sitting in his chair, his dark glasses glittering in the neon lighting.
“Don’t stare, baby,” he said, and I thought he might be grinning. “They see you looking at nothing, they might keep you here.”
I plopped my notebook on the table, careful to avoid a grape-colored stain that was probably sticky. When I opened it, I scrawled, Not funny. Underlined it a few times. Added exclamation marks.
Darius laughed so that only I could hear him, but five tables away, in the long part of the hallway, the man who had his face in his hands lifted his head as if the sound had startled him. His eyes traveled the room until they found me, and he fixed his gaze on my face like he was searching every thought I’d ever had. He was dark-skinned like my father, but heavier, with a slack look about him like he hadn’t focused on anything in decades. His eyes, though—wide and wild and terrified—I couldn’t stand it. I looked away.
Maybe I wasn’t cut out for this social-work thing. At least, not here at Lincoln Psychiatric.
“Don’t sweat it,” Darius said as if he had just read my mind. “You want to work for Children’s Services, not here. This is just field experience. Credit in a class. Treat it like those stats seminars you hated.”
I wrote, Necessary evil.
“Yeah. That.”
My body relaxed enough for me to breathe regularly, and I turned the page and began to take notes about the surroundings and the man on the unit, who had lost interest in me by then. Who was he? Why was he here when everybody else was away? I supposed people could refuse to go to groups, or oversleep. Maybe they had sick days, too. All of this got recorded as questions for Ms. Miller. No doubt she thought I was an idiot already. Asking intelligent questions might help me make a better impression—and writing down everything I noticed might give us some hint about the next bad spirit we’d have to fight. Who knew what I might see but not yet understand? Levi and Forest could sort through it all later, when they got finished reading Imogene’s records.
Imogene.
Great.
Thinking about her brought me straight back to my main worry—what was happening with my father.
Darius murmured, “Don’t get all tense again, now. What is it?”
My cell phone buzzed in my pocket, and I grabbed for it and punched it on without saying hello.
“Your father’s up and about,” Imogene said in her backwoods accent, way too loud. I could imagine her standing in my front yard, holding Darius’s cell phone directly in front of her mouth, talking into it like a World War II radio. “Your stepmother’s seeing to what ails him, I suppose.”
Relief made me lean forward and prop my elbows on the table, sticky stains and all.
“Thank you,” I said in a quiet voice.
My eyes darted up and down the hallway, checking the guy in the chair and the nurse at the desk in case I wasn’t supposed to be using a phone on the unit. Ms. Miller might have said something like that, but I wasn’t sure I cared.
“Your house has got some good protections,” Imogene went on. “Can’t get through ’em, and it’s probably better I don’t try.”
Now I imagined Imogene, who looked a little like an over-weight version of Granny from that old Beverly Hillbillies TV show, poking around the edges of our yard. I hoped she could go invisible like Levi and Darius and Forest. A police report about the ghost of Granny Clampett trying to break into the pastor’s house would be all we needed.
Sharon glanced in my direction, then frowned and shook her head when she saw my telephone.
“I have to go,” I told Imogene. “Check in again soon.”
I hung up.
Thunder exploded over the hospital, and lightning flashed so brightly the hallway around me seemed to flicker. I shifted my gaze from the nurse to the door, and that’s when I saw her.
She came through the door.
The closed door.
It was Forest. Or it was her twin, wearing faded jeans and a blue shirt, with a frightened expression and a vacant, forward-looking stare.
The air around me seemed to crackle, and when I sucked in a breath I smelled trees and oceans and flowers.
Everything about the girl seemed a little faded, but I was positive I was looking at an image of Forest, and the hall was full of that calm, fresh vibration I associated with her.
But the calming vibe wasn’t working on me this time.
My pulse sped up until I could hear blood thumping in my ears. My fingers twitched over my pen and pad as I watched the girl walk—only she wasn’t really walking. More like gliding. The unnatural pace and flow of her movement gave me a double case of shivers.
Was Forest projecting herself here somehow? Was this some Madoc trick I didn’t know about? Had she and Levi found something in the records they needed to tell us?
Why not just call me?
Maybe something had gone wrong in the records room, up in Lincoln’s famous bell tower.
Oh God.
Was I looking at Forest’s fresh-made ghost?
The nurse at the desk didn’t look up, but the male patient did. He scooted back in his chair and turned his face away from Forest, like he didn’t want to see her.
Neither did I, but I couldn’t look away. Horror pooled like ice in my belly.
“What the hell?” Darius whispered. “Is that—but—it looks like—”
He never got to finish, because the ghostly image of Forest stopped and fixed her now glowing eyes on him. She lifted her arm, and one of her long, pale fingers pointed in his direction. She opened her mouth as thunder bashed th
e air again and she let out a scream.
The sound tore into my mind and my skin.
The patient covered his ears and rocked hard.
I jumped to my feet, trying to shake off what felt like burning bugs crawling over every inch of my body, shocking me with a million electric bug feet.
Forest vanished, leaving nothing but the scream at the end of the hall.
The patient rocked and rocked and rocked as the awful sound slowly died. I scratched at invisible insects, my chest hurting like I was having a heart attack.
The nurse stared, but she wasn’t staring at me.
She was watching Darius, who was bent over, his mouth opened in a silent bellow, his ears covered.
He had become completely visible.
Chapter Twenty-Six
I ran to Darius and knelt in front of him. His forehead glittered with sweat, and when I grabbed his wrists, his skin felt clammy.
“Are you okay?” My words came out in a fast wheeze, and my face twitched from the fading sensation of superheated bugs making tracks across my eyelids and lips.
Darius coughed. I couldn’t see behind his dark glasses, but as he lowered his hands from his ears and let me hold them, I saw the pinched lines of his face and knew he had shut his eyes against whatever had just yelled at us.
“She was bright,” he managed. “Blinded me. I can’t see anything but spots.”
He seemed to be shaking all over. I was shaking all over.
I glanced at Sharon, who wasn’t at the phone calling for Security like I expected. She was with the patient, kneeling just like I was kneeling, and she spoke to the man in gentle tones until he stopped rocking. Then she stood and held out her hand. He took it and got to his feet, and she began walking him toward one of the rooms—but not before she fired a look at me that would have killed most people.
“Can you walk?” I stood and gave Darius’s hands a gentle tug. “We better get out of here.”
Lightning cracked outside, and the bulbs in the hallway blinked off, then back on.
Darius took a deep breath and nodded as he raised up to his full height, his face aimed at the floor like he was fighting off a big wave of dizziness. “You’ll have to lead. Everything’s blurry.”
As I turned loose one of his hands, I asked, “What was she?”
“Strong.” He shook his head. “Other than that, no idea.”
Witch girl. Come here, said a low voice from somewhere so close to me I heard it in my brain cells instead of my ear.
My shoulders tensed and my heart stuttered. I gripped Darius’s hand. “Did you hear that?”
“Hear what?” He turned his sunglasses toward me. “The thunder? It hasn’t stopped since we got here.”
I let go of Darius and pushed around him toward the room at the end of the hall farthest from the main door. The door was closed, and streaks of gray light slipped out beneath the worn wood. Something about it felt ... wrong.
My skin prickled from my neck to my toes.
A shadow passed across the light as something moved in the closed room.
I sucked in a breath and grabbed for the door handle, but Darius put his hand over mine before I could try to open it. “Trina, did that bunch of screaming scramble your mind? Come on, baby. We need to beat it before Security gets up here.”
“Oh no you don’t,” said a woman’s voice, more sharp and commanding than Darius’s mother ever even thought about being. “You just stay put.”
Darius and I jumped apart to find Sharon the nurse standing at the table we had just vacated, her frown at full volume. Now that I could see her up close, I realized she was much older than I had thought, with salt-and-pepper hair pulled into a bun and a lined face dappled with age spots on her jaw line. She folded her thick arms over her ample bosom and narrowed her eyes at Darius.
“What are you?” she demanded.
Not who. What.
And then her face changed from suspicion to shock as she recognized him. “Oh, wait. You that boy who got charged with murder a while back.”
Darius let out a sigh, but Sharon was still talking. “Weird as all that was,” she said, “figured you had to have a little Madoc in you.”
Keeping himself between me and the nurse so I had to look around his shoulder to see the woman, Darius asked, “How do you know about Madocs?”
“None of your business,” Sharon snapped. She turned her attention to me. “And you—you’re the pastor’s girl. The little witch. What do you want around here?”
“I’m not a witch,” I said reflexively.
Thunder turned loose outside, broken only by the crack-boom of lightning striking nearby. The lights on Unit C flickered again.
“Then what they calling folks like you these days?” Sharon’s tone shifted to teasing, or maybe it was mocking. “You work with potions and powders and charms like the pastor does when he thinks nobody’s watching, you a witch, as far as I know.”
I tried to think of a good comeback, but she was already back on Darius. “I don’t know why you came here hidin’, but she don’t like most Madocs. She’ll never let you stay.”
It took me a second to realize that Sharon was talking about the Forest-apparition we had seen, but Darius was quicker than me. “Who is she? That—the—um, is she a ghost?”
“Can’t nobody staff Unit C without knowing about Miss Bridgette,” Sharon said. “You worked around the hospital for a while. Didn’t you hear stories?”
Darius kept his arms at his sides, and I knew he was trying not to look threatening. “No. I didn’t come on the units.”
Sharon shrugged. “Every part of this hospital has ghosts. She’s ours.”
“Can you see her?” I asked, wishing I hadn’t left my pad and pen on the table beside Sharon.
“No, but some of our folks can.” Sharon glanced back toward the unit door, then at us. “She runs off most of the other ghosts, and the people who don’t need to be here—like staff who treat the patients mean, and witches who come here for no good reason.”
I’m not a witch, I started to say again, but that would have been habit, not truth. What did come out of my mouth was, “I’m on an externship.”
Sharon pointed at Darius. “If you came here just to work, you wouldn’t have snuck him in.”
“It’s not that simple—” I began, but she interrupted me.
“It is that simple, and you need to get on out of here. These folks have enough trouble without you scaring them.”
Darius didn’t move. “Do you have Madoc blood, Miss Sharon?”
I expected another “none of your business,” but she said, “My mother did. Not rightly sure how strong it runs in me, but I’m more sensitive to spirits than most folks.”
Darius reached back, took my hand, and pulled me up next to him as he asked, “Why are you at Lincoln Psychiatric?”
“I’m here for them.” Sharon pointed toward the door of the room where she had taken the unit’s only patient. “Been working here over thirty-two years.”
Witch girl. Come here. Now.
The voice crawled through my brain. My eyes slammed closed against the cold, dark chills that skittered down my spine, and I had to force my lids up again. When I did, I saw black sparkles in the air around my head.
The sound had come from the bedroom behind me, I was sure of it. I pulled away from Darius and marched toward the bedroom door.
“You stay away from that room,” Sharon said. “Nothing good ever happens there.”
Darius managed to catch hold of me from behind, then asked, “How come?”
Sharon sighed. “We don’t put patients in that room. Miss Bridgette don’t like it. And you two better—”
“I heard somebody in there,” I said, struggling out of Darius’s bear hug.
“Then you as crazy as the people I look after,” Sharon said. “It’s been empty all year.”
She walked straight past me to the room, used her key, and pushed the door open.
I fo
ught back an urge to leap forward into the gray shadows to confront whatever had been messing with me—but when the door swung wide, there was nothing. Just a bed, a wardrobe fastened to the wall, and a barred, screened window taking punishment from the stubborn storm.
Darius stepped into the empty doorway and glanced around. Then he shrugged. “Nothing, baby.”
From deep in the center of my mind, something laughed, shooting gooseflesh all over my body.
Menace washed across my senses. I smelled dirt and something coppery, like blood. I plunged my hand into my pocket, grabbed my willow charm, and I held it in front of me like a shield as I muttered the words to a reveal spell I had learned from Addie. It was Greek, or maybe Latin. I had no idea. I knew the sounds and the cadence, not the meaning.
The thing in my head laughed again.
I finished the spell, and my willow charm twitched in my fingers.
Nothing happened.
“Trina?” Darius sounded concerned. “What are you doing with that willow thing?”
He was standing in the room’s door with Sharon, and both of them were studying me like I was completely over the edge.
No wonder. I was standing five feet away from them pointing a flimsy willow cross at shadows in an empty hospital room.
The charm twitched again.
Lightning ripped the sky outside the bedroom window, forking down and blasting onto Lincoln’s manicured grounds. Sparks flew off cinder blocks and circled my charm. The willow burned into my fingers, but I held tight and kept it aimed into the room, and—
Threads of lightning fired over Darius and Sharon, straight at the corner of the empty room. When they hit the gray shadows nearest the window, they shifted into something man-shaped.
“Witch girl,” the thing said in an eerie voice that echoed down the hallway until the patient on Unit C started shouting. “Come here to me.”
I felt pulled toward the thing in the corner. I stumbled over to Darius and Sharon as more lightning fired out of my charm. Thin bolts struck the shadow-thing again, and he let out a howl.