Cherry Hill

by James A. Moore

  Paul Cioffi rested in his cell. One touch was all it needed to know the man’s name and a great deal of his history as well. One touch was not enough to satisfy it.

  It delved into Cioffi’s mind and body, ripping away what it needed.

  ***

  The guards came fast, thundering down the stairs after him, and Jonathan Crowley shook his head, resigned to doing what he had to do. He waited at the bottom of the stairs, knowing full well that in an enclosed area he would have the advantage. Six guards came toward him in a near stampede, with remarkably little thought about what they were facing. The first one went down with a loud expulsion of air as Crowley landed a blow across his sternum that was hard enough to ignore the padded armor. Crowley caught the club in the man’s hand as he fell and brought it across the face of the second in line before the first guard even hit the landing. He didn’t have time to play by honorable rules, not if he wanted to stop whatever it was that was trying to take over the asylum.

  Guard number three got stupid and tried for a jump over the two unconscious obstacles in his way. Crowley spun him down to the next level for his troubles. The man made several loud noises as he fell. He also failed to get back up.

  The remaining guards stopped where they were to consider the situation and Crowley smiled for them. “Come on, boys. I’m on a schedule here. Either come and take your lumps or run home to momma.” He spoke the words and knew they were a mistake, but damn, it felt good to be active again instead of just stuck in the same room and waiting.

  They rushed him. John stepped back to give himself as much room as possible as the three men stepped over their fallen cohorts and came in swinging. One of them, he couldn’t tell which, got a solid blow across the side of his head and neck. His ear felt like it had been carved free. He used his newly acquired stick to return the favor, shattering one man’s front teeth in the process. The other two kept pounding away and he did his best to block them, but his speed was limited by the area he was working in and in the end he had to go on the offensive. He took a strike to the left arm at the same time he was breaking his baton against the helmet of one of the guards: the helmet broke with the baton and the guard kissed the floor. Then he started fighting dirty again and slapped his fingers across the remaining guard’s eyes. The man let out a yelp and reached to protect himself. Crowley had to hit him four times before he fell.

  All of the men wore handcuffs on their belts. He used them to bind the men together and left them behind as he went down the last flight of stairs and stepped over the one he’d thrown earlier. The man was dead, his neck bent at an angle that guaranteed he would not be getting back up.

  He hadn’t wanted to leave any permanent injuries, but they’d left him no real choice.

  As he opened the door to the dungeon he heard the screams and realized that he’d blown it. Whatever was going to happen was apparently already taking place.

  ***

  Kimberly was off for a few days. Whatever she’d seen had bothered her a lot, and that meant someone else had to do the dirty work. Mary Gerber was not the sort to make somebody else do something she wouldn’t do herself and now and then she liked to prove that point, so she took over in the Dungeon. She wasn’t happy about it. There was too much weirdness going on lately for her to be happy. She was seriously considering looking into working at the Riverside Hospital. There would be a pay cut, but the odds were good that it wouldn’t be a huge reduction, and she wouldn’t have to deal with nearly as much insanity.

  She barely knew either of the men on the floor with her, so mostly they worked in silence. They didn’t seem overly impressed with her and the feeling was mutual, but despite the tension between her and the two orderlies, she was comforted by their presence. Touching the men in the Dungeon was like touching freshly dead corpses in her opinion: they were creepy and no matter how often they were cleaned, she could almost feel the diseases on their bodies. She’d never understand how Kimberly could put up with them.

  She moved from one patient to the next on automatic pilot, not bothering to see their faces, merely reading the lists of medications and then feeding them, cleaning them and doping them. The faster she finished, the happier she’d be.

  Next up was Paul Cioffi. According to his file he was a sexual offender with a history of violence that went back for over two decades. He was also, happily, another of the lifeless husks. Her little sister had been raped years ago and while she’d recovered physically, she was never quite the same afterwards. She was withdrawn to the point of becoming a spinster at the age of twenty-seven. So it didn’t bother her at all that the man she had to deal with was “unresponsive to stimuli and no longer a threat.”

  Cioffi was looking straight at her as the door opened and she stepped inside. He was on his hands and knees, his face strained in a silent scream, and a large red lump was swelling on his back.

  The air was too dry, like a baked Arizona desert, and the hairs on the man’s head stood away from his scalp as if charged with electricity. Mary looked at the man’s agonized face and let out a gasp as something inside of him popped wetly. There were things moving under his skin. Long snakelike shapes slithered around his legs and arms, crawled through his neck. Then as it progressed, they slid into his face, distorting it even more.

  He was supposedly beyond help. According to the file he was as functionally intelligent as a tree stump, but she saw intelligence in his eyes and panic and pain as well.

  Mary stood still for several seconds, trying to absorb the details of what was happening in front of her. Almost twenty years of working at Cherry Hill had shown her a lot of unusual things, but she’d never seen a man warping before her eyes.

  Cioffi looked at her and opened his mouth—perhaps to let out a scream, because damn, whatever was happening to him looked painful—and she saw something black moving up his throat, filling his mouth, spilling past his teeth. When she saw the same obsidian stuff come out of his nostrils and then fill his eyes, she finally moved, backing away and shrieking as she watched, horrified.

  The two fine young orderlies who’d been assigned to her for protection had already started running. She couldn’t blame them.

  Before she made five paces, the door to the stairwell slammed open and a man she’d seen a few times came storming in her direction. His face was lowered, his eyes raised and the florescent lights highlighted several growing bruises on his face. He didn’t even bother with looking at her, but instead ran past her toward the room where Cioffi was dying.

  The man stopped dead in his tracks at the door and shook his head, his lips peeling back in a feral grin. “Well, isn’t that just something?”

  “Excuse me?” She had no idea why she answered him. Even in her current state she could see that he was talking to himself.

  The man didn’t bother with answering her, but instead started speaking in a foreign language that made her ears ring and her head hurt. Languages had always been a hobby of Mary’s. She spoke Latin, French, Spanish, German, and English fluently and also had a working knowledge of Yiddish and Japanese. None of the words he spoke sounded like anything she’d ever heard.

  Before he could finish whatever it was he was saying, Paul Cioffi flew through the open door to his cell and smashed into the man. He fell backwards and slumped to the ground his eyes gone wide and his mouth hanging slackly for a moment. Then, disgusted, he shoved the remains aside and stood back up.

  Cioffi looked like someone had taken a blow up doll and filled it with bones, but hadn’t bothered with actual inflation. His mouth gaped, his eye sockets glared, and his leathery skin hung loosely over what little remained inside of him. What was left of him broke as it hit the ground, and the man moved in her direction, his eyes looking at each cell.

  “Where’s the other one?” He focused on her and she wanted to run, but decided it might be safest to answer his questions.

  “Where’s the other what?”

  “Damn it, what’s the name? Granger! Where is
Alexander Granger?”

  “He’s been moved to the ICU.”

  “That’s just lovely. Show me the way.” The man was smiling. She didn’t figure Jack the Ripper would have managed a nastier expression on his face.

  Mary nodded and headed for the stairwell. He put a hand on her shoulder and shook his head. “Not that one. It’s a little crowded.”

  “There’s only one stairway up from here.”

  “Well then, ignore the guards and walk fast.”

  They moved up three flights of stairs, the first one had a corpse on it. Mark Haley. Mary let out a gasp and felt the man breathing behind her as he almost collided with her frozen body.

  “He’s dead!”

  “Yeah. I’ll feel bad about it later. Right now, get your ass in gear, woman!”

  She looked back at the stranger and shivered. His eyes were locked on her face; his expression was the same as before, a wild grin that made her feel almost feverish.

  She steeled herself and led the way, running past the bloodied men on the landing. They were alive, at least. That was something. She didn’t think she could take too many more surprises.

  She moved as quickly as she could up the stairs, all too aware of the man directly behind her, and halfway convinced that he would attack while she wasn’t looking.

  Riverside Hospital had never seemed like a better idea.

  ***

  Power echoed through it, shattering perceptions and illuminating possibilities. Its senses had expanded, as if it had just opened its eyes for the very first time.

  Godhood was now more than a concept. It was a possibility. Rather than hide itself away, it moved through the entire structure of Cherry Hill, fusing with the atoms of the walls, and even the air.

  Physical laws that it only now began to fully comprehend limited Alex Granger. It saw the living as they moved through Cherry Hill and it saw the dead as well, watched as they moved around and through each other without any notion of what it was they moved among.

  The old man who had grown young was moving closer to Alex’s body, and that was not acceptable. It needed to understand even more than it did now and it needed time.

  The once old man was not going to afford it that luxury; it could sense the troubles that he would cause given the opportunity. As much as it had grown and changed, it still regarded the lessons it had already learned and opted for caution. The woman had taught it that what it had taken for itself could be taken away.

  So it decided to change the rules, to keep the old man from Alex if possible.

  The question was how.

  It looked carefully at the environment it existed in and discovered something new, something that simply had not existed in its limited experience before. And in studying, it learned a new trick.

  The answer was simpler than it ever would have dreamed.

  ***

  Everything was going along just fine, right up until the time the stairs changed and both Crowley and the nurse he was following fell on their faces. One second they were ready to put their feet on the next step and then the stair dropped by almost two inches. Both were moving fast; neither of them caught the change in the stairs before it was too late. Their shocked exclamations merged into one as they lost the struggle to keep their balance.

  Mary Gerber struck her head hard when she landed and let out a groan as blood started welling from her scalp. John was faster to recover, and caught himself with his hands instead of his face. He pushed back into a standing position and looked at the stairs below him. Somebody with a great special effects budget had gone and changed reality when he wasn’t looking. The metallic stairs they’d been on were gone, replaced by wooden risers that looked old enough to collapse at any moment.

  The air temperature dropped abruptly enough to let him see the condensation from his breath. “Oh, shit.”

  John grabbed Nurse Bloodyskull and hauled her over his shoulder as he started moving again, his eyes focused heavily on the steps now, instead of whatever was ahead of him. As he feared, the steps changed again, reverting to metal and a couple of inches higher than they were a second before.

  “Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit!” He ran faster and finally made it to the landing as the walls started to shimmer. Opening the door with a slightly pudgy nurse on his back wasn’t easy, but he managed. A moment later he was in the hallway on the third floor and carefully setting the unconscious woman aside as the strange fluctuations he’d seen a moment earlier intensified.

  Odd patches of the ground under his feet and the walls around him shifted as he stood still and tried to assess what was going on. The patches seemed to be fairly stable: they moved, and the areas within them were affected, but as soon as the bubble-like fields shifted, everything was back to what it was supposed to be. Wherever the dislocations appeared, the walls changed from Drywall to wood, but it was more than that. Cell doors were transformed, and even the décor. A blank part of the white walls of the asylum might be replaced momentarily with a doorway or a portrait, only to reappear a moment later. The floors were pulling the same stunt, switching from linoleum to hardwood.

  He wasn’t the only one to notice, either. Down the hallway a man was staring at the wall with abject fascination, now and then poking his finger into the field of distortion to see what would happen. So far he hadn’t managed to get himself hurt, but Crowley guessed it wouldn’t take too long.

  The damned thing was screwing with the laws of physics, pulling the barriers between the living and the dead apart. John’s adrenaline kicked in, making his legs twitch with pent up energy, and just as quickly as it had started, the flickering stopped. The floor was linoleum again, not the hardwood he’d expected to see. John looked around hurriedly, trying to decide where to search for Alexander Granger. As far as he could tell, the man was the only possible connection left between the living hungry ghost and the real world.

  Crowley spared one last glance at the injured nurse and then left her behind as he started looking for his new target. Down the corridor, the moron playing with the odd patches got a surprise: the wall in front of him shifted and revealed a doorway. The difference here was profound in that the door was open, not closed.

  “I wouldn’t do that!” Crowley bellowed as loudly as he could to catch the fool’s attention, but he was too late. The man’s testing finger poked into the open entrance of the door that hadn’t been there a moment before, even as he looked toward John with an annoyed expression.

  A moment later, two scabrous arms reached out and grabbed at the questing digit. One second later the man let out a scream as he was pulled into the darkness, straining hard as soon as the pale fingers caught his skin.

  John watched it all, still too far away to help and too busy even if he were closer. The pallid hands caught human flesh and sank in like fangs, drawing blood even as they found purchase. Whatever was on the other side of the door was far stronger than the unprepared man and he was halfway through the threshold before he could actually respond. Worse still for the surprised victim, the rift between the living and the dead was still in motion. Over half of his body was through the doorway before it moved on. What had not made it into the opening stopped at the wall and slid down in a thick wash of blood.

  The doorway vanished as the distortion moved on, leaving most of one leg and part of the other from the knee down.

  “I don’t have time for this.” Crowley turned away from the sight and started moving, looking through the shifting plains of reality to see if he could find the medical center or even a sign pointing the way.

  The only good news was that the rifts were too small to let much get through.

  Crowley finally spotted the doors to the medical center a few feet past where the bright boy had gotten himself cut in half. He looked at the locks on the double steel doors and shook his head. “Perfect!” he spat the word and shook his head. “Can we have something go right here? Just for the change of pace, please?”

  As if in answer to his reques
t, one of the orderlies on the other side opened the door to see who was screaming. “Thanks!” Crowley took one step into the open door at the same time that he knocked the man unconscious. “Nothing personal.”

  The splits in the universe didn’t continue over into the medical center, and he had to guess that meant he was getting closer to his goal. It made sense: if Granger was, in fact, responsible for whatever was happening, he wasn’t likely to risk his health in the process of defending himself.

  What he hadn’t counted on was the number of patients already in the rooms or the number of people who’d just seen him knock one of their coworkers unconscious.

  Several people looked at him, and not a one of them looked the least bit intimidated.

  “Well, this just keeps getting better and better.”

  ***

  It stared at the remains of a man who had reached into the darkness of the dead realm and pondered the implications. Somehow one of the ghosts had grabbed the man, touched the man and killed him. It hadn’t thought the dead and living could interact, but now it knew better. The problem seemed to be a barrier that kept them apart. It had broken that barrier by accident: a side effect of trying to be in both worlds at the same time.

  It hadn’t realized that the barrier existed on a conscious level, mostly because the barrier didn’t keep it from coming and going as it pleased.

  This is interesting. This has potential.

  The Dead God looked upon the bleeding, dying man of flesh as he was attacked and brutally beaten by a dead man who had no real memories of being alive. It had seen that particular ghost on several occasions and left it alone merely because its antics had always been interesting. Whatever mind the ghost had was damaged, and most times it simply walked around its cell and called out to things that were not there. Now, when faced with a living thing, the ghost had attacked, shrieking and flailing its rotting arms until it managed to kill the living being. And as soon as the living man was dead and his spirit was set free from the damaged flesh, it attacked again, pounding at the newly dead man until there was little left that was recognizable.