Cherry Hill

by James A. Moore

  The once old man caught the Dead God’s attention as he wandered into the area where Alex Granger rested. Once again fear touched it, frosted its soul and left it wondering what it should do.

  It decided to wait, and see if the once old man could survive the surprise it had made.

  In the meantime, there were other things to consider, other challenges to deal with. It wanted a new body, needed a new body if it wished to interact properly with the world of the living.

  It would have hidden away to accomplish the task in the past but with power came confidence. It merely started working, designing a body it knew would survive and flourish, focusing in the area it knew most intimately.

  If all went well, a Dead God would soon walk the earth.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Phillip Harrington sat in the break room and nursed his black eye. Crowley hadn’t hurt him nearly as much as landing against the guard’s knee, but the end result was the same; either way he blamed his patient. Ludicrous! How could it be so damned hard to catch one man inside a locked building?

  Well, the answer was easy enough: The man in question had a key given to him by a supervisor who had lost his mind. No one was talking to Phil and that was just fine with him. He needed to think for a while, to gather his nerve and head off with another squad of guards. This time, he’d make sure they were properly equipped. When in doubt, tranquilizer darts should do the job of restraining John Crowley.

  He’d have to talk with the head of security about that.

  The ice against the side of his face was making his bruised skin numb and his nose runny. He set down the icepack and reached for a napkin. His hand slipped right through the table and the tissue paper.

  Phil looked for several heartbeats, stunned, and slowly withdrew his limb from the Formica. There was something there, a faint shimmering spot, like heat radiating off the road, and his hand had gone through it.

  “I’ve been working too hard.” He closed his eyes and then looked again. The shimmer was gone and the table was where it belonged. He reached down again and touched solid plastic and paper.

  He took care of blowing his nose and wadded up the tissue. Off to his left one of the guards who’d come through the fight with minimal damage was limping over to the coffee urn they’d set up in the break room. He made it half way there before he disappeared.

  This time Phil didn’t think he was imagining things. No, he thought he was losing his mind. He stood up immediately and walked over to the spot where the guard had been. The guard still adamantly refused to be there.

  There were five other people in the room with him (six if you counted the disappearing man) and they were all engaged in conversations. He didn’t give a good damn.

  ”Did anyone else just see that?” His tone demanded an answer.

  Two off duty nurses, an administrator and two orderlies all looked up from where they were sitting together and stared at him blankly. Finally, one of the nurses—a rather slow-witted example of her species named Betty Somers—shook her head and offered a puzzled frown. “See what, Dr. Harrington?”

  “There was a guard right here. He vanished.”

  Miles Bronski from accounting shook his head. “Maybe he just left?”

  “No, Miles, I saw him disappear.”

  In most places that sort of declaration would have gotten nervous laughter at best. At Cherry Hill the average response was a sudden case of the jitters.

  “Are you sure?” Miles was trying to be rational.

  “Yes, I’m sure. I was looking right at him!”

  The air between Phil and the other group suddenly blurred again. The odd smudginess was strange enough and unsettling to boot, but the fact that all five people and the table they were sitting at suddenly vanished from sight didn’t make it any easier to accept.

  All five people were still there. He could tell by the way they started calling his name in a panic.

  Phil was never all that curious a man when it came to unusual phenomena. He made it a point to ignore strange events whenever he ran across them, actually. So he didn’t touch the strange, smudgy spot. Instead, he backed away from it. That was the wise choice: a moment later the guard came stumbling back out of thin air and fell on his face as he hit the floor.

  Phil backed away again, eyes wide and heart hammering, as the man slumped across the ground. The guard’s skin was the wrong color, several shades too light, and his eyes were wide open. Professional ethics pushed his fear out of the way and Phil stooped down to make sure the man was even alive. He wasn’t. Wherever he’d gone, whatever had happened, it had killed him.

  “Phil! Are you all right?” That was the nurse, who seldom called him by his first name. He looked in her direction and opened his mouth to speak just as the distortion moved out of his view.

  “I’m fine, but the guard is dead.” He wanted to scream and run, but he couldn’t. Somebody had to be in charge of the situation and it looked like he was that somebody.

  He stood back up, swaying a bit as his blood pressure changed to accommodate the sudden motion. The nurse screamed. So did Miles from accounting. So did the other three.

  Phil looked their way again, and felt the hairs on the back of his neck lift up. “What is it?”

  A second later he understood: What he’d thought was a shift in his blood pressure was actually a shift in reality. He stood perfectly still and looked down to where his body just…ended four feet off the ground. Below that point he could see nothing: the shimmering distortion prevented it. He looked back at the group, his eyes wide and his mouth hanging open as if he were a fish.

  Logic demanded that he carefully assess the situation. He could feel his legs and his midsection. He knew that he was standing on solid ground. The air around his lower half felt odd, thick and cold, but he could feel. That meant he wasn’t actually cut in half, he just looked like he was.

  “What should I do?” He stayed still, not certain if moving would cause a problem. The weird blurring was moving slowly around him, like a patch of pollen moving on the surface of a mostly still river.

  Miles moved closer, his eyes looking to the ground and then back up to Phil’s face several times.

  “I don’t know, Phil. I don’t think being where you are is a good place to be.” He resisted the urge to start swinging at the man. “Just stay where you are and see if it goes away on it’s own?”

  “That’s sort of what I’m thinking, too.” That from an orderly he couldn’t remember ever meeting before.

  “I think I agree,” he added. Forcing himself to take several deep breaths. “I don’t think I’m hurt, just…not all here.” He could hear the tremble in his voice. “Oh God, where am I if I’m not here?”

  Crowley’s comments came back to haunt him: the living and the dead coexisting in the same space, seldom able to see each other until he threw his powder into people’s eyes. He wanted to believe that this was all part of the same hallucination, but there were five people looking at him who said otherwise and there was a dead man at his feet—wherever they might be at the moment. He bit the inside of his mouth to stop himself from getting hysterical.

  Something touched his left leg not far from his groin, and a shriek slipped past Phil’s lips before he could stop it.

  “What happened?” Miles was trying, God love him, but he couldn’t see a way to get closer. The distorted air looked like it was finally starting to move on: the shimmer in the air in front of him seemed smaller. He wanted to look behind him to confirm that, but was afraid to move. What if by moving he separated his two halves like an assistant locked in a magician’s box?

  Phil tried to answer but couldn’t. He was breathing too fast, starting to hyperventilate. Instead he shook his head even as whatever touched his leg moved around, as if examining the shape of him: blindly groping out a Braille map of what he might look like.

  “Phil, calm down. Deep breaths, okay?” He nodded and tried to concentrate on his breathing, instead of the panic th
at was rampaging through his body as whatever was touching him kept moving. Long, cold fingers seemed to run across his scrotum and down his other leg with spidery caresses.

  Finally, when he could speak, he answered Miles. “I think something touched me, but I think it’s going away.” His shuddery speech was infuriating, showed a lack of control that he hated. Happily, no one was saying anything about it or mocking him.

  His leg seemed to catch fire. One second it was fine, if a little cold and the next it felt like his bones were being filled with molten lead. The pain was too much to allow him even to scream. So instead he tried pulling his leg away. Tried and failed. He couldn’t move his leg at all, couldn’t do anything but feel the hideous sensation of something bad happening. He half expected to smell the roasting meat, but there were no changes in scent, in the sight or anything else. A moment later he couldn’t even think about anything beyond the inferno consuming every nerve in his lower limb. Finally he managed to draw in a breath and scream for all that he was worth.

  The people in the room with him screamed too, all except Miles, who moved into the distortion and grabbed his arm. Miles pulled at him, throwing his weight into the motion, and hauled him away from the shimmering pool in the air.

  The pain didn’t go away, but it lessened as Phil stumbled forward. Though the shimmer was past him, he could feel a resistance, almost as if he were caught on the edge of a pool and being lifted from the waters. The pressure scraped along his stomach, his groin and finally his legs. When he felt it on the one that felt like it was burning he almost passed out. Finally, after a few seconds and a life time or so, he hit the floor of the break room and stayed there, panting, trying to recover from the sensations. His leg was calmer at least, still painful, but not enough to make him scream.

  “Oh, Jesus Christ!” Miles looked at Phil’s lower half and paled.

  Phil turned to see what the cause of the commotion was and felt his head grow light as he stared at the ruin of his lower extremity. He’d seen the same sort of damage before, on several people now, all of them dead. His leg looked like it had been held in the hands of a giant and squeezed into a new shape. The bone, if there was a bone left inside of the mess, must surely have been twisted into a lazy S.

  Phil looked down at the ruin and moaned softly, unaware of the noise.

  He wanted to speak, to tell himself and anyone who would listen that everything was fine, that the wound was an illusion, because that sort of thing could not happen in the rational world. He might have even managed it if the pain hadn’t started again. This time it was all over his body, not just in his leg.

  And as it started and he looked toward the accountant for help, he realized that no one in the room would give the least bit of a damn what he said.

  Because as it started happening to him, he saw the same thing happen to every person in the room. No two were struck in quite the same way, but all of them fell to the ground and all of them let out the sounds of unspeakable pain. Body after body started to shift and bend as bits and pieces were torn away from them and devoured by something unseen.

  Doctor Phillip Harrington and the rest of the people in the break room were either the luckiest souls in all of Cherry Hill or the most completely damned.

  All of them lived through the attack.

  None of them came out of it without crippling wounds to let them know they were still alive.

  ***

  John looked around at the infirmary team and they in turn looked at him. Aside from the moans of a few patients stuck in the overloaded area, there was little to hear for a few seconds as everyone assessed the situation.

  Finally, Crowley spoke. “So here’s the deal. You don’t want me here and I don’t want to be here. You might be thinking about doing something bold, like calling security or tackling me yourselves, but I have to be honest: You don’t have a chance. So, let me do what I have to do and then we can all go on our merry ways.”

  The speech worked as well as he expected. Two brawny interns made their tries for taking him down. They were doing their jobs and they were careful, so he did his best to avoid any permanent injuries when he knocked them unconscious.

  The rest of the staff looked at the three unconscious men and decided to get away from the lunatic. He liked the way they thought. Well, except for one man who felt the need to pick up the phone and start dialing.

  John moved over to where he was busily trying to dial on the rotary phone and pressed his finger over the disconnect button. “You need to not do that.” His smile was pure venom and the man backed away with a startled flinch. For some insane reason he seemed to think standing in the middle of the nurse’s station and grabbing the phone would go unnoticed. “I said I wanted to do my thing and leave. Let’s not invite anyone else to our little get-together, okay?”

  The man looked at him as if he’d just committed a social faux pas of epic scale. Crowley looked back until the idiot suddenly decided to look elsewhere. Just to make sure he got the point, John ripped the phone out of its mooring in the wall.

  Mister Call-In-The-Troops started walking away and Crowley caught his shoulder. “Listen, let’s make this easier on everyone involved. You point me to Alexander Granger, and I’ll go ahead and leave a lot sooner.”

  “I can’t do that.” For such a weasel-looking individual, he spoke with a deep voice.

  “Sure you can. See, if you do that, I’ll leave sooner and everyone can go back to doing their own things. I’m not going to hurt Granger. I just want to see him.”

  “I’ll have to come with you to make sure.” Had any man ever dreaded speaking a few words so much? Crowley doubted it.

  “Well that’s just fine with me.” John tried to give him a winning smile. The man flinched again. Then the weasel led him over to one of the beds, where a much healthier looking man than Crowley remembered lay unconscious on the bed. Much healthier. Like fifteen pounds more flesh than he should have had and no sign of the atrocious surgery scars he remembered from before.

  “Well, somebody’s been busy making Mr. Granger all better.” Crowley grabbed the medical charts and started reading the latest information on the man who’d piqued his interest. Red cell count was perfect. White blood cell count was perfect. Muscle mass was increased. His heart rhythm, pulse rate, blood pressure and every other vital statistic that was listed seemed to be in order. Hell, better than that. Physically he was as close to perfect as Crowley had ever seen.

  He double-checked the name on the charts, just to make sure the weasel wasn’t trying to pull a fast one. When he was sure it was Granger, John reached out to check the man’s vitals himself. He never made contact. His hand stopped roughly five inches from his target and the air crackled where his fingertips hovered over flesh. Something was surrounding the man, protecting him from Crowley’s touch.

  Crowley backed up a bit and looked at the man on the bed more closely. “Well that little bastard.”

  “Excuse me?”

  John looked at Mr. Weasel and smiled. “Come here.” Despite a slightly worried look the man came closer. “Touch him.”

  “What?”

  “Touch the man on the bed.”

  “Why?”

  “Humor me.”

  The man reached out and placed his hand on Alex Granger’s arm.

  Crowley nodded his head and looked around the room, carefully scanning the faces that were doing their best not to look like they were watching him. Then he reached out his hand again and tried to touch Granger. The same thing again, there was a pressure and then the air crackled. He pushed harder and the pain started, like fire ants biting down on his flesh. His skin began to cook and he pulled back, looking at the blackened flesh of his fingertips even as it healed.

  The hungry ghost was learning new tricks. In this case it had made a duplicate of his very own wards and managed to attune them so that they affected him.

  “One little problem with that, sunshine. I would never build something I couldn’t tear dow
n.”

  John placed his hand above Granger’s head and spoke softly for a moment. He felt it when the ward collapsed and nodded his satisfaction.

  A moment later the people in the medical ward started screaming.

  It only took a second to understand why.

  ***

  Most of the Dead God’s attention was focused on building a new body. Even a few hours ago it would have been blind to what the old man had done, but not any more.

  The ward it had created was gone, and much as it might have liked to do the same to the defenses it had imitated, it wasn’t quite capable of that. Not yet at least.

  Earlier it had learned that merely by observing, it could cause damage to the skin between the living and the dead. Now it actively concentrated on rupturing that barrier. The shift was easy and if it was lucky, the old man might be too distracted to stop it from finishing what it had started.

  ***

  The change was abrupt and disorienting. One moment they were all locked in the darkness and the next there was light so powerful that it made their eyes ache.

  The dead were not always aware of the living. Most of the ghosts of Cherry Hill remained in the same cells where they had lived their last, unaware in many cases that they had even died. Despite Jonathan Crowley’s claims that the spirits in the asylum were mostly mere echoes, faint recollections and energies left by years of pain, many of the dead had more coherent thoughts than he imagined.

  They were simply not sane thoughts. Simple math, really: crazy in life, crazy in death. They might not have all started out insane, but the dead of Cherry Hill were almost guaranteed to be psychotic. Death had not ended their mental imbalances; if anything, the time locked away within their own minds had distilled whatever dysfunctions they suffered.