Earthbound : A gripping crime thriller full of twists and supernatural suspense
Page 38
“Dad trusted you. You sold us out, Jim. You sold us all out. After all that my father did for you!”
“John, forgive me. I had no choice… What . . . what’s going to happen to me?” he pleaded.
“I really don’t know, Jim. Eventually a spirit like you or me will find you. He or she will be good or evil, willing to help or harm you. I don’t know which, and I don’t care.”
“At least show me how to move, so I can get out of this car and garage! “
“Why should I? You can stay and wait, like I had to. Whatever happens will be left to chance, just like you left all our lives to chance.”
“What the hell is this?” Jim looked down as he noticed his thighs had been slowly disappearing into the trunk.
“‘Hell’ could be right, Jim. You may just be going there.”
John turned away and started walking back to the elevator enclosure. He had his answers, but it didn’t make him feel any better.
John turned the corner to where he had left Jennifer and David waiting. Donovan’s screams, audible only to John and Jennifer, followed them into the elevator and were finally cut silent with the closing of the doors.
The elevator slowly rose and then the doors opened onto the lobby of the condominium building. David made straight for one of the couches that was hidden from the receptionist’s view. Jennifer joined him in sitting down while John stood watching over them both. She ran through the conversation that she had overheard in the near-empty garage between John and Donovan, right up to the point where Donovan had described how he was driving up in a van, side door open, mask on, ready to complete the kidnap when he had seen the aftermath of the stabbing and driven off. She told both men that she now remembered the driver looking at her with the hideous, bony grin of a skull, which she now realized must have been the mask Donovan had been wearing.
“So, Donovan,” David said, trying to piece everything together, “tried to use Hardwell to kidnap John. But Hardwell was possessed at that time by Santiago’s spirit…. and you know that because you saw him leave Hardwell when he was arrested.”
Jennifer nodded.
“So, on the night of the stabbing…” David continued thoughtfully, “Hardwell was trying to answer to two masters? Donovan wanted him to kidnap but not harm John, but Santiago’s spirit wanted him to…” his voice faded.
“To kill me, Dad––not John––as the start of his revenge against you.”
“And Santiago must have seemed like a constant voice in Hardwell’s head––telling him to stab you––driving him almost insane! There was no way that Donovan could compete with that and stop Hardwell doing what he had been ordered to do,” John observed.
Jennifer repeated his words for her father’s benefit and added, “At the moment of the stabbing, the pressure must have been intense. It was Santiago’s will against Hardwell’s, yet somehow Hardwell must have won. He may have been weak-minded, but his feelings for me must have been strong enough to make him turn the knife away from me and onto John at the last second.” She paused a moment as she looked at the expression of disbelief on her father’s face. “None of this is your fault, Dad,” she said softly. Then her tone changed. “Enough of this feeling sorry for ourselves! We have to go to the hospital.”
David got to his feet. They all passed through the lobby and onto the street, where they stood outside under the long, gray canopy that extended out over the sidewalk with ‘Kingston Residences’ printed in silver cursive script on its sides.
Jake, the doorman, was, as John had assured them, charming, tipping his hat and offering to hail Jennifer and David a cab, which they willingly accepted. During the twenty-minute journey to Queens Bayview Hospital, they delighted in the fact that for the first time in over two weeks, Jennifer and David were no longer hunted by anyone or anything.
By the time they had made their way up to the ICU, it was nearly 10:20 p.m. Visitors were allowed until 10:00 p.m.
“Are you family?” The duty nurse challenged them at reception.
“No, but––” Jennifer gave the nurse her most charming smile, also glancing at John, who walked straight past with the advantage of being invisible to everyone but her.
“Only family can stay longer past ten under special circumstances. I’m sorry, but as you’re not family, I can’t let you in,” the nurse interrupted.
Jennifer wanted to protest. There was a chance that the greatest moment in her life was about to happen: a chance of being reunited with John, the complete and whole John, both body and spirit, which she was now sure she had fallen in love with.
David calmed her down and made her sit with him. He assured her that they would know soon enough if John’s attempt would be a success, and there was nothing that either of them could do to help make it happen.
Once inside the ICU, John looked in each of the rooms one by one and found his father sitting in the second room on the left. He was sitting facing the bed and had fallen asleep, his face thin and tired from worry.
On the bed was a body with the face partly obscured by a ventilator tube. The body was still, save for the exaggerated and unnaturally precise breathing movements of the chest. It was the body that had carried him for eighteen years, that he had worked hard to make lean and muscled, yet somehow it seemed inexplicably alien.
This is it! John thought. It had all been leading up to this moment. He would soon know if he could return to the living or if he was doomed to eternally walk the earth as a spirit. It was his chance to live the life that had been brutally taken away from him. A chance for his father to see him achieve all that he had hoped for him. But most of all, it was his chance to be with Jennifer.
John had transferred into many other mortals, but now he found himself unable to move. While he did nothing, there was still hope—hope that he could become mortal again. His next action—trying to inhabit his own body—could crush it forever. What if his body was as empty as the body of the brain-dead youth he had possessed? His brain was currently dormant, running with minimal activity since it was in a coma, but was that low-level of consciousness any better than being brain-dead? Wasn’t that the reason he was the way he was now, as good as dead? But what if the energy of his spirit could ignite some complex chemical chain reaction which would spread rapidly throughout his body and bring him hurtling back to the living? Could it really be that simple?
He decided that he had stood on the edge of the unknown long enough. He was ready to take this leap of faith.
Twenty-Nine
John moved toward his body. It looked annoyingly peaceful, showing no signs of the danger or stress he had been through. His hand passed through its chest without resistance. Disappointingly, he felt nothing new, nothing to suggest this possession would be any different to the others he’d tried. He took his hand out and sat on the edge of the bed, fighting to retain his diminishing hope. All he had to do now, to know for sure, was to lower himself backward and submerge into his former self. He summoned all the courage he had. He lay back, and slowly his spirit disappeared into his body.
He felt the seal envelop and connect. He waited. Then he waited some more. Nothing happened. There was no magic moment in which his spirit started to bind irreversibly with his mortal body and mind. In fact, he could still move in and out of the body just as he’d been able to in every other possession he had experienced. His brain was stuck in a recurring loop of memories, like a scratched vinyl record causing a gramophone needle to skip back to exactly the same part of a song. They were memories from the hours before the stabbing, when he had felt his connection with Jennifer at its most intense.
He lay useless in the body that had once been inseparable from his identity, watching the playback of events. Long minutes passed.
“Did you really think it would be that easy, John?”
He heard the voice as a spirit, immediately recognizing it as belonging to Nikki. Raising his head, he was shocked to see the dark nothingness of a void hovering to his left.
“Hmm, not so feisty now, are you, John? Does it help if I look like this?” The Void turned into Nikki as he remembered her, looking tough and attractive. “I’m guessing you prefer me like this,” she said. “Relax, I’m not taking you anywhere,” she added.
John nodded with relief. “I thought I could somehow rejoin my body and come out of this coma,” John admitted in a resigned tone.
“There is a chance, John, but you have to believe in, and do, what I say, no matter how counter-intuitive it might seem.”
John nodded.
“Listen carefully. You’re projecting an image of your human self because you cannot give up what you understand as being your identity on Earth. It will feel wrong, but in order to regain your body, you need to abandon your need to associate your identity with it…. Only then will you reveal your pure consciousness––your essence, your values, what truly makes you who you are. And only that pure consciousness can bind with your living, mortal self through every fiber and cell in your body. You have to let go, as much as you don’t want to. That is the only way, John.”
John pressed his lips together in a slight grimace.
“You will then have a short time to decide whether to be truly free and travel enlightened with all the knowledge of time and space, your potential being truly fulfilled, or…” She paused, clearly for dramatic effect. “Or whether you want to enslave yourself once more within your meat-robot of a body with all its limitations and be in a state of advancing decrepitude until it dies.”
“How do I know this isn’t a trap and you won’t just send me out into the cosmos anyway?” John asked.
“You don’t. You have to trust that I have no interest in doing so. This information is my gift to you. Now it’s your choice. Choose wisely.”
Before he could say anything more, she disappeared in a flash, just as she had done before.
John stood there, hesitating to trust Nikki’s advice. If he somehow released his consciousness, he would become a Void, and could be taken from Earth forever by another Void in the same way Santiago was taken in the interview room of the police precinct. If he did nothing, he would be destined to continue wandering the Earth like he was now. He would be just an observer of mortal life, never again able to truly experience it and never to experience love like he had felt for Jennifer. How long could he accept only being able to observe her, the girl he had fallen so deeply in love with? He would be condemned to watch as she moved on to love someone else and grew old, until one day she would die and then, would she stay on Earth as a spirit? Probably not. She would have nothing to avenge, no injustice to correct. She’d be gone and he’d be stuck here without her. Could anything be worse? He decided to let go.
His conviction and his dedication to that path set in motion a chain reaction. He felt the glow from his form receding. The same blackness that had appeared within Santiago’s spirit had now appeared at his center and was consuming him. His anxiety about the possibility that he might have made a grave mistake mounted, before slowly ebbing away as if it, too, was being sucked into the nothingness. It continued to absorb him until he couldn’t see any part of his former spirit self or feel any of his human emotions. If he had any left, he would no doubt have been scared beyond his wits.
Suddenly, his mind and field of vision were expanding again. The information was flooding in, but this time, John could filter it without effort, to get to exactly what he needed to know––like running some monstrous search engine with the results he was looking for instantly available. Images of human consciousness as black voids appeared, emerging from human bodies during surgery or from comatose patients. There was no rule deciding whether or not consciousness would return to their bodies––an inexplicable event which had become known as a ‘near-death-experience.’ The one thing that all those cases had had in common, had been a powerful desire to return to the living.
John’s desire to return was all-consuming, and he felt himself being drawn closer to his body. In an instant, he was inside. This time it was different. He felt cocooned, protected and, for the first time in a long time, he felt warm. The breaths that his body was taking and the heartbeat he could now hear were undoubtedly his own. He felt the harshness of the ventilator tube pressed against tender areas of his throat and windpipe––it made him want to gag. Feelings of weakness, stiff limbs, and sores crowded his senses, but no sensation was as great as the dulled pain from his midsection. The continual loop of memories suddenly stopped playing, unconsciousness became foggy awareness which transitioned into sudden reality as his eyes snapped open. His own fully conscious thoughts filled his head.
He was finally back.
Thirty
John moved his head and looked at his father. He was asleep on a chair in the corner of the room.
“Dad!” John tried to say, but with the tube in his throat it came out as a cough that was both dry and sore. “Dad!” He repeated the effort, but again it came out as a rough, hacking sound.
“John?” responded a sleepy-sounding voice followed immediately with a louder, “John, are you awake? Oh, sweet Jesus!”
Tom Logan got up, his hair ruffled and his eyes puffy, and he rushed out into the corridor to bellow excitedly: “Nurse! Nurse! My son is awake!” He hurried back into the room and into the chair next to John’s bed.
John offered an outstretched hand and his father enclosed it with both his hands, his eyes watery as pools. “Christ Almighty! The doctors didn’t know if you would come back!” His voice was breaking, tears were spilling.
John squeezed his father’s hand tightly. He wanted to tell him that he loved him, but the damn tube was stopping him. He tapped it in frustration.
A few minutes passed before a doctor approached. He placed a hand on John’s. “Welcome back, young man—you gave us all quite a scare. Just don’t touch that now; we need to perform some tests before we decide to take it out.” His voice was energetic and confident. John liked him immediately.
“I’m going to tell you a few things, and I want you to blink once to show you understand and agree, or twice if you feel something is wrong, OK?”
John blinked once and listened to the doctor tell him things he already knew, like why he was there, and what had happened. He blinked each time on cue, impatiently.
“Good. Let me just check the readings on the ventilator.” The doctor paused for a moment. “Tidal volume, respiratory rate, and oxygenation all look good,” he muttered. “What I’ll do now is consult with a respiratory therapist and contact your assigned doctor. If they agree I’ll come back with a nurse, and we’ll look at taking that tube out.”
The doctor asked John’s father to step outside and wait in the corridor until he returned. When he came back with a nurse fifteen minutes later, he found that John’s father was no longer sitting alone. Jennifer and David had joined him and were also waiting outside John’s room. The doctor explained the extubation procedure and asked them all to remain in the corridor until he called them.
“Alright, John, we’re going to take that tube out of your mouth. In a second, I will use a suction tool to get all the mucus that might be in your throat. When I say so, I want you to cough. And when you cough, I’m going to pull that tube right out, and you will be a lot more comfortable breathing on your own, OK?”
John could only nod his eager agreement.
After cleaning his throat, the doctor disconnected the tubes and attached a manual respiratory bag, which he pumped slowly to allow John to get to his own breathing rhythm. “OK, I will give you a big breath to take in. I want you to cough it out and then I’ll pull out the tube.”
As he coughed out the air, the tube was pulled out. He spluttered for a second and then, by Christ, he was bre
athing by himself!
“Hi, Dad,” John croaked after he gained normality to his breaths.
The doctor turned around and saw John’s father in the doorway. “Please sit outside, Mr. Logan. We need to identify what level of recovery John has without him being distracted,” demanded the doctor.
John could see that Jennifer had now appeared beside his father. She was also being held back by a nurse. The doctor looked toward the door again and back at John. “Your girlfriend, I presume?”
“Yes,” John rasped.
“Miss, you can see him as soon as I have done some tests, I promise. Now, please sit down outside in the corridor.”
For the next twenty minutes John was asked question after question to gauge his memory. The doctor also tested his reflexes and checked his ability to swallow water and some liquidized food that the nurse brought in.
“It looks like you’re in good shape, John, but you won’t be going anywhere for a while. We need to keep checks on you. Try to get some rest now.”
The doctor walked out into the corridor, where David and Jennifer were waiting expectantly.
“It’s remarkable. He seems to have full cognitive function and reflexes. His memory is a little shaky. If it wasn’t for the fact that he has been lying in a bed for fifteen days, he could get up now and leave.” He paused, looking squarely at Jennifer before continuing. “But just in case there is any confusion, he can’t. His body is weak, and his digestive system has practically shut down. It will take days, if not weeks, for him to gain enough strength through eating normally and through physiotherapy to regain a normal lifestyle. He probably won’t be able to stay awake too long now and will drift in and out of sleep. Don’t be alarmed—he is out of the coma, and this will be regular sleep,” he said with a kind smile in response to the look of concern on Jennifer’s face.