The most powerful of these would become what mortals knew as “poltergeists,” and what the court would label “a bloody nuisance.”
A few days later, the poltergeist would be exorcised, and all that would be left of the non-aligned specter would be a hollow memory that would soon be forgotten.
Jennie crossed the street and made for the large building by the edge of the river Hudson. She waved at several cars that stopped in their tracks and honked their horns as she passed.
As she hopped onto the sidewalk outside the hospital’s entrance, she wondered what became of the non-aligned in the US. The specters who were new to the world. Before they’d encountered the other specters hanging out in the underbelly of society, and before they were even aware of what the afterlife was.
Only one way to find out, she thought.
New York-Presbyterian Hospital, Lower Manhattan, Present Day
“I’m sorry, ma’am, but visiting hours are over.”
Jennie removed her glasses to reveal eyes shimmering with tears.
“Please, have some compassion. My uncle…I’ve traveled all the way from London to see him, and I’m worried I won’t get the chance to say goodbye.”
The nurse behind the reception counter looked out from under her glasses. Jennie had seen her type before-a woman so hardened from years and years of sob stories and working around the dying and the grieving that the only authority she recognized was the hospital rules.
The nurse snorted air through her nose. “What’s your uncle’s name?”
Jennie looked over the nurse’s shoulder to where Worthington was peeking down at a logbook of visitors and a stack of patient clipboards.
“Rodriguez.” He squinted at the paper. “Rogelio Rodriguez.”
Jennie repeated this to the nurse, instantly regretting saying the words out loud.
“You’re the niece of Rogelio Rodriguez?” the nurse asked skeptically.
Jennie gave her best smile. “That’s right. My father and his family moved to London when I was a little girl. My mother was actually born in Leeds, so I was unlucky not to get the Latino genes.” She gave a half-shrug. “Maybe my children will be blessed with my family’s heritage, eh?”
The nurse stared at Jennie for a few uncomfortable seconds before slamming her clipboard shut.
“Look, Ms. um…” She took a deep breath. “Rodriguez. I’m sorry, but policy is policy. You can come back tomorrow morning between the hours of eight AM and twelve noon, or come back in the afternoon.” She picked up the stack of clipboards and held them to her chest. “Otherwise, there’s nothing I can do. Sylvia, will you please show Ms. Rodriguez the way out?”
A scrawny nurse with her hair thrown into a messy top bun nodded and scampered their way.
Jennie reluctantly obeyed, following her directions to the corridor outside of the intensive care unit.
“Straight down the elevator to the bottom floor, and straight in front of you,” the scrawny nurse told her with a smile. Though she looked exhausted, it was great to see that at least one nurse in this place cared enough to show some genuine affection.
“Thank you,” Jennie smiled back. “We’ll be back in the morning.”
“Your uncle’s vitals are great. He’s holding on. I’ll pass him your love.”
Jennie waved a sarcastic goodbye as the elevator doors shut.
“Rodriguez?” Jennie suddenly snapped at Worthington. “Out of all the names on those boards you could have gone for, Rodriguez? Do I look Hispanic to you?”
“I was under pressure,” Worthington replied. “You try to look through clipboards without moving them and alerting the nurse to your presence.”
“You know what?” Jennie rubbed a hand over her face. “Enough talking. Make yourself useful.”
Before Worthington could protest, Jennie closed her eyes and began to draw power from him. She felt her body becoming immaterial, and when she opened her eyes and looked into the mirror, she could see no reflection.
“Perfect,” she snarked. “If only the Army had a thousand of me for their covert ops.”
“They’d struggle to get them into the tanks due to their fat heads,” Worthington quipped.
He shut up the instant Jennie turned and glared at him. “One more peep out of you, and I’m shipping you first-class back to England.”
“Then who will you have to bully and abuse?”
“I’m sure I’ll find someone else,” Jennie replied as the elevator doors opened. She stepped toward the intensive care ward. “Now shut up and keep your ears open. We’ve got a job to do."
The intensive care ward was as quiet as a library. The only sounds were the steady beeping of machinery tracking patients’ vital organs and the occasional clop of nurses’ footsteps as they trailed down the halls.
They stayed in the hospital for hours, familiarizing themselves with the layout of the building and the patients spaced out among the various single-bed rooms on the ward.
Jennie passed through curtains and hovered over the patients, staring into faces blank with unconsciousness. She examined charts and read their stories, looking to find the patients most likely to be candidates for the next life.
All of the rooms in the ward were named after plants and flowers, an attempt to veil the morbidity this ward represented.
In the Lotus Room, Jennie came across Michael Dover, a seventy-eight-year-old organ donor from Long Island who had recently suffered a heart attack. His prognosis was bleak, and Jennie knew that soon he would find himself cast into the corridor to the beyond, where he would be able to make his final choice.
In the Lavender Room, Jennie introduced herself silently to Carolyn Hurst, a twenty-four-year-old woman who had been involved in a hit and run and suffered major internal trauma. A punctured lung and several damaged organs were a lot to come back from.
And in the Lily Room, Worthington read the story of a woman in her late fifties named Betty Garland who had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time, walking through the back streets of New York during the climax of a gang raid in which a number of store clerks were shot and killed and civilians were badly injured, Betty included.
Jennie made her rounds across the ward and found herself back at Carolyn. When she rested a hand on top of the ECG monitor, she felt the dust coat her palm and rubbed her hands together to clean them. The machine let out a few irregular beeps, then continued its pattern.
“Magical machines, aren’t they?” she mused, staring at the peaceful face of the young woman. “A TV screen that can show you how your heart is beating and track any irregular activity. Einthoven really did something amazing here, didn’t he?”
Worthington came over to the other side of the bed, a look of boredom on his face. “Another of your friends?”
“I wouldn’t say we were friends. We attended the same cocktail party once. Not that he would remember, I was invisible at the time.” Jennie shook her head. “Did you know that the first iteration of this machine was invented in 1895, but it took almost seventy years before they were commercialized and brought into modern hospitals?”
“Doesn’t surprise me,” Worthington replied. “Humanity has a certain amount of friction against mass manufacturing the things that might actually help its progress and development. I waited years for them to invent those little bone-shaped containers that attached to leads so it was easier to carry bags for dog crap, and they didn’t even release them in my time!”
Jennie gave the Beefeater an incredulous look. “You’ve really got to sort out your priorities, Conrad.”
“If you say so, Genevieve,” Worthington replied stiffly.
Jennie took a seat beside Carolyn’s bed. She rested her head back and closed her eyes, allowing her mind to empty.
Twenty minutes later, the ECG emitted a long, continuous flatline that woke Jennie up. She heard the sudden rush of feet and suddenly realized she’d lost her connection to Worthington and was now visible.
In a matter
of seconds, she rectified the problem, but not before the first nurse arrived on the scene.
“Paddles, Diane!” The stickler for the rules who had kicked them out of the hospital earlier snapped. “What are you waiting for?”
The nurse did a double-take, followed by an eye rub. “I thought I saw… Never mind.”
Although invisible, Jennie and Worthington moved out of the way of the nurses and let them do their thing. There was a small utility closet—a metal container with thin doors—which they climbed into and watched as the nurses brought out the defibrillator and worked on chest compressions.
Given that the poor girl had a lot of internal organ problems, Jennie had to give it to Diane. She didn’t hold back.
Jennie supposed a life of pain was almost always going to be better than death. Little did they know.
They worked on the poor girl for fifteen minutes before a doctor arrived and officially pronounced her dead. The head nurse made a note on the clipboard and arranged it so that the gurney was removed from the ward, and for Carolyn to be taken down to the morgue.
Jennie and Worthington followed them through the hospital, standing directly beside the nurses in the elevator. At one point, it was so crowded that Jennie found herself standing inside someone and had to hold back a slight chuckle when the nurse who’d inadvertently occupied Jennie’s space shivered and complained about the temperature.
The nurse’s colleague shook his head. “It’s just the morgue, Susan. Honestly, when will you get over it? People die. That’s part of the job.”
“It’s not that, it’s…” She couldn’t explain what she was feeling.
The frigid room was illuminated by rows of fluorescent lighting. Along the far wall were the rows of metal lockers containing the bodies of those who had passed in the hospital and were awaiting either autopsy or exportation to their final resting places.
Jennie passed through the double doors leading into the autopsy room.
Worthington hesitated outside the door.
Jennie noticed his absence and poked her head through the door. “Are you coming in or not?”
“It’s going to stink in there, isn’t it?” Worthington complained.
Jennie rolled her eyes. “That’s a common misconception. The majority of bodies in there have hardly had the chance to decompose. You might get the odd post-life fart, but otherwise, the smell is similar to the inside of an empty fridge.”
Worthington gave Jennie a Look.
Jennie sighed and grabbed Worthington by the wrist. “Fine. The fridge you last smelled forty years ago when you were alive. Get over it and get your arse in here.”
Worthington gulped and allowed himself to be pulled.
“We’ve got to stop meeting like this,” a thin, gravelly voice crooned as the nurses put the brakes on the gurney and stepped away. A man who looked like an insect pretending to be a human handed his clipboard to the head nurse. He was tall and frail and hunched over with his hands rubbing his knuckles.
Diane gave him a stern look. “That gets funnier every time you say it, Durst. You might need a new line if you’re ever planning on getting out of this human refrigerator.”
Durst grinned, the expression painful to watch. “You can’t beat the classics, though.”
Diane shook her head. “You can’t polish a turd, either, but I don’t see that stopping you.”
The nurses swept out the door as quickly as they could, leaving Durst behind to hover over the body.
“Poor girl,” Durst croaked. He shook his head. “Taken in the prime of her life. Don’t you worry, we’ve got a place for you right over here.”
He half-galloped over to the lockers and pulled out a long metal tray. “Keaton, I need you.”
Keaton, a man who was the polar opposite of Durst, appeared from a door at the back of the room. He was the same height, but he was at least three times as wide, and his arms were thick with muscle.
He glided over to the bed without a word and picked the body up. He placed her with surprising delicacy onto the tray poking out of the lockers like a robot’s tongue and gently slid it closed.
Durst hesitated a moment, abandoning the sheets of the chart to talk to Keaton as he passed. “Pretty little thing, isn’t she?” His tongue flicked over his lips obscenely.
Keaton half-turned on his way back to the office. “Don’t do that, man. You know it gives me the creeps.”
“Charming pair, aren’t they?” Jennie whispered.
Durst’s ears pricked up. “Did you hear that?”
“It’s nothing. Just your imagination,” Keaton called from the other room, where the flicker of a TV and the theme song to Pretty Little Liars was playing.
Durst busied himself at a nearby desk, resting his head in his hand as he digested the information on the new arrival.
Jennie was about to cross over and read the papers when Worthington grabbed her shoulder, a sudden panic on his face.
“What? What is it?” Jennie whispered as quietly as she could manage.
Worthington thumbed toward the door, while Durst’s eyes scoured the room.
The coroner stuck a finger in his ear and gave it a wriggle.
Jennie could hear it now. Footsteps coming toward them. More than that, she could feel that something wasn’t quite right. Over the years, she had learned to trust her instincts, and in this case, her instincts were telling her to hide.
But where?
Jennie grabbed Worthington and shoved him toward the lockers. His body disappeared behind the metal, and she vaguely heard his utterance of disgust. She looked around, saw a room divider behind Durst’s desk, and flitted over, managing to hide just as a knock came at the door.
“Just a second,” Durst called, irritation in his voice.
Jennie peeked above the divider and watched Durst cross the room.
When he opened the door, he couldn’t see anyone standing there. He shrugged and closed the door, then returned to his desk, totally oblivious to the chuckling specter who had just stepped inside.
The specter checked Durst’s clipboards, then made their way toward Carolyn’s drawer.
Chapter Nine
The specter glided silently across the morgue without a care in the world. He wore a hospital nightgown that blew open behind him and showed Jennie things she’d rather not see, but there was confidence in his gait as he traced his finger in the air and looked for the correct number of the drawer.
“Ah!” he muttered.
He gripped the locker door, and a ghostly projection of the tray peeled away from the real thing, looking like a holographic replica had taken its place. On the tray was the pale, spectral body of Carolyn Hurst.
The specter leaned down until he was nose to nose with the girl. “Wakey, wakey,” he shouted, his face hysterical. “Rise and shine!”
Jennie expected Durst to jump up in the air with a triumphant, “Aha! I knew it!” She was disappointed to find he sat with his eyes half-closed, leaning over the stack of paperwork in front of him.
She flushed, remembering that only certain specters could talk in a frequency that could be heard by humans.
There was a high-pitched scream and the spectral form of Carolyn sat up suddenly as if waking from a nightmare. She looked around, her neck almost turning a full one-eighty, and screamed some more.
“Easy, easy,” the male specter reassured Carolyn with a dark chuckle. “I know, I know. This is never the easiest bit to explain to a baby specter, particularly one as young as you. Here’s the ten-second summary. You’re dead. You died. You’re no longer living. Your heart stopped beating. There’s no more oxygen in your body. Life is over, and you now have a choice to make. How did I do? Did that cover it?”
Carolyn’s face dropped. If she wasn’t already as pale as a specter, she would’ve turned white. “I’m…I’m dead?”
The specter sighed. “Which variation of that sentence are you struggling with, dear? Do you want me to say it all again?”
Carolyn shook her head. “No. It’s just, I was walking near the Plaza. Then…” She held a palm to her temple, trying to remember. “The car came out of nowhere. The next thing I knew, I was…”
“Dead!” the man snapped loud enough to make Carolyn jump.
I really don’t like that guy, Jennie thought. Toying with her is no way to introduce a new-born specter to the afterlife.
The man looked at his watch, although the hands no longer moved. “I’m sorry to push this along, darling, but I’ve got places to be. Do you know how many people are dying here at the moment? Enough to fill a semi-truck, and then some. Every friggin’ day!”
His words were cheery, a huge smile breaking his face. It was almost as though he was discussing the fact that it was going to be a beautiful day, and the Knicks had just won the NBA.
“So, here’s the deal,” he continued. “You’re dead. I’ve covered that. But you have a choice to make. If you’re happy to end your life and travel into the great beyond, then lay back, close your eyes and kiss goodbye to all your Earthly connections. You only get one shot at this, and it has to be quick.”
He held up a finger. “If, on the other hand, you have unfinished business and wish to roam the world a little longer—which I’d highly advise, given that you likely just graduated from diapers to your big-girl panties and have yet to see the world—then I suggest sticking around as a specter.” As he said the last word in his best spooky voice, he raised his arms.
“This is all so much to take in,” Carolyn whimpered. “I can’t be dead. I was in a car. Cody…he was there with me.” Her eyes widened. “Is Cody okay?”
The specter shrugged. “Cody is…”
“My boyfriend!”
The specter paused for a second, cheeks puffed as if he was about to spew another round of irritating vitriol. Only this time, he showed the first ounce of compassion that Jennie had witnessed.
Rogue, Renegade And Rebel (In Her Paranormal Majesty’s Secret Service Book 1) Page 9