Shadeland (The Ethereal Crossings, 1)

by D.L. Miles

  Chapter 20

  The bright fluorescent halls of the hospital basement said the same thing as the college. They tried to appear non-threatening and positive but I knew what was at the end of the hallway; the morgue. Those bright green and yellow lights made me feel as if I was walking into a zombie horror movie and I knew how those ended.

  A few silver carts used to move bodies sat down the hallway, always opposite an open door. The walls were freshly painted and a thick, bitter chemical smell hung in the air, reminding me of the time I had to dissect animals in high school. I held my arms to my stomach, trying not to breathe through my nose.

  Violet certainly had a different way of dealing with things compared to Jared. When we had walked into the hospital she didn’t ask where to go, or who to talk to, she just went straight for the elevator and nobody stopped us. We rode it all the way down to the morgue, clearly the hospital didn’t want people accidentally getting off on the wrong floor; the dead were stored just above the parking garage.

  There was nobody in the hallway, the only sounds coming from our footsteps. It reminded me of being in the forest not two hours earlier when that thing had flown overhead. Nothing had made a noise then, too scared to even take a breath. The only difference now was that anyone nearby wasn’t capable of breathing.

  As we passed the second to last door, Violet came to a stop. The wooden door was open to an empty office, appearing just as positive and “safe” as the hallway. She stepped inside.

  “What are you doing?” I whispered, feeling as if I wasn’t supposed to make any sound. Poking my head in, I saw her grab two white lab coats off of a hanger in a change room, tossing one to me.

  “Put this on,” she ordered, “we need to look the part.” I threw the jacket on over my sweater and followed her down the rest of the hall. Checking if I had a nametag, I didn’t; at least that would make lying easier, if it came to that. Violet put the identical jacket on and slammed open the doors to the morgue.

  The large silver room only had one living occupant, a young intern asleep at his desk. At least, he was asleep, before Violet woke him. He jumped to attention in his seat, frantically looking around for the cause just as Violet stuck a wedge under the door to keep it open. When he saw our lab coats he quickly pushed up his glasses and straightened his clothes, attempting to save himself. If we were actually doctors he might be in trouble… I remembered Violet carried a gun and decided that he was still in trouble, just a different kind.

  “C-can I help you?” he asked, keeping his eyes on Violet.

  “Yes,” she said, “I’m Dr. Ryder and this is my intern, we’re here to take over your shift.” She flipped out a white ID badge and flashed it to him, not long enough to see anything clearly but the picture. When she put it away he looked to me for one. “She doesn’t have one yet, so don’t bother asking. She doesn’t even speak any English; fresh off the plane from Germany! Now get out.” She thrust her thumb at the door, almost nailing me in the eye. I leaned back fast, narrowly dodging her most likely intentional attack.

  “But I was never told—”

  “That isn’t my problem,” Violet said, “this girl needs to learn how to…uh…” she looked around the room, “handle being around the bodies, so leave us to our teachings.”

  “I think I should call the night manager…” he said as he stood. Picking up the phone he punched in four numbers and I heard it begin to ring.

  “Well I tried to be nice,” Violet grumbled, reaching into the back of her pants to reveal a black gun, similar to Jared’s. It only took one hit from the butt to knock out the intern, leaving the person on the other end of the phone confused. He fell onto his chair and Violet hung up the phone before the person could ask anymore “hellos”.

  “Why did you hit him?” I asked, watching her walk around the desk. She shoved the intern underneath as I heard the elevator ding down the hallway. Sitting in the chair she looked up at me.

  “Can you see him on that side?” Not thinking I looked down.

  “No,” I said, leaning backwards to check down the hallway to see a woman dressed in a paramedics outfit wheeling a black bag towards us. “What are you doing?”

  “You should hide,” she said, folding her hands in front of her on the desk. “It’ll look suspicious for two of us to be here.”

  “What?”

  “Hide. Before they get here.” She rolled her eyes at me, like this should make any sense? I wasn’t really sure where she expected me to go. The morgue walls were lined with boxes, labelled with names and there were no carts around to dash behind. That only left the doors.

  I took one last look down the hallway at the paramedic wheeling towards me. Her attention was on the large body bag in front of her so I took the chance to rush behind the open door. Leaning back as much as I could against the wall, I heard the wheels squeak to a halt when she got into the morgue.

  “Johnny not here tonight?” she asked Violet. I wondered how often she came here, if she knew who should be working when. Did that many people die in Ellengale? Lately, they did. Well, maybe they were just good friends…

  “Nope,” Violet said with what I assumed was a fake smile, “he’s taking a personal day. What have ya got for me?”

  “Another murder,” she said, “from that Nighstalker bastard!” I clenched my fist, feeling as if she was talking about Luke. But I was just being overly defensive; he had been cleared of all charges.

  “Well put her over there,” Violet said, very nonchalantly. I heard the wheels roll further into the room and then footsteps coming back towards me. Peeking through the window I saw the paramedic facing Violet at her desk when suddenly a moan emerged from beneath it.

  “What was that?” the woman asked, staring down at the floor, trying to look for the source of the noise. She couldn’t see anything, that much I was glad for.

  “That was nothing,” Violet said with a jolt, kicking the poor intern under the desk. She stood and walked around, putting a hand on the woman’s shoulder. “It was really nothing. Are you doing something after this?”

  “No,” the paramedic said slowly, “I’m done my shift but—”

  “Good,” Violet said. With one swift movement she clocked the paramedic over her head as she had to the man moments earlier. The woman went down easily, landing on the tiled floor with a thud. I stepped out from behind the door.

  “Stop hitting people!” I tried to order her. Violet stuck her gun into the back of her pants and shrugged.

  “They asked too many questions.”

  “They were just doing their jobs!” I huffed away my frustration, knowing she was just like Jared; the little people didn’t matter too much, especially if they got in the way. Violet dragged the paramedic behind the desk and left her with the intern.

  “Let’s just get this over with,” she said coming back towards me, opening her palms.

  “Agreed,” I said. We both turned to face the body bag then. It sat only a few feet away, beside an empty silver set of tools. As we walked over I tried not to breathe too deeply, the smell beginning to make me feel woozy.

  “Wait here,” Violet said, “I need to get a needle.” She walked away from me but I kept my eyes on the black bag. Was this what they took Charlie away in? Was this where Charlie was right now?

  I looked at the rows of storage containers on the wall and at the metal trays around the room. Is this where they did her autopsy? Suddenly I could see her smiling face in my mind and unexpectedly I remembered the time she had taken me to get her hair cut before a date.

  “What do you think?” she had asked me, holding up a magazine to her head. The photo had a woman’s hair up in a ponytail, with just simple bangs falling to the side. “These?”

  We had been sitting in the hair salon, the smell of chemicals had made me feel dizzy there too. Her hair was long and straight, without a fringe. Quite different from the curls she sported the day s
he died. For some reason she had decided she needed a change for her date at the time.

  “I don’t think I’m the person you should ask,” I told her, still uncomfortable around such an exuberant person. We had only recently met, then, and she was determined to be my friend.

  “Well I want to look good tonight!” she threw the magazine into her lap. “You never know, this guy could be The One!”

  “Really?” she sounded so positive I couldn’t believe it.

  “Haven’t you ever met someone you’ve just had an instant connection with, Liv?” she laughed at me, as if love was the most common emotion to feel about a person. My name echoed in my head with her laugh.

  “Liv? Liv!” Violet elbowed me in the ribs, bringing me back to my current and morbid reality. She moved me down to the head of the body, syringe in hand and asked, “Where the hell did you just go?”

  “A memory,” I said under my breath, “nowhere but a memory. How do you know my name?” I had never introduced myself and it had just occurred to me.

  “Yamuna told me about you,” Violet said as she unzipped the body bag, “she finds you disturbingly interesting.”

  The victim’s body was exposed to us to the hips. She had a clean, white peasant top on, flowing over her stomach. I hadn’t realized it at first, but she was pregnant. She had just the slightest baby bump showing underneath her shirt and just like all the other victims, there was no blood; no evidence of any kind.

  I could say the same about how interesting Yamuna was, I thought with a tilt of my head. Actually, I could say the same about all of them. Damn them all for being so mysteriously intertwined.

  This woman wasn’t quite like the other victims; she was middle aged, she looked like a common housewife. She didn’t fit the image of some young party girl. This woman probably had a husband, maybe a child, and she was expecting another, just like Heather… Something in my mind clicked.

  Violet stuck the needle in the woman’s arm and withdrew blood. It was thick and dark, like the blood at Alice’s crime scene. I began to purse my lips as I stared down at the woman’s stomach. Something about the fact that they were both pregnant bothered me, a lot. Could it simply be a coincidence? Nothing so far seemed like a coincidence though.

  “Let’s go,” Violet ordered, “before anyone else comes here.” She zipped the bag back up, covering the woman’s face with the black plastic.

  “Wait,” I said, grabbing her forearm before she could leave. “Where would they keep the coroner’s reports?”

  “They would go to the forensic lab,” she told me, “and a copy would go to the coroner, which he would file away somewhere.”

  “Would they be in one of the offices down here?”

  “No, none of these offices are occupied,” Violet said, wrenching her arm from me. She pulled a vial out of her pocket and injected the blood into it. “They’re going to be doing construction down here to make the morgue bigger.”

  “Why?”

  “Because nobody wants their office next to the morgue.” I tilted my head again, imagining that to be true.

  “So where would they be then?” I asked, following her down the hallway.

  “Who cares?” she shrugged out of the white jacket and tossed it into an open office. I stopped and twirled in a circle as I took mine off to do the same, jogging to catch up with her. She pressed the elevator button and watched the numbers above the doors change.

  “Because I need to see something that might help us,” I said, pleading. It was a slight lie, I mostly wanted to indulge in my own curiosity but there was something just…off about this.

  “Hmm, fine,” she said, deciding not to bother arguing with me. “You have five minutes when we get there. That’s it.”

  “Okay,” I smiled slightly as the doors dinged open and we stepped inside. She pressed for the second floor and the elevator shuddered as it raised us up.

  She never asked me what I wanted to know and it bugged me a little. Wasn’t she at all wondering why I wanted to view the coroner’s report? If I was her I would want to know what I was doing.

  The doors opened to another fluorescent hallway. There were only a few nurses, walking in and out of rooms to behind the oval desk between them all.

  “This way,” Violet tapped my arm and took a sharp left down the empty hall, which had nobody there. “These are the offices for the coroners.” She stopped at the door labelled 205 and pulled a key from her pocket; where had she gotten that? I wondered. Checking over her shoulder, she unlocked and opened the door. I glanced behind myself, to see if anyone was looking but the coast was clear when Violet yanked me inside with a whisper, “Hurry it up.”

  She shut the door behind me as quietly as possible and I looked around the room. The only light that I had to see by was from the hallway and the moon outside, neither of which gave much. Violet never turned the light on so I assumed that meant we couldn’t.

  “Here,” she said as I stumbled through the darkness. She passed me a mini flashlight that hung off of her keys. “Try the cabinet.”

  “Thanks,” I said taking it from her. The grey filing cabinets sat just behind the door and opened with ease. “Shouldn’t these be locked?” I rifled through the file names, trying to find the victims.

  “This is Ellengale, honey,” she said, sounding exactly like Jared, “they don’t lock up much here. Trust me, I know.” She shot me a tight lipped smile. I didn’t ask what she meant.

  Continuing through the files I noted they weren’t in chronological order as I had anticipated. Once I reached the end of them all I saw they were actually simply alphabetical, the first recognizable name I went for being Rosa’s. Pulling out the last four files took longer than I had hoped, but I managed to find them all and carefully opened Heather’s first. I knew what Rosa’s would say; it was the rest I wanted to check out.

  It contained a lot of jargon that I wasn’t familiar with so I skimmed it quickly, looking for certain words. Once I found what I wanted I checked Alice’s, and found the same. That only left Charlie’s file. Going over her name with the light I began to reminisce again, my mind wandering back to the salon.

  “Whadyathink?” Charlie had asked me as she spun in the chair, hair bouncing through the air.

  “It looks nice,” I told her, not sure of what I was supposed to say. After she had paid and we started walking back to the apartment building to pick out her outfit for the night. “Why did you bring…me?” Charlie was popular, she had plenty of other friends that would actually enjoy this, so why me?

  “Because we’re friends silly!” She playfully pushed me on the arm and quickened her pace, making me stop in my place.

  She had really impacted me at that moment; I had never made a friend so easily.

  “Hey, hurry up!” Violet jostled me back to the present. “We need to get going.”

  “Uh…oh, yeah,” I said, reading the cause of death. Each victim had died from blood loss, but the coroner couldn’t figure out how; there were no cuts, no marks, nothing. It was as if most of their blood just…disappeared. As I continued to look over the files I came across something shocking. I think my mouth must have been hanging open, it was the only explanation for Violet’s next sentence.

  “What is it?” I looked up at her, the hallway lights reflecting onto her face.

  “She was pregnant,” I said, “they were all pregnant.” I thought my words would impact Violet more.

  “So?” she asked, grabbing the files from me and shoving them inside the cabinet. Once they were inside she slammed the drawer shut.

  “Don’t you think that’s a little strange?” I followed her out the door and back to the elevators. “Five victims, four of them knew each other and all of them were pregnant.”

  “Coincidence,” Violet shrugged as she hit the elevator button. The doors opened instantly and we got in, heading back to the first floor.

  “How often are things like
this a coincidence?” I questioned. It couldn’t just be that simple.

  “Lots of times,” she said, “look, you got the blood, Yamuna’ll summon it, the thing’ll die and it’ll be done.”

  We got out of the elevator and headed for the front doors. Nobody looked at us as we walked outside, our pace fast. The rain had calmed down a bit, but was still coming down. She made it to the car before me and opened her door.

  “Would Jared think it was just a coincidence?” I called to her, a few feet away from the car. I opened my arms under the crashing sky, awaiting her reply. She stopped and faced me. I moved the few steps to the door, lessening the distance between us

  “Yeah, he would,” was all she said before slamming her door shut and coming around to my side. She grabbed my collar and shoved me against the Cooper. She was close enough for me to see the water running down the strands of her hair, to see the tears welling in her eyes. “And don’t you think for a moment that you know what he’d think.”

  “I—”

  “No!” she pushed me harder against the car, her voice cracking. “He is my family, not yours. I grew up with him, not you. So don’t you think for one second that you know him better than me.”

  I didn’t see it before, how much it hurt her that Jared was turned to stone. She had seemed so indifferent, she never gave off any indication of caring. But now that she was inches away from my face I could see it quite clearly. Her brown eyes were red, her breathing shallow, trying to hold back the tears.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. I had never actually tried to say I knew Jared better than her, but…I didn’t think he would consider it a coincidence. Violet released me from her grip, walking back around the car and carefully facing away from me. I saw one hand reach to her face, wiping away a tear that I wasn’t supposed to see.

  “Just because he lets you go around with him doesn’t mean that you matter,” she said, wrenching on her door handle, “you’re just another girl in another town that he is going to forget.” She slammed the door again and started the car. I stood for a second next to the Cooper, thinking about what she had said. That kind of hurt, just a little bit.