Putting her shoulders back, Nurse Ackerman entered the room. She even considered closing the door, but she couldn’t do it. None of the nurses had ever closed themselves inside room 1280. Quite frankly, they were afraid to.
She only needed a minute anyway.
Crossing to the loathsome thing in the bed, Nurse Ackerman took out her first glass vial of morphine and thrust it onto the needle end of her syringe. She ignored the flutters of excitement that danced over her skin. It wasn’t that she was eager to kill. It was just that it would be such a relief to rid her hospice wing, her hospital, her world of this stain upon mankind.
With a steady hand, Nurse Ackerman injected the first of the morphine into the man’s IV port. She watched the heart monitor. Its rhythm didn’t falter.
She had suspected this would happen. Smoothly, she pulled out the second vial.
That’s when she heard the giggle.
Nurse Ackerman pivoted toward the door, but no one was there.
Stepping away from the bed, she went to the door and looked out into the hallway. Had Nurse Fremont finished her lunch?
The hallway was empty.
Then Nurse Ackerman heard another giggle, and this time it was behind her.
A blast of cold rushed down her spine and tightened into a vice grip in her bowels. Slowly, as if about to face a wild animal she didn’t want to spook, Nurse Ackerman turned.
She didn’t know what she expected to see. She was prepared for literally anything. How could she not be? Anyone who had the man in room 1280 as a patient would have to be ready for anything.
But she saw nothing.
Everything was just as it had been when she entered the room.
Even so, she stood next to the man for several moments to be sure, watching him to see if she could discern a change. She couldn’t.
Well, that wasn’t true. She did notice one change.
The smell in the room was worse now than it had been when she first came in. It had intensified, as if someone had been fiddling with the hospital’s thermostat, and had allowed the room to heat significantly. The odor was ghastly.
She’d better get on with it.
Nurse Ackerman still held the second vial of morphine, so she quickly inserted her syringe and emptied it into the IV port. Again, she watched.
And again, nothing.
Nurse Ackerman straightened her spine and pulled the rest of the morphine vials from her pocket. Eleven more. She laid them on the edge of the bed, in a tidy row. She’d inject them all if she had to, one right after the other. She wasn’t going to wait for a result.
Reaching for the third vial, she heard the giggle again. Her hand stopped in midair.
The giggle came from right next to her.
A little black-haired boy stood by her side, looking up. He was grinning a grin so feral that it acted like a siphon, extracting the strength from Nurse Ackerman’s limbs. She felt herself start to crumple toward the floor, and she caught herself on the edge of the bed just in time.
He was just a little boy. Why was she so afraid?
He ran out of the room, and Nurse Ackerman tried to steady her racing heart rate. She needed to get herself under control so she could return to what she needed to do.
But her mind, her memories, wouldn’t let her find calm. Instead, she was transported, wholly against her will, into her past. She was deposited next to the bed of her dying son, the one who had left this world and had taken with him every smile Nurse Ackerman might ever have smiled. Feeling the agony as if she was living it, Nurse Ackerman experienced for the millionth time that moment when her son’s death had reached into her heart and had torn it apart.
She hadn’t always been this shell of a woman. But Elijah’s death had carved her out, leaving a barely functioning person to find a place among living beings who tortured her with reminders of the life she’d once shared with her son. Even though her heart was frozen, she’d become a hospice nurse to help others who had to walk in her shoes.
Stop this right now! she admonished herself. She didn’t have time for this misery.
Nurse Ackerman pushed aside her past, along with the question of who the little boy was and why he was here. She also boxed up the puzzle of why he was so terrifying. One thing at a time, she told herself.
Once again, she reached for a vial. Before her fingers could close around it, though, a child-size shadow flashed in front of her.
As it streaked by, all the vials flew off the bed and hurtled toward the floor, where they shattered on impact.
Morphine puddled innocuously on the tiles.
Nurse Thomas’s plan was simple because Nurse Thomas was simple.
A lover of growing flowers, cooking her family large fattening dinners, and needlepointing Bible verses, Nurse Thomas—Beatrice to her friends—had become a nurse because she also loved people, simply loved them. She wanted to serve them, however she could.
These truths about Nurse Thomas were a little counter to where she currently was and what she was currently doing. Right now, she stood outside room 1280 holding a pillow that she intended to use as a weapon.
But really, Nurse Thomas’s goals were all congruent, she told herself. What she was about to do was an act of love, an act of love as pure and simple as she was. Beatrice was doing this for the same reason she did everything every day. She was doing it to help people.
Nurse Thomas looked over her shoulder. She was alone.
Just because she was doing this to help didn’t mean she wanted to be seen doing it. No one besides Nurse Ackerman and Nurse Colton seemed to understand.
Pausing to say a short prayer outside of room 1280, Nurse Thomas hugged the pillow and then opened the door. She ducked her head as soon as she was in the room. She always did this in room 1280. It was a way of seeing well enough to do what she needed to do without having to look too closely at what was in the bed.
She didn’t want to look at what was in the bed because it was the most grotesque thing she’d ever seen. A macabre conglomeration of writhing slime and fire-branded dross, the man-shaped mass of bone and tissue in the bed literally made Nurse Thomas’s eyes burn, as if she was looking at a solar eclipse without shades. This effect was so intense that she’d even tried wearing sunglasses in this room to see if they’d help—which they didn’t.
Breathing through her mouth because Nurse Ackerman was right—the smell was much worse than ever—Nurse Thomas approached the head of the bed. Giving the pillow one last squeeze, she held it in two hands, out in front of her.
She knew that Nurse Ackerman and Nurse Colton both thought her idea for killing the thing in this bed was silly. Maybe it was. But sometimes the easiest solution was the best one.
Morphine hadn’t worked. That was for sure.
Nurse Thomas and her fellow nurses had spent an hour the night before discussing the little boy Nurse Ackerman had seen. Both Nurse Thomas and Nurse Colton had seen him, too. They even got Nurse Fremont to admit that she’d spotted him. Nurse Thomas didn’t think Nurse Fremont had told them everything about what she’d seen, but she’d told them enough.
Earlier today, Nurse Thomas had overheard a couple orderlies talking about how people were seeing a little black-haired boy all over the hospital. The mystery of the boy wasn’t necessarily related to room 1280.
Or was it?
After Nurse Fremont went home, and after handing over the hospice wing to the swing shift, the three nurses had shared coffee in the cafeteria and discussed the question that was even more important than the boy.
“What do you think the shadow was?” Nurse Thomas had asked Nurse Ackerman as she tried to ignore all the food smells in the room. She was hungry and couldn’t wait to get home to cook macaroni and cheese and green bean casserole.
“I think it was it … whatever’s inside that man.”
“How did it get out?” Nurse Thomas asked.
“I can’t explain any part of this!” Nurse Ackerman’s voice was so loud it startled seve
ral nurses and doctors sitting nearby. Forks clattered. Someone dropped a glass. She immediately dropped her voice to a whisper. “It doesn’t matter. What matters is we need to try again.”
That’s when Nurse Thomas volunteered her homespun little plan: she’d smother the man in room 1280 with a pillow.
Nurse Ackerman had wanted to try again with morphine, but Nurse Thomas convinced her that the man in room 1280, or whatever was inside the man in room 1280, would be ready for that. They needed to take him, or it, by surprise.
So here she was.
The previous night, Nurse Thomas had practiced. She’d done a bit of research, and she’d discovered it took about three minutes to suffocate someone with a pillow. She had to find out if she could hold a pillow forcefully over something for that long—or even longer. Learning from Nurse Ackerman’s experience, Nurse Thomas figured that if normally lethal doses of morphine didn’t kill the thing, suffocation would take extra effort as well.
Nurse Thomas looked pillowy herself, but she wasn’t. Hours of cooking, cleaning, gardening, and needlework had given her unexpected upper body strength. The strength came in handy when she did her pillow experiment on a doll she’d bought for a niece. She had no problem holding a pillow over the doll for seven minutes … although her muscles were burning a little by the time she was done.
She’d receive the strength she needed now, she was sure.
Nurse Thomas took a step toward the bed. She paused and listened, but there was no giggling of the kind Nurse Ackerman had described. Apparently the boy wasn’t around.
Tightening her grip on the pillow, Nurse Thomas marched to the bed and shoved it down hard over the man’s face, or at least over where his face should have been. Nurse Thomas’s muscles were tensed, poised, and ready for anything.
Yet nothing happened … at first.
Then the pillow started filling with blood. It came through the middle of the pillow, and soon began spreading outward, seeping inexorably toward Nurse Thomas’s fingers. But she didn’t let go. She was focused on the end result.
After six and a half minutes, the monitor’s steady beep … beep … beep picked up its pace. Then, glory be, after another minute it shifted to the sustained tone of a flatline.
She was doing it!
Just a few more seconds should be enough.
The pillow was almost fully saturated with blood, and now Nurse Thomas noticed a sickly green fluid was coming through the pillow as well. She gagged but kept pressing.
That’s when a shadow darted in front of Nurse Thomas and tore the pillow from her grasp. Before she could even think about trying to retrieve it, the pillow ruptured, its contents ejecting into the room … and all over her.
Sticky, odious blood went into her mouth and up her nose. Putrid slime flew into her eyes. And bits of cloth and foam stuck to the fluids that sluiced over her skin and coagulated in her hair.
Nurse Thomas didn’t make a sound, but the monitors did. They shifted from a steady flatline tone back to a stable, even rhythm.
Nurse Thomas fainted into the middle of the sickening mess on the floor.
Arthur was getting frustrated. He didn’t often get frustrated because he believed in universal timing. But that timing seemed to be a little off right now.
It was now five days since the man in room 1280 had been able to communicate with him. Since then, Arthur had been back to see the man daily, although he’d only stayed a couple hours each time. The rest of the time he was at the hospital, he was in the administration offices trying to get someone to listen to him.
“What harm could it do?” he’d said over and over, to at least a dozen different people.
He simply couldn’t understand why moving the man in room 1280 was such a bad thing. Either he’d survive the experience and get whatever it was he wanted from his visit to Fazbear Entertainment Distribution Center, or he wouldn’t. And if he didn’t, well, Arthur couldn’t help but think that would be a mercy.
The hospital administration didn’t agree.
They also were distracted. It seemed that the whole hospital was abuzz about repeated sightings of a little dark-haired boy wearing an alligator mask. Dozens of people had seen the boy, but thus far, no one had been able to talk to him.
The police had been called in to find the boy and figure out where he belonged, but none of the officers ever spotted him. Every time the boy was seen, and officers rushed to the location reported, the boy was gone before the officers arrived. Meanwhile, patients and staff had seen the boy in locations all over the hospital. Apparently, a janitor even saw him in the hospital’s basement, near the backup generators. As far as the hospital administration and the police could determine, no one was missing a child who matched his description.
Because no one had spoken with the boy and no one had been able to grab him, people now were wondering whether he was a ghost. A ghost in an alligator mask—of all things.
But that wasn’t Arthur’s business. He had his own problems to solve.
And today he was taking a breather from arguing with hospital personnel: he was having lunch with Mia.
“Here I am,” Mia called out as she wove her way through the wooden picnic tables in the outdoor eating area off the cafeteria.
The tables were set up on pinkish stone pavers, within a larger patio lined with stone planters filled with orange and yellow mums. A half dozen dark-eyed juncos and a couple sparrows hopped among the flowers.
The sun had reasserted its dominance over the sky, and it was lighting up all of fall’s jewel colors, turning the trees surrounding Heracles Hospital into masterpieces of brilliant reds, yellows, and oranges. Only the faintest of breezes made the tree branches sway and the leaves on the ground gambol about. It was a glorious day.
Mia’s bright presence made it even better.
“I hope you haven’t been waiting long,” Mia said.
“Not at all.” Truthfully, Arthur had been here for twenty-five minutes. But she was only fifteen minutes late.
“I also hope you didn’t bring your lunch, because my boyfriend made these amazing provolone and corned beef sandwiches. Oh, you’re not a vegetarian are you? Or can you eat corned beef? Is it kosher or whatever?”
Arthur smiled. “I’m not a vegetarian,” he said.
“Oh good,” Mia replied. She pulled out two thick sandwiches on hoagie rolls, both tightly wrapped in plastic, and handed one to him.
“So how’s it going with admin?” she asked as soon as she’d taken a bite and washed it down with a soda.
“It’s not,” admitted Arthur.
Taking the fact that he’d run into Mia every day he’d been at the hospital as a sign of encouragement, Arthur had finally told her he was trying to get permission to take a patient out of the hospital to a place the patient had requested to visit.
Mia had surprised Arthur when she responded, “Oh, the man in room 1280?”
“How did you know?” he asked.
“I overheard Nurse Ackerman and the others talking about him, and they caught me listening, so they told me about him. I haven’t seen him yet or anything. They say I’m not ready for that. I think I’m more ready than they think I am, but whatever. I’m plenty busy.” She took a bite of sandwich.
“I’m not sure you’re ready, either,” Arthur said. He hated the idea of this cheerful girl having to see … But wait, that wasn’t very kind, was it? The man couldn’t help what he looked like.
Arthur bit into his sandwich and immediately knew why Mia was so crazy about her boyfriend. The man was a sandwich saint. “This is amazing,” he said.
“I know. Right?” She grinned.
They both chewed for a few seconds. When Mia finished chewing, she said, “The man in room 1280’s that bad, huh?”
Arthur shrugged.
“I’ve overheard them talking about other things, too,” Mia said.
“Who?” he asked.
“Nurse Ackerman and the others.”
Mia was q
uiet for a minute, so Arthur prompted her. “What other things?” he asked.
Mia bit her lower lip. Then she waved a hand. “It doesn’t matter.” She took a drink of soda. “You’ve heard about the boy, right?”
Arthur laughed. “How could I not? Everyone’s talking about him.”
“I saw him,” Mia said. Was she bragging?
“Really?”
“At least four times so far. Always wearing that silly mask.”
Arthur settled in with his sandwich and listened to Mia describe the curly-haired boy with the devilish grin. He had to admit mild curiosity about the child. Arthur himself hadn’t seen him, but that was okay.
“You know,” Mia said. “You could use the boy to your advantage.”
“How?”
Arthur wasn’t a fan of using anyone, much less a little boy, but he figured he might as well hear what Mia had to say. He found her voice to be as comforting as one of Peggy’s hot toddies on a cold night.
“Well, the whole thing is causing a mass of paperwork for the people in admin. It’s a nightmare to document all the sightings and coordinate with the police, I’m sure. Why don’t you suggest you’re going to follow them around and bug the heck out of them unless they let you take the man to where he wants to go? I used to do that when I was a kid. If you just keep asking, keep pestering people when they’re really busy, they eventually say yes just to get rid of you. Works like a charm.” She laughed and bit into her sandwich.
Arthur thought about it for a second. “That’s not a bad idea.”
Mia grinned. She had a piece of lettuce caught between her two front teeth. On her, it was charming.
Nurse Colton had a plan she was sure was better than those of Nurse Ackerman and Nurse Thomas. It had the advantage of being both simple and sophisticated. And it should also be lethal, she expected, assuming she wasn’t thwarted by the mysterious shadow that had derailed the actions of her fellow conspirators.
But unlike Nurse Ackerman and Nurse Thomas, Nurse Colton expected the shadow to intervene. She had a plan to stop it.
Nurse Thomas had been home sick for two days. Neither Nurse Ackerman nor Nurse Colton knew whether the sickness was physical or psychological. Obviously, anyone who’d experienced a monstrous deluge of foul bodily fluids like those that had drenched Nurse Thomas had a right to get a little hysterical. Fainting seemed an appropriate reaction. Nurse Colton didn’t begrudge Nurse Thomas at all for just escaping consciousness for a while.
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