The Haunted

Thirty-six

The lights in the hospital flickered.

Claire had been about to fall asleep. Maybe she had been asleep. But the sudden sputtering of the overhead fluorescents in what almost looked like a lightning flash jerked her wide-awake. She was in a modern hospital, in a room filled with expensive diagnostic equipment, with medical professionals hard at work throughout the building, yet she was filled with the same sense of dread she’d felt back at their house.

Frightened, she checked on James, lying asleep on the bed before her, then dashed down the corridor to Megan’s room in order to make sure her daughter was all right. She passed two nurses at the station between the rooms, but that didn’t make her feel any less uneasy. She knew what was going on. She’d experienced this before.

The hospital was haunted.

Where was Julian? He should have been back—she looked at her watch, shocked at the time—hours ago! Her heart felt like it stopped for a second. Something had happened to him. She didn’t know how, didn’t know where, didn’t know when, but it had, and she was almost hysterical as she ran back to the nurses’ station.

She stopped, taking a deep breath before she spoke so she wouldn’t seem crazy. “I need one of you to go into room one twenty-eight and watch my daughter, Megan Perry. I’m with my son in one twenty-four. I’m afraid something might happen to one of them.”

The lights flickered again, the ones in the corridor, the ones above the nurses’ station, the ones in the rooms, and the nurses looked at each other worriedly. “I’m sorry,” the older one told her. “But we need to stay here and monitor all the patients. If there’s a power outage and the emergency backup comes on, we need to make sure there are no glitches or disruptions that could endanger one of them.”

There was no flickering this time, but Claire saw something worse, something that the nurses, looking down at the screens before them, did not see at all.

A twisted shadow, folding in on itself, moving from ceiling to wall to floor before sliding through the open doorway to James’s room.

“James!” she cried, running over. She screamed his name at the top of her lungs in the hope that one of the nurses would follow, but she heard no footsteps or cries behind her, and when she rounded the corner of the doorway, James was still sound asleep in his bed.

Couldn’t anyone hear her?

The atmosphere in the room was heavy, and though the lights remained on, they seemed dim and were unable to penetrate the darkness that had enveloped the walls and corners. James’s bed and the empty bed next to his were little islands of visibility amid the growing gloom. Things were moving, unidentifiable entities that were glimpsed only out of the corner of her eye. Below the beeps and pulsations of the machines were whispers, sibilant sounds that were not quite words but that still seemed to carry meaning.

She should have been more afraid than she was. But there was familiarity in the horror, a pattern or signature or underlying unity that was almost recognizable.

Was recognizable.

“Julian?” she whispered.

Everything stopped. The movement, the sound, all of it.

She knew at that instant that he was dead, though she didn’t want to believe it, refused to let herself believe it. “No,” she said, wiping her nose. “It’s not true.”

“What’s not true, Mom?” James sat up, rubbing his eyes. He froze, looked around, instantly aware of the changed nature of the environment, knowing they were not alone in the room. Claire moved next to him, reaching out to hold his hand.

A figure detached itself from the gloom, a vague dark shape composed of swirling shadows that nevertheless stood there, watching them, perfectly still.

“Is that Dad?” James’s voice was hushed, and she heard the devastation in it. She had never in her life seen a look of such complete and utter despair on another human being.

It mirrored exactly the way she felt.

But no, that was not true. She was older; she was an adult. She had lived through a death before and come out the other side. She could handle this. She had done it before. But James was just a boy, an unusually sensitive boy, a boy who was much closer to his father than most children his age. Julian, too, had been closer to James than most fathers were to their sons. Probably because of Miles. He had been there for James every hour of every day of his life, the buffer between his son and the world, and the two of them stood staring at each other now, the shadow and the child, each suffused with a sadness so overwhelming it was palpable.

“Mom!”

Megan came through the doorway, a look of confused determination on her face, as though she’d done everything in her power to get here—but didn’t know why. Claire had no idea how her daughter had gotten out of bed, but she had, removing the monitoring clips from her fingers but leaving in the IV and dragging the rolling IV stand with her.

Where were the nurses?

It didn’t matter, Claire realized. Physically, medically, her children were fine, and what was happening here was so far beyond the scope of everyday reality that such a question was meaningless. The reason the nurses weren’t here was because they weren’t a part of this. It was not for them.

For a brief moment, the shadow in the center of the room grew less vague, more solid.

“Dad?” Megan said.

There were no details visible, and Claire could barely see through her tears, but she recognized the contours of the form. “Yes,” she told her children.

And then …

It was gone.