Ashes to Ashes (Experiment in Terror #8) (26 page)

I frowned and wiped the
cold flakes of snow off my face.
End? What do you mean?

I don’t know. It’s a
feeling.

You know
what?
I said angrily. I started stomping
through the snow to get to her, the cold sinking into the tops of
my Converse shoes. I stopped right in front of her, close enough to
count the flakes nestling on the top of her thinning hair.
I am getting sick and tired of you
and your feelings! Why can’t you ever be sure of something for
once? Why is it always a hunch? It’s never real.

Because I’m
not real, my dear,
she said.
And I can never be sure of anything.
All I have is what I feel and what I fear, and it’s better that
than nothing.

Well, what am
I supposed to do about it?
I shoved my
hands in my back pockets to keep them warm.
I’m quitting the show now, didn’t you hear?
Didn’t you feel that?

I did.
A timid smile stretched across her wrinkled
lips.
And for that I am
glad.

Then what’s the problem?

I think the
problem is something you won’t see coming. I think the problem will
come in the form of someone who is trustworthy. And I think when he
comes, he will bring you here. Where everything will end.
She breathed out slowly, like her lungs were
labored.
It will come full
circle.

He?
I repeated.

She just stared at me,
eyes dull.
There will be
death. And in that, I cannot help you.

“
Death!?”
I cried out
loud.

The world is changing and I am
growing weaker. The death may be my own.

“
You’re
already dead,” I tried to say as politely as possible.

She cocked her head and for
once her eyes sparkled as if they belonged to a younger woman.
“Death is never the end, only a transition. I have tried to stay
here, in the Veil, for as long as I can, to look after you and Dex.
But time here can run out. It can be used up. Just like the time in
your hands. And when I go, I don’t think we’ll ever have contact
again. So whatever I am able to pass onto you, even if it’s a
feeling from deep inside my lost soul, I will. While I can.”

Her words seemed to exhaust
her. She breathed in deeply through her nose just as the snow began
to fall harder, thicker, until she was gone and all I could see was
white.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

I woke up with a start.

My eyes flew open and I sat
straight up, trying to get my bearings. I wasn’t on the
snow-covered Brooklyn Bridge anymore. I was in the teachers’ lounge
at Oceanside Arts Academy.

But what the
hell woke me up?
I thought to myself,
holding the covers close to my chest while my heart pounded as if
set off by something else, something I wasn’t aware of
yet.

I tried to listen, keeping my
breathing as quiet as possible, and surveyed the room for anything
unusual. The clock on the microwave above the fridge read 3 a.m. It
was always 3 a.m. when the scary shit happened, but the room looked
normal to me. I’d fallen asleep with the lights on, naturally, and
though the window above the sink showed the black sky outside, if I
tricked my mind hard enough, maybe I could pretend it was morning
and I was safe and I could fall back asleep.

I laid my head back on the
armrest and tried to think of nice thoughts. I was drawing a blank.
I kept thinking about my dream, about Pippa, trying to decide
whether that was a figment of my imagination or if it was real. I
kept thinking about Rebecca being pregnant and the fact that Dex
stuck his dick in her all those years ago. I kept thinking about
Ada and how alone she felt, then about my parents and how
disapproving they were going to be when I showed up with Dex.

And then I thought about where
I was and what I was dealing with. And it seemed pretty fucking
futile to try and think about anything nice.

I sighed and watched with
surprise as my breath hung suspended in a cloud. It had grown
colder in the last minute, so much that my nose and chin and hands,
the only things outside the blanket, felt partially numb. I hated
cold spots.

They usually only meant one
thing.

A mechanical noise by the door
caught my attention, making my pulse jump. I carefully slid my eyes
over to it. The doorknob was very slowly turning, almost so
imperceptibly that you couldn’t even see it happening.

I held my breath, paralyzed by
fear, submissive by my lack of options. I watched as the door knob
continued its long turn until it couldn’t turn anymore.

The door jumped in its hinges
as if someone on the other side tried to push it open.

The lock held.

I let out a little cry,
bringing my knees up to my chest, as if shrinking away from it
would help.

Suddenly, the door stopped
jangling. The room grew silent. I knew this was probably a good
time to turn on the camera and film whatever the hell was going to
happen, but I didn’t want to turn away, I didn’t want to take my
eyes off the door.

There was a knock at it. Faint,
just three raps, but definitely there.

“
W-Who is it?”
I cried out softly. “Dex? Rebecca?”

I slowly got off the couch,
tossing my blanket aside. The vinyl floor was ice cold underneath
my feet as I crept over to the door.

I gingerly put my ear against
it, hoping I could hear something on the other side.

And I could.

Whispering.

At first it was the harsh,
ragged whisper of just one voice, male or female I couldn’t tell.
They were speaking nonsense, words I didn’t recognize as any
language, and yet they sunk into me just the same. The intent still
came across.

They were the whispers of
psychosis, of pure hopelessness and desperation.

And then they multiplied. One
voice became many, all whispering their rough pleas, their
nonsensical words getting under my skin, lulling me into their
madness until the hundreds of crazed voices were all I could
hear.

I pulled away from the door,
and the minute I did so, the whispering stopped, leaving me in
silence. I counted to ten, gathering the courage to do it again. I
carefully put my hand on the knob and my ear back on the door.

There were no whispers.

Just one metallic voice, like
it was speaking through a crackly radio.

“
She’s behind
you,” it whispered in its strained transmission.

My lungs felt like they were
shriveling up, my heart seeming to stop. The fear was so strong, so
wicked, I thought it might just consume me right there and reduce
me to nothing.

She was behind me. I didn’t
have to guess who.

I straightened up and turned
around to look.

Shawna was across the room
staring at me intently, her posture stiff and her head angled down,
creating shadows on her sickly white face. Blood dribbled down her
chin and a red-stained rag was clutched in one of her small
hands.

She didn’t say anything. She
just stared at me.

And ever so slowly smiled,
displaying a mouth soaked with blood.

I wasn’t about to hear what she
had to say.

I pushed out the door lock and
was ready to turn the knob when I looked down and saw eight long
black fingers coming in underneath the door, wiggling up at me.

I screamed and staggered
backward toward the couch.

“
Dex!” I
screamed. “Rebecca! Someone help!”

“
I can
scream louder than you can,” Shawna said in her sing-song voice.
She took two steps toward me and stopped, her gaze going over to
the door, to the wriggling, stick-thin fingers of the
bad thing
as it tried to get underneath it. It was only a matter of
time before it realized the door was unlocked, a matter of time
before it was in the room with me.

“
Dex!” I
screamed again.

“
Dex!” she
screamed, high-pitched and piercing. Then she laughed, mocking
me.

“
That’s
right,” she said. “Keep screaming. I screamed and I screamed and I
screamed when I was locked in that space, locked in that cold box.
I wasn’t dead and they wouldn’t believe me.”

I eyed her with trepidation,
not wanting to engage her but feeling I had to all the same. “What
box?”

“
The morgue,”
she said, smiling and twirling a strand of her hair around her
blood-stained finger. “It wasn’t my time, I wasn’t dead. And they
knew it. The nurses knew it. But they had to make room. And my dad
wasn’t there anymore. He couldn’t tell them no.”

“
The nurses…”
I trailed off, finding it hard to speak. My gaze kept going to the
fingers under the door, now making long scratches in the floor.
“The nurses killed you?”

Her eyes turned black as coal,
her irises obliterated. “I was going to die anyway, we all knew
that. My father couldn’t save me. He couldn’t save himself either.”
She came two steps forward, almost floating along the floor. “I
wasn’t the only one. Some of us burned in the incinerator. Some of
us were left in the cold to die. My friend Elliot was smothered
with a pillow. We were all tossed out to make room.”

“
What do you
want with me?”

She eyed me curiously. “You’re
the only person who really sees me.”

“
What about
Jody?”

She snarled contemptuously.
“She doesn’t have what I need.”

I inhaled icy air into my
lungs. “What do you need?”

She grinned. “A way to be alive
again. He promised me I could have that if I let him eat.”

I didn’t have to look to the
door to know whom she was talking about.

“
And he
can’t do that without you?” I was afraid of the answer to this one,
but I asked it all the same. “He can’t
eat
?”

With a scraping sound, the bad
thing retracted its claws underneath the doorframe. Shawna looked
at me in shock. “What did you do?” she hissed at me.

I shook my head, terrified and
confused.

Shawna ran over to the door and
opened it, poking her head out into the hallway. She gave me one
last blood-glazed snarl before she ran out the door and down the
hallway. Her already faint footsteps faded into nothing.

Well that was just great. I
posed one question and their whole dynamic came crashing down. I
had to wonder here who was the pet and who was the owner.

The answer made me shiver.

If he was a demon like Oldman
said some believed, and he fed off of hate and fear, he’d have an
endless food supply at this hospital, especially if what Shawna
said was true. Was there really patient abuse, nurses killing off
young ailing TB victims in order to make room for others during the
epidemic? It wouldn’t have been the first time it happened, but to
imagine sick children with no hope being tossed into a fire or
smothered with a pillow, like Elliot was supposedly, it got me deep
inside.

I looked around the teachers’
lounge again, paranoid that maybe some other child would be in the
room with me, another child like Shawna with a deal with the devil
and an obvious vendetta, but everything looked normal again.

I couldn’t stay in here. I
didn’t care about my pride or my point. With shaking hands I
gathered up my blanket and the camera I’d never turned on, and
cautiously made my way to the door.

I poked my head out. The
hallway looked empty. I stepped out, looking both ways.

Down by the washroom I saw
Rebecca walking toward it. She stopped halfway, looking over her
shoulder at me for a moment before she continued and disappeared
through the door. I walked back into the nurses’ quarters,
wondering if I was being selfish by being upset over her and Dex
when here she was pregnant and feeling alone

Dex was lying on his side in
bed, his eyes watching me and glinting in the low light. I couldn’t
look at him, not now. I wanted to ask if he had heard anything,
heard me screaming for help, but I could only assume he didn’t. Dex
was loyal and protective to the core. If he heard anything wrong,
he would have been there for me.

I ignored his stare and made my
way over to my bed.

That’s when I noticed the
silhouette of someone in Rebecca’s bed next to me.

Fuck.

Before I could think about it,
dwell on it, get scared about it, I poked my head around the
curtain and to my surprise saw Rebecca, in the flesh, sitting up in
her bed and looking at me with sad, wet eyes.

“
Sorry,
Perry,” she whispered. When I didn’t respond and could only stare
at her dumbfounded, she lay back down in her bed, turning over on
her side.

What the damn ass hell was
going on? One minute I see Rebecca going to the washroom, the other
she’s back in her bed. I stewed on that as I climbed into my bed,
dragging the blanket up to my chin. This place really was fucking
with me, and now I was in bed between my two friends and partners,
both of whom were intimate with each other at one point, both of
whom had kept something major out of my life, both of whom I was
mad at.

And both of whom were the only
people in this place that I could ever trust.

I didn’t sleep a wink for the
rest of the night.

I didn’t think any of us
did.

***

“
Are you sure
you’re up for this?” Dex asked Brenna as she puttered about her
classroom, putting art supplies away.