Chapter 3
The world got swimmy for a while.
Hazel dimly heard sirens, a concerned voice asked her to open her eyes, and people lifted her onto a stretcher.
All of those couldn’t have happened at the same time, but she couldn’t tell how far apart they were.
“Hazel Lewis,” she rasped, answering questions.
“Thursday.” Her throat hurt. Her leg hurt more.
Somebody was cutting off her pants leg, fully exposing the wound, and she yelped even though they were being gentle. “Jesus, what happened?” a high voice asked.
“Wire,” she managed, picking the nearest equivalent she could think of.
“Tetanus shots, then,” said the voice.
“All the shots,” a deeper voice answered. “Let’s just get this cleaned—fuck—”
A sting almost as sharp as the electrical shock flooded out from the bite, and Hazel faded away again.
When she woke up the next time, she had a tube in her arm, a huge bandage on her upper thigh, and a general floating sensation that was miles better than anything she’d felt in the last few hours.
Morphine. The word drifted toward her, passed close enough to touch, and then wafted off into the distance. She’d made it to a hospital, then.
The view when she dragged her eyelids open confirmed it: bed with bars on it, white sheets, blue blanket, TV bolted to the opposite wall.
As she was getting her bearings, licking dry lips and rubbing her eyes clear, the door opened. A nurse in bright green scrubs walked in and smiled. “Back with us?”
“I think so,” Hazel said, “though I’m not sure I want to test that theory.”
The nurse laughed and came over to the bed. Up close, she saw their name tag said Anita, She/Her/Hers. “We’ll go slow. Do you know where you are?”
“Not exactly. I know I’m in a hospital.”
Nothing in the room helped her get more specific.
The walls were white, bare except for the TV, a clock, and a metal strip over Hazel’s bed that held plug outlets and a white phone.
A couple of generic gray chairs occupied one corner, out of the way, and a blue curtain covered the window.
When Anita drew it aside, Hazel could see treetops and a few buildings in the distance. The sun was setting behind them.
“Orange River,” Anita said.
“Oh.” It was a name on a highway sign, making Hazel remember that she was two states away from her home. “How long have I been out?”
“Four hours or so. You were very dramatic at first, but you didn’t give us a lot of trouble once we got your bleeding stopped. Do you think you can drink something?”
“God, yes.”
Anita chuckled. “Just ginger ale for now. We’ll save the margaritas.”
She left the room, giving Hazel a few minutes to stare at her blanket-covered legs, then out the window. Neither gave her much information, but both fixed her in the material world and confirmed that the last half day had been real.
A lump of bandage covered the mark on her thigh. Hazel touched it gently, felt no pain, but hissed and snatched her hand back when she pressed a little. Painkillers couldn’t do everything.
“Your whole back’s one big bruise,” Anita said, returning with ginger ale in hand, “and you pulled a muscle in your shoulder. If we’ve done our jobs right, you won’t feel either, but be careful how you move. Here you go.”
Hazel took a long sip, feeling the cool liquid flow down her throat. It stung a little, and she put a hand to her neck.
Anita nodded sympathetically. “You wore out your vocal cords,” she said, “and you probably breathed in a bunch of dust when that house collapsed. Nothing that’ll last. You will have a scar on your leg, but they can do some surgeries to make it smaller later on. If you want.”
Caring about a scar struck Hazel as so odd just then that she could only stare at Anita, then shrug.
Her health insurance probably wouldn’t pay for it—she suspected she’d be out of pocket enough to eat Clarence’s fee just from the hospital stay—but that was a problem for later, and the least of those.
“My car?” she asked. Her bag, including her wallet, had been in Clarence’s room, and so was almost certainly a lost cause.
“Probably in the impound lot,” Anita said with a sympathetic grimace.
“Figures. Cell phone’s in there.” Digital gadgets and the ethereal interacted in unpredictable ways, each using its own form of liminality.
Sometimes, like with Chapman’s TV, the results were strange.
Usually the electronics just broke. Discovering that had cost Hazel three laptops, and she’d stopped taking any technology more advanced than a ballpoint pen along on séances.
Anita wrapped a blood pressure cuff around Hazel’s arm. “Is there anybody you want to get in touch with? We do have phones here, and we can probably find a computer you can use for email.”
The machine beeped, the cuff tightened, and Hazel thought through her options.
She’d taken an extra weekend day at Rochambeau Accounting and gone to Chapman’s on Friday evening, so her boss wouldn’t miss her.
Her college friend Martine had two kids under ten, her fellow occultist Summer wasn’t in any shape for last-minute travel, and her ex Brandon would drive her up the wall if he swooped in to try to manage the situation. Her family was out of the question.
“No, thanks.” She drank more ginger ale to clear her throat. “I guess I’ll call the impound lot, see if I can at least get my phone back. Or do I need to go through the police?”
“The guy at the lot can tell you more, I bet. But…” Anita never hesitated as she jotted down numbers and unwrapped the cuff, training taking over in a way that Hazel could appreciate.
She was frowning, though. “A couple policemen do want to talk to you. They’ve been in the waiting room for an hour, hour and a half. ”
“Oh.”
She should have expected that. A guy was dead, his house had collapsed, and Hazel had been one of two surviving people at the scene.
She was pretty sure Agatha Christie characters would call those suspicious circumstances.
Just to add a cherry to the sundae, Clarence had been a cop himself about twenty years back. She groaned.
“I think they just want to know what happened,” said Anita. “But—”
“Please tell them that I don’t talk to police without a lawyer present.”
“Do you have a lawyer?”
Hazel shook her head. “So they can either arrest me and get me a public defender or they can wait for the…I don’t know, the official reports.” Were there crime scene reports if nobody had committed an actual crime? “Either way, there’s no point in us wasting each other’s time.”
When Anita left, worry flooded in, starting with oh, good, law enforcement’s involved and spreading little tendrils out in all directions.
She could start at the cost of her hospital stay, shift a little and fret over what shape her car might be in, then move on to whether the impound lot would accept knowing her PIN as ID and how she was going to get a driver’s license.
Maybe she would need to call Mark or Tiffany after all.
The police had taken an interest. She had a demon bite on her thigh, and while she hoped Anita would have mentioned it if she’d been missing enough flesh to give her trouble when she walked, she couldn’t be sure. She was in a hospital, one kind of place most likely to be haunted.
Also, she’d nearly died, and she suspected died wouldn’t have begun to cover what would’ve happened if the demon had gotten its hands on her. Even with the merciful fuzziness of drugs, time, and blood loss, Hazel knew she’d gotten out of Chapman’s house by the skin of her teeth.
Hazel lay back against her pillows, heart thudding in her throat.
Her mind filled up with Clarence’s dusty laughter and the wet squelching sounds the maggots had made when they moved.
She didn’t even need to shut her eyes to see the demon shamble toward her or the hands trying to push their way out of the wallpaper.
A fan turned serenely overhead. The edges of its blades blurred as Hazel watched them, losing their shapes, then went back to normal when she blinked.
She had just enough control not to turn over and curl into a ball, and that was only because she knew it would disconnect the IV and a couple important sensors.
Hazel stayed flat on the bed instead, hands twisting in the sheets, and a moan forced its way up her throat even though she kept her mouth closed.
None of the objects in the room changed their outlines, but they all took on a new and sinister depth as Hazel’s chest tightened, as though the IV stand and the lamp were themselves alien, malicious presences that had just passed unnoticed until that moment. Shadows grew darker.
The chairs’ gray fabric suddenly looked fungal and slimy.
Nope.
Strong emotion didn’t generally summon ghosts or demons, but it could slide a medium closer to the ethereal world. That would be bad even in a non-haunted hospital. Death and birth charged the whole place, and the bad spiritual resonance would be hideous.
I’m here, Hazel told herself sternly, I made it. Close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades. If I have to call people, I will. If I have to dip into my savings, I’ll do that. It’s not the end of the world. I’m alive.
Internal monologues never dented the knot of panic as much as she always hoped they would, but it gave her a place to hold on, so the feeling didn’t overwhelm her. She could work from there.
Counting slowly backward from twenty, with a long inhale and exhale on each number, brought the chairs and the shadows back to normal.
Hazel carried on talking to herself, a habit she’d picked up as an odd child and found too useful to entirely discard.
This is overdue fear. This is your body dumping adrenaline, your mind processing what you went through. It will pass.
The talk let her loosen her grip on the sheets.
She took a long sip of ginger ale, centering herself on the taste, the can’s bright green color, and the feel of cool metal in her grip.
Food and drink made the parasympathetic nervous system kick in, which was useful as long as she didn’t throw up from stress. Hazel took another slow drink.
After she swallowed, she hit the call button.
Processing was good. But processing became obsessing far too easily to keep going unchecked, especially when she was stuck in a hospital and far from at her best physically or spiritually—or mentally, probably, between the trauma and the morphine.
“Having a panic attack, I think,” she said when Anita opened the door. A lifetime of rigid control and the sight of a human face let her get the words out without gasping. “I know combining drugs is risky, but is there something…”
The nurse clicked her tongue sympathetically. “Oh, honey, of course. Just sit tight, okay?”
Hazel nodded. She turned on the TV when Anita left, and while the memory of Clarence’s set made her flinch, the program that came on was a sitcom she’d seen a hundred times before. She let the canned laughter wash over her and concentrated on her breathing again.
I’m here, she kept reminding herself. I made it. The worst is over.