Chapter 4
She snapped her eyes open and didn’t know where she was at first. It was dark, the bed was narrow, there was an unfamiliar pressure on the back of her hand—
Right, the hospital.
That didn’t explain the noise. It came from all around her, though she couldn’t see anybody else in her room, and most of it wasn’t human.
Voices rose in mosquito whines and train-engine howls, approaching maniacal laughter or blatting on in horrible constant monotones.
Hazel couldn’t hear words in any of them—or at least not words in any human language.
Had she slipped across the border while she was sleeping?
The combination of morphine and antianxiety drugs should have made that hard, and Hazel certainly had felt her emotions receding before she drifted off, but she’d never heard that it was impossible.
She peered around the room as her eyes focused, searching for signs.
A low human voice from across the floor cut through the otherworldly shrieks. “Someone make it STOP dammit! ”
Footsteps hurried past her door and down the hall. More than one person was practically running.
It looked like Hazel wasn’t the one who’d crossed over.
Moving carefully, attentive to both her body’s stunted reflexes and the wires attached to her, Hazel sat up and turned on the light.
It didn’t go as far as it would have normally, but it was enough to see by.
She swung her legs over the side of the bed and hissed at the feeling of cold linoleum against her feet.
Another group went past in the hall, raising their own voices in urgency that barely hid panic.
“…not the PA system, for God’s sake!”
“Well, what else could…”
Otherworldly chill and hospital gowns didn’t go together. Hazel shivered as she stood up, hugging her chest as much as her IV tube would let her. She was fairly sure the screaming was getting louder.
What resources did she have? No candles. No salt—there’d been a packet on her dinner tray, but she hadn’t thought to save it before Anita took the whole thing. Water in a plastic cup beside her bed, monitors and wires, and plastic chairs. She wondered if saline solution would count as salt water.
Somebody knocked on her door. “Ms. Lewis?” A tenor voice struggled to rise above the screaming. “Just checking that you’re all right.”
“I am. Is everyone else?”
“We think so. We’re figuring out what’s going on. Try to stay calm.”
It was bad advice, but it was probably the best anybody could manage, and at least they’d said try. “I will!”
“We’ll be—” A loud crash interrupted the speaker, who dropped all attempts at professional composure. “What the hell ?”
CRASH, Hazel heard again, and then the noise kept on going, finding a rhythm that almost sounded like a heartbeat. More people screamed, almost inaudible through the chaos.
Hazel started across the room, pulling her IV stand behind her with one hand. A half-laughing wail, so sharp she was surprised the windows didn’t break, rose above the rest of the otherworldly screams and then died into a bubbling rattle. The crashing in the corridor went on.
She opened the door a crack, enough to assess the situation but, with luck, not enough to draw attention to her before it would be useful.
At first, she just saw the green scrubs of the person who’d come to her door and still had the right side of their body in front of it.
She glimpsed other human figures past them, saw metal glinting beneath the fluorescent lights, and couldn’t quite put the pieces together.
Then the metal object flashed sideways with another head-splitting bang, and Hazel saw the whole picture.
A gurney was flinging itself from one side of the hall to another.
It rested for a second as Hazel watched, then smashed back into the opposite wall hard enough to send up chips of plaster.
The metal frame bent under the blow. People on either side gaped from a distance, some holding up their hands as if to ward off the cart.
Now, even close up, the screaming drowned out human voices. Hazel heard a few words from those around her and filled in a little more by trying to read lips.
“…magnets?” asked one doctor.
The orderly next to them shook their head. “It’s aluminum.”
“Should we—” asked a tall person in a hospital gown, stepping forward.
A nurse caught them by the shoulder. “…hasn’t hurt…”
Around them all, ear-drilling screeches of agony or anger mingled with low, clotted moans and tortured howls. A patient ran down the hall toward the clump of hospital staff, shouting as they went, then froze and put a hand to their mouth. Others watched from their doorways.
Hazel sighed. The conversation she was about to start was awkward even under normal circumstances. Having to conduct it at the top of her lungs wouldn’t help. She tapped the nurse in front of her on the arm.
They whirled around, eyes wide, and froze before they realized that Hazel was a human patient rather than the next strange threat of the evening.
“Do you have candles?” Hazel yelled.
“What?” Dan, he/him, gave her a completely baffled look.
“Candles.” The word strained Hazel’s throat. She tried to get her point across with gestures, realized she looked like she was requesting either upward motion or a sex toy, and gave up.
Dan had heard her, though. “Why? You shouldn’t be out here!” The veins in his neck stood out with the effort of making himself heard.
“I—”
The voices blended together, becoming a long, tormented shriek. Hazel clapped her hands to her ears and noticed other onlookers doing the same, but it didn’t help much. The noise went on inside her head, louder and louder, as the gurney crashed itself against the wall with increasing speed.
Just when Hazel thought her eardrums might rupture, it stopped.
The gurney fell to the floor, one final crash in the sudden silence, and lay in a heap of battered metal and ruptured plastic cushions. Nobody spoke.
Hazel rubbed her head just below her ringing ears. Her bitten leg ached, so did the arm she’d used to pull the IV stand, and the linoleum was freezing even in the material world. She glared at the gurney.
“What was that?” Dan finally said, calling Hazel’s attention back to him. “And why did it stop?”
“Out of power,” said Hazel, choosing to answer just the last question.
Most manifestations vanished on their own.
They rarely went away permanently, and sometimes they escalated, but the blood dripping down walls generally evaporated, and the headless lady only swept down the hallway for a few minutes at midnight. “Do things like this happen a lot?”
“No. God, no!” he said, giving her another of those incredulous expressions. Then professionalism seemed to intrude. “You—you should be back in bed. I’ll give you a hand.”
Hazel let him, leaning on him like she was a little old lady and he was a Boy Scout helping her across the street. Trying to be self-reliant too soon would only damage her further in the long term—and she had the feeling she didn’t have much time for a slow recovery.