CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
I'm so pleased to write the story "Haunt Me" that… well… it's scary! My first published books, for the Silhouette Shadows line, were dark romances, so Halloween anthologies are a kind of homecoming for me. And this particular story allowed me to explore several topics that have fascinated me for a longtime: romance between a married couple, near-death experiences and the idea of astral projection. Especially astral projection. I mean… imagine it! The astral world has far fewer limitations than the plane on which we usually exist. Could adventures on the astral plane allow us to mingle with loved ones who have passed? With people from history or from the future? With other kinds of beings we can't even define? With characters from our favorite fictitious worlds, even? The possibilities are exciting and endless.
And exploring them in story form has all the fun and none of the scary part. Well… not unless you count the Monster! Definitely be careful of what kind of emotions you feed the Monster.
I hope you enjoy reading David and Charis's story as much as I enjoyed writing it.
Sincerely,
Evelyn Vaughn
Much thanks to the writing community—the friends—whose caring helped me through my own abyss: the Wyrd Sisters; the Writers of the Storm; the Witches in Print; Denise Little; my agent, Paige Wheeler; my kind editors at Silhouette; and the ladies of NTRWA and DARA. Who would have guessed cards and flowers can communicate so much love?
Special thanks, too, to Juliet and Toni and Deb for reading and critiquing, despite my truly twisted writing schedule.
In memory of my dad,
John Bruce Jocks
The Nomadic Rhymer
1923-2004
You said I killed you—haunt me, then! The murdered do haunt their murderers. I believe—I know that ghosts have wandered on earth. Be with me always—take any form—drive me mad! only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh God! it is unutterable! I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!
—Heathcliff
Wuthering Heights
Heathcliff was a jerk.
The quiet beeping of a monitor. The rhythmic hush of the respirator. White walls, white sheets, white floors… and occasionally a nurse's flowered scrubs, more blasphemous than cheerful amidst the sterility.
Charis had made up her mind about Heathcliff when she'd been forced to read Wuthering Heights for high school, then again for college. She hadn't veered from that opinion when her artsy friend Diana insisted on renting the movie. By the time Charis was pushing thirty and had joined a reading group at her local bookstore, she had the guts to argue it out loud. Mr. Famous Romantic Hero was a bully and a selfish jerk.
Tubes. Wires. Numbers and displays. Technology seemed such a cold way to keep a human being alive. Especially this human. Especially when he shouldn't be.
Alive.
Some idiot named David Fields had been crazy enough to argue back. "Don't you believe in passion?" he'd asked. "Emotions that push a person beyond reason? A love so powerful that you don't care whether or not you're selfish, so necessary that you'd sell your soul—hell, you'd sell your best friend's soul—to keep from losing it?"
Paper-wrapped footsteps beyond the doorway—her face lifted in bleary hope for a doctor. Had something changed? Was there even a chance? But it was someone else, an old man crumpled with despair, being led toward another of the ICU rooms.
Charis had been a never-married and glad of it, back then. From what she saw of friends who'd wed too young and were having trouble with rebellious children or broken marriages, she felt increasingly smart for having resisted that complication. She'd told David-the-idiot exactly that. But as with her opinion on the novel, he took her argument as a challenge.
Two years later, they'd married. Soon, they'd celebrate their four-year anniversary. Charis hadn't known such happiness existed. True, they had their little problems. Happily ever afters weren't immune to minor conflict. But David was great, really. Even if she wasn't as enthusiastic as him. Even if maybe she disappointed him, now and then. Every day, David told her he loved her.
And Wuthering Heights remained their favorite book.
"Because misery, and degradation, and death, and nothing that God or satan could inflict would have parted us,'" Charis read. Her voice rasped, hoarse, but she didn't dare stop. The familiar scene, in which selfish Heathcliff berated his dying Cathy, felt like a magic charm. If she just kept reading, David might still open his eyes. David might sit up. David might argue with her, once again, like he always had, about ridiculous passions and limitless love. "'You, of your own will, did it. I have not broken your heart—you have broken it."
Her throat felt like sandpaper. Trying to swallow, she made the mistake of looking up. Her world swooped at the shocking sight of David's swollen, bandage-wrapped face, the tube down his throat—the brace—halo, they called it. It was too much metal and plastic, too much whiteness, too little David. She squeezed his limp hand around the hard clamp of a pulse-ox monitor. It didn't feel like his hand. It felt lifeless.
She made herself look back down to their book.
The book was safer than the horrible place that reality had become since the phone call… yesterday? Maybe the day before that. She didn't know or care what time it was, anymore. Her ability to care was dying, on the bed beside her.
… Accident…
… Teenager ran a red light…
… Children in the crosswalk…
… We think your husband pulled into the intersection to protect…
She forced the words in order to keep from weeping, desperate now for the familiarity of Heathcliff's selfish pleas. '"So much the worse for me, that I am strong. Do I want to live? What kind of living will it be when you…?'"
But the lines had taken on a horrible new familiarity. Always before, Charis could distance herself from the book's desperation. Heathcliff was, after all, a jerk—and so unlike David. David was selfless. Heroic, even. In this day and age, who would guess that there were still heroes?
… Head trauma… CT scans aren't good… agonally breathing… won't be long now…
Stupid damned hero. He could have stayed safe, but his selflessness had killed him. The doctors had said as much. All that was left was the wait. Loss had become too real now, a force that didn't discern between the worthy and the unworthy. Between people who'd chosen wisely, and those who'd chosen poorly. Between people who were kind, and those who were selfish.
None of it mattered in this cold, horrible place. Here, loss was loss. Lives could be fragmented no matter their worth.
God, she was tired. Normally the ICU had strict visiting hours, but the nurses and doctors had made an exception for Charis, for her deathwatch. They'd brought water and snacks and begged her to rest and let her friends or family take over, but Charis refused to give up a minute, a second, a breath with David.
Not if these were the last she'd get.
It had been hours. Or days. Her eyes could hardly focus on the familiar words in the book. Her dry lips moved, but she got no more help from her throat. Desperate, she bowed her head onto her arm across the bed rail, just for a minute. She wished David smelled more like David and less like antiseptic, less like blood. She desperately wished she'd been more of what he'd wanted in life…
But no, she couldn't go there.
She thought of Wuthering Heights.
"What kind of living will it be when you—oh God! would you like to live with your soul in the grave?"
She startled awake to alarms from the monitors that crowded the tiny, sterile room. Even as she blinked into comprehension, nurses were drawing her away from the bed, making space. The book wasn't in her hand anymore; she must have dropped it. Doctors bent over David, talking about BP and ICP and dilation like it was algebra homework and not her husband's life—her life—withering away in front of her.
"No," rasped Charis, recognizing the truth even as she protested it. She'd been staring at those monitors long enough over the last day or two to recognize what the falling numbers and flattening lines and buzzing alarms meant. No.
"Run the tape," ordered the older doctor, while a younger doctor squeezed on the IV bag and pinched open David's eye and shook his head. Machines continued to wail impersonal protests.
No.
A nurse rubbed Charis's back in mute sympathy. Was that part of her job, too? Charis strained away from her. "David—"
Don't leave me! Even now, she couldn't force such dramatic words from her throat. Charis wasn't the kind of woman who wailed protests in hospital rooms. Charis was discreet. Pragmatic.
At this moment, she hated her pragmatism almost as much as David always had.
"Paddles," said the younger doctor.
"No," insisted the older one. "Call it."
"Is there a DNR?"
Horrified, Charis forced her gaze from David long enough to turn, long enough to recognize the Do Not Resuscitate order that lay, unsigned and forgotten, on her purse in the corner. So much for being the efficient one. She should have handled that; it was the right thing to do. She and David had talked about this, back when it was comfortably abstract. He wanted to donate his organs, the damned hero. He didn't want to be a vegetable…
She could do it now. Snatch it up. Scribble her signature as her final, brave tribute to the man she'd loved.
But she couldn't move. She couldn't sign it. Not yet. He might force her to say goodbye, but she wasn't about to volunteer it.
Maybe she was as selfish as Heathcliff, after all.
Turning back to the bed, Charis saw that the paperback novel had been kicked underneath.
"Paddles," repeated the younger doctor, but the older one said, "Don't be a sadist. I'm calling it. Eleven o'three."
So that she could always know, to the minute, when her world had ended.
"You can go to him," whispered the nurse, and Charis numbly did as she was told. The nurse snapped off the alarms, the sudden silence drowning. Echoing. Awful.
Charis took David's hand, still warm, no more limp than it had been a few minutes ago. She stared into his swollen, battered face, searching for any sign of life, willing him to open his laughing dark eyes, silently pleading, praying…
It didn't make sense. How could she still be here in this cold, sterile world of machines and strangers, if he wasn't?
"Don't leave me," she whispered at last. He'd wanted emotion? Her words were suddenly thick with tears and desperation, and she couldn't stop them. "You can't be that selfish. Don't leave me, David. Don't do it. I can't let you go."
"It's better this way," said the older doctor from the doorway, even as the younger one hovered. "Perhaps Dr. Bennett wasn't as clear as he should have been about one's chances after severe head trauma. If your husband had survived… "
But Charis ignored him, bent across the rail, pressed her face into David's gown-covered shoulder. "I'm not letting you go," she slurred. Some part of her was aware how ugly this was—her wet words, her cruel insistence. How indiscreet. But her need won out. "I don't care, I don't care, I don't care. You can't come into my life and change everything and then leave. Please. Please. Don't make me stay here alone… "
Which is when the monitor quietly beeped.
Everything in Charis went still. David was alive?
"Yes," breathed the younger doctor in triumph.
"Oh, God," muttered the older one. "God forbid."
"He's alive?" Charis whispered, gulping back her misery, afraid to hope.
"For all the damned good it will do him," snarled the older doctor—and left.
Charis stared into the swollen wreckage that had been David's face… and horror slowly settled across her, turned in her empty stomach, tightened into her throat.
He was still gone.
"Dr. Smit is old school," murmured the younger man—Bennett? "Not all surgeons are on track with the new guidelines… "
His noises meant less than nothing against a truth that her eyes, her heart could see. David was still breathing, thanks to the tubes. His heart was still pumping, thanks to the fluids the younger doctor had been pushing since the accident. But damn it…
He wasn't there anymore!
She'd lost him anyway. And worse, she hadn't let his body go with him. The guilt of it welled up inside her like vomit—she staggered back, stumbled out of the tiny ICU room, slumped against the white wall across the hallway. What had she done?
He was a hero. He always had been. But she was a coward.
She was supposed to have loved him, no matter how rarely she'd been able to say it.
What had she done to him?
Vaguely, she became aware of the open doorway into the next room, of the old man she'd seen before, now pressing his lips to his wife's blue-veined hand. As if in a dream, she became aware of his weeping. "Kathy," he said, through desolate tears. "Kathy… "
Like from the book. Charis whispered, '"How can I live without my heart? How can I live without my soul?'"
But better that kind of fate than what she'd done. She shrank away from the stranger's pain, from her own cowardice—
And something cold washed past her.
It felt real, as real as a current of invisible water. Cold, and ugly, and pitiless. She recoiled from it, bumped back against the wall, stared at—
At nothingness.
At linoleum, and glass, and glaring white.
She stretched out her shaking hand—and again, she felt it, like thick, diseased liquid sliding icily past her fingers. It was real... and then it was gone. Rather, it was past. She shuddered, afraid whatever it was might linger for a lot longer than it should.
If that had been David's ghost, it had been the exact opposite of what she would have expected from him…
But exactly what she deserved.
He didn't hurt.
That was the first thing Dave noticed. Or maybe it was just the first thing that struck him as worth noticing. He usually tried to show a macho, tough-guy face… but secretly, he didn't much like pain.
Luckily, when he'd seen the Corvette speeding toward the red light, and the kids crossing the street beyond him, he hadn't had time to worry about pain or anything else. He'd barely had time to recognize the danger, to punch the gas…
A gunning engine. A rush of motion. A crash, a lurch, a blur, screaming metal, screaming bystanders, spraying nuggets of glass.
Oh, crap. He'd been in an accident, hadn't he?
He glanced over at himself, where he lay in the hospital bed beyond several rushing, strangely lit doctors. Wires. Tubes. Screws? He looked bad. Really bad.
Then it occurred to Dave that he shouldn't be able to do that. To see himself, swollen and bandaged and unconscious, his wife Charis weeping beside him in thick, mustard-colored shadow.
Uh-oh, he thought. This can't be good. In the six years he'd known her, Dave had never seen Charis cry. Not at sad movies. Not when the cat died. Never.
It had kind of bothered him, never being sure what she felt. In fact, they'd fought about it this morning…
"Show me something," he'd challenged, trying to keep it light, like a joke, but failing. It wasn't a joke. "Show me anything."
She'd set her jaw with that cool control that so grated on him. "Maybe you aren't looking closely enough."
Dave blinked away the abrupt, disconcerting memory and the bare wisp of emotion it brought. Strangely, he couldn't work up much upset over that, now. Rather, he could—he still felt things—but it felt safer than it should. One step removed. Like watching something really dramatic on television.
That's when Dave realized he might be dying. His first instinct was to fight this death. He had too much to live for. What about Charis? But even as he moved toward his body, toward where she wept uncharacteristically over him, real pain struck.
His arm, bent ways arms didn't bend. His legs, trapped and bleeding in the wreckage of metal, waiting for a rescue crew with a blow torch. And his head—he remembered glimpsing a bloody smear against a spider-webbing of broken glass on the car's windshield, like stained glass in the sunshine, before unconsciousness had eased him from the encroaching agony.
That agony surged back when he even thought of returning to his body, and he stumbled farther away. Nope. Wherever he was now was much better. In fact, he felt great! And…
He looked down at himself—the himself standing there, not the one in bed. And he looked great, too, especially contrasted with the other version. He glowed with a bright, turquoise light that shimmered like the Northern Lights, and that looked healthy, too.
Like a step-by-step instruction manual, the cliche began to unfold. Aware of a brilliant light to his side, Dave pivoted toward it. Illumination and comfort poured from a beautiful tunnel, beckoning him, drawing him. Figures emerged from it and he knew them all with the certainty of his heart, even the grandparents who had died before he was born. His parents were there, parents he'd lost as a teenager. After only a moment's stunned surprise, he stumbled into their waiting arms. Others surrounded him with silent, tangible welcome, and he was home. Right here in the hospital.
All the love, the acceptance that he'd missed for so long was his. Damn! This whole dying business was definitely underrated.
Except…
Even through this rush of well-being, something niggled at him. As his mother drew him toward the tunnel, toward the light and contentment and pure peace, Dave looked over his shoulder.
Charis…
"Don't leave me, David," she sobbed, from where she lay across the body that, weirdly, had to have been his. Her words sounded faint and warped, as if he were hearing them from under water, but he definitely heard them. He'd needed words like that from her for so long, he wasn't about to turn away now. "Don't do it. I can't let you go… "
She did love him. Really.
"I'm okay," he told her, and he knew it was the truth, but she didn't seem to hear him. "Char, it's okay. Really."
"David," said his mother softly. "We have to go now."
His mother had always called him David, too.
"She'll be fine, son," said his father.
Dave knew they were right. Somehow he understood beyond doubt that the pain Charis felt was natural but temporary, that their separation was an illusion. The very real presence of his parents proved that, as surely as the way that the doctors, the walls, even his wife were fading toward insubstantiality. Everything except his deceased loved ones and the brilliant, glittering light were dimming into illusion. Charis's words faded into wisps of sound.
But he heard her, all the same. His heart, his soul, heard them. "I'm not letting you go," she sobbed. "I don't care. I don't care."
"It's okay," he insisted to her deaf ears, even as he backed a step closer to the light.
Then he sensed a wash of something opposite of the light. Of darkness, cold… of evil. He spun to look.
"Hurry," insisted his mother, but what Dave saw wasn't okay at all.
Charis, the doctors, even the hospital walls… though real, they all had a strangeness about them, a color or shadow or distance like a faded photograph. Only his parents, still lingering just inside the brilliant tunnel's mouth, seemed fully solid and real as they reached beseeching hands toward him.
His parents—and the Creature.
The explorers who first viewed a platypus must have felt something like Dave as he watched the Creature that snuffled across the ICU room behind Charis… well, they would if platypuses were the size of rhinos, had no obvious legs or eyes and exuded a menacing aura of pure evil. This thing, or Thing, was solid and gray-black and malformed, and it stank of wrongness and corruption. It seemed to have more than one gaping mouth, and perhaps... were those eyes, multiple eyes like a spider's, behind the stretched, stained membrane that seemed to coat it?
Despite its lack of feet, it was shambling toward the bed where Dave's former body lay.
It was approaching Charis.
"Hurry," insisted Dave's father, repeating his mother's words.
But Dave turned his back on his parents to step between this Thing and his wife. "No."
And that's when—
On his honeymoon, in Hawaii, Dave had tried surfing. Of course Charis had protested and called him reckless, but he'd loved it—or he had until a towering wave had broken right on top of him, slamming him and his board downward through water and sand, rolling him until he didn't know up from down or light from dark.
As soon as he said "No," it felt just like that.
The world exploded around him, slapped him silly, but instead of water he drowned in a rush of memories and hopes and dreams and regrets and noise and light.
On that beach on Oahu, the wave had suddenly receded, spitting his bruised body onto solid sand as the world righted itself into air, sunshine and one angry bride. This time, when he opened his eyes, Dave was on his knees on oddly lit linoleum. He saw that the Creature was retreating from him, scuttling back like a roach from light. From his own turquoise light, in fact. It moved with a grotesque slither that, like a snake's, hid uncanny speed. Was it afraid of him? Good!
"Yeah! You should run!" Dave called after it, pumping a fist. "Let's hear it for the dead guy!" Triumphantly, he twisted toward the tunnel, toward his parents.
But they weren't there. Somehow, when the world disintegrated around him, his mother, father and even the tunnel had vanished.
Dave turned all the way around, but apparently he'd delayed too long. Either that, or he wasn't dead after all, and if that was the case, why wasn't he in that twisted body of his?
Not that he was in any hurry to go there.
"Well… damn," he muttered. "Now what?"
Adding insult to injury, Charis backed away from his bedside. Hello… what about her not letting him go? He should have known that wouldn't last; God forbid Char be impractical. Still, backing away until she bumped against the hallway wall, she bled a dirty, sulfuric color that he belatedly recognized as… pain? It hurt her to lose him, of course, just as it had hurt him to lose his parents. He hadn't realized at the time how right that pain had been, like the pain that accompanies childbirth or… or sacrificing oneself for a good cause. He hadn't realized it then, and clearly she didn't either. But somehow…
Somehow he'd figured she could handle it. Char could handle any thing… even when he wished she weren't quite so competent.
Anything that she could see, anyway.
But while Dave had been distracted, the Creature circled back from a different angle. Its maws widened greedily, emitting slimy black tendrils that slithered out, tonguelike, to slurp across the dirty aura radiating from Charis. She simply bled more pain to replace it, even muddier.
The Creature shuddered with satisfaction, extending more tongues.
Was it feeding on her suffering?
"Get away from her!" Again, Dave shouldered between Charis and this… this Thing. For a moment one of its black tongues brushed past his arm, leaving a streak of pain like fire. He caught his breath—out of habit, apparently, since he doubted this ghostly version of him was really breathing. The Creature's essence dizzied him, a stench like rotting bodies, a roiling mass of fears and angers and agonies and so much more. If we were what we ate, then this Thing…
This Thing hungered for everything horrible.
"Get… " Dave struggled to stay conscious against the burn of its touch, not wanting to even imagine what kind of venom it secreted. "Get back."
Again it retreated, avoiding his aura only sullenly. Maybe it wasn't so scared of him after all. He felt half-hidden, malformed eyes on him and on Charis behind him, as if it were merely waiting for him to falter.
As if it could wait eternally.
Then, to Dave's momentary relief, it abruptly turned away from him and Charis—and toward another target entirely. Dave saw just how solid the old lady in the next room seemed as she hugged the old man who wept over… her. Rather, over her corpse. The version he'd noticed—still moving—was one of the few things free of the strange lighting that cast across Charis, the doctors, everything else. The old woman seemed as real as his parents had, as real as he did. But she seemed exhausted. The light she projected was nearly invisible.
Her husband's aura was a blurry mixture of sulfur and gray… which seemed to draw the Creature like blood would draw a shark.
And the Creature, Dave finally noticed, had no aura at all. It put out no light, reflected no light. If anything, it absorbed light. Its presence was a hulking absence outside their door.
"It's all right, my love," the old woman insisted, holding and kissing an earthly husband who couldn't hear or feel her. She wore a sweat suit and a chenille robe instead of a hospital gown, as if she'd been there long enough to have her own clothes. "A few years barely make a difference, really. I'll be with you always, I promise, and when you come I'll be waiting for you."
Making a motion as if sniffing the air—as if this monstrosity had a nose—the Creature charged at the pair of them. Dave took off after it, despite the burn that still throbbed on his arm from its touch. It was either that, or watch this Thing…
Well, whatever it meant to do, he couldn't watch it without acting, no more than he'd been able to simply watch that drunken teenager mow down those schoolchildren. No matter what.
Just because Charis annoyed him when she said he was reckless didn't mean she was wrong.
The Creature slithered nearer the grieving couple but kept a wary gaze on Dave, sizing him up with countless eyes hidden behind lumps in its mottled, black-gray membrane and tasting the air with its tendril-like tongues.
"Lady, get back," called Dave, slowing his step to circle the Thing.
She looked up, saw the Creature and gasped. But she didn't move. "I can't leave him yet."
The Creature vibrated with apparent ecstasy at this old couple's suffering and uncertainty. It seemed to salivate at her exhaustion. Dave moved even closer, eying it, a contest of wills. "No offense, ma'am, but I think you already have."
"Yes… " With a final, defeated kiss, she stepped back. The Creature continued to watch her, but Dave kept himself between them. "Oh my! I can finally breathe again. I'm tired, but I can stand. You don't know what a joy it is to stand! And the pain is gone. It would be such a relief, if only… "
Feeling the Creature's focus move from her to her living, grieving husband, Dave understood exactly what she meant. The only thing that really sucked about dying, once you got there, was your loved ones' pain.
As the woman came to terms with her death, she seemed less appetizing to the Creature. But her husband, bleeding his despair…
Dave made a decision and stomped at the Creature, like he might stomp at a wild animal he had to somehow, against all odds, chase away. When it didn't move closer, Dave tried the other foot, dangerously close now. He waved his arms. He'd heard that with some bears, it didn't hurt to look as big as you could, so it seemed worth a try. "Get! Go on!"
Instead, it snarled. The snarl hit him like a blast of sleet and icy numbness, and he shuddered with the uncertainty of just how dangerous this Thing might be.
Then, as if it heard something he didn't, it seemed to look elsewhere. With a sudden burst of speed, it hugged the wall and skittered disjointedly away, down the hall and off to other areas of the hospital.
"Holy—" But Dave didn't finish the exclamation. It seemed rude around this nice old lady. Instead, he turned back to her—and was surprised to see the bright tunnel opening for her. People emerged from it with short, excited steps, watching her like long-lost relatives at an airline terminal.
So that's what had scared it?
"My darling," she sighed to her husband, kissing his bent head as he wept over the shell she once had been. "Take care of yourself. Enjoy the life you have left, the children. Remember your medications… "
"Mama," said one of the ghostly figures from the tunnel—and finally the woman turned away from the man.
Dave had never thought of an old woman as radiant, until he saw the joy that lit her face at the sight of her dead son. With a wordless exclamation, she threw her arms around the boy, sobbing her joy as throngs of other loving figures surrounded her. "My baby," she wept, laughing at the same time. "Oh, my baby… "
Together, the crowd of them filtered back into the tunnel.
Dave looked back for Charis—and felt disappointment slump his shoulders as he saw what she was doing. She seemed to be talking to one of the doctors, a pen and paper in her hand. There he lay, freshly dead, and she was taking care of the paperwork?
That's what he got for falling in love with someone he wanted to save from herself. Sometimes, you failed.
At least he'd tried. "I'll miss you, anyway," he whispered, and the pain no longer felt distant. It was hard in his throat. "I hope you find joy with someone, Char. Really. I'm sorry… I'm sorry it wasn't with me."
Damn it. If he continued this way, he was going to cry. He'd already lost his Firebird today, then his life. His macho, tough-guy facade could only handle so much.
So he turned away from Charis—from life itself—and he followed the old woman into the tunnel.
Or he started to. But he walked into what felt like a wall.
"I don't think it's your time," said one of the old lady's relatives, patting him on the shoulder as she passed him, entering something he could not. "Not quite yet."
Then the light was gone and Dave, stunned, stood alone. There was Charis, still dotting i's and crossing t's with the doctor. Other doctors and nurses and random health workers moved about as well—Dave could see them through the glass ICU windows and oddly, even when the blinds were pulled, he could see shadows or auras that hinted at the people beyond. But they only saw the corpse that was his body.
Or was it a corpse? He moved closer, for a better look.
The pain forced him to back up.
Macho façade or not, he was starting to panic. "Charis?" he shouted, and put everything into it—his whole soul. "Charis!"
If this had been a movie, she would have at least sensed him, wouldn't she?
She did not.
He guessed they hadn't had that kind of bond after all.
That hurt almost as much as the accident had.
"Kiss me again, but don't let me see your eyes! I forgive what you have done to me. I love my murderer—but yours! How can I? "
—Heathcliff
Wuthering Heights
Charis was standing at the window of David's ICU room, looking out across a gray parking lot, when the ghostly reflection of a man's face from behind her appeared in the glass. For a moment her heart leaped with foolish anticipation. She spun.
But of course it wasn't David. The exhaustion had to be getting to her. In fact, the person who hesitated in the doorway of the ICU room wasn't even a man. He was a teenager.
A teenager bruised brown and yellow and purple, his pale face mottled with healing abrasions, confined to a wheelchair. He glanced nervously from her to the bed where David lay, deathlike, then back.
Charis had never seen the kid before.
"I'm sorry," she said, and her voice rasped in her throat from disuse. She'd spent the last four days with David, sleeping in the reclining chair near his bed, holding his still hand, alternately sitting and standing. The only times she'd eaten had been when the nurses brought her someone's untouched tray, or when her best friend, Diana, had shown up in the waiting room with a care package for her. And Charis had barely spent any time with Diana, since David wasn't supposed to have more than one visitor at a time. "You must have the wrong—"
"Mrs. Fields?" The boy's voice cracked.
Okay, so maybe he had the right room after all. "Do I know you?"
"I'm Todd Vernon." The name sounded uncomfortably familiar, but Charis still didn't place it until he added, "I'm the one who… who ran into your husband." A wounded sound escaped from Charis's throat, startling her as much as it seemed to startle Todd Vernon. This was the monster who'd gotten drunk, run a red light, nearly mowed down a cluster of schoolchildren? This was the person who'd stolen her husband from her?
He looked so… young. Scrawny. Vulnerable.
She felt herself start to shake, a twitch in her wrists, her fingers. She doubted that was from exhaustion.
"I'm being transferred to the rehabilitation hospital," Todd continued quickly, his gaze finding and then veering from the bed. "I didn't want to leave without… without apologizing. To you and your husband, I mean. My parents' lawyer said not to, but I—"
His increasingly panicked eyes glistened suspiciously.
Forgive him. The voice was in her head—it had to be—but it sounded so remarkably like David's that she looked more closely at him, laid out in the bed, his rising and falling chest the only sign of life.
David was being transferred today, too.
He was being transferred to the long-term care wing. Dr. Bennett, the younger of the two physicians who'd worked on him, would have her believe this was a good sign. David's blood pressure was back to normal. The swelling in his brain had gone down. When he came out of the coma, Dr. Bennett insisted, they'd have a better grasp of what could be done toward his recovery.
But the older Dr. Smit, who'd visited only twice, gave her the respect of a more honest assessment. David might never come out of the coma, and if he did, the brain damage threatened to be so severe as to rob him of speech, of muscle coordination, of organized thought. She might never, never have the man she loved back. Dr. Smit had even used the "n" word—nursing home.
After he'd left, Charis had thrown up.
Todd Vernon continued to babble about how stupid he'd been, how he had no excuse, how if it hadn't been for David he would have hit those kids, and he had a younger brother almost the same age. He spoke of how sorry he was, how sorry, how sorry. But he, the one who'd had a choice in this, was awake, talking, facing a full recovery and probably some community service. Her David…
Char, damn it, forgive him.
No, she thought firmly, in response to what had to be an imagined plea. She would have spoken the word, but her stiff silence was all that was keeping her from throwing herself at that stupid, murderous teenager and beating the crap out of him, trying but never succeeding at showing him exactly what kind of pain he'd caused.
Todd swallowed, hard, and looked down. "Anyway. I wanted to say that."
Then he wheeled himself backward out of the room, turned the chair with the ease of a kid already adjusting to his temporary inconveniences, and rolled away past the large glass wall.
Ice princess. It's what David had called her during that last, awful fight, the morning of his accident, and suddenly Charis was back in their kitchen, wishing now that she could have stopped him from leaving.
"Because I'm the one who always plans our anniversary," David complains, stalking to the front hall for his jacket, his briefcase. "Maybe I'd like just a little indication that it's important to you, too."
"Of course it's important!"
"Then you plan it for once. Surprise me."
Charis feels herself tense at the very idea. David always goes all-out for their anniversary getaways, finding incredible hotels, reserving cozy restaurants, arranging treats like string quartets or carriage rides that are so over-the-top romantic that they almost embarrass her, except for how much she enjoys watching his enjoyment. She can never come close to the sort of weekend he would plan. She will get it wrong, and he'll be disappointed, and she really, really doesn't want him disappointed on their anniversary. "I wouldn't know where to start."
"Figure something out." He hesitates in the doorway, his clear gaze especially cutting. "Unless you don't want to."
What a relief. He's so much better at this kind of thing. "I don't want to."
She's surprised by how, his eyes flare in annoyance, by the bitter edge to his voice. "Nice job softening that one, Char."
"Softening…?"
"It takes two to make a relationship work."
But—their relationship does work, except for moments like this. She's never been happier in her life than when she's with him. Why does he require restaurant or bed-and-breakfast reservations to prove it? "We are two people."
"Sorry, Ice Princess. I meant two people who care."
"I do care!"
"Then show it. Show me something." He laughs, but not convincingly. "Show me anything."
Beyond marrying him, he means? Beyond the lovemaking, the living together, the quiet times? He knew she wasn't one for big gestures when he met her.
She clenches her jaw. "Maybe you aren't looking close enough."
"Maybe I shouldn't have to."
Unsure what else to say, but hurting like hell, she says, "Screw you."
That's the last thing she says to him. Screw you. But of course, standing there in the doorway to their house, she doesn't know…
"Nice spontaneity," says David, "but I'm late for work."
She watches him go out to his car, his shoulders stiff, his step tight. She finds herself holding her breath when he stops without unlocking the door. He's about to turn around, to apologize, to promise her the best anniversary weekend ever.
Instead he says, "I'll call you later."
And with a beep of the remote key, he unlocks the door, gets in and drives away.
That's the last thing he says to her. But of course he doesn't call. He never makes it to work.
It would be just like David to take the high road and forgive Todd Vernon. Maybe Charis could have, too, if it had been her he'd hit. But forgive the boy for David? David lay there, nothing moving but the rise and fall of his chest. His eyes were taped shut. He was being fed through a tube. Though scans showed he had brain functions, he might never walk, talk, reason again. Never touch her face. Never draw her into laughter or arguments or passion of any kind again.
"Rot in hell, Todd Vernon," Charis whispered.
"Mrs. Fields?" She jumped before she recognized Jed, the evening nurse. "Are you all right, Mrs. Fields?"
That was a stupid question to ask in ICU, wasn't it? Even more stupidly, she muttered, "I'm fine."
Fine and dandy. No use showing otherwise, right?
"I need to bathe him," explained Jed, carrying in a basin full of supplies. "Why don't you go stretch your legs, get something to eat? It's a beautiful afternoon."
Charis blinked. "Leave?"
The nurse smiled. "It will only take half an hour."
Her sense of responsibility stiffened her. "Shouldn't I… help?" Charis had no nursing experience. She didn't really want to stare at the open wounds and broken bones of David's tortured body—every time she even glimpsed them felt like a cattle prod to her gut. But…
For better or worse. She'd bathed him more than once during the better times. Bathed with him anyway…
A splashing of water echoes off the bathroom's tile walls. The air thick and hot with more than just steam. David thick and hot behind her, his wet arms circling her, the hair on them dampened to dark, straight brush strokes. She leans her head weakly back into the solidity of his chest, trying to let go. That's what he calls it, anyway.
"Let go, Char," he murmurs against her wet, exposed neck. "Just trust me and let go."
Instead, her hand tightens into a fist, sending a gush of suds from the sponge she's been drawing indiscriminately across them both. Doesn't he understand that the more he asks, the worse it is?
She does want him, him and everything he brings her. She's never been happier than since she met him, loved him, married him. It's just that she can't simply—
More splashes. She begins to drift away in the sensation of his hands on her, his lips on her. Then he whispers again, "Let go."
Damn it.
"Make me," she challenges, not wholly teasing. And oh, he accepts the challenge. He succeeds, too. Finally.
But she can't help but worry that she's somehow disappointed him. Again. He thinks everything should happen so easily, like in a sweeping, romantic novel…
"Once the wounds have better healed," Jed suggested. "For now, though, there's not much you can do to help with this. Go on." His eyes were gentle but firm. "I promise, he'll still be here when you get back."
So he understood. The two times she'd had to rush home over the last few days, for a quick shower and change of clothes, she'd gone over the speed limit. Her heart felt compressed with dread. What if David died while she was gone?
Because she was gone?
Maybe everyone visiting the ICU thought that.
So after a few more owl-like blinks, Charis forced herself to stand and leave David's room. She scanned the nurses' station and the walls of glass-fronted rooms, most with their blinds down, some open to show patients alone or with vigilant friends and family. It felt odd to realize that she and David were just one couple of many, their suffering downgraded from life-shaking tragedy to another mere misfortune. It almost felt… comforting? But that wasn't right or fair to anyone.
A stooped old man stood at the nurses' desk with a huge spray of flowers. Yellow gladiolas and white lilies and pink roses mixed with narcissus and carnations in a burst of natural beauty. They'd been beautifully arranged, with a big pink bow and a little cheerful bird-house and two fake birds mixed in with the blooms.
The old man looked familiar, but his familiarity didn't nauseate her like Todd Vernon's name had.
"… people loved her so," the old man was telling the nurse. "I've got more danged flowers than I know what to do with."
"We all miss Kathy," agreed the nurse sadly, accepting his flowers. Now Charis recognized the man. He'd lost his wife in ICU, the same day that David had died and then revived into… into whatever purgatory David's existence had become. "You're kind to think of us, Mr. Wells. Your wife was so—" But a ringing phone interrupted her.
The old man lingered, as if unwilling to leave before he knew what she'd meant to say about his wife. Perhaps he was clinging even to mentions of her. He looked frail and white-haired and easily as alone as Charis had felt this week.
Unsure what she meant to do, but unwilling to leave him standing there while the nurses conferred about an incoming patient, Charis went to Mr. Wells's side.
"They're beautiful flowers," she said, and the polite words felt fake in her mouth, despite that she meant them. "I'm sorry for your loss."
Wells turned haunted eyes on her for a long, solemn moment. It was a moment of recognition that went deeper than mere names, the look that people in hospital waiting rooms or the fringes of the ICU often shared. Desperation, hope, fear, resignation. A recognition of shared humanity.
"I remember you," he said. "You're the one whose husband saved all those children, aren't you? It was on the news. My sons were talking about it."
Charis nodded, only vaguely surprised to hear that. Messages from reporters had filled her answering machine. She'd erased them. "That's David for you," she said.
The bitterness in her own voice surprised her. But Mr. Wells suddenly smiled for her, the expression weary on him, as if he hadn't had much cause for smiling lately. "Would you do me the favor of joining me for a cup of coffee, Mrs. Fields?"
"I don't know… they might need me… " Charis glanced toward David's room, with its pulled blinds. She could see her reflection across the horizontal lines, hollow-eyed and pale with wrinkled clothing and uncombed hair. She looked even worse than poor, frail Mr. Wells. And standing off to one side, his arms folded and his shoulders wonderfully broad and his mouth set with disapproval as he eyed them both, stood—
David!
Charis spun with a sob of relief to where the reflection showed him standing—but of course nobody was there. When she glanced back at the window, both confused and embarrassed, his reflection had vanished as well. She'd imagined it.
David lay, all but lifeless, behind those blinds, having his bandages changed and his body cleaned.
The real sounds of phones ringing and machines beeping and low conversations and nurses prepping for an incoming patient—"bicycle… no helmet… another head injury… "—taunted her.
Charis shuddered—and not, this time, from the Cold. That's how she'd come to think of the awful wash of ugly, icy dread that she'd sometimes encountered here, over the last few days. She couldn't explain the Cold as blowing vents, because it never seemed to be in the same place. She couldn't explain the Cold as the result of, say, spilled rubbing alcohol or sprayed disinfectant, because its presence gagged her like nothing clean or good. She couldn't explain it at all, unless…
Maybe her shudder was related, after all.
"Mr. Wells," she heard herself asking with a shaking voice—and she must be exhausted, to say something so stupid and so embarrassing to a complete stranger. "Do you believe in ghosts?"
"Yes!" screamed Dave from the room's doorway. He spread his arms to embrace the triumph of this moment and wished he were embracing his wonderful, wonderful wife—but he'd already tried that once, and the whole stumbling-right-through-her thing had freaked him out. Still, way to go Char!
She, of all people, got it!
"Yes! I'm a… well, maybe not a ghost exactly. I mean, there's probably some technicality about the body dying first, right? But that's close enough, hon. God, I love you."
And he did love her, damn he loved her, Ice Princess or not. Hell, he'd known she was an Ice Princess from the minute he met her, and it hadn't even slowed him down.
He'd kind of liked the challenge of thawing her out.
And now she was living up to his highest hopes by grasping the seeming impossibility that—
"No," Charis said to the old man then, answering her own question… and David stopped spinning to frown. Her voice sounded no more odd than it had since he'd gone ghosty—noise from the living already seemed monophonic, like a cheap speaker—but that's not why he frowned. He just saw it coming—"No, of course you don't. Why would you? Only an idiot would believe in something like that. I'm sorry, Mr. Wells… "
David felt like he'd been gut-punched.
Only an idiot. And God forbid Charis ever, ever risk looking like an idiot.
"No, hon," he protested, crossing toward her. "You had it. You had it. I'm here. If you just try, maybe… "
But as ever, nobody heard him. Mr. Wells said something about coffee and some quiet, and she agreed, and they headed off together.
"Charis!" Dave called after her, following.
Or he started to follow her. As usual, he didn't even make it to the elevator before he felt a powerful lurch in his solar plexus. With a rush, he was jerked into a backward blur.
Into pain.
That's because he was suddenly too close to his body again.
Dave scrambled away from it, where it lay corpse-like on the hospital bed, being bathed by a male nurse.
He scrambled away from the head-cracking, arm-shattering, soul-wrenching pain that struck him whenever he got too close to the damned thing. He dropped, exhausted, to the indistinct floor, with his back braced against the weirdly lit white wall. For some reason, while he could go right through people, wheelchairs, food carts and anything that didn't sit in one place too long, the walls and floors were less penetrable.
Just now, he didn't give a damn why that was.
Soon, he could breathe again without his chest imploding—or, at least, he could mimic the memory of breathing, since he wasn't sure if this new, ghostly form of his needed oxygen or not. It didn't seem likely.
He half lay, half sat there on the floor in defeat, and he glared at the physical shell to which he seemed permanently attached. He looked down at himself and his pale, fluctuating glow of turquoise, then back at the shell.
Then he slapped the floor beneath him in fury and frustration. "Damn!"
To him, his shout seemed to ricochet off the walls, off the ceiling, off the floor in otherworldly reverberations. But in front of him, the nurse continued to matter-of-factly sponge off his clinically naked body with nary a recognition that the thing on the bed wasn't Dave at all. Dave had already tried everything—pushing people, which led to diving through them; trying to throw things, which he couldn't even pick up; screaming in their faces. But he was invisible to them. Invisible and silent and all but dead.
Even to Charis.
He'd hoped that if anybody would recognize the real him, the him that wandered this ward of the hospital trapped somewhere between life and death, it would be his wife of four years. The woman he loved. The woman he'd sometimes thought might be his soul mate. But nope.
Charis never had been that fanciful…
"Why do we all assume that it's really Cathy's ghost?" The woman at the book discussion group, the one with the solemn expression and the funny name, wears her hair up in a bun. Dave has always thought the hairstyle a cliche for unimaginative movies and TV shows where the straight-laced ice princess ends up tossing her glasses aside, kicking off her pumps, unbuttoning her high-collared blouse to show some cleavage and letting down her hair. But there the reality sits, sans spectacles.
Except that he doubts this one will be kicking off her beige sling-backs anytime soon. He says, "Of course it's Cathy's ghost."
"Of course? Isn't it more likely Mr. Lockwood is having a nightmare? "
"Oh, come on." Dave leans forward, bracing his elbows on his knees as if he can change her mind through sheer proximity. Also… she smells surprisingly good. "Where's the fun in that?"
The woman—Charis, right?—stares at him as if she's never heard the word "fun" before. Poor, inhibited Charis.
"Like haunted houses at Halloween?" prompts Dave. "Horror movies? Campfire stories? Ghosts are fun."
Just as he's really starting to feel sorry for her, she simply shrugs him off, turns to the others and says, "Show of hands, how many of us have ever had a nightmare? "
Of course everyone in their group of seven raises their hands. Dave can see where she's going with this, even before she pointedly asks, "And how many of us have seen ghosts? "
Only one person raises her hand. It's Charis's friend Diana. Unexpectedly—well, Dave didn't expect it—Charis laughs. "Oh, Di, not your YaYa's kitchen again! "
The two friends momentarily bicker about an incident they both, clearly, already know. Dave hardly hears them. He's still blinking, stunned by the way his insides lurch when Charis laughs.
Whoa.
Some women, especially the kind he usually dates, laugh easily. Dave also laughs easily, so he of course assumes it's a good quality in a human being. But with her…
Hearing Charis laugh is like spotting a red cardinal amongst a treeful of brown sparrows. Her laugh is a gift. It's special.
He wants to hear it again. Suddenly he notices just how pretty she is… or would be. If she'd just let her hair down.
And maybe unbutton her blouse a little.
"Was it fun?" she demands of her friend, as their debate winds to an end. "Even if it really was your grandmother's ghost, would you call the experience fun?"
Diana sighs in defeat. "I wouldn't use that word, no. Maybe… poignant."
Charis turns back to Dave, her eyes flashing triumph, because she did hear his point and she disagrees and she's not the kind of woman who backs down. He likes that, too. "It's more likely that Lockwood dreamed Cathy," she insists.
"Except that I don't read books like Wuthering Heights for reality," Dave argues right back. "I get plenty of reality in my day-to-day. I read books for something extra. Call it poignant, call it fun, call it drama, whatever. The point is to feel something, anything, intensely. Cathy's ghost is exciting. A nightmare? Like you say, everyone gets nightmares."
"But if it's not realistic, isn't it a waste of time?"
"And if you don't risk wasting a little time now and then, how do you experience anything new at all?"
"I try new things!" Charis protests, while the others in their group exchange arched looks or grin at the entertainment.
The words tumble out of Dave's mouth before he's even thought them through. "Then go out with me."
She gapes at him. But he's determined that, before the week is over, he'll hear this woman laugh again. He'll see her smile. And it will be just for him…
"Mom?"
Dave's eyes snap open.
The voice—clear for once, instead of sounding like something underwater—would've caught Dave's attention even if it weren't a child's. But as he rolled to his feet, he clearly saw a little boy, maybe eight or maybe nine, standing just outside another of the ICU rooms. Clearly.
Oh, damn. Dave knew what it meant when he saw and heard a person this solid, now that he'd gone all ghostly himself. It meant that they'd died.
Even after four days, Dave had a new and more positive perspective on death—a continuation of the life process, another stage instead of an end. But still… a kid?
The boy radiated fear—which was apparently thick and dark blue—and his voice spiked upward. "Mommy? "
"Hey, buddy, it's okay." Dave hurried past the nurses' station, slowing before he reached the wide-eyed kid so that he wouldn't scare him further. "Look, your mommy's right there. She's fine."
Well… if you could call her hand-wringing panic over the kid's still body on its gurney fine.
"But she looks funny." The kid wiped an arm across his nose and straightened his shoulders, his aura lightening as he tried to buck up. "Like… like someone needs to adjust the picture."
Good description. "That's because she's, uh… "
Alive.
Luckily, Dave didn't have to finish his attempted explanation, because as suddenly as the boy had appeared, he vanished.
The body on the gurney moved.
Thank God.
"Good for you, buddy," Dave muttered—and tried not to feel jealous of a child. It's not like he wanted back into his own wreck of a body, was it?
The broken one being bathed like an infant. By a guy.
Another voice, from across the hall, grumbled, "What the hell is this? Damn it, I've got meetings."
A bad day for the ICU, Dave guessed, turning his attention to the businessman sitting at the foot of a bed in which his body was receiving CPR. Dave had only seen four people—or spirits, whatever—pass through here, including Kathy Wells. Now he had two more showing up within a breath of each other?
Or maybe just one and a half.
"You may have to take a miss on the meetings," Dave suggested gently, crossing the hall to the open doorway.
But the fury in the businessman's eyes made him take a quick step back. What he'd noticed about this in-between place, that people put off colored auras, reflected in a twisting, bloodred corona around this man. It felt hot, tangible.
"Not these meetings," insisted his fellow ghost. "I sold my freaking soul for these meetings, and nothing, nothing's going to get in my way. This deal could set me up for life."
"Um… yeah. About that—"
Dave was saved from trying to explain further as the tunnel appeared—the same old tunnel, glowing with that same, glittering, blissful illumination that felt like music.
The one he could no longer enter, even when he tried.
Several figures emerged, opening their arms for the man.
"Rick," greeted an elderly man, and a sleekly slim girl said, "Daddy?"
"Who the hell are you?" asked Rick, backing away from them. "You look like my—but no, you can't be. And you! I don't have any children."
"I was never born," explained the girl simply. "But that's all right, Daddy. We can be together now."
Rick shook his head. "No."
The older man put a hand on his shoulder—all the ghosts could, apparently, touch each other. "Ricky, I know it's a shock. But—"
Rick spun away from him, smacking him away. Hard. "I said no! Get off me, old man!"
Wow, Dave hadn't yet seen anyone this resistant to passing.
"It's all right," insisted the old man gently, taking no offense at all. "You just need some time to adapt."
But Rick was staring at his body—his worldly body—and the doctors who surrounded it. "The hell!"
More faintly, they heard the doctor say, "It's no use. Hold compressions."
"What? No! Don't hold compressions!" That, of course, would be Rick.
"Time of death… "
"You'd better goddamn start compressions again, or I'll sue! I've got meetings, damn it! I've got a reputation!"
Dave felt the chill, singeing cold across his back, just in time to whirl on the slick, lumpy, multieyed Creature.
As usual, he had to gulp back nausea at the very sight and stench of it. It was wrong. It was evil. It was an abomination. And, clearly, it was hungry as ever.
"Back!" Dave stomped at it, waving his arms as if he wasn't wholly grossed out… but damned if it wasn't slower than usual to retreat. Did it smell some particularly tasty emotions off Rick the Businessman, making it hungrier than usual?
Or, worse… was it getting accustomed to Dave?
Behind him, Rick bellowed, "What the hell is that?"
The Creature sludged to one side, as if to circle the obstacle Dave presented. Dave edged that way, too, staying between it and the businessman. "Rick, you'd better listen to your family and get to safety."
"Please, Daddy," pleaded the little girl who'd never been born. Miscarried? Aborted? Dave guessed it wasn't his concern.
"Hurry, sonny," pleaded Rick's grandfather.
"Like hell," snarled Rick.
The Creature slimed closer, mindlessly stubborn as a shark. This time when Dave stomped at it, increasingly afraid that he wouldn't be able to repel it this time, it didn't retreat. Instead, it extended one of its long, dark, tonguelike tendrils, slow, experimental…
And then whipped it across Dave's gut.
Cold—so cold it seared him, and sharp, like a saw-toothed blade—the tongue cut deep into him. Dave gasped back a cry as he dove to the side, away from this Thing. What the—?
It usually ran from him.
He'd thought he was immune!
"Hurry," pleaded Rick's grandfather. "If you stay, you'll just keep losing life-force like that young fella there until you just… vanish."
What? Keep losing what until he what?
Think about that later.
In any case, Rick wasn't having it. "Screw that!"
Dave dragged himself back to his feet, one arm pressed hard across the burning wound in his gut, his eyes fixed on the mutated, membranous Creature. It flexed its way closer to Rick, and Dave hated putting himself in danger for someone that stubborn, that stupid.
But he couldn't just stand by and watch the Creature… well, do whatever it was this Creature was intent on doing.
Not even to Rick.
"Would you just go?" Dave demanded, limping between the ghostly idiot and the hungry Creature yet again. The pain in his gut was fading from scream-worthy to merely whimper-worthy. "Please?"
Rick said, "I've. Got. Meetings!"
And then Dave heard something that sent a rush of horror through him. It was the same boy's voice he'd heard before, little, young, scared.
"Mommy!"
Worse—the Creature's veiled eyes slid toward the sound.
"In every cloud, in every tree—filling the air at night, and caught by glimpses in every object by day—I am surrounded with her image… The entire world is a dreadful collection of memoranda that she did exist, and that I have lost her! "
—Heathcliff
Wuthering Heights
Charis felt strangely… nervous. But maybe it was just the caffeine.
"Not surprising you'd be hearing things," soothed Hank Wells, over their cardboard cups of cafeteria coffee. "Sitting with your husband day after day, and him in that state. At least my Kathy could chat with me, when she wasn't sleeping. Until near the end, anyhow. There toward the end, she wasn't talking much. Maybe she gave up… "
Charis flushed, realizing that she'd been unburdening to this kind old man almost nonstop… on the day of his wife's funeral. God, could she be more selfish?
"How long was your wife in the hospital?" she asked, basic courtesy taking over where her stunted instincts had failed miserably.
"Three days," he said—but the sharpness in his tone contradicted him. "That's what the doc told us it would be, anyhow. 'Three days,' he said. 'Simple operation.' But that was months ago. He said she'd be home in three days, and she never went home again. Not the way we'd hoped."
"I'm… " But she didn't want to insult him by simply saying she was sorry. Sorry? Why not face that there were no words? She reached across the table and squeezed his old hand with its worn wedding ring.
He met her gaze and nodded his acceptance of what she couldn't say. Their shared humanity, shared mortality linked them as words couldn't. "We wouldn't have done it, if the so-called doctor hadn't assured us how simple it would go. Then the operation took too long, and then she, she just didn't heal up from it. Turns out her breathing medicine 'interfered with the healing process,' they said. Well the doc knew she was on that medicine before he ever cut into her. He prescribed it his goddamned self—"
He stopped and shook his head, closed his eyes. "Excuse my French, Mrs. Fields."
"It sounds warranted!"
"My Kathy never did like profanity, warranted or not." He took a deep, shaking breath. "But as far as I'm concerned, that doctor of ours murdered her, as surely as if he'd held a pillow over her face. He knew we trusted him, fools that we were. A week before she died, not long before she stopped talking altogether, Kathy looks at me and says, 'Three days, Hank.' Because that's what we were told, before it became months of her just getting sicker and sicker. Broke my heart."
Charis wasn't sure if his eyes were glistening with tears or not. She couldn't see clearly through her own.
Hank squeezed her hand. "Whatever happens, Mrs. Fields, you keep an eye on those doctors. Some of them are fine individuals—I wouldn't be walking without them, and they saved our firstborn's life. But some of them… "
Then he stiffened, and took his hand back.
Charis wiped at her eyes, confused, while Hank stood.
"I'd best get back to Kathy's and my guests," he said, looking past her, with a definite chill in his tone. "You take care of that husband of yours. And don't you give up hope. That was the hardest part… watching my sweet Kathy give up hope."
Charis looked over her shoulder—and recognized, among a cluster of doctors buying sandwiches, Doctors Bennett and Smit.
"Goddamned murderer," muttered Hank beneath his breath as he turned away, whether Kathy would have approved or not.
The sense of nervousness that Charis had blamed on caffeine intensified to full nausea. Was the doctor who'd so badly botched poor Kathy Wells's operation one of the men working on David?
Which one?
She wanted to ask it, "Which one?" But Hank was already several steps away. She'd have had to call the question out to him. Even if he answered, he might've just been speaking from grief. And by the time Charis realized it didn't matter how silly she looked, that she should call out to him, Hank was even farther away—and Bennett and Smit were heading toward her.
Oh, God.
If only she weren't so tired, so confused. Maybe she could find Hank's number in the phone book and call him. Maybe she could ask then, keeping in mind that his story was wholly subjective, and find out…
"Mrs. Fields," greeted Dr. Bennett. "May we join you?"
But no matter how exhausted and confused she felt, Charis knew she didn't want that. She stood. "I'm sorry, I really need to get back to David. Perhaps another time?"
Dr. Bennett nodded. He always seemed so optimistic. Was he optimistic to the point of giving bad advice, such as when he'd insisted on treating David even after Smit deemed it unnecessary, even cruel?
Of course, if Bennett hadn't continued treatment, David might not be alive now. But was that really a good thing?
Was David even alive, in any way that counted?
"We'll take that for you, Mrs. Fields," offered the older man, Dr. Smit, and politely relieved her of her tray. He eyed not just the coffee cup but the half-eaten doughnut lying on a napkin. "If I may offer a word of advice?"
I really need to get back to David. Why did she feel that so strongly? It didn't make sense.
Charis nodded, more unsettled than ever.
"Don't forget your own health, during this trying time," he advised, like a kindly grandfather. "Get more sleep, watch your diet, make sure you exercise instead of just sitting with your husband day in and day out. You won't be of any use to him if you fall ill yourself."
"Dr. Smit," explained Bennett, "is quite the advocate of active wellness."
The older doctor looked to be in his sixties. He seemed very fit. Charis guessed it worked for him. "I'll keep that in mind," she said.
Dr. Bennett said, "If you have any questions about the transfer to the long-term care wing, feel free to call me. Anytime."
Charis nodded, but she was already backing away.
Sensible or not, she really needed to get back to David.
Now.
As soon as she reached the carpeted corridor, she broke into a run. She still wasn't sure why. She didn't believe in psychic warnings or supernatural instincts. If something had gone wrong upstairs, there was no way she would sense it from the cafeteria.
No way.
And yet when she saw that both elevators were on other floors, Charis shouldered through the metal door into the stairwell and ran up the concrete steps rather than wait. Like her pounding pulse, she couldn't deny the fear that choked her. Something was wrong. Something was wrong.
She rushed into David's room, half-expecting to find doctors and nurses crowded around him, to find his monitors screeching and flatlined, to find him gone forever.
And she didn't want that, God she didn't want that.
Or that's what she thought—until she saw Nurse Jed tucking the cotton blanket over David's now-clean body.
"See?" Jed said, with a friendly grin. "I told you he'd be fine while you were gone."
Stunned, Charis stepped dumbly to the side of the doorway, so that Jed could carry his empty basin out. She stared at David, so blank and bandaged and quiet—and now freshly dressed in a new hospital gown, like some mannequin.
Fashion for the Persistent Vegetative State.
Once Jed left, she began to shake with awful understanding.
She wasn't relieved.
Why wasn't she relieved? But she knew that already. The only real relief would be to find him improving somehow. That seemed so unlikely, no matter what Dr. Call-Me-Anytime Bennett suggested, that of the alternatives…
God.
Charis wished she could be sure it was just her knowledge of her husband that made her resist the idea of him continuing on like this for weeks, months… years. Bathed like an infant. Fed through a tube. She wished she were sure he would prefer death to this. Because if it was just her…
Oh, God. She was definitely as selfish as Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights.
No. That wasn't her. She wouldn't let it be…
"No," INSISTS David Fields on their first date. "I'm the one who invited you. I'm the one who pays."
Charis shakes her head—and not just to protest the unfairness of that outmoded custom. Something about David Fields makes her vaguely dizzy, like being at a high altitude or breathing nitrous oxide. Some of it is how handsome she finds him… his thick, dark hair and brows and lashes; his stubborn jawline; his bright, lively eyes. But she's been around good-looking men before, better-looking men than him, without losing her balance this severely.
Her light-headedness stems from something less easily defined than appearance… from something far more integral to this man.
She clings to practicality even more desperately, in response. Practicality makes sense. "I probably earn just as much as you do, and we're both taking the equal risk that we won't enjoy each other's company—"
"Not me," he interrupts with a grin and a waggle of his eyebrows. He is sitting to her immediate right, instead of across the table from her. She can feel the warmth off him, and she likes it. "I've already enjoyed this date far more than… " Again he reaches for the check, which she has covered with her hand, but she slides it away. "Than whatever amount that says."
"I wouldn't have gotten the appetizer if I'd realized you meant to pay for everything."
"I enjoyed the appetizer," he insists.
"So did I, so I should pay for part of it."
He sizes her up, candlelight soft on his gray suit. David Fields cleans up beautifully. "Is this so that you won't feel indebted to me? Because I have no intention of taking advantage—"
"Oh, please!"
He grins, teasing her now. "What if my manly ego can't handle having a girl pay?"
She snorts.
He laughs. "Okay, so this is really about fairness to you? Women like you really exist?"
She narrows her eyes, warning him how close he has come to being annoying. That's another thing about him that has kept her off balance all evening.
He holds her gaze as he covers her hand, over the check, with his own. Gentle. Warm. "Then… how about a deal? I pay for this date, and you pay for the next one?"
The next one. Only as he says it does she realize how foolishly, how desperately she has hoped there will be a next one.
"Okay," she agrees—and his answering smile creases his face, crescents his lively eyes, makes her want to laugh. She lifts her hand and lets him have the check.
"Our next date at McDonald's," he adds then, holding the check away from her like some childish game of keep-away. Now she does laugh, right there in the restaurant…
He'd been so full of life, of passion. And now…
"I miss you," Charis confessed to the stillness of him. "I'm starting to think I see you—in windows, or mirrors, or across the parking lot. Sometimes I think I hear your voice… "
That happened especially in the deep of the hospital's never-silent nights, when illusions were easiest to believe. Worse, her heart leaped every time, as if on some deep level she hoped that was exactly what she was hearing and seeing.
When the inescapable truth lay right in front of her.
"Maybe I'm going crazy," she admitted, tugging uselessly on his sheet as if a little more tautness would bring him comfort. An overly bright, jingly lullaby played out then, through the hospital—marking that a baby had been born in the maternity ward, the nurses had told her. It felt jarring. "I'm going crazy, and here you are, missing it… "
But a wave of uncharacteristic despair stole her voice.
Her mouth gaped wide, wider than would have seemed possible. Despair closed her throat, pushing upward, upward, until she thought she'd never breathe again. It gagged out of her in a long, jerking sob—and then she gasped air, and she was still alive, damnably alive.
Whether she wanted to be or not.
With breath, she had the strength to truly sob, wet and sticky and convulsing and ugly. She crumpled over David's immobile body, muffled her wail in his blankets. Nothing should hurt like this. It wasn't fair. She wanted things to be how they'd been. She wanted God to give him back. She wanted the hurting to stop.
But it wouldn't, it wouldn't, it wouldn't…
At some point, she slid off of David's body onto her knees on the linoleum floor, beside the wheels of the bed, beside the receptacle of his urine. Only that last, ugly detail gave her the strength to push away, to crumple into the reclining chair instead, to curl into a ball and hide her sticky, burning face. Her nose was stuffed up. Her throat burned. She'd never felt so exhausted.
Finally, finally, she slept…
"Will you get into the damned tunnel?"
Startled, Charis turned toward the familiar voice—and there he was. David!
It didn't make sense. Strangely, he wore the clothes he'd worn to work the morning of his accident; khaki pants, a pressed shirt, his stupid fish tie. Even more strangely, he was scooping a little boy into his arms. if But she didn't dare question it, not any of it.
"David?"
He spun—and stared in instant, unmistakable recognition.
It was him. Him! His hair stuck to his forehead. His eyes slightly wild. His mouth open with his panting breath. But him.
"Char," he whispered, a tremble to his raspy voice. Then his gaze moved past her shoulder and widened. Charis felt something cold behind her, and she turned…
And she screamed.
It was—
God, how could it be her? Standing there, staring at him, as real and solid as if he could reach out and touch her!
"David?" she whispered, her voice exactly the way he remembered it.
Dave stopped midspin, so that the socked feet of the little boy he held swung with the force of his aborted turn. Charis! His throat tightened with recognition, with hope, with a love as powerful as the day he'd married her. "Char… "
Then he saw it, that huge Thing with which he was in a desperate game of keep-away, moving in. Damn, this was getting old! Whenever Dave got between it and Rick the Businessman, the Creature had gone after the child. When Dave moved between it and the little boy, the Creature simply moved back toward the businessman. It had an alien quality Dave thought of as mindless—but even mindless determination made it dangerous, if it could outlast him.
And now there were three people to protect?
With the sucking sound that usually accompanied the Thing's low, lumbering movements, it sludged into action. Charis turned, saw it and screamed.
"Charis!" yelled Dave.
The how, the why, the when—all of that could wait. Dave had one priority now. Her. Child still dangling from his arms, Dave lunged for his wife and her frightened, desperate, apparently tasty aura.
The Creature, with a silent kind of triumph, veered away… straight toward Rick, who never had gone into that damned tunnel of light.
"Oh my God," wheezed Rick, his horror palpable, somewhere behind Dave. "Oh. My—"
Charis tipped her face up to Dave's, only a breath away now. Her eyes were bright with confusion at this strange, sudden meeting. And it was a meeting; it was her. He could count every eyelash, could see that tiny chip in her front left tooth, and he wanted nothing more than to lose himself in her brown gaze, to drown in her nearness, to just touch her, be with her, until this eternity in which he'd found himself finally dissolved into nothingness. Char—
"No!" screamed Rick, behind him.
And Dave stuffed the little boy into Charis's arms. "Hold this!"
"What?"
Their hands brushed as he handed off the kid, barely a suggestion of the touch he'd been missing so badly. Then Dave spun and bolted toward where poor, stubborn, stupid Rick was backing away from the advancing… Thing.
"David!" But he couldn't let Charis distract him at the moment. He had a big… slithering… membranous…
He had a monster to stop.
Even as he got close, the sheets of cold that reeked off of the Thing knotted his stomach.
"Get back," Dave warned it, sidling around its high, lumpy girth. "I'm warning you. Rick may be a jerk—"
"Hey!" protested Rick.
"But I'm not letting you hurt anyone," Dave continued. "Rick, get into that damned tunnel or I swear… "
"Come on, sonny," pleaded Rick's grandfather.
But Rick had other plans. "No," he panted. "I need to get to my meetings."
And he took off running.
"No!" warned Dave.
"David!" screamed Charis again. "Look out!"
And yes, the Thing got damned close to Dave's feet, for a minute there. But even as he dodged it, Dave feared something else.
Rick didn't even make it as far as Dave usually did before whatever force it was that kept a spirit near its body caught him and flung him back like some otherworldly bungee. One minute, Rick was racing for the strangely lit elevators. The next, he'd been thrown bodily into the wall, beside his corpse.
And that corpse of Rick's—it was definitely finished. The doctors and nurses, blind to the drama playing out right beside them in this overlapping but distinctly different world, had already turned away. They shook their heads as they left the room.
Rick hit the wall, dropped to the floor—
And the Thing slid onto him.
Again, Charis screamed. In four years Dave had never heard her yell like this—and don't think he didn't take that as an insult—but now she was like a banshee. Still, he couldn't have turned to her if he'd tried.
The sight of Rick, whose screams outstripped even Charis's, held Dave dead still. The Creature devoured the man. One minute, Rick had been slumped across the shadowy hospital floor. The next, the Creature swallowed him, as inexorable as a jellyfish wrapping a fish or… or quicksand, drawing its victim deeper and deeper.
Rick's feet went first. Then his legs. Then his thrashing, twisting waist vanished beneath gelatinous appetite and gaping maws while his arms flailed helplessly…
"Help me!" shrieked Rick, his voice cracking with the pain of it. "My God, help…!"
Shaken out of his shock, Dave leaped for him, inches from the glacial stench of the Thing. It hurt just to be near it, the opposite of reaching into a hot oven. He had to try three times before he caught one of Rick's flailing hands. Grabbing it with a double-handed grip, bracing his feet too near a slimy streak the Thing had left on the floor, Dave pulled with all his strength.
He didn't need all his strength.
Only Rick's upper half—his shoulders, arms, and head—pulled free. Everything else was… melted.
Rick's screams hit a pitch that surely didn't exist in the real world.
Dave let go. Fast. He choked back vomit, twisted away, stumbled. This wasn't… this couldn't…
Like a spreading puddle of ooze, the Creature slipped across the last of the businessman. Silence washed across the ICU ward as it shrouded him completely.
The Thing shuddered with pure satisfaction.
Then the stench it put off finished the job that Rick's mutilation had started. Trying to stagger farther from the Thing, for safety, Dave doubled over and dry-heaved. After all, he hadn't eaten anything in days. Not since…
"David!"
Another scream? Half-lost in his own failure, he tipped his attention Wearily up from the floor between his knees—
And Charis tackled him clumsily to the ground, rolling him away from a long, probing tentacle just as the Thing licked across Dave's leg for another burning taste.
"Damn!" yelped Dave. Between the nausea, the searing pain, the weight of Charis on top of him and the way his head walloped the linoleum—or whatever this other-world's version of linoleum was—he hurt in more ways than he could count.
But he also had Charis.
Oh, heavens. He had his arms full of Charis. And the sensation was…
Wow. Nothing he'd ever experienced while he was alive.
He blinked blearily up at her, then said "damn" again and scrabbled backward, Charis still in his arms, in case the Thing was still coming after them. This time, it was not. Sated with the businessman it had just devoured, it slid off to its own matters, leaving a trail of putrid slime behind it.
Dave's grip on Charis tightened, guilt-ridden and grateful. Then, suddenly, he sat up. "The kid! Char, you were supposed to be watching the kid!"
"Didn't you hear me scream?"
"Which time?"
"He vanished," she explained coolly. Now that was the Charis he remembered—except that, despite her calm act, she was trembling. "David, he just disappeared! Where—?"
"Shhh." With another gulping breath of relief, Dave twisted toward the gurney where the child had been brought in. The kid—as strangely lit and indistinct as everything else from what used to be his own world—was sitting up, his parents holding him, seeming to weep from joy. Their auras were bright, clean. "Look. He disappeared because he's not dead."
At first Dave didn't notice Charis stiffen. He was busy turning toward the tunnel of light, spiraling into a smaller and smaller diameter. "I'm sorry," he said to the old man.
The little girl, the one who'd never been born, wept into the old man's side, but Rick's grandfather nodded glumly and turned back toward the vanishing tunnel.
Dave called, "What exactly happened to him?"
"You saw it," said the old man, trudging away in a trick of perspective. "It ate his soul."
His… soul?
Was that even possible?
"Best make up your mind, before the Critter comes after you," warned the haunting voice of Rick's grandfather. "It's built up quite an appetite, 'round here."
Then the tunnel, too, had vanished, taking the pair with it.
Dave and Charis were alone.
Her eyes, when he met her gaze—so near, so real—brimmed with tears. '"He's not dead,'" she challenged, repeating his earlier words. "He's not dead? What does that mean, David? Does that mean you…?"
New horror twisted, deep inside him. "What about you, Char?"
His voice actually cracked. He'd hated these last few days, being alone, unable to talk to her, to touch her. But the idea that her own life might have been cut short…
"No," she reassured him, framing his face with her hands. "No, David, I'm okay. I think I'm sleeping. I think… "
He followed her gaze through the semitranslucent walls to his room, where his own corpselike body lay unmoving—and where her own form curled, still and quiet, on the accompanying recliner. Even as they stared, her form shifted and again stilled.
Relief warred with disappointment in Dave's gut.
She was alive, safe, thank God. But that also meant this… this visit.. .would be temporary and he would soon go back to whatever it was he was. But not yet. Not yet.
With her in his arms, he missed her already.
But not yet.
"I think I'm dreaming," Charis whispered, and turned her attention back to him, held his gaze hungrily. "I know I am."
That's when he kissed her.
Across the boundaries of life and death itself, Dave Fields kissed his wife.
I have not one word of comfort. You deserve this. You have killed yourself. Yes, you may kiss me, and cry, and wring out my kisses and tears; they'll blight you—they'll damn you. You loved me—then what right had you to leave me?
—Heathcliff
Wuthering Heights
David's lips pressed onto hers, and Charis surged into his embrace.
Really. Into his embrace.
Into him, as he flowed into her.
The sensation was electric, all-encompassing, whole. Because somehow, in this strange place, they weren't two bodies forced to stop at clothes, at skin, at bones. Or… they weren't merely that. They were also two souls, and souls really could exist in the same place at the same time. Mingling. Bonding. Charis felt completed, full, as if she'd been unfinished for long and lonely lifetimes and now, now…
David.
She lost track of how long they kissed, soul to soul. Apparently, in dreams, one didn't have to breathe. Even when they drew back, to stare at the confirmation of one another's presence, she felt wrapped in his essence. In him.
And it was him. David! After days of believing that she'd never see him again, those were his bright, intense eyes; that was his blocky jaw; those were his lips, parting as if distracted on the way to a smile. These were his arms around her. If this was a dream, then dreams were worth far, far more than she'd ever credited them.
"Wow," she heard him mutter. "Holy… wow."
That was his raspy voice, all right. That was his smile, half awe and half delight, which didn't make sense, since all those things were of the body. As warm as his embrace felt, as solid as his arms seemed around her even as their souls mingled, this wasn't his body, was it? David's body lay over there, oddly shadowed as if to visually emphasize its separation from wherever this was. So this David…
Oh, God. What was he?
Despite her need to hold him, to continue to savor the unmistakable reality of this reunion, Charis could only teeter on the edge of impossibility for so long.
So she repeated what he'd said about that other… ghost? About the little boy who had clung to her neck during the nightmare preceding this dream, only to vanish, leaving her arms feeling cold and empty. "He's not dead?"
David glanced toward the gurney where the strangely lit child still moved, tended by parents, by doctors, by people who'd succeeded where David's doctors seemed to have failed. "Obviously."
"And you?"
He frowned. "I don't know, Char. You've talked to the doctors a lot more than I have, lately."
Oh, God. Had nobody told him? "You were in a car accident," she admitted, tightening her hold on his arms as she forced the necessary explanation. "You're in a coma. You broke your arm, and some ribs, and punctured a lung, but the worst part is that you suffered head trauma. At one point your heart stopped—"
Dave's fingers, pressed gently against her lips, silenced her. "I know that part. I can hear what people say, if I listen closely. I even heard you talking about putting me… "
But he swallowed hard, scowled and looked past her shoulder at nothingness.
Real nothingness. Almost everything here seemed insubstantial—everything except him and his obvious distress.
And the other ghosts.
And the monster. The Cold.
"The nursing home?" she finished for him, guessing.
"Easy for you to say."
"No! It's not easy for me to say. And that was just Dr. Smit trying to keep me from getting my hopes up. Dr. Bennett says there's still hope for… for your recovery… or at least… "
The laugh that barked out of him held little humor. "You really suck at false optimism, Char."
It sounded like an accusation, which stung. She wanted to hope for the best, damn it. She did. But sitting with his inert form, day in and day out, collecting information about the dangers of muscle atrophy and bedsores and a dozen other ailments a man in his late thirties shouldn't be facing was hardly encouraging.
"At least you're not dead," she suggested, though it sounded lame even to her. And rude, as if she were flaunting the fact that she was more alive than him. "And that… that Thing… "
She knew on an instinctive level that the lumpy, shambling, membranous monstrosity which had eaten that other ghost was what she'd been sensing since her first day at the hospital, cold and wrong and curdled with death. If the idea of putting David into a nursing home could be real, then why couldn't it be?
"No." David's hold on her tightened, and she curled gratefully into him with something nearing desperation. She didn't want to wake up, separated from him again. She didn't want to ever wake up to that. "The Thing didn't get me, either."
"What was it?"
"I've got a theory," he admitted, and she closed her eyes to savor the precious sound of his voice as she listened. "Wherever this is—this dream world, this spirit world, whatever—energy seems more distinct here. Remember how your friend Diana talks about seeing auras?"
"Yes, but she talks about crystals and pyramid power, too." And astral projection. And dream interpretation.
And soul mates. Her friend often spoke of soul mates.
"I think that's part of why the living look so strange here. I'm seeing them through the haze of their auras, different colors for different emotions. Some emotions are strong, and bright, and alive. Greens, and blues, and yellows. But others look kind of, well… still. Dirty. And not—" His breath warmed her neck in a wry chuckle. "Not in a sexy way."
Charis smiled, eyes still closed, face still pressed into his shoulder. Don't go, she thought. Please don't go.
No matter how selfish or controlling that was.
"Anyway, whatever that Thing is, it seems drawn to the dirtier colors. Hatred. Anger. Fear. Like that older woman who died the day of my accident. She was already exhausted and depressed from her hospital stay, and that Thing… I think it smelled it."
"Kathy Wells," guessed Charis, her heart speeding as she thought of Hank. Not his Kathy!
"It wanted her, but something distracted it. Either that, or it's scared of the tunnel. Just not scared enough." He took a deep breath, needed or not. "Then there was this man who died of a fast-moving cancer yesterday, very religious. His family was there. And although they were sad, it was kind of a healthy sadness, you know? They knew everyone dies sooner or later, and they were all so secure in their faith. And the Creature didn't even show up! But people like Rick, the guy who got, uh… melted? He was so angry, he buzzed with it. Did you see that color he gave off? A dark brown, like drying blood. I think that attracted the Thing. And the little boy… "
The one who'd vanished from her arms? "I didn't see any colors. Not on anybody."
"Didn't you? He was really scared. His family, too. They put off a kind of muddy blue the Creature seemed to like."
"It's drawn to the living?"
David held her gaze. "It's even drawn to you, Char."
But she knew that already, didn't she? She'd felt the ugly chill of it, more than once.
David said, "I guess even you've been kind of emotional these last few days, huh?"
And after she'd fought so hard to keep herself together. "I'm sorry."
"For what? For caring?"
His question embarrassed and confused her, so she changed the subject. "But why is it drawn to unhappy emotions? Does it…?" But she knew that already, too. "It feeds on us?"
David nodded. "Whatever it is, I don't think it's natural. Those ghosts who show up to collect their loved ones when they die? They all seem surprised to see the Thing. And usually pretty scared of it, too."
"The ones in the tunnel," Charis remembered. "They were there to collect Rick's soul?"
"If he'd just gone through the tunnel, he would've been safe."
But that emphasized his own danger, didn't it? "Unlike you," she said.
"Hey, I've done just fine for myself. Sure, the Thing's gotten one or two licks in, when I got careless, but nothing I can't handle."
"For how long?"
David's jaw set at that, and his dark brows lowered. He clearly didn't want to think about that. David had often annoyed her that way, refusing to face facts.
And, as ever, she pushed it. "The old man from the tunnel. He said that the Creature would be coming after you."
"Well, I'm not dead yet."
Charis's throat tightened. "Yet?"
"What—you're in a big hurry to be widowed?"
"No! I just want to understand what's going on. Is that so terrible?"
He let go of her to scrub his hands through his thick hair. "I don't know what's going on, Char. It's not like I got a manual, or like gate-agents met me when I showed up here. Obviously I'm not dead or I'd be in a coffin instead of ICU. But clearly I'm not completely alive, either, or I'd be back in my body. What else do you want me to tell you?"
She could think of one thing, and her eyes stung to have to ask it. "Why are you angry at me?"
"Because you're talking as if this is my fault!"
"Isn't it?" Oh heavens. Had she actually said that? Clearly, from the way David's eyes widened in bright accusation, she had. Wherever they were, truth must ride much closer to the surface—even the uglier truths.
"And here I thought it was the fault of the guy who plowed into me. Speaking of which, I heard you with Todd Vernon. Way to go with the forgiveness, there!"
"Wait—you think I should forgive the person who did this to you?"
"He's just a kid. He's going to have to live with this his entire life."
"Good!"
"You didn't have to twist the knife."
"He didn't have to drive drunk."
David shook his head. "You can be such an Ice Princess!"
"And you never think before you act. The only reason he plowed into you is because you pulled into his—"
She clamped her teeth shut, too late. She felt seasick from all the emotion roiling between them, almost visible, and she didn't want the damned monster coming back, but something about this place seemed to tease the words right out of her.
"Yeah, I pulled into his path so he wouldn't plow into children. You think I should've let them get hurt instead?"
"No!" Of course she didn't! She was proud of him. So why hadn't she simply said that? "I… I don't know… "
"Look," said David.
Which is when she woke.
Charis sat up with a gasp. "David!"
Where was he?
But of course David wasn't there to answer her, or accuse her, or taunt her. Not the man she'd just been dreaming about, anyway. The only David here was the one in the hospital bed, his jaw drawn, his eyes taped shut, far too many tubes and wires running into and out of him. What had just happened? What…?
Charis rose and swayed, wrapping her arms around herself when she felt suddenly cold and alone. Had she just dreamed all of that? In two steps, she stood unsteadily by David's bedside. Had none of it been real?
She moved slowly, automatically into the routine she'd adopted over the last few days, an attempt to make him more comfortable. She dipped a sponge on a stick into his ice water, then slid it into his mouth, running it along his gums, over his tongue. To think that someone mass-produced things like this! Then she used a finger to slide petroleum jelly onto his drying lips.
Everything else, the physical therapist and the machines seemed to be doing.
Only then, out of chores, did she extend a tentative hand and brush her fingers across David's thick, dark hair. It felt strange to her. It could have been anybody's hair. His skin, suntan fading the longer he lay here, was mere epidermis. After only four days of unconsciousness, this barely seemed like David at all. And that scared her.
Never had the human body seemed more like a biological machine than it did now, now that it didn't work right anymore.
The real David…
"No," Charis protested to herself, shaking her head. "Don't be stupid. That was just a dream."
But she didn't want it to have been just a dream. Given the choice between a random sleep-induced fantasy, and having actually found her husband's soul across the boundaries of reality, of course she would prefer the latter. Who wouldn't?
She pressed a hand to her mouth, fighting back the surge of insane hope.
Yes, it was ridiculous.
Yes, she felt embarrassed to even entertain the teeny, tiny possibility of it. And yet…
Oh, God. Wasn't that madness still better than this?
If someone else had approached her with the idea, Charis would have immediately condemned that person as a con artist. But nobody had brought this to her. Nobody stood to profit by this delusion. She'd brought it to herself.
She'd already taken personal time off work, refusing to even consider going back until David was safely settled in the long-term care wing. She'd already spent more time than was probably healthy reading everything she could about comas and head injuries. She recognized that, even if David lived, he could suffer from seizures, memory loss, impaired judgment, more. Worse.
But what she couldn't find anywhere, not in any book or pamphlet, was how to handle this. How to handle any of this.
What did she have to lose in hoping… beyond her self-respect?
Judging by the growing ache in her chest, the growing tightness in her throat, she was heartbroken already.
Decision made, Charis picked up the overly large receiver for the ICU room's telephone off David's bed table and dialed nine to get an outside line.
David and Charis have been dating for over a year—a wonderful, fascinating year—when he finally gets just how difficult a time she has letting go.
Letting go of what's familiar to her. Letting go of the past. And most significantly, letting go of her illusion of self-control.
"I've been offered a promotion," he tells her, leaning against the kitchen island in her town house while she cooks dinner for them. "It's a good one."
She frowns at her cookbook a moment longer and then, as if only then hearing him, she looks up with a growing smile. "You have? Congratulations!"
God, she's beautiful. Not fashion-model beautiful, but real beautiful, deep beautiful. Especially when she smiles, her hair curling around the edges of her glowing face from the heat of the stove. He loves that she's got that special smile, just for him, and he can't help himself, doesn't want to help himself. He kisses her.
After a surprised start—which he finds kind of endearing, considering that it's not like they haven't kissed, and more, plenty of times—Charis relaxes into the kiss, into his embrace.
Then the timer goes off, and she starts away from him. "Sorry," she whispers, turning to move a pot off a burner.
Because heaven forbid the potatoes cook even half a minute longer than they should. She's so funny.
"It's in Paris," Dave announces. When his boss told him that, he'd been thrilled. Paris! The romance capital of the world. What an adventure that will be! Him and Charis…
Watching her opposite reaction—the widening of her eyes, the fading of her smile—Dave realizes just how significant a role Charis plays in his excitement about the idea. Just how important she's become to him.
"Paris…?" she repeats, looking lost. "That's… so far."
"I'm not going without you," he assures her.
She looks confused. "But… you said it's a good offer."
"It's an incredible offer."
"Then are you sure you want to give it up for me?" Her eyes are so big, and she's holding a ladle without doing anything with it. She doesn't want him to leave her, and that makes him feel immortal.
"I don't want to give it up for you," he admits.
She presses her lips together, turns toward the oven so that he can't see her expression, but he ducks between her and her roast to capture her gaze. "I want you to come with me."
She blinks, bewildered.
"Marry me," he whispers, drowning in those eyes, wondering if he will ever, ever be able to swim deep enough to know all her secrets. "Marry me, and come to Paris with me."
She blinks again, still poleaxed.
He puts his hands on her shoulders. "I'm sorry—I'd meant to do this more romantically. Maybe slip a ring into your dessert, or hire a billboard… "
Her own voice isn't so much a whisper as a strangle. "Oh, please don't."
"Now, with this great opportunity—I don't want to go without you. I want you with me. Married. In Paris.""But… " She lets the word linger, then ducks around him to check the damned roast.
Dave reminds himself that it's kind of a comfort thing for her, being in control of the meal. He figured that out about her a while ago. Usually, he finds it endearing, but just now…
He asked her to marry him!
"But what?" he insists, brushing her jaw with his fingers in a plea for her to turn her beautiful eyes back to him. Even when she's schooled her face to show nothing, her eyes give her away. She's frightened. "Tell me why you're scared. Is it me?"
"I've got a job, too," she reminds him.
"I'll be earning plenty."
"But it's my job. It's what I do. And my friends are all here. And… and I don't speak French. Even if I knew the language, there would be all these cultural differences. I don't want to go to France, David. Please… " Her voice falters before she whispers, "Please don't make me go to France."
"Make you?" he repeats, his pulse loud in his ears. "How could I make you? "
"By leaving me. It's not you, David. I'm not scared of you." And her face brightens with her own slow certainty of it. "I'm not scared of marrying you!"
Hallelujah. He kisses her again, and she kisses him back, long and grateful and right. And then the uncertainty seems to creep into even that, and she ducks her head into his sternum. "I love you, but I don't want to move away. If you ask me to choose, I don't know what I'd—"
"You don't have to choose." He rests his chin on her hair, his eyes closed in gratitude. Paris, schmaris. She wants to marry him, and that's afar bigger thing. "I'll stay here. I'll stay with you."
She sighs, deeply, relaxing more into his embrace than ever. She whispers again, more firmly this time, "I love you, David Fields."
And the world is perfect.
Then the timer on the oven goes of, and she kisses his chin before turning out of his embrace to make sure the meat doesn't dry out…
Maybe Dave was a spirit. Maybe he was even a ghost of some sort. But he was still feeling downright skeptical.
He knew Charis, and Charis was too practical to take her friend Diana's advice. He knew that. But since it was his only hope of seeing her again, his only hope of speaking with her, he eavesdropped anyway.
Pacing.
He gave his body, in the bed near the window, a wide berth. It still hurt too much—head-crushing, arm-snapping pain—to get close. The two women, friends since before he'd met them, sat in chairs at the foot of the bed… also not that close to his body.
"You've got a couple of options," their friend Diana admitted. Dave had to concentrate to hear her faint, underwater-like voice. "Really."
But she seemed to be pushing the optimism. She'd only marginally recovered from her shock at seeing David for the first time since his accident. He'd recently been moved to the long-term care ward. On the plus side, he finally got to have visitors.
In the minus column, Charis now had to go home at 8:00 p.m. every night.
"Curfew," muttered Dave sourly to himself, "and this ward's one step closer to the nursing home."
He sensed a chill, smelled an acrid dankness and spun to look for the Thing. He didn't see it as often in this wing as he had in ICU, but it still lurked, waiting for him to screw up or—if his understanding was correct—to bleed dark enough emotions to make him worth approaching.
Today, it skulked at a safe distance. It seemed to be watching him, though he wouldn't have thought it smart enough to blame him for its recent low-soul diet. But it wasn't getting anywhere near the golden glow that Diana Trillo cast off.
Interesting.
"Option one," stated Charis, her own voice frustratingly distant now that she was back among the living. "Get my head examined."
Dave glared. Now that was the Charis he knew and… and wished would change, for once.
"Enough with the negativity," chided Diana for him. "Belief counts for more than you think."
"Exactly," said Dave.
Charis looked so crestfallen, he would have laughed, except for how serious this was. If their chance of meeting again rested on Char's ability to believe in the supernatural, they were in serious trouble.
But they had to meet again. And not just to be together, though that was reason enough.
Dave also had more, well, pragmatic reasons than he wanted to admit.
"Option one," continued Diana, "is to have a seance. I don't advise that one."
"Because David isn't dead." Charis didn't make it a question. Clearly, as far as she was concerned, while the body lying there kept breathing he couldn't be a ghost. No matter how ghostly. Charis was a stickler for technicalities.
"Yes… there's that." Diana liked to dress the part of someone who believed in the supernatural. She wore long, gauzy skirts and multiple strands of crystals, and her eyeliner was unusually dark for a blond woman… but it worked for her. Especially when she made a face. "But I was thinking of the fact that we're in a hospital."
"Oh. Stupid horror-movie plot?"
"Exactly. Doing a seance in a hospital is almost as bad as holding one in a cemetery. It's right up there with 'Don't explore a dark basement when a serial killer's on the loose' and 'Never read a book of demon summoning aloud, even as a joke.'"
"Agreed. So what's option two?"
"Well… I'm going on the assumption that since David isn't dead, maybe he's having some kind of extended, out-of-body experience," explained Diana. "You said his heart stopped in the emergency room?"
"Yes."
"So chances are he had an NDE."
Charis—and Dave—stared at her.
"Near Death Experience," Diana clarified. "It usually starts with an out-of-body experience, where the subject floats outside his corporeal form."
Both women looked toward the body in the hospital bed.
Dave preferred not to. He didn't like what he saw.
"In fact, many people report that it feels as if they've shed their corporeal form completely. They often describe what they've become, there in the astral plane, as their true form."
"Damn," muttered Dave, and sank down onto the room's second bed, currently empty. "Damn, Di, you're good. That's exactly how it feels."
Yet another reason he had to talk to Charis.
"Thousands of people have experienced this," Diana continued. "Tens of thousands. And that's just the first of the similarities they've described. There's also the appearance of a tunnel, and the person's departed loved ones, and a bright, bright light."
"But… haven't scientists dismissed all that as a trick of brain chemistry?"
"That's my girl," muttered Dave grimly. They couldn't hear him, of course. Not even when he shouted it, annoyed. "That's my girl!"
Diana didn't quite snort, but she made another face. "Some scientists, sure. But a lot of them think the study of NDE's is completely legitimate. Look at it this way. The same scientists who claim that NDE's are the hallucinatory result of brain functions shutting down? What would they say about the dream you had yesterday?"
Charis bowed her head. "That it was just a dream."
"But it wasn't," insisted Dave. "Char, it wasn't."
"And which would you rather believe?" asked Diana.
"Does it matter what I believe? What matters is what's true."
"Stop it," said Dave, pushing off the bed to pace to Charis's side. "That's not going to help us!"
But Diana said, "What's really bothering you?"
Like this wasn't enough?
Maybe it wasn't. "It's real now," admitted Charis, a catch in her throat. "With you here. It's… it's real."
Immediately, her friend slid from her chair to crouch at her feet, taking one of Charis's hands between hers. Dave backed up, quickly, to avoid standing in her.
"Oh, honey." Diana pressed Char's hand to her cheek. "Is that why you've been so distant this last week?"
"No! David couldn't have visitors in ICU," Charis reminded her, but Diana looked firmly at the telephone on Dave's bed table, amidst the plastic cups and tubes and tools. Then she quirked a challenging eyebrow at Char.
Dave hadn't noticed that, despite all the time Charis had put in at his bedside, she'd made very few telephone calls. The practical ones, sure. She'd informed his job, her job. She'd contacted their insurance company. Charis was great at that sort of thing. But as for talking any of this over with her friends…
"It's because you didn't want to cry on the phone," he said to himself, his throat tight.
Charis nodded. "It's stupid, I know."
"No! It's not." Diana rubbed Charis's hands, and it occurred to David that this might be the only physical, human contact his wife had had in over a week.
He felt sick. He wasn't the only one lonely, here.
Diana said, "It's normal to make things more real by sharing them with our friends, our family. That's one reason why we invite people to weddings and funerals and graduations. As long as you kept quiet you didn't have to admit, maybe even accept what's happened. And now that I'm here, now that I've had a chance to see how bad this is, you can't pretend it away anymore."
Dave wouldn't have imagined Char pretending anything. She just wasn't that fanciful. But what Diana said sounded too true to ignore. Charis had isolated herself with his soulless body rather than unburden herself on anybody else. She'd temporarily given up her job, her schedule, her world, as surely as if he'd moved her to a new country. But without even him there.
And he'd done this to her. She'd said it herself. He didn't have to pull into that intersection. He was still glad he'd done it. It had been the right thing to do, for those kids. But for his wife, the one person he should have protected above all others?
Damn.
"You don't have to go through this alone," insisted Diana, since he couldn't. "You're not the first person to have to endure this, and you won't be the last. You're probably thinking 'if only's' too, right? If only he'd driven a different route to work? If only you'd asked him to stay home?"
"If only we hadn't fought," agreed Charis quietly.
Had they fought that morning? He'd already forgotten.
"It's not your fault, Char," he said. He knew she couldn't hear him, but he had to say it anyway and to hope that somehow, some part of her would get that. "You're not the reason I ended up this way."
For the first time, he felt jealous of Diana. Diana was able to give his wife a hug, while all he could do was… was hover. Almost literally.
His "true form" sucked.
It was Charis who ended the hug first, of course. Charis who pulled back, who wiped at eyes that did look suspiciously damp. Charis who got control of herself.
As ever.
But Dave couldn't help noticing that her aura seemed even less muddy than it had right after their… rendezvous. Just what did that mean?
"Well, let's say Dave is having an OBE," said Diana, as if nothing had happened. The two had been friends for a long time; of course she knew how much more comfortable Char would be discussing solutions than emotions. " 'Out-of-body experience.' That would make him a disembodied spirit. Which, despite that his body's alive, is pretty much like being a ghost. Just… a ghost with options."
Dave glanced at the body he couldn't even get near. Options, huh?
"Then how was I able to see him, in the dream? How was I able to touch him, and talk to him?"
"Look at it this way," Diana tried. "We exist on more than one plane, in more than one dimension, all at the same time. While we're alive and awake we're usually just aware of the physical world. But sometimes, when we sleep, our astral bodies—which were there all along—temporarily leave our corporeal bodies behind. So what seems like dreaming could be a spontaneous form of astral projection. And that's what you want to learn."
"Astral projection."
"Yes. Deliberately leaving your body."
When Charis just stared, not even blinking, Diana clarified, "You let your body relax, and you… you separate from it so that you can move around the astral realm."
"But assuming people can really do that, why would they?"
"For the experience?" suggested Diana. "For the adventure. To find out about other beings and other realms."
David said, "To meet with their comatose husband so that he can tell them something important before… "
But as long as she couldn't hear him, he didn't see why he should force himself to say it. Not yet.
Diana dragged her chair closer to Charis's so that she could sit beside her but still hold her hand. "That's probably your best option. Visit his world. On purpose."
"Even if I wanted to, I don't know how!" Charis was shaking her head. That wasn't a good sign.
"I'll bring you some books. But mostly it'll just take practice in relaxation, meditation, in just… just letting go."
Charis looked haunted. Her distant voice said, "I don't think I can."
David, his heart sinking in disappointment, believed her.
The woman didn't even have the guts to leave the familiarity of her own country for more than short vacations.
Where would she ever find enough sense of adventure to leave her body?
"Why, she's a liar to the end. Where is she? Not there—not in heaven—not perished—where?"
—Heathcliff
Wuthering Heights
It was only as she and Diana walked out to the windy parking lot together, when visiting hours ended, that Charis dared ask the most disturbing question about her reunion with David.
"When I was dreaming," she started, halting. "And suddenly David was there, and it seemed so real—"
"It was real," Diana assured her.
"There weren't just other souls there. There was something else. A… a monster."
Diana stopped, eyed Charis for a silent moment, then took her elbow and steered her to her battered old pickup truck. "Climb in and tell me."
So, safe from the wind in Diana's passenger seat, Charis did. She explained how the Thing seemed to mutate from moment to moment—sometimes looming, sometimes low and wide. She explained how its membranous exterior seemed to be stretched across something lumpy and misshapen and… and foul. And, most disturbing, she told how it seemed to have melted a dead man named Rick—and how the old man had said it ate Rick's soul.
"Is that even possible?" Charis asked, hoping it wasn't. All she had left of David was an empty, comatose body and his perhaps inaccessible soul. If his soul itself was in danger…
"I've heard legends," murmured Diana, which wasn't what Charis wanted to hear. Her fear must have shown on her face. "Nothing more probable than stories of vampires and werewolves, though. Really, Char. It's a lot more likely that the monster was a creation of your mind. A nightmare."
"But you said the dream was real."
"Some of it was! But you probably were dreaming before you left your body, and maybe the monster was part of that."
"But it—" Charis silenced her own protest. She'd asked a question, Diana had answered it, and that was that. Whether she liked the answer or not.
"I'll do some more research, see what I can find out," Diana promised her. "And I'll bring those books on astral projection tomorrow."
Charis doubted she'd ever be able to leave her body on demand. But if it were her only chance to talk to David, then she had to try. She and Diana exchanged hugs over the stick-shift of Di's truck, and Charis was surprised at how sorely she'd missed being held.
At how surely the knowledge of David's presence and embrace had colored her world, her future.
Now alone, she climbed out to cross to her own sedan. The wind off the lake seemed particularly cutting tonight, but it also smelled fresh and alive with the promise of spring. It blew Charis's hair off her face, off her neck.
Would David ever again feel something as basic as the wind on his face? Not according to Dr. Smit. And as for Dr. Bennett…
Well, Hank Wells had warned her against doctors who promised more than they could deliver.
Charis hated that she had to go home at night. As she'd told Diana, earlier, it became real now. Up to this point, she'd been avoiding the truth of what her life—and, more important, David's—had become. As long as she'd been holed up with his unnaturally still body, sleeping in the hospital recliner, eating hospital food and keeping her trips home as short as humanly possible, she didn't have to truly face it. But now that she was driving home every night, with twelve long hours to fill before visiting hours resumed…
It meant facing their world without him.
Gassing up the cars had always been David's job. Despite that they'd only been married four years, Charis had gotten used to that. Her route home took her by his favorite restaurant, by the park where he liked to jog and, if she didn't go out of her way to avoid it, right through the intersection where a drunken Todd Vernon had run that fateful red light. Was that glitter by the curb the remains of David's windshield? Was that lamppost the last thing he'd seen, or had it been that tree?
And then there was their house…
Charis stares out the car window at the little brick bungalow-style house. "Well… it's a detached home, anyway. How old is it?"
"From 1925. It's one and a half stories, if you count the basement, with three bedrooms and one bath. You'll love it," David assures her, his eyes dancing.
Charis seriously doubts that. As David leads her up the stone steps to the front door, she leans out to examine the narrow space between this house and its next-door neighbor. David uses the key that he apparently sweet-talked out of the Realtor, unless…
Her stomach sinks. "You haven't made an offer already, have you?"
"Give me a little credit." He takes her hand—her left hand, with the engagement ring—and leads her into the low-ceilinged front room. "Tah-dah!"
Charis blinks at it, stunned. "The carpet is aqua."
"Carpet can be replaced. Come look at this." As David leads her through the house, Charis is increasingly mystified. The kitchen has old Formica cabinets—not just countertops, cabinets! They're yellow, to match the lemons on the stained wallpaper. The walls in one room have been painted fuchsia, and in another, forest-green. There is only one bathroom, and it has its original, powder-blue tiles. Wood paneling frames the den walls.
"So what do you think?" asks David, after giving her the initial tour.
She wishes she did like it. It's in their price range and, more important, David clearly sees something in it. She desperately wants him to be happy. But… "This is the ugliest house I've ever seen."
He grins. "I know!"
Charis shakes her head, increasingly worried. David was orphaned in his teens, so she never met his family. Did they have a history of mental illness? It's not too late to break their engagement…
Except that she doesn't want to. With David, for the first time, she doesn't always want to do the practical thing. "I don't get it."
"With a house this ugly, we'll have to change everything. Well, except the outside—the brickwork's okay. That means you get to choose everything. The wall color. The carpet. The cabinets. You'll be in complete control."
He leans closer to her, as if he can better judge her expression from inches away. "C'mon, Char. That's gotta curl your toes, doesn't it? "
She never would have thought of it that way… but damned if he isn't right. "And… we can take out that wall between the kitchen and the dining room? "
"Anything you want," he promises.
"Then I love it." And she loves him. Engaged to be married, and sometimes that still surprises her.
"I knew you would," he says. Which unsettles her, somehow. Because she never would have guessed that she would like this place, so how did he?
How can he know her better than she knows herself?
Charis let herself in and locked the door behind her, sliding the chain into place for extra safety. Although she'd lived alone for most of her life before she and David married, she felt unusually vulnerable, now. She had to turn on the radio to break the echoing silence.
But not the TV. That would feel too much like going on with her life without him, to kick back and watch TV.
There was a message on her answering machine. "Charis?" It was her boss. "I just wanted to let you know that we're all praying for David, and… I don't want to push you, take all the time you need. But the temp has another job offer. If you have a guess-timate as to when you might be coming back to work, could you give me a call?"
She erased the message and headed for the bedroom. She couldn't think about going back to work, not yet. Leaving David alone all day; only visiting him after work and on weekends. It felt blasphemous… and horribly inevitable. How long would it be before she cut back to four nights a week, then three nights and Sundays, then…?
No.
Everything in the house reminded her of David. They'd painted the walls themselves, taken down the paneling, stripped the wallpaper and torn down several walls to create a more open floor plan. Between his enthusiasm and her attention to details, they hadn't done badly, despite their inevitable arguments. The bungalow had quickly gone from a house to a home.
Now it was just a house, again.
Charis glanced at the bedroom clock, where it hung between two paintings of the wind-swept moors—another Wuthering Heights touch of David's. It wasn't even nine o'clock. But she stripped off her clothes and climbed into bed anyway.
After she took the paintings down and turned them against the wall.
The bed felt too big, without her husband beside her. It felt too cold. She wanted his arms around her. She wanted his body over her, in her. She wanted David, David, David…
She'd hoped she would dream of him.
Instead, she just cried.
"It's not good," admitted Diana, meeting Charis in David's room the next afternoon.
What about this is good? thought Charis. Then she realized what Diana had to mean. "You mean… the monster?"
Her friend nodded.
"You said it might be a creation of my mind." Charis hated the shrill edge to her voice. "A nightmare."
"And it still might. Maybe I shouldn't have said anything. Look, here are the books I promised you."
But of course, now that Diana had mentioned it, Charis had to follow up. "So what did you find out?"
Diana sighed but, resigned, she sat. "I sent some e-mails to people I know. A Wiccan high priestess. A shaman. A medium. The kind of people you never believed in."
Charis had never disbelieved the actual existence of such people, certainly not after the proof of her friend's reality. She'd just never believed they were particularly… sane.
And now she was hungry for anything they could tell her.
Welcome to desperation, she thought.
"Mind you, none of this is scientifically proven," Diana cautioned. "But apparently the threshold between life and death is a traditionally dangerous place. What you described sounds like an entity which prowls around that threshold, scavenging for any morsels of energy they can get. As food, I mean. See, our thoughts, our feelings, our actions—we're always projecting energy, no matter what we do. And apparently, there are some… things… out there that feed on the more negative flavors. Grief. Anger. Despair. And fear—fear is a big one."
Well wasn't that convenient? Charis couldn't help but be skeptical. "Why don't they feed on positive energy?"
"The same reason that healthy people are less likely to catch a contagious illness. People who are joyful and confident tend to be stronger, so parasites have to work harder to get through to them. It's the people who are exhausted by negativity who make easy marks. And apparently there's a particularly nasty kind of entity that targets the newly dead—"
"Like that guy Rick," said Charis.
Then Diana warned, "Or the not-quite-dead."
Like David.
Shaken, Charis reached to her husband and took his hand. Of course, he couldn't squeeze back. His hand was limp in hers. "So… so if this is common, they must have some kind of remedy, right? An exorcism of some kind?"
"Except that it's not common."
"But you just said—"
"They've heard of this, yes, but on battlefields or in concentration camps. Apparently they were common in asylums, before the mental health profession cleaned up its act. This sort of Creature can't exist unless there's the right mixture of suffering and death to draw it and to maintain it over a long period of time. They never heard of one in a modern hospital. Never."
Charis shook her head. "Then why this hospital?"
"That," said Diana, "is what we have to find out. While David still has the energy to fight this thing off."
Dave managed to venture farther and farther from his body, as the days passed, until he could roam much of the hospital.
He wasn't sure if that was a good sign, regarding his body's health. He wasn't sure that his once-turquoise aura fading to a misty, bluish smear, was reason for optimism either. Probably not. But at least this meant he was able to patrol the E.R. and the ICU again. And not just to stand guard against the Creature.
He'd become increasingly fascinated by the death process.
What surprised him most was that, often as not, it seemed to be a good thing.
"Wow," he commented, as one woman sat up from a cancer-ridden body and stretched her astral arms up high over her head. She radiated glittering light. "You seem almost… cheerful."
"Why not?" She swung her legs off the gurney and stood, leaving her less-distinct corpse behind her. "I've got energy for the first time in months. My chest doesn't hurt. I don't feel like throwing up. The hard part's definitely over."
Dave glanced over his shoulder, to make sure the Creature kept its distance. He needn't have worried. If Diana were right, and it only scavenged on negative energies, then this woman was clearly immune. She seemed delighted when the tunnel appeared, doubly so when figures emerged from it.
"Joe!" she exclaimed, flying into waiting arms. "Grandma! And look, Rascal! Hello, Rascal. Hello, boy. Oh, I've missed you so much."
"What about your family?" Dave asked, from his position on the edge of this strange reunion. "Won't you miss them?"
"It's not like we won't always be connected." She looked toward the indistinct figures surrounding her bed and pressed her lips together, marginally more solemn. "I do wish I could tell them not to worry, though. I wish I could tell them I'm okay."
"Don't you worry about them," instructed her grandmother, squeezing her shoulders. "They're strong enough. Now this is your day."
As if it were her birthday, or something.
"Bye," called the woman, as the whole lot of them—a waggly tailed Rascal included—vanished into the bright tunnel. Then the tunnel vanished, too.
"Damn," marveled Dave.
Now that was a death.
And then, in contrast, there were the hard deaths. Like Kathy Wells, from that first day, these ghosts were often elderly and usually confused and exhausted… because, Dave came to realize, they'd been dying long before their spirits finally left their bodies.
And some of them resented the hell out of it.
"Aw, hell," grunted one old man, scowling at the figure still in his bed. "What a lousy way to go."
Or, "It wasn't supposed to be like this," mourned a thin-haired woman, her faded eyes gleaming with unshed tears. "We were supposed to take a cruise this spring."
These spirits, the Creature liked. Dave was so busy guarding their passage from their corpses to the inevitable tunnel, keeping himself between them and the increasingly aggressive scavenger, that he only half listened some of the time.
That is, until he began to notice the same refrain.
"… If I'd have known it would go this way, I wouldn't have had the operation. I'd at least have had an extra year at home."
"… One week, that's what the doctor promised. Just one week and I'd be back in my garden."
"… 'In and out' my aunt Fanny's ass."
"Wait a minute," protested Dave, despite the need to hurry, when a tall, white-haired man made that last comment. "You're saying you were promised a quick recovery?"
"That's right."
And he sure wasn't the first one. "Who was your doctor?"
The man frowned over Dave's shoulder. "Look out, sonny."
Dave spun—just in time to dodge the Creature's silent attack. "Go!" he called to the white-haired man, scrambling back. "You'll be safe when you reach the tunnel!"
"What about you?"
"I'll be safe once you move on," Dave insisted.
But that was only half-true.
As the Creature slimed nearer, emanating such a foul scent that Dave felt dizzy from it, he sensed the increasing danger. These older people had lost some of their spiritual armor as they'd lain there, still hoping for the recovery they'd been promised, dying by inches instead. That's what made them vulnerable.
But what the hell did Dave think was happening to him?
With a barely discernible popping noise, the tunnel behind him closed. Good. Dave relaxed.
And it struck.
The sensation of sticky pseudo-mouths closing around his legs screamed through him. He felt as if his life force, his being, wasn't just hemorrhaging from him, but was being sucked out against his will. As if someone had punched through his leg muscles, twisted his tendons and veins and arteries around its hand and yanked.
Dave couldn't stop himself. He cried out. But he also flung himself blindly away from the Thing, quickly enough that—as a horrified glance confirmed—his legs and feet came with him. The Creature slimed after him. Dave forced himself onto his frozen, throbbing feet and stumbled to outrun it.
It loomed behind him, not quite catching him, almost as if it were playing with him.
How could something that big, without legs or even discernible feet, move so quickly and so silently? But it did. And Dave, struggling to keep his own feet moving, staggered in the only direction his pain-addled mind would let him.
He ran for Charis.
Over the last week, especially as she'd studied astral projection and out-of-body theory, Charis's aura had begun to change. She was still depressed, Dave was sure of that. It frustrated her that she still hadn't managed to actually leave her body—almost as much as it frustrated Dave. And yet…
The fact that she had a mission, even if it was studying a process she would never achieve, seemed to comfort her.
To strengthen her.
Dave stumbled into the room where she sat beside his body, reading not Wuthering Heights but the even less likely Astral Projection for Beginners, and he tumbled to the floor by her feet, panting. He rolled, looked toward the doorway…
And the Creature had stopped. Apparently, as Dave had hoped, it wasn't getting any closer to her.
Charis shivered and looked up. She stared at the doorway, exactly where the Thing lurked in all its misshapen, membranous misery. And to judge by her blank expression, she couldn't see any of it.
Which wasn't necessarily a bad thing.
After a long, threatening pause, the Creature slurped off in search of some other weaknesses to exploit, and Dave was able to lean against the wall, beside Char, and to consider the repercussions of this afternoon.
The Thing had almost gotten him. If he went on this way indefinitely, then the odds were in its favor. Sooner or later, that soul-sucker was going to have him for breakfast.
Charis seemed… okay. No, she wasn't happy. With the exception of her dream visit that one time, he hadn't seen her smile since the accident. But as he gazed at her, memorizing the little line between her brows as she squinted at the page and the way she would unconsciously brush back a strand of hair that hadn't even come loose yet, he thought she would survive this. As some of the spirits who'd appeared to guide loved ones across the threshold had noted—the experience was universal, and loved ones were usually stronger than they thought. So was Charis.
It occurred to Dave that, for once, he didn't resent her composure. Maybe he'd been a selfish jerk for wanting to see her advertise her emotions just to prove her love for him.
Or maybe he was simply giving in to fatalism.
As the throbbing in his ravaged legs eased, David stood and forced himself to step closer to his body. His head immediately began to throb, and his arm, and his chest. He found it hard to breathe—or to mimic breath, since he still didn't know if he needed it here on the astral plane. It felt as if rocks were piled on his chest, crushing him. But he forced himself to stand close for a few moments longer.
He forced himself to really look.
"God," he muttered, through the discomfort. "I look terrible."
His hair, which Charis brushed daily for him, didn't look clean. His jaw was bristly, and his tan had faded sallow. His lips were chapped, despite her best efforts. He was losing weight. And all those freaking tubes! Nasogastric tubes. Endotracheal tubes. The location of the IV was changed every few days, to preserve his veins, and his hands and arms boasted bruises from previous sites, running the gamut from purple to yellow.
When Dave backed away, it wasn't just to escape the agony of pain that the body seemed to telegraph to him.
He bumped into a wall and stopped, shaken by the realization that he didn't want that form anymore.
He was ready to let it go.
With one, no, two lingering concerns.
One was the Creature scavenging the halls of St. Emily's Hospital. What kind of a jerk would he be, to move on while it was still loose? He'd heard what Diana had said—that this kind of Thing wasn't likely to exist without a regular source of food, of negative energy. If Dave's suspicions proved correct, and the source could be traced back to a negligent doctor performing unnecessary operations, then stopping the doctor should dry up the Creature's main food source, right?
Okay, so that was basing a hell of a lot on speculation. But he was already a disembodied spirit fighting a soul-eating monster. It wasn't like there was a manual for this, either.
And since he was a disembodied spirit, then his only hope for stopping the doctor lay in his second concern about leaving.
The woman who sat vigil by his body, struggling to learn an impossibility in the mere hope of seeing him again.
Charis…
"I, David Matthew Fields, take thee, Charis Elise Sinclair, to be my lawfully wedded wife… "
David has never suffered from stage fright, but as he speaks his vows, his voice trembles. He has trouble catching his breath. She's become that beautiful to him.
"… for better or for worse… "
Her wedding gown isn't the romantic sweep of ruffles and train he'd always imagined. Then again, Charis isn't the kind of wife he'd imagined. The ivory gown she chose, long and sleek and simple, complements her solemnity far better than would flounces. And the way she's gazing at him…
"For as long as we both shall live," He finishes, and he means it.
Then it's Charis's turn to repeat the words of the minister. Unlike David, she speaks clearly and simply. "I, Charis Elise Sinclair, take thee, David Matthew Fields… "
So maybe she isn't particularly romantic. Maybe she can learn. But he has no doubt that she loves him.
"… in sickness and in health… "
The service is small, consisting mainly of friends and colleagues. Neither of them have much in the way of family. But they will be each other's family.
He has family, again. And if he's not careful, he's going to completely blow his macho image by tearing up.
"For as long," she says, "as we both shall live."
Dave had figured "as long as we both shall live" would last a lot longer than four years. But so, he guessed, did everyone who took vows. He didn't want to leave her. Of course not! But did he want this to be the rest of her life, babysitting a vegetable? She excelled in responsibility. And she'd rarely even dated before they met. He could easily imagine her giving up on any social life out of some misconceived loyalty.
Maybe the kindest thing was to let his body die. Assuming he even knew how.
It's not like he wanted to risk trying, just yet. And he didn't plan on giving into the soul-for-lunch method.
So, first step? Stop the Creature.
How? Find the doctor.
And as for that…
"Charis," he said, loudly. Like raising his voice would help. "I think it's one of the doctors."
Charis, of course, continued to read.
He said, "One of the doctors may be performing unnecessary operations on the elderly. We need to find out who."
Charis turned a page, continuing to frown at her instruction manual for astral projection.
Damn! Dave planted his hands on the back of her reclining chair, one on either side of her head, and leaned over her. Into her, even. But it didn't feel strange, where parts of them overlapped. It felt right. Like they'd done this before.
"A doctor!" he shouted into her ear. "If it's one of the doctors, we have to stop him! Charis, hear me. Please. I think we're dealing with—"
"A doctor," she whispered, then looked up, startled by her own words.
"Yes!" Dave pushed back off the chair and spun in triumph, then leaned close again to kiss her cheek, even if it felt like an air-kiss to him, even if she couldn't feel it at all. "Yes, Char. We've got to find out which doctor it is."
But a different voice, hollow with distance from the doorway, teased, "You called for a doctor?"
And suddenly, Dave wasn't so sure he was ready to cast off this mortal coil after all.
Because the way Dr. Bennett was smiling at his wife—pleasant enough, but obviously interested—really pissed him off.
"You have left me so long to struggle against death, alone, that I feel and see only death! I feel like death! "
—Catherine Linton
Wuthering Heights
"That was weird," said Charis, more to herself than to Dr. Bennett.
"What was?" He came in and began to do his regular look-over of David. He wasn't David's primary doctor, anymore; like Smit, Dr. Bennett did surgery and sometimes responded to the ICU. But he still checked in every few days, even since David's move to the new ward. He'd told her he couldn't just file people away like old projects.
She'd appreciated that, appreciated the familiar face. Sort of. But Hank's comments about a surgeon's promise killing Kathy made her wary. And now…
Why had she just said, "a doctor"? Out loud? As if it meant something.
Just as intriguing, why did the knot in her stomach insist that it did mean something?
Maybe her imagination was just working overtime since Diana's visit. Maybe she was an idiot to have bought into all that craziness as much as she already had. Maybe her nightmare with David had been just that. A nightmare.
In any case, she was saved answering Dr. Bennett's question when he glanced at the bright yellow book she was reading. "Astral projection?"
Out of the awkward frying pan and into the fire of embarrassment. Two weeks ago, she would either have stuttered or dismissed it as a joke, but… "Do you think it's possible?"
To judge by her first awkward attempts, it was not. Not for her, anyway.
"I believe a lot of things are possible." Dr. Bennett patted David's shoulder, then swung a chair closer and straddled it before sitting. "For example, I believe that more people can recover from head injuries than old-school medicine would predict, if we just change the way we treat those injuries. Fluids are the secret of minimizing swelling, and I—we—made sure your husband got plenty of fluids when he came in. After that, it's just a matter of trusting nature to know what she's doing. I understand that you're probably feeling pretty desperate about your husband right now, Mrs. Fields, but it's far too early for hopelessness."
"What makes you think I'm hopeless?"
He nodded toward the book. "Paranormal diversions could be seen as wish fulfillment. An emotional escape for people who don't want to face reality."
Which was easy for him to say, with his thick blond hair and his golf-course tan and his broad shoulders and his… his…
His being conscious.
"Have you looked around?" she asked, and extended an arm. This was an entire ward full of people unlikely to get better. "Sometimes reality sucks."
"Yes, but sometimes it doesn't suck as much as we think it does at the time. You never know what's going on behind the scenes. Your husband's scans are hopeful, or as much so as can be expected. He's not brain-dead. There's cause for optimism. Don't let anyone tell you differently."
A doctor, she thought again. "Anyone like who?"
Bennett grinned toward her book as he stood. "Anyone you might meet on the astral plane, Mrs. Fields."
Well… that was confusing. He'd said nothing to indicate that he was the surgeon Hank had meant, back when Hank called one of the doctors a murderer.
Still, almost as if she'd been asked to, Charis belatedly stood and followed Dr. Bennett out of David's room.
She looked both directions and saw nothing but the nurses' desk. There wasn't even a community area, as none of these patients were particularly mobile. Either Dr. Bennett walked very, very fast, or he was visiting with another patient.
Still unsure why she was doing this, Charis turned left and paced past several rooms. One was dark, its occupants either absent or sleeping. Another was crowded with someone's family, children and grandchildren perched on windowsills and countertops amidst bobbing Happy Birthday balloons. In another, an older woman lay staring blankly at the ceiling instead of the blaring TV.
No Dr. Bennett. Charis retraced her steps to David's room—and, glancing in, noticed just how still he seemed. How quiet.
How empty.
"David," she whispered. "Where are you?"
If he were here, she thought, he would step up behind her and put his arms around her, strong and warm and real. Yes, like that. And he might rest his chin on her head—like that, she thought again, imagining a weight against her hair so real, she stretched up into it. He would stand that way for a few minutes, anyway. But David couldn't stand still very long, and soon he would be ducking his head, his jaw gently scraping her cheekbone, his breath heating down her neck, followed by his familiar, familiar lips__
She closed her eyes, savoring it, relaxing back into the embrace that felt more right, more necessary, than anything else in her life ever had. "David… "
"Darling," he whispered against her neck. "I love you. You know I love you."
Eyes still closed, she smiled. Yes, she did know it. She would always know it. No matter what.
Then he said, "But we've got this monster thing to figure out—"
And her eyes flew open—to nothingness. Rather, to reality. To the same old, unchanging view of him lying there, corpselike.
Now she was fantasizing about him?
"This is stupid," she muttered, blinking back a burning disappointment. But she turned from the room and sped her step, all the same. In the choice of whether to spend time learning a technique that might not even exist, or looking for clues that might not even exist, at least this one got her the exercise Dr. Smit kept recommending.
"—cause for optimism," Dr. Bennett's voice said from a room ahead of her, and Charis froze.
Was he telling everyone on this ward the same thing he'd told her?
Was he lying?
Her pragmatic, prudent side balked at listening in on someone else's medical consultation. It wasn't just unethical, it was probably illegal! And yet, good God, if Bennett was just mouthing what he thought people wanted to hear…!
She guessed her current situation—hers and David's—had shifted her priorities a bit, when it came to prudence, and she blatantly eavesdropped.
"In light of that, you and your husband may want to prioritize," she heard him continue. "The results of the colonoscopy were disturbing. I don't mean to imply that you were misled. But they aren't yet life-threatening, and there's the chance the blockage isn't permanent. You may want to wait until Leonard has better recovered from his stroke before asking his body to undergo more trauma."
"But what if he doesn't recover?" asked a woman's quavering voice. Charis raised a hand to her own throat, feeling a bond with this unknown, unseen wife, suddenly overwhelmed by the responsibility of deciding her husband's care. "What if he's stuck in this bed until… until he…?"
"That's a different issue," Dr. Bennett reassured her. "People do recover from strokes. We have no reason to believe that Leonard won't. I'm merely suggesting you give him that chance before asking him to recover from a surgery as well."
Leonard's wife said, "Dr. Smit told us that if we wait, he may not survive the surgery."
Oh? Charis could hear her own breathing as she strained for Dr. Bennett's response. "Surgery at any point is a risk," he started. Then something in his tone changed, like he'd given up. "And really, either decision has merit. Please don't think there is a right or a wrong decision, here. Just… be as informed as you can. And ask your pharmacist about Leonard's medications first."
"Thank you. I'll—we'll take that under advisement." But Leonard's wife sounded no more convinced than Bennett had sounded convincing, there at the end.
Charis was so fascinated, so horrified, that she didn't even bother to back away before the younger surgeon left the room.
He stopped abruptly, recognizing her. "Mrs. Fields! I—did you have some concerns about David?"
"I'm concerned about Leonard," she said quietly, and his face set. "I'm concerned that you aren't telling his wife the truth."
"You know that I can't discuss another patient's treatment with you. Just… go back to your husband and hold his hand, read to him, be there for him. Let this family make their own decisions."
"Without them knowing everything?"
He shook his head and turned toward the stairs, but she followed, protesting, "Why not flat out tell them that his medications might interfere with the surgery? The way they did with Kathy Wells?"
Dr. Bennett, of course, said nothing. He took the stairs quickly, his steps echoing off the close walls.
Charis's accusations echoed, too. "You don't think he needs this operation at all, do you?"
"It doesn't matter what I—" But Dr. Bennett bit back his protest. He used both hands to push out the exit from the stairwell, into the hallway on the floor where David had first been brought in, near the emergency room.
Charis followed. "You're a surgeon! How could it not matter?"
He spun on her. "Because he's not my patient!"
She stared.
"He's not my patient," Dr. Bennett repeated, more evenly. "I can only intercede so far. I can offer general opinions. But I cannot give medical advice, not without risking… "
Again, he shook his head.
But this, this was an area Charis knew. Chains-of-command and hierarchies were all about practicality. And efficiency.
And dehumanization.
"Not without risking another surgeon getting angry at you?" she finished for him.
Dr. Bennett said nothing, but she could sense his desperation, as surely as she'd sensed David's arms around her in the hallway, as surely as she'd sensed David's lips on her neck. Real? Or merely imagined?
Oh, hell, what did she have to lose? She chose real.
"His surgeon," she insisted, "who is more senior than you are, and who could get you fired. You don't want to piss off Dr. Smit." It made sense, but she had so much more to understand. Why would anyone advise a patient to undergo an operation he was too weak to survive—or worse and more likely, one he would survive, only to slowly die in its aftermath? How could nobody else have noticed such a pattern? And…
"How can you be such a coward?" she demanded.
In contrast to her David.
The wailing of an ambulance, pulling into the bay, interrupted them before Dr. Bennett could answer her—or not answer her, which was more likely. He looked relieved to escape her questions in order to meet the gurney being wheeled into the emergency room.
"Senior citizen, male, found by his daughter," reported the paramedic. "Overdosed on his medication. Possible suicide attempt. Apparently his wife died a few weeks ago."
Then Charis recognized the frail, unconscious occupant under the oxygen mask, and she caught back a cry of dismay.
It was Hank!
If Dave hadn't been trailing Charis and Dr. Bennett in some dysfunctional mixture of chaperoning and eavesdropping, the Creature would have gotten to Hank first.
Instead, as soon as Charis cried out the old man's name, Dave readied himself.
And sure enough, here it came. The Creature swayed back and forth by the crash cart, as if its appetite refused to let it sit still. Every bulging, membrane-veiled eye, out of dozens, seeming to focus on the blurry old man and the dark, dirty colors he put off.
"No," said Dave. "No, you don't."
But when he looked down at himself, he noticed that his own aura, once blue, had faded to little more than the ripple of heat on a hot day. While Dave still has the energy to fight this thing off Diana had said.
He had the sinking sensation that his aura was kind of like his battery pack… and that it was increasingly low on juice.
And yet when he heard moaning from the gurney—clear moaning, now in his plane—Dave wouldn't have cared if he was out of juice entirely. He didn't intend to watch this Thing eat anyone else.
Certainly not someone he knew. Sort of knew, anyway.
"This way," he whispered, placing himself firmly between the monster and the gurney.
"Wha-a-a-t…?" A glance over Dave's shoulder, toward Hank, showed the man flickering in and out of existence while hospital staff worked over him. "Wha-a-a-t the…?"
Then he was gone.
Then he was back.
The old man groaned—and the Creature, intrigued, started to circle Dave.
"No!" Dave reached out and deliberately trailed his fingers through the edges of the Creature's slime, despite its sickening reek, its burning cold. Broken promises. Broken dreams. Abandonment. Shame.
A bulbous eye, momentarily revealed, blinked at him.
Dave shuddered, gagged. Shaking the goop from his hand, he backed quickly away. "Come on, you stinking sack of slime."
And it ignored him! Instead, it sludged closer to Hank.
For his part, Hank was sitting up on his gurney, more solid now, shaking his head in confusion. "What the blazes is that?"
Hurrying to get between him and the Creature—again—Dave asked, "Where's the damned tunnel?"
But a quiet, strangely familiar voice said, "There is no tunnel."
It was just enough to distract Dave, to spin him back toward Hank, so that the Creature got its shot.
"Look out!" called the old man.
Too late.
The Creature swelled over Dave like a wave. One moment he'd been in the strange twilight of the astral realm, the oddly lit walls and apparatus of a hospital around him, and then—
Impact.
Cold.
Blackness. Or rather… an absence of light.
And pain. More pain than the car accident. More pain than losing his parents. More pain, even, than the time he'd feared Charis would leave him…
Broken promises. Broken dreams. Abandonment. Shame.
Dave became nothing more than endless anger, depthless pain, drowning despair…
"—back!"
Dave gasped as feeble old hands, Hank's hands, tugged him free of the retreating Creature. Dave felt raw, frozen, wholly beaten by life. Not by death; by the inability to escape into the peace of death. He could hardly think, hardly move. But he seemed whole. How…?
Then he could see how.
The angel glowed with so bright a gold, her light arcing in rays far into the corners of the emergency room, that she hurt Dave's eyes. What effect she must have on the monster…
Well, Dave could see that in its absence.
He tried to open his mouth, tried to sit up, but had little will and no strength. God, this was as bad as being stuck in his body!
The angel bent over him, slid a hand across his cheek.
Dave's suffering eased immediately, and he was able to see her more clearly. He managed to work his lips around the word, "You." Then his struggling brain arrived at a name. "Kathy?"
And it was the old woman he'd seen his first day here. New and improved. This woman radiated health, peace, beauty.
And strength.
Aged or not, she had to be the most beautiful human being he'd ever, ever seen.
"Thank you," she whispered to him, while her warmth filled and healed him. Then she turned to Hank, who stared at her. Trembling in recognition. Weeping.
"I told you I would always be with you," she chided him with a happy laugh. "You just weren't listening, were you?"
And suddenly, Hank wasn't the only one of them crying.
"I'm the one who always plans our anniversary," Dave complains, stalking to the front hall for his jacket, his briefcase. He hates fighting with Charis. He needs to get out of here before one of them says something they shouldn't. And before he sounds any more like a woman. "Maybe I'd like just a little indication that it's important to you, too."
Too late.
"Of course it's important!" She says that as if she's made it obvious. At all. She hasn't. Oh, she says the words. She buys the cards. But there's no spontaneity to her. He's beginning to fear that even her passion is by rote.
That he failed to awaken her spirit, after all.
He has an idea. "Then you plan it for once." It'll be great. He'll finally get a glimpse at what she finds romantic. Maybe he'll get a better glimpse of her. "Surprise me."
"I wouldn't know where to start," she says coolly.
"Figure something out." Then another thought occurs to him, one so ugly that he has to turn in the doorway and search her for some hint as to whether it's true. They've been married almost four years. He knows he's been happy. But there are moments when they're talking, when they're planning, even when they're making love, that he has the occasional doubt about Charis. Usually he dismisses it. But this is a bad day, so he has to wonder. What if…? "Unless you don't want to."
And she says, "I don't want to."
God. "Nice job softening that one, Char." When she plays dumb, he reminds her that, "It takes two to make a relationship work."
"We are two people." Does she have to look at everything like some kind of computer?
"Sorry, Princess. I meant two people who care."
"I do care!" At least she makes that much effort.
"Then show it. Show me something." He tries to soften his request with a laugh, but it's an awful laugh. "Show me anything."
She sets her jaw. "Maybe you aren't looking close enough."
Because God forbid she ever be the one in the wrong. It's as if she keeps points. Dave says, "Maybe I shouldn't have to."
That's her chance to agree. For once. But she says, "Screw you."
"Nice spontaneity," says Dave, swallowing back his hurt, "but I'm late for work."
Even then, even as he stalks out to his Firebird—which she also hates—he can't leave it at that. She's his wife. She's everything. He has to keep trying. "I'll call you later," he calls.
But Charis says nothing.
So he drives away. And he's still unsure about her feelings for him even as he's stopped at a green light, waiting for a crosswalk to clear so that he can make a right turn. Surely Charis wouldn't have married him if she didn't love him. It's not like she hasn't said she loves him. But if only she could show it in more than a joint checking account and a shared bed. If only she would make some kind of grand gesture, put herself out therefor once, so that he could be sure. Because if their marriage is in trouble…
It's during that moment of despair that he sees the Corvette racing toward the red light—and the kids in the crosswalk.
Dave doesn't think. He just yanks his steering wheel left and hits the gas.
He had done it on purpose.
Dave replayed the morning again, even while he watched a still-flickering Hank almost vanish in Kathy's brighter, loving embrace. No, the accident hadn't been some kind of suicide attempt. He wasn't that lame. And he was glad to help save the children in the crosswalk; that part really had been instinct.
But all the same, Charis had been right, too.
Even if it had been the absolute right choice, in the broad scheme of things, it had been a bad choice for their marriage. He'd chosen a handful of schoolchildren over his future with his wife. She had every right to be angry about that particular moment of nobility. She was the one suffering from it. Especially after he'd said all those things.
He'd been an ass that morning. He'd wanted a grand gesture?
What did he call the constant, daily vigil she'd kept over his body, when even he hadn't wanted to get near it? If Charis were as indifferent as he'd sometimes feared, surely she would have gone back to work by now. Marrying him? That had been big. Sharing his bed? That was great.
But giving up every other element in her life to sit, day after day, by the bedside of a man who was little better than a vegetable? Being there? Always?
That was love.
He saw it now, in part because he was seeing it in someone else. Maybe he'd been confused because his own parents had died before he'd learned it from them. But he was seeing it now.
"It's not your time," Kathy insisted, leaning her forehead against Hank's, holding him in her warmth. "You have more to do."
"And you'll be here?" he asked, his voice trembling. "With me?"
"Always, my love. Always."
So he nodded, then grimaced at the body on the gurney. "Whooey," he muttered. "That's not going to feel good."
"You can do it," she laughed. "You always were stronger than me."
"And here I thought angels couldn't lie."
They kissed again, long and romantic and true. Then Hank hitched himself back up onto the gurney.
"Wait!" called Dave, then felt guilty. The man was already flickering between life and death, leaving the love of his life behind. But Dave's love was powerful enough to be selfish. "Tell Charis something? Please?"
Hank nodded.
"Tell her that I know it's Smit," Dave said quickly. "Tell her I have a plan. And—and tell her I love her?"
"I'll do that," Hank assured him. Then, with a grimace of distaste, he leaned back into his body—
And the body seemed to lurch back to consciousness.
Kathy smiled, pleased. When she turned back to Dave he felt awed, as if he were in the presence of a saint or… well, an angel. "You've been kind to us more than once, Mr. Fields."
"Then… " David felt like a jerk for asking anything more, after she and Hank had saved him from the Creature, but this might be his only chance. "Then I have a favor to ask you, too. If you really are able to come back."
"Oh, we're able to come back," she assured him, with a beatific smile.
Dave wanted to get back to Charis, even if it was merely to hold her in her imagination, like he'd held her in the doorway to his hospital room. He sensed, from his pale aura as much as his inability to fight off the monster, that his time was short.
But duty called.
"Then how would you like to help me stop this from happening to anybody else at this hospital?"
"We've braved its ghosts often together, and dared each other to stand among the graves and ask them to come… but Heathcliff, if I dare you now, will you venture? If you do, I'll keep you. I'll not lie there by myself: they may bury me twelve feet deep, and throw the church down over me, but I won't rest till you are with me. I never will!"
—Cathy Wuthering Heights
"Are you Charis Fields?"
Charis stopped pacing the overcrowded emergency room waiting area, startled in her worry by a middle-aged woman. The resemblance was obvious. "You… are you Hank's daughter?"
"Yes, I'm Jean."
"How is he?" Charis hardly knew Hank Wells, but between the immediate intensity of their brief relationship and her previous experience in this damned emergency room, she felt close to panicked.
"He's fine," Jean assured her, relief palpable. "It was close—his blood pressure dropped so low that his heart stopped for a moment—but he's fine now. They pumped his stomach and gave him charcoal, and he's going to be just fine. He's asking to talk to you. I wasn't sure…?"
"We became friends in the ICU."
Even as Jean led Charis to the curtained area where Hank was being treated, Charis could hear the old man arguing. "I'll talk to your shrink all you like, but I'm telling you, I did not try to kill myself. It's just… Kathy's the one who kept track of my medications. My Kathy always looked out for me that way. I guess I just got confused."
Passing through the curtain revealed that he was talking to a black lady doctor, who was nodding.
"Daaad." Jean extended the word, her tone a harmony of love, and fear, and frustration. She had to be in her mid-forties, but Charis could suddenly see the teenager she must have once been. "That's why we've been after you to move in with one of us. Or if your independence is so important to you, at least consider an assisted living community."
"I might just do that, Jeannie-mine. But first, I'd like to speak to this lovely lady here. Hello, Mrs. Fields."
"Hank. I'm—" But what could she say? Sorry you OD'd? "I'm glad you're feeling better."
"That I am. Better than I've felt since I lost Kathy, truth be told."
The doctor took that opportunity to draw Jean aside for private consultation. Now Charis could finally find out why in the world a man she barely knew would ask to talk to her.
Then he said, low, "He's just fine."
For a moment, Charis didn't understand. He? Who…?
Then she remembered that Hank's heart had stopped.
David! She clapped a hand to her mouth, catching back a cry that sounded pained to her own ears. But she was glad, so glad to have any word from David, even that pain was a good one.
Hank studied her, curious. How a man with smears of charcoal down his face and shirt could look so wise, she didn't know. "So you believe me? Just like that?"
But it wasn't "just like that." She believed him after having imagined David holding her in the hallway—or not. After having dreamed about him—or not. After any number of moments when she thought she saw something, noticed something, at the edge of her hearing or vision. This faith had taken weeks to build.
So Charis nodded. If believing that David was here, just beyond her ability to see or touch him, was crazy, then she no longer wanted to be sane. But it wasn't crazy.
Either Hank proved that—or they were part of each other's insanity.
"Did he talk to you?" she asked. "Did he help? Did… did you see the Thing?"
Hank shuddered. Apparently he had. "My Kathy sent it packing, I'll tell you what," he said proudly. "But your husband, he bought her the time to do it. He asked for me to give you a message."
Charis nodded, held her breath.
"He said he knows it's Smit. I don't know what that villain's been up to now, but it sounds like Mr. Fields is onto him for something."
Charis wrapped her arms around herself at the idea that David had been there when she talked to Dr. Bennett and learned the key to the hospital's curse. "Then Smit is the one who recommended Kathy's operation?"
Hank nodded, his thin-lipped, black-smeared mouth tight. "I know it's a sin to hate a fellow. And now that I've seen how happy Kathy is, how healthy she is, I suppose I shouldn't hold it against him like I do. But I still resent the time he stole from us, even if we do get it back in the next world. He should've known Kathy wasn't well enough to recover, should've known her medication would work against her. I guess I'm just selfish."
"Or in love," said Charis. Like Heathcliff.
A love so powerful that a person wouldn't care whether or not they're selfish, so necessary that a person would sell his soul to keep from losing it.
Two different questions—why would Smit do such a thing? and what else did David say?—warred for priority. Charis went with, "What else did David say?"
"He said he has a plan," reported Hank. "And he said he loves you. 'Tell her I love her.' Those were his words."
When Charis closed her eyes, she could picture it. Hear it. In her mind, anyway. It still counted.
She smiled and opened her eyes. "Thank you."
He nodded.
She'd almost turned away before her less selfish side reasserted itself. "Hank—do you have any idea why Dr. Smit would recommend operations on people who aren't as likely to recover from them?"
"Because he's a son of a bitch."
"But it doesn't make sense. It's not like he looks any better if he leaves a trail of corpses behind him."
Hank held her gaze for a long, tired moment, thinking. "Well, it's not like they die on the table," he noted finally. "The operations are almost always a success, on paper. Kathy's death certificate reads, 'pneumonia,' not 'surgery.' As for what caused that pneumonia, it seems the hospital's just as glad to keep that part quiet."
Or they just didn't know about it.
Charis thought of David—not her ghostly companion, but the physical David, comatose upstairs—and her stomach cramped in recognition. The most common cause of death for someone in a coma was infection, especially pneumonia.
Long, lingering deaths had to be one of the crueler kinds of murder. And while Hank might be old, and tired, and sick from his close brush with overmedication and death, she was not.
"Being a son of a bitch isn't good enough," she decided. "I need to know more."
"You do that." Hank caught her hand with his, old and veined and age-spotted. "And you take care of that husband of yours, you hear?"
"Any way I can," promised Charis, and kissed his cheek.
Since she couldn't do anything about the health of David's body, one way or the other, the least she could do was work toward the safety of his soul.
She had a plan, too.
Dr. Smit wasn't easy to track down. Finally, Charis learned he was scheduled for surgery in half an hour. She made a quick trip by the gift shop, then found the operating rooms and waited as close as she was allowed.
If she had to, she would wait even closer.
As in the emergency room, she felt haunted by bad memories. David, too, had needed surgery—to reinflate his lung and to relieve the pressure in his skull. She'd spent two ugly hours on that leather sofa in the waiting area, where two separate families were clumped together even now, one group holding hands in prayer. God. Was there any wing of the hospital she could enter again, without feeling this weight of dread?
As if on cue, a lullaby tinkled out of the intercom system, signifying that a baby had been born in the maternity wing.
"Don't you want children?" he asks, deliberately turning their shopping cart down the baby aisle of the supermarket. "You said when we were dating that you wanted children."
She's overwhelmed by all the cuteness around her. The cute baby faces on jars of food. The teddy bears on bags of diapers. The bottles, and the bibs, and the teeny, tiny booties. She imagines holding a baby with David's bright smile, with his flashing eyes, and it's tempting, so tempting.
But babies, like puppies, are about more than being cute. They're a big responsibility. As enthusiastic as David is, is he responsible enough?
"You'd have to get rid of your Firebird," she hedges. "It only seats two."
He laughs. "You just hate my Firebird."
"They're dangerous. I've read the statistics."
"They're only dangerous because young, stupid guys like to drive them."
Charis arches a telling eyebrow at him, but he just grins. "You're changing the subject."
"No, I'm not. I just… I don't think it's practical to have a baby yet. I think we need to be better prepared… "
Now, with David out of the picture, even the idea of babies hurt. And not just because, if she'd gotten pregnant when he wanted, he might have been driving a nice, solid minivan. If she'd gotten pregnant when he wanted, she might have a baby to live for.
Still, bad memories or not, she waited there. And she intercepted the older surgeon on his way down the hall.
"Excuse me, Dr. Smit?" She winced at her own politeness, but still removed her hand from her pocket to shake his when he offered.
"Mrs… Fields? Your husband's that fellow in a persistent vegetative state, right?"
Not his spirit.
"I'm afraid I haven't had a chance to look in on him, lately," Smit admitted. "And I'm on my way to remove a gallbladder—"
"I don't suppose you do much surgery on comatose patients," interrupted Charis deliberately. "Do you?"
Smit checked his watch. "That depends. Sometimes a patient like your husband might need a colostomy, to ease his upkeep, or a tracheotomy, to preserve the moisture in his throat. If you're having a problem, we could certainly set up an appointment."
"But—aren't comatose patients particularly susceptible to anesthesia?" persisted Charis, biting back what she really wanted to ask. Somehow she suspected that "Why are you killing off sick people?" would be too direct.
Dr. Smit glanced at his watch again before patting her shoulder. "If your husband is strong enough to survive," he assured her, "he will survive. Now, I really must be going."
And if he isn't strong enough? That's when Charis remembered Dr. Smit's words to her, back in the cafeteria. You won't be of any use to him if you fall ill yourself.
At the time his words had seemed innocent, even encouraging. But now that she knew what he'd been doing, the comment took on far uglier implications.
There was a time when she would not have challenged a man like him. He was older. He was a surgeon. She had no proof on which to base her anger.
But over the last few weeks, she'd learned a lot about following instinct—and being a little selfish.
Not to mention, the brand-new miniature tape recorder in her pocket, which she'd gotten at the gift shop, hadn't caught anything incriminating enough. "So if he isn't strong enough to survive the surgery, he might as well die?"
Dr. Smit widened his eyes at her. "Excuse me?"
"Is that what you're doing?" But she knew it was, even without him confirming it. So she went with direct after all. "You're getting a reputation, Dr. Smit. You like to do surgery on patients who are elderly or weak. And I've been trying to figure out why."
"I don't know with whom you've been speaking, Mrs. Fields, but I'd very much like to find out!" Warning darkened his tone.
"So that you can have them fired? No."
"I'm going to be late for my gallbladder, Mrs. Fields."
"I don't care, Dr. Smit!" She stepped between him and the double doors into surgery. "Do you understand what you've done? These people think they're going to get better. You tell them they're going to get better!"
"People with sense know that any surgery is a risk."
"And you tell them it's a risk worth taking. They want to believe you, to believe there's a chance. And then when they can't recover they just get sicker, and sicker, and more depressed. And what that's created, Dr. Smit…!" She shuddered from the memory. "You have no idea of what you've done."
"What I've done? Anybody who can't recover from a simple surgery is someone who would have been a drain on their family, on the system, on society for years, not just months. How do we know how strong we are until we test ourselves?"
And that, thought Charis with a mix of horror and relief, is the part that's going to lead the malpractice suit against you. "That's easy for you to say. You're healthy."
"Because I'm smart enough to keep myself healthy. I eat right. I exercise."
He wasn't as old as some of his patients, either! And he hadn't worked with asbestos or dangerous machinery, or in cruel weather, like some of them had. He hadn't been in an accident, like David. Maybe he was smart. But he was also lucky.
"That," said Charis, "is called 'blaming the victim.'"
"No, that," he countered, "is called pragmatism." It had never sounded like such an ugly word. Charis could think of a few particularly ugly words that might go well with it. But before she could offer them, the strangest thing happened.
Dr. Smit's gaze focused over her shoulder—and his face went white. White as a ghost.
"Nelly, there is a strange change approaching; I'm in its shadow at present. I take so little interest in my daily life that I hardly remember to eat and drink."
—Heathcliff
Wuthering Heights
"What's wrong?" Charis asked, wary—and turned.
All she saw was the floor-to-ceiling window overlooking a peaceful little courtyard, complete with a tree and a fountain.
She turned back to Dr. Smit, who blinked, then backed away a step. "Me? No. Nothing."
"What?"
"I have a surgery to perform!" He broke into a run.
Charis let him go. She had enough information on the tape recorder to take to a lawyer. It was a start, although one she feared would take far too long for David's safety.
David… Damn. In the excitement of the day, she'd forgotten for whole minutes at a time that David was still… was still…
That he still wasn't David anymore.
She felt guilty for that, and looked back at the window. All she could see were the tree, and the windows across the courtyard… and, of course, her own reflection, superimposed over them. Something felt wrong.
Of course, something had felt wrong for weeks now. Something was wrong; her husband was in a persistent vegetative state! But she still felt so unsettled, Charis had to go check on David. Now.
Just in case.
"Good start," said Dave, to Kathy. "I'm sure he saw you."
The elderly angel kissed his cheek. He felt stronger for it, bathed in her brilliance. "You make sure that wife of yours checks in on my Hank, now and then," she insisted.
"Won't you be there?"
"He could use people in his world as well."
Dave nodded agreement. Kathy turned, walked away—and faded completely, in the space of three serene steps, leaving only the empty, otherworldly corridor.
Dave glanced at Charis and wished he could talk to her about this, but the distance between them was too real. Instead, he followed Dr. Smit to where the surgeon prepared to operate, washing his hands to the elbow, shaking his head as if to clear it of what he'd seen reflected in the window. The slimeball was actually going to do surgery after that? Smit really did subscribe to the school of suck it up, didn't he?
But not on Dave Fields's watch.
"So who's next?" Dave called, before an innocent patient could be wheeled in. "Kathy said that there were other people this man helped kill, other people who want to stop—"
Poof! Even as Dave blinked, at least five people stood there with him, all of them strong and bright with the peace of the afterlife. Three elderly types appeared, and a painfully skinny girl, and a young man whose round face and slanted eyes indicated Down Syndrome. They all exchanged solemn looks while, unaware of their presence, Smit extended his hands for a nurse to dry.
"It's a shame," said the young angel, his voice not at all slurred despite his appearance. "But I suppose he does have to be stopped."
One of the older men nodded, and the five of them crowded around Smit.
"Doctor," called the young man. "You have to stop this."
"Doctor," repeated the skinny young woman. "It's enough."
"Doctor Smit," added the older man. Over and over again, they called his name, walking with him into the operating room. Doctor, doctor, doctor…
Even Dave found it eerie, and he was one of the ghosts.
At first, he didn't think Smit even heard them. Then he noticed the tightness in the surgeon's jaw, noticed the shallow edge to his breathing.
Oh, Smit heard all right.
The nurse asked something that Dave couldn't hear over the ghostly chorus. Smit responded sharply and glanced upward toward the round, reflective disk of the surgical light.
He cried out, looked away—then winced back.
Dave had to know. He came close enough to see how the concave reflector twisted and flattened the surreal faces of Dr. Smit's victims as they called to him. "Doctor?" "Doctor." "Doctor!" Their eyes seemed lengthened, their mouths wide.
Shaking his head, Smit backed out of the operating room before the patient even arrived. Hopefully someone else could do the gallbladder operation if, in fact, it was needed.
Dave followed Smit into the corridor—and stilled, awash in brilliance.
"My God," he muttered.
The hallway thronged with angels, souls whose time had been cut short by Dr. Smit's conceit, by his misdirection, by his bias. Dave couldn't have hoped to count them, even if his vision weren't obscured by their radiance. There had to be dozens. Scores. Maybe even a hundred.
No wonder there'd been enough misery around here to feed a monster!
The calls of "Doctor?" "Doctor!" reverberated around and through Dave. But now, not just Dave felt it.
Smit was staggering now, turning, occasionally trying to flail one of the ghosts away from him. Dave wasn't sure how much he saw around him and how much he only saw in reflections and at the edge of his vision. But he clearly knew something was happening.
"No!" shouted the surgeon, and sped his step, his head down, his jaw set. He was going to ignore them even now?
Dave shook his head. Reckless. . Then he realized what direction the surgeon was headed, and he broke into a run.
Charis!
David was—well, of course he wasn't all right. Charis feared he would never be all right again.
But nothing seemed to have changed, at the moment.
Confused, exhausted, she sank into the chair near his bed. Only once she realized that she'd been staring at the numbers of his monitor, as if she could change them by will alone, did she shake off that useless funk.
She opened the drawer of his bedside table. It was time she forgave him for being a hero. It was time she gave him what little she could.
She opened the new copy of Wuthering Heights and began to read where the pages had opened. '"He shall never know how I love him: and that, not because he's handsome, Nelly, but because he's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same… '"
Her voice broke. She swallowed and tried again, several lines down. '"If all else perished and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would… would turn to a mighty stranger… I should not seem part of it… '"
Come on, Charis. It's his favorite damned book.
She cleared her throat. '"Nelly, I am Heathcliff! He's always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being.'"
But it was no use. Tears were running down her face. Charis let the book fall to her lap. She tipped her head to stare up at the ceiling, teardrops sliding into her ears. David wasn't here anymore. No matter what the monitor said about his heart rate and his breathing and his blood pressure, this wasn't David. David was somewhere else, and he'd left her alone.
But he hadn't wanted to. He'd sent word to her.
Tell her I love her.
With a snuffled start, Charis sat up. She understood her feelings of unease, now. What if David hadn't just sent her the message as a loving communication?
What if it had been a goodbye?
"David?" she whispered, reaching across the space to his bed, shaking his arm. Of course it was futile. She knew exactly how desperate she looked, and she didn't care. Even if this shell was all she had left… "David. You aren't really going anywhere, are you? You can't—"
"What the hell have you done?"
Dr. Smit filled the doorway to David's room.
Charis stood, immediately wary of his hunched posture, his wild expression. "What have I done?"
"You're the one making those crazy accusations," insisted Smit. "You're the one who thinks I've done something wrong. It has to be you. Did you drug me?"
She backed toward the head of David's bed, as if she'd be safer there. "Of course I didn't drug you. Why would you think that?"
"I—" He began to laugh, an unsettled, unbalanced sound. "I'm seeing dead people!"
"Oh, God," whispered Charis. David hadn't just sent the message that he loved her. He'd said he had a plan.
When Smit took another wild step toward her, she pressed the panic button beside David's bed. An alarm began to beep.
"And just what dead people are you seeing, Doctor?" she demanded.
Tara, one of the long-term care nurses, skidded into the room. Even as she rushed to David's side, she glanced nervously toward Smit.
"No!" said the surgeon, to nothing at all. Then, "Be quiet. Stop it!"
"Whoa," murmured Tara, checking David's pulse—and switching off the alarm. "What's up with His Highness, there?"
Smit backed away from them, out of the room. "I said be quiet! I did it for your own good, damn it. I did it for your families!"
"I'd better go get some help with this," said Tara.
When she followed Smit out of the room, Charis followed, too, both horrified and fascinated.
Smit was talking to himself now, flailing at invisible attackers. "Not my fault!" he snarled. "If you were strong enough to survive… better it take a few months than a few years, right?"
With a ding, the elevator doors opened and Dr. Bennett hurried out. "What the hell's going on?"
With one last, wild look, Smit broke into a run for the emergency exit. He pushed through the double-doors to the stairs, vanished…
And screamed.
When Charis heard his scream abruptly stop, her chest clenched. Tara, Bennett and another nurse ran for the silent stairway. Charis followed more slowly to keep out of their way, almost in a trance.
"He's still alive!" she heard someone call. "We need a neck collar and a backboard!"
She thought of Kathy… and as she backed away from the crisis, Charis didn't feel the least bit sorry for the man. At least he was still alive.
That was better than many of his patients, the ones he'd proven "too weak" to survive, had gotten. Just because people were weak didn't mean they shouldn't get every chance to live. The children David had saved, back in that crosswalk, had been especially in danger because they were smaller, weaker than adults. And David himself, he was weaker now…
Charis didn't want him to suffer indefinitely. And no, of course she didn't want him to die! This wasn't something for her to control, any more than Smit should have manipulated his patients' ability to control their destiny.
What she wanted, now, was whatever David wanted. But… but how could David even tell her what that was?
Tell her I love her.
Charis's throat felt tight with the need to act. She had to find him, had to meet with him at least once more, had to tell him she loved him, too. She had to let him know that whatever he decided…
She looked over her shoulder at David's room—and she knew that as low as her chances at astral projection were, they'd never happen inside the hospital. Not with nurses checking in regularly, not with nearby TVs blaring, not with all the conversations and equipment.
No matter how much she'd read, she didn't want to leave her body. She couldn't help imagining it like a roller-coaster drop without the safety harness.
But she had to see David, the real David, at least once more. She had to try!
Decided, Charis headed for the elevators—and the privacy of her car.
"But the country folks, if you asked them, would swear on their Bible that he walks. There are those who speak to having met him near the church, and on the moor, and even within this house… "
—Nelly
Wuthering Heights
"Now that," said Dave, "is what I call vengeance."
Dr. Smit lay in ICU, paralyzed from his fall. He radiated enough muddy gray fear and sulfuric despair to keep the Creature that loomed over him lapping up his pain with its tendril-like tongues for a long, long time. The only thing that would have made it complete would be if Smit could actually see the Thing he'd created.
And maybe if he were eaten by it. Slowly.
So why didn't Dave feel better about this?
"It's not about vengeance."
He didn't have to turn to know that Kathy Wells stood at his shoulder. Her voice and her illumination gave her away. That, and the fact that she'd seemed to read his mind.
When the Creature shuddered back from her light, she drew it in slightly, as if she had a dimmer switch.
The monster began to drink Smit's despair again, but its wary, half-hidden eyes didn't leave the angel.
Noting her tolerance, Dave said, '"It looks like vengeance."
"It's about understanding." She rubbed his back, like his mother used to do when he was little. "Sadly, some people can't understand the consequences of their actions until they experience them."
"But this isn't what he did to his victims."
"Yes, it is. He took away their ability to make an informed choice. He took away their control over their own lives. Now he has lost his own."
"Kind of like when I was hit… " But Dave stopped himself. Charis had been right, after all. That stupid drunk driver had been at fault, but Dave had been given a choice as well.
Kathy looked at him expectantly.
"Okay, so I chose to risk myself," he defended. "It was the right choice."
"Of course it was. Every one of those children, every one of their parents and schoolmates, would agree. Those children have the chance to grow up, to fall in love, to have their own children because you made a selfless, heroic choice."
He liked hearing that. "So why do I feel guilty?"
"Because the one person who didn't have a choice is the one person you would not have hurt for the world."
Charis.
Dave thought of her sitting by his body, day after day, a prisoner to his decision, and he cringed inwardly. He couldn't ask her to do that indefinitely.
But as long as he lingered… wouldn't she?
First things first. He gestured toward the Creature, still feasting on Smit's misery. "What about that Thing?"
Kathy laughed. "Isn't this what you so often accuse her of doing?" she asked, when he frowned at her. "Focusing on practical matters instead of affairs of the heart?"
Her wise-woman routine was starting to bug him. "So I shouldn't do anything about a soul-eating monster?"
"No." As Kathy's smile widened, so did her brilliant golden aura. "But perhaps you could understand her better."
As her light expanded and intensified, the Creature shrank back from her and, by default, from Smit. Dave braced himself. But before it could slither past the edge of her radiance, another angel appeared. Then another.
"Well howdy," said one wise-old-man angel, as if he knew Dave. When Dave squinted, trying to place him through the glare, the angel added, "I see it ain't et you yet."
Only the accent gave him away as Rick-the-business-man's grandfather.
"Y-you… " stuttered Dave. "I mean, how…?"
He probably would have continued to embarrass himself if he hadn't been distracted by a clear, familiar voice.
"David!"
Charis! Dave spun, desperately searched. But he didn't see her. All he saw were several more angels emerging from the bright, spiraling tunnel with which he'd become so familiar.
So why did the tunnel scare him, this time?
The Creature, cornered, writhed in discomfort as a length of light from the tunnel solidified, separated, and became yet another angel. The sweep of light off her seemed majestic.
"Pat Trammell!" this one called, and the shuddering Creature let out a horrible, wrenching screech.
A bright light tore out of it, arched to the angel's side, and resolved into a hunched, shivering person. One who increasingly straightened, healed, reformed into what he'd been.
"Pat," greeted the majestic angel, looping an arm around the recovered soul's wide shoulders. "Welcome home."
She drew Pat into the tunnel even as another angel called, "Becky Russell!"
The Creature's shrieks almost covered the sucking, slapping sound of its writhing, bucking distress. The membranous, raw wound where Pat had escaped flapped with its shudders. Its screeching pierced the air.
But another soul shot from it, morphing into an old, confused, slime-covered woman.
Dave gulped back his unease at the increasingly shredded look of the monster. It bled rolling eyes and ichor in black splatters. Was it shrinking?
Backing away from it brought Dave nearer to the tunnel.
And he felt it!
A sensation he hadn't felt since the day of the accident. Comfort. Beckoning. Drawing…
The tunnel was open to him.
"Mac Harper!" called yet another angel. But Dave was looking past that angel, farther up a line of glowing silhouettes. One leaned out, waved at him, and he recognized her even through her dazzle.
"Mom?" he breathed, suddenly tired, suddenly so ready. And the taller angel behind her…? "Dad!"
Behind him, someone called "Joshua Smith!" That was followed by more air-rending squeals of a dark, dank Creature being burned on the outside and torn apart from the inside.
The Creature was the unnatural part. It was the horror. But nothing could be more right than reuniting with his parents…
Then he heard his wife's clear, desperate voice again"—David, where are you?"
And he definitely felt afraid. And now he knew why.
Dave was scared to face what he had to do next.
But he wasn't scared to face the cause of his uncertainty. Not even close. He turned toward her call like a plant turning toward necessary sunlight.
Just in time to catch Charis as she flung herself into his waiting arms, solid and real. "I did it," she gasped. "I made it. Oh, David… "
Dave buried his face into her hair, held her so tight, so very tight, breathed the smell of her…
And he felt her tremble against him as, for the first time, his usually calm, cool wife wept in his embrace.
Here in a dimension she normally would not have believed even existed.
Charis hadn't thought she could do it, even in the marginal privacy of her car with the seat laid back. She'd tried again and again, concentrating on the instructions she'd memorized, trying step-by-step to achieve the seeming impossible.
"Relax, focus, envision it. Relax, focus, envision it… "
But willpower hadn't worked. Concentrating hadn't worked.
What had worked was when she gave up, let go… and simply wanted to see David again, one last time, more than life itself.
The first time it happened the sense of otherness, the view of the parking lot rushing past as she was drawn toward the emergency room, had startled her. "David!" she'd cried.
Just before opening her eyes, back in the car. Nothing.
She'd almost given in to despair, then. But despair wasn't, well, practical. She'd done it once, damn it. Twice if you counted the not-a-dream. She would do it again.
And now, here they stood together, bathed in the light of countless… angels?
She didn't care, didn't want to let go.
"I did it. I made it. Oh, David… "
He kissed her head, kissed her cheek, kissed her closed eyes as if he couldn't get enough of her. "Are you crying?"
"No," she lied, and laughed because lying didn't seem possible here. When she opened her sticky wet eyes, he was laughing, too. And his dark, intense gaze looked bright.
"Char," he whispered, and again he kissed her.
Body. Soul. Everything.
Everything.
The sensation of being alone with him, creating their own world amidst the chaos around them, was rent by more ungodly keening. Charis tried to ignore it, honestly she did. The world could end, for all she cared, as long as she and David were together.
She whispered, '"If all else perished and he remained, I should still continue to be… '" But she said it quietly, in case he thought she was whining about losing him.
David broke first. "What's it going to take to shut that thing up?" he called over his shoulder, past spirits helping other spirits into…
Into a bright tunnel.
She almost hadn't made it, had she?
In part to deny the presence of the swirling, inevitable threshold, Charis followed David's line of sight to the most miserable, disgusting puddle of Creature she could ever have imagined.
"Let me… " for some reason, David laughed at himself before he continued. "Let me deal with one more practical detail."
He strode toward the Thing. That's when Charis saw just how tired he looked, how… dull. She didn't see auras the way he apparently did. But she could tell that being trapped betwixt and between had weakened him, somehow. It had diminished him. And small and helpless though that Creature might look…
"No!" she called, and ducked between him and it.
"Wait!" David protested.
"Stay back. You're not strong enough anymore."
"Like hell I'm not!" He sounded like the businessman that had been eaten in front of them, the one Charis now saw being led, shivering, into the tunnel.
She didn't want to think about the tunnel. And since she doubted she could convince him, she did the only thing she could think of. Something rash.
Something David-like.
She turned, crouched—and picked up the cool, rubbery remains of what had been a monster before Dave could get to it. "So this is all you were before that slime-ball of a surgeon overfed you, huh?" she asked it.
"Charis!" bellowed David, reaching for the Thing. She twisted it away from him. "What do you think you're doing?"
"I'm letting it go." She slid the sorry, shivering Thing under Smit's bed, where it immediately cowered into protective shadow. Then she stood. "Unless someone like him shows up and starts creating too much misery and death, it shouldn't get big enough to harm anybody else."
David didn't look convinced. "What if it had hurt you?"
Hurt her? Her?
"You have got to be kidding!" Damn. It really was too easy to speak one's mind on this realm, wasn't it? "What if I got hurt?"
To her surprise, David looked chastened. "You're right. Char… I'm sorry. I'm so sorry I created this excuse of a life for you. You're the only innocent victim in this whole thing."
What? "I'm not the one in a hospital bed! I'm not—"
Dying. But she couldn't speak the word. She would never, never speak that word.
"I made my choice. And God forgive me, Charis, I didn't choose you."
That should have hurt a lot more than it did. "No! David—no! You made the right choice. I don't blame you, not as much as I admire you anyway." She framed his jaw with her hands, held his gaze. "You're the bravest man I ever met."
He tried to shake his head no.
"Yes, so I'm selfish enough to resent what we lost. Who wouldn't? What we lost was, it was magic. It was love. But regret what you did? David, you're my hero. I—" She could barely force the words. She wanted to do anything, anything but to say them. Still, this was why she'd fought so hard to get here, wasn't it? "I love you. I will always love you, no matter what happens. I had to make sure you knew that."
"I know it," he murmured.
"I've always been so horrible at showing it. I'm sorry."
"I shouldn't have doubted you. I was a jerk. I was such—"
She covered his mouth with her own, and not just to silence him. If this was all they had left, the moment shouldn't be spent in regrets. It should be spent memorizing every bit of his soul. Her soul's mate.
"David," called a gentle voice behind him, at the tunnel.
The angel had eyes just like his. This resemblance, too, was obvious. All the other spirits had gone except for her.
And him.
"I can't leave you," said David. "I can't do that to you."
"You can't just wither away to nothing! People work through grief, so I will, too. I'm sure I will." Probably she'd be more convincing if she weren't starting to cry.
David's skeptical gaze said the same thing.
"I'll find that idiot boy and tell him we forgive him," she hurried on, trying to outtalk her closing throat, her burning eyes. "Because it's what you want me to do."
"You're being practical again," he warned.
"Because—" Too late. Her last words came out in an unbecoming wail. "Because it's the only way to let you go!"
With a groan, David pulled her back into his chest, back into the only embrace she ever wanted to know. "I'm sorry," he whispered into her hair while she sobbed, noisy and wet and shameless into him. "I'm so sorry."
"If I follow my heart," she slurred, between desperate gasps, "I'll just turn selfish again. I can't do that to you. I can't. I love you so much… "
"Shhh. I love you, too, Char. I don't know how I ever deserved someone like you."
"David," called his mother, again.
And, at the wail of a car horn, Charis started awake—or at least aware—in her car's reclined seat.
Alone.
"No," she muttered, shaking off the momentary dizziness of being back in her body. And that's exactly where she was. In her body, in her car, in the rapidly darkening parking lot. "No!"
She had to do it again. She had to go back. She couldn't leave it at that! "Relax, focus, envision."
But a buzzing in her pocket wouldn't let her concentrate.
With a lurch of dread, she recognized the vibration of her silenced cell phone. No…
Part of her knew, even as she fished it from her pocket. Part of her understood, even before she saw the number for St. Emily's long-term recovery ward on the phone's display. But she didn't answer it. She couldn't face it. Not yet.
For a few more moments, even as she scrambled out of the car, she made herself focus on the sensation of David's soul in her arms. He loved her. He knew she loved him. That mattered.
She ran across the parking lot in a daze, barely dodging a car that braked and honked. The evening receptionist, who knew her well now, called a hello, but Charis didn't answer. She felt as if it would be blasphemous to speak.
She had to get to David, first.
As she stepped off the elevator and navigated the maze of corridors to long-term recovery, Charis saw several hospital personnel rushing in. A blue light flashed over the door to David's room, signifying an emergency.
Charis sped her step. At least his suffering would be over, she thought doggedly against her growing, selfish fear. At least… at least…
But no. Nothing would make this more bearable.
She broke into a run. Braced, she swung into David's room.
And was confused by the smiles on the doctors' faces. What was there to smile about? Why had they raised the head of David's bed for the first time since his accident.
Then she met his gaze.
Her hands pressed to her mouth at the kick of recognition. Yes, his face was gaunt and pale. Yes, his eyelashes looked spiked and oily from the drops they'd been giving him. But those bright, intense eyes?
It was David. Awake. Alive. It was David's soul.
"Ch—" he tried, his words slurred and hoarse. "Charis."
She began to tremble, staring.
"It's a good sign," encouraged Nurse Tara. "He'll need physical therapy, but Mrs. Fields—this is a really good sign. Your husband's obviously a fighter."
"Fight." David swallowed, obviously in pain, clearly uncomfortable with his recovered language skills. "With me?"
His eyes pleaded far more eloquently. When he said fight, he meant it. There would be physical therapy. Rehabilitation. Frustration. It wouldn't be easy.
"Char?" he added.
With an almost inhuman cry, full of more emotion than she'd believed herself capable of, Charis fell on him. She kissed him, held him, smeared him with her tears and who-knew-what. "Stupid!" she scolded him. "You stupid, wonderful risk taker."
"For. You."
She kissed him.
Then she held him.
"Not in… " He took a deep, deep breath of her, and seemed to relax. "Not in the abyss alone."
"No," she agreed, kissing him again. She loved how his stubble scratched her cheek. She loved his sour breath. She loved the feel of his thick, thick hair as she wove her fingers into it to hold his head under her onslaught of kisses. "Never alone."
And together, they could conquer anything.