“Hello?”
“Yeah, who’s there?”
She ventured farther into the room and could see the foot of his bed protruding around the corner. “Uh, it’s just me, Mandy, coming to say hello … I think.”
“Mandy?”
She came past the corner …
Oh, my.
It was he, the painter, shoulders in a brace, wearing … wow, it looked so much like the gown she had at the fair that day. By the pale, horrified look that came over his face and the way the ice rattled in the water glass he was holding, she figured he recognized her. “You!”
She gave him a shy, apologetic wave. “Hi.”
“You—you’re Tinkerbell, the pink girl!”
“And you’re Ernie the painter, right?”
His hand went to his call button, and he pressed it like he was reporting a fire.
“I’m sorry about what happened. I hope I didn’t do this.”
“You
did
do this!” He almost couldn’t say it, he was gasping so hard. “What are you doing here, you some kind of ghost?”
Oh, man, this was going south in a hurry. “No, no, I’m not a ghost, I’m real. Here, feel my hand—”
“Yahh!”
He shied back, which made his injuries hurt, which made him yell in pain. “You get away from me!
Get away
!”
There was going to be trouble, no way around it.
“Well,” she said, backing out of the room, “I just wanted to say hello. Sorry if I hurt you.”
He was still hollering. “
Nurse!
Somebody, help!”
She got out of there.
Where now?
Away from the nurses’ station, down the other hallway, back to the elevators—
“Miss!” said a voice. “Excuse me?”
It was a nurse hurrying down the hall. Ernie was still hollering for help.
“Were you bothering that patient?” the nurse demanded.
The nurse was getting close enough to grab her. Mandy thought of smiling, denying, walking away …
She ran—in kitten-heel sandals. The nurse was in sneakers; she was going to win.
“Oh, no you don’t! Stop! Stop right there!”
Mandy gave it her best and it was an all-out chase for several yards until the nurse turned back, probably to check on the patient. “Stop her! Where’s Bill? Call security!”
Mandy clumped, clopped, hobbled, and hopped out of her sandals and took the first right, hoping to circle back to the elevators, but now the alarm was spreading; other sneakers were pitter-pattering in the halls, voices were shouting—but not too loudly. They would hem her in soon enough. Forget the elevators, they’d head her off there.
She found the stairs—right where they’d always been—and took them, bounding down two and three steps at a time, sandals in her hand, to the main floor. She opened the stairway door a crack, made sure the hallway was empty, then stepped into the hallway looking for an
EXIT
sign. No problem; there was one down the hall to the left. Time to say good-bye to this place. She scurried toward the sign, passed an unmarked elevator …
Stopped. She knew this elevator. She’d been in it, rode it down, down, she didn’t know how far down. There was no button on the wall to press, just an electronic keypad with a card slot.
Somebody was making very good time coming down the stairs.
Could she … ?
She placed her hand on the closed elevator door, closed her eyes, thought of so many visions she’d had of this elevator …
Bill, male nurse, along with Tyler the security guy, thought they saw someone through the window of the stairway door, but by the time they burst into the hall there was no one there.
Bad move, very bad move! The moment her feet left solid ground and she went in-between, something sucked her through the elevator door and she tumbled down the shaft like a particle in a vacuum hose, flailing and groping for control but finding none. At the bottom she made a dizzying, pretzel-bodied ninety-degree turn and shot into another hallway like a leaf from a downspout, afloat above the floor. She groped for the floor to stop herself; the floor rushed around her hand like water. She reached for the wall—her hand passed right through it. She was rushing down the hall in an invisible current, spinning in unseen vortices. One of her other hands, one that might be in this place, contacted the wall …
She landed on the floor with a bump, bruising a knee, banging a hip and an elbow, sliding to a stop on the tile. Clunk-clunk! Her sandals came to rest not far from her. She felt nauseated.
But she made it. She’d seen this hallway before. She remembered the quiet rush of the ventilation system, the hum of the lights, the cool, hard tiles under her, and the hallway’s distinguishing feature, the steel double doors that spanned it just a few yards away. On the wall was a blinking keypad for admittance, and painted across the doors in bold red letters were the words
AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.
“Well, hi there!” she said.
So she and those doors were meeting in the real world at long last.
She rose wearily from the floor, straightened her dress, and slipped into her sandals. She walked to the doors, extended a tentative hand, and touched them. For the very first instant she wondered if she might try to pass through them, but recent experience killed that idea. As she’d just found out, going in-between in this place was like parachuting into a thunderstorm. Besides that …
Something on the other side of those doors had such power as to send terror through the steel, and she could feel it. She, or part of her, or one of her, had been inside and brought back the memory of electric hums in windowless chambers, senseless numbers blinking and sourceless voices muttering in the dark, the stench of singed hair, the red glow of fire … the half-open eyes of monkeys as they ignited in flames.
She backed away, scared to the point of shaking, remembering how those doors had once sucked her in. Even now, in the solid, real world below Clark County Medical Center, she could feel them pulling, drawing, tempting her. No. She could never go there again.
Did a person need a clearance card to get out of here? The elevator had no keypad or card slot, just a button. She pressed it, then wondered what she’d do if someone else rode the elevator down and they ran into each other.
The steel doors began to open!
The stairway door, behind her! She ducked through it and crouched against the wall. She heard two voices in the hall.
“Where’s Kessler?” said one.
“We’ve paged her. But the subject took the stairs and then security lost her.”
“She’s probably long gone by now.”
“Wouldn’t that be better?”
The elevator dinged. She looked through the door window in time to see two doctors—at least they were wearing white coats—get into the elevator.
Before the big steel doors swung shut she caught a glimpse of a dark hallway bathed in hellish red light.
Well, this was quite enough for one day. She hurried up the stairs, one flight, two flights, three, four. She reached a landing with a door and went through.
Oh, wow, main floor, back in the hallways. A sign on the wall directed her toward the lobby, and she went back the way she came. A left turn at the next intersection should take her past the gift shop, then to the lobby and out of there. She reached the intersection, turned left—
And almost collided with a lady doctor, her sandals squeaking on the floor as she braked and almost toppled.
Try to bluff?
“Oh, sorry, excuse me.”
Smile, try to pass by—
But her eyes went to the doctor’s face as if the face had pulled them there, and just in time to see the doctor do a double take and turn pale, her professional demeanor melting away. “Oh, my
God!
” She backed toward the wall, putting a hand behind her to touch the wall and steady herself.
Mandy felt her own reaction, an ache of foreboding. “You—you’re Dr. Kessler! From the ER!” It still astounded her that she knew.
Dr. Kessler’s other hand went over her heart as she stared Mandy up and down, wagging her head in what looked like disbelief, maybe horror. Her jaw was trembling. She fell against the wall as if all her strength had gone out of her.
Mandy was stupefied. She was supposed to be running from trouble, but all she could do was stand there. A
doctor
afraid of
her
? “Are you all right?”
And then the disbelief in the doctor’s face gave way to a profound look of pity, the most tragic face Mandy had ever seen.
“What’s wrong? Do you need a … doctor?”
Kessler covered her face a moment, then shook her head in an unexplainable fit of remorse. She looked at Mandy as if trying to find words, but finally just waved her along. “Go on,” she whispered, “go on!”
“Are you sure—”
“Get out of here!”
Mandy hurried, looked back—the doctor was still resting against the wall, head down, a hand to her forehead.
She made it to the lobby and slowed to a brisk but normal-looking walk, making a beeline for the front doors. She came by the reception desk, smiled at Nancy—
A hand grabbed her right arm. “Hold up there, girl!”
“What—”
It was Bill the male nurse and …
Tyler the security guy, grabbing her other arm. “Take it easy now.”
Her first reaction was natural, to squirm and try to break away, but their hands were clamped on her, digging into her, and she couldn’t move. It hurt. From somewhere she found the self-control and civility to ask, “Please let go of me.”
“Not till we’ve cleared up a few things,” said Tyler.
So here she was again, held against her will and painfully so by two insensitive brutes—like Johnny the cop and Dr. Angela’s apes Bruce and Dave and the sneaky Samaritans Clarence and Lemuel—and once again, she was being held and manhandled in a
hospital
.
“Let go of me,” she said, and it was a warning.
Of course they didn’t. They started forcing her along and she knew they would take her down another long hallway to another door that would lock behind her.
Any thought of doing the right thing, any consideration of being reasonable and compliant, flickered out like a candle in a gale, and in their place flashed a burning, visceral rage. She growled, clenched her fists and eyes, reached from the depths of her rage into unseen places and times, and drew back to herself any and all parts of her that were free and could fight.
It happened fast. It was noisy and alarming. Nancy screamed and cowered behind the reception desk. Everyone else in the lobby froze, and some ducked. Mandy remembered making some kind of shrieking animal sound, and before she drew another breath she was coming at Tyler and Bill from every direction, fighting mad, ready to show them how it felt to be grabbed, dragged, manhandled, and hurt. Both came off the floor and sailed several yards before landing, Bill on the floor, Tyler slung over a couch in a sitting area. A lamp next to the couch shook, then slid, then sailed in Tyler’s direction.
It stopped, in midair.
Mandy was looking at herself looking back. The Mandy she was had just come in the front door, neatly dressed, wide-eyed and curious, looking at every little thing until she saw herself.
The lamp crashed and rolled on the floor before it ever reached Tyler.
Mandy was crouching like a cat, panting, disheveled. She’d just decked two men twice her size and was ready to do worse and she would have … which scared her. She stared at who she was then, shocked at who she was now. How in the world did she get from
there
to
here
? Sense and civility returned—whipped and ragged, but they were there, along with a healthy dose of shame and embarrassment. “Oh, boy, are you in for a ride!”
She made sure Tyler and Bill got the message—they were obviously in pain as they looked up at her, not moving—then walked up to her earlier self. The words didn’t come from memory; they burst from her as if foreordained. “Don’t let ’em do this to you, you hear me?”
She could hear hurried footsteps from the hall, see Bill and Tyler stirring. She brushed past herself and headed for the door.
“Let her go!” came Kessler’s voice. She looked back to see Bill and Tyler get to their feet. “Let her go,” Kessler repeated, and they remained in place. Kessler met her eyes, but only to watch her leave.
Kessler did not want to talk to Ernie Myers. She dreaded what she would learn, loathed what she would have to do with it. But the others were waiting.
She leaned over Ernie. “You look like you’ve seen someone, Ernie.”
He was ready to confess. “Yeah, yeah, I did. But it wasn’t a hallucination! I saw her. She was standing right there. She tried to zap me again!”
“Who?”
“The ghost, the Tinkerbell girl.” He spilled it. “Yeah, I saw her on the job. She was this ghost kind of thing, all dressed in pink and sparkles and she just came out of nowhere and when I touched her she, she zapped me, she did all this to me! And I’m not crazy, I swear to God!”
“It’s okay, Ernie, it’s all right. Did she have a name?”
“Uh, yeah. Mandy. She said her name was Mandy.”
Of course.
Ernie brought out a section of Sunday’s newspaper. “And I found her, can you believe that? I’m not crazy, I really found her. She was asking about the Orpheus Hotel, so I checked the paper. Take a look!” He folded the newspaper to the page and handed it to her, pointing at an ad featuring a sprite young magician opening at the Orpheus. “That’s her! Mandy Whitacre! That’s the gal I saw! Man, she must be really good. I’d just like to know why she zapped me and broke my collarbone.”
Kessler straightened. No surprises here, just confirmation. “I’m sure she could have explained it all to you.”
“Yeah, well, she’ll explain it all right, she’ll explain it to my lawyer!”