“The Beast,” Tangina muttered, “would work its will.”
Quietly, Tangina removed the I.V. from her arm, taped the puncture site, dressed, and slipped from her room. She walked down the hall, past the nurses’ station, to the doctors’ conference room. There she found Dr. Berman sitting, as she knew she would, talking to a medical student.
She addressed the student first. “Would you excuse us, please?” The flustered youngster left; Tangina closed the door behind him.
“Where the hell’s your I.V.?” demanded Berman as she sat down. “You shouldn’t even be out of bed. Let alone dressed.”
“Hello! And how are you?” she said brightly.
“Being nice is no excuse,” he scolded. “Now, what do you think you’re doing?”
“Just saying . . . hello,” she smiled.
“Meaning what?” He turned a jaundiced eye on her.
“Well, aren’t
you
suspicious.” Tangina tried to sound insulted, but failed. “Anyway, I just wanted to say thank you for . . . calling me back this morning.”
“Calling you back?”
“Yes. You know, sometimes, if no one is calling, it’s hard to come back.”
Dr. Berman scratched his head. “I have the feeling you’re talking about altered states again.”
“It’s hard to know, from time to time, exactly which is the altered state, and which the referent state.”
“Sounds like my sophomore year in college.”
She laughed with a shake of the head. “Well. You may joke. Still, there are times—critical moments in the migrations of a spirit through the void—when it can go either way. Back to now, or out to never. At those moments, landmarks are crucial—the memory of a touch, a familiar scent. In this trial of mine, you were my landfall. Your spirit cried out for me to come back, and to you I came. The candle that is you. For this, I thank you.”
Dr. Berman looked supremely embarrassed. “No one’s ever called me a candle before . . .” He started to try to make a joke out of it, but stopped.
Tangina walked over to his chair. He sitting, she standing, they were of a height. “Now,” she said, “I want you to kiss me.”
He sat back in acute bewilderment. No patient had ever said such a thing under similar, or any other, circumstances. He had absolutely no response ready. “I . . . I . . . uh . . .”
“Stop being ridiculous.” She almost took umbrage. “I don’t mean anything carnal. Just something . . . warm. Human.” She softened. “The breath of affection, to cup in my hands.”
He didn’t know what to say. “I have bad breath . . .”
She leaned forward. They both closed their eyes. Their lips met: touched, paused; paused, parted.
She stepped back. “Good-bye,” she said simply.
“You sound almost as if you were saying goodbye,” he replied.
She turned and left.
In the corridor she ran into Louise Dreyer, the volunteer.
“Louise, I’m so glad you’re here. I was just going to go look for you.”
“Miss Barrons . . .”
“Please come with me.” Tangina led the woman down to her room, sat her in a chair. “Now. I haven’t much time or energy to give you, but I didn’t really want to put you off to this morning . . . and I don’t know if I’ll be back this way again. So please . . .”
“Oh, no, no . . .”
“Yes. Please. Tell me what you need, and perhaps I can help you, even just a little, right now.”
Louise screwed up her resolve, took a deep breath. “All right. It’s my brother, Andrew. He vanished five years ago, and I just know he’s alive, and if you could just let me give you something of his to feel, and take a reading, and tell me even just what area of the country he’s living in, just any lead that would help us locate him, I’d be so grateful, I could give you whatever we . . .”
Tangina stopped her with a raised hand. “Sshh.” She placed her palm on Louise’s head, closed her own eyes, went into a light trance. Louise remained absolutely silent.
Tangina opened her eyes again a minute later. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“Sorry?”
“I’m sorry, I can’t get any feeling for him—I don’t know where he might be.”
“Oh . . .”
“But leave your address for me at the front desk, Louise. And if I ever run across Andrew, or news of him, during my . . . travels . . . I’ll be certain to try to reach you.”
“Oh, thank you, thank you, Miss Barrons.” Louise was profuse. “Yes, I’ll leave all the information you need.” She almost ran from the room.
Tangina sighed. Andrew was dead, that much was clear. Louise knew it, too, whether consciously or not. Tangina hadn’t received any vivid picture of the circumstances of that knowledge, but she didn’t want a clearer picture. She wished Louise well. She breathed deeply a few times. She hoped she didn’t run into Andrew.
She walked out into the hall again, up the first stairwell she found, up to the fifth floor. Five North. She walked to the nursing station.
“Is Julie here?”
One of the nurses looked up. “Down the hall, passing meds.”
Tangina walked halfway down the hall, and stopped. Julie stood at the medication cart with her back to the psychic, counting pills into paper cups. Willow-thin, blond, a little stooped. Tangina studied her aura.
At last, she walked up to the young woman. “Excuse me . . .”
Julie turned. “Yes? Oh. Yes?” She was a bit surprised.
“Excuse me, I’m rarely this forward, but I’m about to go on an extended trip . . . and I thought I’d like to say . . .”
“Yes?” The young nurse looked intensely curious.
“You . . . have a lovely aura. I . . . that’s all. God bless you, dear.”
Tangina turned and exited quickly by the far stairs, leaving a bemused Julie recounting her pills.
So much for final farewells. Time now for the final grim event. She descended six floors to the basement. She didn’t exactly know the hospital layout, she wasn’t sure just where she was, but she knew she was in the basement, and this was where most hospitals kept the place she was seeking. The morgue.
For it wasn’t the child she was after anymore; now, it was the Beast she must lure.
She walked up one hall and down the next, some dark, some lit with sickly fluorescence. She passed labs, locker rooms, lecture halls, slide libraries. Finally she came to a door marked PATHOLOGY: NO UNAUTHORIZED ADMITTANCE. She knew what that meant. Gently, she cracked the door and went in.
The room she found herself in was the pathology museum. Shelf upon shelf lined the walls, floor to ceiling. Each shelf was filled with bottles, each bottle filled with liquid; in each bottle, something floated: a cancerous hand, a head sliced in planes like a loaf of bread, a mutant embryo, a diseased kidney. A museum of human pathology. Tangina flared her nostrils—if she couldn’t find a place to hide in the morgue, this place would do nicely. Empty, dark, quiet, deathly; a proper place for her task.
She ambled across the floor to another door, this one frosted white glass, upon which were stenciled the letters POST-MORTEM. Beyond the glass were bright lights, and the sound of clackering instruments.
She approached the door, pushed it open an inch, and peeked in. Four men in white coats stood around a single corpse lying pale upon a steel table. They joked, spoke of football and sex. Two of them ate sandwiches. A third took a scalpel and began to flay open the belly of the cadaver.
Tangina let the door ease shut. A good place, in there, but too crowded. It would have to be in here, her seance. She would have to call the Beast to her here.
She looked all around until she found just the right spot—a niche formed by a semicircle of bottles piled in one corner: a brain, with eyes attached; a malformed fetus; a gouty foot; a heart, showing entrance and exit wounds; a face eaten by tumor. The catalogue was endless. Tangina curled up in the niche. She stared deeply into a spot of light reflected in the curved glass of one of the beakers. Her breathing grew quick and shallow. Her eyes began to glaze.
“Come to me, Beast,” was the last thing she consciously remembered thinking. “We have much to discuss, you and I.”
She dissociated. The phantoms of the morgue and museum surrounded her—decapitated spirit-forms, ghastly and gray; scabrous, emaciated, tormented, unwhole.
“Beast, come.” Tangina communicated through the ether. “See what I am made of.”
A demon tried to lock onto her from out of nowhere—a test, perhaps—or perhaps it sought her vitality. It made a clackering noise, and it hurt, but Tangina had known worse demons and let it pass through her.
“See, Beast,” she called, “I have no fear to die. Other things I fear, but not to quit this sleepless life of mine; nor do I fear you. I know you, Beast.”
Tangina rose higher, into black space, above the other spaces. She couldn’t soar here, though—this domain was viscous. A diminishing place. It was akin to a plane she’d passed through before—she knew she could cross from here to the sphere of shadows, and from there to the Beast’s domain. But she didn’t want to go there now. She wanted the Beast to come to her.
She didn’t think drawing him here would be too difficult. This was the type of spirit-world he rejoiced in. A phantom without a face rose beside her. A hand—twitching, crushed and severed at the wrist—grabbed at her neck, but she batted it away easily. Rotting entrails flowed behind her, caught her foot, began to enwrap her. She pulled them away, but they left a film upon her, a foul and mucoid odor.
“Beast!” she called out. “Come!”
But he did not come.
She flowed in paceless turnings, trying to approach his lair tangentially, to catch him unaware. This way took her through a universe of yellow webs—a sticky, clinging lattice that enclosed her quickly in a smothering cocoon. She chewed her way out—chewed an air hole, at least—and freed her fingers enough to pull herself thread by thread across the yellow matrix.
Eventually, the lattice turned into a foam of sorts, more slick than sticky, and then into a froth, or lather, in which Tangina foundered, gasping, under a moaning storm. Raging ages passed. At last, the storm abated; Tangina rose above the foam into a clear and icy calm.
She took her bearings. Far ahead, a ruby sun revolved around its indigo twin. Liquid fire gushed between the two at their closest point; amethyst ice crystals cracked and tinkled as they drew apart. Rainbow spirits lived in the diffraction patterns, spiraling in orbits of intricate design. Creatures of light, Tangina trusted them. She called to them her plight; they answered in color-song; they gave her direction.
She moved beyond the sibling stars, into an empyrean of concentric, gaseous rings. Careful not to touch any ring, she tunneled through the core, exiting into a shimmering atmosphere, spotty with mists. It was here, for the first time, she saw the woman.
A stately spirit-woman, moving on the mists. Her gown was regal, fin-de-siècle; her manner, graceful. There was a pale beauty about her face; yet her eyes were the deepest hollows, plummeting to the abyss of another dimension. She had an air of waiting about her.
Surrounding the spirit-woman were twenty souls, who somehow seemed to be looking out for her—on guard, even. Beyond them, a thousand souls milled aimlessly in the vapors, weeping, laughing, lost, wandering. Carol Anne was among them.
The spirit-woman moved in their midst, encircled by her entourage. It was unclear how, but in some way she was the mistress of this astral level. She neither ruled nor guided these wandering spirits, yet was somehow their essence. She was good, withal, but goodness was not her quintessential aspect. Her quintessential aspect was attendance.
The spirit-woman waited. She wasn’t lost, like others here, nor did she tarry in hopes of tempering her state by the timely arrival of that which she awaited. The lingering itself was her object and her element. It made her neither happy nor sad. The waiting was what she was. She abided.
Tangina glided over the haphazard procession, looking for a sign. She saw Carol Anne at one point, rambling through the multitude, but left the girl to straggle, temporarily safe in her anonymity. It was the vile thing Tangina wanted now.
There. In the mists, she dimly perceived him.
She opened herself to sense—so exposed, she was dangerous and endangered. “Beast, I see you,” she glowered. The Beast was in the earthly plane, bending over a woman who slept in a yellow dress—groping, probing, drooling in demented foreknowledge. Suddenly it looked up from its unconscious feast, alarmed by Tangina’s presence.
“I see you, Beast,” she called again. “Come to this one who knows you.”
The Beast screeched in fury at the intrusion. It hobbled crabwise up and down the bed, back and forth, walking across the sleeper’s back, dragging its ragged claws, grimacing, salivating. It sat on her back, rolled her over, sat on her chest. It screeched again.
“I am here, Beast,” announced Tangina.
With a vacant hiss, it took one final look at the sleeping figure of Diane, put away its lust for another time, and loped off. Into the void.
In the void, they circled—Tangina and the Beast. Neither could see, here; neither could hide. All was sense, here, and counter-sense. They circled, coalesced, evaporated.
“Come, show me your fangs,” Tangina laughed. “Do your worst. Say your name.”
Before she finished, he attacked—sank his saber teeth into her neck with an anger beyond all reason. Almost tore her head off. Tangina dissolved, though, into a vaporous presence; wisps of her smoke circled around him. A bit of her even wafted up his nostrils—he shrieked at her smell.
In the moment before he violently exhaled her steamy substance, she crept up his nasal passages. A few motes of her reached his phthisic lungs; a few even needled his turbinates, went into his brain, before he could expel her.
With a great snarling cough he was rid of her, but too late. She’d won the first round. A piece of her knew him now, intimately, from within. He’d never been so violated. It made him wary, and enraged.
They hovered, facing again. Tangina felt powerful after her first strike; but also loathing almost beyond endurance at what she’d been able to sense in the Beast’s heart, and in his brain. It was vital knowledge for her to have, but at what cost!