Graveyard Shift (14 page)

“Don't come near me,” he whimpered. “You're a freak. Stay away. Stay away!”

Nursing his injured paw in the crook of his arm, he kicked open the outer door and ran into the hallway, mewling, his cries reverberating through the school.

I stared after him, stunned. I couldn't stop myself from shaking.

Stay away, enter at your peril. . . .
Mr. October had explained the meaning of the runes, but he hadn't said what it meant to be branded like this, to have to carry the mark wherever I went.

Only Becky had been able to see it. Now I had to know why. I washed and dried my face and collected my backpack from the hook by the mirror, and in the mirror I could still see the mark. If I hurried, I might still catch her. It might not be wise, it might be a terrible mistake, but I ran outside knowing the time had come to tell Becky the truth.

B
ecky's gang was already heading up the street on the bus when I got outside. Becky was waiting at the roadside to cross.

“Déjà vu,” she said, seeing me.

“Can you still see it?” I said, prodding my cheek.

“Yeah. How'd you get it?”

“Long story. Doesn't matter. But I've been thinking. . . .”

“Oh, have you?”

“You were right about the kids, Becky. I did see them, clear as I'm seeing you.”

She all but shrieked with delight, clapping her hands together. Then, suddenly serious, she dropped her voice to a whisper.

“At that desk near the back of the class,” she said. “The one where no one ever sits.”

“Yes.”

“They weren't there today, though.”

“No, not today.”

“Last week,” she confided, “I noticed something too, but I dismissed it, thought I was imagining it. But then you threw a fit, and I knew.”

“You saw something too?”

She thought about it. “Not exactly. I felt something there, though, and the light seemed unusual on that side of the room — you know the way it refracts through a prism? And I could've sworn I smelled something too. Something burned.”

She has it too,
I thought. If not the same gift, then something like it. Unlike me, though, Becky seemed happy, even eager to talk about it.

“Do your friends know?” I asked.

“I can't tell them. They don't believe in this kind of thing. Matthew likes ghost stories, but that's all they are to him — stories. Make-believe. I don't have anyone I can talk to about this.”

“Me neither.”

“So what did the kids do? Did they say anything? And why were they there in the first place?”

“They didn't say much, but I knew they needed help. They're trapped somewhere. Lost. But I haven't seen them since, and I don't know where to start looking.”

“Maybe they'll come to you,” she said. “They did once before, so maybe they will again.”

I hadn't thought of it that way. “Yeah, maybe. In their own time.”

“What's up with him?” she said suddenly, staring past me.

Raymond Blight was coming our way up Mercy Road, his face screwed into a rictus of pain. As soon as he saw us, he stepped aside into the road, skirting around us at a safe distance. By the looks of it, he'd come straight from the nurse's office; his finger was wrapped in clean gauze. He scowled but didn't speak as he passed.

Becky turned to me, puzzled, after he'd gone. “Funny, he looked afraid of you. What was that look for?”

“Nothing. He got his finger caught in a door or something and he thinks it's my fault.”

“What a dope.” She hitched her bag on her shoulder. “Are you going my way? Race you to the nearest caff. I think I can manage a hot chocolate now that the anesthetic's worn off.”

I hesitated. I'd be expected at headquarters soon, but now it seemed more important to be at home for Mum.

“Got a phone I can borrow?” I asked. “I'm supposed to be somewhere later, but I'd better call home first. Mum's not well.”

“Sorry to hear that.” She found her cell phone in the depths of her bag. “It's OK, I've got loads of credit.”

Mum sounded upbeat when I called, much brighter than I'd expected.

“Do whatever you like,” she said. “I'm fine. I'm not made of glass. Ellie's coming for the evening and we're going to have ourselves a good old heart-to-heart, so you'd only get in the way.”

“If you're sure, Mum.”

“I'm sure.”

“Sounds like good news,” Becky said when I handed back her phone.

“It is, in a way.” But I didn't want to say more. “Now what about that caff?”

“Last one there can pay.” She grinned. “Don't worry. The place is dirt cheap.”

And off she ran.

 

The Portuguese café on the edge of De Beauvoir Square was cramped and dark inside, but there were wobbly tin tables out on the sidewalk, so we took one and sat watching the street. I ordered a Coke, Becky a hot chocolate topped with whipped cream, which gave her a foamy white mustache. She laughed and wiped it away when I pointed it out.

“So you believe me about what I saw,” I said.

“Course I do.
I
told
you
what you'd seen, remember? Getting you to admit it was like drawing blood from a stone. Besides,” she added, “I don't have a problem with these things — with death and ghosts and all that. I've always taken it for granted. Accepted it.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. Like when I was six, my great-gran passed away. We called her Blue Grandma because of the blue cardigans she always wore — she must've had twenty different ones in different shades of blue. One night my mum came to my room, very weepy and whispering. She said, ‘Blue Grandma
went to sleep and she's going to sleep for a very long time.' It made me feel very grown up that she'd share this important news with me, and I knew what she was trying to tell me. I said, ‘You mean she's dead, dontcha, Mum?' I could be incredibly blunt when I was little.”

“Blue Grandma,” I said thoughtfully.

“A real sweetie,” Becky said. “Plus, I got to see her again at the funeral. I almost expected to. I wasn't surprised. She was standing on the far side of the grave with her sisters on her left and this elderly man in a white suit on her right. Struck me as odd, him wearing white to a funeral. Gran didn't say anything, she just smiled at me like she knew I knew she was there. But I never mentioned it to Mum later on — I thought it'd upset her. In fact, I never told anyone else until now.” Becky paused, watching me critically. “Question is, do
you
believe
me
?”

“Why wouldn't I?” I took a sip of my drink before asking, “The man at the funeral . . . Did you know him?”

“Oh, him. No. Never saw him before or since. I just remembered him for his kind eyes and grubby white suit.”

She shivered, watching the sky. A cool wind was bringing pale gray clouds.

“Drink up, Ben; it's looking like rain,” she said.

I wasn't in a hurry, but I didn't want the rest of the Coke. I was jumpy enough already without the caffeine. We set off along the blustery street.

“Do you see things all the time?” I asked.

“Mostly I sense things. I can't say I've seen that much,
except once a couple of years after Gran. I was nine then, and driving up to the Lake District with my parents for the weekend. They'd offered to bring some of my friends, so Kelly and Ryan came too. There'd been a train crash the week before — really horrendous. Maybe you remember the news.”

I didn't offhand.

“Two fast trains on the East Coast line had hit each other head-on and burst into flames. They said you could see the fire for miles. We had relatives who lived close to the scene of the accident, and my folks decided to pay them a visit to break up the drive and recharge their batteries. The back of the house faced a huge field, and across the field you could see the leftover wreckage of the crash. The fronts of the trains were fused together by the heat, so you couldn't tell where one started and the other ended.”

She went quiet until we'd crossed the next intersection.

“It was Ryan's idea to investigate the crash site while my folks had tea with my aunt and uncle. The rails were all torn up and that part of the line was closed. It still smelled of diesel and something like burning rubber, and you could see from the way the trains were mangled why so many had been killed and injured.”

“That's awful.”

“Yeah, it was. Kelly suggested a game of hide-and-seek, 'cause you could still get inside some of the carriages. I wasn't sure because of the people who'd died there, but I went along with it anyway. When it was my turn to hide, I climbed inside a compartment near the front and huddled down between
the seats. They'd never find me in there, I thought. The carriage was so dark, they could walk right through and never see me. So I waited, listening to them moving away along the train, slamming doors, and their voices growing fainter all the time.

“It was creepy in there, and I could still smell burning. I thought I'd give it a minute and then go and give myself up. And then I heard something shuffling in the carriage, and this wheezy-sounding breathing. You know, like asthma?”

“God, you must've been scared,” I said.

“Petrified. My hands were over my face, but I couldn't help peering through my fingers, and all these shapes were moving around with smoke coming off them. Some were floating high above my head, moving in all directions through the carriage. I was glad of the darkness, glad I couldn't see more. There were so many voices all whispering at once. I wanted to run but I couldn't make my legs work. Then I started to see more detail: badly burned faces and arms and shredded bits of clothing. Just flashes. The smell of smoke became stronger, and I cowered down and shut my eyes, and one of them spoke close to my ear.”

We walked to the next block while I digested what she'd just told me. Becky stared into space, reliving the memory.

“Isn't that nuts?” she said.

“No, I don't think so.”

“But I never felt like I was in danger. I never thought they meant to hurt me.”

“And one spoke to you. What did it say?”

“It sounded like, ‘Tell them sorry. I was trying to make it right, but I lost my way.' Four years ago, but I still remember it like it was yesterday. I didn't dream it up, Ben.”

“I know.”

We stopped under a tree on a corner as the first drops of rain began falling.

“Sometimes I still think about them,” Becky said. “I just hope they aren't all still lost, like those children.”

“A lot of people are,” I said. “That's why I —” But I stopped myself there, watching the raindrops rippling through the leaves. “Well, I have to get going.”

“Ah yes, the other place you have to be. Anything exciting?”

“Not really. Just helping someone out.”

“Very mysterious. You don't give much away, do you? Well, see ya.”

“Yeah.”

She set off toward home, breaking into a trot as the rain picked up. I watched her go, glad to have someone to confide in but wary of saying too much. A little knowledge could be dangerous, and it wouldn't be smart to involve her too.

Still, as I started to Islington, I couldn't help wondering how long before I caved in and told her everything else. It wouldn't be easy to keep it to myself. And I wondered what Mr. October would make of Becky, whether he'd see her the way I did, and whether he'd remember her from her great-grandmother's funeral.

T
he cold and damp took over the week. Rain fell most nights, and the city streets glittered when I joined Mr. October on his rounds. Ellie had decided to call on Mum every evening, so I was free for the Ministry after school, and when I came home Ellie's umbrella would be propped against the radiator in the hall.

Ellie was a big-boned, good-humored woman with smiling brown eyes and a Mediterranean tan. She'd been a friend of Dad's before Dad met Mum, and she and her boyfriend, Ross, used to join my parents on double dates before they married and I came along.

Ever since Dad left, she and Mum had grown closer, and I knew Mum was in safe hands with her. Not that I was fooling myself — life didn't feel very safe lately and Mum was anything but well — but after Ellie started visiting she seemed more positive, more like her old self.

Ellie couldn't be there all the time, though. On weekends I worked short hours so I could spend most of the day with Mum. She seemed glad to have me around.

On Saturday morning we took a thermos of coffee to a bench in London Fields and sipped the hot liquid and watched dog walkers and cyclists going past. I'd brought my sketch pad and started a portrait of her, hoping to catch her off guard, looking calm and relaxed.

At first she was self-conscious about it, trying to wave me away and cover her face, but by the time I'd finished she was beaming with pride.

“See what I mean?” she said. “Capturing life as you see it, that's what you're good at. I'd rather that than have you keeping the dead company in graveyards.”

“It's OK,” I said. “I don't go to those places often now.”

And I thought,
Because there's no need to. Nowadays the dead come to me.

Later that day, she had her first hospital appointment, and I took the bus with her. The ride was rocky — you could feel every bump on the road — and Mum couldn't disguise the pain, clutching her arm all the way.

The nurse attending to Mum said it would be best if I waited outside the treatment room. They would be at least an hour. She was settling Mum into a big adjustable chair like a dentist's when they closed the door, locking me out.

Ten patients waited on hard plastic chairs across the ward. Three others waited in wheelchairs. At least half of them looked in much worse shape than Mum, and I
hoped she wouldn't become like them if the treatment didn't work.

For a time I wandered from one white ward to another, down one corridor and up the next, the tiled floor squeaking under my sneakers. Everywhere there was a metallic clink of cutlery and surgical instruments, everywhere a sickly smell of disinfectant mixed with blood.

Phones rang around every corner. Porters rumbled gurneys in and out of elevators and operating rooms. I hated hospitals, though I'd never been a patient and I'd only ever visited twice before Mr. October started bringing me. Something about them made me uncomfortable. I'd never known why until Mr. October had explained that eighty percent of the Ministry's cases passed away in places like this.

On Ward 6, a man in his early thirties sat alone outside one of the side rooms. He had a shell-shocked look and his dirty, unshaven face and ragged clothes suggested he'd been living rough. He gave up his seat when an elderly man, not seeing him there, shuffled up with a walker and lowered himself onto it. The younger man stepped away clutching his side, red-fingered from the wound seeping below his ribs.

On Ward 4, in a six-bed unit, two nurses were drawing curtains around the bed nearest the door. A white-haired lady occupied the bed. Her eyes were closed and her lips were smiling. She must've expired in the last few minutes. When the screens were drawn, the nurses' silhouettes moved about her, adjusting pillows and covering her face with a sheet while a third figure much like the old lady's looked on from
the foot of the bed, arms crossed on her chest, one foot tapping the floor.

In a waiting area near intensive care, a fuzzy-bearded biker in his fifties nearly barged into me. The bloody scrape marks around his face and neck and his torn leather jacket were typical of road accidents.

“Sorry, mate,” he called as he strode away. “Didn't see you there. Just like the truck that hit me.”

They were everywhere — on the wards, in the cafeteria, in all the corridors and waiting areas. As I moved through the hospital, I could imagine the telegraph pumping out their names. Sometimes knowing what I knew, seeing what I saw, seemed more like a curse than a gift. There were times when I wished I could shut it all out.

Back on Mum's ward, the clock above the treatment room showed she'd only been inside half an hour. I wished they'd hurry. I was edgy and ready to leave. There were too many strandeds and newly-departeds here, too many voices whispering inside my head.

“How much longer?” I asked the girl at the desk.

She shrugged. “As long as it takes. Why don't you sit with the others, dear, until she's done?”

Past her desk at the far end of the ward, a group of nurses were talking excitedly in quiet voices and nodding vigorously. It must have been a vital medical matter or hot gossip; hard to tell which. A set of double doors swung open behind them as someone else entered the ward, a tall man wearing a
black suit and what looked like small round-lensed sunglasses.

But as he moved farther inside, past the nurses, I could tell those weren't sunglasses. They were the dark, sunken sockets of his eyes. His face was little more than a living skull, the flesh as pale as bone. No wonder the nurses didn't see him and no one looked up: It was a Deathhead, one of Cadaverus's agents. One of the enemy.

The eyeless black sockets narrowed when it saw me. Its lipless mouth grinned. Without pause, it made a beeline straight for me, ignoring the treatment room and the other patients waiting outside it.

That told me all I needed to know. It wasn't here for Mum or the others. It was here for me.

I strode past the girl at the desk, then broke into a run along the corridor to another set of doors at the end. I didn't need to look back to know it was following me every step of the way. Turning left past the doors, I legged it along the next corridor, then went left again at the end. My heart slammed inside my chest as hard and fast as my footfalls across the tiled floor. Arrowed signs to other departments and wards rushed past in a blur.

“There's no point in running,” the Deathhead called in a scratchy sandpaper voice. “We'll find you wherever you go.”

But I didn't care about that. I was more concerned with keeping it as far away from my mother as possible. I ran on, deeper into the maze.

The next corridor I took had a murky, lifeless atmosphere,
as if no one ever set foot there long enough to disturb it. There were no more wards on this part of the floor. There were no more voices or echoes, only a deathly silence. I slowed as I reached a bank of steel-door elevators and hit the nearest call button.

The doors slid open. I jumped inside just as my pursuer rounded the corner behind me. The doors closed an instant before it hit them from the other side, making the steel cage I was standing in tremble. Dry mouthed, I thumbed the button for the next floor down. The elevator simply sat there, thinking it over.

Come on,
I thought.
Come on. . . .

It seemed to take forever before it clicked to life and began its descent. I half expected the demon to hammer the door again, but the silence that followed didn't mean it'd given up. It was taking the next elevator down, no doubt.

The doors spilled me out into an even gloomier space than the one upstairs. It was airless and dark with a constant throb of central heating pumps. The smell of disinfectant and blood was stronger, as if this was the source of it and it crept up through the rest of the building from here.

Metal gurneys stacked with black plastic waste bags were shoved haphazardly against the opposite wall. Past them, along to the left, were three closed doors with more loaded trolleys outside. The farthest room had a light on inside. I hurried toward it like a moth drawn by a bulb, stepped inside, and closed the door after me as the second elevator arrived with a crash.

I leaned back against the door, holding my breath, mentally kicking myself for coming this way. From here there was nowhere to go. I'd arrived in the dark bowels of the hospital, exactly where they'd want me to be.

And worse than that, the room I'd ducked inside was the last place I should've chosen.
Of all the rooms in the building,
I thought. Stupidity or just dumb luck?

I was inside the morgue.

A stainless steel counter ran the length of the far wall. At its center were two steel sinks, and between the sinks a length of hose on a spool. A dozen gurneys took up most of the floor space. Three were occupied by bodies draped with clean white sheets.

Their ghosts weren't around, though. If they were, I would have known. By now they'd be wandering freely through the wards upstairs, scared and confused and seeking assistance. In here, though, all I could feel was a cold emptiness. Those three on the gurneys weren't people anymore. They were shells. They were meat.

From the corridor came the sound of footsteps scuffing across the stone floor. Patient, unhurried footsteps. The demon was taking its time. It knew I had nowhere to go from here.

Or maybe I
did
.

My eyes were hazy with fear, and everything in the morgue looked soft at the edges, but to the right of the counter was a concertina screen. And just visible above the screen, the top frame of a door.

As I started toward it, the tiles squeaked loudly beneath my rubber soles. I froze, listening for movement outside. It wasn't easy to hear above the pulse between my ears, but I was sure the footsteps had stopped. They'd stopped right at the door.

My heart skipped a beat.

And then the door was thrown open and in it came, a dark vision with a pale death's-head face. A worm slithered from one of its eyeless sockets; the mouth without lips chanted words I didn't understand and didn't want to. It'd had enough of tiptoeing around, and now it wanted to tear me to pieces.

I jumped back, colliding with the nearest gurney. The gurney, holding one of the bodies, skewed aside and went into a roll. Its wheels hadn't been locked. Running around behind it, I pushed it with all my strength at the demon.

But the gurney passed straight through it, as if it'd dissolved at one end and materialized again at the other. The gurney struck the door behind the demon and rolled back into the room, the impact sending the corpse it carried into a sideways roll off the edge.

“Harvester . . . ,” the demon began.

I didn't wait for it to finish. I turned and darted between the other gurneys and around the screen, grasping the door handle and pushing.

The door didn't budge. It wouldn't open outward or inward. I tried again as the demon's footfalls crossed the floor behind me.

Then I saw a metal bolt up near the top of the door, another
lower down driven into the floor. The first slid back easily. The second was tougher but gave way when I pulled with both hands. As the demon reached the other side of the screen, I yanked the door open and slammed it behind me and ran on through the next room.

Now I was moving through a cold storage area, a fridge room for bodies. On both sides of the space were the storage units, stacked three-high, gunmetal gray, many of them displaying the names of the departed on their doors. I ran past them toward the murky light farther on, heading for a sign that read
PATHOLOGY, FIRE EXIT, STAIRS
.

At any second I might feel the Deathhead's cold hand on my shoulder, and it'd drag me back to the morgue or kill me on the spot, if killing was what it had in mind. I kept going, through the next set of doors, across a concrete passageway where my footfalls sounded like shots, then up the first flight of the stairwell.

It was like being in an echo chamber, the bare walls amplifying every slap of my feet on the stone steps. The air was cool and damp as a dungeon's, the light almost nonexistent. I'd taken three turns of the stairs and almost reached the second floor before it dawned on me that the only steps I could hear on the stairwell were my own.

At the top of the next flight, I slowed to listen. In the echoic space below I could've heard a pin drop, but there was nothing. For whatever reason, it must've given up. Perhaps it'd been called away on other business. Or perhaps it'd only
intended to scare the daylights out of me, send me a warning shot like the one on the wall back home.

I left the stairwell, following signs to the wards, checking behind me all the way to make sure he wasn't still there. This area of the hospital was quiet except for the kitchen sounds, although the smells coming from there weren't much of an improvement on the ones down below.

Around a corner past the kitchen, I stopped near a private ward. A switchboard phone rang and rang, but the desk was unmanned. A silver-haired man in his sixties paced around the desk in navy silk pajamas, looking flustered and wringing his hands.

“Can you see me?” he said.

“Yes, sir.” I took a step into the ward, a fancier ward than the others I'd seen, with soft blue carpeting and classical art on the walls. The lighting wasn't any good, though: a faulty fluorescent strobed on and off, hurting my eyes.

“I can't feel my legs,” the man said, blinking in time to the light. “Can't feel anything much. Am I dreaming?”

“No, I'm sure you're not dreaming. Maybe you just woke from a bad sleep.”

“I don't know. . . . I don't know. I think they must've drugged me, put something in my food. They gave me something so I couldn't feel my legs. Do you think they might've done that?”

“Who?”

He continued as if I hadn't spoken. “It isn't safe here. I've
got to get out before they come again. Will you help? I've got money. I'll pay you to help.”