March Forth (The Woodford Chronicles Book 1) (6 page)

              He treated her as if she were an enemy that needed to be subdued and questioned, and had no qualms about doing so.  Her eyes, however, gave him some misgivings.  There was fear in her eyes when he had his hand around her neck; there was abject terror in her eyes when the librarian walked through him.  He realized she truly had no idea what was happening, and no idea what he was.

              “What the hell is happening?” she whispered.

              “I was hoping you could tell me.  I guess we should talk,” he said, squatting so he wouldn’t be towering over her.  “Are you okay?”

              “No.” She said it so quietly he barely heard her.

              “Fair enough.  I’m sorry I choked you.  I thought you were…. Someone else,” he said lamely.  She stared blankly at him, and the librarian came rushing back over and threw an arm around the woman’s shoulder.

              “It’s okay, honey, they’re on their way.  You’re very pale; I don’t know what to do.  What are you feeling?” the librarian asked the woman.

              “Honestly… I don’t know,” the woman said in a voice so low it was almost a whisper.  She spoke to the librarian but she was staring at Steven.  “I think I’m seeing things.”

              “I’m real,” Steven said, helpfully.  “It’s just that no one else can see me.  Or hear me.  Or touch me…. Or anything me, really.  I’m not sure why you can.”

              “And hearing things,” the woman murmured.

              “Look at me, Deanna, look at me,” the librarian said, grabbing the woman’s face in her hands and jerking it toward her so that the woman looked at her eyes.  “Your eyes look funny, and you’re a little clammy.  I think you’re going into some kind of shock, Deanna.  Do you understand?  Do you hear me?” 

              “Uh-huh,” Deanna mumbled, her eyes wandering back to Steven. 

              “Deanna, huh?  That’s a pretty name,” Steven said.

              Deanna’s eyes rolled back in her head and she fainted, moments before the ambulance arrived.  Steven decided to ride along; he didn’t want to lose the strange woman before figuring out why she could see him despite the SmartWand’s cloaking settings.  Also, he was feeling vaguely guilty about the whole thing for some reason.

              “It wasn’t really my fault,”
he thought.  Nonetheless, he climbed onto the ambulance, unseen by the EMT’s, and rode to the hospital with her.

Deanna

              Deanna opened her eyes, disoriented.  There was a man in a blue jacket over her, saying, “Talk to me, hon.  You with me?  You take anything?”

              She tried to answer him but there was an oxygen mask over her mouth, so she just shook her head.  She felt like they were moving.  The last thing she remembered was thinking her heart should not, could not, beat as fast as it was beating… at the library.  Yes, she had been at the library.  It was all coming back now.  The man in black, Barb walking through him, the realization that she was hallucinating.  It had been unpleasant.

              Feeling very clichéd, she asked the man in the blue jacket, through her oxygen mask, “Where am I?”

              “We’re going to the hospital, hon, you’re gonna be fine.  What happened?  You sure you didn’t take anything?”

              “I’m sure,” she said drily, wishing she could take the mask off.  “I had… some kind of an attack.”

              “Okay, they’ll fix you right up at the hospital.  You sure you didn’t take anything?”

              Another voice, an all-too-familiar voice, said, “For fuck’s sake, she didn’t take anything.”  Deanna’s eyes widened and she felt her heart start to race again.

              The man in the blue jacket, the EMT, continued as if he had heard nothing.

              “Cause if you took anything, we need to know so we can help… what happened?  You ok?”  The EMT checked a band around her arm, checking her blood pressure.  “Your blood pressure just skyrocketed.  What did you take?”

              “Tell him you smoked crack in the library,” the man in black said, leaning over the EMT’s shoulder.  “I just wanna see what he says.”

              Deanna started hyperventilating, even with the oxygen mask blowing into her mouth and nose.  The EMT was frantic as they pulled into the hospital’s ambulance-unloading area, turning dials on the oxygen tank and trying desperately to figure out why she was hyperventilating and why her blood pressure had so suddenly escalated.  The driver got out and opened the back doors of the van; the two men unloaded the stretcher Deanna was on, popped the wheels down, and rolled her into the emergency room.  A woman in a white coat, wearing a stethoscope around her neck and carrying a clipboard, rushed to greet them.

              “What’s the situation?” the woman asked.

              “Not sure, we got a call from the library, where the woman was unconscious.  Librarian said she had some kind of attack, and then fainted.   She – the librarian - thought the patient went into some kind of shock.  The patient came to on the ride over, seemed ok, but then her blood pressure went from 120/70 to 150/100 within seconds, and she started hyperventilating under the mask,” the EMT responded.

              The man in black, standing behind them, said, “Well, that’s not good.  You really need to calm down.”

              Deanna was fairly certain her heart was going to explode, it was beating so fast.  She was petrified, both because she was seeing and hearing a person no one else heard or saw – a person other people could walk through – and because she feared being locked in the psych ward.  It was one of her greatest fears, to wind up like that.  Her trip to the adolescent unit the psychiatric hospital twenty years earlier had been bad enough.  The idea of winding up as an adult locked away in a straightjacket, a permanent source of heartbreak for her parents with no control over her own existence, at the mercy of doctors….it terrified her.  So, she stayed quiet.

              She was wheeled into a tiny room, where the doctors removed her shirt and stuck suction cups with wires around them to her chest, presumably to monitor her heart rate and vitals.  She was embarrassed to be sitting on a cot in just her bra in front of the man in black, then mad at herself for being embarrassed about a hallucination seeing her without her shirt. 

Someone put a hospital gown over her torso, and she was grateful.

              They swapped out her ambulance oxygen mask, which the EMT’s took, for another oxygen mask. 

              The woman in white said, “You didn’t take anything, did you?  Any pills or coke or anything?  We can’t help you unless you tell us.”

              The man in black said, “Seriously, do they want you to be on drugs?  Do they not have any other illnesses around here?”

              Deanna shook her head, and murmured, “Nothing, no drugs.”

              The woman in white said, “Okay, I’m gonna give you something to bring your heart rate down.  You’re gonna feel a little pinch.”  A needle stabbed her in the arm, and released something that stung a bit under her skin as it came out of the needle.

              “So if you’re not on drugs, they’re gonna put you on drugs,” the man in black said.  “That’s an awesome system.”

              Deanna was quickly learning to tune him out.  She was feeling calmer by the second, too. Whatever the stinging substance in the needle had been, it was a-ok in her book. Everything was going to be fine, she decided.

              The woman in the white coat watched a screen over Deanna’s head for a few minutes, and then adjusted her oxygen mask.  “Your heart rate’s looking pretty good, now.  We’re gonna let you rest for a couple minutes, and then take some blood tests, okay?  We’ll figure out what’s going on, don’t worry.”

              Deanna nodded.  Rest sounded good.  “It’s really cold in here,” she said aloud.

              The other woman pulled a thin blanket over her, and then left the room.  Deanna heard machines beeping and feet walking by the door every few seconds, but it was white noise.  Her eyelids were drooping.

              “We really do need to talk,” the man in black said.

              “Nope,” Deanna whispered.  “You’re not even a person.”

              “Look… Deanna… I am a real person, I promise.  You’re just gonna have to accept the fact that I am real but no one else can see me, and we’ll talk more once we’re out of here.”

              She shook her head slightly.

              “We can talk here, but people are gonna think you’re talking to yourself.  I’m trying to protect you, here, not me.”

              Deanna shrugged a shoulder.

              “You’re an incredibly frustrating woman, do you know that?”

              “You’re an incredibly annoying hallucination, do you know that?” Deanna replied, though slightly muffled through the oxygen mask.

              “Look, Deanna,” he grabbed her chin gently and tilted her face upward, staring into her eyes.  “I am not a hallucination.  I am real.  My name is Steven.  No one else can see me because… because I am disguised by magic,” he said.  “But you can see me, and you can hear me and feel me, so please just trust your senses and understand that I am real.”

              She stared up at him, remembering the Charles DeLint quote that had crossed her mind earlier: “That’s the thing about magic:  You have to know that it’s here, it’s all around us, or it just stays invisible to you.”  She had always wanted so badly for that to be true, for magic to be manifesting all around her, unseen by eyes that had become jaded by society and experience.  Could it really be true?  Magic?  Her mind reeled.

              Aloud, she said, “Disguised by… magic.”

              He nodded.

              “Are you a ghost?”

              He chuckled.  “I am alive and well, though calling me a spook would not be totally off base.”

              “Like… a CIA kind of spook?”

              He shook his head.  “Not CIA, no.  I work for a different outfit.  You haven’t heard of us.”

              “What kind of work do you do?”

              “You ask a lot of questions,” he said, smiling slightly.

              “There’s an invisible man talking to me in a hospital bed.  I have some questions.”

              Steven quirked an eyebrow.  “Fair enough,” he said, finally taking his hand away from her face and sitting back a bit.  “Do you wanna get out of here?”

              Deanna blinked.  “I mean… can I?”

              He nodded and pulled out his phone again, tapping away at the touch screen.  Deanna cocked her head, confused.  “What are you, texting your ride?”

              The corner of Steven’s mouth lifted in a half smile, his eyes never leaving the screen.  “It’s not a phone.  I’m just… changing a couple of things.”  He paused, glanced over at her.  “How are you feeling now?”

              She took stock of herself, and realized she was absolutely fine.  Better than fine, she felt great.  Her heart was beating normally, her breathing was fine… come to think of it, she had more energy than she had had in a while.  That feeling of wanting to hibernate that plagued her all winter, and the sleepy effects of whatever the doctor had given her, were gone.

              “I feel great,” she said, and he nodded, turning back to his not-phone.  “What did you do?”

              “I told you, I’m just changing a couple of things.”

              “What is that thing?” Deanna nodded toward the not-phone.

              “Long story.  Where do you live?”

              Deanna told him her address and he said, “Got it.”  He continued typing for a few minutes, then pulled another device out of his pocket.  It was a little round black thing.  She stared at it, wondering what it was, while he pushed a button and…

              They were sitting on the couch in her living room.

              “What the hell?” she said, looking around.  She did not feel nearly as disoriented as she felt she should after experiencing such a sudden change.  Had she not been holding on to the memory of being in the hospital, she would have thought they’d been on the couch the entire time they were having this discussion.  It felt very natural.

              “It’s just molecular changes and stuff….” Steven said vaguely, waving a hand slightly.  She continued staring at him, so he added, “More magic.”

              She nodded.  That seemed obvious, at least. “I didn’t even notice we were moving or anything.”

              “It was a relatively short distance.  Longer distances cause a slight feeling of vertigo.”

              She nodded again, amazed. “So…..how’d you do that?”

              “Years of training,” he said shortly, successfully avoiding the question.  “So, who are you, Deanna?  Why can you see me?”

              She shrugged, shaking her head.  “I’m nobody.  I’m a waitress… actually, I’m not even that anymore.  I don’t know…” She thought for a bit.  “I’ve always wanted magic to be real.  I always hoped it was real.  Could that be it?”

              He stared at her.  “Maybe,” he assented.  “I don’t really see how, but the energy is definitely very reactive to belief.  There’s got to be more than that, though.”

              “The energy?”

              “Magic,” he said.  “I think we’re going to have to do some tests.”

              Her eyebrows furrowed.  “Like, magic tests?”

              “I guess you could say that.”

              “How?  What kind of tests?”

              “Well, I’ve already scanned you with everything I’ve got and come up blank.  I think I’m gonna have to bring you in,” Steven said casually, apparently not realizing how ominous this sounded to her.

              “Bring me in WHERE?”

              “To my… to my boss.  I’ve never experienced anything like this before.  We’re going to need some help figuring it out.”

              “Your boss?  Who’s your boss?”

              Steven smiled.  “He’s going to like you, actually.  He likes when people ask questions.” He started tapping away on his not-phone again, saying, “I’m just briefing him now.”

              “You said that thing wasn’t a phone.”

              “It’s not,” he said, with that satisfied little half-smile again.  “They’re ready for us.”

              “Wait,” Deanna said, panicking.  “I’m really not okay with going to some mysterious place where people are going to run tests on me.”

              Steven nodded and shrugged a shoulder, while continuing to tap on his device.  “I get that.  But the thing is – “

              Deanna felt a sudden feeling of vertigo.

              “The thing is,” Steven continued, “you don’t really have a choice.”

              The feeling of vertigo dissipated, and Deanna’s head felt clearer.  However, something felt wrong.  It took her a moment to realize they were no longer in her living room.  She was sitting in exactly the same position she had been in on her couch, but the chair underneath her was a comparatively uncomfortable metallic affair.  The room they were in was small, with dark grey walls, a dark grey carpet, and a dark grey ceiling; it was terribly gloomy, she thought.  Steven, rather than sitting a few feet away on her couch, was now seated in a chair identical to her own, on the other side of a small table which was immediately next to her.

After taking a moment to assess her surroundings, Deanna felt a vague sense of anxiety that was almost immediately pushed aside by an overwhelming rush of pure rage.  The sense of awe and wonder that Steven had awakened in her by showing her that magic was real dissipated in the face of her current situation.  She found herself in a completely unfamiliar place, with no idea where she was or how far from home, and she had no control over when or even whether she could return home. She felt frightened and helpless, and feeling like that – like a victim – made her angry.