Outside the sealed doors of the paranormal unit, we identified ourselves to the armed county deputy sitting there. He made a few calls to the unit at his back and nodded us on. Before he could ask, we dressed out in unis and bagged the psy-meter. Then we entered the controlled chaos of the paranormal unit. Which was a madhouse in the most literal way imaginable.
In one room, a young woman was strapped to her bed, arms bleeding, while above her, all the medical equipment was circling, like something out ofThe Exorcist—which I had walked out of one movie night at Spook School. Along the freshly scarred walls was broken equipment and several busted bags of IV medicines. It looked as if they had been smashed against the walls before being dropped. A lone, blue-dressed nurse was trying to bandage the woman’s bleeding, blackened arms, stopping the blood flow, from where the IVs had been scratched out. But the equipment overhead kept dipping as if to bash her brains out. The nurse ducked and bobbed and, when she was done, raced through the door and into the hall, between us. She was huffing breaths inside the faceplate and cursing steadily as she rushed past, blond hair stuck to her sweat-damp face in the airless uni.
Without a word, she stripped and redressed before bustling on into the next room, where a child was being held down on the bed by three hefty-sized men. The child kept rising up off the bed, like in a magic act, and it looked as if she wanted to spin in a circle, her body twisting clockwise.
“Patient in room three twenty-one exhibits poltergeist-like activity,” T. Laine said into a handheld mic, watching back and forth between the two rooms. I realized she was taking notes while her hands were gloved. That was smart. I needed amicrophone recorder. I pulled the P 2.0 and started taking readings, feeding them to her. She stated what was happening in the room and what equipment was flying around, and ended with, “Violent reaction. Patient is covered with black... stuff. Looks like mold.”
Into the mic, I said, “Redlining on all four levels.”
“Patient in room three twenty-two is trying to levitate. Three people, probable combined weight of six hundred pounds, are managing to hold her down. This seems to confound Newton’s third law of physics. And gravity. And Einstein’s everything. Ditto on the mold.”
I said, “Redlining on all four levels.”
We walked on and T. Laine kept up a steady commentary as we paused and studied the patients in each room, ignoring any patient confidentiality rules and laws. “Male humans in three twenty-five appear psychotic and hallucinatory, talking about things they see that no one else does. Though they both seem to be discussing the same thing, as if they see into each other’s heads. Or into the same alternate reality. One has a moderate amount of mold; the other seems to have little.”
“Redlining on all four levels.”
“Patients in three twenty-four: One appears to be sleeping or comatose. The sleeping one is moldy. The other one is saying, ‘Flows, flows, flows. Pools, pools, pools.’ Over and over.”
I stopped at the room and covered her mic with one hand, saying, “His words are similar to what I heard deep in the earth, at the triangle sites the first day, theflowsandpoolsphrases.” What I didn’t say aloud was my fear that something I had heard below the ground was capable of communicating in human language, maybe just the woman I had heard before. It was probably just parroting back the words of the working, but what if something down there, besides the sleeping Old Ones, was sentient? Mythology offered some unexplainable truths about the life of the ancient world. In my understanding it was Biblical—powers and principalities that humans should fight and guard against. But this felt different from anything I had been warned about in Bible lessons in my childhood in God’s Cloud of Glory Church.
T. Laine nodded, and my hand fell from the mic. We moved on, me listening. “A female patient in room three twenty-three is saying, ‘Dancing in the earth,’ and she’s moving as if dancing, even though she’s restrained. Double mold. Her skin isnearly tarry all over. Sheets and floor are tarry. There are ultraviolet lights in the room, all on the patient.”
I said, “Redlining on all four levels.”
As I watched, T. Laine reached the nurses’ desk and turned on the toes of one foot, nearly a dance pointe, and moved back up the hallway. She took the P 2.0 out of my hands. I watched as she went into first one room and then another, retaking readings, making notes on the recorder. When she had been in all the rooms we had passed, and taken readings on all the patients, a nurse stopped us and told us that we couldn’t enter patient rooms and couldn’t be on this floor, and threatened to call security.
Rather than argue or explain, T. Laine and I stripped off our contaminated suits and left, me trailing behind my current partner. She was still muttering into the recorder, “Upon bedside inspection, patients exhibiting poltergeist activity redline in level four but are slightly less than redline on other levels. Patients with the strongest signs of black mold redline on level three and are slightly less on other levels. No idea what this means, if it means anything at all, but a coven of witches might be able to help.” She clicked off the recorder.
“You really think a coven could help?” I asked, our voices echoing hollowly along the hallway to the outside.
“No idea. Hope for the hopeless,” she said. “I’ve been at this going on twenty hours. I’m heading home. You?”
“Yes,” I said, pushing open the outer door and staring out over the parking lot as we walked to our vehicles. “I think so.”
“Well, be careful and don’t get bit.”
Which seemed a strange comment in every way, until I was closing my truck door on the cold and looked up to see the moon rising over the horizon, full and bloated, as if it had eaten a corpse. This was the first night of the three days of the full moon. The werecats of U-18 would be hunting on my land, as they had on each full moon I was away at school. I wondered if I’d be safe sleeping in my own house. I wondered if I should change out my ammo for silver. I wondered if could kill my friends before they killed me. Or if I’d stand there, frozen in horror, as they tore me to pieces and ate my entrails.
I started the C10, which coughed and spat and got the heater cranking before I checked voice mail, and found one from Soul. It was polite but pointed. “Nell. Soul. Rick has been making progress on his were-shifting predicament. It is not impossiblethat he might yet shift into his leopard, and if he does, he might be dangerous. Occam has a cage prepared for such an emergency, and it is in the edge of your trees, near the graves of your dogs. Stay away from it.”
“Well. That stinks,” I mumbled through a yawn. “It’s hunting season. If the churchmen spot it while hunting, we might have a dead wereleopard.”
I pulled out of the parking lot and toward the hills of home, but before the turn to home, I made an illegal U-turn and headed back to the triangle of contaminated houses. I hadn’t inspected every house or yard. What if I had missed something?
And I had. Once again, the deputies dressed in unis told me I could go in, but my truck couldn’t. I should have thought to bring them a box of coffee and cups. Stakeout nights and traffic guard duty were supposed to be the worst.
I passed through the barricade again. There were landscaping lights on at some houses, the solar-powered kind that came on by themselves. Light-sensing security lights brightened backyards. Two motion-sensor lights came on as I walked down the streets, too sensitive or aimed improperly. My breath hissed and thrummed inside the faceplate of the 3PE uni. My bootiesshushed softly on the pavement with each step. The absence of humans and pets—of anything alive—made me want to run home and hide, as I walked the gloomy streets alone. The night wrapped itself around me, isolating, insulating, like a freezing, menacing blanket.
I had checked Point B, Alisha Henri’s house, so I inspected Point A this time. The black slime was worse here. How could I have missed it before? The mold coated every tree, branch, stem, every blade of grass. In the center of the front yard, a ring of black toadstool-looking things formed a perfect circle, about seven inches tall. Around it trotted four possums, one adult and three small, like a mama and her toddlers, all coated with the slimy tarlike stuff. Their squat bodies glistened with it. As I watched, they went around once, twice, and kept going, clockwise. They were stuck walking in a circle like the geese and humans swimming at the pond, and the humans who had walked here. Like the goldfish in the tank. There was no smell of poison, and I guessed that KEMA hadn’t sprayed this yard yet. The possums would die. The possums were dead already, but didn’t know it.
In the distance, at the third house, Point C, bluish lights as bright as stadium lighting were shining, illuminating the whole area. I heard a generator running, and voices carried on the faint breeze, along with the stink of poison. Someone was spraying the house and grounds. I stopped midstep and turned around, heading back to the truck. The breeze appeared to fall away, moving no faster than my own feet. Moonlight draped over my shoulder, painting my shadow ahead of me, long and lean, even in the bulky suit. Overhead, movement caught my eye. Limned by silver moonbeams, crows were sitting on a telephone wire. Seven of them, sitting equidistant on the line. Shadows so black they were iridescent. The birds were silent. Awake. Black eyes on the distant lights. I hadn’t looked up as I’d passed by the first time. Surely they were perched there then too. I hadn’t heard the sound of wings.
I walked closer, my shoes the only near sound,shushing,shushing softly. As one, the crows turned to watch me. Black beaks looking knife pointed and razor sharp. There was something about their regard that was more than simply intelligent, that was also wise and crafty, two murders and a third of tricksters, watching me. Unpredictable as lightning.
One lifted his wings and leaned into a downward glide, off the wire, ahead of me. The others followed, still equidistant, in a floating line of seven, wings outstretched. They glided past the deputies, to my truck, and, one by one, alighted on the hood of the C10, or the roof, fluffed wings, and settled. Stared at me.
The deputies looked from the crows to me and back. The younger one finally found his voice, and asked, “Ma’am, you okay?”
