The Haunted

That was it. He knew from everything he was and everyone who was here that it was the link to this spot that kept his form alive, that granted it power. He needed to leave, to sever all ties. If he could move from this location, he could break the connection off at the source. It would be like pulling the plug on an appliance. Whatever was left would dissipate, float away.

Already he felt resistance. John Lynch. Jim Swanson. The man before him. And the man before him, and the man before him …

He needed to maintain control. It was hard, but it was possible. He was the newest and the strongest, and what he had become was what it had become. They were one and the same; that was how it worked, and he tamped down the other voices even as he moved away from the house, away from the neighborhood, through the town.

Stretching.

Thirty-six

The lights in the hospital flickered.

Claire had been about to fall asleep. Maybe she had been asleep. But the sudden sputtering of the overhead fluorescents in what almost looked like a lightning flash jerked her wide-awake. She was in a modern hospital, in a room filled with expensive diagnostic equipment, with medical professionals hard at work throughout the building, yet she was filled with the same sense of dread she’d felt back at their house.

Frightened, she checked on James, lying asleep on the bed before her, then dashed down the corridor to Megan’s room in order to make sure her daughter was all right. She passed two nurses at the station between the rooms, but that didn’t make her feel any less uneasy. She knew what was going on. She’d experienced this before.

The hospital was haunted.

Where was Julian? He should have been back—she looked at her watch, shocked at the time—hours ago! Her heart felt like it stopped for a second. Something had happened to him. She didn’t know how, didn’t know where, didn’t know when, but it had, and she was almost hysterical as she ran back to the nurses’ station.

She stopped, taking a deep breath before she spoke so she wouldn’t seem crazy. “I need one of you to go into room one twenty-eight and watch my daughter, Megan Perry. I’m with my son in one twenty-four. I’m afraid something might happen to one of them.”

The lights flickered again, the ones in the corridor, the ones above the nurses’ station, the ones in the rooms, and the nurses looked at each other worriedly. “I’m sorry,” the older one told her. “But we need to stay here and monitor all the patients. If there’s a power outage and the emergency backup comes on, we need to make sure there are no glitches or disruptions that could endanger one of them.”

There was no flickering this time, but Claire saw something worse, something that the nurses, looking down at the screens before them, did not see at all.

A twisted shadow, folding in on itself, moving from ceiling to wall to floor before sliding through the open doorway to James’s room.

“James!” she cried, running over. She screamed his name at the top of her lungs in the hope that one of the nurses would follow, but she heard no footsteps or cries behind her, and when she rounded the corner of the doorway, James was still sound asleep in his bed.

Couldn’t anyone hear her?

The atmosphere in the room was heavy, and though the lights remained on, they seemed dim and were unable to penetrate the darkness that had enveloped the walls and corners. James’s bed and the empty bed next to his were little islands of visibility amid the growing gloom. Things were moving, unidentifiable entities that were glimpsed only out of the corner of her eye. Below the beeps and pulsations of the machines were whispers, sibilant sounds that were not quite words but that still seemed to carry meaning.

She should have been more afraid than she was. But there was familiarity in the horror, a pattern or signature or underlying unity that was almost recognizable.

Was recognizable.

“Julian?” she whispered.

Everything stopped. The movement, the sound, all of it.

She knew at that instant that he was dead, though she didn’t want to believe it, refused to let herself believe it. “No,” she said, wiping her nose. “It’s not true.”