He listened a moment, then started for the doors. “I’m here right now,” he said before breaking the connection and entering the building.
“What’s up?” Stephan asked.
“Don’t know exactly,” John said, scanning the lobby for the doctor. “He said to wait for him here.”
Dr. Franklin Cho appeared from around a marble pillar, followed by three associates in white lab coats and two security guards.
“Doctor,” John said, moving toward him, hand outstretched.
Cho shook his hand, and John at once noticed that the grip was cold—damp.
“Is everything all—”
“John, I need you to come with me.” Cho let go of his hand immediately and turned away.
“Is it my wife?” Fogg asked, attempting to keep up with the doctor as his ankle painfully throbbed.
“It is,” Cho said, without turning.
They were heading for a heavy security door, with a placard attached that read:
NO ADMITTANCE WITHOUT PROPER AUTHORIZATION.
“Your wife regained consciousness a little over two hours ago,” Cho said as they slowed down long enough for one of the security guards to open the door using a card key. “As a matter of fact, it was right after we spoke this morning.”
“She’s awake?” John repeated, following Dr. Cho through the door as the guard held it open. He knew he should be happy but instead felt an odd sense of trepidation that he couldn’t understand.
“I’m sorry, you’ll need to wait here.” Cho stopped and pointed at Stephan.
“No, he should come,” John said as Stephan opened his mouth to protest.
Cho looked at him. “John, I really think—”
“It’s okay, John, I’ll be fine here,” Stephan interrupted. John fixed him in a powerful stare. “You’re coming.” Then he turned to the doctor and added, “He’s family.”
Cho wasn’t pleased but didn’t argue. Without a word, he continued on down the white corridor to another security door. “Where are we going?” John asked as they went through the door into another long white corridor. “I thought Theo’s room was on the third floor?”
“It was, until she woke up,” Cho said. “Your wife began to exhibit symptoms that we really don’t understand,” he explained, appearing uneasy.
“What kind of symptoms?” John asked.
Cho stopped in front of a closed door. “See for yourself,” he said, unlocking the door and opening it wide.
John went into the room expecting the worst, but finding the most amazing of sights.
His wife, although looking tired and sickly, was sitting up and smiling weakly as several doctors and nurses attended to various tasks around her. John paused for a moment, hearing Cho behind him begin to question his staff about Theo’s condition. John made his way toward the woman who had made his life complete, catching snippets of the team’s responses as he drew closer to her bedside. “I’ve never seen anything quite like it. . . .”
“Vitals were all over the place and suddenly they were normal. . . .”
“It’s like she became another person. . . .”
John was standing at her bedside, gazing into those bleary, yet still beautiful icy blue eyes. “Hey, you,” he said, reaching to take her hand in his. It was then that he noticed the restraints, binding her wrists to the side of the bed.
“I guess I was pretty wild,” she said, pulling on the bonds. John didn’t even hesitate, freeing one hand, then reaching across her to undo the other, ignoring Dr. Cho’s urgent warnings. “John, wait! Not yet! Be careful!”
And then John heard the laughter. At first he thought it was a happy sound, his wife joyfully chuckling at the idea that he would need to be careful of the woman he loved with all his heart and soul. But then he realized that it was not his wife who was laughing. The blow was savage and unnaturally powerful, sending him hurtling backward into some medical equipment before crashing to the floor. The room was suddenly alive with activity, but no one had a chance to touch Theodora before a pulsing preternatural energy burst from her body, scattering doctors and nurses like leaves in the wind. John had lost his cane, but he hauled himself up from the floor, using the radiator for support. It was as he’d feared.
Actually it was worse.
His wife floated above the hospital bed, her face twisted with an expression that looked like a grimace of pain. But John knew otherwise.
It wasn’t pain at all.
“What’s wrong with her, John?” Stephan cried from the corner of the room where he recoiled in terror. “What’s wrong with Theodora?”
It was absolute joy.
John lurched toward the bed under the woman’s watchful eyes.
“It’s not her,” he said.
A smile split her face wide, showing off razor-sharp teeth. “Hello, John,” she said with a voice composed of a multitude of demonic voices. “We’ve been waiting for you.”
CHAPTER THREE
The alarm clock rattled.
It didn’t really ring anymore, the mechanism inside the wind-up travel clock muffled by something mucking up the works. But it still did the job.
Barrett Winfield turned over in his bed and fumbled with the back of the clock, silencing the alarm. He lay there on his side for a moment, gathering his thoughts—booting up, so to speak—and stared at the face of the clock. He’d never noticed the bodies of dead insects that had been trapped inside the clock face, crumbled at the bottom, just beneath the six. On closer inspection he saw that they were the remains of cockroaches and thought how odd it was that they’d found their way inside the plastic.
Now he knew why the alarm was probably muffled. Barrett smiled with his newfound knowledge and sat up in his bed. Once again he found the old adage to be true—one truly did learn something new every day.
He picked up the clock and gave it a little shake, watching the buggy remains crumble even more inside.
“It’s the damnedest thing,” he muttered as he climbed from the worn and sagging mattress and made his way across the cluttered bedroom to the bathroom, where he voided his bladder in the waterless toilet.
Relieved, he returned to his bedroom and assessed his domain. The room was filthy, the floor littered with the remains of fast food meals, old newspapers, and clothes, both dirty and clean. He made a mental note to clean the place up soon, but right now just wasn’t the time.
It seemed so long ago since Barrett had had the time to actually do things for himself. He’d been so damn busy with this new job. But at least he enjoyed this job, after he’d been let go from Rothmore Elementary. . . .
He felt the emotions well up inside him as they often had done since that dark Halloween day. The costume parade for grades one through five had just ended when he was called to the principal’s office. Mrs. Gornett had never been one of his favorite people, but he’d believed that they had shared a mutual respect. After all, Barrett had considered himself one of the best third grade teachers and was sure the other teachers at Rothmore knew that to be so.
Or at least he’d thought that to be true.
Barrett pushed the thoughts of his past away and rummaged through the clothes on the floor. The shirt and pants he’d worn for the last few days still seemed to be fine, and he figured he could get another day at least out of them. But when he slipped the yellow dress shirt on, he noticed the red stains.
“Damn it,” he hissed. He’d thought for sure that he hadn’t gotten any on him.
Shaking his head in annoyance, he pulled off the yellow shirt and tossed it aside. He riffled through a pile of clothing on an old, folding chair and pulled a white shirt with vertical red stripes from the heap. He gave it a sniff—a bit musty, but it would air out as the morning went on. As he slipped the shirt on and began to button it, his mind drifted back to the day he was fired.
No, he corrected himself. He was not fired, he was let go. But was there really a difference? What they had done to him—to his self-esteem that Halloween da
y was more than he could stand. They’d said that he wasn’t performing up to Rothmore standards, whatever the hell that meant. They even had the nerve to comment about his personal hygiene, as if that had anything to do with a child receiving the best possible education.
But in their pathetic little minds, he guessed, it did.
Barrett found his spirits sinking, and forced himself to remember the good that had come from such a horrible incident. For if he hadn’t been let go, then he would never have found his dream job. That put a smile back on his face and he went to a mirror leaning against the wall in the corner to look at himself. The mirror was cracked, and it distorted his reflection, but it was good enough to show that he still looked the part. That no matter what some nearsighted individuals with no true vision couldn’t see in him, he still saw it in himself.
He was still a teacher, and he still had so much to give. Satisfied with his appearance, he left his bedroom in the house he’d shared with his mother for his entire life.
She sat in a chair in the center of the living room, directly in front of the television.
“Good morning,” he said as he passed the archway, going into the kitchen.
He felt pangs of hunger but wasn’t sure if his stomach was up to handling anything of substance this early. He still got the butterflies before heading into work.
He decided on some toast, going to the bread box and removing the plastic bag. The bread was covered in green and white mold, but that didn’t bother him in the least as he selected two slices and placed them in the toaster. Four cockroaches ran for cover beneath filthy cups and dishes as he pushed the lever down.
“The place could do with a little bit of tidying up,” he called over his shoulder to his mother, still in the living room.
She remained silent. But he knew how she hated it when he criticized her housekeeping skills.
The bread popped up, the odd smell of burned bread and cooking mold wafting into the air. Barrett took a dirty plate from the stack near the sink and dropped the hot bread on it. Looking in the fridge, he found a plastic container of margarine, but the contents of the tub were black. Barrett looked at it and sniffed it before deciding to eat the toast dry.
Besides, he had to get moving. Today was a special day. “You might want to do some grocery-shopping, too,” Barrett said as he carried his toast from the kitchen into the living room. His mother continued to sit stiffly in her chair in front of the silent television. Usually she would say that he was picking on her. Picking on her, he thought as he munched on his toast while he stood beside her chair. He was picking on her when he suggested that she might want to do a little bit of cleaning, or maybe a little bit of shopping. He stared at her, wondering what she thought she was doing to him when she complained that he worked too much, and that he needed to find a nice girl to marry and give her some grandchildren. His mother just couldn’t understand that his students were his children, and really, his job was his wife; that he was totally dedicated to both.
He took another bite of the toast, finding his thoughts drifting back to that day again, and how the horribleness of it all had seemed to flow into the night as well. He and his mother had been watching television, in between running to the door to dole out candy to trick-or-treaters. He hadn’t told her that he had been let go, hadn’t been able to find the right words. Besides, she’d been transfixed on one of her foolish paranormal reality shows—Spirit Chasers—convinced that it was all the God’s honest truth. They’d had many an argument about those TV shows, and she’d usually ended them by shushing him quiet and saying it wouldn’t be on television if it wasn’t true. Sure, as if television couldn’t lie.
He’d planned to wait until her show was over before finally telling her that he’d been let go, but he just couldn’t wait any longer. Barrett ate the last of his moldy toast, watching his mother, remembering how she’d reacted. He wondered if it would have been different had he waited until a commercial break, or until the show ended as he’d originally planned.
Instead he’d blurted it out, standing in front of the television.
She’d screamed for him to get out of the way as he’d bared his soul and sadness to her, not sure he’d ever get over the devastation of it. But he had gotten over it, that very evening actually. It was right after she had shown him her true face. His mother had always been cruel, but that night she took her cruelty to another level entirely.
She’d called him a failure, telling him that if she’d known when she spent twelve hours in labor with him what a disappointment he would be, she would have visited the abortionist and saved them both a lot of misery.
A part of him still wanted to believe that his mother hadn’t meant what she’d said, that she was just annoyed because he was interrupting her television program. But he knew her, and he knew that she very likely had meant every hurtful word.
Trick-or-treaters had been knocking at the door, and people screamed on the television behind him, when Barrett had gathered his courage and strode toward his mother, demanding an apology. Instead she’d just leaned sideways in her chair, telling him to get his failure of an ass out of the way, as her clawlike hands tried to push him to the side. She’d demanded to see.
And he had shown her.
He had shown her the depths of his despair, the sadness, and the rage.
He’d grabbed a handful of candy corns from a bowl beside her chair. He’d always hated those things, and she used to tease him about making him eat all the candy corns in the house if he wasn’t good. If he wasn’t good.
But what about her?
He remembered grabbing her by the front of her housecoat and pulling her toward him. He remembered her expression, how the anger had turned to fear. Fear of what he was going to do with a fistful of candy corns.
Barrett looked down on the hand that had held the candy corns, and at the scars on his knuckles, left as her dentures raked across the back of his hand while he’d forced handful after handful of the colorful confections into her mouth and down her throat.
The bowl beside his mother’s chair was still as empty now as it had eventually been that night. When he had finished, she appeared to have had enough of the candy.
And hadn’t asked for any since.
Barrett stood in front of his mother, between her and the dormant television set, as he had on that Halloween night so many nights before. Her skin had turned an ugly black, reminding him of the peel of a rotten banana. Her mouth hung open, her jaw obviously broken.
Candy still filled her gaping mouth, and some had spilled out onto her lap. There were living things moving on her blackened skin, more than the last time he had looked at her. He smiled at the thought that these were her new children, and wondered if they would disappoint her as much as he had.
“I’m leaving for school,” he told her, not expecting an answer. He just wanted to say it aloud. Her failure of a son was going to work. Her failure of a son had a very important job now.
He wondered, as he had many times before, if the new opportunity he had embraced would have come about that Halloween night if he hadn’t struck back at his mother.
If she hadn’t been watching that television show.
Barrett remembered the sounds of that night: the pounding on his door, his mother’s foul venom spewing from her mouth, and the screams from the television. When it was all over, he’d simply stood there, looking at what he had done, and feeling the sheer terror begin to envelop him. He had been considering calling the police and confessing when a voice spoke to him.
He’d realized then that the screaming on the television had stopped, but now a voice whispered to him from its speaker. He’d thought it strange, and turned to see that the screen had gone to static, but the longer he’d looked at it, the more he had started to see something in the gray-and-white snow.
There was a face in the haze, and it was speaking to him. Speaking directly to him.
At first, he was sure he’d lost his mind, that losing his
job that day had pushed him over the edge, but then the voice commanded him to listen, and he’d had no choice but to do just that.
The voice had told him that it had need of someone with his talents.
It had need of a teacher.
All Barrett had to do was swear his fealty.
He could think of no other answer but yes. And then the voice had whispered to him from behind the static, telling him what he was to do and all that he had to know.
When it was done, Barrett was ready to teach them all. “Well, how do I look?” he asked his mother as he straightened his tie.
She remained silent, but he already knew the answer. He looked fine . . . better than fine, which was exactly how he needed to be to satisfy the needs of his new employer . . . his new master who’d lifted him up from the depths of despair and given him new purpose. Today Barrett would prove to himself, to his mother, to his new lord and master, that he was every bit the teacher he knew he was. Today was the day he would begin to gather his students, and he would teach them about things long forgotten, and as they learned, that which had been lost to the ages would know life again. And the world would never be the same.
“What’s the matter, Johnny boy?” a legion of voices asked, using his wife’s mouth. “Surprised to see us?”
John crawled across the floor under his wife’s, dark, watchful eyes—No, he corrected himself—it wasn’t his wife at all. He used a nearby chair to haul himself up from the floor, purposefully displaying his weakness.
“A bit under the weather, Johnny?” asked the terrible voices.
Holding on to the chair for balance, he turned his gaze to the woman, locking his eyes to the windows of her soul.
“Are you there, Theodora?” he asked, his words calm, even though he was filled with fear and rage. He could not show it—would not show it.
Her face twisted unnaturally, the hint of a struggle within.
“Oh, she’s here, Johnny,” one voice answered, a voice as ragged and as old as the grave. “But she’s a little busy at the moment.” And then it began to laugh, the other horrible voices joining in.