The anxious passenger was in the process of composing topics for conversation when Eva abruptly stopped, leapt from the driver’s seat, and charged across to the opposite shoulder of the road. By the time her companion joined her in the sward, a body was pulled into the hammock of her skirt. “He’s alive!” she exclaimed. “Maxwell is alive!”
Eva and her cargo returned to the waiting car; Liam designated himself driver.
Cinder blocks propped open the pneumatic doors of Waverly Bean Municipal Hospital. Steps leading to them were buried under a layer of peeling birch. Moths amassed past the doorway and blotted out scenic views of low hanging chandeliers. The diminution of light persuaded the arrivals they had strayed into a candlelit Ante-bellum mansion, one requisitioned into service as a Civil War field hospital. The poor illumination would no more do for critical medical procedures than for paperwork.
Given the uninhabited hour, staff in the emergency room could not manufacture a reasonable excuse to turn away the injured dog; and seeing the animal clinic connected to the establishment would not open before daybreak, Eva’s plea won out. She and her injured pet were escorted down a corridor.
Liam was too anxious to surrender sense to a sofa. The pother of flying insects contributed to an air of busyness, even where their shadows lagged behind them and passed in and out-of-doors with whatever elementals were afoot.
A conspicuous painting hung between two elevators, and was geographically situated halfway between flanking wings of the building. It depicted the opening of a cave. Photons, ancient and far in coming, collected in the back of the viewer’s retina, and the mouth in the rock face, first thought bare but for a black glaze, produced a pair of beseeching eyes. They preceded the outline of—what could only be—a Resurrected Christ emerging from his burial clothes.
Liam approached the curious painting, and the Jesus that was faintly visible yards away disappeared completely under layers of translucent black oil paint. Close inspection, however, drew the painter’s attention to a hillock beside the craggy cave, on which lambs grazed without a tending shepherd. Because they were set far from the action, their inclusion, he reasoned, was meant to connect the risen shepherd symbolically to his flock—or was an allusion being made to the animal hospital?
All the lambs faced the same direction, away from the cave. Their alignment was perhaps to direct a visitor to the animal portion of the hospital, but nothing in this direction was different from the opposite direction. Doors along this corridor were also closed, as not to disturb the residents.
A visitant, or draft, insinuated itself; and as if seeking contrast, a man materialized on a ladder at the far end of this principle hallway. This individual methodically unscrewed low-wattage bulbs from a chandelier, and with the removal of each, his portion of the passageway grew darker than anticipated, or so it was logical to link his activity to this obnubilation.
A door marking the exit for this location took on a peculiar cast where, in the second before, nothing about it merited alarm. It was suddenly as black as the night Liam imagined to be on the other side of it. He could not say what, in contemplating the dilated or prolapsed state of compromised doorways, inspired him to dread, but it was more than their unhygienic aspects.
A men’s room provided a detour where a wastebasket jimmied its door. Liam’s hand lifted to test the barrier—an equal force pushed back. An antagonistic voice erupted from inside the facility. “Who woke you up?”
Liam croaked in a low, contrite voice, but maybe was not heard.
The inquisitor did not appear in the doorway but shuffled behind the door and bellowed, “God hasn’t finished rearranging the furniture here! If you come in now, what you see will drive you mad! Come back later!”
A tincture of shadow was glimpsed in the interstice between door and corresponding molding, betraying a skulking draped figure. This gentleman sported either a blanket or a trash bag fashioned into a poncho. His fugue state prevailed on the intruder to think better of his intrusion.
Liam was halfway returned to the lobby when the man erupted, with incident, from hiding. He had shed his cover, which had concealed large feathery wings strapped to his shoulders. Sandals and a flowing robe completed his unlikely costume, and set him off dramatically when he turned clapping down the hallway on a heading that took him deeper into the unlit section of the building. What lingered as impressions were his gait, fetor, and single-minded purpose. He passed beside the workman on the ladder, who did not react to his presence.
The onlooker to this strange event did not see the costumed character raising spirits of ailing patients by barging into their rooms at three in the morning.
Momentarily, the seeming vagrant stepped through the foreboding exit past the ladder, where his wings drew back and blackened like quill-tipped pens dropped in an inkpot. All sound and sensation fell dead away with his last clap of sandals. He gazed back with an atrophied face, or perhaps he wore a mask of piercing gold.
The terrifying face, once removed, lingered as an afterimage. Liam’s chest pancaked into his pelvis and squeezed out a solitary, bookended breath—
“Are you lost?” barked the nurse.
The sharpened tines on the nurse’s cap punctured the noxious atmosphere, leaving little time for the startled trespasser to finesse a pretext. “I wish to check on a friend, David Emory.”
He expected to hear about visiting hours being ended, but instead she explained, “Names beginning with ‘E’ are in the west wing.”
Given her begrimed fingernails, it was fair to guess that the nurse washed her hands but infrequently. Other aspects of her appearance might have been judged in a similar disapproving light, but her stiff pace demanded his undivided attention.
It would perhaps have done him good to think about how the hospital conspired to keep patients in alphabetical order, but the darker corridor was intellectually pervasiveness. Its tumefied shadow wafted, with personality, in their direction. Liam feared that the winged emissary would rejoin him at any minute, so wisely peeled away when he spotted his colleague through an open doorway.
The hypochondriac (preadventure this judgment was harsh in the circumstance) was unconscious and hooked up to an electroencephalograph; heartening brainwaves appeared on its screen.
This interval in happening on his unfortunate friend permitted study of incongruent features of the ward in which he was triaged: Crepe paper turkeys and pilgrims taped to walls properly identified the month as November, just as their crude execution identified their fabricators as children. Liam broached a relevant subject with himself: Was this the only bed to spare? The only place to fit David into the alphabet correctly?
Moths not fluttering about the room appeared fastened, like so many sconces and planters, to drab, ulcerated walls: The crepuscular light smeared their bodies through their shadows, making them appear thewy and doubled in size.
The air was unwholesomely warm. The visitor turned to seek medical personnel and information, but before a foot could be aligned in this direction, David’s hand shot up and latched onto his friend’s arm.
“Did you see Jesus on your way in?” he asked impatiently.
Liam nodded ambiguously.
David relayed his alarm. “This is an animal hospital, I fear.”
The visitor corrected the impression. “This is a children’s ward. Look at the size of the empty beds.”
“No, no,“ mumbled the scared man. “Those beds are for four-legged patients. Four-legged and sometimes two-legged…“
Liam followed his friend’s worried stare into the tenebrous corners.
“You are injured,” proclaimed the bedded man.
A streak of blood on the visitor’s shirtsleeve belonged to the Scottish terrier, but before this explanation could be provided, a voice sliced through the doorway behind him. “Visiting hours are over.”
A crooked fingernail, more ghastly than what memory stored, urged the visitor away. He inquired after the warden. “Why was my friend admitted?“
“Cotard’s Syndrome,” said she.
Liam returned to the emergency area where the attending nurse brought him to pressing business: Eva was no longer in the building. He found her sitting inside her car, slumped over her steering wheel. Coming to the passenger door, a cardboard box was spotted in the backseat; it contained the remains of her beloved pet.
Eva was less guarded approaching his house this time, and did not park far away. Her lover assumed she would be eager to be rid of him, but she was imperturbable, and moved about without her acquired hobble: Her second heel had been jettisoned to improve her traction. Halfway to his door, she heaved on his arm like a boat sail pulling around in a churlish headwind. “Where is it?” she asked.
Her question at first puzzled, but in looking over the dark field that alarmed her, the resident replied succinctly, “It cannot be seen because the power’s out.”
Her finger nudged at numinous clouds, which also searched for the archangel: They offered up its ballast of bricks, but not an extension cord. Presumably the hollow-bodied relic was carried off—if not by wind then by malevolence.
Liam was relieved to find no one lurking past his front door, although this relief was not universally joined. Delayed shock was perceived in Eva, as the violence in the evening was only then catching up to her. Maxfield’s blood on her skirt was unconcealed in a moonlit window where it had not been noticeable in the dim hospital. It was perhaps seeing it that brought this change over her. She was concerned about the box in the car’s backseat, about its removal.
Liam thought this panic peculiar and sudden, as if she had not known the container was behind her while she drove. He bowed to her wish and fetched the item, and placed it with due solemnity on his kitchen table. The pallbearer turned to find his mourner stripped down to her bra and briefs and standing below the drafty attic hatch; her soiled dress was flung over the bathroom door.
“I can reset the circuit breaker and launder your skirt,” he told her.
She was initially reticent about his offer, and meekly requested tape for the box lid. Liam obtained a piece of strapping tape from a drawer and punctiliously sealed the funerary box. Seeing her satisfied, he removed the dress from the bathroom door and disappeared down the basement steps.
His fingers found two tripped breakers in the fuse box. This meant no intruder manually switched them off. The one responsible for the basement and exterior outlets was reset while the other, which powered all the upstairs and its ostentatious display, was left off. With the washing commenced, the launderer returned upstairs.
He was at first mortified in not finding his guest, but was spared reliving her first disappearance when she was spied past the bedroom doorway lying on his bed.
Little in the way of comestibles was in the house, beyond requisite cookies and tea, but after imitating her attitude on the warming counterpane, he was overcome with the same fatigue that superficially affected her.
“I need to lie down but for a moment,” she explained softly.
“It should take no more than an hour to wash and dry the dress,” he assured her.
These were their only words of conversation. It was forty minutes before Liam noted the silence’s duration, and only then because it was broken.
Rising quietly, he was certain that tread reached him through the next room, so walked the long way round to the front of the house, going first by the backdoor, which faced the rear of the kitchen. Liam resolved to reenter the basement and see if the load in the washing machine was out of balance, but the noise penetrated his ears with better information. He stared at the cardboard box sitting on his kitchen table. It was impossible that this was the source of the disturbance.
His heart pounded, producing an audible clucking in his windpipe. He had not continued halfway across the living room when swaying alerted him to Eva’s presence in the bedroom doorway opposite. She gazed anxiously toward the open attic hatch, where a light poured down over the extended ladder’s treads. Both gasped, but the light, which was soft and variegated, did not not advance on them.
Her exclamation barely rose above a whisper. “It’s the angel…”
Liam need not climb the steps to confirm her deduction. Queerly, the statue stood in the same relative position where he left it after failing to pull it through the opening days earlier. Its illumination owed to the circuit reset in the basement.
“We must leave,” she announced.
“After the laundry…”
Her question ignored this option. “Is there somewhere else we can go?”
A jacket was found for the shivering woman in the front closet, but its slightness regrettably did not chase off her chill.
After driving a half mile, she confessed, “I heard the footsteps, too. When you went into the kitchen to investigate, I rose and went toward the hall.”
Liam glanced over his shoulder. The homestead was the darkest thing on the landscape, but no other vehicle was seen in the vicinity. He was confident they would not be followed.
Copyright © 2008-2022 Michael Teague. All rights reserved.