Sentinel Event Read online

  Sentinel Event

  By Samantha Shelby

  Table of Contents

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 1

  Dr. St. Cross, the psychiatrist, would have found it ironic that Tammy was watching the news report on the TV in the waiting room when the ambulance arrived. Chester Williams, a leading expert in Passerism, had given a speech at the anti-Passer protest in Denver earlier that morning, and choice segments were being replayed throughout the evening.

  “No one can argue,” he was saying with educated eloquence in a long-suffering tone, “that our lives have become more meaningful and safer with the help of the spirits, to whom we owe so much and can offer so little. Our world has made progress in leaps and bounds since the first of the Passers began visiting and speaking to us. It saddens me that so many of you believe otherwise.”

  The image lingered on Williams while the sound of the news anchor’s reportage continued; Chester’s eyes showed keen irritation. He pursed his lips and sighed deeply just before the scene cut away.

  Tammy had come looking for a patient’s son in this waiting room, and hadn’t found him, but had paused to sit down on a chair and retie her tennis shoe while listening to the news report. When the sound of the ambulance’s sirens reached her ears, the nurse broke away from the distraction and ran out into the receiving hall to help.

  Two paramedics, both young and newly minted, pushed in through the doors rolling a patient on a stretcher.

  “Twenty-nine-year-old male,” one of the EMTs told the ER doctor who came to oversee. “Attempted suicide by hanging. Found by a neighbor in the nick of time, who initiated CPR.”

  Tammy moved closer to get a look at the face behind the bag attached to the intubation tube in his mouth.

  “I know him,” the doctor said before the nurse had a chance to. “He’s in here all the time.”

  “Never self-inflicted injuries, though,” agreed Tammy. The stretcher was swiftly wheeled into one of the critical care rooms. “Are you sure it was suicide?”

  Without speaking, one of the paramedics lifted the patient’s right arm by the wrist. Taped to the back of his hand was a piece of note card on which was clearly printed, They won’t stop.

  “‘They?’” asked the other EMT.

  “The Passers,” answered Tammy.

  “He claims it’s the Passers,” the doctor talked over her. “This is private information that we’re not allowed to discuss. Patient confidentiality.”

  The paramedics scrunched their foreheads and shrugged, but left the doctor and nurses to do their work. While the former checked the patient’s chest with his stethoscope and another nurse bagged the patient, Tammy paused to stroke the young man’s brown hair off his forehead.

  “Poor Aidriel,” she murmured.

  Outside the open door, the ghostly figure of a Passer peered out from behind a curtain at the end of the corridor. It turned and walked away, vanishing through a wall.

  The days passed with Aidriel alive and alone, spending hours staring off into space. Doctors and the other patients alike showed little interest in him, and eventually, how many days later, he didn’t know, he found himself in a familiar ward, on the 4th floor among the crazies. He didn’t spend any time in the main room with the couches where the visitors were. No one came to see him, and he was ashamed of the bruises on his neck and jaw; the evidence of his failure.

  Aidriel resented the fact he was alive. He had only survived as long as he had because of happy accidental discoveries or miraculous rescues. When he was unconscious, the air gone from his lungs, the pulse gone from his heart, and the life fading from his brain, the Passers would save him. Indirectly, that is. They would alert anyone nearby and he’d be brought back at the last moment. Eventually, he began to think of those visits past the threshold of death as if they were dreams. Dreams of strange visions and of what awaited him when he escaped life. If only he could escape.

  He was sitting cross-legged on his bed, staring out the window, when the patient named Clifford first came to see him. The mad, bearded old man peeked around the doorframe, mumbled something unintelligible, and widened his eyes maniacally when he saw Aidriel.

  Aidriel turned to acknowledge the uninvited visitor, his face blank, his gray eyes pained.

  Glancing up and down the hall to make sure no one was watching, Clifford slipped silently into the room and moved to stand right behind Aidriel. The old man looked closely at the younger, saw the marks on his neck and the edge of a previous scar barely visible beneath his collar.

  “It’s you, finally,” Clifford said. “I knew this would happen.”

  “What are you talking about?” Aidriel whispered, his voice still hoarse from his ordeal.

  “Them,” answered Clifford. “You know what I’m talking about. There haven’t been any of them in this ward since you got here.”

  “Leave me alone,” murmured Aidriel. “You old fart.”

  Clifford reached out to lay his hand on the other patient’s shoulder, and Aidriel flinched. Clifford smiled knowingly and left.

  Later that evening, Tammy came up to visit Aidriel when her shift ended. He showed little sign of pleasure to see her, and turned his eyes once more to the window. The kindly nurse had been on duty most of the occasions he was brought to this hospital, and knew his history. She’d also been around long enough to remember his first time, when he was seventeen. He was a happier person then.

  “How are you?” she asked, lingering in the doorway.

  “Fine” was his whispered reply. He didn’t want to talk to her. Tammy was just like the rest of the hospital staff; she pretended to believe him if she thought it would be of comfort. But he wasn’t naïve enough to think she actually did believe him.

  Once, she had seemed willing to believe, though. Aidriel was in the emergency room with a broken tibia, blunt force trauma, and she was helping prepare his leg to be set. She noticed the claw-mark scar on his forehead, and realized it had never been there before.

  “What happened to your face?” she’d asked, reaching impulsively toward him. Aidriel had caught her hand defensively, and though he said nothing, he had recalled the cause of the wound.

  One of Aidriel’s many professions over the years was maintenance in one of the old government buildings downtown. The crawl space beneath the structure was long and narrow, and the plumbing and wiring pipes ran along the top of it. There had been problems with intermittent telephone failures, and Aidriel and two other maintenance workers had gone down to investigate.

  Aidriel had been elected to get into the crawl space, mostly because he was the smallest and least lazy of the three. He’d put on a hard hat and headlamp, securing his gloves and tool belt. While the other two men lingered, shooting the breeze, Aidriel had climbed into the narrow tunnel and begun his inspection of the communication cables.

  For several minutes he’d crawled along with little thought of his surroundings. He could faintly hear his colleagues talking over the sound of his own breathing, but when he stopped breathing to wet his lips, he heard another voice. Straining to see down the tunnel, he thought he could detect movement outside the range of his lamp. A familiar sick feeling overtook him and he heard ringing in his ears. Though he had begun to frantically back up, he wasn’t fast enough.
From out of the darkness ahead rushed a Passer, pale and translucent, like all the spirits, galloping on its hands and knees like an animal. It resembled an old woman with empty white eyes, its mouth open in a blood-curdling shriek, its ghostly fingers reaching out to claw him.

  The other two workers heard Aidriel screaming, and, peering into the crawl space, they saw him lying several yards into it, panicking and trying to back up.

  “What’s going on?” they shouted.

  “Pull me out!” Aidriel yelped back.

  After a brief, bewildered hesitation, the nearest worker dove into the crawl space, grabbing Aidriel by the leg and dragging him out to safety. Aidriel collapsed to the floor, shaking and breathless. His face and arms were streaked in blood and scratches; his headlamp was broken. He was too disturbed to explain what happened besides saying, “Passer.”

  His coworkers didn’t believe him.

  “Did you try to kill yourself?” the police officer asked Aidriel when he regained consciousness after the hanging. He was still in the medical wing, and they’d removed the ventilator. It hurt to breathe or swallow or talk, but he nodded.

  “Why?” Tammy asked him. The policeman directed an icy stare at her, and she turned her attention back to the IV bag she was changing. She didn’t notice the expression of pain and betrayal on Aidriel’s face.

  “You know why,” he whispered to her. Tammy’s attempt at compassion came off as condescending.

  “The Passers don’t want to hurt anyone,” she told him. “They’re here to help and guide us so that they can pass on into eternity.”

  Aidriel couldn’t argue with her and simply shook his head. He’d harbored a childish resentment for her since and didn’t care when she came to see him. She had come into the room and sat beside him the first time, but because of the cold shoulder she’d gotten in return, she now remained standing in the doorway.

  “Most Passers stay away from hospitals,” she said, as she often had before.

  “Most,” he muttered bitterly.

  “The old assumptions of hauntings, being bound to a certain location, are false, you know.”

  She’d said that before as well. Many times. Everyone knew that anyway. Children learned about Passers the same way they’d learn about their own families, because so often the spirits lived like members of the households they watched over.

  Even though these ghostly companions only existed in cases of violent deaths, many Passers eventually avoided the locations of their actual passing away. Often they lingered in sites of meaning, particularly old houses or cemeteries, until they answered an unspoken call to their living companion. Sometimes their death was of little meaning to them, and they were not of much comfort to the sick or mourning. It was a strange concept that had often been discussed in detail among scholars, but no cut-and-dried explanation had ever been ascertained.

  “Is it at all reassuring to you that Matilda sends good wishes?” asked Tammy, referring to her own Passer. Aidriel had fortunately never seen Matilda as far as he knew, nor did he care to.

  Rising off the bed, Aidriel moved to the door and slowly closed it, shutting Tammy out. Waiting near it for a moment and hearing nothing from her, he wandered over to the window and peered down into the parking lot. Visitors and medical workers came and went here and there, though there were no Passers that he could see. As he watched the darkness gathering, he became aware of one visible ghost. It stood unmoving in the shadow beneath a tree beside the parking lot, staring toward the building. Aidriel knew it was looking right at him; he shuddered and the hair on his arms stood up.

  Eventually the spirits would grow impatient; they always did. He could only stay safe in the hospital for a certain amount of time before the Passers would break their own boundaries and come looking for him.

  Clifford sat down on the bed the second time he came to see Aidriel, and received a glance of indifference for his trouble. The old man held out his arms, the insides of which were crisscrossed with scars and recent wounds.

  “These,” he said, pointing at the fresh scabs, “are because of you.”

  Aidriel looked from Clifford’s arms to his face, but pretended to be unmoved. Clifford smiled wide, exposing large yellow teeth behind his tangled beard.

  “It’s alright,” he murmured, his voice trembling with emotion. “I’m glad to finally meet you. It’s been a long time coming. A long, long time.”

  Aidriel turned away and closed his eyes. Getting up to leave, Clifford warned him, “You have only hours left. They are slow sometimes, but they always arrive.”

  CHAPTER 2

  Night fell and wore on slowly into the wee hours. Aidriel slept shallowly and awoke agitated, rising to pace around his room. He hated the quiet and the shadows. He measured the time not by the hours but by how long his recovery was taking, and how often he was visited. He was in no hurry to leave, but soon it wouldn’t matter where he was.

  At a soft knock on the doorframe he looked up to see a brunette in scrubs carrying a little organizer tote.

  “Hi, I’m Dreamer from the lab,” she said. “I’m here to draw some blood.”

  She paused as if waiting for his reaction, and he wondered if she expected a comment about her name. He understood how being constantly asked about one’s moniker could quickly grow tiresome. There was no point in making small talk. Besides, it still hurt to speak.

  Aidriel passively sank down onto his bed, keeping his eyes on her. She approached with a hint of shyness, and he noticed as she put on her gloves that her hands were shaking.

  “Could you spell your last name for me, please?” Dreamer asked softly. She set her supply tray on the chair beside his nightstand and began preparing the items she’d need without looking at him.

  “A-K-I-M-O-S,” he whispered. She looked up questioningly, but saw the marks on his throat and just nodded and smiled, thanking him.

  Dreamer’s hands steadied as she positioned his arm on the bedside table, tying on a tourniquet, softly speaking—or rambling, he thought—about what she was doing.

  “You’ve got great veins,” she murmured with a smile.

  Aidriel wasn’t listening to her, and had turned so he could better hear the hallway, his eyes to the side and fixed on the door. The ward was very still, and over the classical music drifting from far away somewhere, his ears caught the whisper of ragged breathing.

  Instantly, Aidriel became restless and flinched away from Dreamer, who paused patiently and apologized. With a calm warning, she inserted a needle into his vein and attached a tube, waiting for the stream of blood to fill it.

  “Do you work with animals?”

  She was trying to make conversation, noticing the claw marks on his skin. Aidriel was mostly ignoring her, but perceived the pause in her words while she waited for an answer. He shook his head and whispered, “Hurry up.”

  He was still watching the doorway when the Passer came to stand in it. The spirit was a middle-aged man with long hair and long nails. He was wheezing loudly and had a glower of hatred on his face. Everyone had a Passer; this was Aidriel’s.

  Dreamer glanced up at him uncomfortably and noticed his anxiety. She followed his gaze to the door, but saw nothing there.

  “Is it a Passer?” she asked, removing the tube from the needle to push on another. “Bothering you, is it? They don’t cause these, do they?” She indicated his injuries.

  Aidriel was startled that she knew immediately what was wrong, and was turning to say so when the Passer attacked.

  The spirit came flying forward in a blur, a guttural growl rising in its throat. Aidriel jerked swiftly to try and get away, but found himself cornered by Dreamer and the nightstand. His sudden movement pulled the needle in the phlebotomist’s hand out of his arm, but he didn’t notice the blood streaming out of the puncture wound.

  There was no protection against a Passer attack, though it was human nature to at least attempt
self-defense. Aidriel was not unused to being treated harshly, but had endeavored unsuccessfully to fight back before. There could be no trading of blows with the spirits. The result was always frustration or despair and inevitable harm.

  The ghost leapt up onto the bed and clawed at him, snarling and howling, swiping its hands up and down like a slashing cat. Aidriel pulled his legs up against his chest and wrapped his arms around his head, shouting for the Passer to stop. Sometimes it heeded him; more often it didn’t.

  Dreamer had shrunk back in shock at the spectacle, and Aidriel accidentally kicked her in his initial attempt to protect himself. The needle in her hand flew up toward her face but fortunately didn’t poke her. She had the presence of mind to snap the safety cover over the sharp end and discard it.

  “What’s happening?” she asked, stepping back to avoid Aidriel’s defensive swings. He didn’t answer her, and she saw that the tourniquet was still tied around his arm, causing profuse bleeding and purpling in his fingers. Without thinking, Dreamer reached out for the rubber strip, and her hand passed through the invisible shoulder of the Passer. Enraged, the ghost turned on her and slashed several times at her arm before Aidriel realized the Passer was actually harming her, and intervened.

  His first attempt to block the blows with his own arms proved futile. Seeing no other option, Aidriel scrambled forward, shoving Dreamer as hard as he could out of the way. The young woman had managed to catch the end of the tourniquet, and being thrown off balance helped her to pull it loose, but it tangled in Aidriel’s sleeve. He reached for the night table to prevent his fall off the bed and onto the phlebotomist heaped on the floor.

  The Passer took a few more swings at the side of Aidriel’s face before two orderlies came running into the room in response to the ruckus. At the sight of the patient balanced precariously over the phleb on the floor, they reached across the bed and seized Aidriel by his other arm. The Passer was between the hospital workers and its target, but it turned invisible when two more physical bodies came in contact with it. The attack ended.