Graveyard Shift Read online

  On Ward 6, a man in his early thirties sat alone outside one of the side rooms. He had a shell-shocked look and his dirty, unshaven face and ragged clothes suggested he’d been living rough. He gave up his seat when an elderly man, not seeing him there, shuffled up with a walker and lowered himself onto it. The younger man stepped away clutching his side, red-fingered from the wound seeping below his ribs.

  On Ward 4, in a six-bed unit, two nurses were drawing curtains around the bed nearest the door. A white-haired lady occupied the bed. Her eyes were closed and her lips were smiling. She must’ve expired in the last few minutes. When the screens were drawn, the nurses’ silhouettes moved about her, adjusting pillows and covering her face with a sheet while a third figure much like the old lady’s looked on from the foot of the bed, arms crossed on her chest, one foot tapping the floor.

  In a waiting area near intensive care, a fuzzy-bearded biker in his fifties nearly barged into me. The bloody scrape marks around his face and neck and his torn leather jacket were typical of road accidents.

  “Sorry, mate,” he called as he strode away. “Didn’t see you there. Just like the truck that hit me.”

  They were everywhere — on the wards, in the cafeteria, in all the corridors and waiting areas. As I moved through the hospital, I could imagine the telegraph pumping out their names. Sometimes knowing what I knew, seeing what I saw, seemed more like a curse than a gift. There were times when I wished I could shut it all out.

  Back on Mum’s ward, the clock above the treatment room showed she’d only been inside half an hour. I wished they’d hurry. I was edgy and ready to leave. There were too many strandeds and newly-departeds here, too many voices whispering inside my head.

  “How much longer?” I asked the girl at the desk.

  She shrugged. “As long as it takes. Why don’t you sit with the others, dear, until she’s done?”

  Past her desk at the far end of the ward, a group of nurses were talking excitedly in quiet voices and nodding vigorously. It must have been a vital medical matter or hot gossip; hard to tell which. A set of double doors swung open behind them as someone else entered the ward, a tall man wearing a black suit and what looked like small round-lensed sunglasses.

  But as he moved farther inside, past the nurses, I could tell those weren’t sunglasses. They were the dark, sunken sockets of his eyes. His face was little more than a living skull, the flesh as pale as bone. No wonder the nurses didn’t see him and no one looked up: It was a Deathhead, one of Cadaverus’s agents. One of the enemy.

  The eyeless black sockets narrowed when it saw me. Its lipless mouth grinned. Without pause, it made a beeline straight for me, ignoring the treatment room and the other patients waiting outside it.

  That told me all I needed to know. It wasn’t here for Mum or the others. It was here for me.

  I strode past the girl at the desk, then broke into a run along the corridor to another set of doors at the end. I didn’t need to look back to know it was following me every step of the way. Turning left past the doors, I legged it along the next corridor, then went left again at the end. My heart slammed inside my chest as hard and fast as my footfalls across the tiled floor. Arrowed signs to other departments and wards rushed past in a blur.

  “There’s no point in running,” the Deathhead called in a scratchy sandpaper voice. “We’ll find you wherever you go.”

  But I didn’t care about that. I was more concerned with keeping it as far away from my mother as possible. I ran on, deeper into the maze.

  The next corridor I took had a murky, lifeless atmosphere, as if no one ever set foot there long enough to disturb it. There were no more wards on this part of the floor. There were no more voices or echoes, only a deathly silence. I slowed as I reached a bank of steel-door elevators and hit the nearest call button.

  The doors slid open. I jumped inside just as my pursuer rounded the corner behind me. The doors closed an instant before it hit them from the other side, making the steel cage I was standing in tremble. Dry mouthed, I thumbed the button for the next floor down. The elevator simply sat there, thinking it over.

  Come on, I thought. Come on. . . .

  It seemed to take forever before it clicked to life and began its descent. I half expected the demon to hammer the door again, but the silence that followed didn’t mean it’d given up. It was taking the next elevator down, no doubt.

  The doors spilled me out into an even gloomier space than the one upstairs. It was airless and dark with a constant throb of central heating pumps. The smell of disinfectant and blood was stronger, as if this was the source of it and it crept up through the rest of the building from here.

  Metal gurneys stacked with black plastic waste bags were shoved haphazardly against the opposite wall. Past them, along to the left, were three closed doors with more loaded trolleys outside. The farthest room had a light on inside. I hurried toward it like a moth drawn by a bulb, stepped inside, and closed the door after me as the second elevator arrived with a crash.

  I leaned back against the door, holding my breath, mentally kicking myself for coming this way. From here there was nowhere to go. I’d arrived in the dark bowels of the hospital, exactly where they’d want me to be.

  And worse than that, the room I’d ducked inside was the last place I should’ve chosen. Of all the rooms in the building, I thought. Stupidity or just dumb luck?

  I was inside the morgue.

  A stainless steel counter ran the length of the far wall. At its center were two steel sinks, and between the sinks a length of hose on a spool. A dozen gurneys took up most of the floor space. Three were occupied by bodies draped with clean white sheets.

  Their ghosts weren’t around, though. If they were, I would have known. By now they’d be wandering freely through the wards upstairs, scared and confused and seeking assistance. In here, though, all I could feel was a cold emptiness. Those three on the gurneys weren’t people anymore. They were shells. They were meat.

  From the corridor came the sound of footsteps scuffing across the stone floor. Patient, unhurried footsteps. The demon was taking its time. It knew I had nowhere to go from here.

  Or maybe I did.

  My eyes were hazy with fear, and everything in the morgue looked soft at the edges, but to the right of the counter was a concertina screen. And just visible above the screen, the top frame of a door.

  As I started toward it, the tiles squeaked loudly beneath my rubber soles. I froze, listening for movement outside. It wasn’t easy to hear above the pulse between my ears, but I was sure the footsteps had stopped. They’d stopped right at the door.

  My heart skipped a beat.

  And then the door was thrown open and in it came, a dark vision with a pale death’s-head face. A worm slithered from one of its eyeless sockets; the mouth without lips chanted words I didn’t understand and didn’t want to. It’d had enough of tiptoeing around, and now it wanted to tear me to pieces.

  I jumped back, colliding with the nearest gurney. The gurney, holding one of the bodies, skewed aside and went into a roll. Its wheels hadn’t been locked. Running around behind it, I pushed it with all my strength at the demon.

  But the gurney passed straight through it, as if it’d dissolved at one end and materialized again at the other. The gurney struck the door behind the demon and rolled back into the room, the impact sending the corpse it carried into a sideways roll off the edge.

  “Harvester . . . ,” the demon began.

  I didn’t wait for it to finish. I turned and darted between the other gurneys and around the screen, grasping the door handle and pushing.

  The door didn’t budge. It wouldn’t open outward or inward. I tried again as the demon’s footfalls crossed the floor behind me.

  Then I saw a metal bolt up near the top of the door, another lower down driven into the floor. The first slid back easily. The second was tougher but gave way when I pulled with both hands. As the demon reached the other side of the screen, I yanked the d
oor open and slammed it behind me and ran on through the next room.

  Now I was moving through a cold storage area, a fridge room for bodies. On both sides of the space were the storage units, stacked three-high, gunmetal gray, many of them displaying the names of the departed on their doors. I ran past them toward the murky light farther on, heading for a sign that read PATHOLOGY, FIRE EXIT, STAIRS.

  At any second I might feel the Deathhead’s cold hand on my shoulder, and it’d drag me back to the morgue or kill me on the spot, if killing was what it had in mind. I kept going, through the next set of doors, across a concrete passageway where my footfalls sounded like shots, then up the first flight of the stairwell.

  It was like being in an echo chamber, the bare walls amplifying every slap of my feet on the stone steps. The air was cool and damp as a dungeon’s, the light almost nonexistent. I’d taken three turns of the stairs and almost reached the second floor before it dawned on me that the only steps I could hear on the stairwell were my own.

  At the top of the next flight, I slowed to listen. In the echoic space below I could’ve heard a pin drop, but there was nothing. For whatever reason, it must’ve given up. Perhaps it’d been called away on other business. Or perhaps it’d only intended to scare the daylights out of me, send me a warning shot like the one on the wall back home.

  I left the stairwell, following signs to the wards, checking behind me all the way to make sure he wasn’t still there. This area of the hospital was quiet except for the kitchen sounds, although the smells coming from there weren’t much of an improvement on the ones down below.

  Around a corner past the kitchen, I stopped near a private ward. A switchboard phone rang and rang, but the desk was unmanned. A silver-haired man in his sixties paced around the desk in navy silk pajamas, looking flustered and wringing his hands.

  “Can you see me?” he said.

  “Yes, sir.” I took a step into the ward, a fancier ward than the others I’d seen, with soft blue carpeting and classical art on the walls. The lighting wasn’t any good, though: a faulty fluorescent strobed on and off, hurting my eyes.

  “I can’t feel my legs,” the man said, blinking in time to the light. “Can’t feel anything much. Am I dreaming?”

  “No, I’m sure you’re not dreaming. Maybe you just woke from a bad sleep.”

  “I don’t know. . . . I don’t know. I think they must’ve drugged me, put something in my food. They gave me something so I couldn’t feel my legs. Do you think they might’ve done that?”

  “Who?”

  He continued as if I hadn’t spoken. “It isn’t safe here. I’ve got to get out before they come again. Will you help? I’ve got money. I’ll pay you to help.”

  I glanced at the clock above the desk. Still fifteen minutes before the end of Mum’s appointment. “People will be here to help soon. Shall I wait with you till they come?”

  “Will they help me get away?” He sounded desperate.

  “They’ll do their best. What’s your name, sir?”

  “McCready.”

  “Good. So which one’s your room? It’s best if we wait there.”

  “There,” he said, pointing.

  His door was half open, and through the gap, I could see drawn curtains shutting out the daylight. The stuttering light of a silent TV played around the room and over the figure in the bed. Like those in the morgue, the figure was hidden under clean white sheets.

  Seeing that, McCready made a grab for my wrist. His fingers were icy. There was no electric charge, no light show of the kind I’d seen when Mr. October took newly-departeds by the hand.

  “That isn’t me,” he said. “That’s my bed, but that isn’t me. We can’t wait for help. We have to go now.”

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “I know it’s a shock and a bad way to find out —”

  “No! You don’t understand!”

  He was delirious. He tightened his hold on my wrist. Behind us, the ringing phone stopped abruptly.

  “I can’t take it back,” he said. “Don’t you see? It’s too late to undo what I’ve done.”

  I stared at him in confusion. “What do you mean, sir? What did you do?”

  He let go of my wrist and covered his mouth, staring into the room, visibly shaking.

  “What is it?” I asked. “What are you seeing?”

  And out of the silence inside the room came a sound like a yawning gale. A rustling of sheets as the figure in the bed began to move.

  It raised itself up into a sitting position, turning its head slowly toward us. This was no practical joke, no Scooby-Doo ghost draped in bedclothes. I knew that as soon as the sheet fell away, revealing the face underneath.

  It was no kind of face at all: no eyes or nose, no features except for the huge red mouth that covered most of its surface. The creature licked its lips, spilling drool on the bed, then wiped its chops with a translucent hand that had seven suckers for fingers. The belch it let out sent a wave of foul air through the doorway.

  “You’re right,” I told McCready. “Time to go.”

  Whatever the thing on the bed was, it wasn’t McCready’s body, which meant the man standing next to me wasn’t his ghost. Apart from that, I was clueless. The only option I could think of was: Run.

  “Come on,” I said.

  “Too late,” McCready said.

  He braced himself at the sudden flurry of movement on the bed, as if he already knew what was coming. In the blink of an eye, the creature leapt up and at him, fastening its suckered hands to his face, opening its dreadful red mouth wide as it dragged him inside the room.

  The door slammed behind them. McCready started to scream. I covered my ears, not wanting to hear it. But the screams didn’t last for long.

  A silence emanated from McCready’s room. I sagged against the wall by his door, trying to make sense of what had just happened. The screaming had stopped but I still heard it in my mind, and now the strobing light was giving me a headache. Squinting through it, I could make out two figures entering the ward. They seemed to move in slow motion as they rounded the desk toward me.

  The Deathhead came back, I thought. It lost me in the basement, but now it’s found me again. And this time it’s brought a friend. . . .

  They moved nearer, into focus, and I relaxed then, recognizing friendly faces: first Lu, then Mr. October a few paces behind. They were here on official salvage business, I guessed, with Mr. October dressed in the old man’s weathered body, feeling his way forward with the walking stick.

  “You OK?” Lu asked, looking at me with concern.

  “I’ve been better.” I nearly gagged on the words, and my legs were rubbery and weak. “Something in that room . . .”

  “We heard,” Mr. October said.

  “What about him?” I said, gesturing at McCready’s door. “Are we too late? He needed help.”

  “Open the door,” Mr. October said.

  I hesitated. If that thing was still inside, I didn’t want to be anywhere near when it came roaring out.

  “It’s safe now,” he said. “See for yourself.”

  It took me a moment to pull myself together. Then I made myself twist the handle and give the door a push.

  Inside, McCready’s corpse lay peaceful and pale among the sheets. His eyes were open, staring up at the ceiling, but he wasn’t at home anymore.

  The beast was nowhere in sight.

  “It returned to where it came from,” Mr. October said. “It came and found what it wanted and took him with it.”

  “What was it?” I asked.

  “What did it look like to you?”

  Uncannily like something no one had ever seen before, I thought, remembering Tommy Farley’s English story.

  I described it as best I could, as much of it as I could remember, from its nearly transparent, wormy body to its hungry, gaping jaws.

  “Mawbreed,” said Lu without hesitation.

  “Maw-what?”

  Mr. October agreed. “Sounds very
much like one. Some call them Devourers, as that’s basically all they do. They’re like industrial-strength vacuum cleaners of doom. They come up from the depths to suck out the souls of the living.”

  I looked at him blankly. “Can they do that? I mean, don’t they have to wait until someone passes on? Isn’t that how it’s supposed to work?”

  “There are exceptions.” Mr. October closed McCready’s door. “The Mawbreed wait for no one. They’re a law unto themselves.”

  “He seemed to know it was coming,” I said. “What did he do to deserve that?”

  “He sold his soul,” Mr. October said with a note of regret. “In return, the Lords of Sundown gave him forty years of prosperity and power, the kind of wealth he could never take with him. He was a banker who foreclosed on many small businesses, refused loan extensions to the needy, and put scores of families out of their homes. Built himself an empire of greed. We can’t help him now. The second he signed himself away, he stopped being our responsibility. He wasn’t even on our list.”

  It was a relief to leave the ward behind, to turn away from that room and the stuttering light above the desk. I was jittery on my feet as Lu and Mr. October escorted me back to Mum’s ward.

  “You’re OK?” Lu asked again along the way.

  “I will be. Still shaky,” I said.

  “The Mawbreed are so ugly,” she said. “I have nightmares about them sometimes.”

  I knew what she meant. I’d probably have nightmares about them too from now on.

  As we arrived at Mum’s ward, I warned them about the demon I’d encountered; it could still be inside the hospital somewhere.

  “We’ll be on the lookout,” Mr. October said, “but frankly, they’re ten a penny in places like this. You’d be hard-pressed to turn any corner without coming face-to-face with one.”

  “But what if I see it again?” I asked. “If I see any more of them?”

  “Zap them,” Lu said.

  “She means use your developing skills,” Mr. October said. “You’ll be surprised how easily it comes to you.”