“Hey, I have a joke for you.”
Dr. St. Cross patiently lowered the medical journal he was reading to look at Todd. They were sitting across the aisle from one another on the cramped little plane, and most of the other passengers were reclined and asleep. The night was dark and starry above the clouds outside the windows, and St. Cross was tired, but Todd was keeping him awake.
“Okay, why are a gorilla’s nostrils so big?” asked Todd.
“This can’t be going anywhere good,” St. Cross replied.
“Because their fingers are so big!” Todd exclaimed softly, barely able to contain his amusement and keep his voice low. He broke into a fit of chuckling, and the psychiatrist rolled his eyes.
“That’s infantile,” St. Cross commented, going back to his reading.
Todd continued to snicker, and the woman beside him lifted her head, opened her sleepy eyes, and gave him a dirty look. Once he had controlled himself, Todd whispered,
“Hey, I wanted to ask you, though—where are we going exactly?”
“Columbus Airport,” St. Cross answered, transfixed on his papers. “Then we’re taking a charter to the Fulton County Airport in Wauseon.”
“Wauseon? Never heard of it.”
St. Cross shrugged, and turned the page.
“Nevertheless,” he said, “that is our destination.”
“Hopefully we’re going to a hotel,” Todd mumbled, pulling his neck pillow in around his ears and shifting in his chair to make himself comfortable.
“Yes, we are,” St. Cross replied with a smile.
Williams and deTarlo had reached the hotel first, and had questioned the night clerk and already left by the time St. Cross and Todd got there. The clerk ran his hand through his spiky hair and twitched nervously.
“I need to make a phone call,” he kept saying.
“I just need to ask a few quick questions,” St. Cross said in his best shrink voice. To better see him in his wheelchair, the clerk had come around the counter, and was leaning against it as if desperately wanting to be on the other side.
“My boss isn’t coming in tonight,” he said. “I already called him and he said he’d call the cops, but I don’t know what we can tell ’em. There was just a bunch of stuff left behind, and they wrecked the TV and AC/heater unit. It was a good thing I smelled something burning and grabbed the fire extinguisher, ’cause it could’a burned the whole place down!”
“Who did you see?” St. Cross asked, ignoring the drama.
“When? I saw a guy come outta the stairway like a shot, and a bit later a chick with an armload of stuff came outta the elevator. She got in her car and drove off. It took me forever to figure out which room they were in; they left the door open.”
“Did you see any Passers?”
“Yeah, I saw a million of ’em chasing after the guy. My computer crashed just before that too, completely fried. Must’a been lightning or a power surge or something.”
“You don’t know where they went?”
“No, they left hours ago. I heard sirens and called my boss, but I don’t know what’s going on. You just missed the tall woman in the witch shoes and her son who came in asking about it. Said they came ’cause they tracked a credit card or something. Said they’d pay for everything.”
“Did she say her name?”
“No, but she was a Dr. Something. She called her son Chet.”
“He’s not her son.”
“Okay, man, whatever you say. I need to make a phone call. I should really talk to my boss again.”
“Just calm down,” St. Cross said soothingly. “If something like this upsets you, perhaps you should consider a different profession.”
“Yeah, really, right?” piped in Todd. “Weird stuff is always going down in hotels on the night shift. You should be cool as a cucumber.” He snickered at his own cleverness.
St. Cross gripped the wheels of his chair, turning it to leave.
“We’re not staying here tonight?” asked Todd, disappointed.
The shrink moved a sufficient distance for privacy and took out his cell phone, dialing and smiling in relief when he got an answer. Tilting the receiver away from his mouth, he turned to Todd and said, “Get the car ready. We have to get moving again.”
Aidriel finally relinquished the driver’s seat to Dreamer when she convinced him to pull over at a Walmart in Elkhart, Indiana, more than two hours after the attack. They parked in the furthest corner of the lot and she ran inside with the credit card from Williams. She knew that Chester’s people could see every purchase she made and where, but without access to her own money, she couldn’t think of any other way to buy what they needed.
She grabbed a first aid kit, aspirin, a bag of apples, bottles of water, a couple of lightweight khaki jackets, and three plastic five-gallon gas jugs. Aidriel was dizzy and half-asleep when she returned, and once she made sure the cut on the back of his head and a few of the worse scratches on his arms were taken care of, she commandeered the wheel. He swallowed the pain pills on an empty stomach and fell asleep.
Dreamer turned on the GPS and programmed it to guide them to the dead zone in Iowa. The location was a square at the center of four streets out in the middle of nowhere, surrounded, from what she could tell, by nothing but houses and a field.
Her last purchase with the credit card was a full tank of gas in addition to the extra fifteen gallons she put in the trunk, so she wouldn’t have to stop again, at least for a while.
As she drove, Dreamer began to feel the anxiety from the night’s attack easing a little, and she sneaked a glance from time to time at Aidriel sleeping. At a red light she studied him, taking in his every feature; his uneven but steady breathing, how his eyelashes flickered from time to time. He looked worried, even in his dreams.
Dreamer reached over to take his hand, pulling it up to rest on the lidded compartment between their seats. It wasn’t exactly comfortable to have her fingers interlaced with his, if only because she still felt physical contact was premature. But somehow it seemed like she had to do it; like they were stronger holding hands. Aidriel didn’t stir, so she didn’t let go.
When Dr. Ana deTarlo was working on her Study of the Psychological Limits of Vasovagel Syncope, Kara, her Passer, had not spent much time in her company.
At Ana’s townhouse, there was a comfortable pair of wicker chairs on her back porch, overlooking a lawn that the landlord kept well-groomed, and a ditch with a trickle of a stream coiling through it. DeTarlo liked to sit in one of the chairs and savor the small victories along the path of her studies. One evening as she was lingering over the last sips of her favorite Cabernet Sauvignon, Kara appeared from nowhere beside the other wicker chair, and slowly sat down.
Kara was much younger than Ana; the girl it had once been was only eighteen when she died and had been a real beauty before the melancholy of its restless purgatory afflicted its features. But it had been a ghost for longer than deTarlo had been alive, and though innocent, it was not naïve.
“I wonder at the ramifications of your study, my friend,” Kara mused. “It strikes me as odd that you can call torture, ‘research’ in the name of psychology.”
“It isn’t torture,” Ana responded in a calm, patronizing tone. She rested her head back against her chair and closed her eyes to enjoy the evening. When something cold brushed her shin, she opened her eyes and was startled to find Kara standing over her.
“Back off!” deTarlo exclaimed, darkly surprised.
“Imagine that tonight, as you sleep, the wires to the outlet by your bed spark and ignite,” said the Passer. “You remain blissfully oblivious to the danger even as the nightstand burns, and the bedclothes catch on fire. You only awaken when the flames spread to your nightgown and hair, scorching your skin too quickly for you to react. Imagine as vividly as you can the agony of your crown of fire, burning down your temples and around the back of your scalp, spreading to your forehead, cheeks, ears and neck. Sitting half-upright in your bed, you are overwhelmed with the agony and eventually faint away. Shall I, in the name of research, ask you in your last waking moments what you are feeling? Shall I record how many minutes you could remain conscious and endure the pain? Shall I try to revive you again without putting out the flames, to see if the suffering would keep you in a state of coma, all in the name of psychology?”
Ana was not unmoved to listen to the Passer’s description, and barely waited to hear the end of it. Gulping down what was left of her wine and getting swiftly to her feet, she brushed her shoulder through the spirit as she passed.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she spat, slamming into the house through the backdoor. “None of my patients are permanently harmed by my study.”
“Pain is eternal,” Kara told her, drifting through the wall to join her in the kitchen. “Pain lingers in the heart and mind like invisible scars.”
“How dramatic.”
DeTarlo set her glass down on the sink so harshly, she was surprised it didn’t shatter.
“Why have you not asked me about pain, my friend?” asked Kara. “I know it intimately.”
“Is that so? And in what way?”
Kara smiled sadly.
“I have described it to you,” the Passer said. “In the last moments, I thought that surely my face and brain were melting. I fell away after less than an agonizing minute. And once I had fainted away, I could not have been revived, if even a person had tried.”
Ana furrowed her brow as if she did not believe the spirit.
As if aware of this fact, Kara seemed to relax and release a tense hold of something. Before Ana’s eyes, the head of the Passer was engulfed in vague, lightless flames, and its face blurred and melted into horrific features unidentifiable as human. The longer deTarlo stared, unblinking, the more disturbingly bright the echoes of the fiery death wreathed the head of the ghost. Kara burned and beamed with cold white light in edgeless symmetry and lost any semblance of mortality in favor of the unimaginable state of death. Ana thought she was gazing upon a beautiful flaming angel.
“Speak to the Passers,” Kara said. “We can tell you with all certainty exactly what the psychological limits of fainting-away pain are.”