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.”