Even the television station was too controlled for Aidriel to tell the time of day or the date. He guessed from the commercials that they were in Pennsylvania or Eastern Ohio. There was no guide to what would be airing, and no way of keeping track of the hours based on the programming. They’d taken his watch away while he was in the hospital and he hadn’t gotten it or any of his other personal belongings back. The storage tubs contained clean clothing for him, and he had only the pair of shoes he was wearing when he arrived.
Every so often, at intervals he couldn’t consider a schedule because they were purposefully erratic, the door would open and three of the medical mercenaries would come in. He had been given an electronic reading device with a random selection of books on it, and was fed twice a day. There were five bland meals they cycled through at random, ignoring the fact he hated the fish and never touched it. The water tasted like minerals, and barely took the edge off his perpetual thirst. He was used to some degree of paranoia, but since arriving at the Bird Cage he’d been increasingly agitated or overwhelmingly drowsy, even dizzy, which he attributed to boredom and being sedentary. The orderlies did not seem to consider him a threat and didn’t bother to talk to him. What was there to say?
“How many days have I been here?” Aidriel finally asked when he was sure a full week had passed. “I need to know how long I’ve been in one place.”
The orderlies raised their eyebrows at him like he was a monkey trying to imitate them, and left without answering his question.
If only each day were indeed his last. Living as if there might be no tomorrow caused every minute to pass at an agonizingly slow rate, and Aidriel was itching for something to happen. He began to ache for a rope and a branch to hang it from, and he was almost impatient for what he knew was going to occur, though he dreaded it also.
“I have to know how long I’ve been here!” Aidriel called out to the ceiling, unsure of where the cameras or sensors even were. “I need to know how long it’s been.”
Time was important. He had to know how long it would be before the Passers would find him.
After the first meal on one of the featureless days, Aidriel was sitting at the table with his chin resting on his folded arms when the doors unlocked and Dreamer came in with two orderlies as an escort.
“Hi, I’m here to draw some blood,” she said as if they were strangers.
Without speaking, Aidriel straightened and pulled up his sleeve, extending his arm. His face let slip the smallest sign of his pleasure at finally seeing her and his hopes that she might be all he imagined she was. Dreamer set her tray of supplies on the table, but one of the mercenaries picked it up again to keep it out of Aidriel’s reach.
“Why does my blood have to be tested?” Aidriel asked. “Am I on drugs?”
Dreamer wouldn’t look at him or answer, but took a small sheet of labels for the tubes from her tote. Pretending to double-check the stickers, she laid them on the table, tapping them with her fingertip to draw Aidriel’s attention to a certain word. The labels were upside-down, but in the snatch of view Aidriel had before one of the orderlies picked up the sheet he saw the word Depakene. He had no idea what that was and looked to the phlebotomist, who had chosen her supplies from the tray and was putting on her gloves. She mouthed the word “schizophrenia.”
The orderly with the labels cleared his throat; Dreamer ignored him, tying her tourniquet around Aidriel’s arm, choosing the sight and cleansing it with an alcohol wipe while Aidriel watched her closely for any other subtle communication. She went about her business without talking at first, finally warning just before the needle pierced his skin, and waiting while the red-and-yellow-topped tube filled.
Her casual silence gave Aidriel the impression that he had not been privy to the obvious fact the two of them were somehow as thick as thieves. Dreamer sneaked a glance at him and smiled a little; he admitted to himself that she had been on his mind often since their shared attack. She was wearing short-sleeved scrubs, and he could see the barely perceptible shadows on her right arm of the injuries she had received during the attack. They had corresponding tattoos of sorts.
“What’s going on outside?” Aidriel murmured. He turned his gray eyes up at her, and she glanced at the mercenaries before answering; they didn’t motion or speak.
“A whole lot of nothing,” Dreamer said. “Dr. deTarlo is angry with Mr. Williams all the time, and as far as any of us med workers know, none of our Passers will come here.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know, but even Mr. Williams’s Passer is shunning him.”
“Sounds like a stressful working environment.”
Dreamer smiled slightly before she could stop herself. She took a short breath as if to speak, but didn’t.
“I’m at their mercy here,” Aidriel whispered, turning his wrist so he could grip her elbow. The phleb hesitated, then undid the tourniquet, leaning closer as she did so.
“Rubin showed up last night,” she murmured. “It’s been standing outside, waiting.”
Aidriel cursed under his breath. Dreamer was finished with her draw, but as she removed the needle, she intentionally lifted it enough to widen the puncture wound. Her intention was to cause more bleeding to allow a few more moments in his company. If it hurt, Aidriel showed no sign of it.
“They can hear everything we’re saying,” she told him while she held gauze to the wound. “I don’t know if you can speed this ‘project’ along enough to be freed, but is there something you know that we don’t?”
Aidriel took his time answering as if he had to think.
“Rubin’s not waiting for me,” he said. “If it hasn’t come in yet, it’s because it’s waiting for others.”
“Other what?”
“Other Passers.”
“This dome is an electromagnetic field. You’ll be—”
“I might as well be standing in the middle of the street,” Aidriel said definitively. “You can’t hide from them.”
Rubin had always been around. Aidriel could remember, as a boy, standing at the end of the driveway watching his father’s truck vanish around the far curve in the road, never to return. Rubin was nearby, observing also.
“You have your mother,” the Passer had told him. “She loves you, and your father only disciplined you. I’ll do that now.”
It was not an idle threat, and for the rest of Aidriel’s childhood, he was slapped or reprimanded almost daily by Rubin for getting out of line. He fell into a cycle of forced trust with the Passer, relying on the dead older man’s opinion of balance to keep the peace. His mother had other things on her mind, and didn’t interfere. It suited her just fine that her only son didn’t get into trouble and treated her with respect.
The relationship between boy and ghost was not only a violent one, though. Rubin had been deceased for more than a century. It was tolerant of listening to troubles and freely offered advice.
“What did you die of?” young Aidriel had once asked.
“I was a rich man,” Rubin told him, calling attention to the garish red velvet vest it always wore. “I lived long enough ago that I could own slaves and had workers to maintain my extensive grounds. My life was long and comfortable, but I was not generous, and I died of food poisoning after an extravagant feast honoring my birthday.”
“What is it like to have so much money and power?” starry-eyed Aidriel had wanted to know.
“Find out for yourself,” Rubin said.
“Does that mean that someday I will be rich?”
“I don’t tell lies.”
“But is that what you meant?”
“Stop questioning me, child,” Rubin responded testily.
“But you can see the future. I want to know.”
Rubin had cuffed Aidriel and left him alone.
As Aidriel entered his teens, the physical punishments lessened, but the advice and companionship did also. Rubin was still often present. However, it began to act more and more as if it resented Aidriel. When he was seventeen, Aidriel finally learned why.
“I’m going to kill you,” Rubin had said.
Aidriel was breathless and barely managed to ask why.
“I hate you,” responded the Passer. “We all do. I’ve lost years’ worth of opportunities to kill you. Be sure that I will accomplish it, though.”
Aidriel could remember his father threatening to kill him once. The elder Akimos had not made good on his promise, electing instead to leave. Rubin, however, was not his father.
It was both boring and calming to supervise the video, audio and electromagnetic data feed from the Bird Cage. A group of technicians took shifts sitting in front of the cluster of four screens in the monitor room, watching with half of their attention while focusing the rest on a book or a football game on a small TV. Once or twice a day, Chester Williams would come into the room for an update.
“There’s been a lot of static and flashing in and out on the video feed,” the tech on duty told him on one such visit during the second week. “Nothing but blurs and temperature clouds on the thermal, but there’s been distinct interference on the other two feeds.”
“Show me,” ordered Williams, leaning on his fist on the desk. The technician consulted a list of times he’d recorded in a log notebook, scrolling to the corresponding frames on the monitor.
The first time frame listed showed a strange foggy shape flash in front of Camera Number 2 for only four or five frames. The tech slowed it down, and Chester peered at the screen. It took him several seconds to realize it was a ghostly hand trying to block the camera.
People were used to seeing Passers living among them by now. It wasn’t strange or frightening to view a crowd and perceive that half of the faces were translucent. They weren’t misshapen; the cause of death was not visible on the spirit of a vacated body. But to witness a Passer in a way that ghosts used to be seen before the Sentience, in sinister snatches or threatening poses, made Chester shudder.
The disturbing images continued. In the footage, Aidriel wandered aimlessly from one resting place to another, doing very little to extricate himself from a trance, but all around him was ghostly activity. The technician showed Williams video frame after frame of Passers blocking the cameras or flashing terrible expressions of hatred or agony of which Aidriel was completely, possibly intentionally, oblivious.
Chester recognized one of the Passers’ faces. He saw for several seconds that while Aidriel had his back turned, a ghost made itself visible several paces behind him, and stood absolutely still, watching him. When he began to turn around, it vanished. It was Williams’s own spirit companion, and seeing it standing in such an attitude that he had never seen before sent chills down his spine.
“I don’t want to see any more,” Chester said.
“There’s audio feedback too,” said the technician. “Only one mike would pick it up at a time, so it’s most likely Electronic Voice Phenomena.”
Once more consulting his notations, the tech scrolled through the audio files until he reached a certain time, playing the clip for Williams. At first there was simply soft white noise, the amplified scraping sound of Aidriel moving, then a fuzzy, distorted voice clearly saying, “I bring death.”
The tech ran it over twice more, and Chester rubbed at his eyes with his thumb and middle finger. The dim light in the room and seemingly cold temperature only magnified his sense of unfounded fear, a feeling he hadn’t had since watching movies about haunted houses as a child.
The next audio file played was similar in its arrangement. White noise, movement sounds from Aidriel, then a very quiet voice that gave a long wheeze and hissed, “Be gone! Curses!”
“That’s enough,” Williams said before the tech could play anything more. “I get the picture.”
“Then here’s the printout of the electromagnetic fluctuations,” the other man summed up, handing over a pile of several pages showing numbers, waving lines, and technical data. Chester looked over the information briefly, taking it in and pondering it while glancing around at the screens.
Aidriel was sitting quietly at the table with his head on his arm; he often assumed this position. The image appeared frozen on the monitors, and lulled Williams into a near- blindness as his mind worked and his eyes barely registered what they were seeing. The fright that washed over him all of a sudden made the hair on his arms and neck stand up. The tech caught his breath; he had seen it too.
For the briefest of moments, a Passer had appeared inside the Bird Cage, taking several steps toward Aidriel before it became invisible again. Chester realized he was trembling as he stared unblinking at the video feed, waiting with bated breath to see if the Passer would make itself perceptible again. For several seconds, the image did not change.
“Can you see it, sir?” whispered the tech. Williams shook his head. He would be able to see the Passer in its invisible state if he were in the Bird Cage with it, but the ghost was at present in a plane that the video cameras could not detect; even the thermal imaging feed from Camera Number 1 showed nothing.
Something might happen; even at a run, Chester wouldn’t be able to reach the dome in less than ten minutes. There were doors to unlock and stairs to navigate, if he circumvented the maddeningly slow elevator. He didn’t want to take the chance of leaving the room and missing an appearance on camera of the Passer.
“Should we alert security?” breathed the tech.
Without answering, Chester held up his hand to signal patience. He was frozen, staring at the screen where the Passer was visible again. It stood just across the table from Aidriel, who did not stir. His back rose and fell with slow regularity; he was most likely asleep, and wouldn’t see the attack coming before it was too late.
But as Williams and the tech watched, holding their breath, they saw the Passer turn slowly around and walk away from Aidriel, nearly reaching the wall of the Bird Cage before it vanished.
For several seconds, Chester and the tech silently tried to calm themselves, relieved that nothing had happened. Both were startled out of their wits when the same Passer they had just seen suddenly appeared again, flying up at Camera 4 with a horrifying expression, its eye sockets black as holes, shrieking a spine-chilling scream. With echoing cries of fear, the two men jumped back from the console, and Williams fled in a panic, leaving the poor tech, ashen with terror, to stare at the screen, where the lens on Camera 4 was obscured by three deep nail scratches.
Whoever had designed the Bird Cage had not seemed concerned with simulating the change of light between night and day, but Aidriel could tell the difference. He’d sit for hours in the chair at the table, sometimes drifting off to sleep with his head on his arm. Vague shadows would begin to backdrop the furniture and the lights above, and he would know night was falling. He observed the changing of time this way after being suddenly awakened by what he, in a state of half-consciousness, thought was a shriek, and he began to become agitated.
The familiar sense of pain and nausea gripped the pit of his stomach, and he had the desperate urge to run. There was nowhere to run to, nowhere to hide.
The dome began to hum faintly; perhaps the electromagnetic field had been increased. Outside of it, he heard the echo of footsteps, voices, ragged breathing. Rubin was here, and was probably not alone.
Aidriel got up and walked to the wall near the doors, touching the pane to feel its temperature, peering through it into the gloom. The warmth of the surface began to noticeably drop, and Aidriel was startled to see Rubin suddenly step up close to the glass, though it stayed outside. Its hand came toward him, its long sharp nails scratching noisily on the dome’s exterior.
Taking several paces back, Aidriel looked around and saw the ghostly silhouettes of dozens of Passers standing just outside the Bird Cage, watching, waiting. Rubin continued to wheeze and scrape at the pane.
The ringing in Aidriel’s ears changed pitch and he fled from the wall, moving to the middle of the open floor. He didn’t want to be near any of the furniture, even if it was padded. He didn’t want to be smothered. Sitting down Indian-style, he leaned forward as far as he could, wrapping his arms around his head.
“This won’t keep them out,” he whispered despairingly.
Rubin’s breathing stopped; he shrieked and the other Passers screamed out as well. Aidriel could hear the television sputter, hiss and explode with a spray of sparks, then the Passers were upon him. Dozens of hands tore at his clothing and hair, nails digging into his flesh and pulling, scratching, gouging. Their screams were deafening, and, folded so tightly against them, Aidriel couldn’t breathe. The pain was unbearable and crushing, but he was too much in shock to cry out.
One of the Passers grabbed onto a handful of his hair and pulled hard, coming away with a chunk that it flung away in disgust, reaching for more. Hands were seizing and pulling Aidriel from all sides. One overwhelmed the others, dragging him by his shoulder several feet toward the wall before losing its grip. Another kicked him hard in the neck, and for a few seconds he blacked out. He barely had a chance to cough and suck in a breath before another clamped its claws over his face, trying to smother him.
There had to be dozens of them, swarming like a shapeless cloud of misty wasps all stinging at once. Aidriel’s shoes and socks were yanked off, his feet trampled and punctured. Pieces of his clothing were being cut and ripped away, the exposed flesh falling target to the flying claws. Some of the Passers have paranormal weapons and were stabbing or hitting him. Clifford was there among them, using his scissors to strike with the same hatred and ferocity as Rubin.
Aidriel was seized and dragged toward the wall again, his hand groping desperately at the carpet before it was stomped and kicked. A female Passer shoved his head back with both hands, tipping him backward and sitting down on his chest, gripping his throat to strangle him. A male was twisting his leg, trying to dislocate it at the knee, and Rubin was striking at his face with both fists.
Unable to breathe or think, Aidriel instinctively tried to block the blows or fight back, his blotchy vision focused on Rubin. It was at times like these that all memories of his Passer being kind vanished. Aidriel couldn’t recall anything about any other spirits before they chose to hate him, though he was not so young when it began that he could forget.
Clifford shoved the strangling woman aside and took its place, swinging the scissors down swiftly, striking a different location each time. It seemed to Aidriel that Rubin and Clifford’s heads passed through each other and combined for a moment; his vision was exaggerating the translucent effect of the spirits as his brain was starved of oxygen. He remembered what Clifford had told him—that he was the last one. The burden had been passed and multiplied; never before had he been attacked so viciously or by so many.
Aidriel was grabbed by his outstretched arm again and jerked swiftly sideways, away from the wall. He slid out from under some of the Passers, though others managed to hang on. Tangible hands were holding him; Williams and two orderlies had arrived and were trying to get him out of the swarming pass of murderous ghosts.
“Rod, stop it!” Chester yelled at one of the male spirits. Williams began cursing and threw himself over Aidriel’s body, ineffectually endeavoring to block the raging hands. The orderlies continued to drag their limp patient across the floor on his back, their eyes darting around in confusion as to what was happening. The strangling female was splattering blood at them and shrieking in rage, her swipes having no effect. Even Williams appeared untouched by the Passers, but there was no denying the spirits were there.
Rod and Rubin were frothing at the mouth, digging their claws into Aidriel’s sides and pulling against the orderlies. Clifford swung his scissors at Chester but missed. The ethereal blades struck Aidriel in the side of the head, flooding his mouth and ear with blood. He was finally beginning to lose consciousness from the pain and asphyxiation and could do nothing in his defense. He felt his body leave the floor as the tug-of-war became more intense. The ghost gripping his leg continued to twist it sharply to try to cause the knee to dislocate, but the white hot flashes of pain in Aidriel’s nerves caused a reflexive kick that succeeded in flinging the spirit away.
Chester’s smartphone exploded in his pocket; he recoiled in surprise, his grip slipping. The Passers wrenched Aidriel away and dragged him all the way over to the wall, striking his head and shoulder against it as if they had forgotten he couldn’t be hauled through. It didn’t stop the hate-filled spirits from continuing their attack, though here and there, they were losing steam and fading away into nothing one at a time.
Rubin punched Aidriel in the chest as hard as it could but he managed to get a breath in. Williams and the orderlies seized him once more, pulling as hard and swiftly as they could, and freeing him from most of the ghostly hands. The Passers no longer touching him yelled out in disappointment and vanished, but a few hangers-on refused to give up fighting. Clifford got in one more stab then disappeared. Rod was flexing its nails in Aidriel’s shoulder, screaming in a cursing match with Chester. Rubin gripped Aidriel by the throat, choking him senseless, but suddenly released and drifted back away from the struggle as if it had deployed an invisible parachute. As soon as it had given up in the attack, the other Passers did as well; within a moment, all of them were gone.
With moans of exhaustion, Williams and the orderlies dropped Aidriel to the floor and slumped down beside him. Their patient was unconscious and a bloody, battered mess. One of the orderlies was shaking violently, looking at the blood all over his chest and hands and trying to wipe it off.
“I need a drink,” muttered the other in a thick Southern accent.
Chester crawled to Aidriel, leaning over him and checking for a pulse.
“Still breathing,” he panted, crouching back down on his haunches. He fished his phone out of his pocket and dropped it, shaking his hand to ease the sudden burn caused by touching the electronic device. The phone was melted and smoking.
“Is that from the Bird Cage’s field?” asked the Southern orderly. Williams shook his head.
Dr. Ana deTarlo was pacing up and down the hallway in the office area, her heels clicking and screeching as she turned on them swiftly. Some half-wit designer had chosen to display large photographs of tropical scenes on the walls between the doors. Not that the psychologist had anything against the tropics, but it seemed so inappropriate for the facility that it came off as tacky.
The double doors to the medical wing flew open with such force they slammed into the walls on either side. Williams came stalking out, putting on a clean sport jacket, two security guards and an assistant following a step behind him.
DeTarlo stepped aside and let Chester go by, falling into his procession between him and his security.
“Do you consider this a failure or a success?” he asked her, throwing open the door to his office and moving over to stand behind his desk.
“It depends on how you—”
“A success for you, I suppose,” interrupted Williams s