WE STEPPED INTO a recovery ward, closed off behind a nurses’ station. Behind it sat a pleasantly plump woman in a gleaming white uniform. Hair the color of a new penny frothed under a nurse’s cap straight out of the fifties. Her skin had the shape and shade of uncooked biscuit dough, making the hair look brassy and fake. Not like a cheap dye job, but the color and consistency of fine copper wire.
“Can I help you?” Her voice was chipper and high pitched. Pushed through a wide, saccharine smile, it squeaked like a dog toy.
Immediately my nerves were on edge.
Nyarlathotep stepped to the counter in a swirl of midnight coat. He stood in stark contrast to the nurse, sinister and saturnine against her gleam. Looming, his head tilted slightly, he spoke. “Stand aside.”
A hand fluttered over pillowy cleavage. “Now, you can’t just barge in here! There are rules, and our patients need order.”
My fingers tightened on the charred stick I held as tension clamped across the back of my neck, making the vertebrae grind. I looked around, stretching while I did. My neck popped and cracked and felt better. Studying the reception area put the tension right back where it had been.
I’d been in ICU, a recovery ward, and a psych ward. This place looked nothing like any of them. Those all had things in common. The same bland, abstract paintings on the wall, nonspecific track lighting to diffuse the atmosphere, pastel colors to set visitors and patients at ease. None of that could be found here. Everything gleamed as white as the nurse, unadorned and blank. Harsh light cut from bulbs set into the ceiling, striking the floor in bright pools. Only one painting broke the stark whiteness. It hung down the wall, angled just out of my direct line of sight. I could see it was abstract, but it wasn’t bland. The colors slashed across the canvas like claw marks on bare flesh. I leaned back, trying to look at the painting, to study it, but my eyes kept sliding to the left, going out of focus until a headache started to black-hornet buzz behind them. I turned. “What kind of wing is this?”
Before the nurse could answer, the Man in Black’s voice whip-cracked at me. “Do not speak to her.”
The nurse looked up at him, a wide clown grin plastered on her face. Daniel nudged my arm. He pointed at a sign over the automatic doors leading to the rest of the ward.
ONCOLOGY RECOVERY.
That explained a lot.
I don’t just hate hospitals because of what happened to me. No, my hatred of them goes way back. Long before that night, at a time where my memories are lost in the fog of childhood, my dislike of hospitals had been cemented into who I am.
My grandmother died when I was seven.
She’d been old my whole life. In my child’s memory she’d been ancient, not even human, just a collection of sticks wrapped in sagging, wrinkled skin. I have no memory of her other than the hospital. I don’t remember when she got sick with cancer, or what she was like before.
I’ve seen pictures, a pretty woman who looked a lot like my mom, but that’s not the image in my head. No, I remember her as a sad, inhuman thing lying in a bed, curled in pain. She moaned, low and constant, the undulating rhythm of low-yield agony broken only by the sucking in of more breath. I remember the smell of her, moist and decaying, the scent of her body betraying her bit by bit, strong enough to cut through the astringent bleach and medication smell that all hospitals share.
I love my mom. I really do. Caught in the sorrow of losing her mother, she had no idea what she did by making me go with her to keep vigil. As an only child, she didn’t have a choice; there was no one else to be with my grandmother and no one else to watch me. So I went with her, every day, all day that summer, until my father came to rescue me, taking me home and leaving my mom behind to stand watch and witness the slow dying, the ebb of life with each thin, tortured inhale and exhale.
I was there the moment my grandmother died.
I can still feel it clearly. The very moment the moaning stopped and didn’t start again. The machines hummed and beeped and whirred, but there was a hollowness in the air, a desolation scooped from the atmosphere as my grandmother ceased to live. My mother sat up and looked at me. Both of us were frozen, locked in time by what had just happened between one breath and the next. Neither of us moved for a long moment. Then my mother’s face twitched and cracked and broke, tears spilling down her cheeks, running off her jaw, and splashing her shirt. She slipped off the chair, crumpling to the floor with a sob that turned into a scream.
I was a child. I didn’t know what to do. I stood there, locked in fear, until strangers rushed in the room and shoved me away.
“Move aside. I will not tell you again.”
Nyarlathotep’s voice broke through the memory, snatching me back to what was happening here and now in front of me. His red right hand had slipped out of its pocket. It hung beside him, skinless fingers slightly curled. He looked almost casual, indifferent and unconcerned, but the air crackled with tension.
“Sir, I will not allow you to disturb our patients.”
The nurse stood now. Her uniform puckered at the buttons as the fabric strained across a generous middle and spongy breasts the size of my head. Self-conscious, I hunched my shoulders around my own modest B-cup. The nurse’s smile was still in place, cheeks pulled high, stretching lips tight against teeth that were so very white.
The tension between them vibrated. I had to speak, had to say something in the face of it. “She’s only a nurse. Why don’t we just go around her?”
“She is the guardian of this place.” The Man in Black didn’t turn when he answered me. “Stop asking questions, Acolyte.”
The nurse turned her face toward me. Her smile got even wider. It looked painful, pulling her eyes into diagonal lines, thinning the skin over her brow and drawing tight her double chin. “Acolyte? Dr. Mason would love to … examine you.” Her head swiveled toward the Dark Man with a snap. As her cheeks quivered and strained under the pull of that clown smile, her voice dropped a full octave. That smile hadn’t faltered since we stepped off the elevator. “But you will not gain entrance.”
The Man in Black didn’t move. He didn’t. His coat rustled, pulling its hem tiredly off the floor. It had been nothing, a simple shift, the tiniest movement of all.
But it was enough.
The nurse’s face split in two.
It started in the corners of her mouth, twin ruptures like paper cuts, trickling translucent blood that zigged and zagged down the plane of her jaw. I could hear the skin ripping, like packing tape being pulled off the spool. The splits widened, yawning in strings as they tore all the way to her ears. Teeth ran to the very back of her skull.
In the blink of an eye her face swelled, expanding like a puffer fish and turning a dark shade of jaundiced, a rotten-lemon yellow. The top of her head flipped back to reveal an open maw crammed full of jagged teeth, all of their crowns wicked sharp and white. They circled an empty, gaping gullet like an enameled chainsaw whirlpool. Saliva sluiced out in a gush to spill over the counter and drip on the floor. From the neck down she was still human, with the same pudgy arms, still wearing the white uniform now obscenely see-through after being soaked with spittle. Putting its chubby, pale hands on the counter, the thing that once was a nurse pushed off, lunging at the Man in Black with her mashing monster mouth.
That terrible red right hand flashed, slapping her to the floor.
The thing that once had been a nurse tumbled off the counter in a sprawl of chubby arms and legs. It scrambled to its feet, the top of its head askew. Its face had deformed: eyes slit closed, copper-wire hair wadded around skin gone swollen and bright, dehydrated-urine yellow.
Its upper jaw clacked against the lower as it tried to speak, but words dribbled out in a chewed-up, mangled mess.
The Man in Black’s red right hand curled into a fist. With one step, he drove it into the skull of the thing that used to be a nurse.
Its head exploded in a shower of pulp.
Tiny pieces of monster head splattered across Daniel and me. We hadn’t moved. There hadn’t been time. It was over in a moment, a breath … no, a thought. One second the nurse was talking, the next her head had been obliterated.
The Crawling Chaos turned to us. Blood and gore slid slow and chunky down his face. His eyes glittered with dark amusement, backlit with glee as he licked clean the fingers of his red right hand.
Finished, he looked at us and smiled under sharply arched eyebrows.
“What? Did you want me to share?”