Sun-washed and of recent vintage, most of the hospitals in the greater Phoenix metropolitan area glowed with comforting earth tones banded with rows of darkened glass windows. The one in Scottsdale that Kelli had been rushed to was no exception. In an East Coast city of older vintage the complex might have been mistaken for a new office building or software park. Entering, one was instantly disabused of any such frivolous notion. No matter their location or lineage, design or décor, on the inside hospitals were invariably similar. And there was always the unmistakable dry tang of disinfectant.
It was not a place in which Cody wanted to find the light of his life. If only she had believed him, if only she had listened more closely to his warnings and explications, this would never have happened!
What would never have happened? he asked himself. As yet, he knew nothing of what had actually occurred.
Though he appreciated their genuine and heartfelt concern, Mark and Dana were not much help. As they hurried down one sterile hallway and then another like rats in an ochre-walled maze, a fearful Dana told Cody that it had happened while she and Kelli were out shopping. The two women had been stocking up at Albertson’s market, laughing and chatting and having a nice afternoon; there was nothing amiss, nothing untoward, nothing to indicate that either of them was feeling anything unusual. And then suddenly a peculiar expression came over Kelli’s face; she stopped speaking in midsentence, her eyes had rolled back into her head, and she collapsed like a sack of rain-soaked rice.
Dana had managed to catch her as she fell, unable to arrest her fall completely but at least preventing her from cracking her skull on the hard floor of the supermarket. Unable to revive her friend, she’d unashamedly begun screaming for help. The store manager called 911 and paramedics arrived with commendable speed. Dana had gone with Kelli in the ambulance. As soon as they arrived at the hospital, she’d called Mark. Unable to do more than pace the waiting room, unable to reach Cody by phone since he’d already left his office on campus, they’d returned home to await his arrival.
“Where did it happen?” Though he was all torn up inside, he did his best to fight down the nausea and despair that threatened to overwhelm him. His people were supposed to be good at that sort of thing, but as they hurried along the passageways all he wanted to do was start bawling and throw up.
“I told you.” Dana was having trouble keeping up with the two men, obliged to break into little, short sprints from time to time to avoid falling behind. “In the market.”
“No, not that. Where in the market? What section? What were you doing, what was Kelli doing, when she collapsed?”
Distraught and concerned for her friend, his neighbor struggled to recall. “We were shopping, just shopping.” She shook her head in disbelief at the remembrance. “It happened so fast. We were on our way to check out and Kelli stopped to look at some new ornamentals that had just come in.”
“Ornamentals?” Without breaking stride, Cody looked at her sharply. “What kind of ‘ornamentals’?”
“You know.” Puzzled at this line of interrogation but too worried to argue, Dana chose to reply without questioning. “Houseplants. Ornamental houseplants.”
“Live, or dried?” At any other time Dana would have wondered at the seriousness with which Cody put the query to her.
“Alive, of course. There were some pretty tropicals, some calatheas and a couple like them that I didn’t recognize. Lots of coleus, of course. Kelli thought they were all beautiful. She loves unusual things, you know, and . . .”
With Mark leading the way, they rounded still another corner, brushing past nurses and candy stripers, medita-tive interns and the aimlessly ambling, dull-eyed relatives of the ailing.
“She touched one of them, didn’t she?” Cody sounded more accusatory than he intended. “One or more. And then she went down.”
“That’s right.” Having already explained what had happened, his neighbor was not surprised at his reaction. Later, when she had time to think about it, she would wonder at his uncharacteristic and seemingly unjustified vehemence.
For now, though, she and her husband and their friend were adrift in the acute emotions of the moment. “Here we are. Three-twenty. No, Three twenty-two.”
Why couldn’t the manufacturers of hospital apparatus make their equipment silent, an anxious, fearful Cody wondered as he followed Mark into the room. With all their high-tech skills, why did they have to build devices that warbled horrid beeps and squeals? The information the machines provided was relayed to monitoring screens at the nurses’ station anyway. It seemed that the sole purpose of such familiar, seemingly innocuous sounds was to terrify already apprehensive visitors to the sickrooms of friends and loved ones.
He caught his breath and his heart missed a beat as Mark stepped aside to reveal the full length of the hospital bed. Suspended in a sea of milky white, the light of his life lay unmoving beneath a thin layer of eggshell sheets and pastel blankets, her hair haloed behind her head which was gently cradled by an oversized, hypoallergenic pillow. Her complexion was wan and her eyes were closed, and he thanked Manitou that she was breathing, albeit barely perceptibly, on her own. Had her face been obscured by a nest of tubes and hoses he was not sure he could have handled it.
Moving to the edge of the bed, he stood staring down at his unmoving wife. Tears came easily, automatically, as he reached down to pick up her right hand. The unaccustomed unresponsiveness of those small, strong fingers that under normal conditions pressed so effortlessly and reassuringly into his own shocked him more than anything else. They lay immobile in his cradling palm, warm but limp.
“Coma.” Mark’s voice reached him from somewhere nearby, from a distant place that barely impacted on Cody’s consciousness. “Some kind of anaphylactic shock. I didn’t get to talk to the attending physician much. We were in a hurry to get home so we could meet you.”
Cody silently cried out for his brain to work, his mouth to function. “Did the doctor have any idea what might have brought this on?”
His friend shrugged, eloquently illustrating the helplessness he felt. “We thought maybe she cut or pricked herself on one of the plants, and that she had a violent allergic reaction. When Dana told the paramedics what had happened, that was their first thought, too. Or maybe there was an exotic spider riding on one of the imports, and it bit her when she was checking them out. They’re supposed to have been running tests here . . .” His voice trailed away inconclusively.
“If you want us, we’ll be outside, down in the waiting room.” Taking her husband’s hand, Dana led him out of the room and closed the door quietly behind them. When Cody did not turn or speak or otherwise acknowledge their departure, they were not offended. They understood, which is the best thing good friends can do.
Left alone with his unforeseen, intimate disaster, Cody found he couldn’t move. All he could do was stand by his wife’s bedside and stare down at her, as if by the sheer force of his gaze he could somehow break the venomous spell that had overwhelmed her. She continued to breathe easily on her own, her chest rising and falling as gently as tissue in a warm summer breeze.
Unexpectedly, a soft moan escaped from her lips. Beneath the sheets, her body twisted, and her head fell toward him. The peaceful, unpained expression on her face contorted as something dug at her, probing and disquieting, unsettling the trance into which she had fallen.
The small, fist-sized head that welled up from her throat was particularly ugly; a warty, leprous mass of pustular knobs and protrusions. A single ichorous eye gazed unblinkingly up at Cody. Frozen in mid-breath by an overwhelming rush of fear and fury, he could only twitch and jerk back slightly as his eyes locked onto that pernicious, unwholesome gaze. And the abomination was not alone.
A clutch of barbed tendrils pushed up and out of her forearm. Reflexively, he pulled his hand back as they lashed in his direction like so many stinging anemones hunting undersea prey. Emerging from her ear like a snake sliding out of its burrow was a banded length of drab-toned alien corruption. Split into four sections, its nether end probed and felt of its immediate surroundings. Each of the four slender sections was lined with tiny, dark-stained teeth. These were designed for feeding; not on material as prosaic as ordinary flesh, but on something else. Something at once less obvious and more vital.
Interlopers. Several of them, feeding on his beloved. In shape and state they were as horrible as any he had yet encountered.
He didn’t even know what they consumed, much less have any insight into the process. For all that he had learned, for all the arcane knowledge he had studied and gleaned from the glyphs and carvings of the long-vanished Chachapoyans, he felt as if he were drowning in a deep, dark well of oily ignorance. Certainly, obviously, they were the cause of his wife’s present condition. Despite his warnings and forgetting his admonitions, preoccupied with casual sociable chatter, she had made contact with a living plant, or with several. At least one had been the abode of an insatiate, waiting Interloper. Apparently more than one. Or maybe she had caressed and inspected several tenanted plants before their incursions had taken full effect.
Without knowing what they were doing to her or how they were doing it, there was nothing he could do for Kelli. He could not help, could not relieve, could not make her better. Nor could any traditional physician, no matter how many elegantly gilded testimonials from prideful institutions of advanced study hung on the walls of expensive offices filled with deep-pile carpet and soft music. Kelli was afflicted beyond the call of modern medicine. No known drug would alleviate her symptoms, no conventional course of treatment would restore the color to her cheeks or the brightness he knew so well to her eyes.
Was she going to die? Lie in a state of living death until all the wondrous, vibrant life that sustained their love leaked out of her, with neither him nor anyone else able to stanch the seepage? He would not allow it!
Reaching down, he swung with a vengeance at the ghastly shapes that protruded, writhing and contorting, from her helpless form. They twisted as his clenching fingers passed through them, fluttered briefly as his fists battered the space but not the place they occupied. With mouths that bloated and shriveled, ballooned to turgid proportions only to be swiftly metabolized, they mocked his futile efforts: moaning, whistling, enouncing in measured, whispered tones that echoed with the icy indifference in which they dwelled. Spicing the grisly, pianissimo chorus of corruption that arose from his wife’s inert body was the faintest possible, barely perceptible insinuation of distant, giggling laughter.
He could stand by her side and fume powerlessly. He could weep and whimper and bemoan her fate. Or he could do something. Return to the university, bury himself in his work as never before, and try to find a solution, if not an outright cure. Having had ample opportunity to observe firsthand the effects of infecting Interlopers on a wide variety of human beings, he knew that their influence varied as much as their sizes and shapes. Whatever had struck down Kelli was more harmful than a recurring headache but less so than the sudden urge to leap off a bridge or drive into oncoming traffic. As long as she lay in a limbo of their creation and grew no worse, there was hope.
She was stable, the attending physician informed him later. Her vitals were strong, from her heartbeat to her blood pressure to her subdued but regular respiration. Insofar as he could tell, she was in no immediate danger. But neither did she show any sign of emerging from the comatose state into which she had inexplicably lapsed. Oh—and they were still searching for possible cause, concentrating on the plants she’d been browsing in the market. Samples had been brought in for analysis. Her blood was being minutely screened for indications of sensitivity to the relevant plant matter, and also for susceptibility to a wide range of insect and arachnid venoms.
A distressed and distracted Cody listened with only half a mind. He knew that the hospital lab’s search, however thorough and well-intentioned, would find nothing. Kelli had been bitten, all right. As a consequence, she was infected by something that their expensive and state-of-the-art equipment would not, could not, detect. He already knew the source and the nature of her infection.
It was dark when, exhausted, he knew it was time to go. If she was in any way at all aware of his presence, or that of any other visitor, she gave no sign. Every time she had one of her small, subdued episodes of arching and grimacing an ache shot through him no painkiller could snuff. Those Who Abide were hurting her. Doing what to her imprisoned psyche and self he could not imagine.
He rose to leave. Not because he could no longer stand seeing the mute agony in her face, but because it was clear that in staying he was doing her no good at all. Any answers, any succor for her condition, were to be found not at her bedside but back in his office and the archaeology department’s basement lab. He had to go to work.
The hospital bustle that had greeted him earlier was at this late hour much subdued; the ebb and flow of those employees and visitors and patients who remained was considerably reduced. Mark and Dana had long since departed, but not before making him promise that if he needed anything, anything at all, he was to call them either at home or work, regardless of the hour. It was good to have friends, he told himself as he strode purposefully down the hall, even if there was nothing they could do. It was all up to him now. All up to him.
He turned corners and traversed passageways until it occurred to him that he might be lost. He was more irritated than angry. It was the nature of whoever was responsible for the planning of hospitals to construct them in such a fashion as to make their interiors as confusing as possible for unknowing visitors. Theseus himself would not have been able to follow the “simple instructions” that were commonly provided to preoccupied visitors. To indicate direction, large urban hospitals resorted to strips of colored tape affixed to floors and walls, when what each visitor really needed was an individual, hand-held GPS.
Finding himself in a comparatively busy corridor that looked exactly like the dozen or so corridors he had already traversed, he confronted a tall, preoccupied intern clad in surgical greens. A cap covered his head and hair and a white mask hung from his neck.
“Excuse me. I’m lost, and I was wondering if you could show me the way out.” Despite his distress, Cody somehow managed a smile.
“The way out?” The intern smiled. He had a narrow but pleasant face accented by a distinctively hawkish nose. “Most people use the Eighth Street exit.” Raising an arm, he pointed. “Keep straight on that way and go through the double doors. Turn at the first right and you’ll see another set of doors. There’s a security station on the other side, and beyond that, the street.”
“Straight, right, straight,” Cody repeated mechanically. “Thanks.”
“You’re welcome.” The intern grinned widely. “Of course, that’s the exit everyone else takes. For you, Coshocton Westcott, there is no exit. Not now. Not anymore.”
Shocked out of his suffering, Cody stumbled away from the intern’s glacial, slightly twisted smile. As he stared at the other man, he saw that his eyes were completely glazed over, like a window on a particularly frosty morning. Small, many-legged creatures bulged in the middle and translucent of aspect milled about on the surface of his corneas—or in that general psychical vicinity. Somewhere behind those squalid, transient cataracts there lived a decent, caring, concerned medical professional. But at the moment, his entire system, from eyes to ears to mouth, had been taken over and was under the tenacious control of Interlopers unknown in strength and number.
One corner of the man’s smile imploded, as if the parasitic aberrations fighting to command his body were imperfect in their understanding of his motor functions, unable despite their skill and power to operate the complex human machinery they had taken control of with the same ease as its evolutionary landlord. The left side of the intern’s face hung slack, as if he had suffered a serious stroke. It rendered the ghastly grimace even more grotesque. Expression-wise, before Cody’s eyes the unfortunate intern metamorphosed into a cross between Dr. Kildare and the Phantom of the Opera.
The archaeologist didn’t give a good goddamn what the man looked like. When he spoke, he knew he was addressing anything but a bewildered apprentice physician.
“What have you done to my wife?”
“She sleeps.” The intern was weaving on his feet now, caught in the grip of and manipulated by purposeful nightmares. “Not dead but not alive.” The scornful sneer grew more contemptuous. “She is become food.”
Howling, Cody launched himself at the other man. Veering away from the archeologist’s lunge with preternatural grace, the haunted physician whirled and sprinted down the hallway. Blind with rage, Cody pursued without stopping to consider what he would do if he actually caught his tormentor. Whoever he actually was, the poor intern was not responsible either for his scornful words or his taunting actions. Interlopers operated his muscles, his tongue, his palate, making clumsy use of them to convey their feelings in terms a human could understand. Catch the man, tackle him, bring him down, and carry the confrontation further, and observant hospital personnel in the vicinity might readily assume that the tall outsider was assaulting one of their own. Cody would be swarmed by security officers, dragged off his inculpable quarry, and arrested. Little good could he do Kelli in jail.
None of which penetrated his anger sufficiently to slow him down.
They passed a wide-eyed night nurse and a startled janitor, a grieving family on their way out and a pair of assistant administrators necking in a phone alcove. The chase continued down a glut of corridors that were new to Cody. As he penetrated deeper and deeper into the hospital complex, he encountered fewer residents, fewer people.
It struck the panting archaeologist that the overhead fluorescents were growing dimmer. The change was so gradual he hadn’t noticed it at first. Shifting his attention to something other than the running man he was chasing, he saw that the reduced illumination was not a consequence of his sharpening fatigue. The glow from the glass tubes overhead was markedly feebler.
There was no one else around. Come to think of it, they hadn’t passed anyone in quite a while. Where was he? An infrequently visited service corridor might reasonably be expected to be fitted out with subdued lighting, weaker bulbs being utilized to save electricity. Or was he being led by the tip of his anger into less prosaic regions that bordered not just on the hospital complex, but on reality itself?
Coyotes would send out one of their own, tongue lolling, prancing amicably, to make friends with a neighborhood dog, or simply to irritate it into defending its territory. The dog would track its wily relation into the hills or out into the desert, where the rest of the pack would be waiting to pounce on and devour their domesticated cousin. Was he following—or being coerced? What, exactly, was he accomplishing by continuing this aimless chase, when he could not even hope to gain honest satisfaction by eventually flailing away at the body of an innocent man?
The Interlopers lived in this world—but they came from, they originated, somewhere else. What, he found himself wondering as he slowed to a stop, might that somewhere else be like? Was it above ground, below ground, under water? And more meaningfully for the moment, was it a place that favored subdued lighting?
Ahead of him, his target had also halted and turned. A hand beckoned. “Think of your wife-food, Coschocton Westcott! Have you propitiated your anger already?”
“Oh, no.” Slowly, Cody began backing away. If the man came after him, he would fight. Though no football player, the archaeologist was of good size, and in excellent condition thanks to years of digging and climbing. The possessed intern did not appear to be armed.
Reversing direction, he lurched unsteadily toward Cody. “You—were—warned. Not to interfere. Not to intervene. To drop a certain line of research. You are a clever man, Coschocton Westcott, but you cannot watch everywhere and everything at once. Any human can be reached, even one who can perceive. And if he cannot, others who are near to him can be made to abide. You were warned.”
The admonition echoed, burned in his ears as Cody turned and ran. “You were warned! Warned . . . warned . . . warned . . .”
Was that the last turn they had made? Ducking to clear the occasional low-hanging light fixture, avoiding the pipes and conduits that lined the walls and ceiling, he ran on, ignoring the strain in his legs and the pounding of his heart. He found himself hungering for the sight of another human being: a security guard reading a girlie mag, a bored nurse delivering nightly medications, a housekeeper pushing a voluminous laundry cart—anything with a human face and eyes that were not windows into the depths of horror. But there was no one. Only the murky glow of the oddly muted fluorescents, an occasional rattle or gurgle from one of the pythonic pipes, and the steady slap-slap of his shoes hitting the smooth concrete floor as he fled.
The wholly manufactured nature of his surroundings gave him hope. There were no stones for him to step on, no Interloper-inhabitable trees or bushes for him to bump into. If they had been trying to lure him into some nebulous border region where his soul and self would become more amenable to their manipulations, they’d failed.
Or had they? Wasn’t that the intersection he wanted just up ahead? Didn’t he turn left there? He slowed, hesitating. Or was it right? Was the main corridor that led to the reception area to the right or the left? Did they have him running in circles? Were they watching and laughing, just waiting for him to collapse from exhaustion, to pass out, so they could send dumb and deceived vassals like the unfortunate, unwitting intern to fetch him back to nether regions just this side of the particular Hell they called home?
His throat burned as he impulsively chose the left-hand corridor. Almost immediately, it seemed as if the light ahead began to brighten slightly. Enclosed by walls of concrete and plaster, paint and plastic, he felt comparatively safe from direct assault. If they were going to get him, it would have to be through the use of deluded, victimized proxies. He knew them too well, could see them too clearly. Only his rage at what they had done to Kelli had momentarily blinded him to their propinquity. It had taught him a valuable lesson, one he would not repeat. Nothing, absolutely nothing, would cause him to let his guard down ever again.
If he was going to restore his wife, he would have to stay clear of their grasp. Not to save himself, but to save her. In her current comatose state, how long could she tolerate their loathsome “feeding”? How much time did he have?
How much time did she have?
Voices. He heard voices. Following them, he stumbled into a brightly lit hallway, nearly bowling over a sleepy, startled orderly as he lengthened his stride. Eyes both bemused and tired looked up at him sharply. The majority of visitors seated in the reception area ignored him. Breathing hard, perspiration pouring down his cheeks and neck to soak his shirt collar, he slowed to a less conspicuous walk. Without pausing, ignoring the few stares, he strode past them and out into the entryway atrium. From an overbearing but sickly philodendron, grasping pseudopods reached for him. He avoided them absently, almost contemptuously. There was no sign of the abiding intern whose taunts had led him on a fool’s chase that, had he not come to his senses, might well have turned into a fatal one. Nor did he expect to see that poor, pitiable creature here, wandering about beneath bright lighting and energetic, healthy, uninfected people.
Nothing intercepted him as he made his way to the parking lot and his waiting car. The warm post-midnight air was alive with the sounds of the city: cars accelerating, the occasional horn protesting, a distant siren wailing to or from some minor disaster, the muted night-subdued chatter of visitors and employees entering or leaving the hospital.
There was that, and then there was the steady susurration of spectral sniggering that had become his constant companion. It was a little louder now, a little closer, uncomfortably familiar, insinuatingly intimate. He shut it down, refusing to hear it. It became pervasive only if he granted it permission. He locked it out just as he shut out everything in his life save one overriding, all-important matter.
He had work to do and nothing, not on Heaven or Earth or any as-yet unknown regions tangent or between, was going to stop him.