Page 74 of The Devil and His Ghost

She beamed up at me and nodded hard, which made glee fill me up like helium in one of those very colorful balloons. Her acknowledgement wasn’t words, but it was still communication. If I could keep figuring out her interests, maybe I could get her to open up to me.

She tapped happily at another image on the page. A bear was riding a scooter in that same park. She beamed at Catsper while pointing at the picture. I shared a confused look with my cat, not seeing the correlation.

“Do,” I started slowly, “you like scooters, too?”

She shook her head and simply pointed at Catsper with a happy smile. The cat stared at her finger with his one eye and meowed in response. What did a scooter have to do with my cat? A light bulb went off in my head.

“Are you saying Scooter is the name of a cat?” I asked.

She looked up at me and nodded hard with her toothy grin.

I mirrored her expression. “Was Scooter your cat?”

Again, she bobbed her head gleefully.

“So you had a pet cat named Scooter, huh? How sweet. Cats are the best, aren’t they?”

Cats—specifically ones named Scooter—and balloons. So far I knew she liked those two things. It wasn’t much, but it was a great sign that I’d managed to learn both things within a handful of minutes. Her story was still a huge question mark, but the revelations renewed my confidence.

“If only I had your chart,” I mused with pursed lips. “Maybe Xander found it.”

Or maybe it’s in the area I’ve been too scared to venture into.

I swallowed hard at the thought of going to the area I’d avoided, but I knew I had to. As much as it unnerved me, I refused to let fear win. Not again. Not like the last time I’d let it take over. That was exactly what had cost me the relationship with my brother and my belief in the one I could’ve had with Xander.

I quickly shoved the memory of that day down and refocused on the two nameless ghosts in the room and their mysteries. No names, no clues as to why they were patients here, no explanation for how they died so young, nothing. Not only were their lives an unsolved puzzle, but so were their states here in the afterlife. I couldn’t tell from their behavior if they realized they were dead or not. In instances like this, I always aired on the side of caution and pretended as though they were alive so as not to trigger an outburst that led to them turning into a malicious spirit.

“It’s time for my doctor’s appointment,” I told the ghosts as I stood up. “We’ll play after I talk to the doctor, okay?”

“Doctor?” the teen boy in the corner suddenly shouted. His spectral form flickered as his eyes darted around wildly while he chewed on his fingers and began pacing. “Doctor? Doctor, doctor, doctor, doctor.” While mumbling the word over and over, he abruptly vanished.

I was still staring in shock at the spot he’d been in when a faint tug came on my shirt. I looked down at the little girl, who stared up at me with a worried frown, her little hand clutching my shirt. She gave a small shake of her head.

“Bad,” she whispered.

I couldn’t even leap with joy upon hearing her finally speak, because her terrified whisper had a chill rolling down my body.

“Bad?” I repeated. “The doctors?”

Her brow furrowed, and her grip on my shirt tightened as much as her phantom form allowed. “Bad.”

She disappeared the second the word left her lips, leaving Catsper and I alone in the children’s ward. He meowed in confusion while staring up at me with one eye, but I didn’t share in his bewilderment. I knew very well what type of people the doctors at Mountview were like.

“Come on, boy,” I told Catsper.

The ghost feline drifted through the air near my shoulder as though traversing invisible ground with his puffy paws. We made our way downstairs, and when I rounded the corner to the doctor’s hall, my legs froze. My heart raced from the sight of the door at the very end of the hall. For me, the closed door was akin to what most felt when staring down a dark staircase with no end in sight, nor sign of what lurked at the end of the eerie abyss.

The bronze plaque on the door read Director Edwin Cartwright.

A thick sickening knot climbed my throat. I breathed in through my nose for four seconds and held it for seven before exhaling for eight seconds. It was one of the few helpful things I’d learned while at Mountview, and I repeated the breathing exercise until the nausea vanished. My palms remained clammy, and an anxious tremble lingered.

The doctor’s offices and admin hallway were on the first floor, and the hallway was directly across from the public elevator. Every ward had an attending physician’s office, but each doctor’s personal study resided in this hall. I wasn’t sure how much useful information I’d glean from rummaging around in these rooms, but I hoped to find some files or creepy notes or something to begin piecing together a somewhat accurate story of what kind of patients the hospital catered to and what sort of ghosts might’ve lingered.

I started down the silent hall with Catsper by my side when a light tapping sounded from behind me. I stopped in my tracks and looked over my shoulder, but the only thing behind me was the elevator. The rusty tan-colored doors were closed, and the unlit floor numbers above it were dark. While the building had power, the elevators had been shut off due to Bethelma not wanting to deal with the maintenance that came with them.

I strained my ears to catch the tapping again, unsure why the shut-off elevator would be making a sound. After a few seconds of silence, I shrugged it off and started to turn back around.

Tap, tap.