AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“I don’t care if you don’t believe,” he said, rolling his eyes. “I just need to—”
A man appeared at the end of the hall they were standing in, shuffling into view. When he saw the pair of them standing at the opposite end of the hall, he hastily shuffled back the way he had come. Both Bunny and the man turned to watch, momentarily distracted from their argument.
Bunny let the experience sink in for a moment before she lifted a finger to point. “Was that… Mr. Lucas?”
The man’s jaw flexed with irritation. “Yes.” And then he started to move, his long legs carrying him at an impressive pace that forced Bunny to spring into action to keep up.
“Wait,” she called, coming up alongside him. “So the other night—”
“You really did see him,” he cut her off. “He’s wandering. It’s why I’m here.”
She frowned. “Huh?”
“Keep up, Bernadette,” he snapped, turning the corner with a swoop of his coat. “I’m here to collect his soul.”
“Only my mom calls me Bernadette,” she snapped back, rushing to match his pace. Called.
He smirked, arrogance flickering across the surface of his expression. “I know.”
They came to a standstill outside of room 192. It was shrouded in darkness, but Bunny could see all the old man’s personal belongings had been cleaned out in preparation of a new patient moving in. She stood behind the man, reasoning that if this was for real and there was somehow a ghost around the place, she wasn’t going to put herself in the firing line.
“Mr. Lucas,” the man called gently, his voice echoing slightly in the empty room.
“Get out!” a voice snarled from thin air, making Bunny jump. Straining her eyes, she could just make out the shape of a hunched old man in the shadowy far corner of the room. “I already told you, I’m not going anywhere you want to take me!”
A smell wafted out of the room on an unnatural breeze, taking Bunny by surprise. She felt her gag reflex hitch, and she clapped a hand to her nose to protect it from further assault. “What the hell is that?” she asked, working hard to keep her stomach from clenching.
“He’s overdue.” The man pressed his lips together, his jaw setting stubbornly. “His soul is rotting.” He moved into the dark room without further hesitation.
“Are you serious?” Bunny hissed, lingering in the doorway. But he ignored her, choosing instead to move in slow, deliberate steps towards the shadow figure in the corner, his shoulders swinging casually with the purposefulness of his stride. But Bunny wasn’t fooled. He had all the poise and hidden danger of a panther ready to strike.
“Mr. Lucas, you need to come with me. It’s for your own good.”
“You know where I’m going,” Mr. Lucas said, his words sounding like gibberish as he got more and more upset. The shadow shifted in the corner, like an old man hopping indecisively from one foot to the other. “Don’t tell me you haven’t seen those black things. They crawl around in the corners of the ceiling, writhing and whispering my name. Telling me all the things they want to do to me…” He sobbed. “I’m not going down there!”
Bunny watched the man in black edging towards the corner. In all her years as a nurse, she had never felt more helpless than in this moment. Cerise had told her Mr. Lucas hadn’t exactly been a model patient during his time at Arcadian Waters, and Bunny would bet that his mean streak had been a problem way before he ever got sent to live in a nursing home.
But now, at this moment, he sounded like a frail, scared old man who was worried about his future.
She shifted in the doorway and light spilled into the room from behind her.
“I’m afraid you don’t have a choice,” the man said, his voice tinted with compassion that Bunny hadn’t thought he could possibly possess. He shrugged a shoulder in an it-is-what-it-is gesture. “You can either come with me now and go to where you need to be, or you can let those things continue to eat at you until they infest your body. What’s it gonna be?”
For a split-second, the shadow in the corner wasn’t a shadow any longer. It was a humanoid, with sallow skin that hung off his skull like melted candle wax. His huge eyes bulged unhealthily, looking for all the world like they could pop at any moment. Spittle had collected in the corners of his gaping mouth, and the rest of his body looked so thin that there was no way it should have been possible for his legs to physically support him.
Bunny gasped.
It was enough to distract the man in black, who glanced over his shoulder in her direction.
The thing inside Mr. Lucas had been waiting for just such an opportunity.
“Go to hell!” the old man screeched, before rushing at the man in black. The blade of a kitchen knife clenched in his fist flashed in the light from the doorway.
The man in black turned back just in time to close his fist around the old man’s wrist, the point of the knife merely centimeters away from his stomach.
His voice was soft, almost apologetic. “You first.”
He reached with his other hand to draw a necklace from beneath the black shirt he wore under his coat. A black pendant glinted in the light. As he held it aloft, a thin wisp of a dark gray, almost greenish smoke began to rise up from Mr. Lucas’ head. It swirled and eddied like a pungent fume, and the stench that had almost made Bunny barf became unbearable.
She was able to stomach it just long enough to see the last of the smoke slip out of the old man and start to creep into the other man’s pendant.
And then she turned, rushing out of the room to throw up in the hallway.
