Graveyard Shift (15 page)

I glanced at the clock above the desk. Still fifteen minutes before the end of Mum's appointment. “People will be here to help soon. Shall I wait with you till they come?”

“Will they help me get away?” He sounded desperate.

“They'll do their best. What's your name, sir?”

“McCready.”

“Good. So which one's your room? It's best if we wait there.”

“There,” he said, pointing.

His door was half open, and through the gap, I could see drawn curtains shutting out the daylight. The stuttering light of a silent TV played around the room and over the figure in the bed. Like those in the morgue, the figure was hidden under clean white sheets.

Seeing that, McCready made a grab for my wrist. His fingers were icy. There was no electric charge, no light show of the kind I'd seen when Mr. October took newly-departeds by the hand.

“That isn't me,” he said. “That's my bed, but that isn't me. We can't wait for help. We have to go now.”

“Don't worry,” I said. “I know it's a shock and a bad way to find out —”

“No! You don't understand!”

He was delirious. He tightened his hold on my wrist. Behind us, the ringing phone stopped abruptly.

“I can't take it back,” he said. “Don't you see? It's too late to undo what I've done.”

I stared at him in confusion. “What do you mean, sir? What did you do?”

He let go of my wrist and covered his mouth, staring into the room, visibly shaking.

“What is it?” I asked. “What are you seeing?”

And out of the silence inside the room came a sound like a yawning gale. A rustling of sheets as the figure in the bed began to move.

It raised itself up into a sitting position, turning its head slowly toward us. This was no practical joke, no Scooby-Doo ghost draped in bedclothes. I knew that as soon as the sheet fell away, revealing the face underneath.

It was no kind of face at all: no eyes or nose, no features except for the huge red mouth that covered most of its surface. The creature licked its lips, spilling drool on the bed, then wiped its chops with a translucent hand that had seven suckers for fingers. The belch it let out sent a wave of foul air through the doorway.

“You're right,” I told McCready. “Time to go.”

Whatever the thing on the bed was, it wasn't McCready's body, which meant the man standing next to me wasn't his ghost. Apart from that, I was clueless. The only option I could think of was: Run.

“Come on,” I said.

“Too late,” McCready said.

He braced himself at the sudden flurry of movement on the bed, as if he already knew what was coming. In the blink of an eye, the creature leapt up and at him, fastening its suckered hands to his face, opening its dreadful red mouth wide as it dragged him inside the room.

The door slammed behind them. McCready started to scream. I covered my ears, not wanting to hear it. But the screams didn't last for long.

A
silence emanated from McCready's room. I sagged against the wall by his door, trying to make sense of what had just happened. The screaming had stopped but I still heard it in my mind, and now the strobing light was giving me a headache. Squinting through it, I could make out two figures entering the ward. They seemed to move in slow motion as they rounded the desk toward me.

The Deathhead came back, I thought. It lost me in the basement, but now it's found me again. And this time it's brought a friend. . . .

They moved nearer, into focus, and I relaxed then, recognizing friendly faces: first Lu, then Mr. October a few paces behind. They were here on official salvage business, I guessed, with Mr. October dressed in the old man's weathered body, feeling his way forward with the walking stick.

“You OK?” Lu asked, looking at me with concern.

“I've been better.” I nearly gagged on the words, and my legs were rubbery and weak. “Something in that room . . .”

“We heard,” Mr. October said.

“What about him?” I said, gesturing at McCready's door. “Are we too late? He needed help.”

“Open the door,” Mr. October said.

I hesitated. If that thing was still inside, I didn't want to be anywhere near when it came roaring out.

“It's safe now,” he said. “See for yourself.”

It took me a moment to pull myself together. Then I made myself twist the handle and give the door a push.

Inside, McCready's corpse lay peaceful and pale among the sheets. His eyes were open, staring up at the ceiling, but he wasn't at home anymore.

The beast was nowhere in sight.

“It returned to where it came from,” Mr. October said. “It came and found what it wanted and took him with it.”

“What was it?” I asked.

“What did it look like to you?”

Uncannily like something no one had ever seen before,
I thought, remembering Tommy Farley's English story.

I described it as best I could, as much of it as I could remember, from its nearly transparent, wormy body to its hungry, gaping jaws.

“Mawbreed,” said Lu without hesitation.

“Maw-
what
?”

Mr. October agreed. “Sounds very much like one. Some call them Devourers, as that's basically all they do. They're
like industrial-strength vacuum cleaners of doom. They come up from the depths to suck out the souls of the living.”

I looked at him blankly. “Can they do that? I mean, don't they have to wait until someone passes on? Isn't that how it's supposed to work?”

“There are exceptions.” Mr. October closed McCready's door. “The Mawbreed wait for no one. They're a law unto themselves.”

“He seemed to know it was coming,” I said. “What did he do to deserve that?”

“He sold his soul,” Mr. October said with a note of regret. “In return, the Lords of Sundown gave him forty years of prosperity and power, the kind of wealth he could never take with him. He was a banker who foreclosed on many small businesses, refused loan extensions to the needy, and put scores of families out of their homes. Built himself an empire of greed. We can't help him now. The second he signed himself away, he stopped being our responsibility. He wasn't even on our list.”

It was a relief to leave the ward behind, to turn away from that room and the stuttering light above the desk. I was jittery on my feet as Lu and Mr. October escorted me back to Mum's ward.

“You're OK?” Lu asked again along the way.

“I will be. Still shaky,” I said.

“The Mawbreed are so ugly,” she said. “I have nightmares about them sometimes.”

I knew what she meant. I'd probably have nightmares about them too from now on.

As we arrived at Mum's ward, I warned them about the demon I'd encountered; it could still be inside the hospital somewhere.

“We'll be on the lookout,” Mr. October said, “but frankly, they're ten a penny in places like this. You'd be hard-pressed to turn any corner without coming face-to-face with one.”

“But what if I see it again?” I asked. “If I see any more of them?”

“Zap them,” Lu said.

“She means use your developing skills,” Mr. October said. “You'll be surprised how easily it comes to you.”

I looked at him none the wiser.

“You're still growing into the role, Ben,” he explained. “So much is happening around you, so many things you can't explain. Things you haven't learned to control yet. Don't question it, don't try to understand it, just try to accept what you're becoming.”

“And what's that?”

“One of us. Someone who tries to make a difference.”

They didn't wait around once we reached the ward. They had other calls to make, a short list of newly-departeds to visit inside the hospital. Watching them go, I puzzled over what Mr. October had said about my developing skills. Did he mean something else besides the gift of seeing?

Mum came out of her treatment room fifteen minutes late. She looked sickly pale, worse than before she'd gone in.

“A slight reaction to her medicine,” the nurse told me. “The first time's always the worst. Also, she told me about your uncomfortable ride here, so I've arranged for a car to take you home. Shouldn't be long.”

I hope not,
I thought. I was anxious to breathe fresh air outdoors, away from this place.

“Sorry to keep you,” Mum said, as if it were her fault. “Were you bored waiting?”

“Oh, you know, it wasn't too bad.”

We had to wait an hour for the driver, but then the ride took only ten minutes. Mum's head bobbed like a toy dog's in the backseat; she could barely keep her eyes open. She was tired enough to sleep for a week, she said when we got home. She ran a bath and later settled in the living room to watch
Meet Joe Black
on a movie channel.

“After that ordeal, I'm in just the right mood for a good tearjerker,” she said.

I brought tea and cookies and sat with her while the film began.

“Is it OK if I go out?” I said. “I mean, I'll stay if you want me to.”

“I'm hunky-dory. Run along and get on with your life, darlin'.” She kicked off her slippers and spread herself out on the sofa. “Hospitals are no place to spend your Saturdays. I'm glad you came, but now you need to go and do your own thing.”

Ten minutes into the film she was already half asleep. I watched her from the doorway, worried by how wiped out
she looked. Whatever they'd given her at the hospital hadn't seemed to do her much good.

I slipped quietly away, heading down the stairwell and onto Middleton Road, ignoring the wall across the street. I didn't need to look that way to know the cat was still watching.

 

Over the next few days, most of my time with the Ministry was spent in receipts. My duties there were light relief after the hospital. There were occasional trips in the field with Mr. October, but I was getting used to the small dark space, just me and the candlelight and the telegraph machine.

On slack nights, when the machine was quiet, I'd sit with my sketch pad, drawing the Mawbreed from memory, or I'd roll paper into the typewriter and tap out my thoughts.

Sometimes I could go as long as an hour without the telegraph springing to life. When it did, I'd drop whatever I was doing, type up the names it spat out, then face the wrath of Miss Webster. Miss Webster was more cobwebbed every time I saw her, the records office continued to grow all around her, and the walks to her booth became longer and longer.

At school, Raymond Blight kept his distance. Whenever I looked at him, he buried his hands deep in his pockets and turned away.

It wasn't just Raymond, either. Rumors about his injury had spread. There were mutters and whispers about me behind my back, and I saw something like fear in the eyes of most classmates I spoke to.

But I still hadn't fathomed what I'd done to Raymond that day; I wasn't sure I'd done anything at all. It concerned me enough to ask Mr. October, who believed it was a sign of those “developing skills.” If it was a part of the gift, it scared me more than a little. I wasn't sure how much I wanted a gift like that.

Becky was different from the others, but even she seemed agitated when we went to the crypt on Wednesday.

“What's wrong?” I asked. We were sitting on the outside wall with coffees in paper cups. “It's like my first day all over again. It's like being an outsider.”

“You
are
an outsider, in case you haven't noticed,” she said. “You'll always be an outsider. It's one thing putting Raymond in his place — who cares what you did, nobody likes him anyway — but it's something else keeping secrets from your mates.”

“What secrets?”

“There you go again.” She frowned at the curb, scrunching up her dainty freckled nose. “It's been a week and a half now. Ever since we spoke about you-know-what, you've been avoiding me.”

“But I haven't. You mean because I haven't walked home with you since?”

“It's not about that.” She kicked her heel back against the
wall in a steady rhythm. “OK, yes, it is. Not that I care, but you've always got some excuse, something you have to run off and do.”

“I'm not lying about that.”

“No, but you're being very secretive about it.”

It was true. I was, but only for Becky's own good.

“Sorry,” I said.

“No need to be sorry. It's just, I told you something important and secret that happened to me, but you . . . you're all zippered up; you keep everything hidden away.”

She set her coffee down on the wall and looked at me searchingly.

“What are you involved in? Where do you go, Ben, every night after school?”

I shuffled on the cold bricks, trapped in the glare of her spotlight.

“Nowhere.”

“Bull. You know that's impossible. You have to be somewhere.”

“I meant nowhere special.”

“If you say so.”

One thing I'd learned about Becky: She was like a terrier with a rag in its teeth when she got going — she didn't know how to let go. But now she sat back, deflated.

“Look,” I said, “it's not because I don't want to tell you. It's because I don't think I'm supposed to. It could be bad for both of us if I did.”

She glared at the pavement, refusing to look at me. “What, so you're working for the secret service now?”

“Not exactly.”

“But something like it.”

“Don't be daft.”

“Something secret,” she said. “Something life-or-death important.”

I took a deep breath, let it out slowly. “OK. Yes.”

A light came on in her eyes. “See, I knew it! Just like I knew about the fire children. You're not as good at hiding things as you think.”

“I can't say any more, though,” I said.

“I'll keep on at you till you cave in.”

“Then I'll have to get used to it. It's like the third degree, talking to you.”

“Well, I'll leave you alone if you answer me just one thing. Does it have anything to do with the kids?”

“Yes.”

“And with what happened to Raymond Blight.”

“That's two things,” I said. “Let's change the subject. What are you writing for English this week?”

She rolled her eyes. “A ghost story. What does it matter? I'm trying to talk to you.”

“It's not easy, I know.”

“
You're
not easy. You're bloody hard work, Ben Harvester. If I'm like the third degree, you're like the
Mona Lisa
.”

“I'm what?”

“You know. That enigmatic smile, giving nothing away, keeping it all to yourself.”

A silence fell between us. The bell across Mercy Road announced the end of break.

“So what's your ghost story about?” I said.

Becky hopped off the wall, turned, and gave me a look. “Not telling. See how you like it,” she said.

 

She snubbed me after school too, making a big show of chatting and laughing with her friends and not looking at me when I passed them at the bus stop. My punishment for not telling all.

As I did every day now, I called home from a pay phone a few blocks up Mercy Road from the school. I had a cell buried away somewhere in my room, but lately I couldn't afford to buy minutes. The phone booth shuddered around me as the school bus went past. I shoved in a coin and punched out the number.

Mum answered on the third ring, sounding as if she'd just woken.

“Nothing to worry about,” she said. “The nurse came to dress my arm an hour ago and it knocked the stuffing out of me. I'm over it now, but my arm looks like an Egyptian mummy's.”

“Are you sure you don't need me there?”

“No. Ellie's here now. We're looking through vacation brochures.”

“Oh?”

We both knew we couldn't afford minutes for my phone, let alone vacations.

“It's like this,” Mum went on. “Ellie's thinking of investing in a condo on Lanzarote. She's brought holiday photos from the last time she went. I'll show you when you get back. She says if she and Ross go ahead with this, we can visit any time for free. We only need to wait for a break in my treatment. Isn't that great?”

“Sounds good to me.” A change of climate would surely do her more good than the treatment had so far.

“There's something else,” Mum said, and then faltered. “Actually, it's kind of a surprise. I'll leave that until I see you.”

“Good or bad surprise?”

“A bit of both, I suppose. How long will you be?”

“A few hours, probably. I'll try not to be late.”

“OK.” After a pause, she said, “I'm so glad you're making friends now. Things are going to turn out fine, darlin'. You'll see.”