The constant beep of the machines was the one thing that allowed Lacey to lay her head down next to the frail hand of her grandmother. It was steady and slow, evidence that her grandmother was alive. Lacey was so tired. From school to work to the hospital, there was nothing else in her life. The nurses applauded Lacey’s dedication, but Lacey felt like a fraud. If she’d made this kind of time for her grandmother before the fall, then her grandmother would still be the laughing parent Lacey had counted on all her life.
“Follow the…” came the whisper and Lacey’s head jerked up, a frail hand falling back to the bed. Had her grandmother’s hand moved? Had she touched her head? Lacey’s eyes froze upon the miracle of her grandmother’s smile, her hands fumbling to gently grasp her grandmother’s hand in hers.
“Gran,” Lacey whispered, torn between calling for the nurses and keeping this moment selfishly to herself.
“Follow the White Wolf,” the paleness of her grandmother’s eyes met Lacey’s brilliant blue ones, Lacey’s fraught with confusion and her grandmother’s full of her old mischief.
“I love you so much,” Lacey got out as Gran’s eyes drifted closed only to flicker back open. “I’m here, Gran. I’m here.”
“Lacey,” and Lacey winced at the effort it took for Gran to get the words out. “If you’ve ever trusted me, trust the White Wolf.” Lacey’s heart lurched at the thought that her grandmother’s last words might just be delusions. Gran loved to tell old stories, and Lacey had grown up entranced by them. Perhaps this was Gran’s form of love, these stories.
“Gran,” and Lacey’s eyes filled with tears.
That was it. No profession of love for her. Her Gran was lost in her own musings about the White Wolf out of her old stories. Gran’s eyes were closed again, and Lacey’s only company became the blip of the machines that were likely the only thing keeping her Gran alive. Lacey wept, her blonde hair caping over her face to muffle sobs.
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An hour later, Lacey’s eyes were still red as she left the hospital room to trudge home. She’d sold the car to pay medical bills. That was okay since she lived in a small apartment near the hospital anyway. Guilt tugged at her again. If she’d still lived with Gran across town, maybe she’d have been there when the fall happened, and they could have gotten her help sooner.
A clatter didn’t even phase Lacey as she reached for the button to call the elevator. There were a few muffled curses and another clatter of metal clashing to the tile floor, but Lacey just stepped into the elevator, ignoring all else. She didn’t have the energy to deal with a crisis. She only let her gaze check that the commotion wasn’t around Gran’s room, then leaned forward to hit the button for the ground floor.
When the commotion clattered itself into her elevator as the door shushed closed, Lacey finally goggled, her tired mind waking up.
“What the?” Lacey lurched back from the half-sized, green figure that had dashed into the elevator.
The grin that turned on her split the thing’s face almost in half from one long, pointed ear to the other. The metal bins under each of the creature’s arms were dripping medical instruments as if it had raided a surgical storeroom. It wore nothing but rags, filthy in ways that would make those surgical instruments uncleanable. Its long, pointed nose hung over and practically dripped into a mouth rimmed by teeth so sharp that Lacey figured that she’d lost her mind.
“You see?” brows dipped low between beady yellow eyes as the thing seemed to be able to talk with a tongue so long and pointed that Lacey was almost sure it should have been in a demon’s mouth.
Lacey choked back a scream, but it was such a short ride down to the first floor that she almost thought she’d imagined it, as the green thing darted out the doors the instant they opened. She flinched at another clatter as she cautiously slipped out of the elevator while still trying not to look like a crazy person.
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“No, you don’t,” came a growling voice, as a man in a flapping lab coat and white hair chased the creature down a dark and quiet hallway, the fluorescent lights flickering and adding their own touch of unreality to the scene.
“I this way!” the green half-creature taunted the man who could obviously see the thing.
Lacey looked to the bored intern sitting behind the front desk and back to the man and green creature. The intern or secretary seemed completely oblivious to the racket that the two combatants were making as the old man in the lab coat, twice as tall as the little creature, hunched away from her after the darting green entity. It was obvious the intern didn’t see a thing. A part of her froze; another part of her winced away from the conflict as she herself was running on fumes; but the last little part of her yearned to run after what could only be a delusion.
It ran in the family. Lacey’s grandmother had often told stories that seemed like they came straight from the woman’s memory and those stories were full of fantasy and fun, mischief and adventure. On the flip side, Lacey’s mother had disappeared one day with no explanation except a conjecture of her grandmother’s that her daughter had gotten lost in the fantasies; the coin one paid for the curse and blessing that was an intensely vivid imagination.
Lacey took a step toward the door and away from the obvious delusion and felt a portion of her soul wither at the thought of walking away. A tug of her heart and she looked back over her shoulder. Her eyes caught on his and the world she’d known tumbled away. She’d taken him for an old man because of the white hair, but the golden eyes that met hers as he turned back from chasing the monster belonged not to an old man, but a young and vibrant one. A second later, his eyes narrowed, and she felt immediately like prey, frozen on the cusp of something both wonderfully and terribly made on this edge of reality.
The little green thing poked his head back around a corner and blew an improbable raspberry around those sharp teeth and then pitched a medical implement at the man with the white hair. Another growl and they both disappeared around that corner. Lacey would never know what drove her to run after them, but she did. Something in her soul told her that if she didn’t, she would never know anything except a dreary reality. If this was how her mother had gone, Lacey forgave her immediately and completely. The tote she normally carried from home to work to school and then here was left near the hospital’s front sliding doors as her feet scrambled to catch up.
Lacey dashed down the hallway, ignoring the intern rising from his chair and telling her that she couldn’t go down there. Renewed, Lacey ran, her shoes squeaking on the tiles in empty hallways of late night. Had she stayed later than she usually did? The nurses always allowed her to stay later than normal visiting hours, but had it been later than she’d thought? She turned a corner to see only the wisp of a white, furred tail dash around another corner. Lacey ran harder. It was crazy. It was somehow everything.
At the next corner, the ground began to slant down, but Lacey didn’t stop. There was a whirl of something on the floor ahead of her, blackness beyond except for the hint of a long white tail that almost sparkled with stars. One last pull of sanity reached to her diving mentality as she skidded to a stop over a hole of swirling blackness, the tips of her sensible shoes touching the edge of insanity.
“Come,” came a deep voice, and Lacey fell willingly. Madness or not, that voice’s command pulled on her in ways that couldn’t be explained or revealed except in the madness of poets.
Lacey closed her eyes as her life floated by her while she fell. Her favorite stuffed animal that had been lost during one of their many moves. A hairbrush she’d tossed away because all it did was increase the frizz of her curly blonde hair. A doll whose face was smudged with mascara Lacey had tried to apply with horrible results. And old pair of sneakers she’d worn to death during her tennis phase. Books of fairy tales that she’d loved as a child. Books of romances she’d been obsessed with in her late teens. How long had it been since she’d taken the time to read something new? Even with her eyes closed, she saw it all.
At times, she would fall quickly, but then it would slow to let her pet a stray she’d fed for a whole year in elementary school and speed up again past a scene of her first kiss on Gran’s porch and how awkward that had been. More random than meaningful, these things fell by. Jeans she’d ripped up. Popcorn, jacks, her first video game.
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Lacey stretched, trying to shake the dream from her groggy mind. How long had she slept? She was going to be late. With that thought, she rolled over on automatic to flop her hand around for the phone that should have been on her bedside table, eyes blurry, blinking. Her phone wasn’t there.
“You’re awake,” came that low voice from her dreams and Lacey sat up so quickly her head spun.
“I don’t think so,” Lacey managed to say.
He gave a low chuckle. “You have her eyes.”
“Sure, I do,” Lacey’s mind woke fast and furious, grasping at reality that wasn’t there anymore. She was in a cave. She was on a large medieval bed. She was covered with a thin blanket. Okay Gran, Lacey said into her own mind as quietly as she could think, I followed the White Wolf. Now what?