There was nothing I could have done.

There was nothing I could have done.

There was nothing I could have done.

I kept running the words through my mind, hating them, but needing them; terrified of them, yet terrified of being without them.

Was it my fault?

I didn’t know—though it certainly felt like it was.

Literally.

When the specter was lifting the bed, burning agony had shot through my body like I was a live wire without the insulation. My gut told me Frank’s specter had used my powers. The most reasonable explanation for why it hurt so fudging much was because—unlike, say, Letty’s—my powers were still weak. The pain was the pain of lifting heavy weights with sore, untrained muscles.

Why did I run? I ran because I didn’t want to be caught. I ran because I was afraid of breaking down in front of my colleagues. I’d already done so with Jim Draunborn.

Two people, dead by my hand, barely an hour apart from one another. You didn’t need to be a detective to find it suspicious.

Did those fears make me guilty? Was it an admission of guilt, to run from fear? The voice of habit inside me said yes. I didn’t know how to fight it. I didn’t know how to keep the guilt at bay, so, instead… I climbed.

The security camera had been ripped off. None of what happened would have been recorded. That gave me a tiny sliver of relief, which only made me feel even worse.

How do you know you are guilty? When you feel relieved that your crimes are hidden, that’s how!

And that… creature. Any remaining shreds of hope I had that the Green Death was, somehow, a part of the natural order went out the window as soon as I’d laid eyes on Frank Isafobe’s specter.

It was a demon. A corrupted soul. It had to be. What else could it be?

Words flitted across my mind: I put him in you.

That was Andalon’s explanation for what happened to Aicken, and for why I’d been confronted by his spirit. That same argument was also the simplest explanation for how Frank’s spirit had gotten into me.

If only the other questions were so easily answered. I ran up an octagonal stairway, panting with every step. I needed to get to the second floor as quickly as possible.

Whatever Andalon was, she was powerful enough to transform the fungus and its behavior, even if she couldn’t control it directly.

More of her words:

Gotta make as many wyrmehs as I can!

That was what clinched it for me. She’d used the plural… I think. It wasn’t just me—at least, I was pretty sure it wasn’t.

I was never too fond of math. Not that it wasn’t useful. It was just too depressing. It didn’t pull any punches.

I might have run for self-preservation, but I’d also run for my patients.

For the other transformees.

Somehow, Frank’s ghost had been corrupted in some way, and whatever had happened, it allowed him to make use of my psychokinetic powers. And look what it had done.

I could smell the blood like it was right in front of me. I gagged.

Shuddering, I hurried up the staircase even faster.

I needed to get to Room 268 for the simple reason that what was happening to them was happening to me. What if Frank was haunting them, too? Or, if not him, another ghost? Using my feeble powers, Frank’s corrupted ghost had flung a quarter-ton hospital bed across a hallway like a plaything.

What if what had happened to me happened to Letty?

Mid-step, I stopped, standing in place three-quarters of the way up to the second floor with one foot higher than the other. My stomach churned.

I still didn’t know what the rules were governing Andalon’s appearances and disappearances—assuming there were rules in play—but, at the moment, I didn’t care.

“Andalon… did you do this?” I wasn’t yelling, but the way the stairwell echoed my words amplified them enough to make it seem like I was yelling. “What did you do to Frank?”

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No response.

I recalled her words once more.

I save people. I won’t let them be lost.

Bein’ wyrmeh’s better than bein’ gone, right?

I squeezed my gloved fingers tightly around the antique metal handrail.

Andalon didn’t like it when people died. In fact, she disliked it so much that she’d rather turn dying people into wyrms—doing whatever than entailed—rather than let the fungus kill them. Generally, when it came to her emotions and her preferences, she was an open book. Even more: she was an audiobook. She had no reservations about sharing how she felt, nor how her feelings changed from moment to moment.

Maybe I could use that to my advantage.

I raised my head.

“Andalon,” I said, “if you did this, if you corrupted Frank somehow… then the deaths he caused are on your hands. You killed people.”

The reaction was instantaneous. It was as decisive as a sledgehammer to the skull.

“DARKNESS DESTROYS! DARKNESS DOES NOT SAVE! ANDALON DOES NOT DESTROY! ANDALON SAVES!”

There was no physical manifestation to accompany Andalon’s words, but she didn’t need one. My legs buckled beneath me. I teetered backwards on the staircase. If I hadn’t lunged onto the railing and gripped it with both hands, I’d have toppled over and cracked my skull open on the old metal steps.

“YOU’RE MEAN!” Andalon sobbed. “YOU GO AWAY!”

My whole body shook.

And then her presence departed from me, just as suddenly as it had appeared.

Well… that wasn’t very helpful.

I hoped the same wouldn’t be true of me.

— — —

The only thing worse than the thought of a room filled with people turning into wyrms was a room filled with people turning into wyrms while not understanding what was happening to them. And the only thing worse than that was those same wyrms’ burgeoning psychokinetic powers being hijacked by the evil dead.

I shuddered.

Angel…

When you did something wrong, the only way to make up for it was to do something good, even though there was no guarantee it would work. Forgiveness and redemption were as precious as they were rare. As I stepped through the outer doors and into Room 268’s vestibule, I noticed the old, bare clothing stand by the doors had toppled to the floor, likely after having gotten flung against a wall. Then, before crossing through the inner doors, I made myself a promise.

After this, I’m going to call home. I’m going to talk to my family, and I’m going to tell them I love them.

As I stepped through the inner doors, I was confronted by a scene stolen from a painting of old; a history painting, one where every figure was a piece of a greater whole, yet still held a story all their own. The patients in the room were allegories of themselves. It did not matter whether they lay in their bed or waddled barefoot around the room, clad only in their hospital gowns. They were allegories all the same. A gaggle of uncorrelated dramas played out in everything from their comportment to their clothes. It was a chamber orchestra, and every member was playing a solo.

Letty Kathaldri sat up in her bed, a portrait of wrath halfway covered by the sheets. The bedside console played VOL News in full sound and fury, and Letty’s saucer-wide eyes drank up every last drop. The pundits’ waspish rantings glowed red, white, and blue on the hag’s sunken mien. A box rested in Letty’s lap. Like clockwork—in sync with her jaws—Letty jammed her skeletal hands into the box and pulled out another frosted doughnut to stuff into her scowl as soon as she’d swallowed. Every once in a while, she opened her mouth to vent contumelies in between doughnut bites.

Once again, Andalon’s words sounded in my ears.

You need to eat. Eat lots of stuff. Lots and lots! Grow big and strong!

Before, they’d been an enigma. Now, I realized, they were prophecy.

Eating drove the transformation. That was the reason Kurt had grown a tail in the handful of hours after gorging himself on food. Now, facing Letty, the connection between the hunger and the transformations were truly obvious. Painfully obvious.

Dark, unquestionably fungal tissue had begun to encroach Letty’s neck and jaw. The skin wattle sagging from her neck had become taut where it had been replaced by a black so deep and perfect, it almost glowed. I almost tried to take the food away from Letty, but stopped myself.

I’d be of no use to anyone if she splattered me all over the wall like Frank’s ghost had those poor people in the hallway.

Oh God.

I’m going to be having nightmares about that for a long time, aren’t I?

With a shudder, I turned my head. Looking around, it was clear the new sequestration policy for Type Two patients was already in full swing. Mrs. Elbock had been relocated to Room 268. She lay in the bed opposite Letty’s—and opposite in more ways than one. Where Letty was zealous with wrath, Merritt radiated the same quiet grace I’d always known in her; never optimistic, but always resilient. Whenever she asked me or my wife to come over to help move the furniture or wrangle open an especially recalcitrant jar of pickles or ragu, she’d have a fruit casserole baking in the oven, and would always fret that it might turn out badly, only to smile in delight when, inevitably, it turned out just fine. More than once, she’d attributed the good fortune to my lucky bow-tie.

That’s why the way Merritt was looking at me right now made me feel bad and uncomfortable. I saw that same sense of hope in her eyes; that expectation of deliverance, but I didn’t deserve it, even though I wished I did. Slowly, but surely, Mrs. Elbock was disappearing. The dark, green, fungus-haunted flesh on the left side of her face had advanced considerably. Her eyebrows had fallen out. Eyelashes too. Her eyelids were loosening, drawing back like drying leaves. She was still recognizable as Merritt Elbock, but… for how much longer?

Kurt’s bed was next to Letty’s. He lay on his side with his back facing the older women, and a pensive, nervous, and fearful look in his face, as if he wanted to disappear into the fabric. He’d drawn the pillows and bedsheets over his body, clearly trying to hide his tail from view. Then I realized he was quivering slightly, and that made my breath stick in my throat. His eyes locked with mine, and I turned away.

Human beings liked to believe their perceptions of reality were trustworthy. Scientific inquiry proved otherwise. There was a famous study in experimental psychology—the Invisible Orangutan—where subjects were asked to count the number of players in a game of frisbee who wore white shirts. The subjects were so focused on counting the players in white suits that they failed to notice a person in an orangutan suit standing in the middle of the field. Like many of the students in introductory psychology, I’d seen the video and failed to notice the orangutang.

Now, history repeated itself, this time, with the literal symbol of a patient sitting up in the bed next to Kurt’s.