Sleep Stalker (Ghosts Beyond the Grove Book 1) (17 page)

     “He thinks you’re his sister Rachel.  They’re very close.  If he thinks you’re her, it will soothe him.  Please ride to the hospital with him—I’ll meet you there.”

     Shaking and confused, she nodded her head and took her place at Zach’s side.  But I needed someone by
my
side too.  I called for Clay as I ran for my car.  He appeared in the passenger seat while I was firing up the engine, full of questions I had no answer for.  When he saw that we were about to fly down the road behind an ambulance, he quieted completely. 

     I buckled my seatbelt as I drove, both physically and metaphorically.  This was far from over and I needed to be prepared for whatever the road before us had in store.  I had to find the courage to keep moving forward.  Life was not meant to be lived in reverse.  Some moments in life were obvious turning points and this was one of them.  Whatever the future held, I needed to face it head on.  If I ran away from Zach now, I would forever regret it. 

     As Clay and I collected Addie and raced toward the emergency room door, the sound of flapping wings filled the air above me.  I stopped dead in my tracks and looked toward the sky.  A flock of pigeons roosting in the eaves of the hospital roof had chosen this moment to take flight.  And something was falling out of the sky toward me.

     I watched it—tiny at first and almost invisible—the breeze tugging at it as gravity fought to pull it down.  When it was clearly recognizable, I caught my breath.  It was a feather.  I closed my eyes and silently tried to communicate with my mom.

     “If this is a sign from you, Mom, make it the clearest one yet.  Put it in the one place that only
you
would.”

     Addie and Clay both began to urge me forward, curious as to what I was doing.  I held out my hands, begging them to stop right where they were and not move.  “Sometimes moving forward means stopping in place for a little while,” I spouted out cryptically.

     The feather tickled my nose as it floated past my face and I waited a moment before opening my eyes.  When I felt that enough time had passed for my experiment to be complete, I opened them and looked down. 

     And there it was.  Her sign. 
My
sign. 
Our
sign.  Exactly how I envisioned it to be.  The small gray feather had come to rest on my right shoe.  The laces of my boot were configured in such a way that the loops formed a nearly perfect figure eight.  The tip of the feather’s shaft was lodged into its center, the feather itself pointing back toward me. 

     I began to laugh as I plucked that feather from my shoe and stuck it into my curly entanglement of hair and behind my ear.  There was nothing for me to fear now.  I may not know the origin of Zach’s delusions but I knew that the answer was out there somewhere.  I may not know what I would have to endure in the meantime but I knew it was what I was meant to do.  My mother wouldn’t lead me into something terrible otherwise. 

     A trip to Arizona definitely lay in my cards but it would have to wait until I knew that Zach was out of immediate danger.  And as bad as today seemed to be, things were finally starting to feel like they were going to be all downhill from here.

29.  High Anxieties

     I woke up feeling very groggy and disoriented—like I had somehow transcended time.  What happened to me?  How did I end up in the hospital and how long had I been here?  I wasn’t having any pain except for the dull ache in my head that I’d grown so accustomed to.  But there was a distinct and overwhelming emptiness in my heart.  I was missing someone or something, unbearably so.  Something I was never going to find here. 

     My brain was overtaken with only one thought—get up and keep moving until you find what you’re looking for.  Placing both hands on the sides of the bed, I gave a hard shove and tried to sit up.  But I got nowhere.  My arms wouldn’t hold my weight long enough for me to reposition myself.  They were lead heavy yet with the tensile strength of soggy spaghetti.  I wasn’t going anywhere.  I was trapped inside my own body.  Trapped inside my restless, lonely mind.

     I tried to reach out to the call button for help but with no success.  If I couldn’t get up, I wanted something to put me to sleep.  At least in my dreams, my body worked.  At least there I could find freedom.  That’s when I remembered what I was looking for—or more precisely
who
I was looking for.  Ruby.  Yet it wasn’t Ruby.  It was more her essence that I sought than anything else.  She was driving me crazy and I wanted it to stop.

     Who was I trying to kid?  I loved it.  I loved the madness and I
never
wanted it to stop.  I wanted her in my head for the rest of eternity.  I
wanted
to be crazy.  I wanted to
stay
crazy.  But I didn’t want to do it here.  Again, I struggled for the call button and finally found the strength to tap on it.  When the nurse responded, I said only one word.

     “Ruby.”

     Barely a minute later, both she and a nurse appeared in the open doorway.  The nurse appeared happy to see me awake. Ruby, a feather tucked behind her ear, was smiling and dare I even say looking joyful.  How
did
I get here? 

     “You’re awake,” the nurse proclaimed cheerfully.  “How does your ankle feel?”

     “My ankle?  How about my arms?  They feel like they are only a half a step away from paralysis!  What happened to me?  What did
she
do to me?”

     I nodded my head toward Ruby, full of love and disdain for her at the same time.  How could both extremes exist in my heart simultaneously?  Why did I want her one moment yet not the next?  It never used to feel like this before.  I needed it to end yet I desperately wanted it to continue.  Messed up, huh?  It was an insane concept and I knew it.  They would lock me up forever if I verbalized what was in my head.  It was a secret that no one could ever know.

     Any positivity there was in that room was immediately sucked out and swallowed up by an invisible vacuum of negativity.  The nurse asked Ruby to leave and she did so without argument.  As she checked my vitals, the nurse explained how I had come to be lying in that hospital bed.

     “According to witnesses, you were incoherent and stumbling down the sidewalk.  Before they knew it, you stepped out into the crosswalk and right into the path of a Chevy Impala.  It hit you hard enough to roll you up onto the hood of the car.  Your left ankle hit the frame of the windshield with enough force to break it.”

     “But that doesn’t explain why I can barely move my arms, does it?  If I don’t have a spinal injury, why am I partially paralyzed?”

     “Well, Zach, your injury also doesn’t explain what caused the caused the accident in the first place.  It doesn’t explain your behavior afterwards, either.  You were walking around on that ankle, assaulting the EMT workers as they tried to help you.  What’s your history of alcohol and drug use?  No need to lie—we already did the blood tests and we’ll have the definitive results soon.”

     Drugs and alcohol?  Was this lady crazy?  No one who actually knew me would even suspect something like that about me.  They would have asked Ruby that question first, wouldn’t they?  That beautiful, stupid bitch lied to them.  Why did she insist on torturing me?  And why did I continue to want her to?

     “I don’t
do
drugs!  I don’t drink either.  All I take is one nightly sleeping pill her dad prescribed which doesn’t seem to help me much anyway.  Unless that isn’t really a sleeping pill and he’s in on the plot to kill me too!” 

    “Yes, I see that in your chart,” the nurse went on, ignoring my suggestion of a murder plot.  “And is there any family history of psychiatric disorders? Depression, chronic anxiety, bipolar, paranoia, schizophrenia?”

     The way her voice changed when she got to “schizophrenia” let me know that’s what she thought she was dealing with.  I wasn’t crazy.  Ruby was mentally torturing me in some way.  She was possessing my brain and toying with it.  It was nothing more than a mental game of Twister where she routinely changed the rules to ensure that I lost every time. 

     That’s when genius struck me. 
I
wasn’t the one possessed, she
was
.  So without thinking, I blurted it out loud.

     “My girlfriend’s possessed!  She’s trying to hurt me!  She’s trying to make me look like the crazy one but really it’s been her all along!  When I went back home for a month, I started to feel better.  Things got worse once we were back together again.  She’s a siren, a succubus, a serpent!  Lock
her
up and you’ll see that I start feeling better again!”

     Even though I knew the things I said were true, I immediately knew that I shouldn’t have said them.  Yet again, Ruby had led me down the path to certain ruin.  They were going to put me into a strait jacket and a tiny little room with nothing inside of it.  I wasn’t the one who belonged there—
she
was.  But that’s exactly where they were about to send me.  I needed to stay calm and hide my crazy long enough to get myself out of this.

     After calming my anxiety as much as possible, I tried again.  “I didn’t mean that she was
actually
possessed—it was a metaphor and nothing more.  All I’m trying to say is that I feel better when she isn’t around.  I have more energy.”

     The nurse nodded her head and said unemotionally, “I see.  Well, we’re waiting on the results of your tests right now.  A therapist will be in soon to talk to you.”

     A therapist.  That meant that I was going to have to be on my best behavior.  I was going to look and sound sane as much as I possibly could. 
That’s
how I would get out of here. 
That’s
how I would get far away from Ruby.  Distance would release the hold she had on me like it had before.

     About twenty minutes later, the therapist walked in and I thought I had pulled myself together enough to get through the conversation logically and sanely.  I was polite and smiled when he sat down in the chair next to me.  I even thanked him for taking the time to talk to me.  Everything was going fine until
she
sauntered in the door about ten steps behind him.

     She sat down on the foot of my bed and stared at me, the folds of her dress draped delicately around her legs.  She pressed one finger to her lips and in a barely audible tone said “Shh.”

     I wasn’t going to let her control me. 
I
was the one in control here.  As calmly as I possibly could, I turned to the therapist and said, “I would prefer that we talk alone.  It would be best if she doesn’t hear what I have to say.” I nodded in her direction.

     Slowly, he lowered his glasses and peered over top of their frame.  “It’s best if
who
doesn’t hear us?”

     He was looking right at her and pretending that she wasn’t there.  Great.  Now she even had strangers in on her plot to destroy my mind.  No.  I wasn’t going to fall into her trap.  Not this time and never again.  If he was going to play stupid, then so was I.

     My mind raced to find a plausible explanation for what I had just said.  Realizing that the door to my room was wide open, I used that as my excuse.  I was smart enough to get myself out of this.  Ruby, of all people, should have known that.

     “The door’s open.  I don’t want my nurse or anyone else to overhear me.  I know that everything I say is going to go into my file but I would at least like for the actual conversation to be as confidential as it can be.”

     “Oh,” the therapist said, suddenly seeming less judgmental of every word that escaped my lips.  “That’s understandable.  Most people prefer their sessions to be that way.” 

     Ruby giggled quietly as he crossed the room to close the door.  My excitement at having outsmarted her began to diminish.  I didn’t really outsmart her, did I?  This was exactly what she wanted me to do, wasn’t it?  I’d played right into her evil little hands yet again.  No matter what I did, she was always a few steps ahead of me.  Not just physically, but mentally now, too.  I had to stop focusing on her and instead concentrate on getting myself out of this situation.  I couldn’t afford to look crazy now even though that’s exactly how I felt.

     As the therapist droned on about the hospital’s privacy policies and how I should feel comfortable telling him the truth about any issues in my life, I frantically scrambled for a plausible explanation for what happened to me today.  It would have been a much easier task if I could have at least
remembered
what happened.  What they
said
happened didn’t match up with how my body felt.  I was barely able to move.  I was going to have to summon every scrap of mental agility to get me out of this one. 

     I couldn’t remember a time when my anxiety topped—or even matched—the level it was at currently.  I had to convince him that my ailments were physical in nature and nothing more.  It would have been a lot easier to do without
her
there.

     I was barely able to concentrate on a word that came out of that man’s mouth because of her.  She danced around the room trying to get my attention but I refused to look at her.  I simply couldn’t afford to right now.  There would be plenty of time to stare at her perfection later after I got myself out of the mess she’d gotten me into.  Still not sure of how to excuse strange acts that I wasn’t sure I’d even committed, my anxiety grew steadily into a deep, pulsating river of panic.  All I wanted to do was go home and go to sleep.  Alone.  Forever.

     A flash of sudden genius struck me then.  Sleep.  Sleep was the answer to all of this.  I knew just what to say in defense of myself.

     “Sleep.  I have serious sleep issues.  I take sleeping pills but they don’t always solve the problem.  Sometimes I sleepwalk.  I’m not on drugs; I’m not crazy.  I just can’t control myself when I’m asleep.  That’s all it is.”

     I launched into an overly thorough account of how jet lag coupled with a badly timed case of mono had set off a chain reaction in my sleep patterns which led to vivid dreams and sleepwalking.  I explained about the melatonin Ruby had started giving me and about how it hadn’t been enough so Dr. Matthews gave me a prescription.  A prescription that still wasn’t completely eradicating the nighttime deprivation I was experiencing. 

     It took everything I had to keep my eyes on that man and not to longingly trace her every movement around the room.  Every graceful step, every sly flirtation were noticed yet ignored simultaneously.  I wanted to scream at her and kiss her at the same time yet could do neither.  My brain was on fire while trying to pretend that those feelings didn’t exist but I needed to get out of that room, that hospital.  I needed to be as far apart and as close to her as I could possibly get. 

     When I was done, he thanked me for speaking with him then quietly walked away.  I sat there in my bed, still afraid to talk to or even look at her.  Someone might be watching, waiting for me to slip up and put my insanity on display.  So I closed my eyes and waited until I heard the latch on the door signal either one of two things—either she had given up and left or someone was returning with the results of my tests and mental evaluation.

     But the face I saw next was an unexpected one.  Not unwelcome, but definitely unexpected. 

     “They’re signing your release papers now.  I’ll get your things together while they work on that.  It’s time to get you out of here.”

     I breathed a sigh of relief and my anxiety melted away.  Maybe, just maybe, there was hope for me yet.

30.  Landing Gear

     The conversation between the three of us in the emergency room had to have been a strange one to witness.  To the outside world, it was just Addie and me sitting in those seats speaking randomly to an empty chair.  But to both of us, that spot wasn’t unoccupied.  As it turned out, Zach and I weren’t the only living souls able to see Clay.  My new, best,
living
friend was happy to meet my dead BFF.  And Clay was pretty pumped about it, too.

     So excited, in fact, that I had to reel the conversation in on several occasions.  Addie and Clay could bond later.  What mattered most at the moment was Zach’s condition.  And what my mother was trying to do to help me figure out what was wrong with him.