painfully aware that it shouldn’t have come as a surprise. Truth be told it was already too late the day I awoke with the inexplicable pain in the side of my neck.
“Rowan?” Ben’s voice hurtled past me once again, pausing in its flight just long enough to send a distorted echo down my ear canal before continuing along its random trajectory through the room.
I don’t know how long it actually took me to figure out that the ricocheting noise was my name being called, but it really wasn’t important. Whether minutes or only fractions of a second passed, the point was moot. For me, time was no longer a constant.
For a third time, he called my name, adding even more insistence as if I simply wasn’t listening. I still didn’t answer. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to. I simply couldn’t form the words, either physically or mentally. In fact, all I could manage to do was stare downward at the edge of the slide out drawer but, more specifically, at my hand resting upon it. Of course, it wasn’t so much that my hand was resting on the metal as much as the fact that it was also in full contact with Emily Foster’s arm.
I couldn’t help but stare in wonderment. My right hand was still sheathed in the surgical glove Doctor Sanders had insisted I wear. Heretofore, even such a thin layer of latex had seemed to be an insurmountable barrier whenever I was purposely attempting to connect with the dead. But now, that had obviously changed. With a single accidental touch I was now spiraling into an encounter with this dead woman’s horrors, and there was little I could do to stop it from happening.
The dizziness was taking over now, swirling around behind my eyes as my stomach churned out of synch, making a strong bid to work itself into a frenzy of nausea. I could feel my heart thumping just behind my face instead of in my chest where it belonged, and an odd pressure forced outward from inside my skull. The headache that had been knocking on the back of my head let itself in and fell into a wildly syncopated rhythm with the frantic beat.
Ben’s voice corkscrewed its way through the rush of blood in my ears. “Somethin’s wrong… Felicity? You with us?”
Hearing him call my wife’s name sent a wave of panic ripping through my intestines. In the past few moments, I had all but forgotten that she was fighting to anchor me in the realm of the living. I now feared that the solid connection she had formed to protect me was now placing her in jeopardy.
I tried to alleviate the threat by releasing my grip on her hand but immediately found that the signals from my brain were being stopped well before they made it to my fingers. Realizing that there was nothing I could do, the terror now shot upward through the pit of my stomach and settled into my chest. As it began spreading out into a cold fear, a second voice slammed headlong against my eardrums.
“ Caorthann,” my wife said, calling my name in Gaelic.
What I managed to glean from the sound was not that she was in distress but that she was concerned. While that fact didn’t completely quell the panic, it at least put a damper on the fear that she was in any danger. If she was talking to me, then she was obviously in much better shape than I was at the moment.
The influx of relief forced my guard down just enough that the incorporeal Emily Foster gained an even more solid foothold in my psyche. In a flash she slipped through and demanded to be heard. I had no other choice but to listen.
I felt myself falling, but it wasn’t the dreamlike sensation of endless descent to which I was accustomed. This was the real thing. My knees buckled. Soon, what followed was my body pitching to the side and then back. The fall came slowly at first, then with an ever-increasing rate as I crumpled in place.
I heard Felicity yelp. “Rowan!”
As I hastened toward the floor, I felt a quick tug on my hand. I thought I heard my wife let out another sharp cry, and then I experienced the sensation of cold tile slamming against my back and shoulder. Not to be outdone, my head cracked against the floor, sending a fresh and very intense pain to join forces with the migraine as everything shuddered. As it morphed into a dull ache, I could feel the coolness of the floor seeping into my cheek. A split second later the air was unexpectedly forced from my lungs by a squirming weight landing hard on top of me. I realized, as the object continued moving and then scrambled to the side, that it was Felicity. My hand was still locked tight with hers, and I had apparently dragged her down with me.
“Are you all right?” Ben’s voice bounced through the room, but I knew he wasn’t speaking to me.
“Aye,” Felicity answered him in slow motion. “Rowan? Rowan?!”
I could feel something prying at my fingers. I was struggling to stay planted in this plane, but a tortured spirit had a much different idea about where I needed to be. Emily Foster had something to show me, and she was pulling me backward into darkness in an insane tug of war across the veil.
And as I expected she was already starting to win.
“ Just a little sting…” an androgynous and wholly unfamiliar voice echoed. But it wasn’t in my ears; it was inside my head.
I can’t see anything.
The world is completely black for me.
I feel pressure against my neck.
“ Don’t worry,” the voice says again. “It will all be over soon…very soon… I envy you. To be chosen like this. It’s such an honor… I wish it were me…”
I still can’t move. I’m facing the tiled wall lined with stainless steel doors, and I see shadows moving across it. There is a hard pressure against my neck now. Although I can barely make it out over the din of blood rushing in my ears, I can hear what sounds to be a flurry of activity just out of my line of sight.
My ankles are burning… The rope is biting into them hard.
I can no longer feel my feet. They’ve gone completely numb.
Dizziness…
Headache…
I wish I could see.
I won’t be afraid… I won’t be afraid…
I am chosen…
It is an honor…
I have been prepared…
I can hear the chanting now…
The time must be near…
It is an honor to be chosen…
It is an honor to be chosen…
I won’t be afraid…
The last thing I heard before blacking out was Doctor Sanders voice puncturing the drone in my ears with a sharp note of controlled alarm threaded through her words. “I can’t stop the bleeding. Get the paramedics now!”
CHAPTER 23:
I slowly opened one eye and let it roam. There was no mistaking where I was based simply on the institutional colors now bleeding into my limited field of vision. But, even if the drab hues didn’t give it away, there was a failsafe to back them up, that being the antiseptic smell that was now tingling my nostrils. I closed the eye once again and tried to remember what was going on prior to this particular moment in my life.
Unfortunately, my head was throbbing too much to allow for anything resembling deep thought. I remembered being at the morgue, accidentally touching Emily Foster’s corpse, then becoming acquainted with the floor of the autopsy suite. All of that pretty much consumed the space I had left in my grey matter that wasn’t being taken up with pain. However, there was still enough room in between the cycling aches for me to wonder where my wife happened to be.
“Felicity?” I barely croaked in a dry, wispy voice.
I didn’t get an answer, but since I could barely hear myself, maybe she couldn’t hear me at all. I cleared my throat then opened both of my eyes this time and lifted my head slightly as I sent them searching. To my
