Shutter(28)

“She can see. She can.” The ghost of a man in an orange construction vest pushed the little girl aside. “Help us. Please, help us.”

I stood, feeling the stings of the wires, tubes, and cables still attached to me. I headed toward the hallway, pulling all of it with me.

“Rita, don’t.” Angie tried to stop me, but I pushed her back as hard as I could. I couldn’t even hear her voice anymore among the voices of a million ghosts going on at once.

“Please, you need to let my daughter know that I left the key for the box in my desk.” The construction worker’s ghost was once again in my face.

“Do you know where my mom is? I’ve been waiting for her a long time.” The little girl tried to pull at my fingers.

A woman spoke in Spanish. “Hija, ayudame. Por favor.” I felt her heat on my arms. “Por favor.”

A teenager—still in her hospital gown and with cuts on her arms—tried to snatch my hair. “Are you a doctor? Can you give me something, you know, for the pain?” Her voice was indifferent and raspy, her heat the smell of a freshly struck match.

There were hundreds of them. They all spoke at once, in different languages, in different tempos and volumes, and tried their best to get my attention. One man’s ghost pushed all the others aside. It looked like he had taken a gunshot to his face—half of it was gone; his left eye hung loosely in its socket.

“Tell my wife it was an accident. I never would have done this to myself. Never. The gun. It just dropped. Fell on the ground. Please.” I couldn’t take my eyes off him.

“Rita, look at me. Rita!” Angie pressed her fingers into my face. “What is the matter, Rita? What’s going on?”

“They’re all here, Angie,” I answered. “You should never have brought me here. Get me out of here. Get me out of here now.”

“It doesn’t matter how far or hard you run, Rita.” Erma stood at Angie’s side. “We will find you.”

The pressure in my head was unrivaled. My nose started to bleed again, the warmth spreading over my lips, my chin, and my neck. The ghosts felt my own life force and tugged on it like a rotten tooth. In a surge of panic, I yanked at the wires attached to my body.

“Oh my God, Rita.” Angie pulled a towel from a side table and handed it to me. “Your nose. You must stay here. There could be something seriously wrong with you.”

“If we all hold on to her, she won’t be able to say no.” The construction worker was determined. “Everyone. Hold on to her.” And they did. I felt all their bony and cold fingers on my face, my back, my hair. Their force wrenched me so hard I thought my arms would be jerked from their sockets, that every hair would be plucked from my follicles. The pain was a descending pulsation. It was the pain of death, the ache of decay, the voices Grandma and Mr. Bitsilly warned me about—the darkness that stays. Erma was doing this to me. They had never been able to touch me before.

“Get me out of here, Angie,” I pleaded. “Angie, please.”

Angie grabbed a blanket from the bed and wrapped it around my shoulders. She held me up the best she could, her strong hands beneath my arms, and led me out of the examination room. The ghosts writhed and screamed at me in the corridor, desperate to come close to me, to feel one last pulse of life in their dead existence. I couldn’t keep my head up anymore. I wrapped myself into that blanket and into Angie, feeling her pulse, strong and steady. My own barely beating heart was a thin, deliberate pulse marked by the running of blood from my nose and arm.

“Please, help me find my mom.” The little girl yanked the blanket so hard that it flew from my shoulders and onto the floor. I watched her light morph to black, her face contorted by darkness. “Find my mother, now!”

The living inhabitants of the ER sat staring at us blankly, their injuries fresh and their bodies alive.

“Excuse me.” The doctor was running toward us. “Where are you going?”

The automatic door flew open and blasted Angie and me with air and the beginnings of a light snow. We moved as fast as we could into the crime-scene van parked outside. Once inside, I looked to the rear to make sure none of the others were in there with us. It was empty of ghosts, but there was my camera.

My camera was broken in two—the lens free from the body and dented along the ribbed edges of the lens threads.

“What happened?” I asked, holding two pieces.

“Everyone on scene at Judge Winters’s house saw you stagger down the steps and land flat on your face and on top of your camera.” Angie looked at me out of the corner of her eye as she pulled out into the street. “So, are you going to tell me what happened in there? And don’t try to tell me nothing happened. I’ve never seen you so scared. Never.”

I had no idea that the county hospital was so full of souls. It was a testament to my own weakness.

“I don’t know what to tell you, Angie.” I felt alone and terrified. All this time, I thought I was in control, but now I found myself drowning, looking for the surface. “I’m haunted.”

“What do you mean you’re haunted?” Angie stopped at the light. “You need to quit this job, Rita. You’ve finally gone off the deep end.”

“I . . . I can see . . . ghosts sometimes.” I could feel my arm pulsing where I’d torn the IV out. I pressed my coat into the wound. “I don’t know how else to explain it. I used to be able to control it, but now they know. It’s Erma.”