Max and Sebastian - Chapter 11
Contemporary young adult horror fiction
Dearest Penguin People.
To the fantastic few who show up every week to read this, a huge thank you 🐧💖.
Please note, this chapter can be read as a stand alone story.
In the last chapter Max dreamt about a former life. When she awoke she took a turn for the worse and was sent to the emergency room.
One of the characters introduced in this chapter will be familiar to those who have read my short story Larry. I posted a link at the beginning of the chapter for those of you who are interested. Just be advised the events in Max and Sebastian come before those in Larry.
If you are new to Max and Sebastian please click below…
And as always, a quick thank you to P.Q. Rubin for the clumsy penguin up top.
Part II - Chapter 11
Autumn Teaberry perched on a hard-plastic seat in the emergency waiting room. The longer she waited, the more difficult it became to sit in a dignified manner while touching the least amount of its germ-infested surface. It would not surprise her in the least if she came to the emergency room with one ailment and left with another.
To her left she saw a splattering of something brownish and squishy streaked across the wall. Was it blood, vomit, or perhaps the decomposed remains of a forgotten patient? And, as if that wasn’t enough, there was an odiferous green something pooled on the floor a few seats away. It seemed to grow if she stared at it too long.
She scrunched herself into a smaller spot on the seat, mentally berating her personal physician. He couldn’t see her until next Wednesday. Fortunate for her, she didn’t have a knife sticking out of her chest; although for that, he might have squeezed her in on a Monday. With misgivings, she had asked her niece to drop her off at the hospital. Three hours later she was no closer to seeing a doctor than when she had first walked in.
As she waited, she wondered if she belonged here at all. The young mother hacking up a lung behind her certainly needed to be seen. And the elderly black gentleman across from her merited attention. He hadn’t moved since she got here. God only knew what was wrong with him.
She kneaded her purse straps between restless fingers. Her reason for coming in seemed silly now. She had experienced a lapse of reason, a mental hiccup if you will.
It had started innocently enough with Autumn at the kitchen table solving crosswords, her only company a cup of herbal mint tea and a half-eaten cookie. A six-letter word for spirit stymied her. She reached for a pocket dictionary and noticed her sister, May Teaberry, seated in the opposite chair. The dictionary fell from Autumn’s fingers.
“Wraith,” May told her.
“Excuse me?”
“The crossword, you ninny.”
“Oh, yes. Of course.” Autumn smoothed her napkin, a slight tremor in her fingers. “May?”
“Yes, Autumn?”
“Correct me if I’m wrong, but I buried you on Sunday.”
May smiled. “When are you ever wrong?”
After that it only got worse. Others began wandering in, from old friends, to Autumn’s mailman who had always liked to chat and random souls who pretended to know her but she knew were full of it. And all of them, she knew, were quite dead.
It had disturbed her quite a bit, but now, being insane didn’t seem nearly as important as giving her backside a respite from this despicable chair. It would be more convenient to be crazy in the comfort of her own home and avoid getting Typhoid in the process.
Evening rolled in, bringing a smattering of rain and light fog that sprinkled the air with fairy dust. That is, if one believed in that sort of thing, which Autumn did not. She glanced out the waiting room window. The lights in the ambulance parking lot glowed like misty sea lanterns. All it needed was a fog horn and the illusion would be complete. She sniffed. The news had promised clear skies. Why did she bother watching? Her shoulders drooped. She watched because she had nothing better to do.
She glanced nervously again at the elderly gentleman seated in a wheelchair across from her. He really didn’t look well at all. Dull, unblinking eyes stared straight ahead, his mouth slightly agape. Autumn leaned closer and waved a magazine in front of his face. Nothing. She drew in a breath and closed her eyes. Lord Almighty. Surely someone would have noticed a dead man in the emergency waiting room long before this. She opened her eyes, hoping that she was wrong. But his lifeless corpse remained, his gaze fixed directly on her.
Autumn gritted her teeth. A list of appropriate but unacceptable words bounced unsaid against her tongue. She would have to tell the grumpy nurse behind the Plexiglass that she had one less patient to worry about.
As she stood, she noticed the man seemed strangely blurry as if looking through tears. A gray sheen clung to his body. Against her better judgment, Autumn edged closer. The grayness detached, stood up and stretched ghostly arms above its head. She watched with mouth open, no sound escaping her sensibly painted lips. The gray man sat down with a satisfied grunt. He looked up at her and grinned. It was much to Autumn’s credit that she returned to her seat. She lifted her chin and met his gaze with her own.
“Hello there,” he said.
Autumn didn’t reply. She set the magazine down.
“It’s a fine evening, isn’t it?” continued the gray man.
Still silent, she stared at him; her purse clutched tightly in her perfectly manicured hands.
“Well, you’re no fun,” he said and turned to look at his body still frozen in place, the eyes staring off into eternity. He sighed and turned back to Autumn. “I always thought my death would be memorable. I thought I would die rock climbing or perhaps my parachute wouldn’t open. You know, something exciting like that. But no, I miss a few dialysis treatments and I end up talking to a fussy old white lady.”
Autumn couldn’t help herself. “I would think, someone of your age should hardly be rock climbing.”
The man seated next to Autumn looked up. The batty old woman was talking to herself. He turned back to fiddling with his phone.
The old man’s ghost smiled. “So, you do talk.” He settled back into his body until he over-lapped with his old self like double exposed film. “I did all sorts of crazy stuff,” he went on. “But eventually my body wore out and life became less interesting.” He shrugged his shoulders and looked at the throng of people passed out on the hard-plastic seats and sprawled on the floor. “Man, this place is dead.”
“Well, you would know,” Autumn said.
The gray man gave her a wolfish grin.
Autumn pursed her lips tight. “Don’t you have somewhere you need to go?” She had asked the same thing of her unwanted house guests but none of them had been polite enough to answer.
“Not really,” he said. “I’m in no hurry. My name is Hank, by the way.”
“Hello Henry.”
“Only my mother called me Henry.”
“She knew best.”
His smile grew even wider. “I’d shake your hand but I’m not really myself right now.”
Autumn’s patience had come to an end. “What is wrong with you people?”
Everyone within hearing distance looked up at her, pausing in their various attempts to escape the boredom.
“What exactly do you mean by ‘You people,’” asked a large man, dressed in Bermuda shorts and socks with sandals. He stood up and glared at her.
“Oh, dear Lord,” Autumn thought. This day was just getting better and better. She was one step away from being pronounced a racist. She glared back at Mr. Bermuda Shorts and crossed her thin arms across her chest. Unable to meet her gaze the man sat down and stared at his sandals.
Other eyes were not as bashful, thick with recrimination. She squared her shoulders against the onslaught. “I was not talking to any of you. I was simply stating my desire that the undead refrain from speaking to me today.”
A brief silence. People exchanged looks. “Maybe she should be at the front of the line,” someone whispered.
Autumn’s cheeks burned. Her eyes fixed onto the hapless whisperer. “Is there something you would like to share with the rest of the room?”
The young man cowered. “No, ma’am.”
“I didn’t think so. Anyone else?”
No one answered. They had all magically found something else to do.
Hank giggled, tickled to death, again.
“You really are maddening,” Cold fire tore through Autumn’s heart. She counted her breaths.
“So, you were a teacher, I assume?”
Autumn scowled.
Undaunted, Hank continued. “Me, too. Though I suspect my students were older than yours. I taught Archeology at community.” He paused, and stared back at his body. “I spent my life wishing I was digging up fossils or any artifact that was more interesting than me. Instead, I taught generations of knuckleheads who were only interested in an elective credit. Where is the wonder in that?”
“If you move on, then perhaps you’ll find all the wonder you need.”
“Damn, you’re cold.”
She sniffed.
His eyes took on a wicked gleam. “You know, there’s one way I would have preferred to go, if I’d had my way.”
“Really?” The frost in her voice only grew.
“Yes, really.” He leaned in to whisper in her ear.
Autumn’s face turned pink. She took a swing at him with the rolled-up magazine. It passed through Hank’s ghost and hit his corpse smack in the forehead.
The man in the seat next to her looked up from his phone. “Geez lady, what’s wrong with you?” He leaned toward Hank’s body. “Are you okay, buddy?” His eyes widened. “Hey, this guy is dead! What did you do to him?”
“I didn’t kill him, you twit,” she said.
Autumn stomped off to stare out a window, leaving the sudden pandemonium behind her. A horde of nurses converged on the body. Rigor mortis had long set in. They pried his hands from the armrests but couldn’t lay him flat since his knees were locked in a seated position. A well-meaning but clueless intern started to do chest compressions. Autumn kept her back to the whole mess. It was better to stare out the smudged windows of the ER, than deal with these nincompoops.
Hank’s ghost appeared at her side.
“Thank you so much,” he said.
“Whatever for?”
“I haven’t had this much fun in years.”
Autumn shook her head in disgust. She glanced behind her as the nurses tried to straighten out Hank’s legs to no avail. “I can’t believe you died in the waiting room.” She hesitated. “And for what it’s worth, I am sorry.”
“Ah, don’t be,” Hank said. “I was dead long before I got here.”
“How is that possible?”
“This morning my grandson set me in front of the TV. He put on golf, a crime in itself. Who in their right mind watches golf?”
Autumn interrupted him. “My husband loved golf.”
“You said that in the past tense. Is he dead?”
Autumn shifted uncomfortably on her feet. “Well, yes.”
“See, he got bored to death just like me.”
Autumn tightened her lips. “I never would have imagined that dead people could be so ill-mannered.”
Hank ignored her and kept talking. “I wanted to change the channel but I couldn’t reach the remote. My heart gave out trying to lift myself out of the chair. When my dingbat grandson saw that I wasn’t ‘feeling well,’ he packed me up and dropped me off here before going to work.”
“That’s preposterous. The nurse would have noticed you were dead when she registered you.”
“Well, if my grandson had bothered to check me in, then yes, she would have noticed. But he just rolled me in and left.”
“Things like that don’t happen,” Autumn said indignantly.
“Ah, but obviously they do.”
Autumn mulled this over. She looked out the window into the parking lot. In general, she didn’t care much for other people or what they thought about her, but this crossed a line. Family took care of each other. Even if the other person was annoying as hell.
As she looked out into the dreary parking lot, a dark, sinewy shape rose from the shadow of one of the ambulances. It sped across the lot on all fours and then paused in front of the sliding emergency doors. It raised a long, thin snout to sniff the air, a flash of red pinpoint eyes reflected in the ER’s bright lights. It stood briefly on its hind legs and then melted into the glass, leaving an oily smudge against the panes, until it too disappeared.
“Good Lord, what was that?”
“That my dear, was a spirit scavenger,” Hank said.
“A spirit scavenger? I’m sure there’s no such thing.”
Hank gave a dry cough. “I’m sure he’s never heard of you either.”
“Hmmph.” She tapped her foot impatiently against the tired linoleum. “Humor me then. Why is it looking for spirits?”
“Simple, he’s hungry.”
Autumn frowned. Hank seemed deadly serious. “If one of my students told me a story like that, then they would have some explaining to do.”
Hank’s face relented a bit. “Think of it this way. A spirit is a source of light, or energy if you prefer. The way we live our lives can either feed the light or extinguish it.” He snapped his fingers and a small white flame appeared between his thumb and index finger.
“How did you do that?” Autumn asked.
He grinned. “Cheap theatrics. I’m sure I can find a rabbit in my pants if you want me to look.”
“I’d prefer you didn’t.”
“Spoil sport.” Hank held the flame up to his face and stared at it as he talked. “If the life energy is strong enough, it outlives our bodies and we fill one shell after another. Unfortunately, there are beings that through their own deceit or pure laziness that don’t create enough energy. Eventually they disappear into a cloud of ghost dust. That is, unless they take energy from someone else, hence spirit scavengers.” The flame snuffed out in a puff of black smoke.
“Then why aren’t they eating every soul they find?”
“In most people the light is dim and you end up getting various shades of gray. They’re barely alive as it is, not worth the effort. But those with glimmer, a strong energy source, be it bright or dark, make quite a tasty meal. So, if it steals from angel or demon, it makes no difference. It’s all food to them.”
“Which one are you, angel or demon?”
Hank shrugged his shoulders. “Honestly, it’s hard to tell the difference sometimes.”
“I don’t believe any of this.”
“Suit yourself.”
“Henry?”
“What?”
Autumn peered closer. “Your eyes are glowing. They weren’t a minute ago.”
“I doubt it. It must be the moonlight.”
“There’s no moon. It’s raining.”
Hank’s lips curled up. “Are you flirting with me, Mrs. Teaberry?”
“I certainly am not!”
“Uh huh, whatever you say.”
“And how did you know my name?”
Hank winked at her. “You look like a teaberry, all proper with a trace of spice.”
“Really!”
Hank’s eyes sparkled, casting silver embers across his face in a glittery cloud. “And I couldn’t call you Autumn, since we both know you crossed into winter a long time ago.”
Autumn sniffed and pushed a stray wisp of gray from her face. Her pale fingers paused against a lightly rouged cheek.
“Was it something I said?” Hank asked.
Autumn’s lips parted slightly, hesitant to answer.
“Aw, come on,” Hank said. “It’s not like I’m going to tell your secrets to anyone.”
She gave him a sideways glance. Hank waited patiently, watching the raindrops as they left clear tracks against the window.
“I can see you plain as day,” she said.
“Yes, we’ve confirmed that.”
“And I saw my sister and other spirits that filled my house.”
“And that bothers you.”
Autumn dabbed the corners of her eyes with a tissue. “What bothers me,” she said, “is that I saw them and you, but when my husband died, I saw nothing. I was totally alone. I said goodbye to an empty room.”
Hank’s face lost its smugness. “Dang it, you’re going to make me say something nice now, aren’t you?”
“I wouldn’t want to make you break character.”
He grumbled a little under his breath. “Do you want me to sugar-coat it or just tell it to you plain?”
“No sugar for me.”
“First, you weren’t alone. If you said goodbye, he heard you.”
Autumn stared at the worn, gold band on her wedding finger. “You’re saying it’s possible Walt did try to say goodbye,” she murmured.
“It’s almost certain he did.”
“You can’t know that.”
“I’ve known you for five minutes and I know I would stick around until I knew you were okay.”
For one of the few times in Autumn Teaberry’s life, she didn’t know what to say. Autumn put the tissue back in her purse with a snap. “So, what part needs sugar-coating?” she finally asked.
“The reason you can see me is because you are closer to my side,” he waved his spectral hands in front of his face, “than to theirs.” He pointed to the other patients in the waiting room.
“Oh.”
“Maybe being here is a good idea.”
She gazed thoughtfully at the parking lot through the rain-streaked window and then turned to Hank. “I’ve had a good life,” she said and left it at that.
A new set of lights lit up the rain. A tall female paramedic, with jet-black hair pulled back in a ponytail, stepped out of an ambulance. She reminded Autumn of an angry martinet as she marched stiffly to the back. Another woman in a tired blue uniform hopped out. Her patient was talking nonstop while clutching a paper sheet to his chest. Miss Martinet pointed a petulant finger toward the emergency room.
The patient crawled out of the back and pulled the thin paper sheet around him. He wore a diaper though he didn’t seem old enough to need one. He noticed them in the window and waved, first at Autumn and then a hesitant gesture toward Hank. They waved back. Then the patient and EMT walked across the lot and disappeared inside the emergency room.
“I think he saw you, Henry.”
“I think you’re right.”
“Then I’m not crazy after all. I can go home.” Relief washed over her. Other people saw ghosts, too.
“But what about the scavenger?” Hank asked.
“Just what do you propose I do? The last I checked I had no super powers over the undead.”
Hank shrugged. His eyes glowed a little brighter. “That poor soul looked like he could use some help.”
“The nut in the diaper?”
“He’s hurting, I can tell. You should help him.”
“And just what do you suggest I do? Bake him cookies?”
“That would be a start.”
“Then, why don’t you help him if you’re so worried about him?”
“Because I’m dead. What’s your excuse?”
Autumn bristled and put her nose in the air.
Hank muttered under his breath, then crossed his arms. “Woman, do it your own damn self.”
“Well!”
Silence.
“Henry?”
He was gone.
Autumn scanned the crowded emergency waiting room but found it was minus one ghost.
“Hank?”
It surprised her a little that it felt so empty.
As a side note…none of this was written with AI and I kindly ask that no one use it for training purposes. Thank you :)
You do have a way with words! Missed the penguin again:) 😁
A hospital to avoid! great writing as always.