The Graveyard Shift (22 page)

*

The car ride across town was quiet but pleasant. Rebecca told William about her schooling and about her past accounting experience, which was next to nothing, and William told her about Miguel Rodriguez and his tyrannical son.

“And so now he’s rotting in prison,” William said, as the automatic doors opened with a ‘whish’ and the two walked inside St. John’s Medical Center. “It’s probably not very nice of me to say this, but I’m glad for it, too. He deserved it.”

Rebecca showed her volunteer badge to the front desk and proceeded down the next hallway with William following closely behind.

“It sounds like the company’s in much better hands, Mr. Bellows.”

“Please, call me Bill. Or hell, you can even call me Gingerbread Man if you want. Everyone else in the office does.”

They rounded a corner, into an adjacent hallway, and Rebecca glanced back at William in confusion. “Why do they call you that?”

William was already wearing a smile. “Because I’m a redhead and I used to hand out all of the ‘bread’.”

“Ginger… oh, I get it.” She stifled a laugh.

“You can laugh, you know. You have the job. I’m not just going to take it back from you.”

Rebecca wrinkled her brow. “If you don’t mind me saying, Mr. Bellows—err, Bill—this has been a very odd day. I can’t say I expected any of this to happen.”

“I didn’t either, Rebecca,” William said, as he felt the weight of the stone-hilted knife in his waistline.

Heading toward a long row of rooms, Rebecca showed William the supply area, and introduced him to some of the staff in the waiting area. She then escorted him through various rooms. Rebecca was much more at ease in the north wing of the hospital, which she walked through freely and with confidence.

“This room belongs to Norman,” she explained, as she popped in and offered a wave to the old man lying in bed. He returned the wave with a smile. “He slipped and broke his hip last week. He won’t be here much longer, but I think he gets lonely, so sometimes I come in and just let him talk.”

“That’s nice of you,” William said. He felt the knife rub against his belt and winced.

“And this room belongs to Robert,” Rebecca went on, but this time without going in. “Who’s definitely a regular. He’s on life support. The doctors don’t think he’ll ever come out of it, but so far his family is keeping him plugged in because they think that one day he’s going to come back to us.”

“Do you think he’ll come out of it?” William asked.

“I think miracles happen all the time,” Rebecca replied. “But his family is very wealthy, and money isn’t an object. I just think they don’t want to say goodbye yet. Not until they’ve given that miracle a decent chance.”

They reached the room at the end of the hall. “And this is a new patient, Mary-Frances. She’s just lost a leg to diabetes, and she likes to practice using her crutches with me. We take walks up and down the hallway until she gets tired. Last week we made it all the way to the chapel.”

“There’s a chapel here?” William spun toward the other side of the hall. “Will you take me there?”

“Sure,” Rebecca said, and led him to the modest chapel that contained eight wooden pews on each side of the main aisle, leading up to a wooden altar and a cross nailed against a blue curtain. “It’s nice, isn’t it?”

“It is,” William said, and shifted nervously on his feet. “Hey, would you leave me be for a moment? I’ll grab you in a few minutes, I just… I just need a moment to myself.”

“Of course,” she said, with genuine concern radiating in her eyes, as she left him alone in the chapel and pulled the doors quietly shut behind her.

William dropped into the nearest pew, kneeling down with his head bowed and his hands folded together. He let out a sigh that echoed across the chapel.

Rebecca was pure, of that he had no doubt. But suddenly, after walking the hospital with her, he saw just how many people she had helped.
How many people she would continue to help. The needs of the many outweighed the needs of the few, yes, but just how many patients would suffer if Rebecca was gone? Was it still worth less than keeping a few extra families employed at a low-paying assembly job?

William closed his eyes, sighed under his breath, and fumbled his way through the Lord’s Prayer. It brought him no comfort.

When he stepped out of the chapel, he stopped inside the nearest restroom. He stood before the mirror, glancing intently over his reflection’s shoulder, and began to speak to the empty restroom.

“I’m trying,” William said. “Really, I am. But this is hard. This is…” William bit down on his lip. “This is really fucking hard. But I’m trying, okay?”

A figure stepped forward, in such a manner as if he’d been there the entire time. Though the fluorescent light above was obnoxiously bright, the demon’s cloudy face was draped in impossible shadows.

“Your pathetic prayers will not guide you any closer to an answer, you know.”

“I wasn’t praying,” William said defensively.

“It matters not what you were doing in that chapel, and I assume I need not recite the crude colloquialism of wishing in one hand and defecating in the other.”

“No. But I’m just telling you that I’m trying. I’ll find you your soul, even if it’s not her.” William smirked as he eyed his reflection—between his bloodshot eyes and the bags that crept beneath them, he looked as if he’d aged five years in the last two days. “It's not like she's the only pure person on this planet. In this state. This city. I’ll find someone.”

The demon uttered a laugh. “When four days has passed, William, and the matter becomes you versus her, will you still be able to defend her actions? Or will your selflessness leave you? Tell me, if you keep her alive, will she provide for your family? Put a roof over their heads? Will she take care of your children?”

“I told you, I’m
trying
,” William said, as he threw open the door and stormed off to find Rebecca.

*

That night William spent with his family. He took them out to a movie—a comedy, which he and the rest of the family enjoyed—and then to the arcade to play a few games. The thought that this might be some of the last quality time he ever spent with them was looming in the back of his mind, and he wanted to make the most of it. The look on little Lynette’s face as she waddled away from the arcade center with a teddy bear as big as she was made it all worth it. If he could remember that smile, engrave it into his brain, maybe somehow he could endure an eternity of suffering.

Lynette fell asleep on the ride home. Dana had nothing smartass to say, and was actually talking to William and Grace about which classes she was enjoying at school. And that night, after the kids were in bed, William and Grace made love for the first time in a month. As William fell back onto his pillow, Grace nestled her face against his stubbled cheek and sighed.

“We haven’t done it like that in years,” she cooed, as she admired his chest in the faint lamp light. “Such vigor. Such passion. Like it’s your last day on earth.” She giggled at the thought. William did not.

“Sometimes it feels like it,” he admitted.

Grace laced her hand into his and admired its smoothness. As she glanced at it, she didn’t notice the deep sigil burnt into the palm of his hand—a permanent emblem of his dark dealings. Perhaps only he could see it. At first he thought that might bring him comfort, but it did not.

Three hours of staring at the ceiling later, William finally slept.

*

After spending the first few hours of his workday teaching Rebecca the basics, William went to Steve’s office and told him he needed to run some errands, and to call him if he or Rebecca needed anything. Steve was happy to hold down the fort, and William hardly said a word as he dashed out of the building.

Soon after, he was blazing around town in his Volvo, head hung low, eyes slipping between the road, the side mirror, and the rearview mirror endlessly, like a drug dealer on his way to a big (but dangerous) trade.

He stopped by the soup kitchen that the first potential candidate for his old job had listed on his resume, though Steven Silas wasn’t there that day. Masquerading as a man named James who was interested in helping out (why he felt the need to use a fake name he didn’t know, but it somehow seemed to be appropriate), William asked some of the volunteers about helping out. If they liked it. Two of them were unfriendly and unhelpful. Another said he did it because he liked to eat the leftovers. Sometime later William overheard the last volunteer selling a homeless man some cocaine for his last ten dollars.

Next he stopped at the nursing home, under the guise of a man looking for his elderly uncle Stephen. He talked to a few old men and women, and those who were aware enough to understand where they were seemed none too pleased at being dumped off by their children. They were bitter, and mean, and full of regret. Meanwhile, the men and women who took care of the elderly were grumpy, impatient, and even more difficult to talk with.

After that William drove to the nearest preschool, but as he sat in his car, watching the toddlers outside bound across the playground equipment, laughing and screaming, he couldn’t bring himself to even get out.

Instead, he drove off to the nearest church.

It was a Catholic church, and though William wasn’t Catholic, he stepped inside and slumped into a pew in the back row. The church was otherwise empty, save for him and the figure nailed to the cross above the altar that wept tears of blood.

It seemed, at least for the moment, that Rebecca was the only clean soul in the entire city. And even if she wasn’t, how could he possibly hope to find another in just two days? Finding a needle in a haystack was a miracle in itself. Asking to find two was nothing short of greedy.

William knew not what to do or where to go from here. But if anything, he found solace in the fact that the demon could not follow him here, into this church. He contemplated staying here, camping out in this church for the next few days as a sort of sanctuary, but he knew that wasn’t the answer to his problems, and he also knew deep down in his heart that the contract would be upheld no matter where he hid.

With the demon unable to look over his shoulder, William pulled out his smartphone and began to Google demonology. He looked up the contract between man and demon—something he instantly felt silly for searching, as the results he found were cluttered in guesswork and bad assumptions from ghost hunters that probably spent a good deal of their time simply spooking themselves. But looking it up somehow brought him comfort, if only to know that he wasn’t the only one with demons on the brain.

And then, feeling bold, he began to search terms like “how to break a contract with a demon” and “how to kill a demon.” Unfortunately for him, the answer to both of those was a resounding ‘not possible,’ even if half of the answers were filled with crackpot science.

It is a law of physics that energy cannot be destroyed. It can only be contained,
wrote demonhunter43 in a random paranormal forum that William stumbled across.
Therefore a demon cannot be killed, merely contained.

So how do I contain a demon?
William pondered, as he Googled the very term.

Again, the answers were broad and cluttered in guesses. William assumed that a demon was not something that could be boxed up in cardboard and sealed away in a dark basement like an unwanted sweater. It seemed the only way a demon could be contained was within another human being through demonic possession. A living container. And yet, the knife already seemed to be a method to that possession, and if he put it into someone’s belly, it meant the demon was going to take over their body anyway. That provided no way out.

An hour later, William found himself no closer to an answer, and the idea that he was going to find a clever solution to get out of this contract was starting to feel more and more like a pipedream. He sighed, put down his phone, and was about to rise when it started to vibrate. The name ‘Steve’ popped up on the LCD display.

“Yeah, Steve?” William asked softly, even though he was still the only person in the church.

“Oh, hey, Gingerbread Man. Just calling about Rebecca,” the voice on the other end chirped. “She’s stuck on something and needed your help. I’m no good with that software so I can’t help her. Just seeing if you were on your way back yet.”

“Actually, I’m on my way right now,” William replied, as he rose from his pew with both shoulders significantly more slumped than they had been on his way in.

Just before he left he spied a table full of rosaries, and though he knew not why he did it, he grabbed one. Rather than fill him with hope, however, it burned the sigil in his flesh like a red hot poker, and he dropped the beaded jewelry into his pocket.

Once again, as was the case with the Lord’s Prayer, he felt no comfort. He felt no relief. He felt no clear solution to his problem.

*

“And that’s what you do if the columns get knocked out of whack,” William said, hovering over Rebecca’s right shoulder. She was sitting in his old cubicle, using an even older laptop, and though she was nodding in agreement, it seemed as if she was a million miles away.