Border, KS

Saturday, 3:15 AM

Siobhan leaned over to look at the page that her sister put in front of her. The handwriting was difficult to decipher, since it had been written by a fevered pre-pubescent, but it described the events leading up to Matthew and Natalie’s disappearance. How the fever and hallucinations had spread through the the pediatric wing, and the dark vision that they had seen when someone died from it. And how they had traced it through the hospital to the basement, and were going to try to confront it. That day’s entry was from the day they had apparently disappeared, and the fever broke.

“So they went to confront it and locked it away…somehow,” Siobhan said as she looked up, sighing. “That’s distinctly unhelpful. But I guess they couldn’t really take notes as…quasi-ghosts, right?” Siobhan leaned against the nurse’s statement, scuffing her bare feet on the cold floor. “Are my freaking clothes somewhere, or are we going to have to fight this thing with my ass hanging out?”

Despite the situation, Antigone let out a startled giggle, and nodded. “I saw where they put them. We might get murdered, but we can at least do it without your butt being visible.” She sighed. “How much do you remember? What’s the last thing?” She asked, as she pushed away from the station to begin walking down the hallway.

“I remember getting to the door, touching it, and then…” Siobhan shuddered, and shivered as they padded up to a closet. Antigone reached out with a key-chain that included a pink rabbit’s foot to open it, which distracted her for a moment. “And I remember something talking to me.” That caused Antigone to pause in opening the door, leaving it quarter open as she looked back at her sister. “We can talk more once I’m not causing people to go to jail for just looking at me.”

Antigone sighed at that but nodded, reaching in to the closet, and started counting off clothes items. “Shirt, pants, panties, tennis shoes, socks of arguable cleanliness, all in black. We should have bleached them while you were unconscious.” Siobhan reached out to take them and begin pulling them on with little modesty in front of an empty hallway and her twin sister.

“For what, a trip to play at Wimbledon?” She asked with a smirk, as she settled everything back in to place. “Now I wish I’d brought a jacket or something, if we have to fight Death. Or a howitzer.” She leaned against the wall to start pulling on her socks and shoes. “So spill, what the hell happened?”

Antigone sighed again and leaned against the wall next to her twin. “After we got out of the basement the fever started spreading like crazy. Everyone tried to get it under control, but it kept going out. We put out calls to other hospitals and even the CDC, but Paul said it was worse this time—like it was juiced up somehow. But things got really weird on Friday. Dad and Uncle Ryan tried to go in to the basement as the first kids started getting close to dying, all geared up for war. They got blown back, and then every adult got blown out of the building in more of that thick black smoke.”

Siobhan blinked, as a memory came back to her from what had apparently been here fevered state. Tendrils of inky thickness roiling through the hallways, cracking and shoving and causing terror.

Her father shouts something, and there is gunfire—the he shouts more, and it stops. Someone, maybe a cop or security guard, was doing something he thought was dumb. The tendrils kept coming, and grabbed people. Like something out of a Lovecraft story, minus the cultists and ominous chanting.

“Shit,” Siobhan cursed quietly, but vehemently. Laces done, she ran a hand back through her hair and pushed off from the wall. “Well, alright. This seems pretty much straight battle of the High School stuff. We make our way downstairs, and then we fight it. I’ll bring the sword, you bring the dog. It goes away, dad can come back in, and then he won’t be able to lord it over us about that time he killed a god. Party time.” She cracked her knuckles with obviously faked enthusiasm as she started to walk back toward the nurse’s station.

Antigone looked a little bit doubtful. “It’s…death, Bonnie, or at least a version of it. I didn’t see a scythe, but I’m not sure that we can just go down stairs and punch death until it goes away.” Nonetheless, she started to follow Siobhan down the hallway back to the stairs.

“You have a hair-tie?” Siobhan asked as she reached up to start pulling her hair back in to a pony-tail. Antigone reached in to her pockets and scrounged out a rubber band, which Siobhan took with a shrug. “Look…something has to have changed. This hospital wasn’t a horror movie, and then it was, and then it wasn’t, and then it was. There is something that changes there, and makes it possible to put it back in the box. Otherwise it never would have come out of the box, or never would have gone back in to the box. So we just find it, find what Matty and Natty were doing, and do it better.”

Antigone gave a soft smile at her sister’s confidence. They both came to stop at the doors out of the wing unbidden, breathing slowly and mentally preparing themselves for what they would find beyond. “What, don’t want to be almost ghosts for thirty years?” Antigone asked with a little bit of a smile, or something like it—Siobhan thought the banter was for her benefit, and she appreciated it.

“I want to live forever through my work,” Siobhan answered with a smile, rolling her shoulders and focusing on that part of here where some spark of power lived—where her sword lived. Slowly it began to form in her mind, like a flow of power from her core down in to her hand. In one blink it wasn’t there, and then it was—long and slender and made out of the strange Faerie metal, but curved like a katana. She saw Antigone doing the same, and between heartbeats a heavy-set hound clad in iron plates was nuzzling her leg. “We’re in…” She looked around curiously.

“Oncology. Third floor. Things went crazy, and this was the best place to take you,” Antigone offered. There was almost two days worth of tiredness, terror, and fierce protective pride in that statement, and Siobhan reached out with a free hand to squeeze her shoulder.

“Thanks,” she murmured softly, turning to the door. “If there’s a fight to be had we fight to the stairs, get to the basement, and flip the switch to put it back in the box. No ghosts, no death, no fuss, no muss. Ready to storm the castle?”

Antigone nodded, and they pushed through the doors almost at speed.

“It’s not,” Ryan answered simply. He leaned in to the door, putting his ear against the dark wood and listening in the quiet of the hallway. He moved his head away from the door a moment later, and shrugged slightly. “So…that either means that you’re hearing something we aren’t, or you’ve completely lost your mind.”

Siobhan beamed brightly. “See, Annie, it’s a toss-up. You only might be a whack-job.” Antigone glowered at her sister as she stepped toward the door.

“Thanks, Bonnie, you’re a treasure,” Antigone offered sarcastically. She leaned in to the door to put her ear on it like Ryan had and looked like she was going to say something. But the moment her skin touched the door something shifted in the air. A pulse, like standing too close to a speaker and being able to feel the sound pushing against you. Antigone yelped and jumped back with wide eyes, looking around to see where it had come from. “What the hell…”

Siobhan, conversely, stepped forward toward the door and interposed herself between it and Antigone—Walter did the same. Siobhan held a hand out in front of her to try to feel at what happened, and moved her fingers slowly as if she could feel it moving between them. “New rule, Antigone isn’t allowed to touch creepy doors…”

Paul and Paolo, silent during the whole exchange, didn’t seem phased by it at all. “What happened?” Paul asked, looking between them. “Did something change?”

That caused all four of them, the Richards and Ryan, to stop and exchange a quick look between them. Walter sighed, his eyes rolling heavenward as if in great suffering. “Great, now I’ve gotten dragged in to the weird crap too. I’d kill Oberon if I hadn’t already probably killed him.”

They began to step away from the door, as it thrummed again and sent that wave of force in to the air. This time it was actually almost visible, little motes of darkness moving their way through the air. When Siobhan held her hand up again they curled about her fingertips, and the motes were warm and felt…angry. “Ok, that I see…” Paolo said with a note of panic rising in to his voice.

There was a loud creak, and a rumbling like thunder filled the hallway. The bass notes of its force actually scattered some of the dark motes in the air, only to be chased by more as the door slid open an inch.

“Shit,” Walter opined, reaching in to his jacket to pull out his pistol—a move that Ryan mirrored. They started backing everyone back toward the main hallway as the door slowly began to open, but Antigone pushed through them and turned to face her father directly.

“We have to close it!” She shouted as another wave of sound and force filled the hallway. More and more darkness was pushing out from within it, and the hallway was growing darker and more ominous with each passing moment. “We can’t just run or whatever the hell that is will get out!”

Walter shook his head quickly, his eyes flicking quickly between his daughter and the door. “Annie, there is no way that I’m going to let you deal with that alone. Not again!” His voice was heated and his face tight with concern. He raised his gun and leveled it at the door, as if expecting it to come charging at them. Siobhan couldn’t say it wasn’t a possibility, although she had no idea if shooting it would help.

“Dad, this has to be what killed all of those kids!” Antigone pushed his hand away as he tried to pull her back behind him. Siobhan edged forward so that she could see more clearly the argument—and the door. “You can’t shoot this, or trick it and stab it! I don’t know why, but there’s something about these doors and it responds to me and Bonnie—but mostly me.” She shivered as it pulsed again, and the profoundly disquieting noise of the door sliding open another half an inch filled the basement. “You trusted me before with Oberon, please…you have to trust me now or a lot of people might die!”

Walter looked at his daughter with the devastated eyes of a man who knew he had to do something terrible—and wasn’t sure he could bring himself to. “Antigone, we’ll find a way, we’ll get Morgan back here!”

Antigone started to say something, but the door was already sliding open another crack. Whatever was gathering on the other side was pushing, and it would be through completely before they could finish the argument.

Siobhan Richards was good at some things, and not good at others. But the one thing she was most excellent at in the world was acting in a heartbeat—and no one had ever called her slow. She jumped out, ducked under her father, and ran to the door at full speed. She threw her shoulder against it and the world exploded twice—first in what she was reasonably certain was a dislocated shoulder. And second as the door shifted and the darkness poured out from within it, surrounding her and filling the hallway with a deafening boom that trailed away in to the sound of laughter.

**** ****

There was screaming in her ears. Screams of pain, screams of fear, screams of the outside trying to get in. It was in her ears and in her head, and she couldn’t get away from it. It echoed and rebounded the walls of her mind, taking on a mocking quality at times—and others the tones of damned souls crying for release from torment. She couldn’t escape them, and she ran through the dark corridors of her consciousness to try to find some way out.

“Do not run, child…it is only the closing of your eyes, and then nothing…”

“Tell me you can tell me something about the goddamn doors?” Walter asked, looking over to Ryan specifically. In return Ryan scowled, and sighed.

“They’ve been in the city as long as I can remember, so since I was a kid,” Ryan explained. “I know they’re connected to…” he trailed off, sparing a glance to the two nurses who were standing there staring at the door, “Unusual things. You know as much as I do, almost—some of our friends know where most of them go, but I had no idea this one even existed.”

Paul blinked slowly, turning away from the door to join the conversation once again. “You mean there are more of these things in the city? And I’ve never noticed? I was born and raised here too!” He said the last part almost protestingly, offended there were stranger things going on in his hometown then he had even known.

“Border is a weird place,” Ryan offered with a shrug—Siobhan knew he didn’t like discussing the supernatural even with his family, let alone with almost complete strangers. Paolo continued to look at the door intently.

“It almost seems like…if I stare at it long enough I’ll see more,” the man muttered to himself. He reached out hesitantly, tracing a finger along the apparently worn wood. “Why doesn’t it have a handle?”

“What?” Antigone asked, her tone surprised. Paolo shot her a look and raised his eyebrows, as if to indicate the obviousness of his previous question.

“It’s a door. It’s designed to go somewhere…but it’s one way. So where’s it come from, since we’re already so far of the map we might find the compass rose.” Paolo punctuated his response by waving his hand through the spot where a door knob clearly should have been.

“There is one,” Antigone and Siobhan answered simultaneously; even their gesture toward the door was synchronized, to the point where Siobhan and apparently Antigone both saw a knob plain as day. Paul, Paolo, and Walter all turned to look at them intently. The two nurse’s expressions were a mixture of confused and afraid that Siobhan frequently elicited and Antigone desperately tried to avoid, while Walter’s was appraising.

“Ryan, is there a knob in that door?” He asked, in what was one of his more Army-like tones of voices. Apparently it worked fairly well on his friend and former subordinate, because Ryan answered promptly.

“No,” he said with a shake of his head. He looked at Antigone for a moment. “But they could open the one in the basement of the High School too, so the doors may be…specific,” he answered, pausing to very carefully choose a word. Siobhan didn’t think that specific was the first word he would have chosen.

“I didn’t open that one, Annie did—I just. Uh…moral support,” Siobhan answered, weakly at the end as she too chose her words with great specificity to avoid further freaking out the mundane nurses standing nearby. Paul turned to face them squarely, the confusion on his face having given way to annoyance and even anger at their deliberate obfuscations.

“I don’t know what the hell you’re hiding, but this is going on in my hospital again and I have to know,” Paul stated firmly, although there was a tone of desperation behind his words that made the subtext almost pleading. “Spooky doors, knobs that only they can see…to quote, there is some next level shit going on here and I want to know what it is. Or I can’t do anything to save these kids, and it will all happen again!” Tears shone unshod in his eyes as he finished, and he reached up to wipe at them as he stepped back from the door. “I can’t watch it happen again and do nothing.”

Walter looked at the man very seriously for a long moment, no sounds in the hallway besides the low humming of the lights or something electrical in one of the panels. Ryan watched Walter considering Paul, and sighed. “Walter…” Walter turned to his friend, raising an eyebrow in question. “Damn it, dude, you can’t just walk around blabbing this stuff all over the place. This is stuff that people have literally been killed because they knew. Not so much with…our current leadership,” he offered, gesturing to himself and vaguely Siobhan, Antigone, and even their father. “But other people, and previous administrations? Definitely more dangerous to know than not know.”

Paul strode forward angrily, getting right in to Ryan’s personal space. He was taller than Ryan, but there was a sturdiness and strength to the shorter man’s frame and a calm looseness to his shoulders that left Siobhan little doubt who would win if it got physical. “People have died, damn you!” Paul shouted angrily. “A whole school bus worth of children died here in the 80s, and now it’s starting again! How many people dying is worth your secrets?”

No one spoke for a long moment after that, nothing but the humming and the beating of hearts in the small hallway. Ryan returned Paul’s outraged look calmly, his dark eyes like smoked glass—reflecting everything and showing nothing in return. Eventually he shrugged, and looked over to Walter. “They’re not going to like it, but I guess it’s your call, boss. I’ll back you as much as I can, but the more people we tell the harder it is going to be to protect people.”

Walter shrugged. “They’re grown-ups, and we don’t have much of a choice.” He sighed, reaching up to rub the bridge of his nose. “Or have you forgotten that the kids upstairs aren’t that much younger than Antigone and Siobhan?” He asked, not looking over at his daughters. Siobhan saw the stress around his eyes, and knew that had been weighing on him. Paul waited in silence for whatever came next, having said his piece and gotten a bit of his calmness back. Ryan shrugged, looking back to the door.

“Ok, Paul…” Walter offered, clearly trying to come up with some way to ease them in to it, his voice echoing slightly in the hallway.

“Fairies are real and we killed their king last year!” Siobhan piped in helpfully over his shoulder.

“Why is the door humming?” Antigone, quiet until that moment, asked as the dam began to burst and everyone began to speak all at once.

“She’s fine, Siobhan,for the moment; but that continues to not quite be our biggest problem,” Walter explained with a sigh and a shake of his head as they walked in to the Pediatrics area of the Hospital. “Raina is going to be fine so long as her fever breaks soon, but we…found something in the basement.”

After finding the woman and her daughter, Mona and Raina Pierce, in the basement the night before, the Richards family had been hustled home. Siobhan hadn’t slept much, and knew that Antigone hadn’t either, still flushed with the adrenalin of the day before. It left her feeling a little bit strung out, almost hungover, although she didn’t phrase it quite that way to her father when he had asked. Better to avoid fighting about her knowledge of that feeling, for now at least.

Walter had been assigned by the Marshal of the Border PD, William Alexander, to find out exactly what was happening at the hospital. Siobhan hadn’t seen the Marshal but she had heard the early morning phone call that had sent Walter back to Border General at 4 AM; she could hear the strain that had started in Alexander’s voice and spread to her father’s as the Marshal explained what had happened twenty-nine years prior. There was fear there, of a repeat of those circumstances. That fear lay heavy on everyone in Pediatrics as they walked in, to find Ryan waiting for them again at the Nurse’s station.

“We ready to go downstairs, boss?” Ryan asked with a raised eyebrow toward Siobhan, Antigone, and their father as they came up. Ryan was dressed similarly to the day before, leather jacket zipped shut—but Siobhan could tell he was wearing something beneath it, armor of some kind.

“Yeah, saddle up, let’s ride, all those cliches,” Walter agreed. His own jacket hung open, and he once more had his pistol loaded in his shoulder holster. They began to walk and, to Siobhan’s surprise, Paul and Paolo fell in beside them.

“Why do you call him boss?” Paul asked, his hands folded together to hide their fidgeting. “You’re not a cop, are you?” The nurse asked, looking Ryan over as if checking for a badge. Ryan smirked, and shook his head.

“No, I want to actually get paid for getting shot at any more. Walter and I served together in the Army. Met when Uncle Sam paid for both of us to go to Kansas State. Stayed friends because he married my sister and it was either that or shoot him,” Ryan answered very plainly, as if those were the only two logical options in the world. “Bastard got promoted more then I did.”

Walter raised an eyebrow. “You told me, and I quote, ‘Hell no I don’t want to end up a Major, do too much paperwork,’ end quote. In fact you specifically told me that getting promoted was a trap, like getting cheese from a mousetrap or marrying a stripper. Also a direct quotation,” Walter offered in an explanatory tone to Paul and Paolo, while Siobhan and Antigone let out a startled giggle.

“What did you do?” Paul asked, not failing to not the holster that Ryan openly wore on his hip with a pistol in it—Siobhan knew the .45 was a twin to a personal weapon that Water owned—they had bought them together. Ryan, whether he noticed the glance or not, reached back to pull the pistol out as they made it to the hallway. Walter reached into his coat to do the same, and both men adopted a similar posture with the guns out but pointed down and smooth leg movements.

“This and that,” Walter offered unhelpfully.

“Communications,” Ryan offered with a genial smile to both men as they took to the stairs. Paul rolled his eyes at the comments, but he still fidgeted his hands and seemed to be speaking mostly to keep the silence at bay.

“You guys should go on the road, you’re funny. What kind of communications?” Paul asked as he and the rest of the rear guard made it to the stairs.

“Very effective short films noted for their violence and cinematography,” Ryan answered as they carefully reached the bottom of the stairs. Apparently whatever had caused the power outages and emergency lighting had been fixed or abated, because the hallway was back to being a normal and boring one. It was smaller than the ones upstairs, the basement area both older and less used for medical purposes any more. “Did you tell them what we found?” Ryan asked Walter without taking his eyes away from their quick and searching glances.

Siobhan stepped forward quickly, not about to let that opportunity pass her by. “He didn’t tell us squat, so give,” she demanded eagerly.

“Careful, little bug, that eagerness might get you your wings clipped,” Ryan smirked, but the expression fled from his face more quickly than it normally would as he kept scanning the hallway for dangers. “Damn, now I wish I could retroactively nickname you Cat,” he sighed at his inability to travel back in time. They considered down the main hallway, before turning down a very cramped and poorly lit one; the lights above flickered with age.

“Where the hell are we, I’ve never been down this hallway…” Paolo offered, trailing off as they took another turn in to a hallway that was every bit as poorly lit. “I’m not even sure this hallway is on the plans.”

“So what the hell is it?” Siobhan demanded again as they walked down the hallway, shaking her head in frustration. “I love how you guys are treating it like it is super dangerous but won’t tell us what. It. Is.” She enunciated the last words carefully as she stalked ahead, only drawn up short when she realized her father and uncle had stopped walking and she almost walked in to them.

“What’s your favorite thing to find in Border, after the fun in the High School’s basement?” Walter asked, gesturing ahead of him. Siobhan stared at it and blinked.

“Shit!”

Ahead of them was a large door made of some strange black metal, darker even then the shadows around it, with no knob that they could see. An imposing door, one might say—or as Siobhan, Antigone, and their friends had termed them before: A spooky door.

Siobhan had been called many things in her young life, but slow had never been one of them. She moved less gracefully in a run than Antigone, but no less slowly—and with her shoulders more tight and muscles more coiled, like a compressed spring ready to leap out at danger. And that was another thing that she knew to be true about herself, and that she knew her father worried about—her tendency to immediately leap toward danger.

The emergency lights proved to be more than just in the stairwell, as Siobhan burst out in to a basement hallway similarly wreathed in the dark red lights. It was disorienting at first, unable to tell for a moment what was a shadow and what was another hallway. The lighting gave everything the garish color scheme of the underworld, and every patch of blackness could have been just another maw reaching out to swallow her.

She had a flash of thought, in her head, a searing light that brought with it the sudden pain and skin prickling flush of a migraine. She saw herself walking through dark hallways drenched in blood, and heard people screaming at her coming. It was gone in a second, leaving only afterimages and a feeling of heat on her skin. Her father caught up with her a moment later and reached out to put a hand on her shoulder. “Are you alright?”

She swallowed, forcing down the feeling and steadying her legs as she began to move down the hallway again. “Yeah, just…adrenalin I guess, left me a little dizzy.” Walter never took his eyes off of her as she said it, nd she knew he didn’t quite believe her—but then the scream sounded again and they both apparently decided to put off discussion until later.

“Down that hallway,” Ryan said as he came up to them, pointing down a hallway and putting action to words aas he moved to follow down it. “I’ll take point,” he called back as he started to advance down it. Siobhan saw her father give him a grateful look, although Ryan didn’t see it as he disappeared from view.

“Come on,” Walter said, beginning to lead again. “Keep your eyes open and don’t forget to cover behind us, Bug,” Walter told her. “If something comes from behind get on the other side of us and run.” For once, Siobhan didn’t argue. Se began keeping a surreptitious watch behind her and Antigone as they brought up the rear, and noted their father did as well to make sure they were alright.

“I got something!” Ryan called back, and then grunted. Once again all three broke in to a run and come around first one corner and then another. They came out just in time to duck back to avoid Ryan skidding on the ground past them, grunting in pain and cursing. By the time they leaned back out in to the corridor whatever had caused that spectacular display was gone, revealing only a screaming woman clutching a young girl in her arms.

“Help me please, something…I don’t know what happened, but my daughter fainted!” The woman had tears rolling down her cheeks as all three of them ran to her side. She seemed pretty and a relatively young mother to Siobhan, although the lighting robbed a great deal of fine detail from her assessment. The young woman was clearly related to her, both of them with apparently dark hair and skin and fine boned features. The only emotion written on the woman’s face was terror. “Are you a doctor?” She asked, desperately, to Walter.

“I’m not, but I’m CPR and First Aid certified, and we can all help you get your daughter out of here. My name is Walter, and I’m a cop,” he told her. Siobhan recognized it as the voice he used when he needed to be reassuring—and it was reassuring. Deep and calm and steady as a rock in the waves; the voice said that it might get licked by the sea but it was never going to be moved, and anyone who rested on it would be safe so long as they did. Of all his Cop Voices it was the Cop-est, and it was one reason Siobhan never doubted he was good at what he did.

“I thought,” the woman said, suppressing a sob as she cradled her daughter, “that you weren’t supposed to move someone who was hurt.”

Walter gave her a soft smile. “Normally no, but we’re not in a place where she can exactly be helped right now. She is breathing fine, and we can’t do anything in this hallway. Ryan, we passed a room with some gurneys in it. Go get one and bring it back. Siobhan, you’re the fastest, run back upstairs and tell the doctors we have a patient coming up to them ASAP.” His voice was gentle but commanding, no room in it to disagree or dilly-dally. Siobhan nodded, swallowing as she took her feet again and began running back to the stairwell. She heard her father getting the names of the woman and her daughter before she was through the swinging doors and on to the stairs, and then up on to the landing and out in to the hallway once again.

She almost immediately ran in to a man, and stumbled across the hall in a few big steps until she braced herself on the wall to keep from falling. She turned, to tell the person to get help, only to freeze in shock when she found no one in the hallway. The sweat on her skin turned ice cold as she quickly looked around to find him, and she swallowed heavily when she couldn’t. “Damn it this is getting weirder and worse. Worser.” Siobhan commented to herself before she pushed off the wall again and began to run down the hall, shouting for a doctor the whole way.

“You should have told her you were from a vague yet menacing government agency,” Siobhan said with a sigh as they walked down the hallway. “It would have been so much cooler. Also, not un-true…Border PD is pretty weird sometimes.” She added this last bit almost as an afterthought, scuffing her canvas shoes on the floor as they carefully rounded a bit of glass that had not been swept up.

Walter snorted. “I’ve met agents of that kind of agency, and I’ve got pretty much no desire to be one. Besides, telling them I’m with the BPD actually got us in. That big nurse wasn’t going to take any crap,” he pointed out in response. “Why lie when the truth will do just as well, or better.”

Siobhan thought about it for a moment as she walked down the hallway, kicking her legs out. Antigone was next to her and staying quiet, while Ryan was next to Walter and smirking. They walked through one of the broad hallways on the main floor, the walls a more standard hospital green then the bright colors of pediatrics—but still far better than the colors in the ghost hallway. Siobhan shivered as she thought about that, before she answered her father. “Because it’s more fun. You could have claimed to be a ghost detective!”

Ryan raised an eyebrow, as they stopped by an electrical closet. Ryan pulled out the keys one of the nurses rounded up for them when Walter had flashed his badge, and opened it up. It was dark inside with no light from the hallway to illuminate it, so Antigone held up her phone and tapped on the camera light. The circuit breaker was in good shape, no sign of major trauma or blow out, and Ryan quickly turned off the circuits for the lights like they had been asked to. “Another one in good shape, boss. I think we can be pretty sure it was something heeby-jeeby instead of something electrical.”

Walter sighed. “One of these times I want it to be the normal answer. I want to walk down a spooky hallway populated by a monster, and instead find it is just a man in a mask,” he offered, almost forlornly.

Ryan, for his part, just laughed as they continued on down the hallway toward a staircase. The blackened pattern of blown ceiling lights led them toward it, curving down the side hallway rather than continuing straight. “You’ve been in Border for not even six full months yet, I’m not sure you get to be that jaded about it yet.”

Siobhan reached out to pen the door in to the stairwell, where emergency lighting cast the stairs in shadows and crimson. “It’s been a pretty exceptional six months, though,’ she pointed out as they began to walk down the stairs. “What’s down in the basement?”

Walter checked his small notepad, where he had taken down some notes on the basic layout of the hospital from Paul and Paolo before they had gone searching. “Mostly some of the older equipment rooms, and functional rooms. Storage, laundry, the overflow morgue.” Walter considered that last entry. “You know, it probably says something we should have noticed earlier about Border that it has an overflow morgue. That speaks to a certain…volume of bodies that’s kind of terrifying.”

The stairs were definitely among the creepier places that Siobhan had been in her life, up to and including actual graveyards. The red light gave enough light that they could see, but still made the shadows deep and threatening. “Wait…” she said after a moment.

“Well, I mean an overflow morgue just makes sense, really. How else can you ave a horrifying zombie uprising if you haven’t stacked them like cord wood,” Ryan said with a smirk, walking toward the stairwell nonchalantly. Siobhan held out an arm to block him, and he raised an eyebrow.

“To invoke a cliche, what’s wrong with this picture?” She asked, gesturing to the crimson-bathed stairwell. Rather than arguing with her, both Ryan and her father stopped and considered it seriously. She saw a similar movement to them as they swiveled their heads slightly to take in the whole scene, and she loved them for not having cast aside her concerns due to youth or arrogance.

It was Walter who saw it first. “Well…shit, that could be bad.” A moment later Ryan came to the same conclusion, agreeing with an elegant grunt and nod of his head.

“What?” Antigone asked, peeking around Walter to try to see what was wrong. “It just looks like more blown lights?”

Walter gestured to the floor in the landing, an then down the stairs. “No broken glass. We’ve beeen dodging it or crunching it since we left pediatrics,” he explained. Antigone blinked, and then paled slightly.

“So why are the lights out if they didn’t get blown out, when the rest of th hospital kept power,” she spoke slowly, more out of a growing sense of tension then that she hadn’t understood when she began speaking. “Could it be normal? I couldn’t quite fit electrician shop in my schedule last semester, so I don’t know how these tings work real well…”

Walter shrugged artlessly, not coincidentally finishing the motion by bringing his pistol up to bear again as he began to edge toward the stairwell. “I don’t know, but I don’t like anything that’s an outlier right now. So we’re going to take it nice and slow, right? And if I say run, what do you do?”

“Not ignore you for once in my life and run,” Siobhan said with a sigh, quoting it rote like the oft-repeated statement that it was. Everyone nodded and they began to very cautiously advance down the hallway, Walter and Ryan first with their guns drawn followed by Siobhan and Antigone. They kept up tha glacially slow and cautious pace as they came to the top of the stairs, when they heard it.

A scream, coming from the basement and echoing off the wall like a bat trapped inside and trying to escape. Walter and Ryan shared a look and a muttered curse. Walter started to give Siobhan and Antigone a look to tell them t o stay, but they were already bolting past them, Siobhan literally jumping up on to the railing and sliding down past them to race to help.

“Shit,” Walter cursed again,s oft but emphatically, as he bolted after his daughters.

It turned out that the both of them were at lunch together, and once Siobhan explained that the situation was perhaps a little time sensitive, they hurried in. One was, as Antigone had mentioned, Walter’s father, who nodded to Paul and Paolo before his attention turned to the two children in beds. The other one was their uncle Ryan Aquino, who looked like a minor movie star and also happened to be a Knight in the service of the Faerie Queens. He was of medium height with tan skin and dark hair, and Paolo immediately perked up at the sight of him.

“Down, boy,” Siobhan commented with a smirk. “Probably not quite ready to be calling the Richards and Aquinos family.” Paolo gave a smirk as he watched Ryan walk over.

“Wasn’t necessarily talking about going antiquing,” he commented with a snort, before he stood up and held out his hand to the man—all business, all trace of flirtatiousness banished away. “Paolo Costa. I’ve got the computer files open like you asked,” he offered more quietly, eyes darting around quickly to make sure no one was listening too closely. Fortunately the hospital was still hectic enough even two hours after the exploding lights incident that they were unnoticed. A significant amount of pediatrics had been moved due to fears of electrical failure, and it left the wing feeling deserted—empty and lonelier then it had been before, with so many lights off and beds abandoned.

“Ryan Aquino, nice to meet you,” Ryan offered with a winning smile as he pulled out his cell phone and started dialing. “If you’ve got the medical records ready to be…creatively billed, our guy can take care of the rest.”

Paolo looked a little bit skeptical, but he let Ryan slide in to the driver’s seat in front of the computer where he had left it logged in and ready to go. “He doesn’t have to be here to do it?”

Ryan smirked indulgently, as he hit send. “As long as you’ve got an Internet connection he doesn’t even have to be on the same continent to make it work. You should see what he can do when he is wired in.” The phone stopped ringing, and a gruff voice came over the line. “Yeah, it’s me. Yes, this makes us even for Islamabad, although you do still owe me a case of beer.”

Walter came over, sliding in to the physical and conversational gaps. “We’ll get the records taken care of, don’t worry. Also, don’t ask questions, because it would be a shame to add lying on the witness stand to whatever other trouble we’ll be in if we get caught. You’re one hundred percent sure those are the missing kids?”

In response, Siobhan pulled a picture up from off the nurse’s station. It was a color photocopy of the one off the wall, discretely taken down and then replaced while they were waiting for their backup to arrive. Walter took it and walked over to where Matt and Natalie were lying still unconscious, and held the copy up to consider them. After a moment, he grunted and held the picture out for Siobhan to take back.

“Are they going to be ok, Dad?” Antigone asked softly from where she sat between them. She had stayed very much near the both of them in the intervening time, and looked up at her father with wide, concerned eyes. Walter sighed a little bit, moving to sit on the edge of Matt’s bed to look at his daughter.

“I don’t know, Annie,” Walter offered seriously. Antigone winced a little bit at the honest answer, but looked like she hadn’t expected him to lie or try to soften it. “I don’t know what’s wrong with them, to begin with—I mean, you disappear for thirty years and then come back? That’s got to have some,” he waved his hand generally over the two unconscious forms, “interesting side effects. But I can tell you that they’re taken care of for now, and if they do wake up we’ll find some way to help them. Doodle is the best; when he’s done they’ll be able to run for Congress when they’re 25, and no one will be able to tell anything was wrong.”

Siobhan perked up from where she was still leaning and watching Ryan work. “Technically they could run for Congress now—they were born in the 70s.”

Ryan smirked. “Not any more…Doodle must have done some of the work after we called him earlier. Now they were born in the heady year of…2004,” Ryan said, finishing with a sigh. “Blight, we’re getting old, Walt. We need to do something about that.” He didn’t notice as Paolo mouthed the word ‘Blight’ in confusion over his head to the rest of the room, who seemed to give a general psychic shrug at the unusual curse.

“Only alternative is to not get older, and that blows pretty hard too,” Walter offered. “And before you ask,” he added quickly, apparently noting the mounting curiosity on Siobhan’s face, “in order: No, we can’t have them run for Congress just to see if it works. No, Doodle can’t give you a fake identity so you can become a superhero, go clubbing, or any other reason. And no I can’t tell you why we call him Doodle, I am literally sworn to secrecy and if I tell you he will erase my birth certificate.”

Siobhan pouted as her father apparently crossed off everything on her to-do list, but it only lasted a moment before she had come up with another plan of attack. “So what do we do now?”

Walter sighed a little bit, and looked over to Ryan. The girl’s uncle only gave his best impression of a Cheshire cat, which drew another significant sigh from Walter. “As soon as they have the best new identities that a terrifying rescue mission in Pakistan can buy, we go discretely hunt whatever it was that blew out all of the lights.”

Siobhan literally let out a squeal of delight, and did a little dance around the nurse’s station.

“Shit!” Siobhan cursed as she and a brown-haired girl tumbled to the floor. Antigone didn’t even have time for an invective as she joined them, the brown-haired boy on top of her. Siobhan kept going with the momentum and managed to end up back on her feet in a crouch, while Antigone ended up laying on the ground blinking. The boy on top of her looked up, and blinked owlishly with his brown eyes.

“We can touch you?” He asked, a little bit stunned. His voice was a little bit hoarse, as if he had spent a lot of time screaming. His hair was in a neat bowl cut that looked both very fresh and very dated, and his face had shock written all across it. “How can we touch you?”

Siobhan smirked. “Hopefully a little less, because that’s my sister,” she pointed out wryly. She stood the rest of the way back up to her feet, and reached out a hand to the girl who ran in to her, and one for the boy on Antigone. Despite the smirk her eyes were wary and curious, looking between the two of them quickly as if placing them in her mind. “You’re Natalie and Matthew, aren’t you?” She asked, somewhat cautiously—after all, there was no telling if they really were who they said they were, when they had come out of nowhere to tackle them accidentally.

They both nodded slowly, with the kind of clockwork timing that only twins could manage—the same kind of timing that Siobhan and Antigone routinely displayed as well, often to great consternation from family and friends. “I…we saw you, didn’t we?” Natalie offered, mirroring her brother’s bewildered expression. “Coming in to our room. We’ve been seeing people more and more.”

Antigone stood up once Matthew had taken Siobhan’s hand, dusting herself off as she considered the other set of twins. “Something is happening, and we don’t know why. All of the lights just exploded, and we chased it down the hallway when you ran in to us.”

The younger twins shared a concerned look, and then looked up overhead at the blown out lights. “That happened before, too…we don’t know why, but whatever it is seems to like the dark,” Matthew offered. “Right at the end it was in total darkness, in the basement. I don’t even know how we managed to trap it, but…”

A thought seemed to occur to both of them at the same time, and they shared a glance before looking back to Antigone and Siobhan. “How…how long has it been?” Natalie asked, reaching up to squeeze her ponytail in what Siobhan thought was a nervous gesture. “I mean…it’s been some time, but how…” she trailed off, as if nervous that she would find out if she finished asking it again—and that she really wasn’t sure whether or not she wanted to.

“I…” Antigone began. She was clearly trying to find some way to say it nicely, to break it to them without hurting them. Siobhan knew it in her bones that was what was going on in her twin’s head, the “peel it off slowly” approach to band-aids. It had never been the approach that Siobhan favored, as she believed it hurt much more in the long run.

“29 years,” Siobhan answered directly, looking at the siblings in concern. “Or just about. You disappeared in 1986, and it is almost 2015—just give it a week. On the plus side, you can probably buy beer now?” She tried to make it a joke, to soften the hammer blow by making light of it. She couldn’t tell whether or not the fact that both of them fainted was a good sign our a bad one—but she was inclined to believe it wasn’t good.

**** ****

“They’ve been out for a couple of hours, do you think they’ll be alright?” Antigone’s voice was concerned. She hadn’t stopped hovering by their bed since they had managed to get help. She reached out to smooth some hair away from the girl’s brow, her hand twitching like she wanted to do more. Siobhan gave a little shake of her head, smirking. She was further back, leaning against the wall and watching them. Paolo was standing near her at the nurse’s station, typing away, while Paul had gone to be with Antigone and the two children.

“They haven’t eaten in the better part of thirty years, Annie…we probably just need to find them a cheeseburger or something and they’ll be fine,” Siobhan said with a light voice that belied her own frustration and concern. She looked down to where Paolo was working furiously. “You’re sure that you can hide them?”

Paolo smirked. “Oh sweetheart, you work here long enough you learn how people get lost all the time. You think this is the first time some billing has mysteriously disappeared? Other departments learn how to finesse supplies from one another, while about once a year I make somebody’s bill disappear so they don’t go bankrupt.”

That lit up Siobhan’s face with a perhaps unwholesome amount of glee, and she leaned in to see what exactly he was doing on the computer. “You’re like a better accessorized Robin Hood,” she complimented.

“Occupy Border,” Paolo agreed, as he finished. “There. They basically have a dummy file now which should keep them going until we can figure out what to do with them long term. They’ll get what they need, and no one will question anything. And we can juggle the power of attorney stuff by bringing in a friend of mine who works the night shift.”

Antigone looked over from where she was standing, and gave a nervous smile to her sister. “You know who we have to bring back in at this point, right? We’re in to,” she looked around quickly, and then whispered “forging records, and magic ghost children reappearing from the grave.”

Siobhan gave a slow nod. “Probably both of them. If we don’t tell Dad now, and probably bring in Uncle Ryan, we’ll be grounded after we’ve beaten whatever this evil thing is.”

Paul chuckled, relieving some of the tension that was building around his eyes like pressure behind a dam near to bursting. “I like that the thing you’re most concerned about is your dad grounding you, and the rest of this is just normal.”

Siobhan sighed, running a hand back through her hair. “It is depressingly common, it seems. I’ll step out and give them both a ring. Call me if anything else explodes while I’m out.”

Needless to say, Walter hadn’t been thrilled about them going back to the internship. With Morgan out of contact they had been forced to make the decision together, which had resulted in a very long discussion which only at times rose to the level of an argument. The arguments largely involved two positions. Walter’s position was that he was their father and he was supposed to protect them from harm and also crazy things, which was just another kind of harm he couldn’t adequately describe yet. Their position was that the likelihood was they would be involved anyway, and they could probably just sneak out and go do it no matter what. His counter that he would lay disabling spike traps around the house to keep them from sneaking out was quickly shot down on the grounds of lowering the house’s worth and upsetting the neighbors.

Which made it all the more disappointing that Tuesday had been…normal. With Morgan still gone they had been foisted off largely on pediatrics, which was fine—besides Siobhan’s self-admittedly creepy desire to go sit in the morgue and stare at things for hours, it wasn’t a bad place to be. They cleaned, and spoke to several of the children, and had surreptitious conversations with Paul and Paolo about what had happened in 1986 and also which doctors were complete douchebags and which were only sometimes douchey but mostly acceptable. There were more of the first then the second, and only two or three in the whole building Paolo decided were completely well-adjusted and decent people (including Morgan), but Paul chalked that primarily up to the fact that they were doctors.

“It takes a lot of schooling, debt, and alpha personality types to become a doctor,” Paul explained the next day. Wednesday had come lacking fresh snow but still freezing, so the white accumulations were half sparkling and half dirty outside the hospital windows. “It takes most of them decades to get over it, kind of like lawyers. That’s why the old doctors are the best—they might have paid off their debt, or maybe they just started smoking pot or something, but there is a chance they mellow out. It’s almost weird that Morgan is so chill at her age.”

Siobhan raised her eyebrows and then looked over to Antigone, barely managing to suppress a smirk. Antigone turned her laugh in to a delicate cough, smother her smile with a hand before she could put on her poker face. She glanced by to where some other nurses were moving children in wheelchairs who were talking animatedly, IV stands wheeling beside them. “Some people are just good eggs from the beginning,” she offered sweetly when she looked back.

“Where does that phrase even come from?” Siobhan asked, to move the subject to something a little more safe than Morgan Winters’ age. “I mean I know we all want our eggs to be good, but it’s still kind of odd…” Her voice trailed off a little bit, as her eyes glanced upward. The lights above had started flickering unusually, the steady glow giving way to slight sputtering.

“Oh blast it, is a light going out?” Paul asked before he stopped, as his eyes found what Siobhan’s had a second before. There wasn’t one light flickering, but every light across the whole of pediatrics had started. They could see it getting worse, spreading like a wave down the hallway, and Siobhan felt a pressure building in her ears like she was diving under water. Antigone’s eyes widened, and Siobhan knew she felt it too—and knew what was coming.

“GET DOWN!” They both shouted in unison, hurling themselves over the two children in wheelchairs protectively. All four nurses, Paul and Paolo and the two with the patients, started to say something, their mouths opening slowly. But it was drowned out by a shattering sound that ripped down the hallway as every single light above them exploded at once, spraying them with shards of glass.

The cacophony was followed by a moment of stunned silence in the hallway, before everyone started talking at once. Nurses and doctors began to move quickly to check on patients, and Siobhan was guided away from the patient she had saved from the glass so the patient could be looked over. Siobhan tried to brush the glass out of her hair as she took stock, and Antigone looked over and met her eyes.

“Did you see how it came down the hallway?” Antigone asked, looking up. “It came like a wave, which means that it had to have come from somewhere.”

Siobhan gave a slow nod, trying to fish more of the glass shards out of her hair. She came away with a big one, tossing it in to a trash can as she considered. “We’re going to run after it, right?” She shook her head to clear the last bits and then started heading in that direction.

Antigone gave a little bit of a sigh but caught up with her sister, reaching out to take her hand as they dodged past rushing nurses and janitors. “It does seem to be what we do. We need to stop that, eventually,” Antigone added. “It can’t be good for our health, really.”

Siobhan gave an artless shrug as they came to an intersection near pediatrics, looking up at the lights. Only one hallway had lights blown out, which seemed to be a good indication. “Back to the hell room.” The lights were leading them back to the place where they had first encountered…whatever was in the hospital. They rounded the final corner to find it once again abandoned, and once again painted differently—a throw back to the way the walls were in 1986. They started to step forward in to the hallway to face whatever it was.

Only to be bowled in to by two children, barefoot and wearing hospital gowns and screaming for them to run at the top of their lungs.

They ended up at a small restaurant and brewpub nearby called ‘Bottles’, Siobhan settling down in to the seat next to her father after she returned from using the restroom. Walter was still dressed from his day at the office, his gun bulging out slightly from under the jacket he wore and snow still clinging to his hair. It made him look older, a picture of the man he would be in fifteen or twenty years—at least from the scalp out.

Bottles was attached to a fancy restaurant in the trendy Old Market area of the town. Bottlesworth & Sons served upscale French and English cuisine and was apparently a popular spot for the fanciest of occasions; the attached restaurant was decorated like an apparently more authentic English pub, rather than one of the more tourist style ones all towns (including Border) sported.

“I’m still not quite sure why your Dad insisted on coming…” Paul said, running a hand back through his fair hair. Siobhan considered them, and decided Paul really was Paolo’s opposite—still handsome but more traditionally, fair skinned and eyed and haired to Paolo’s darker complexion.

“Two men want to take my fifteen year old daughters out for a drink after work, and you have to ask why I’m here?” Walter offered with a raised eyebrow, reaching out for one of the waters the waitress had dropped off to claim it.

“Did you have to come with a gun?” Paolo asked, his eyes falling to the bulge in Walter’s jacket. “Isn’t that a little cliche?”

Walter grunted as he sipped water, lowering it down after a healthy swallow. “Only if you’re telling me that you want to date them. I came from work, I work with guns, ergo I have a gun. Before we go around in circles about why I’m here, I’d remind you the last time my daughters were involved in odd town happenings, they ended up in a shoot-out with gang members at their High School.”

Paul and Paolo were quiet about that as the waitress brought a round of sodas, full strength for Walter and diet for everyone else, as well as coffee for the coffee drinkers. Walter gave his daughters each a little bit of a side-eye as the coffees were set in front of them, but ultimately turned away with the air of a an who knew he had lost that particular battle.

“Ok, so you know there was a…sickness in 1986?” Paul asked, looking mostly at Walter, who gave a slow nod—he had been filled in on that particular fact in the car ride over. “Well, in 1986 I was the same age as Matt and Nat were. There were a bunch of us that ended up in pediatrics together for whatever reason. I broke both of my legs skateboarding, and ended up laid up next to them.” Paul took a moment to sigh, covering up a little more emotion with a drink of coffee. “They were good kids. They were in for some kind of illness I think, they walked around a lot talking to the other kids. Their parents were shit, some rich jerks that booked them in hobbies so they never have to deal with them. They only visited like…once in the two weeks Matty and Natty were there with us.”

Siobhan looked to her father to see if he was going to say something, but Walter only opened his mouth to sip on some coffee. The gesture looked disinterested, but his eyes were sharp and focused on the nurse as he spoke. There was nothing idle or bland about the look in his eyes, and Siobhan remembered the basics of interrogation: Let them keep talking. She didn’t think her father knew she had read both of his books on police interrogations, but what did he expect when he left them in the bathroom?

Paul considered his coffee, like he was trying to find some truth in the swirling steam coming from it. Paolo reached over and put a hand on the man’s shoulder, squeezing gently. “Kids started getting sick really quickly, but they didn’t think it was contagious at first. Matty and Natty went around reassuring everybody, until they came down with it themselves.”

Siobhan was about to burst with questions, but surprisingly it was Antigone whose dam broke first. “But…that just sounds like they were sick with something. What about ghosts and them screaming?” She looked a little bit surprised that she had spoken, but she also focused intently on the man. “Sorry, but…that just sounds normal,” she reiterated softly.

Paul continued to stare in to the coffee, his shoulders hunched over the table and his reflection dancing in the inky little waves within the slightly chipped mug. “It started at night first. Nightmares, the other kids claiming that they were seeing something in the night. Then the fevers started getting worse and they started seeing things during the day. They described…a cloud of darkness rolling through the hallways. And things started happening,” Paul continued, his normally confident voice growing softer and more withdrawn. “As we got closer to that last day. Systems started shorting out. First the sprinkler system went off, and then there was a fire. Things started disappearing. It got worse and worse, and Matty and Natty were trying to find out what was causing it.”

“They were 11, why were they doing it?” Antigone asked, her eyes wide and voice sounding affronted at the thought that children should be the ones to investigate a supernatural terror.

Siobhan smirked, a cynical little slash of the lips. “Sometimes kids are the only ones who can do it, Annie, didn’t you realize that? The cops all show up late,” she finished, giving her father a sweet and sarcastic smile that was only completed when she fluttered her lashes at him. He gave a snort that seemed to contain a whole world of responses within it, and looked to Paul to prompt him to continue.

“No one believed us, so Matty and Natty did it. That’s just who they were,” Paul said with a shrug. “I like to think I would have gone with them, but I couldn’t walk. Kids started dying from fevers toward the end of the week, screaming for help and crying as they…they boiled,” Paul explained, swallowing to choke down a rising tide of emotions and memories. Paolo’s hand never left his shoulder. “And then on Friday…it was like the scene of a horror movie. People screaming, people dying, there was a fire…people couldn’t get in to pediatrics, and the people in the beds on both side of me just died. In agony.” Paul lowered his head, and Siobhan could see tears making slow tracks down the side of his face. His shoulders shook underneath Paolo’s hand and he took a moment to regain control of himself.

“What do you think happened?” Walter asked after Paul was able to breathe evenly again, his voice gentle but probing.

Paul shook his head again, running a hand back through his hair and leaving it fluffed up and out of place. “I don’t know. I wish I did. I had the fever, and I don’t remember much of that last day—I was just afraid I was going to die. I remember feeling like I was boiling, and then like I was freezing and everything was going dark…and then I felt this…” He paused, trying to describe it. “A pulse, like it pushed fingers away from my heart. Suddenly I could breathe again and the lights were back on. They were able to get the fires under control again, and the other kids and I started to get better.” Now there were tears standing in his eyes, and he made no move to reach up and wipe them away.

“They did something,” Antigone said with a voice so soft it bordered on reverence. “And it…killed them?” This was still soft but questioning, asking the man what he thought happened.

“I knew it was them before I even woke up. Whatever it was that pushed away the darkness it just…felt like them. Like I could hear Natalie laughing, or see that little smirk on Matt’s face when he had just the right tool for the job on his little multi-tool. And I knew they’d be gone,” He confirmed to the first part. “They never found the bodies, but I knew they were gone. Sometimes I could almost hear them in the hospital, and I felt like maybe they were at peace. Maybe when a kid recovered miraculously, it was them—or when they just smiled at nothing.”

Antigone smiled at the beautiful thought, but Siobhan frowned. “So if we saw them in their old room—presumably—screaming at us to run away…that would be bad,” Siobhan stated.

Paul nodded slowly. “I don’t know why or how, but whatever took them out…is coming back.”