That's the Spirit

5

5

All of a sudden, the voices and screams of all the past patients here boomed in my ears. My legs gave out, causing me to fall to the floor. I blacked out.

I woke up with Cara beside me again. My head was pounding, but the noise was gone. I tried to speak, but all that came out were some grunts and wheezes. After my vision centered and steadied, I tried speaking again.

“What… the fuck… just… happened to… me?” In this state of mental wear and confusion, I only said what was going through my mind.

“You could hear them?” Cara asked? She sounded as surprised as I was.

“Of course I could.”

“I hear them all the time, but I’m not mortal so it’s different obviously…” She trailed off as if trying to think.

“Why can I hear them?” My senses were now sharp again, so I sat up.

She was silent, but judging by the look on her face she knew something. I wanted so badly to know what, but it wasn’t important. All that mattered to me was finding my brother.

I decided to check my phone for the time. The time was off by hours, somehow, I had no signal, and the battery had almost drained. When I had left the car earlier, it was fully charged. There was no reason it should have been drained. I figured the paranormal energy or some shit had drained it for power.

“What’s that?”

As I was lost in thought, I almost forgot my ghost friend standing beside me. “Oh, I forgot you’re not of this time. Sorry. This is a cell phone.” She wondered at this object. “It’s like a telephone, but it can pick up certain frequencies that allow you to call or send messages to people wherever you are as long as it is in an area close enough to the towers it uses. It’s… complicated.”

“I could feel an energy being drained from your person… that must have been it.”

“Do you think this is why I was able to hear them?”

“Maybe.”

Finally, we left the office room. I heard screams again, but this time it was only one being. I ran towards the sound, like a fool. At the time, I wanted nothing but to find my brother. Common sense was not an option. I stopped outside of the room. A tool was on. I heard it now that I was closer. When I peered into the room, I saw the first scene of that night that appears in nightmares of mine today. God man was strapped to the table. He had finished screaming now, and he wouldn’t scream anymore. The pain had put him into shock, causing him to lie unconscious. Then I heard that same laugh from earlier.

I saw him, then, clad in a blood covered surgeon suit. It was Brett. He held a chunk of skin in one hand and a tool for sawing into skulls in the other. The grin on his face was one I’d never seen before. It was a look of pure evil. He had just put god man through a ton of pain, and Brett… no, doctor, rather, had enjoyed every bit of it. The tool started up again, and I had to look away. The sound of the flesh and bone being sawed down was too much for me. Cara wasn’t with me, either. With a heavy head and blurry vision, I ran down the corridor, back to the office.

I don’t know exactly why. The senses of emotion and the scene I had just witnessed must have been too much. I sat down against the desk and began to cry. It wasn’t the messy type, just tears and stressed face. I felt a hand rubbing my back in effort to comfort me.

“Cara,” I began, “where were you back there?”

“You got too close,” she replied. “If I was that close, he would have recognize my presence.”

“Why didn’t he notice me?”

I looked around, but Cara had disappeared.

“Maybe I did notice you, David.”