PARABNORMAL SISTERS

Chapter 5

Amy sits up out of Karen's body and stretches. It's a moment before the strange surroundings register: A hospital bed and machines reading out vital signs. An elderly Indian doctor, a nurse with a weary face that has seen too much already, and Amy and Karen's distraught parents clinging to each other at the bedside.

Amy gasps, "What the f...," and flips around to see her sister, motionless, expressionless lying on the bed like a corpse in a coffin. "Karen? KAREN!"

"Please God. Not both our girls," June cries.

Steven fights back the tears. And fails.

"I am sorry," says the doctor softly. "I wish we knew more. None of the tests have shown anything. You had said she's on anti-psychotic medication?"

"Yes," reply both parents.

"There were no signs of drugs in her system." The doctor examines Karen's chart again.

June's face wrinkles. "She hasn't been taking her medication? Do you think that's what brought this on?"

The doctor does his best to comfort Karen's folks. "We don't know, but we're not going to stop looking."

Amy hangs in the air over her silent sister. "Please Karen, you can't leave me. I swear I'll never ask to touch another boy. Anything. Please. You have to wake up."

Mom turns and buries her face in Dad's shoulder. "We can't lose her. Not both. Not both of them."

"This is all my fault. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry." Weighed down with heartache, Amy curls into an orb and drifts off aimlessly through walls and floors lost in pain and regret. Emotions are tough for a ghost. Everything is amplified. She thinks about haunting the morgue for an eternity. Surrounded by cold chrome alone in the dark... THAT would be a just punishment for a ghost that selfishly hurt her own sister.

It's the sight of the naked teenage boy walking out from behind a triage area curtain in the emergency room that distracts her from her self-loathing. She's spent enough time in the boy's locker room she isn't shocked. No, it's the strange way the people around him are behaving. She watches curiously as the dazed boy wanders past people who completely ignore him.

"Hey? Hello. HEY!!" he yells to no avail and then vents his frustration at a nurse. "What's wrong with you?" An orderly walks right past the boy like he doesn't exist.

"He could be a ghost like me!" Amy gasps, and then calls out to the boy, "I don't think they can hear you anymore."

The boy's gaze turns to Amy. He nervously looks around his surroundings again. "What do you mean? Are you saying I'm dead?"

"I think so," says Amy trying to break the news gently. "I can't tell. But, if you're talking to me, probably."

The young man's face contorts with pain, "Why did he murder me?"

Amy is taken aback. "He who? I don't understand?"

The newly dead boy becomes agitated and confused. He looks like he's about to run.

Amy feels it in her chest before it even forms. Warm. Comforting. Almost familiar.

A brilliant light in the middle of the corridor forces Amy to shield her eyes as a tear in the fabric of life opens. The warmth radiating from the rip strikes the panicked boy and he calms immediately. He barely has time to share a look with Amy before he dissolves into the fading light leaving her alone again.

"Whoa!" In all her death Amy had never seen such a thing. She'd been dead for sixteen years and it was just dawning on her how little she really knew about being a ghost or the afterlife. Her years have always been in her house with her sister and family and she never strayed far from them. Her time was always around the living. She knew nothing of the dead. If she was going to find the answer to waking her sister it would probably be learned from someone transitioning here. Fortunately, she doesn't have to wait long.

An alarm goes off in a nearby Intensive Care Unit room as withered old Mr. Crowley has a heart attack. Staff rushes in but it's too late. His wildly beeping heart monitor is reduced to one continuous tone.

Amy waits in eager anticipation of her next interaction with a ghost. Instead of the human form of Mr. Crowley rising -- a dark rotting filth sits up out of his body. She grimaces in disgust as an ungodly stench washes through the air. The black form grumbles and talks angrily to itself, confused and upset like any newly dead thing is. It climbs off the bed passing through the doctor. The ominous shadow figure stands there for a moment taking in its new cold existence while warm life continues on around it.

"Time of death," says the doctor. "Two eighteen. Hmmph. No next of kin."

"Good bye, Mister Crowley," whispers the compassionate nurse to his empty corpse on the bed.

Its angry hiss at the nurse goes unheard. None of the living can see or hear the malevolent newborn spirit. There are few things that can scare a ghost more than a burning bundle of sage and Amy is looking right at it. And if it had eyes in its deep sockets it would be looking back at her.

It charges.

Immobilized by fear, Amy screams and recoils.

The nurse pulls back the drapes and a shaft of sunlight slices between Amy and the dark thing that was Mr. Crowley. The moment his cursed remnants touch the sunbeam he howls and retreats. Hiding in the shadows it searches for a path around the wall of light. Growing more insane with each passing second it can't reach poor petrified Amy. She forces herself to move just as the doctor walks across the room breaking the beam of daylight. The monster leaps at Amy through the shaded gap just as a jagged tear in the physical world opens beneath it. Ethereal light spills upward, but not the warm welcoming light.

Not this time.

Wispy tentacles snap out latching onto the wicked dead man, wrapping around his arms and legs. Thousands of tiny, enflamed tentacles rip his stinking, rotten soul to shreds and drags every last piece of him shrieking into the underworld.

Amy covers her spectral ears trying to shield herself from his unearthly cries that only she can hear. She watches, horrified and fascinated, when another tentacle lashes out of the tear for her. It barely gets a tendril on her, but she screams in agony as searing pain rips through her and tries to drag her to hell.

It's only when the last chunk of Mr. Crowley disappears that the tear seals and the tentacle disintegrates leaving Amy cowering and shaky. She sobs, clutching the painful place where the dark tentacle had touched her. It's several more minutes before she stops shaking.

Out the window the sky red as hellfire as the last bit of light disappears. "I need to face the facts. I was supposed to go somewhere and didn't." She drifts down the hallway watching the activities of the living. "Karen belongs with the living and I belong with the dead."

Amy retreats to Karen's hospital room.

Nothing has changed. Her steady pulse registers on the machine. The rhythm of her brain plays out on a monitor. Mom is a mess, leaning against dad, who also struggles to maintain his composure. Amy pauses memorizing her parent's faces, then floats up and hangs over Karen looking down like she did when they were both babies. "Karen, I promise if you wake up everything will be different. Your life will be your own. Please wake up Karen. Please wake up."

Karen lays motionless.

"WAKE UP!" The ghost screams so loud everyone in the room hears it.

Karen's eyes flutter open. She smiles up at Amy.

Amy's face scrunches up crying phantom tears as she fades out.