OUIJA

East Huron hospital was more than a hundred and twenty years old and served the small communities on the eastern edge of the state of Michigan, along the upper portion of Lake Huron. It had been upgraded and modernized dozens of times over the years, but in its bones it was still an old-timer, replete with all the frailties of old age. It was too cold in the winter and too hot in the summer, it was stooped and crumbling, and it creaked and groaned and moaned in any kind of weather, at any time of year. It should have been euthanized forty years ago, but the towns that it supported were not filled with the kind of wealth that would provide a tax base that could do anything about replacing it. So it lived on, day after day, year after year, creaking, and groaning, and moaning all the while. The third floor of the little, three-floor hospital contained the patient rooms, all twenty of them. In one of the few private rooms on this floor lay Allison Milner. She had only recently been moved from the ICU because she was stable, but she was still in a coma. Eventually she would be transferred to a hospital closer to home, but not until she regained consciousness … if she ever did. But Allison was not alone in the hospital, nor would she be on the trip downstate, whenever that happened. In the basement, in that cool, dark place, that many of the hospital’s staff shunned, was the body of Jason Milner, Allison’s husband. He lay in one of the drawers of the small six-drawer cooler, “on ice”, as they called it, waiting for his wife’s condition to change−one way or the other. Jason’s death had initially been deemed the result of the accident, and because Allison had been in no condition to ask for one, there was no reason for an autopsy. But the chief medical examiner of Detroit carried a lot of weight in a small-time hospital like this, and at his insistence, one was performed the day before. The results revealed that the deceased had drowned, but not before he’d had a massive coronary, no doubt from trauma cased when the car impacted with the old bridge’s pylon. The local pathologist discussed this with Dr. Abrams in Detroit just a few hours ago. Abrams wasn’t so sure that he agreed … not exactly, but he’d held his tongue. After all, he knew much more about the situation−the strangeness of it−than his northern counterpart did. The morgue at East Huron Hospital was just about the scariest place imaginable. It was the kind of place that someone with an entrepreneurial spirit could make a fortune at Halloween time setting up a house of horrors. Unlike the three floors above, it had been given very few updates over its century-long existence. Hard-fought money was to be used on the living, not on the dead. Someone like Doc Abrams would have been horrified by the primitive, unsterile conditions of the morgue. Cinderblock walls, bare cement floor, leaky pipes, evidence of mold in every corner, and hints of corrosion on nearly every metal surface. It looked more like the laboratory of Dr. Frankenstein than it did a coroner’s place of business in the twenty-first century. During normal working hours the eighty fluorescent bulbs in the ceiling lit up the place like the summer sun at noon, but at night, when there was no one in attendance, the few narrow windows set high up into the cinder-block walls, did very little to dispel the feeling of gloom and doom. It would have been difficult to see anything at all down there, and the only sound offered up was the slow drip of the incessant leak and the creaking, groaning and moaning of the structure above. If there was a scarier place on earth, it was hard to imagine. Few went down there after hours, and the few that had to because of some job necessity, never did so alone. When they had to, the first thing that they did was to turn on all the lights. But there was no one there now, and because it was the middle of the night, and the hospital was staffed with only a handful of key personnel, no one was likely to come. So no one was there to hear it, but a quiet hum began to fill the air, starting softly but building, followed by a crackling noise, not unlike that of a heavy thing rolling over gravel. The sounds lasted only a few moments before fading away. And then the temperature began to drop. Lower and lower it plummeted until frost was evident on the stainless-steel faces of the autopsy tables and the cooler drawers. Within minutes the basement was nearly uninhabitable to any living thing, but those in the stainless-steel drawers didn’t complain. And then a new sound crept into the stillness−a squeaking noise like something gliding along on unoiled bearings, and the cooler drawer at the end of the short row began to slowly slide open. The body within was covered with a white sheet. As the drawer bumped silently to a stop, the corner of the sheet rose in the air, as if by magic, and then it was suddenly jerked to the side, and it floated to the floor. The naked body of Jason Milner lay fully exposed, the Y-incision and roughly-tied sutures from the autopsy stood out on his pale-white flesh. He had a slightly cockeyed look because the skin of his forehead hadn’t been pulled tightly back into place after his skull had been opened and his brain removed. The rest of his face, in fact, his entire body, had that waxy look of the dead; no one would have said that he looked anything but. And then the shimmering, silver shadow began to form once more, this time just to the left of the open drawer. Within seconds, the transformation was complete, and the ghost of Tad Jeffries had emerged in a different world of the dead.