Synergeist: The Haunted Cubicle (12 page)

She shifted back to a broad view of the emergency room and waited. She thought about her omnipotent vision as she watched. It couldn’t be anything like human eyesight. Since she wasn’t physically, (or rather spiritually) in the room, she was not interpreting photons of light striking ectoplasmic eyes. She had viewed the depths of space. She saw subatomic bonds, which, if she understood these things, could never be seen directly by the human eye. This had to be something else altogether.

She recalled quantum theories that supposed (or perhaps concluded) that all points in the universe were connected to every other. Perhaps these connections were all part of the Collective Consciousness her Yogi spoke of, and she somehow tapped into this network and was able to interpret a view of anything using it. If that was the case, she should not be limited to views in a direct line from herself. It seemed to her that everything she had viewed had been in a straight line. Maybe because it didn’t occur to her that her view could be otherwise, a preconceived notion left over from the land of the living.

To test the theory she rotated her view all the way around the walls of the room, then to looking down from the ceiling, and then to all sorts of odd perspectives. It was amusing for a while, but like the MySpace Angles fad, it got old. Theory proven, she picked a vantage point that had a good view of the room and waited. Waiting at the doctor’s office. She imagined Doctor McSteamy coming out of the back, clipboard in hand.

Who’s next? What seems to be the problem young lady? Dead? When did this “being dead” start? Do you have insurance? No, not health insurance ma’am, life insurance.

Ha! Things were slow, so she speeded them up. The sun went down and the ER got busier as the evening wore on, but no one died. A man staggered in holding something against his head. She snapped back to normal objective time. His aura reeked of a pollution she understood to be alcohol. He reeled his way toward the doors leading back into the treatment rooms. The security guard stopped him and had a heated exchange with him.

She wished she could hear what they were saying. She saw the waves of sound energy, but she had no way to interpret them. The drunk gave up, plopped in the chair closest to the admitting nurse, and glared at her, radiating his inebriation, impatience, and hostility. The miserable woman, waiting in the chair next to where he landed, glowed with disgust. She got up, made her way over to the water fountain, took a drink, and then made her way to a seat as far from the lush as possible. The guard kept a wary eye on him.

She felt like the Grim Reaper, waiting for someone’s ultimate misfortune. A gurney pushed in through the doors, accompanied by three people. Before she could study them, another followed in behind it, accompanied by more people. What Millie assumed were two doctors, burst in through the other doors. They made their way to the first gurney, pushing other people aside. The doctors radiated excitement, anticipating an end to the tedious stitches and flu sufferers. The others that had accompanied the gurneys through the outer doors worried frantically. Some of them also blazed with suppressed rage. The two paramedics left quickly. They were relieved, perhaps that they had delivered their cargo alive and maybe, to be getting out of the messy drama without getting sucked into it.

On one of the gurneys was a man as intoxicated as the obnoxious man glaring at the nurse. He was in both physical and emotional pain, but his aura looked strong and well bound to his body. The other was in distress. The aura resembled the sleeping man’s but even less active. She sensed in it a resignation, the connections to the body growing tenuous.

The doctors focused on this patient as they wheeled both of them through the doors into the treatment area. The guard prevented their entourage from following. Like a trolley shot in one of those medical dramas, Millie’s view followed the distressed patient through the doors.

Millie watched in both excitement and horror as the doctors and nurses worked to stabilize the patient. Watching the Millie Force ties that connected body and soul fade, she wished she could touch him, and somehow let him know it would be okay. Except she wasn’t sure she was okay.

The bonds faded to nothing, and the ghost of the man began to drift upward. The doctors applied the defibrillator. She saw the body feebly grasping at the energy and using it. The spirit gave a startled jerk, glowed with panic, and then snapped back into place, but the connection was weak and again ebbed away.

This time, nothing the doctors did reestablished the connection. The aura, shaped approximately like the man, floated lazily above. She also noted that a version of her Millie Field was forming around the body. This force bubble seemed to be exuded by the body, its final attempt to support the soul of the former occupant. The field was weak but grew slowly, building strength. The energy had a slightly different flavor than hers. Akin to fingerprints, she thought, similar yet unique. It would not support her. There would be no commandeering someone else’s nest. The notion was revolting anyway.

She also noticed a connection much like the connection shared by entangled quantum particles between the field and the aura floating above. Once she saw the linkage, she saw others as well, leading off to different places. She supposed the spirit at some point chose a haunt and followed one of the tethers. She didn’t recall choosing her cubicle. Why would anyone choose a beige box as her home away from body? Maybe it was a matter of which was strongest and not a choice. Maybe the strength of the field determined the soul’s destination with no choice required.

The newly formed shade was completely serene. She had never seen a person’s aura in this state. Even when they were asleep, there were pools of emotion, structures of subconscious thoughts, and waves of possibilities washing back and forth.

This was different. There had been time between when she had died and when she had become aware. Perhaps this was an embryonic state before being born again. She didn’t know about continuous observation for days, but she was determined to observe as much as possible. The shade became more tenuous even as she watched, like granddad’s smoke rings drifting toward the ceiling.

Just before becoming invisible, the whole thing collapsed to a point. At first she thought the soul had departed. Made the choice and adios. But no, the point persisted. The singularity was dimensionless. No height, width, or depth, but still there. She sensed it, or detected a presence in the connected network of everything, or whatever it was she did with her Millie Vision. The point was dimensionless, but it existed. She was looking at the concentrated essence of a human being. All the qualities of a living person’s aura, condensed into an unmeasurable dot.

She wondered if she looked the same. Probably, but she hadn’t found anything in her reality that functioned as a mirror. Then she realized that given her new found understanding of the Millie Vision, all had she to do was to pick a vantage point and look at herself.

While she debated whether she should continue to watch the baby ghost hatch or to grab a quick peek at herself back at the cubicle, something else drew her attention. While focused on the placid point that was once a man, she also saw through the walls back into the waiting room. Something new oozed through the outer wall and into the room.

It drew her focus. This thing was not a quiet point of presence like the newly deceased spirit before her and not similar to any human aura she had ever witnessed. It passed through the wall, vomiting out huge, gaudy waves of radiation with foul frequencies and corrupt wavelengths. This eruption spewed out somewhere other than the three dimensional space of human existence, but Millie sensed it in the same way she could sense the presence in a dimensionless point.

Even after coming through the wall, it continued to throw off showers of sparks like a Roman candle into this other plane. The thing expended staggering amounts of energy to stay outside of its Millie Field, if it even had one. Within the singularity she saw that it was ancient, the experiences and decisions piled up in its being led off into the distant past. Little of this resembled human experience, but she sensed that once, in the distant past, it was a man. There was the insatiable desire to feed, to accumulate power, and a raging ocean of stored energy that dwarfed her little pool. If the beast made a sound it would be an unearthly howl, and its smell of sulfur and putrid meat.

Startled, her first instinct was to run. Her vision snapped back to her cubical. But the thing couldn’t hurt her from a distance, could it? She didn’t think so. Curiosity overcame fear, and she shifted her focus back to the ER. The people in the room were as unaware of the presence as they were of her spying on them.

The thing meandered around the room. At first its course appeared random, but then it seemed to be snaking toward the miserable woman who had earlier moved as far as possible from the belligerent drunk. She wanted to tell the woman to run. She didn’t know what would happen when the thing reached her, certainly nothing good.

It stopped just before it reached her. Without any fanfare the singularity expanded in three dimensions, becoming a swirling mass of Millie Force in roughly the shape of a human aura. A tendril approximating a human arm formed and touched the woman’s forehead with the tip. The woman jerked slightly as though mildly startled by something. Then the thing began to feed.

The beast drew the Millie Force from the woman, the bonds between body and soul weakening. Like a vacuum cleaner hose it sucked energy down the tendril. The force formed a swirling vortex around the singularity in its center before being absorbed into the thing’s vast collection bin. The hungry monster’s aura began to glow with energies besides the Millie Force. It extracted energies from the woman that it didn’t store as well. These superfluous electrical and magnetic energies built up on the surface of the shade, attracting dust and moisture from the room. Millie could clearly see the matter beginning to collect on the surface, outlining a vaguely human shape. She wondered when the people in the room would be able to see the apparition.

The miserable woman’s body began to resist, calling up its own reserves of energy in defense, creating what resembled a Millie Field between her and the phantom like quantum antibodies. She wrapped her arms around herself and shivered. The heat energy of her body dropped. Her aura however, flared like a supernova, her discomfort ratcheting up the scale. The barrier became strong enough to stop the flow. Withdrawing the vacuum hose from the woman’s forehead, the gluttonous ghost moved away.

The miserable woman tumbled forward out of her chair onto the floor. The admitting nurse noticed and picked up a phone. Others in the room glanced her way but went back to whatever they were doing, pretending not to notice.

The boozer with the head laceration was next. Upon the creature’s touch, his barely restrained impatience and hostility exploded in wild, violent, indescribable colors throughout his aura. He leapt up and staggered headlong for the doors that lead back into the treatment area. The thing tagged along with him, finishing its draft as they moved. The security guard met the lush (unaware of his companion) and became the next victim of the life force vampire. His tolerance for the intoxicated man’s behavior and his self control plunged to zero, and he began to bludgeon him with his fists, elbows, and knees, driving the contentious drunkard towards the outer doors.

The other people in the waiting room were too busy trying to avoid the melee to notice the faint, ghostly image. It fed from each one in turn, taking what it could, and turning the ER into a madhouse in its wake. Some were sobbing in fear for the injured loved ones that had come in on the gurneys. One of them, in an aroused emotional state Millie didn’t care to identify, stumbled out the doors to enjoy the spectacle of the guard beating the inebriate. After brief verbal sparring, one man launched himself over a row of chairs and attempted to throttle another man. The admitting nurse tried to use the phone but had trouble overcoming the abject fear gripping her.

Millie wanted to help them, to stop the monstrous thing. But she didn’t know how, and the strength of it frightened her. The beast came through the wall into the room with the newly separated soul floating quiescently above its former body.

The ravenous revenant approached the serene singularity, puking vast amounts of energy into who knows where to overcome the newly formed field that protected it. The field was not strong enough to stop it. The demon enveloped the serene soul, and the soul was no more. Somehow informed that it was no longer needed, the field collapsed.

The twin howls of the Black Hole of blessed peace and the Blazing Star’s creative fury would have knocked Millie off her feet if she had any. Their harmonic wails, mourning the subversion of free will, and deriding the act of destruction, reverberated through her being. She detected something in the demon other than hunger, and that was disdain. Disdain for the Song of Creation. She found that even more disgusting than what she had just witnessed.

The demon collapsed back to a point. The dust and moisture settled to the floor. It now contained an unfathomable well of energy. The force it expended was nothing compared to its stores. She could do anything with that much energy. It wouldn’t have any trouble pushing a box off a chair.

The appetite and scorn of the thing suddenly modulated with what she recognized as curiosity. It moved toward her point of perspective. She reoriented to get a better view of where it was going. Its path adjusted and once again the ravenous monster headed directly toward her gaze. It could tell she was watching!