Seasons of Heaven (3 page)

The metallic clink of their instruments was beginning to sound like torture to my ears and I tried once more to yell out. In my head, I heard my voice say,

“Hey! Listen to me, I’m here. For God’s sakes, listen to me,” but in the room, there was still not a sound other than clank, clank, beep, beep, swoosh, swoosh…

I began screaming, but still no one could hear me, and then suddenly there was no one to hear. The landscape around me morphed into an empty, gloomy one and then just as quickly as that had happened, I was standing on a precipice watching from above as giant waves crashed and stirred against the crumbling cliff that I stood on the edge of. I watched with a mixture of terror and awe as the waves gained height and speed, gathering more and more water until the peaks rose high enough to engulf the doctors who were sucked into it. They were tossed and turned in every direction their bodies being beaten and battered by the watery fists of the ocean. Just before the waves grew high enough to engulf me I saw them being drawn under. And then I was consumed...

The next place I went had a path. At the end of the path I saw a light…another bright light. I fear it, but at the same time I am drawn towards it. I took my first step and I was set off balance by the contrasts between white and black, light and dark…I stumbled and fell.

********

The surgeon in blue stood next to the table looking down at the body. He was trying not to feel. Surgeons were supposed to be detached, unemotional. He knew this was bad, very, very bad. This had gone very wrong. He could hear gloves being snapped off and instruments being collected around him. Next to him stood the other doctor, the one who had brought the surgeon in blue in on the case. She had her hands on her hips and she was staring at a spot on the wall.

The machines were still beeping and alarming and the surgeon found himself wondering why no one had turned them off. He heard the sound of a female voice, the lead nurse say,

“We’ve lost him,” and that was what snapped him back into action. He was a doctor, patients died. He couldn’t allow himself to wallow in it.

“Time of death: 2223. Please clean the block, I will go inform the parents,” he said.

The male nurse who had been cleaning up the instruments stopped what he was doing, looked at the doctor and said,

“I…I can take care of it! Really, I think it would be better.”

The doctor didn’t look as alert as he should, whether it was fatigue or inebriation was a question on all of their minds. He led them towards the correct answer by saying,

“Don’t take it so hard; I’ll buy everyone a round of drinks when we get off work and we’ll relax…”

“I’ll pass...” the male nurse said, not bothering to try and hide the disgust he was feeling, “We are really not in the mood for that; we’ve just lost a patient.”

The surgeon pulled down his mask and snapped off his gloves before saying in a matter-of-fact tone,

“Well, people come and go…” The nurse’s mouth fell open in surprise, but that was nothing compared to what his face looked like after the surgeon’s next statement, “Actually they just go, since they never make it back, except as ghosts…”

“OK, that’s enough,” the lead nurse said before the angry male nurse could respond. “I’ve heard enough for tonight, I'm wrung out, we’ll talk about that another day.”

********

Everyone who walked out of the operating room that night had the exhausted, aggrieved look of a team who had just lost the championship title. The Cardio-vascular surgeon, the one in the blue scrubs made it a few steps down the hall before he had to stop and put his hands out towards the wall to hold himself up. He could hear people talking as they passed him. He didn’t look up; he didn’t want to invite their conversation. He’d been crass towards that nurse in the O.R., but that had only been to mask what he was feeling at the time.

He waited until the others passed him and then he looked up. He could still see a few profiles, everyone looked dazed and their bodies looked weak and weary.

The surgeon, James watched them until they’re out of sight. He then forced himself upright, teetering just a bit before he got his balance back. He was exhausted and defeated and drunk.

“What a nightmare,”
he thought, as he made his way down the hall to find the boy’s parents.

********

Before he made it to speak to the parents, a bright flash of light followed by a sudden darkness consumed James suddenly transporting him to another place and time, into a nightmare. He found himself wandering through the empty corridors of the hospital. It was completely empty. Each room that he paused to look into was shrouded in darkness and shadows. The usually bright lights were dim and twinkling. He came to the end of the first corridor and turned towards the second one. As he made his way down that one he saw a door at the very end. It was shaking and vibrating. It looked like someone or something was trying to get out.

He approached it with caution…his heart was hammering in his chest. He somehow knew he should turn back the way he’d come, but he was inexplicably drawn to the end of the long hallway. He approached the rattling door and placed his hand on the knob…Another bright flash of light transported him once again to another place and time.

James was a child now, suddenly back in his family home and in his childhood bed. It was comforting at first as his eyes adjusted to the dark and he looked around at all of his old things, things that he hadn’t seen in over thirty-years. He suddenly wondered what the reality was, lying in bed as a boy or growing up to become a surgeon. Was he really not a doctor, but still only a little boy? He glanced down at himself once more and his head was still pointed downwards when he caught a flicker of movement out of the corner of his eye. He sat frozen for a few seconds, hoping it was only a shadow cast off of one of the trees in the back yard. He couldn’t hear a sound other than his own breathing, but he could feel something watching him. Cautiously he raised his head and his wide eyes drank in the horror that stood in front of him. At the end of his bed was a…creature. If James had to describe it later, the first word that came to mind was “dark.” It was dark in his room, with nothing but a small sliver of silver moonlight through the closed blinds, but the shape that loomed malevolently near him was so dark that it seemed to be melting into the night around it. It was standing in one spot, but seemed to be in motion at the same time. Its own darkness left a trail of something even blacker in its wake. It had huge eyes. Sometimes they appeared like obscure sockets that disappeared into the murkiness of itself and other times, they would glow. First James thought they were red, and then white it was almost like it was purposely changing to confuse him. Its head was misshapen like a rotting potato and its arms were long and spindly with appendages that seemed to be able to reach out in every direction all at once. James could feel its evil intentions as it swung and grasped at the air, as if it had an urgent need to devour all within its path. The air in the room was heavy like the loutish thing had sucked out all of the oxygen and replaced it with its bad intentions. The thing wasn’t very tall, but what it lacked in height it made up for in simple vulgarity.

What was this thing and what did it want from him?
He didn’t know for sure. What he did know was that he could feel his tiny heart pounding through his chest and the thick flannel of the pajamas his mother had put him in before tucking him into bed. His mouth was dry as he had a staring contest with the beast, waiting for it to make its move. The bloated miscreant continued to just stand there with its slithery, black tentacles reaching out, swiping at nothing in the air of the scared little boy’s room. Maybe it was trying to catch his fear, James thought. Maybe that was what it fed off of. It seemed to be taunting him, wanting him to react and although the thing didn’t speak it gave the distinct impression that it was annoyed at James for not screaming and crying and running away. James wanted to, there was nothing he wanted more right then but to be away from the creature, but in addition to not wanting to feed it his fear he had a feeling that this thing was like a snake…if you moved too quickly, it would strike.

He sat as still as a stone statue in his bed. He kept his eyes on the creature but he didn’t move at all except to take in the occasional breath. He tried to hold it for as long as he could, partially due to his fright, but also because every time he took a breath in he could smell the foul odor of the thing at his side. The smells it was emitting smelled to James like the decaying body of a rat he’d found in the barn one day. Even to a child, it smelled like death. James didn’t know how long their standoff lasted until at last and to his great relief the unholy creature disappeared. 

James knew he should stay in bed, but he had a feeling the thing wasn’t gone and although he was more frightened than he’d ever been, the simple curiosity of a child’s imagination got the better of him. He slipped quietly out of his bed and walking softly in his bare feet, he moved towards the corridor. He peeked out the bedroom door and at first all he saw were the family photos that had hung on the papered walls for as long as he could remember and the shiny wood floor that led down the hall to the other bedrooms and the bathroom at the end. He had almost allowed himself to relax when he saw the thing reappear at the very end of the corridor. It gave him another intimidating glance and then it vanished.

He continued to tiptoe softly down the long hall, passing the bathroom. Just as he passed that door he heard a loud crack. He abruptly turned back with his heart pounding like a drum in a barrel against the inside of his chest. He was in the hospital, and the horrible thing was right behind him, close enough to reach out and touch if James had been daft enough to want to. He wasn’t and he didn’t, so he began to run. He ran as fast as he could to the other end of the corridor towards the stairs, The hospital looked like it had been the center of some sort of disaster. The windows were shattered, gurneys were overturned and lying in the corridors and the wooden counters were splintered and rotting. He couldn’t see the thing behind him but he could feel it closing in on him. It was almost as if its evil…its bad intentions were reaching out and brushing the fine hairs on the back of his neck, causing them to rise. He could feel its darkness, and it was a cold, empty feeling.

Turning the corner, he continued to run down the second corridor. He was panting and sweating now and he couldn’t block out the sound of the incessant pounding of his pulse inside his head. There were two dummies in the hallway, the kind they used for teaching in medical schools. As James ran past them they lifted their arms at the same time, pointing at something, urging him to look……James didn’t stop, they didn’t look trustworthy. He didn’t want to see whatever they were pointing at but he was compelled to look. What he saw, for a few seconds stopped him in his tracks. It was a place suspended in air where the sky was at first a brilliant blue and the clouds looked like wisps that had been dashed across the sky by some kind of divine paintbrush. The sun was radiant…almost blindingly so. Then the blue sky morphed into night and the sun was replaced by the luminescent light of a silver moon and thousands of twinkling stars that seemed to only dangle there…like one could reach out and pluck them from the sky….

The vision…or whatever it was faded and James got a glimpse of something beautiful. It was more of a feeling than a vision and just for a moment it consumed him and filled him with a weightlessness and light…and then it was gone and he was once again running for his life. Before he’d gotten ten more feet the floor abruptly fell out from underneath him. He fell downward, spiraling towards nothingness at such a rapid speed that his throat constricted and he could hardly breathe. It was like falling off of a cliff into a pit that had no bottom…..

There was another blinding flash of light and he was lying alone in the hall, the dreadful things had vanished once more. A suddenly adult James looked around, simultaneously hoping to see another soul that might be able to help him and glad no one else was around to find him on the floor and ask questions. He quickly pulled himself back up and began to once again walk down the empty trashed hall like a ghost. He didn’t know he was in a nightmare but he was confused and his head hurt from trying to understand what was happening. He tried convincing himself it was just the stress of it all. The toll of his job and his life weighed heavily on his stooped shoulders and in the lines across his face. His hands held his aching head as he walked, hardly looking where he was going. He’d had the worst kind of day a doctor can have. It was no wonder that his head and his eyes were playing tricks on him now.

As he walked down the hall towards his unknown destination he abruptly stopped. He could smell it again, the rotting flesh. Besides that, he could feel them again. It was like the air was laden with their malevolent desires. He looked over his shoulder and saw that another one of the frightful things had begun to slink along behind him. It was soon joined by another of its kind and then another. James began to walk faster, thinking he was too tired to run again. He wasn’t a kid any longer; he was a tired old man again now. His heart felt like it was ready to explode as it were, he wasn’t sure that he could run if he had to.

He finally made it to the end of the corridor and allowed himself a backwards glance. The things were still there, still coming towards him. They didn’t seem to be in any hurry, they just steadily followed the path he was taking. It was almost more frightening than if they just ran after him. It made them seem…confident, almost as if they knew he had no escape.