With the waxing moon overhead shining its silent strength, a strength I seemed to somehow draw from, I turned and headed for the hospital, knowing the staff there would allow me in to be with my sick son.
A sick son, I thought determinedly, who would be sick no more.
Chapter Three
"Hello, Samantha," said Rob, the front desk security guard. Rob was a big guy who probably took steroids. You know there's trouble when the night shift at a children's hospital knows you by name.
I said "hi" and he smiled at me kindly and let me through.
At the far end of the center hallway was a bank of elevators. As I headed toward it, I heard a vacuum running down a side hallway. I glanced casually at the cleaning crew working away...and saw something else.
Crackling, staticy balls of light hovered around the cleaning crew. Many such balls of light. I knew what these were now. They were spirits in their purest forms. Some called them orbs, and sometimes they showed up on photographs. Many non-believers assumed such orbs were dust on the lens. But the camera could never fully capture what I could see. To my eyes, the balls of light were alive with energy, endlessly forming and reforming, gathering smaller particles of energy around them like mini-black holes in outer space. But there was nothing black about these. Indeed, they were often whitish or golden, and sometimes they appeared red. And sometimes they were more than balls. Much more. Sometimes they were fully formed humans.
As I swept past the hallway, a cleaning lady looked up at me. I smiled and turned my head just as one of the whitish electrified balls seemed to orient on me. Soon it was behind me, keeping pace with me.
I just hate being followed by ghosts.
And as the elevator doors closed in front of me and I selected the third-floor button, the ball of white light slipped through the elevator's seam and joined me for a ride up.
It hovered just in front of me, spitting fire like a mini sun. It moved to the right and then to the left, and then it hovered about a foot in front of my face.
The elevator slowly rose one floor.
"It's not polite to stare," I said.
The ball of light flared briefly, clearly agitated. It then shot over to the far corner of the elevator and stayed there for the rest of the ride up.
The doors dinged open and I stepped out onto my son's floor.
Alone.