Chapter 5
By Julie
“AJ!” Kevin yelled, tearing down the hall. The deserted hall. “Somebody help!” he cried as he ran, Howie
and Brian at his heels. “Please!”
But no one came.
What kind of hospital is this? Kevin
wondered vaguely, as he turned a corner.
We’re in the ICU, and there’s not even a nurse around?
He didn’t have much longer to consider this, for at that moment,
he reached the door to Nick’s room and burst in. Inside the room, he stopped dead in his
tracks, staring in shocked silence. He
was hurtled forward as Howie and then Brian slammed into him from behind, but
he never broke his gaze.
Following Kevin’s line of sight, Howie let out a horrified gasp
and pushed past Kevin. “AJ!”
AJ lay flat on his back on the floor at the foot of Nick’s bed,
completely motionless. His eyes were
squeezed close, but his mouth hung slightly open, as if frozen in
mid-scream.
Howie sunk to his knees beside AJ and grabbed his friend’s wrist,
terrified that he was dead. But he could
feel AJ’s pulse racing and hear his breath.
“He’s alive,” Howie said hoarsely to Brian and Kevin, who had come up
behind him to look down on AJ.
Kevin knelt down beside Howie.
“AJ?” he asked hesitantly. “AJ…
can you hear us?” He gingerly reached
out and touched AJ’s shoulder very gently.
When there was no response, he gripped it harder and gave AJ a little
shake. “AJ!” he cried out more
urgently. “AJ, open your eyes!”
But there was no reaction.
AJ did not open his eyes, nor did he even flinch. He stayed motionless, almost lifeless, except
for the slight rise and fall of his chest as he breathed.
“What happened to him?” Brian asked, his voice small and
frightened. “It… it sounded like he was
being stabbed to death or something!”
At these words, Kevin’s eyes traveled up and down AJ’s body,
looking for some kind of physical injury.
But, as far as he could tell, AJ’s body was in perfect condition, not a
mark on him.
“I don’t know,” he said slowly.
“But I don’t like this. I don’t
like this at all.”
“We need to find a doctor,” said Howie. “Get him checked out.”
“I’ll go,” Brian said immediately, backing away from them. “This is freaking me out.” He darted out of the room without another
word, leaving Kevin and Howie behind to puzzle over AJ’s mysterious condition.
***
Brian jogged through the halls, his heart pounding with anxiety,
searching frantically for a doctor, nurse, or anyone who could help him. Finally, just when he was beginning to think
something was very wrong at this hospital, he saw a woman towards him. She was dressed in blue scrubs.
“Oh, thank God,” Brian panted when he reached her. “Excuse me, miss, but my friend… well, I
don’t really know what happened to him, but he’s unconscious, and he needs
help.”
The woman stared at him. She
had piercing blue eyes that seemed to bore right through him. They made him very uncomfortable, though he
wasn’t exactly sure why.
“Miss?” he asked hesitantly.
“My friend…”
“Yes,” she said briskly.
“You friend. Where is he?”
“Come on, I’ll show you,” said Brian, starting back to Nick’s
room. “We were visiting our friend Nick
– he’s here in the ICU – and my other friends and I just heard him screaming,
and when we got to Nick’s room, he was lying passed out on the floor. But we don’t know what happened to him.”
“I see,” said the woman, following him.
“Are you a nurse?” Brian asked as they walked along, glancing back
at her.
“Yes,” said the woman, pointing at the nametag clipped to the
pocket of her scrub top. Desdemona
Aden, R.N., it read.
Brian nodded, feeling a little bit better. At least there was one certified
employee on this floor. “Right in here,”
he said, as they made it to Nick’s room.
He led her inside, where Kevin and Howie still knelt on the floor beside
AJ.
“Oh good, you found someone,” said Kevin, when he saw Brian and
the nurse come in.
“Yeah. Here he is,” Brian
said to Desdemona, pointing to AJ.
“I see,” the nurse said again.
Howie and Kevin moved out of the way, and she knelt down beside AJ,
taking his pulse and lifting his eyelids.
Then, abruptly, she stood up.
“Would you three please step out of the room? I’m going to call a doctor in to examine
him.”
Brian, Kevin, and Howie exchanged glances. Then Kevin nodded. “Thank you,” he said. “Come on, guys.” He led the other two out of the room, Brian
casting one last wary look over his shoulder at Desdemona. She just smiled, those penetrating blue eyes
flashing, and turned away. Tearing his
gaze from her, Brian followed Kevin and Howie out of the room and closed the
door behind him.
As soon as he heard the door close, the man lying in the bed
opened his eyes. Nick had pretended to
be unconscious the whole time his friends had been in the room, although it
hadn’t really made any difference this time – for once, Kevin, Howie, and Brian
were too busy fretting over AJ to even notice him.
“Some friends. They deserve
to die,” he muttered.
“Then why didn’t you kill them.
Why didn’t you kill him?” a voice from across the room asked
sharply.
Nick looked over at Desdemona and glared, his eyes alighting with
fire. “I tried,” he said. “But they came too quickly. I couldn’t finish.”
Dancing flames flickered in her blue eyes as well, and a grin
spread slowly over her face. “Don’t
worry,” she said. “You’ll have another
chance. There’s always a second chance.”
Nick’s lips turned up maliciously.
“Good,” he said.
Desdemona’s smile grew wider.
“The others will be pleased with your newfound enthusiasm. Just see that you don’t fail us again.”
“Oh no,” said Nick. “Next
time, I will not fail.”
***
“Yes… he will not fail again.
Next time, he will kill your friends.
All of them. And you… you will be
powerless to stop him.”
“No!” Nick cried out, but the voice only
laughed at his misery.
“Oh yes, YES!” it bellowed, echoing all around him, a chorus of demonic chants. “You are nothing, Nick Carter, nothing but a
lost soul. We have taken over you, taken
over your body, and your other side will do what we desire.”
Nick did not answer. He clamped
his hands over his ears to drown out the reverberating voice, to block its
horrible words. He knew what it said was
true… he could do nothing to save his friends now. Not since he had succumbed to the pull…
Nick’s eyes flew open, and he sat up with a start. Immediately, his whole body began to throb,
the pain starting in his head and quickly spreading downward.
“God, what the hell happened to me?” he moaned, rubbing his eyes and
feeling extremely disoriented. When he
took his hands away from his eyes, he blinked and looked around, suddenly
realizing he had no idea where he was.
This was definitely not his bedroom, nor the hotel room he had checked
into earlier. It was too dark to see
much in the room, but he could make out enough to tell that.
His heart began to beat faster with the anxiety of awaking to find
himself in a strange place. But that
feeling was soon replaced with something much worse – terror. For at that moment, he felt it, the thing he
had dreaded ever since he was a little boy.
The pull.
It was coming from beneath him, from under his bed. “There’s no monsters under your bed, Nicky,”
his father had told him night after night during his youth. “See?”
He had turned on the light and lifted up Nick’s dust ruffle and shown
him the bare floor beneath the bed.
“Nothing there but dust.”
But there had been something there.
There had been a monster, the monster that haunted his dreams, that kept
him awake at night. And it was back,
here with him in this strange room, lurking beneath this strange bed. It had come for him. And this time, no one was there to protect
him. Kevin, Howie, Brian, AJ… they were
not there. Not there to do their ritual,
to stand back to back in their circle, their hands bound. Not there to block the monster, to deflect
the evil force, to stop the pull.
And so it came.
Nick could feel it tugging at him.
“Please, no,” he whimpered, feeling like a child, not caring. He pulled his covers up around himself, as if
a few pieces of cloth could actually protect him from this unseen evil. But still it came, drawing nearer to him,
surrounding him. Nick gasped, suddenly
unable to breath. He opened his mouth to
scream, but no sound came out. The pull
was stronger than ever before now, and it seemed to be sucking him in. He could feel himself being lifted up, yanked
away from his covers, elevated off the bed.
Yet, when he looked down, he could still see himself lying there,
motionless, as if asleep.
It was like an out of body experience, as if his soul had been ripped
from his body.
And, in truth, it had.
The pull continued to lift him up and then brought him slowly down,
down to the floor. And then, as Nick’s
terror grew even more, the pull dragged him across the floor, towards the
bed. There was no dust ruffle on this
bed, nor was there a bare spot of floor beneath it. Instead, Nick saw a light, a glowing red
light, which seemed to shine up from some kind of gateway that had opened under
the bed. He knew what was coming before
it happened, and he clawed frantically at the floor, trying to find something
to latch on to. But there was nothing,
and helplessly, he was pulled under the bed and into the light.
It had finally happened, the thing he had feared for his entire life.
The pull had won.
Yes, after twenty three years, the pull had finally won. It had grabbed hold of Nick’s very soul and
torn it from his body. And now, it
seemed, there were two Nick’s. One lay
in Memorial hospital, plotting the death of his friends, while the other, this
Nick, was locked away in this Godforsaken place, the Shadow Land, as he called
it, a place that was not quite reality, yet not fantasy… a living nightmare,
that’s what it was. Here, in the Shadow
Land, he was all alone and all-knowing… he knew what was going on in the real
world, knew that the other Nick, the evil Nick, was going to kill his friends,
knew that he had already tried to kill AJ.
He knew it all, and he could do nothing to stop it. It was his worst nightmare. The other Nick had to be stopped, and he
could not stop it.
No, Nick told himself fiercely, it’s not “The Other Nick”. It’s not Nick at all. I’m Nick!
That thing up there… that monster… is nothing but a shell… a shell
that’s been taken over and possessed by evil.
It’s not me, it’s not me doing this, it’s them!
But those thoughts didn’t help much.
Either way, something was after his friends, and he could not save
them. They had always been there for
him, always looked out for him, always tried to protect him. And now, when they needed him more than
anything, he could not help them.
A solitary tear ran down Nick’s cheek as he thought
back to the last real conversation he had had with them…
“You’re late,”
Kevin’s voice boomed across the empty arena.
“Yeah, sorry,” Nick said with little
emotion.
“Where have you been?”
“My mom called… sorry to keep you
waiting with such petty things like my family.”
“Okay, that’s it… I don’t know what
crawled up your ass, but I think you need to get over it. We’ve busted our
asses while you sit back and pity yourself and treat the rest of us like we’re
bothering you.”
“You know what? To tell you the truth, I’m not
happy any more. You guys—especially you Kevin—don’t treat me like a grown man.
I’m tired of being talked down to and told what to do. You have to face the
fact that you can’t control me anymore.
After Friday I’m going home and I don’t intend on doing this anymore.”
“Nick-”
“I’ll be here for
the show tonight, but I’m not staying here right now.”
And he had walked away, stalked off in a huff. He had come back later, as he had promised,
and done the show with them. And after
the concert, he had gone out drinking without so much as a goodbye to any of
them. And then, that night, the pull had
taken him. There had been no chance for
a goodbye, no chance for him to tell them how much he loved them, how much he
appreciated them, despite what he sometimes thought and said, how much he
realized they were only trying to be good friends, only trying to watch out for
him. He had never gotten to say any of
that to them, and now he never would.
For the evil had locked him away in the Shadow Land and taken over his
body.
And
it was going after them next.
***
