Visually there was nothing special about 303. It was a nondescript office that was still furnished with very basic, old office furniture. It comprised an outer office for a secretary, where there were a number of aged side chairs and a metal desk, and an inner office for Clarence, with a larger, wooden desk and an ancient, black faux-leather executive desk chair. There were absolutely no personal objects whatsoever in either room, although there were pale rectangles on the walls as evidence of pictures having hung in the past. The inner office had two good-sized but dirty windows looking south, both of which afforded a direct line of sight out over the Bellevue Hospital complex, which was now dominated by the high-rise tower soaring twenty-five stories into the hazy summer sky. Mitt pulled out several of the desk drawers. All were empty, save for a few errant paper clips.
Taking Andrea’s advice, Mitt got right to work. He took the boxes out of the backpack and, along with the two he’d carried by hand, he arranged them chronologically on the desktop. He then sat down in the old-fashioned desk chair, which faced the door to the outer office. From not having been used for decades, it loudly squealed in protest, momentarily shattering the heavy silence of the abandoned building. For a fleeting moment, Mitt marveled at the idea that he was occupying the very same desk and chair as Clarence Fuller, a man who’d been his idol since Mitt was a teenager.
The first box Mitt opened was Clarence’s. As soon as he looked at the stack of medical records, he could see how Lashonda had found Charlene’s so quickly. It was tagged with a yellow Post-it note. Although he’d already skimmed the record once and then attempted to read it more carefully, he took it out again to go over it once more with adequate light. He wanted to be absolutely certain he hadn’t missed even a brief medical explanation of why the child had been lobotomized. But the moment he started the very first paragraph, he sensed a presence emanating from the direction of the outer office that raised the hackles on his neck. Glancing up, he jolted and caught his breath.
Standing in the doorway to the outer office no more than about eight feet away was Charlene Wagner. The shocking aspect of her sudden appearance was twofold. The first was that from where he was sitting, he had an unobstructed view through the outer office all the way out into the central corridor, making him wonder why he hadn’t seen her coming. The second was that she radiated a totally different vibe, despite being clothed in the same dress with the same bloodstains and with her hair being as blond as ever and her skin as pale as Mitt remembered. Contrary to all the other times he’d been confronted by her, she wasn’t exuding the all-consuming anger and resentment she had in the past. In point of fact, although she was holding the orbitoclast, she wasn’t pointing it menacingly at Mitt as if it were a weapon. Instead, she was merely holding it in her left hand while, with her right hand, she was actively gesturing Mitt to follow her. Perhaps even more compelling from Mitt’s perspective was that she was smiling as if she were deliriously happy. In fact, Mitt sensed she might even be happily laughing even though she was emitting no sound.
Immediately intrigued at what might possibly be making Charlene’s spirit so contented, Mitt stood up. Although he could hear in the back of his mind Lashonda’s warning about ignoring the ghosts, he couldn’t think of any reason he shouldn’t at least see what Charlene had in mind. Stepping around the desk, he watched her reaction. She was visibly pleased and began backing up toward the door to the hall, all the while gesturing for Mitt to follow.
Ever more intrigued, Mitt first ended up out in the main corridor and then at the circular stairs. There Charlene started up, and as Mitt approached the first step, he saw something he thought was both fascinating and, in retrospect, predictable. When Charlene moved through a ray of sunlight streaming in a north-facing window, it passed through her unencumbered, attesting to her immaterialism.
Mitt followed Charlene up to the fifth floor as she continued to urge him on. Once on the fifth floor, he followed her all the way down the east portion of the building’s central corridor and finally almost to the end of the southeast wing. There she gave him a particularly broad smile and gestured for him to follow her into what Mitt guessed had been a VIP patient room with an open but lockable door. Mitt hesitated at the threshold. From where he was standing, he could see that the room had a single window with a view that included a small slice of the East River as well as the Bellevue high-rise building. The furniture consisted of a single bed with a thin, heavily stained mattress and nothing more.
With Charlene’s continued encouragement, Mitt hesitantly entered the room but stopped a few steps from the door. At that moment, Charlene was standing alongside the bed, pointing down to it repeatedly. Mitt was confused, not understanding what she was doing. “What is it?” he asked. He shrugged his shoulders and spread his hands, palms up, to indicate his bewilderment. Suddenly he had a flash of insight and immediately spoke up. “Is this the room where you were lobotomized?”
Charlene nodded yes and her happy expression faded. But she continued gesturing down at the bed, even more intensely. It was at that point that Mitt gathered that she wanted him to lie down on the bed, which he had absolutely no intention of doing. Instead, he took a step back, deciding it was time to ignore Charlene and get the hell out of the room. But before he could, she quickly rounded the end of the bed and approached him. Although his mind was shouting at him to turn around and flee, he somehow couldn’t do it, as he was momentarily transfixed by her unblinking, intensely blue eyes.
And then the worst possible thing happened. Without warning, she reached out and grasped his arm to pull him back toward the bed — worse still, he shockingly, terrifyingly felt it! There was actual physical contact and a tug, which was impossible with her being an apparition without physical presence. After all, he’d just seen sunlight pass right through her! How could she touch him? But she did!
With a sudden overwhelming sense of panic, Mitt yanked his arm free from Charlene’s grasp, spun around, and fled from the room. Once in the hall, he began running full tilt back toward the central stairway. As he did so, it occurred to him that he was at that moment living his recurrent nightmare. He was being chased down an arched, two-toned yellow-tan corridor by unknown forces whose presence had been announced by the shocking reality of physical contact with Charlene’s ghost.
With his breath coming in gasps, Mitt first turned right and then left. He was now in the building’s central corridor, racing toward the circular stairs. His plan was to rapidly descend the central stairway to the first floor and then dash out the door that he and Lashonda had used. At this point, he didn’t care if he was apprehended by Security. In fact, he hoped he would be.
But he didn’t quite make it to the central stairway. All at once, he came to an abrupt stop. Suddenly appearing directly ahead of him was a dense crowd of surgerized ghosts. But this gruesome horde was not carrying amputated limbs or excised tumors and organs. Instead, they were carrying all manner of old-fashioned hay forks, knives, and axes that appeared to be all too real, and they were coming toward him.
Unwilling to test whether these ghosts and their weapons could touch him or not, he changed direction, and in an utter panic fled back the way he’d come. After the first turn, he saw Charlene directly ahead, obviously pursuing him. But as he rapidly closed on her, he didn’t stop. Instead, at the last second he closed his eyes and kept running, unsure of what was about to happen when he collided with her. An instant later and still running, he reopened his eyes. She was no longer there.