Haunted Humans Part 1

NINA KIRIKI HOFFMAN.

HAUNTED HUMANS.

ONE.

Dorothy jean demain, presently known as Dorothy Jean Hand, sometimes called Dot by people who didn't know her and almost always D.J. by those who did, gripped the phone handset between her ear and shoulder. Her right hand held a pen poised over a carbonless message pad; her left hand sorted the Mental Healing Center's mail. The four office hours following Friday's lunch break stretched ahead, aggravated by dealing with the operator who had picked up when D.J. rang the answering service.

"Sandy, have you checked account 551 for me yet?" D.J. said as patiently as she could, breaking in on two minutes of inane chatter.

She listened to Sandy splutter through a message for Dr. Arlene Bollings, D.J.'s boss, managing to extract relevant information with great difficulty. She was just about to demand the phone number of the person leaving the message when Sandy broke in with, "Uh, but-- hey, Dot, there's a message here for you, too."

"Let's finish with the first one, please." D.J. could hear her voice tightening.

She wanted to grab Sandy and shake the information out of her like salt. But she was in secretary mode right now, level, efficient, no matter what the circ.u.mstances. She hunched her shoulders, then took a calming breath.

"But the one for you is creepy." Sandy's voice was high, her words slow. D.J.

wondered what she looked like; all she could tell was that Sandy chewed gum loudly and snappingly, and occasionally smoked; the small sucked intakes of breath were a giveaway.

"I still need the phone number on this one, Sandy." Sandy had purged vital information from the files without communicating it before. D.J. had learned the hard way to persist with her.

After three tries, Sandy managed to tell her the phone number. D.J. wrote, sighed, and said, "Is that it for this message?"

"Yeah, I guess. There's one from that psycho nutcase Dr. Kabukin's seeing--"

D.J. resisted an urge to ask just which psycho nutcase. Dr. Kabukin handled therapy cases, while Dr. Bollings did divorce, custody, and criminal evaluations for the courts. D.J. generally liked Dr. Kabukin's patients better. Most of them were interested in changing. Most of Dr. Bollings' patients were interested in fooling the doctor.

"-- a couple real boring messages for the other doctors, and then this one for you. It's pretty weird, Dot."

"Why don't you read it to me? And get it over with? D.J. poised her pen at the top of the next message blank, wondering if Sandy would communicate any of the information in order.

"To, uh, Dorothy Jean, from Chase. Do you suppose that's a first or a last name?"

To stop her hand from shaking, D.J. pressed the pen down on the message form so hard it punched through several sheets. "Go on."

"There's, like, no number. It just says, 'You know what I need and I'm coming to get it.' Don't you think that's weird?"

D.J. said nothing.

"Well, I do. Kind of creepy. Did you get that? 'You know what I need and I'm coming to get it.' Dot, you still there? Darn, I bet she hung up. Why do people always hang up on me?"

Deciding to take this as a suggestion, D.J. quietly lowered the phone's handset until it clicked into the cradle. Chase? It couldn't be Chase. She stared over the four-foot-high divider that separated her desk and computer hutch from the office waiting room, her gaze finally settling on the crystal vase of Double Delight roses Dr. Kabukin had brought in that morning and set among the magazines and self-help books on the gla.s.s-topped table between the two blue-and-white striped couches. Look how pink and white the roses are, D.J.

thought, just like a baby, perhaps, or the hopes of a young girl on her wedding night.

From the white walls, colorful abstract pictures glowed in the sun slanting through the picture window. Leftover Oregon raindrops glistened on the lawn out front. Everything in D.J.'s view looked cool and clean and calm. Untouched tranquility, like her life before Chase.

She shuddered and lifted the phone again. For a moment she closed her eyes tight, concentrating on cras.h.i.+ng all the thoughts she didn't want to entertain.

She pressed autodial for the answering service, and smiled down at the message pad when Poppy picked up.

"Account 551, please," D.J. said, and took the rest of the messages without a hitch.

Morgan Hesch sat on one of the puffy striped couches in the Mental Healing Center waiting room and stared at the bits of dirt he'd tracked on the white speckled rug. Why did they have a lawn out front if they wanted to keep the rug clean? Well, yeah, there was a brick walk that wound across the lawn, but what if you were coming from the other direction? And the lawn was green and healthy, but there were those flower beds. Somebody must rake the edges all the time to make the dirt look so -- so clean. Like nothing had ever stepped on it since the dawn of time. Morgan hated that kind of clean. If blackboards were bare in his college cla.s.ses when he got there, he always chalked something on them before he sat down. If the dirt were blank he just had to put a footprint in it. If things were wide open, any force, good or evil, could enter and control them.

So the floor was no longer blank, either, not peppered with those chunks of earth that had fallen out of the waffle-stomper soles of his hiking boots.

Morgan looked at the bits of squared dirt and slid his left hand in between the third and fourth b.u.t.tons on his s.h.i.+rt, hiding it against his chest. One of his insiders, Shadow, always wanted to hide Morgan's hands.

"Miss Deej?" Morgan said, his knees knocking against each other, not because he was cold, just to be doing something.

He could only see the top of her head over the wall that hid the desk from him and everybody else. She had messy frizzy brown hair that she parted in the middle. He watched the part lean back until he could see Deej's eyes, green like the devil's, over the divider as she looked at him.

"Yes, Morgan," she said. One of her better voices. Not the first-time-&phone voice which said, I'm-here-to-help,-don't bother-to-know-I'm-human. Definitely not the I-can't-have-a-relations.h.i.+p-with-you-because-it-wouldn't-be-prof essional voice. She'd given up on that one after he'd been seeing Dr. Dara Kabukin for two months. Not the don't-bother-me-I'm-in-the-middle-of-something voice, and not the okay,-okay-yes-I-guess-I-can-look-up voice. More of a I-don't-know-what-I'm-doing-but-I'm-glad-for-a-distraction voice. Actually he didn't think he'd ever heard her use this one before.

Morgan figured Deej must have insiders since she had lots of voices like he did.

Also, she was one of the few people who could recognize his insiders just by the way they talked. Even Dr. Dara got confused sometimes, but Deej always knew who was talking if it was anybody she'd ever talked to before. Timmy liked to play tricks on Deej, but even he was happy when the tricks didn't work. Morgan wondered if Deej had ever thought about being a doctor. Even though her hair was messy and she had the devil's eyes, he might go see her if she was a doctor.

"I'm thirsty," he said.

"Would you like some water?"

"Yes, please. And paper? Pencil?" The voice that asked the last part belonged to the newest insider, who wasn't used to using Morgan's vocal cords and wasn't supposed to talk until Morgan had gotten to know him, anyway. The new insider's voice hadn't sorted itself out yet; it sounded a lot like Morgan.

Deej stood up so he could see about a third of her, the top third. She was wearing a blue and white s.h.i.+rt, and some little bits of color on her lips, just the outside edges. Mostly if she had any color on her lips it was all over them.

Today was not like other days.

She held out some white paper and a pencil with a blunt tip. After he took the things from her, she headed into the other room, the one with the sink and the little baby fridge and the table where you took tests.

The new insider was clamoring to get its hands on the paper and pencil. Morgan's appointment with Dr. Dara wouldn't start for another fifteen minutes. Morgan asked this anxious new insider if fifteen minutes would be enough, and the insider said he'd do what he could, if it was okay with Morgan. Sure, said Morgan. He sat back and let go of his hands. The insider used the left hand to draw a picture real fast of a man's face. The man had dark thick eyebrows and shadowy eyes and his mouth was wide but it sure wasn't smiling. What interested Morgan as he watched the picture form in front of him was that it looked like a photograph, with gray places under the nose and eyebrows, like parts of the face stuck right out of the paper and had shadows. He had never drawn anything like this before.

He finished. Deej brought him a cup with water in it, then looked at his picture without asking and dropped the water. The water splashed on Deej's sandals. Some hit Morgan's hiking boots, but most of it hit the rug.

"Miss Deej," said Morgan.

"Ah, ah, ah, oh, I'm sorry, Morgan," she said, breathing like a dog on a hot day. "I'll get you another."

"Miss Deej, you having a seizure?" he asked.

"Well, maybe, yes, maybe," she said, and ran into the sink-fridge-test room.

Today was definitely not like other days. Morgan had never seen Deej upset before.

When she came back, she handed him the water without spilling any and said, "Morgan, who is that a picture of?"

"I don't know. One of the insiders did it."

"Which insider?"

"Now, Miss Deej," said Clift, "you know it would be unprofessional of us to discuss our case with the secretary."

"Oh, come on, Clift," said Deej. "I'm not asking you for a diagnosis or even intimate personal details. I was just wondering which one of you did it."