By Wolf O'Donnell
Author's Note: I've received word from Fuzy Llama that this story is too confusing, due to its detailed description. Well, it is a PG-13. I'm assuming that the people reading it are reasonably mature enough to read such things without getting bored. But I'll try to find some middle ground. Oh, and Blackfire14, you read too much Harry Potter. Hogwarts is most likely based on J. K. Rowling's very own school experiences and so is Streete Court.
P.S. I wasn't liking the Boarding School direction, so I've decided to alter the plot slightly.
The darkness was suffocating and it seemed as if he had lived in this darkness for what seemed like countless years. It was a stillness, a silence that drowned all life and seemed to make the world pale in its wake. Trapped in a limbo between Life and Death, all one can experience is the pure darkness and silence of sleep. Dreams were his only reality and even in these dreams, the colour and vitality had been drained away.
Yet now what was this strange new feeling?
An awakening, perhaps?
Yes, and even as time passed, the complex nature of an awakening started to blossom, working along a growing cascade of factors, neural networks within the brain and causing the very body and mind to stir from its slumber. The dim stirrings of the subconscious that lead to the full dawning of the consciousness, that which we experience every morning when we wake from our slumber, until at last we recognise ourselves again. So it was with him, taking form, a mist of awareness, of sensation, growing and making itself real and known.
Soon, he became aware. His eyes fluttered open, to be greeted by a vast expanse of white that was as bland and still as the Darkness that had once been all he could experience before. And as his eyes became adjusted to the light, he soon made out structure in the white and found they were tiles with long fluorescent lights attached to them.
That was strange. The ceiling above him didn't seem like the ceiling of his Dorm Room. Where was he and what was he doing there? How did he come to be in this strange place that he had never seen before and why could he not remember how he had come to be here?
"Hey, everybody! He's awake!"
That voice. That voice sounded so familiar to Danny, yet why couldn't he place it? He turned his eyes and saw two figures standing by the side of his bed with familiar faces on them, faces that reminded him whom the voice had belonged to.
"Guys?" exclaimed Danny in surprise.
"Danny," said Tucker, "good to see you're okay, man."
"Yeah," agreed Sam, as she smiled at him, a faint smile that Danny couldn't quite place.
"Danny!" cried Jazz suddenly and she rushed forwards, hugging him tightly. "I was so worried about you!" She then pulled away from him until she was at arm's length from her younger brother. "What were you doing out there?"
Danny looked around him instead of replying. He couldn't understand. Why was he not at Streete Court High? This room didn't seem like the room at the Boarding School he had been sent to by his parents. It looked more like a hospital room more than anything else. Or was it? He wondered, as he attempted to sit up.
"Whoa, don't get up," called out Sam, as she reached out to him and gently pushed him down. "You don't want to strain yourself."
"What do you mean?" asked Danny and for the first time, he realised that he sounded very quiet and weak as if his strength had been sapped straight out of his body. "Where am I? What happened?"
His questions were met with silence, a suffocating silence that seemed more painful for Danny's older sister and his two best friends than to him. Why were they so silent? What had happened at Streete Court that had ended up with him being in this hospital? And the more the silence continued, the more his fears started to deepen and consume his mind, pushing all other thoughts into the shadowy recesses of his mind.
"I don't understand," said Danny, as he shook his head. "The last I remember was being in my Dorm Room."
"Dorm Room?" blurted out Tucker in surprise. "What Dorm room, man?"
A frown appeared on Danny's face, as he looked towards Tucker. What did his friend mean by that?
"The one at the Boarding School I got sent off to," he said sternly. "Remember?"
"Uh… Danny… You were never sent off to a boarding school," said Jazz with a heavy tone of concern in her voice.
Never got sent off to a Boarding School? But… And now that Danny thought about it, something didn't quite add up.
"But… you guys saw me off and everything," protested Danny in disbelief. "I got sent off to…" He then trailed off, as memories started resurfacing back up to his mind. "But…" he murmured to himself.
Danny looked at them and saw the concerned looks on their faces.
"I got sent off after," he began and then trailed off. "After…" he said again, only to trail off. He thought hard and long. "It was a dream," he said quietly to himself, as he realised he couldn't remember why he had been sent off to the Boarding School in the first place, "but it seemed so real." He shook his head in disbelief. "It all seemed so real," he said to himself more loudly. "I could have sworn I was there."
"Where?" asked Tucker.
It was then that Danny realised how loudly he had been talking, though still quiet, but just audible enough for his friends and his sister to hear him.
"Oh, nothing," replied Danny with a shake of his head. "It was just a dream I had, but it seemed so real I could have sworn it was real."
But if that was a dream, then… How? What had happened then before he had ended up with that dream?
"So, dude, what happened?" asked Tucker curiously, before Sam kicked him in the shin.
Danny thought quietly to himself. He wasn't quite sure, but from the way that Sam kicked Tucker, it must have had something to do with his ghostly and currently nameless alter-ego. It must have been, otherwise why would Sam have done that to Tucker? After all, as far as he was concerned and as far as Sam and Tucker were concerned, Jazz knew nothing about his special skills, those powers given to him by the accident in his parents' laboratory.
Suddenly, Danny realised and remembered what had happened to him.
It was if the floodgates had opened and memories poured into his mind, drowning out all other thoughts. Danny remembered the fight against the masked Ghost Hunter and his Undead Army….
The graveyard had been quiet, almost too quiet for Danny. He had arrived there, after transforming into his ghost form, a white-haired youth with glowing green eyes, dressed in a black jumpsuit with white gloves and white boots that were as white as his snow white hair.
For you see, he had sensed a ghost in the nearby vicinities. Many ghosts, to be exact, and it was his job to defeat them and send them back to the Spirit World before they could cause any trouble in the World of the Living. That was his duty, a duty he had figured out for himself after gaining his special powers.
Without warning, though, a beam of light blue energy suddenly flew through the air and struck him full on in the chest, knocking him back through the air to fly and crash into a headstone with a painful thud.
When the mist started to clear, Danny lifted his head up, ignoring the pain that now throbbed where he had hit the hard stone of the headstone. And in the now clear graveyard, he could see a table in front of him, draped in a yellow cloth and someone was standing behind it with three candles positioned on the left, right and in front of him, and huge yellow banners behind it, marked with Chinese characters in bright red ink.
The three candles were all red, the middle one longer than the others, and both had rectangular pieces of yellow paper plastered on them, each with a Chinese incantation written on them in red ink, the same incantation that was marked on the banners that flapped in the wind behind the man that had fired at Danny.
At the time, Danny had thought nothing of it, but he noticed that the man was wearing a mask with no eyeholes in it, a white mask with a Chinese character painted on it in red ink. The mysterious stranger had also been wearing yellow, Oriental silk robes and a black Oriental hat on top of his head. All of these were strange things for a man to wear, especially for someone who was so obviously a ghost hunter.
And there in his right hand was a smoking object, from which the energy beam had come from. It was a wooden octagon, painted red and green with a circular mirror in the middle. Surrounding the mirror were eight sets of three lines and each set was of a varying combination of a full line or a line that had been broken in the middle. Something similar was on the cloth of the yellow table, but in the place of the circular mirror was the universally-recognised symbol of Yin-Yang.
"Strange set up you've got here," Danny had said.
Another beam of light shot out from it, but this time Danny turned invisible and intangible, hoping that the beam of energy would pass through him. It didn't and he was hit in the chest again and sent flying back again, a searing pain burning his chest as if someone with a red hot iron had branded him.
"I want you," the masked man had whispered, his voice echoing inside the mask as if had been wearing a metallic bucket on his head. "I want you, Ghost Boy."
"Well, you'll just have to catch me, won't you?" Danny had said in reply, before he flew up into the air and dodged another blast of light. He had then flown straight at the masked man, but was suddenly caught in another blast of light that had sent him crashing down to the floor.
It smarted and he didn't know how the masked man was doing it. Whatever the beam was, it sure could harm ghosts. He had to avoid it if he wanted to get anywhere near the masked man.
Then with a great battle cry, Danny rushed straight at the masked man, flying through the air. And he would have made it, if something hadn't been in the way like a huge sheet of glass. He had crashed into it like a fly smashing against a window and then fell back, clutching at his head.
"Ow! What's going on?" he cried out loud, as he looked towards the masked man. He saw him pointing down and then his gaze trailed down and he saw a circle surrounding the masked man.
"Ghosts cannot harm anyone that stands in a circle," the masked man had told Danny, as he put the wooden octagon down and dipped his fingers into a pot near a candle. He then flicked his fingers at Danny, flicking a few droplets on to his forehead. "Now, stay still so I can eat your ghost personality." He then rang a small silver bell.
And the ringing, like the ringing of all bells ever since the accident, had made Danny's head hurt. It was nothing like the loud cacophonous ringing of the school bells, however, but it still hurt slightly. It was like one of those irritating pains that didn't quite hurt but made itself known to you...
Danny could still remember the zombies hopping towards him from behind the table. Their faces were covered in large, rectangular sheets of yellow paper inscribed with a Chinese incantation in red, like the ones that had been on the candles. They were large enough, however, to obscure their faces and their noses and mouth, yet the zombies, Chinese vampires the masked man had called then, still managed to find Danny.
He had thought they would be easy to dispose of, especially seeing as all they could do was hop on both feet with their arms outstretched. So he had knocked them down with blasts of ectoplasmic energy, but when the man rang the bell again they all managed to float back on to their feet and resumed their hopping towards the young ghost boy.
And a ghost he was, and with being a ghost came its benefits. He had managed to avoid them by becoming invisible and insubstantial and in doing so, he flew straight towards the man that controlled these Chinese vampires without any hindrance and he would have made it too, if it hadn't been for one oversight.
Only, Danny didn't anticipate the masked man's enchanted sword. The sword was an ordinary one, or would have been, were it not for the Chinese incantation that had been stuck on to the sword, the very same one that adorned the candles and the faces of the zombies. As it was, the blade of the sword bit into him as it would have done to a real human being, even when he became invisible and intangible.
And the masked man had been very quick. Danny received multiple blows, the broad side of the blade on his head and the sharp edges against his chest and sides. And the pain had been more agonising than anything he had ever experienced with his other encounters with the other ghosts or ghost hunters that he had fought.
Danny could still remember what the man had done next. He could remember how the masked man had grabbed a hollowed-out gourd that had a stopper placed in its end. It had the same incantation as did the masked man's other items stuck on to it and when he opened the gourd-bottle, it was like activating the Fenton Ghost Flask that his Dad had invented, yet he was now on the receiving end of it and his ghost-side was being torn away from his body.
He had almost lost his ghost-half to the masked man, had he not fired a blast of ghostly energy that had shattered the table and sent the masked man flying backwards.
Yet… That was the last thing Danny could remember, that is, until his memories of being transferred to Streete Court. But that was a dream, wasn't it? It had to be. How did he end up in Mr. Lancer's class soon afterwards? He certainly couldn't remember anything between those two events and even the events in Mr. Lancer's class after the battle seemed hazy. Had he collapsed in the graveyard and if so, who had been the one to save him from the masked man?
"The last thing I remember was being in the graveyard," said Danny quietly.
"Yeah, we found you there," agreed Tucker with a nod of his head. "Man, were you beat up pretty bad."
"What happened there?" asked Jazz more insistently this time.
For a while, Danny debated about whether to tell Jazz the truth. It would have been best, but, how would his sister react? Would she shun him?
"I don't remember," he decided to say in reply to his question. "I'm sorry, Jazz. I just can't remember."
Jazz looked at Danny as if she didn't believe him. It was a look of complete and utter disbelief, as if she knew he was lying, but that expression soon disappeared.
"That's okay," said Jazz reassuringly with a slight smile on her face. "All that matters is that you're okay. I mean, when we first found you…" She couldn't finish the sentence, almost as if seeing her little brother in his beaten up state had been incredibly traumatising. "I'm sorry, Danny," she said quietly, as she looked away from him. "I'm sorry."
"About what?" asked Danny curiously, and then he noticed that his Mother and Father weren't there. "Where's Mom and Dad? Did something happen to them?" he asked her. He was worried that when he lost consciousness, he reverted back to his human form, and in that instant, the masked man could have recognised him and may have known whom his parents were.
Jazz laughed, although it didn't sound like a sincere laugh. It was more of a… What kind of a laugh was it? It certainly wasn't a happy one.
"No, they're fine," she told him with a reply. "They're on their way right now."
Danny sighed in relief. For a moment there, he feared that the masked man had targeted his parents soon after the battle. But if they were fine, then what was Jazz looking so down for?
"So what's…?" he began.
"You've been out for quite some time, Danny," Sam told him quietly.
"Yeah, a really long time," agreed Tucker with a nod of his head.
"How long?" asked Danny worriedly, as he looked at them carefully, trying to discern how long he had been out from the looks on their faces. He waited. There seemed to be no reply from them and the expressions on their faces made him fear the worst. How long had he been in a coma? A long time? How long? Two weeks? Six months? A year? "H-h-h-how long?" he stuttered, fearing he had spent a huge chunk of his life asleep.
"Two months, man," was Tucker's reply. "We thought you'd never wake up."
Danny mouthed out the words, two months, in disbelief. He couldn't believe that he had spent a sixth of the year unconscious, almost eight weeks unconscious.
"Oh man, that's…" he began, only to trail off. "Two months?"
"Yeah, but it doesn't matter now," said Jazz with a shake of her head. "Now, you can come back home."
"I'm 'fraid that won't be possible, ma'am," called out a Texan-sounding voice from the doorway.
Standing there was a man that looked very familiar to Danny. It was a doctor, that was sure, but he looked exactly like Reverend Fordyce did from his dream.
"Howdy, Danny," greeted the doctor, as he swaggered up towards Danny's bed. "I'm Dr. Fordyce," he said, introducing himself to a wide-eyed Danny. "I must say, kid, you've done pretty darned well to wake up so soon. Yes, siree."
"What do you mean Danny can't come home?" asked Jazz angrily, as she turned to Fordyce.
The doctor was scratching at his head with a pencil he held in his left hand, as he turned to face Jazz and Danny's friends.
"Well, Ms…" he trailed off until she Jazz told him her name, "Ms. Fenton, we have to keep Danny here for a week or so for observations. He was beat pretty badly and last I saw a CAT scan of his noggin', he looked pretty okay… But we can't take chances, ma'am." He shook his head. "Nope, we can't take chances," he repeated himself. "Y'see, ma'am, we've had instances of patients relapsing soon after they've awoken."
The doctor smiled widely.
"Trust me on this," he told her. "It ain't safe for him to be discharged, not so quickly anyhow." And then he said, in response to the expressions on their faces, "Don't worry, though. You'll still be able to visit him and I'm sure it'll be mighty better now that he's awake."
Suddenly there was a jolly little ringing, one that Danny recognised as being from Jazz's mobile. She excused herself quickly and then went out to take the call, much to Fordyce's annoyance.
"Would you kindly take that outside the hospital?" he nearly shouted at her. "No mobiles switched on in the hospital!"
"I'm sorry," apologised Jazz, before she dashed out quickly.
"So, how're you feeling, son?" asked Dr. Fordyce, as he reached in his pocket for a little light. He reached over and grabbed Danny firmly, lifting his eyelid and shining a light into his eyes.
"Uh… fine, Doc," replied Danny, as a light was shone into one eye and then the other.
"Good to hear that, son," drawled Dr. Fordyce, as a beeping resounded in the room. He delved into his coat pocket and then brought a pager, looking at it carefully. "Hmm… well, I'm sorry as all Heck, but I'm needed elsewhere." He then dashed out, without even saying another word or even calling for someone to take over for him.
Now that Sam and Tucker were the only ones in the room with Danny, he decided to tell them everything about the night he had encountered the masked man. He told them everything, about how the masked man couldn't possibly have seen through his mask and how he had called upon a small army of undead zombies that he had called Chinese vampires.
"Reminds me of some Chinese film I saw," said Samantha calmly. "Seems as if you had an encounter with a Chinese exorcist, Danny, but I don't remember the guys in the films wearing any masks."
"Maybe he just didn't want Danny to see him," suggested Tucker. "I mean, most of these ghost hunters wear masks right? It's kinda there thing."
"I guess it is," sighed Danny. "Still, I wish I could have got a good look at him."
Danny didn't know why, but he really wanted to encounter that Ghost Hunter again. He wanted to beat him and unmask him, but for what reason? That was unknown even to him, as if it was another personality that wanted it, a personality that was separate from the rest of him. He shook his head, as if it would help, as if he could shake the thoughts right out of his mind and be rid of them, those scary thoughts that didn't seem to belong to him, or at least, thoughts that he didn't want to own up to having.
Suddenly, he felt a chill run down his spine and his breath became a cold mist. They were all signs that a ghost was nearby. It made him want to go off and find the source of this ghost, but just as he was contemplating turning ghost, Jazz walked back in with a forlorn expression on her face.
"Jazz?" exclaimed Danny in surprise.
"Mom and Dad can't make it," she told him.
An angry silence followed soon after that seemed to drain all energy out of Danny and his thoughts of chasing down the ghostly presence he had sensed earlier disappeared from his mind.
"Figures," said Danny bitterly.
It seemed to him that his Father had almost always never been there for him. Dad had always been too busy with his ghost-obsession to ever care. It was a powerful obsession that was a black hole, that devoured his Father's time and even started to eat into his Mother's time, dragging her into the work to capture ghosts. Low grades were a concern of theirs, especially since the accident in his parents' lab, yet it seemed that only his Mother ever cared and she was hardly ever there for him thanks to his Father's ghost obsession.
"Now, that's not fair, Danny," protested Jazz. "They've been there for us plenty of times."
"To embarrass us?" retorted Danny, silencing Jazz in an instant.
He was right. Most of the time they had been there, they had been nothing more than a source of embarrassment. Still, even those moments had disappeared as of late, thanks to the grant their parents had received from the Blue Bow Group, some strange conglomeration of rich investors that had expressed an interest in his parents' work.
"Sometimes I wonder if Dad even cares," sighed Danny.
"Sure they do," protested Jazz. "You know they want you to get good grades and grow up to be a fine young man."
Danny's thoughts drifted back to his dreams, the very dreams that had plagued his comatose days. Perhaps they contained some truth in them, the way they seemed to capture elements from his life.
"So why is Dad never there for us?".
A banner hung on the wall. It was a blue banner with a black bow-shape inside of it, looking more like a small circle with two triangles sticking out of it. A blue B could be found in each end of the bow-shape, the one on the right-side being the mirror image of the B on the other side. This was the symbol of the Blue Bow Group, though normally, the bow would be blue with white letters inside of it.
That particular symbol was on the breast pocket of black suit that the man wore, as he sat in front of the banner at a large mahogany desk with his hands clasped together as if he were waiting for himself. He seemed to be like any other generic man sitting at a desk, with his black suit and normal blue shirt and normal blue tie. The green four-leaf clover badge on his lapel seemed to be a distinguishing factor, though, as was the left lens of his glasses, which was tinted red.
Suddenly, the phone rang. He reached over and picked up a green phone from its hook, holding it up to his ear.
"O'Donnell, speaking," he said sternly. He then heard the voice on the other end. "Ah, Fordyce, what news have you of the boy?" he asked curiously, his British accent as thick as it had been in Danny's dream. He listened quietly before saying, "What? You promised that you could keep his brain activity flat-lined. A conscious Daniel Fenton is no good to us."
O'Donnell sighed angrily.
"When can you get the chance to put him on haloperidol?" he asked the man on the other end. He waited for the reply and then said, "No, that's not soon enough. Already his very presence is interfering with the running of the GPFDM." He then nodded, as if in agreement to Fordyce's comments. "Yes, we want him prepped for the Destiny Control Drugs that Sifu prepared."
He listened carefully as Fordyce said something to him.
"Don't be ridiculous!" he nearly shouted into the receiver. "That much haloperidol will damage the boy, if not outright kill him. We want him in one piece, ghost personality included. Got that? You can't eat his ghost side. There's only one ghost side and we need it, if we're to summon the Shi Ti'en Shen Wang." O'Donnell's breathing became shallower, as he listened. "No! I don't care if you need to. Eat his ghost side and I will come over there and hollow you out. I'm sure there's plenty of ghosts out there that'd love to have a physical body in this world…"
A smile spread across O'Donnell's face.
"See that you do that then," he told Fordyce calmly. "Goodbye, Fordyce." He then hung the phone back on its receiver.
The phone rang again and O'Donnell snatched it off its hook again.
"Doc, why can't I move my legs?" asked a crackly voice on the other end of the phone.
O'Donnell slammed the phone back on its hook, and then tacked on a yellow sticky note with a Chinese incantation written on it in red ink, dipping his fingers into a pot of water and then smearing on the top edge of the sticky note.
"Blasted ghosts," he murmured under his breath, before he turned back to his paper work. "One day… One day…"
Roslyn Hospital, the very hospital in which Danny had been interred, was a strange one. It sat on the outskirts of the city in a vast expanse of countryside that looked uncharacteristic of the surroundings the city should have been in.
Many of the hospital buildings were what you'd expect from a hospital. Yet the hospital itself had once been a Manor, bought from a rich man that had gone bankrupt.
There was a copse directly to the south of the Manor, a small woodland, that occupied the same size area that the Manor's main building took up. To the north-east was a lake surrounded by trees on all but one of its sides, and a small bridge to the west of it where the water drained from the lake through a small stream.
The main buildings of the hospital lay directly to the west of the Manor, which had been converted into a Mental Institute by the Hospital Directors. Maudsley, it was called, and it was one of the most feared buildings in the set of buildings that made up the hospital.
The place, in fact, looked exactly like the Boarding School in Danny's dream down to the gardens to the east of the vast lawn on the east-side of Maudsley. Even down to the large purple-leaved beech tree that stood there at the steps at one end of the lawn, like a domineering giant.
It made him wonder about the dream and how the grounds of this hospital had become implanted in his dream. Was it a dream? Or perhaps this hospital was the dream and he was really back in the Boarding School? But… The events before he was sent to the Boarding School just didn't add up. This couldn't have been the dream, could it?
"Really, I don't need this," protested Danny, as he was wheeled across the lawn by a blonde nurse whom looked exactly like the Matron from his dreams and even shared the same name.
"Nonsense, you need the fresh air," protested Alethea.
Danny shook his head.
"No, I mean, I can walk, honestly," he said, although he didn't like the idea of walking around in the paper-thin gown he was currently wearing.
"Dr. Fordyce didn't like the idea of that," said Alethea in reply. "He feared you might relapse."
"No way," protested Danny. "I'm fine, really!" He then turned round to face the east-side of the Mental Institute and saw the highly mullioned French windows that led to the library.
"Yeah, that place gives me the creeps too," whispered Alethea quietly, "but not as much as Arcadia Tower." She then turned to face the white tower, half-covered in ivy, that rose up from the main set of hospital buildings to the west of the Mental Institute. "There's something about that place that just…" She shivered.
"What goes on in there?" asked Danny curiously, as he turned round in his wheelchair to look at it. And he couldn't help but shiver upon looking at it too.
"That's where the hospital labs are located," was Alethea's reply. "All of the labs are there, and of course, the morgue too."
Danny didn't say another thing, as he was wheeled into the garden. He sighed, as he was moved there and saw patients and nurses doing their rounds around the paths that passed roses and flowers of all kinds.
A white butterfly flitted past him, joined by two others. They danced in front of him before moving towards one of the flowers, where they flitted about, almost as if they were fighting over who got to land on the flower and then they went their separate ways. He watched as each one landed on a separate flower and then rested there for a while, before flitting up and flying off together.
"They say that if the first butterfly you see in the year is a white one, you will have good luck all year round," Alethea told Danny.
"Yeah?" exclaimed Danny in genuine interest. "I could sure need some good luck."
Danny then thought of the last year and what he had gone through. Fighting a crazed cafeteria woman, a technology-obsessed ghost and of course, Vlad and Valerie and Skulker… On top of that, he kept getting stick from Dash and Lancer, both of whom seemed to have it in for him. And… he shivered, his breath becoming a mist in front of him.
"Ghost eater."
"You say something?" asked Danny.
"I'm sorry?" asked Alethea.
"Did you say something?" asked Danny.
"Nope," was Alethea's reply and she sounded very sincere.
That phrase, Ghost Eater, sounded very familiar to him. It was the same thing he thought he heard Alex say in his dream. And now that he thought about it, the masked man he had fought two months ago, had said something about eating his ghost side. Was that man a Ghost Eater? And who said it just then, a few seconds ago? He wanted to know. Who spoke to him, calling him a Ghost Eater?
Danny shifted around in the wheelchair, looking around him but there was no one around for ages.
"You sure?" he asked her, but now that he thought about it, it certainly didn't sound like her voice. "I could have sworn someone said something."
"Really?" said Alethea, sounding as if she had just stumbled on something very interesting.
That very tone in her voice suddenly made Danny realise that he had just jeopardised his chances of going home early.
"No, it's not what you think!" he shouted suddenly. "I really did hear someone say something. I didn't imagine it! I'm not going funny in the head, I swear!"
"I'm sure you're not," said Alethea calmly, in the tone adopted for those you normally reserve for those you think are crazy. She looked around her and then wondered whether it was the air that was making him act up like this. "I think it's time we go in," she said, as she turned him round and pushed him back in the direction of the hospital.
"Holy Crab Patties!" cried an old man, as he wandered straight towards them. He had fashioned his belt into some strange device, with metallic wires stretched out from the belt, making him look like some deformed half-spider, half-man. "They want to can our corn," the old man screamed. "Corn should grow free in the soil or rot in the soil, not in tin cans! Can't you see? The Judges won't like this one bit. No! No! They won't like this!"
Suddenly, a few nurses rushed up to the old man and grabbed him.
Danny watched as the nurses subdued the old man.
"That's Blind Gerald," whispered Alethea into Danny's ear. "You needn't worry about him. He's mostly harmless."
Yet, there was something about Blind Gerald's voice that seemed familiar to Danny. He could have sworn that he heard that voice from somewhere before, but where could he have?
"Do I have to stay here long?" asked Danny curiously.
"I'm sure you won't," replied Alethea with a friendly smile on her lips. "Now, let's get you back inside." She wheeled him back towards the Milne Wing of the Hospital.
And Dr. Fordyce watched from an opening in the hedge through his mirrored sunglasses, with a wide smile on his lazy face.
