The nagging sense that something was wrong wouldn't go away, though. Chase was normally out the door the instant his shifts ended; tonight, for some reason, he caught himself heading to young Mr. Renfield's room, just to have one last look, one last conversation.
The ward was quiet when he got there, and the corridor was deserted, which was odd. Chase cast a puzzled glance down the empty hall, which should have been quietly bustling even at this hour. He felt slightly uneasy, and impatiently told himself that he was just feeling a little unnerved still from the game-playing of the patient and his friends. Remembering how they'd played him was an instant cure for his apprehension.
He entered the patient's room and stopped near the foot of the bed, disappointed. Renfield was sound asleep, looking thin and childlike in the moonlight that fell across his pillow. There was, Chase knew, no rational excuse for waking him. He tried to throw off his curiosity, tried to tell himself that this was a good thing—a reason to stop wasting time here and go home. He shivered in the breeze, and then glanced sharply at the window, wondering how there could be a breeze. The windows up here didn't even open, did they?
But this one was open: the glass itself had been removed, as cleanly as a canvas cut from a frame. Chase moved numbly towards the gaping hole in the wall, bewildered. They were on the third floor. Why had a patient been left in this room? It wasn't safe. Chase blinked down at the ground, feeling dazed. The night air swirled in, rattling the blinds, and coiled itself lovingly around his ankles, cold and damp and caressing.
And then there was a horrible hissing sound from behind him, and Chase turned, and realized he was surrounded. It was the three Goth girls, the patient's little friends, but there was nothing cute about them by moonlight. Now they looked hard-eyed and adult, and overtly sexual, and threatening. He felt himself freeze, unexpectedly horrified by them. Their faces bore expressions of such unholy desire that they looked barely human; they were like things from a nightmare. He shrank back, barely knowing what it was he feared, his throat instantly too dry to shout for help. "It's the pretty one," the redhead murmured delightedly. "Doesn't he look delicious?"
For a long still moment there was only the terror, and the slow inexorable approach of the creatures as they closed in, and worst of all his own shameful physical reaction to the lascivious way they licked their lips and eyed him. The blonde stepped forward boldly, and with a gurgling laugh said that she would have his first kisses. "But," she assured the others teasingly, "he is very young and blond. There are kisses for us all."
Sickeningly, he found himself feeling almost willing to be prey to them. He waited in an agony of anticipation, loathing himself for the flood of mingled desire and revulsion. And then there was a firm, solid presence at his back, though Chase had not seen or heard anyone enter the room. His knees weakened with relief.
He couldn't pull his eyes
away from the girls to see who it was that stood so close behind him
that they were almost touching, but he could tell it was a man,
someone taller than Chase, and someone, too, whose presence caused
the three fiends to shrink back, dropping their eyes in obeisance.
Chase drew a deep, ragged breath.
"How dare you?" said the man behind Chase, his voice quiet but furious. The three females cast fluttering looks of cringing apology past Chase as the stranger went on, "You know I have forbidden you to touch him. How dare you even look at him? He is mine."
What the hell? Chase wondered, but before he could turn or speak he felt impossibly strong arms go around him, one around his chest, pulling him back firmly to lean against the man; the other gripped his throat. But at the instant of contact there was a sharp cry of pain, and Chase was released. He stumbled with the sudden removal of support, falling to one knee before he could regain his balance, and almost swooning with a wave of vertigo. When he looked up they were gone: all three girls, and whoever else had been in the room, had simply vanished. The room was dark, almost as if smoke or soot hung in the air, but it was unmistakably empty of anyone other than Chase and the still-sleeping patient.
"Weird," Chase said out loud. The room felt too large, and too empty, for his voice. He stood up and rubbed his throat with one shaking hand, his fingers closing around the dangling silver cross. He'd all but forgotten he was wearing it until now. He frowned, and then made up his mind that this was going to have to be one of those things he didn't confide to anyone.