Chapter 13: Permission
When Vlad woke up, the first thing he noticed was that the white ceiling above him was different.
It was white.
There was nothing particular about it, nothing that could be considered recognizable or fundamentally other.
It wasn't the white, indistinguishable ceiling he'd been staring at for more than two months.
It wasn't his room at the hospital.
Vlad had no idea of where he was.
it wasn't enough that he was dead that his corpse was falling to pieces that no one wanted to acknowledge it
He winced, tried to sit up on the bed not his bed not the bed he'd gotten used to at the hospital not the bed he'd spent enough time in to think of as his. The world shifted slowly and he found himself sitting, his head ringing a bit.
He could feel his body, kinda. The disorientation, the confusion came from that, too.
Vlad moved his hands a bit – they did what he expected them to, he felt his arms moving. Not like the night before.
still there was something
it wasn't exactly like before
he could move he could feel he could but something wasn't quite right something seemed out of place the angles weren't good something was off
it was his body corpse body and he could use it normally and yet
it didn't feel like it used to
He blinked – took the room in.
It looked like a hospital room, but no, it wasn't his hospital room. The walls were a shade bluer, the floor was the wrong color of linoleum, the bed was to the right of what he assumed to be the corridor's door, the other door – bathroom, probably – looked like fake wood. There was a round, white wall clock next to a window that only showed a blue expanse of sky. Next to the bed, a small shelf with bandages and his eyepatch. A purple chair against the nearest wall.
He didn't know this room.
Before he could start panicking where why how, the corridor's door opened, and an older woman entered, her eyes on her notepad. She was dressed almost like a nurse – but not quite. Vlad wouldn't be able to tell what was off, but he'd seen a lot of public hospital nurses during the last months, and something didn't add up here.
She looked up. Their eyes met.
The woman squinted at him for a moment, looking wrong-footed – and like he wasn't supposed to be awake at all which greatly offended her somehow.
Vlad didn't know what to say, didn't feel like there was anything he could should say.
I was dead
I was dead and someone stole my corpse
I was dead and someone stole my corpse and now I'm not alive either
Eventually the woman huffed, looked at the hour, noted something on her notepad – and spoke to him once that was all done.
"I will get the director as well as your assigned nurse."
Vlad shuddered when she closed the door behind her – he didn't know what she meant, not about a director, not about an assigned nurse, not about all the things she hadn't said and that a nurse should have.
She'd looked at him without really looking at him, there had been nothing in her eyes that would acknowledge him as a person – it was like he had no identity for her to care about. Not a patient, not someone in her care.
do the dead keep their identity Vladislav? do they not only remain but also keep going? or is their identity buried with their passing leaving only a sharp smile and insincere eyes in the face of who they used to be?
Vladislav, child
why are you still here?
Vlad bit his lower lip hurts pierces cuts why he didn't bite so hard it shouldn't hurt like that and remembered his parents' visit. They'd been here when he'd died he'd had his attack. They'd been here and he hadn't seen them again after, and now he wasn't in his hospital room and the nurse didn't appear to be a real nurse.
Had he been transferred somewhere else? Another unit – another hospital? It didn't make sense, they wouldn't have moved him in the middle of the night and without telling him about it beforehand, not when he'd been awake and lucid for hours last evening.
Did his parents even know where he was?
The door opened once again – but it wasn't the not-nurse this time.
Two people entered the room: a tall but gaunt-looking white man in his seventies who wore a completely white suit, white gloves and a white hat, and a woman around Vlad's age – perhaps a bit older – with curly hair, who wore the same nurse-like uniform as the not-nurse from before.
The man looked Vlad over, but the woman quickly bustled to his side, eyes on his hands and a softness to her movements as she encouraged him to relax – he hadn't even noticed how could he when none of it hurt when the skin and the flesh beneath were both dead and hard and red and black and grey but she had, she'd seen it right away.
"Come on, Mister Masters, don't dig your nails in your palms like that. You'll get hurt."
She even sounded like she was worried for him.
When he let her unclench his fingers deep shredded gouges where what was left of his nails had been digging and yet he couldn't feel any of it just like he hadn't realized he'd been forcing on his greyed palms hard enough to break the almost-dead-except-when-it-wasn't flesh, she looked up and at his face.
She smiled, too.
Like she hadn't been handling necrosed fingers that moved in ways they shouldn't, like Vlad wasn't abnormal in all regards. Like it didn't freak her out.
the nurses and Doctor Jimenez at the hospital had done their best to pretend none of this was unusual beyond the obvious abnormal absolutely against everything they knew to be true about the human body they'd been professional about it they hadn't wanted him to feel like a freak on top of everything
they were good people they were professionals
still
he'd been able to tell that sometimes the state he was in kept shocking and terrifying them
There was no blood seeping out of the small wounds – because dead matter couldn't bleed, not really.
The nurse still smiled at him before she took a step back, her eyes jumping for a moment towards the older man – who had been watching him, watching them in silence, waiting.
Vlad's face made a hesitant jumble of expressions before settling on wariness.
"...Hello?"
The man gave him a quick – a bit thin, but not dishonest for all that – smile.
"Nurse Porter will overlook your stay here, Mister Masters. As for me, my name is Guillermo Bianco. This clinic is mine, you could say. Our people are... specialized, as much as anyone can be, in treating wounds and illnesses of ghostly provenances. Your case is unique, to say the least, but we hope you'll get more adequate treatment here than in a hospital that cannot know to acknowledge the existence of ghosts."
Vlad stared.
This was not what he'd expected – he hadn't been expecting anything, not really, but this was truly out there. There was no clinic specialized in ghosts that he knew about, and he and Jack his fault and Maddie had researched anything public about ghosts over the last few years, no matter how outlandish it seemed at first glance, no matter how nuts others said it to be.
The older man's words rang with a slight accent – an origin Vlad could almost recognize, and given the man's name he'd bet on Southern European – but the nurse sounded all-American, perhaps with a bit of Afro-American thrown in somewhere in her education. He could reasonably assume that this clinic was still in the US.
If this man – if Bianco was saying the truth, then the clinic was a secret well-kept, it was something that was kept out of public knowledge, something actively hidden.
Maybe to keep non-believers from interfering with their work – but that rose the question of where they found their patients, then.
How had they found him?
...The answer to that one wasn't hard, actually. He'd been wounded Jack's fault in a public setting while experimenting on ghosts. He'd spent months days and days and days and days and no one came at the hospital with a strange condition that had most likely been talked about amongst professionals.
Maybe the two months since the accident were the time it had taken Bianco to hear about him.
"Did you..."
But he didn't know what to ask, not really – so he didn't finish.
Before answering the question Vlad hadn't asked, Bianco moved the purple chair next to the bed and sat down.
"I feel a more thorough introduction is needed, Mister Masters. I am somewhat of an expert on ghostly matters, at least where the occult is concerned. My family has operated in Spain for centuries, dealing with the aftermath of ghosts slipping into our reality and causing havoc here, and I've come to your country a decade and a half back."
"The occult?"
Vlad winced, aware that he sounded a bit disbelieving. He didn't want to sound incredulous.
It wasn't that he didn't know that occult means actually worked against ghosts – of course they did, or at least some of those means did, or else humanity would have been completely defenseless against ghosts threats – but Maddie "Jack these calculations aren't right" had vetoed that approach when they'd realized there was no known explanation as to why any of it worked. They'd spent hours going through Jack's "banzai!" green hurts what's happening family knowledge and history and hadn't gotten anything workable out of it, not for what they wanted to study.
They'd had to rebuild everything they now knew from scratch, because nothing about the occult was scientific and they were convinced scientific research would open a whole new slate of knowledge.
Maddie had never liked working with things she couldn't explain, not if she could help it.
Bianco gave him an amused look and clasped his hands.
"Yes, Mister Masters. My family was, is made up of ghost hunters, in the traditional sense of the word. In Spain, we've long ago established a safety net against those invasions from the restless dead, and I came to America to try and get your government to create a similar organization to better protect their citizens."
"You've managed to convince them of the reality of ghosts?"
"Occult means, Mister Masters. It is possible to summon a ghost with the right circumstances, I believe you know that. Showing your president a sample of those beings wasn't easy, but it was done."
...That might explain how they stayed off the radar, Vlad supposed. They were backed up by the US government, somehow – because Bianco had managed to prove the existence of ghosts to the president of the United States.
Summoning a ghost wasn't easy. You needed to have crossed paths with it – Jack "banzai!" and Maddie and Vlad had never seen one before, so that had been impossible – and to know its name, as well as a number of complicated ingredients.
A shaky laugh escaped his lips, and Vlad didn't know why he was laughing.
"I... That's..."
He thought of his dead hands, of the ectoplasm in his pimples, of the things he saw when an eye started bleeding of the fact that he was dead in a stubborn body that he was a ghost stuck in its own corpse that he would make a perfect sample to study.
"...Is that why I'm here?"
Vlad wasn't sure what he meant by that – he knew there were multiples explanations, and most were not what he wanted to hear. They'd found him and they'd brought him here and he hadn't been told beforehand and no one had asked him what he wanted because dead people didn't get a say did they and he didn't even know if his parents had any idea of what had happened to him.
Was his mother worrying about him? Was his father asking questions and not getting answers?
Dasha had been thinking of coming for his birthday, but what would his sister find if she came back to the US?
Bianco nodded – unaware of what Vlad feared, of the thoughts running through his head, but perhaps the older man knew regardless, perhaps he knew the answers and wouldn't give them anyway. Perhaps this was all leading to a speech about Vlad being in their care now, about him not having to worry about anything, about him not having a choice.
"We were overlooking your research from afar. You and your friends are the first to get funding for scientific research on ghosts and we were interested. Just because the occult works doesn't mean our organization thinks it is enough. If you hadn't..."
Bianco stopped there for a moment, and his eyes searched Vlad's face the glowing pimples the grey hair the cuts in his lips for something.
He must have found it, too, because the older man shook his head sadly and continued:
"We were interested, impressed even, by the results you might have brought forth for our field. We considered reaching out once you'd have gotten your diplomas. When I heard about what happened, I looked into your condition at the hospital. I went there the other day to talk to you about the possibility of treatment, but you were in the middle of an attack. I spoke to your parents instead."
Bianco reached inside his suit jacket and took out a sheet of paper, folded through the middle.
He handed it to Vlad.
"They agreed that conventional medicine didn't seem to truly help you. Your father was terrified, frankly. Angry, too."
Vlad wasn't looking at Bianco, only keeping enough attention on him not to miss anything he'd say – his eyes, however, were on the letter in his hands.
It was signed by both his parents and allowed Guillermo Bianco to take charge of his recovery at a private clinic in Minnesota, for a token fee of fifty dollars a month.
at least he didn't have to worry about hospital bills anymore at least Mama and Dad wouldn't spend their entire savings on a corpse too stubborn to die quietly
He wouldn't be able to have visits, because the location was confidential, but correspondence was possible and even encouraged.
it wouldn't change much of anything now would he
it wasn't like Jack and Maddie had even come to see him it wasn't like anyone else had except for his parents
Mama and Dad didn't need to see him like that he didn't want them to he didn't didn't didn't didn't
not if it all got worse
A smaller sheet of paper – about half a page – had been stuck inside the letter, and it was a note for him, something his mother had written in a haste, her penmanship shaky and tired, like that time his sister had broken a leg in a car accident. Mama hadn't slept until she'd known Dasha wasn't in any more danger, and Vlad's permission slip for school had been written just like this note.
Vlad stared more than he read it.
When Bianco delicately took the letter back, the older man made sure Vlad still had the note.
"You are here to get help, Mister Masters. We are here to help you."
Vlad didn't answer.
they might they could maybe perhaps he'd get better with their help perhaps
if Bianco was saying the truth if they were really ghosts hunters who'd been at it for centuries if they had a better understanding of the occult than Vlad and Maddie had
they knew things the hospital hadn't things Jack had hinted at without really knowing more about it
they might be able to help
but
Vlad was dead he knew it could feel it
he was dead and they knew things
they probably knew enough to hurt him without meaning to not enough to truly help and if he told them if they discovered the truth if they knew
he didn't know if they would still want to help him
Vlad smiled an unconvincing smile – and it was alright, because Bianco and Nurse Porter most likely thought he was wary out of disbelief that anyone could help him that was true too, not because he was afraid that they could and wouldn't.
The nurse returned his smile, but hers was a bit sad and encouraging nonetheless, as if she wanted him to believe in them, in himself, in recovery.
no one recovered from death
"Thanks, I guess...?"
Bianco stood up, offering his right hand for a shake.
Vlad looked at his own necrosed rotten ugly dead hands, dumbfounded – but maybe that was why the older man wore gloves even though they were inside.
They shook hand, and the director of this weird secret clinic and whatever-else-came-with-it spoke one last time before leaving the room:
"It's a shame you and your friends didn't look further into the scientific make-up of ectoplasm, that you only focused on identifying and replicating it. It could have helped us with your health, I think. I understand it wasn't what you were looking for, though. For now, I'll be leaving you in the hands of Nurse Porter, if you don't mind. She'll check up on your current health and give you the rundown of your upcoming stay in our clinic."
Guillermo Bianco nodded one last time at the nurse, who nodded back before focusing on her patient.
The door closed behind the older man.