Chapter 57: Demons
One month.
Vlad had to stay healthy, with no ectoplasmic flares and while attending the rehabilitation room thrice a week – and after that, Bianco wanted him to have one last health check-up, and then, then Vlad would be able to leave the clinic. They'd agreed that the presence of "bonded ectoplasm" – as the staff referred to the traces in his system, and Vlad wasn't going to disabuse them of that notion – in his body was likely here to stay, and thus should be taken into account as to what could be considered "healthy" for Vlad – as opposed to anyone who wasn't a freak of nature else.
In other words, as long as he wasn't actively falling through the floor and having ghostly accidents, they'd determine the ectoplasm to be "passive" and without real consequences.
They didn't need to know that such incidents didn't happen anymore because Vlad had gotten skilled enough to only do such things on purpose and when he started panicking when memories rang in his ears when despair and fear clawed along his spine when he couldn't calm down and think enough.
So, as long as Vlad kept everything under control for a month...
He dutifully spent half an hour each evening practicing his powers, to make sure he wasn't accumulating ectoplasmic energy. He went to exercise almost every day – and was starting to look a bit less like a stick, so that was nice too – and didn't feel completely useless after ten minutes of it anymore. He made sure to eat almost everything on his plate, even when he didn't feel hungry.
The few nights he couldn't go to sleep easily, he'd slip out to the indoor garden and linger a bit there, until he felt better and started yawning.
Nightmares and unsettling dreams still woke him up, but not as often – and, in many cases, much later in the night than they used to. Nearly full nights of sleep were becoming common, and truly whole nights weren't a myth anymore.
On tuesdays and fridays, he went to the library to work with the translators and peruse a few books and research papers – he'd tentatively hinted at his future freedom, and they'd all been happy for him and asked if he'd work officially with them afterwards. Vlad hadn't had an answer ready, though he was considering it: maybe not in person, he'd told the director, as he'd already spent much too long in this building, but if he could maybe work from a distance and only visit occasionally...
He made sure to stay away from the whispering book and its aura, just in case.
Nine days in, and Vlad was doing better than ever.
Having a deadline, a day to hope for was making it all so much easier.
if it failed if Vlad crashed if he got sick if anything happened
if that deadline broke into pieces right in front of his eyes
it would be so much worse
He might be out of the clinic in September.
Ziad hummed as Vlad put a final point on his thesis and leaned back in his chair.
"Did you ask the library if they had a typewriter? There's no reason for you to wait until you're out to do the final document. I'm sure the director would vouch for you, too."
Vlad blinked.
"I... hadn't thought that far. But, you're right, Ziad, there should be one, maybe more. The translators have to tidy up their work at some point... Though I guess they could have their own office somewhere, but still, library, typewriters, entirely possible."
If they were in a small cubicle – to prevent too much noise – then he wouldn't have seen them, but they could still be here.
He'd have to ask.
The nurse nodded and put Vlad's clean clothes away.
"Try to type your thesis out, you might even manage to finish it and send it to the university before you leave. Then you'd just have to defend it sometimes after school starts back up, and if all goes well, you'd be all set to find a job with your new degree."
"That'd be..."
Vlad thought the older man was perhaps a bit optimistic, but everything might go well, for once.
Besides, it was nice to have someone who believed in him.
to have someone at all
Ziad smiled with a shrug:
"I'm certain you'll manage. There's..."
The light in the room shifted suddenly, as if the evening had jumped at the sun's throat with no warning nor reason. Something screeched underneath – somewhere in the lower floors – then it turned into a full blown alarm.
A glyph Vlad had never noticed before – but that he'd seen in one of Bianco's collection books – was glowing a sickly yellow on the door.
It felt somewhat repulsive – no, prickly like a barbed fence or an electric arc.
"Ziad... What's going on?"
The nurse looked worried, his jaw tense, but not overly disturbed by the glyph's presence in itself.
"Something escaped from the underground chamber. It can't get in a room with a warded door, not unless it completely destroys the walls, but... Corridors and the like aren't protected. We have to wait until the agents have dealt with the ghost."
The corner of Vlad's mouth twitched badly – some part of him wanted to go out and see, for the first time in his life, the very reason he was barely human, the things that had driven him here – but the truth was, he probably couldn't touch the door and its glyph either.
ghost
Or maybe he could, maybe it would confirm that, despite everything, he was still alive.
but what if he wasn't?
Either way, wandering out, away from the safety offered by the glyph, as a ghost roamed the building... That was perhaps the stupidest thing to do here.
"Children."
A voice, somewhere in the corridors.
Echoes, resonating outside the warded doors.
The only times Vlad had heard something like that "...I'm...", it had been his own voice, as a ghost.
that time with June the day he'd hurt her the first complete transformation
Sometimes, he mumbled to himself as he tried to experiment with his powers. Little "yeah, no" and "let's try that instead", except they sounded just a little off. His voice, but not.
Vlad didn't have much reason to speak up as a ghost – no one to talk to, no one to trust, no one to banter or brainstorm with – but he knew that echo.
"Don't hide, children! Come out here, let me see your faces!"
Like something that came from beyond the pale, a sound that couldn't quite ripple through the air as it was meant to.
The wall rattled, not so far away from Vlad's room.
Ziad and him exchanged an uncertain glance – then the clanking started again, like an angry bull elbowing the same rock again and again.
A cold presence was coming closer.
"You cannot hold me!"
Vlad wasn't sure if the ghost was laughing or angry, but the edge was real.
Sobs came from across the wall – the room next to his, not the corridor.
Vlad couldn't usually hear the other patients from here, but this time...
Ziad shook his head and whispered:
"As long as they've kept the door closed, the ghost can't get in. Besides, you hear it outside still, don't you? I think they're simply afraid."
"Disgusting little maggots, crawling to stay alive... Pray not to cross my path again..."
The nurse gulped as he took an instinctive step back:
"Not that I blame them. If the agents could hurry up..."
A greenish light filtered under the door – something like claws screeched over the doorframe, on the other side.
Vlad could feel his own ghostly powers rippling across his palms, the need to get out there and confront the menace somehow, to do something.
His teeth felt too sharp, his skin too cold. Red was creeping into his eyesight.
Transforming here and now would be the biggest mistake since he'd trusted Jack Fenton to care he could make in this situation.
letting Ziad know the truth was too dangerous
for him of course
but for Ziad too
Vlad hadn't forgotten what had happened to June when she'd seen
Instead, he asked, voice just loud enough to reach the nurse and not the other side of the door:
"The underground chamber?"
"Locked doors, locked doors... Ah, how sad! But I assure you, if anyone here isn't behind a locked door..."
Ziad winced at the ghost's hovering – it didn't seem to want to move away from their part of the corridor, shifting between the cluster of four doors, four patients behind protections, its green glow retreating just long enough to disappear from under the door and come back while you blinked.
"When a ghost causes trouble in our world and an agent manages to trap it with occult means, they are brought here and jailed in an underground vault. I don't really know what kind of protections they have in place down there, but sometimes a ghost slips through. It's... the third time it happened since I started working at the clinic?"
This time, it was Vlad's turn to gulp.
"They're just... kept prisoner, forever?"
Ghosts didn't die – couldn't die again, really – so anything was either temporary or forever.
He couldn't imagine Bianco's organization letting a dangerous ghost out on probation, and yet...
The glyph shone brighter against the door, blinding Vlad with a painful light.
"Don't hide, maggots, come here, children! There are people here, I can tell, and I can wait much longer than any of you!"
Ziad made to pace around the room – stopped before he could really do more than a few steps, and rubbed anxiously at his temples.
"We don't have a lot of other options, do we? Besides, it's not like ghosts stay that long on the mortal plane. After a while, they just... dissipate. And I don't mean that they disappear, there have been sightings of ghosts who'd previously dissipated. It's more... I suspect it's what you and your friends call the Ghost Zone, it reclaims them if they linger for too long and too far away from their place of haunting."
For the first time since they'd met – that day Vlad had fallen through the floor – the young man caught sight of small scars along the nurse's wrists, usually hidden by his uniform's sleeves. From rashes, perhaps – and Vlad had already seen that specific pattern.
Several times since he'd started eating in the communal area, where victims of ectoplasmic burns were a dime a dozen. People who'd gotten tangled up in ghostly business without meaning to – and, of course, Char herself.
Vlad could only wonder if Ziad had gotten hurt during one of the other two incidents he'd just mentioned, if he'd been a victim too once and had since then joined the clinic as a nurse, or if...
The older man looked tense, of course, a bit scared, perhaps, but also...
Frustrated.
Like there was nothing he could do, and he hated it.
He knew entirely too much about the work of an agent, and perhaps that was because he'd talked with some of them, as patients or during his free time.
maybe he'd been one once upon a time
Char's anger her reasons to fight her need to do something against the ghosts who came around and tormented living people
was there something like that for Ziad too?
The door rattled, forcing Vlad to put such considerations away for the time being that and the fact he himself had never dissipated that he was still here in his own corpse body three years and three months later for the first time he could almost believe as the ghost hissed behind the door – and its words sounded much too pointed:
"It's not just a little maggot behind this door, is it?"
he could almost believe that he might have died but not be dead
Ziad put a strong hand on Vlad's shoulder, just as the young man uneasily took a stumbling step back. Something must have shown on his face, because the nurse pointedly shook his head.
"There's someone else here. Someone dead, and I sure hope you aren't cooperating with these children, even though you aren't trapped down there..."
Ziad's hand didn't move.
"It can't come in."
The older man seemed absolutely certain of that.
Vlad's own ghostliness still shadowed his every feeling. Teeth gritted and a sickening taste of acid on his tongue, he whispered what they both knew:
"He's talking about me."
Ziad's face barely twitched, but he didn't seem surprised. This wasn't, for him, the revelation it could have become.
"Of course it's about you. Probably sensing the bond you have with that ectoplasm in your system. Its assumption that you're a ghost, without seeing you in person, makes sense."
The nurse's face hardened.
"We're staying here, and you're not talking back to it. Who knows what it'd do to you, if it found out that you are human? Calling us children, and worse than that, maggots... If it was trapped in the underground chamber, it wasn't a harmless specter."
Behind the door, the scratching along the walls started again, just as the ghost went on humming something disturbing – almost a lullaby, if not for its content – even the most morbid ones weren't that bad, in Vlad's opinion.
"Tell me, have you heard of the dead soul? Tell me, what do you know of the corpse on a tree? Did it have feelings once, was it gentle? Did it close its eyes and believe in waking up again?"
Before it could go further on, a door slammed at the other end of the corridor. Human voices rang, something rolled on the floor, fumes filtered from under the door – the ghost hissed, and then nothing from him again.
Published the first part of my Vlad Masters in the HP World fusion (OT Personel Files: Vlad Masters) if anyone's interested. That Vlad has a bit more of a support system thanks to circumstances and will escape the fate of becoming a problematic supervillain, BTW.