Chapter 21

D anica stared at Nana. Danica opened her mouth several times to urge her grandmother to speak, but Nana would only hold up her hand.

Nana whispered, “I’m getting there. It’s hard for me.”

“I know that, but time is running out.” Danica couldn’t help herself from glancing at the clock.

“Oh, I’m so out of time,” Nana mumbled, her voice so weak. “That’s okay. Any other time I would be all right with this,” she whispered. “But, Danica, you must understand that you should not make the same commitment that I had to.”

“Commitment to what?”

“To the family community, to the family legacy,” she whispered. “They’ll get angry at me for saying that because, as I pass on, you are supposed to pick up the mantle and carry on, as the next bearer of this burden.”

“I don’t understand.… You’re scaring me.”

“I know. I know,” Nana muttered, “and shame on me for having left it so long.”

Stefan, his voice resounding around the room now, declared, “I don’t even understand, and I deal in this, Harriet. You should make us understand.”

Danica looked around the room and cried out, “Stefan, is that you?”

“Yes, I’m helping your grandmother stay on for just a few more minutes, so she can make peace with whatever it is she needs to make peace with, but it’s an energy drain on me. I cannot keep up, and she needs to hurry.”

Immediately Danica turned to her grandmother. “Please, please tell me what’s going on.”

“Listen, and I will explain.”

And the tale that unfolded was something straight out of an Alfred Hitchcock movie.

“Many years ago,” Nana whispered, “and I don’t even know how many, anymore. Somebody came over from Europe. His name was Benjamin, and he loved life, and he loved the idea of living forever and more than anything, he loved his wife, and he didn’t want to lose any of this when his time came. He dealt in the dark arts for a long time, trying to find a way to live forever. He definitely had psychic abilities, and his wife had psychic abilities as well. Just when he was searching for a way to live forever, he realized that they needed an anchor, a ground in a way. So, he built this house as a home for them all, for when it came time to leave, so that everybody would have a place to go to, a family to welcome them. A place of honor and a place to rest and to be together again what they could be.”

“Good God,” Danica said in shock. “You’re talking about a haunting.”

“To a certain extent, yes—but not quite. More of a possessing. I know that makes no sense to you.”

“No, it really doesn’t. There is no living forever.”

“No, there isn’t. And yet—in the same way—there is,” Nana whispered. “These entities, these souls of our forebearers, they control this house, the house that you have always loved and hated, and these entities have controlled it all of your life. It is them, the collective of them, who control this house,” Nana explained, looking around the room. “They call themselves Benjamin , as was my father’s name, as was my grandfather’s name. My grandfather went to join the collective—with joy in his heart, knowing he would live forever as part of it. Then my father joined the collective, knowing forever that he had garnered that promise for me to continue the line. But, as promises go, that was a hard one for me to continue.”

“How are you supposed to continue that line?” Danica asked.

“How do you think?”

“You only had my mother, no son. Surely that was enough.”

“It was. It was, indeed. But it gets worse. With every new transition, there must be a sacrifice. There has to be somebody, something that they use for energy, for transition energy, they would say, to make the journey. It’s not an easy journey, and it requires a lot of power, and, from their perspective, it always required a sacrifice.”

“What sacrifice?” Danica asked, her tone turning hard. “Is that what happened to my mother?”

“No, not really, but yes—she was supposed to be part of this. She was part of this. She was strong energetically, so very strong, but she was also sick. She couldn’t handle the energy, and she was desperate for something other than what would be her life here, so she wanted to transition. She wanted to be part of this forever family and lifetime. Yet she couldn’t seem to make her way to do so. And we tried.” Then Nana’s voice broke. “When she tried to take you, it was her attempt to cross over and to make you her sacrifice.”

“Oh, my God,” Danica cried out in shock. “I was supposed to be Daisy’s sacrifice so Daisy could live forever as part of this house?”

“Yes, something like that. The way you’ve put it is far too simplistic, but the meaning is partially there.”

“No meaning is here”—Danica reared back—“only insanity.”

“And I get that. But you should understand that dozens of our family members are here. That’s why the house protects me. That’s why it looks after me. That’s why it looks after you.”

“You’re kidding, right? It doesn’t look after me. It barely even lets me in.”

“Until it becomes your time, until it becomes bonded to you, then it will look after you,” Nana whispered. “That’s what it’s waiting for. It’s waiting for you to be the next in line.”

Danica didn’t even have a clue what to say. “My God, this is unbelievable.”

“I know. I know it is. I know that, for you, it’s probably too unbelievable to even begin to understand it. I should have started your training a long time ago, but you left, and you didn’t want to come back. I thought that maybe we could find another way for me to become part of the house, as I was always meant to be, without it requiring you.”

“What do you mean, requiring me ?” Danica asked incredulously. “Isn’t it bad enough that my mother already tried to use me as a sacrifice?”

“Instead, she became the sacrifice herself.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You don’t remember? What she tried didn’t work for her because she wasn’t already bonded to the house, which is a process to get that next soul to be the one ,” she whispered. “She wasn’t chosen to be that one because it was still me. Because she tried to jump ahead of time and tried to use you as a sacrifice, when you shouldn’t have been used, Daisy ended up caught in-between worlds.”

“Oh my God. The hauntings at the hospitals.”

“Yes,” Nana whispered, “she’s the one haunting the two hospitals, and, God help me, it’s been impossible for me to figure out how to stop her. I was hoping tonight, as I transition, that maybe I could free her and could bring her with me.”

“To be your sacrifice?” Danica asked, her tone hardening.

“She’s already dead,” Nana whispered. “All I want is for her to find peace.”

“Is that even possible now?” Danica asked, her voice breaking.

Nana sobbed slightly. “I know you don’t understand, and I don’t blame you. I should have told you all of this so long ago, but, once you left, I didn’t know how to bring you back and not have you run away again.”

“My God,” Danica muttered, staring out the window into the wilderness around her.

“This house is centuries old, older than any people who settled here. The house blended in and had the ability with each new generation to recreate itself in conformity to the history of those homes around it, so that the memories blurred, and nobody understood just how long ours had been standing.”

Nana sighed, then whispered, “It is a bloody legacy that I leave you. More than that, it’s a soul legacy, and you are the next soul. With my transitioning, taking Daisy with me, then this house will now bond to you, and you will become the next owner and the next generation of energy. And, for that, you will carry the spirits of all the generations gone before.”

“What if I don’t want to?” Danica cried out.

Her grandmother opened her eyes, and there was power in them as she roared, “It is not a choice. It is ordained.”

Danica stared at her, as if seeing her beloved Nana now possessed by generations of Benjamins. “So, I am to be a prisoner of this house? I can’t ever leave it because all the souls of my ancestors are here?”

“Yes,” Nana replied, “that’s it exactly. And with those souls of your ancestors is my soul as well,” she whispered. “If you do not do this, then we all perish.”

In the background, she heard Stefan muttering something, but Danica was too stunned to even understand. “I don’t get this. What happened to my mother?”

“I already told you. She tried to make the transition before the preparation, without being ready, and it didn’t work, which left her caught in limbo. If and when I transition tonight, I’m hoping that she will make an appearance and that somehow I can free her of her frozen purgatory and take her with me back into this familial soul legacy.”

“Why did you want me to get the property from Cameron?”

“Because they’re all buried there,” she whispered. “I had it wrong when I sold it to him. I thought incorrectly that I knew where the boundary was, but I didn’t know, and I was wrong. So, Cameron has the property with the graves. I need that property back. I need our legacy whole,” she wailed, tears running down her face. “You don’t understand. That’s very important,” she said urgently, reaching out and grabbing Danica’s hand.

Danica stared down at the hand of the woman she had been so close to for so much of her life. Nana had been the voice of sanity in a world gone mad, when so much had been wrong. “Did they have anything to do with me dying?”

Her grandmother hesitated. “Your mother almost succeeded in her wish to join the collective soul,” Nana explained, then stopped. “She almost succeeded when she tried to make you the sacrifice.”

Danica burst out into bitter laughter. “That’s all I was to Daisy. Is a sacrifice always required?”

“Yes, a sacrifice is always required.”

“Is that why she’s haunting the hospital and taking lives there?”

Nana hesitated. “In a way, yes. She keeps trying to get the right sacrifice and to rejoin all of us. She is us. That’s what you should understand, and, being caught in-between the process like that, she is still there. Yet she is still one of us.”

“I don’t know that I can accept her as one of us,” Danica whispered. “I don’t know what I believe anymore.”

“I know that, and I’m so sorry,” Nana whispered.

“Who was the sacrifice for your father? For your husband?” she asked Nana suddenly. “You said a sacrifice is required every time.”

“Yes,” she whispered, “and the sacrifice should be somebody who loves you.”

“Oh, my God, no,” she whispered. “Please tell me that you didn’t sacrifice your husband.”

“I did, indeed, but it wasn’t my choice. It was his. He wanted to join the family. He wanted to be a part of it.”

“And did he join them?”

“Yes, he did,” she whispered. “That was a successful turnover. He’s waiting, and I want to go to him.… I’ve been waiting for this moment for a very long time. It’s my turn, and I desperately want to join them,” she whispered.

“That’s fine and all, but I don’t know what you want from me. You’ve been trying to tell me all this, and you could have told me a long time ago, but you didn’t, which means you still have something yet to say.”

She groaned. “Yes, I have something yet to say.”

“What is that?”

“We need your commitment.”

“My commitment? What kind of a commitment? Why would I commit to this house that doesn’t even like me, this house that has shunned me most of my life?”

“But now it will be yours,” Nana muttered, “and it will include me, and I will always be here for you. It’s not like we will turn our backs on you. We will be here now for you forever, and that is important.”

Danica just stared.

*

Cameron walked the halls of the hospital, looking back at Jenny. “You meant it when you mentioned how it would be dead around here.”

“Yep, everybody knows to stay away,” she murmured. “Doesn’t mean the old witch will show up, but just the chance of it keeps most people away. One year we had a news crew in here because they’d heard the rumors about our resident witch,” Jenny shared, shaking her head. “Daisy didn’t show up, but the other happenings that night freaked them pretty good anyway.”

“How?” he asked in confusion.

“Because just enough weird stuff was going on, amid retelling the tales of past Halloweens, that it completely spooked the news crew,” she shared, with a smirk. “Good riddance, as far as I was concerned.”

He nodded. “I can see how you might feel like that.”

She glanced over at him. “You just wait. It’s almost time.” She glanced at the clock behind him.

“What happens normally?”

“I wasn’t even going to tell you that. It’s pretty much the same every year. There’s a slight bit of difference but not a whole lot,” she replied, with a shrug.

Just then, the police scanners went off about a car accident and a woman coming in.

Immediately Jenny’s expression darkened. “Here we go,” she muttered.

Two nurses raced to meet the ambulance, as it screamed into the parking lot, and a young woman was unloaded from the back on a gurney.

Cameron, completely forgetting about everything Jenny and Danica had warned him about, raced out to deal with the new patient. “What happened?” he cried out.

“Car accident. She hit a telephone pole, from the looks of it,” the first responder cried out. “She’s stable, but she’s completely covered in blood, and we’re still struggling to find the source of the bleeding.”

“I got it,” Cameron replied, as they quickly swung her into the cubicle he’d pointed out, and he went to work, checking for vitals, and yet, the more he worked, the more puzzled he got.

Finally he became aware of the silence around him and the fact that only he was working on the patient. He looked back at the others, glaring at them. “What the hell? Since when do you stop giving aid? We have a patient.”

Jenny looked over at him and nodded. “Yeah, we know. Some of us might have seen her before.”

At that, he turned back to the patient, who was even now twisting in agony, and he shook his head. “No way,” he muttered, going back to helping her. However, he needed to find out more. Cameron turned to two orderlies and snapped, “Get her up to X-ray right away. We need to know what the hell’s going on. I don’t see any visible injuries, but she’s obviously in great pain.”

The two orderlies, both young men, grabbed the gurney and headed out.

As the gurney went past Cameron, his patient grabbed Cameron’s lab coat and called out, “Help me, please help me.”

He frowned, as she let go and was wheeled away. When the earlier warnings came back to him, he stared at his lab coat, as the bloodstains slowly disappeared. He turned to face Jenny.

She nodded. “Yeah, that’s why nobody’s helping you.”

He looked back at the other nurses, who were swallowing hard, both of them staring at each other and then at Jenny. “What about the orderlies?” Cameron asked.

Just then came a shriek, and both men came running back.

“She disappeared from the bed. She took off.”

“One minute she was there, and then she was gone.”

Both orderlies spoke on top of each other, as one of them just went nuts. “Call security.”

Cameron stared at them, as Jenny responded first. “It’s fine, guys. It’s fine.”

They frowned and asked, “What do you mean, fine ?”

Jenny explained, “We won’t need to call security.” As they stared at her in shock, she added, “You’ve just met our Halloween ghost.”

In the meantime, Cameron still studied his lab coat, staring at where the blood had been but was no longer there. “Good God,” he whispered.

“Yep, that’s about how we all feel about the ghost of Daisy. She’s here, and then she’s gone. Now you,” Jenny stated, pointing at him, “need to be careful.”

“Why is that?”

“Because a lot of the time—and I won’t say every time—but, when Daisy grabs somebody, she ends up killing them.”

He shook his head. “She asked for help.”

“I know, but I’m not exactly sure what it is that she expects us to help her with.”

He grimaced and then told Jenny, “But I might.” And, with that, he took off for his office, reaching for his cell phone, even as he slammed the door behind him, shutting out the outside world. He called Danica. “You won’t believe it,” he began.

“Yeah,” she responded, exhausted. “I probably would. You just met the ghost of Daisy, didn’t you?”

He stopped in shock and said, “Yeah, I did. How did you know?”

“Because I finally got the story out of my grandmother, and you won’t believe it.” She hesitated, then whispered, “Did Daisy grab you?”

“Yes, she did, and apparently that means I could soon be dead. She asked me to help her,” Cameron added in frustration, “How the hell can I help her? I don’t even know what happened to her.”

“What happened to her is that—wait, are you sitting down?”

He walked over to a bench and sat down hard. Then she gave him a brief outline of what Nana had finally shared. “No way,” he muttered.

“Yet I’ve been listening to my grandmother, who is, even as we speak, dying, telling me all this and expecting me to become the next part of this house.”

“Don’t,” he replied urgently.

“The worst part of it is, apparently every time someone passes, or transitions as Nana puts it, there must also be a sacrifice. When it was Nana’s father’s turn, Nana sacrificed her own husband. Apparently he was a willing sacrifice, but what do I know?” Danica cried out in pain. “None of this makes any sense.”

“So, your mother—”

“Yeah, my mother tried to kill me, making me her sacrifice,” Danica shared bitterly, “Only it wasn’t her time, it wasn’t her turn, and, as such, she wasn’t properly prepared or some such thing, so it didn’t work. Then, in the end, I survived, and she’s been caught in limbo.”

“That’s what Daisy meant by asking for help.”

“Yes, but I suspect what she really meant was to let her take your soul as her sacrifice, so that she could join the rest of my family. Is she gone now?”

“I don’t know,” he replied in exasperation. “The orderlies were instructed to take her up to X-ray, and they came running back, saying they’d lost her.”

“Right. According to my grandmother, the ghost of Daisy could still be there, as she wanders the halls for a few hours, looking for a way to make this transition happen, before it can’t happen again.”

“Why Halloween?”

“Because that’s when she tried to make me her sacrifice,” Danica whispered. “You need to get out of there.”

“Me? You need to get out of wherever the hell you are.”

“I know. I know,” she whispered, “but you have no idea how hard it’ll be for me to leave Nana.”

“Absolutely nothing is happening here, so I’ll come to you.”

“I don’t think… No.… That’s not a good idea,” she snapped all too fast. “That’s probably what they want. We would all be in the same house, all to be used for their sacrifices.”

Cameron declared, “They can damn well do without you. Hasn’t that family taken enough from you?”

And, with that, he ended the call.