A man and a woman, both in their late twenties, both dressed in jeans and sweatshirts, sat across from the therapist. The woman had one foot pulled under her, just as comfy as could be. Her neighbor was so tense he seemed to be hovering above the chair, poised to leap up at any provocation.
"'No, she's right here!" the young man said. "Why can't you see her?"
"Tell me what you see," the therapist intoned.
"I've told you!" the man said. "I've told you and I've told you and I've-"
"Barton," the woman said. "Remember what we say? Anger has no place in our house. Like trash, we must take it to the curb."
"God, what a bunch of horse crap," the younger woman said, yawning as she stretched her legs. "Tell her she's a bitch. A stupid, blind old cow."
"You're blind," he said to the therapist. "If you can't see her sitting right here-"
"For God's sake, Bart. Stop being such a pussy. She's a bitch. Say it to her face."
"No!"
"What, Barton?" the therapist asked. "What's she saying to you?"
Barton clamped his mouth shut and shook his head. The younger woman leaned over and whispered into his ear. He tried to brush her off, like a buzzing fly, but his hand passed right through her face.
"Go on, tell her," the ghost urged Barton. "Better yet, take a swing. Smash her smug face in. Now, that'd be real therapy."
Barton leapt to his feet and took a swing… at the ghost. When his fist passed through her, he threw up his hands and howled. Then he stopped and slowly turned to the therapist, who scribbled furiously. The ghost convulsed with laughter.
I clenched my fists and turned to Kristof.
"Can I smack her? Just one good smack-"
"Oh, we'll do better than that," he said. "But first we have to find the others."
Again, the ghosts gave themselves away, this time not by making patients scream, but by sitting around chatting about it. No one knows why some mental patients can see ghosts. Maybe mental illness breaks down the boundary between possible and impossible, so, like small children and animals, the brains of the mentally ill weren't always jumping in to edit their perceptions. Or it could be that these people have necro blood, but their families have strayed from the supernatural community. When they began hearing voices and seeing apparitions, everyone around them would assume the problem was psychological.
So when we came across a group of four people, laughing about how they'd made a patient piss his pants, we knew we'd found our haunters. Either that or we'd found the world's first psych hospital staffed by the National Sadists Institute.
"No, no, no!" said an elderly man with a snow-white Van Dyke beard. "We had one better than that. Ted, remember Bruce? The one you convinced he could fly?"
"Oh, yeah," chortled a ghost with his back to my wall.
"What happened?" asked a plump teenage girl.
Ted shifted to better face his audience and I recognized my headless accountant. I backed up and motioned to Kristof that I'd found our ghost. He nodded, and I returned to my peephole.
"… sailed clean off the roof." Ted was laughing so hard he could barely get the words out. "Like Superman. Only, as he soon discovered, he couldn't fly. Landed right on Peterman's Jag. Hit so hard his fucking teeth popped out like Chiclets. Peterman was picking them out of his seats for weeks. That's what he gets for leaving his sunroof open."
The haunters roared with laughter.
The old man waved his arms again, like a bird attempting takeoff. "The best part was when the dumb fuck hits the roof. For a second, he just lies there, dying. Then his spirit starts to separate. He looks around, gives the biggest grin you've ever seen, then jumps up and dances a little jig on the top of the Jag, yelling, 'I did it! I did it! I can fly!' Then-"
Ted stepped in front of the old man. "Then he just happens to look down, and there, under his feet, is this body. His body. He stops-freezes on the spot-stares down, and goes, Oh.'"
"Just like that," the old man chortled. " 'Oh.' "
I looked at Kristof.
"More smacking in order?" he murmured.
"Smacking's too good. Think I can rip out their intestines and use them for harp strings?"
"You could try. Or…"
He tilted his head toward the paper-thin wall.
"… are the best," someone said, then sighed. "We haven't had a decent new one in weeks."
I glanced at Kristof. We smiled at each other.
We found an empty room farther down the hall, where we could talk without being overheard by the haunters.
I perched on the bed. "So one of us will play patient and the other should be a nurse or-"
"First, I need you in a nurse's uniform."
"I don't think I saw any nurses on the way in. I should go see what kind of outfits-"
As I slid off the bed, he put out a hand to stop me.
"I think I can handle this," he said. "May I?"
Being able to change women out of their clothing may be most adolescent boys' idea of heaven, but ghosts can't do it unless they're given tacit permission by the other party. I closed my eyes and concentrated on letting Kris change my clothes.
"There," he said.
I looked down and saw my boobs looking back at me. Well, the tops of them anyway, stuffed into a white shirt with cleavage so low I was bound to pop out if I so much as sighed. I wore a skintight white nurse's dress that barely covered my rear. Speaking of adolescent fantasies…
I glared at Kris, who was grinning like a thirteen-year-old.
"Hey, it's a nurse's uniform," he said.
"Yeah… from a porn movie."
A wide grin. "Works for me."
As I sighed, he stepped closer, finger sliding along the hem of my dress, rippling the fabric so it tickled against my thighs.
"Remember the last time you played nurse for me?" he murmured. "I was working at the New York office, and you came up for the weekend. We were supposed to get together for dinner, but you called-"
"I remember," I said, quickstepping away. "Now, we need a plan-"
"Oh, you had a plan." He stepped as close to me as he could get without touching. "I was on my way to a meeting and you called and said, 'I can't wait for tonight, Kris.'"
I opened my mouth to say something-anything-but his gaze met mine, and the words dried up, leaving me standing there, lips parted, face tilted up to his.
He continued, "You said I didn't sound very good, and suggested I come by the hotel room so you could play nurse for me. Which you did. Most effectively. Ordered me into bed… and, by the time you were done, I couldn't have got out of it if I wanted to." A slow grin. "Of course, neither could you."
Thank God for ghost-hood sometimes. No need to worry about pounding hearts or sweaty palms or heavy breathing. All I had to do was keep my gaze down, and he wouldn't know how badly I wanted to say "To hell with it" and cross that last quarter-inch between us.
His lips moved closer to my ear. "I remember every second of that afternoon, Eve. I've replayed it so many times… in bed, in the shower, even in the car, once during a traffic jam-I was sitting there and I saw a billboard for the hotel we'd stayed in and next thing you know…" A deep chuckle. "I found a way to make the delay a whole lot more bearable."
I backpedaled so fast I fell right through the wall. Kristof grabbed my arm to steady me, but I moved out of his way.
I righted myself and glowered at him. "God, you are-"
A quick grin. "Incorrigible?"