THE WAITING ROOM

From The Raven James Chronicles by B.H. Wydeven

Raven awoke on a small couch in a doctor’s office. He felt dizzy, like he had just gotten off a roller coaster. As he slowly sat up, his weary eyes failed to focus. The white lights in the room were so bright, he was practically blind, but his auditory senses seemed significantly heightened. He could hear chains gently rattling in the distance. Using the walls for support, he worked his way to the door and carefully opened it a crack.

Outside the room was a long hallway with barren white walls. The overhead florescent lights flickered and several were dead, leaving sinister blotches of gray shadows along the walls, and deep black voids on the floor. At the end of the hall, about 20 feet from the office where Raven awoke, was a steel gate with large metal chains and a fat padlock sealing the hallway from the room behind it.

As Raven slowly made his way down the hallway toward the gate, the big round padlock knocked gently against the bars and echoed its steady tone down the hallway like heavy wind chimes.

CLANK

CLANK

CLANK

The other side of the gate, a waiting room, was ridden with obscure shadows and dim light over an array of chairs and tables. There was just enough light to see that no one was there.

When Raven reached the gate, he pulled on the padlock. The round heavy metal felt like a ball of ice in his bare hands. He let it drop and collide against its ringing chains and bars. A fine layer of frost shivered away as the dead metal clashed with the bars. Raven shivered and backed away from the gate.

A steady murmur came from the waiting room.

“Excuse me, sir?” Came a man’s raspy voice in a desperate tone. He wheezed and coughed in between pleas. “Sir? Can you help me? I really need your help!

Suddenly a human form cloaked in a white sheet appeared on the other side of the gate. A hand quickly pulled away the sheet and disclosed a disheveled man with short grayish black hair and dressed in a crude hospital gown. His face was pale as if he had just bled to death and his eyes were sunken in and lifeless. Raven took an instinctive step back as the man took a step forward and grabbed the gate’s bars, causing the lock and chains to jangle and swing wildly.

“Please!” He pleaded. “My name is David Fenton. I have a wife and two kids and I need them to know what happened to me!”

David was a burly man, about six feet tall with linebacker shoulders and a beer gut that tightened against the cheap hospital gown. As David stepped forward, Raven was able to see into the man’s soft light brown eyes and his soul; kind and frantically lost.

Suddenly David’s brown eyes widened and he let out a scream, but for some reason he was unable to make a sound. Looking painfully to Raven for help, he grasped the bars harder.

Something made him stop and look down at his chest.

A dark red stain had seeped through the gown. David watched in horror as the stain grew and grew until suddenly a large pool of blood had flooded to the floor, creeping towards Raven. David looked up at Raven with wide, reddened eyes, his lower jaw shivered under his gaping mouth.

 “How did it happen?” Raven said finally, keeping his voice subtle.

“I was supposed to have heart surgery,” David explained. “I have a condition, and I needed a triple bypass. They told me with my health as it was, there would be a risk of complications.”

Raven closed his eyes as the man spoke, and when he opened them again, the blood on the floor was gone and so was the stain on the gown.

“What does your family need to know?”

The man shrugged. “Everything! I wasn’t supposed to die. I have a will but-.” The man stopped to let his lungs catch up. “Why am I still like this? I thought when you die, your body goes back to being perfect?”

“Not if you have loose ends,” Raven said.

“Loose ends?”

“Do you have unfinished business with someone?”

            The man’s face wrinkled with sadness as everything that he ever wanted to accomplish and all the people he left behind rushed to the tip of his tongue. “I was supposed to give away my youngest daughter in three months.” Instead of turning red, David’s face instead turned pale and the bloodstain reappeared at his chest. He grabbed the bars on the gate to catch his fall, gasping in a single labored breath for a lungful of air that never kept its course.

Raven leaned into the gate, glancing over the rest of the waiting room, but all he saw was darkness. To David, he said quietly, “Listen, I can help you, I just need you to do me a favor.”

            “What’s that?”

            “Guard the gate while I finish sleeping.”

            The blood stopped erupting from David’s chest. “You’re asleep?” Raven shushed him and nodded.

            “That’s what the gate is for. But you’re turning my dream into a nightmare. You see, every night, I get myself good and drunk so I can fall asleep. Because while I’m asleep, ghosts like you won’t hesitate bother me and pester me. When I’m drunk, this gate is solid steel and protects me. But I didn’t drink enough last night so I have this.”

            Raven grasped one of the steel chains with both hands and it gently bent with ease with his effortless force. It made a crackling sound like Styrofoam.

            “I’m sobering up too quickly,” Raven whispered through the bars. “Tell me something, who else is in that waiting room with you?”

            David looked around. “Just a few folks here. I actually thought I was alone until I looked around just now. Everyone in here is just being quiet, keeping to themselves.”

            “That’s because they think I’m drunk. They see this gate and this lock and chains and they know I can’t be bothered. Some of the bastards in there have been waiting on me for months. But I don’t help the attention whores. They can fuck with someone else’s subconscious.”

            “You do this a lot?” David asked.

            “Just about every morning,” Raven said with a tired smile. He could see the understanding in David’s eyes. Raven could sense that David was in a lot of pain and that his family was going through a terrible shock over his sudden death. David’s pain hung heavily on Raven’s shoulders, but as long as they interacted within his self conscious, so did fatigue. The longer they talked, the weaker Raven got.

But despite his pain and desperation, Raven saw a kindness in David too. He looked forward to helping the man do whatever he needed to heal the wound in his heart and bypass the plane between the living world and the waking dead.

            He just needed David’s protection until he woke up in the morning.

            “I’m sorry I bothered you,” David said. “I just didn’t know what to do. I thought you were an angel or something.”

            “Not even close,” Raven said. “But I do help people who have died. But this time, I need your help.”

            “Anything.”

            “All I need you to do, is watch the gate for me. Just hang by it and don’t let anyone near it. If you have problems, shout for me. Hopefully I’ll wake up.”

            David stood up straight. “I can do that.”

            “Thanks,” Raven said, turning back to the office down the hall. “Look me up in the morning and we’ll find your find your family.”

            David smiled and took a deep breath, then exhaled smoothly.

† † †