A little boy lay sleeping in a hospital bed. He looked about five and was very thin. He shifted under the sheets as I closed the door. Flowers lined the windowsill. I set my bouquet on the sill amongst them and approached the bed, checking the floor on either side. It was covered in creamy linoleum. The gap between the frame and floor seemed just big enough to fit my arm in comfortably. Kneeling down, I rolled up my sleeve and reached under the bed.
I couldn’t feel anything at first, but after patting around, my fingers grazed something cool and bumpy. Engraved metal. Relieved, I opened my bag and took out a piece of paper and a stick of graphite. I slid the paper under the bed until it was covering the metal spot, and, quietly as I could, I rubbed the graphite over the paper to make a print of the engraving.
Just as I finished, the door clicked open. I shoved the paper in my pocket, stood up, and leaned over the sleeping boy. I didn’t even know his name. A nurse was holding the door open with an elbow, her back turned to me as she laughed and chatted with someone in the hall. The boy shivered and clutched the sheets to his chest. Gently, I pulled up his blankets and tucked him in. Above me, the lights flickered and slowly darkened until the room, the boy, and the nurse’s laughter all faded away.
I woke up in a strange room, my face cold and wet. A well-dressed man stood over me, holding a spray bottle.
“Ah, here she comes,” he said, his voice gruff. “Sorry to spray you with water, but we tried ammonia several times,” he said, putting the bottle aside. “It seems you have a weak sense of smell.”
“It comes and goes,” I said, sitting up. I was lying on a worn leather couch. The room around me was made almost entirely of mahogany—the floors, the walls, the furniture. Several diplomas and certificates hung above a desk. A medical coat was draped over the back of the chair. On its breast pocket was a name tag that read DR. NEWHAUS.
“Am I in the hospital?” I asked, bewildered. Without thinking, I patted my pockets, looking for the paper that I had rubbed against the floor.
“You’re at St. Clément,” the man said, taking a seat in a chair next to the couch. His face was dull, fleshy, and somehow expressionless. As he stared at me, I noticed that one of his eyes was crooked, as though it was sliding off toward the side of his head. “My name is Dr. Newhaus. I’m your psychology professor, though we haven’t met yet, and I’m also the school doctor.” Opening a briefcase, he pulled out a stethoscope and a flashlight.
“You gave us quite a show,” he said as he listened to my breathing.
“What do you mean—” I began to ask, but he quieted me.
“How strange,” he said, lowering his stethoscope. “You have a slightly irregular heartbeat.”
“It’s just a murmur,” I said quickly. The doctors this summer had noticed it, too. “I’ve had it for a while,” I lied.
Leaning toward me, he listened again, the stethoscope cold beneath my shirt. “This is quite different,” he said. “It almost has the cadence of an Undead—”
I cut him off before he could finish. “What did you say happened to me?” I asked, squirming away from him.
He removed the scope, draped it around his shoulders, and crossed his hands in his lap. “You collapsed during history class and seemed to have had a kind of fainting spell.”
I glanced at the clock above his desk. It had been a few hours since the start of class. “What do you mean?”
“I was hoping you’d be able to tell me.” His expression was so placid that it made me uneasy.
I stared at the paisley patterns in the carpet to avoid his gaze. How had I dreamed of the hospital when I’d never actually been there? It seemed alarmingly similar to my dream of Miss LaBarge.
He studied me with one eye while the other wandered off to the right. “I unsettle you,” he said, his lip curling into a frown. “It’s this.” He motioned to his eye. “I don’t blame you; it makes most students uncomfortable.”
“Oh, no. I, um—” I stammered, feeling suddenly guilty. “It’s not that. It’s just, well…” He waited for me to finish, but I let my sentence trail off.
His expression softened. “Just a moment ago, you were patting your pockets. Did you lose something?”
The rubbing. The dream had been so vivid that when I woke up, I thought I might still have it in my pocket. “Oh, it was just…nothing.”
He raised an eyebrow, but then let it drop. “Do you have any preexisting neurological conditions or a history of brain trauma?”
“No.”
“Have you ever fainted like this before?”
“No.”
“Do you remember anything that might have triggered the event this morning?”
I thought of the slide of the hospital, of how I was overwhelmed with the need to know what was behind the building’s walls. “No.”
Lowering his pad, Dr. Newhaus tried to meet my eyes, but I looked away. “I’m not your enemy,” he said. “I’m here to help you.”
“I’ve had a lot of bad doctors in the past.”
“I understand,” he said. “So have I. That’s why I decided to become one.”
He smiled, one eye resting on me, the other on the trees swaying outside the window. He seemed trustworthy.
“Can you remember what happened before you fainted?” he said. He crossed his legs, revealing mismatching striped socks.
For some reason, they put me at ease. “I remember Mr. Pollet telling us about the founding of Montreal and its tunnels. I remember him showing us slides of a bunch of old buildings. The last one I saw was of the Royal Victoria Hospital, before everything went black.”
He shined a flashlight into my eyes and asked me to count backward from ten. When I was finished, he asked, “And you don’t remember anything in between then and now?”
Wringing my fingers together, I thought about my dream of Miss LaBarge, about all the sleep I’d lost, and all the mornings I’d woken up in sheets drenched in sweat.
But at least those dreams had happened at night. Passing out in class was different; it was abnormal, intrusive, and frightening. “I had a dream,” I said, looking at my feet. “Or something like one. I’m not really sure.”
“Of what?”
“Of the Royal Victoria Hospital. I was walking through it to a certain room, looking for something. Everything was so clear and detailed, like I’d been there before.”
“Have you?”
I shook my head.
“Can you describe what you saw?”
I told him about the hospital waiting room, about going to the pediatric ward and entering the boy’s room and making a rubbing beneath the bed.
He looked unnerved. “That’s startlingly accurate,” he said. “The layout, the interior of the hospital—that’s all correct. Are you sure you haven’t been there before?”
I nodded.
The doctor frowned. “Have you had other dreams like this?”
I swallowed. “At night, yes. In each of them, I’m searching for something.”
He took notes as I told him about the nightmares I’d had all summer. When I was finished, he made me stand up and walk across the room. He then tested my balance, my vision, and my hearing.
“Physically, everything seems to be fine, though your body is exhausted and sleep deprived. I’m going to schedule you for some tests, just to make sure everything inside is okay.” He leaned forward. “But if I may speak candidly, you’ve been through a lot in the last year, and I think you’d benefit from a little help. I’d like you to consider coming in to see me regularly.”
I wiped off a dusty mark on my stockings, which must have been there from when I fell out of my chair.
“You can think about it if you’d like. In the meantime, these may help you get some sound sleep.” He jotted something down on a pad and tore off the prescriptions for two kinds of pills.
“What are they?” I asked, trying to sound out the names in my head.
“One is an antianxiety medication. The other is an antidepressant.”
“But I’m not depressed.”
“That may be,” he said, in a way that made me think he was humoring me. “However, for now, this medication should put an end to these dreams of yours, and hopefully help you relax and get some much needed sleep.”
“But what if I don’t want to stop them? What if I’m seeing them for a reason?”
“And what reason would that be?” he asked, puzzled.
I let my hands drop into my lap. “I don’t know.”
I spent the rest of the day undergoing tests and scans of my brain. When they all came back normal, Dr. Newhaus reviewed my chart one last time and let me go. By then it was already late afternoon, the shadows shifting over the courtyard as the sun sank in the sky. Classes were over, and students poured out of the buildings. Keeping my head down, I clutched my bag to my chest and hurried through the columns that lined the perimeter of campus. A group of girls was sitting on the stoop of the dormitory, Clementine LaGuerre’s voice ringing above the others.
“Apparently she had some sort of seizure in class today,” she was saying, popping her gum as if to punctuate her sentence. “I heard from one of the fourth-years that she wasn’t even that good of a Monitor at Gottfried,” she added, turning to April and Allison and three other girls who had lived down the hall from me last year.
I hid behind a column and watched them. “She was good,” April said, looking to her sister for approval.
“Well, she wasn’t that good,” Allison corrected. She was only distinguishable from her sister by the mole on her chin and her haughty tone. “She just made a big show whenever she found a dead animal. I bet in reality she was only a little bit above average.” The other girls nodded in agreement.
“So how did she do it?” Clementine asked, her voice calm. “How did she survive the kiss of an Undead?”