Phantom by Retifer M. (debian ebook reader .txt) 📖

stop, the sickness in the pit of my stomach and the fingers picking through my hair fading to background sensations.

She looks… really upset.

I involuntarily jerk my leg, barely actually feeling the movement. It’s like my brain and body are disconnected. I hiss, and hold my breath as the light, buzzing, numbness in my thigh and hip turn to burning. The rest of that leg stays numb.

I peek out of one squinted eye. I can only see Sam, the ceiling beyond her hidden in darkness. She’s trying to talk to me but I can’t hear anything beyond my own wheezing breaths. I swallow, trying not to gag at the taste of vomit and ectoplasm lingering on my tongue.

“Look at me.” Sam orders, cracking voice fading into clarity. “Stay- stay awake- please.”

I can’t stay awake though, and she scrambles for something to say when I start to drift off. I hear her saying things, but it’s like she’s speaking an entirely different language. She brushes the back of her hand across her cheek and that grabs my attention. Is Sam… crying?

I look up at her, a little confused. I strain to hear what she’s trying to say to me and almost don’t hear it when she mumbles, “Don’t pass out, it’s almost off, just- please, please don’t die- I swear to god-”

What’s off? Don’t die?

I must be messed up ‘cause all of a sudden the thought of death doesn’t exactly hold as much weight as it should. Instead I feel a prickle of relief that I won’t have to deal with the aftermath- healing and getting in trouble and worrying about Jazz trying to psychoanalyze me afterwards.

I’m tired, and my chest hurts, and my brain supplies me with the word “paralyzed” when I wonder why I can’t feel my leg. The world takes on a surreal, dream vibe and I let my eyes drift closed.

“If you don’t start talking to me I’ll…” Sam sounds lost, unsure, but then I feel her sit up straighter beside me. “If you don’t talk right now I’m going up to your room and smashing all of your stupid model rockets.”

The words “Smashing” and “Stupid model rockets” gets my eyes open.

“Whaah-? No-” I reach out intending to grab her arm, but it ends up just flopping onto the floor beside her. I try to tell her to lay off my rockets- I built those from scratch- but it just comes out as a bunch of unintelligible noises, with a no thrown in.

Even though she probably didn’t understand a majority of what I tried to say, Sam seems satisfied that I’m not dead yet. I gasp sharply when I hear a tearing noise and cold air hits my leg, the contrasting temperatures only making the burning more prominent; like accidentally touching a hot pan.

I try to look around but she holds my face, forcing me to stay staring up at the ceiling. I can hear Tucker saying stuff. He sounds freaked out.

I have to deliberately keep my eyelids open to look up at Sam. “Wha-z ‘ppenin’?” I blurt out. My tongue feels awkward in my mouth.

“N-nothing, it’s fine.” Sam’s eyes flit towards the noise, then she leans in close, pointedly looking at my face. She whispers, “It’s fine, it’s fine-”

I get the feeling she isn’t saying that for me. I let my cheek press against the concrete, let their voices become background noise again. Just focus on my head.

Falling

“Danny?”

My cheek is press against the concrete, their voices background noise.

“Danny.” Not a question. They’ve stopped cleaning my hair off at some point; I don’t know when. Everything is calmer now; I can feel it in the air. Everything is clear and cool. The pain is… it’s less than it was, only a dull thrumming now.

“Danny, please get up. We need to get all of this off of you.”

I crack an eye open and look up at Sam, but don’t lift my head. I offhandedly wonder if she trashed my stuff like she said she would, or if maybe that was a part of a dream. She takes an uneven breath.

“Can you get up?”

Can I get up? Holy crow, I can barely open my eyes and you’re asking me to stand? On my feet? Which I can’t currently even feel? How can I stand on something I cannot feel? And I don’t know if it’s real or a part of a waking dream but I think I’m shaking really bad; too unsteady to stand, too tired.

“We need to bring you upstairs. We’re wasting towels trying to get this stuff off you and there’s no light down here and… We just- we need to get you upstairs, okay?”

I make an unintelligible noise that they wrongly take as an “alright”. They pull me into a sitting position. My vision disappears for a second and when it comes back they’re standing me up somehow, chatting idly about whether or not FentonWorks’s water heater is electric or not.

The pain is now only at the level of a bad migraine with a small spike every few seconds so I go along with their plan to get me into the shower or whatever. I can feel the ectoplasm hardening in my hair and that isn’t something I want to happen; I have no idea how hard it is to get out.

I’m being sat down at the kitchen table all of a sudden. Ignoring the fact that it appears they’ve teleported me, I lean heavily half on the table and half on Tucker, with my leg bent weirdly under the chair and hands splayed on the table so that I don’t fall over.

I feel Sam comb through my hair with a hot wet cloth that smells like dish soap. Their conversation is muffled, but that doesn’t matter right now.

I barely register being helped over to the couch, only really acknowledging the fact once I’m relaxing into the all too wonderful fluffy goodness of the big comforters I forgot I’d brought down, at least one of which has to be filled with like, angel feathers and rose petals.

That concrete has nothing on this.

Tuck and Sam argue over something. Not sure what, though it might be about me. Tucker is pulling out all of his tech, Sam is running around the house. The sun is setting outside, or I’m passing out, but I’m sure it’s just the former. But that makes no sense; we couldn’t have been in the lab for more than half an hour. I had blanked out at some point, but it… it couldn’t have been for that long.

Tucker appears, kneels in front of me on the floor and says something quietly.

“Hm?” I hum.

He jumps slightly, as if he thought I wasn’t entirely conscious too. “Uh, the power’s out…”

I look up at him and then around the room. Ah, no wonder it’s dark then; all of the lights are off.

“The phones are out, none of my stuff works, it’s getting dark out- we don’t know what to do.” He takes a shakey breath. “I-I’m sorry, man. I didn’t think- I didn’t know that would happen.”

I chew the inside of my lip at the sound of his voice cracking.

“The portal must’ve-” He sighs. “I’ll explain later; you look like you’re kind of out of it and…”

I close my eyes when he doesn’t finish. I feel something come close to my face so suddenly that I would’ve flinched if I had the energy. Tucker’s fingers brush my nose but slowly pull away when I exhale. I can’t begin to imagine the crap I’m putting them through right now if Tucker just seriously checked to see if I’m-

I can’t really finish that thought.

He pulls a blanket over me as Sam storms into the room; I don’t need to see to tell that much. She’s still wearing her steel-toed combat boots and those are not easy to miss, delirious or no.

“Everything’s down and there’s noth- Tucker what the hell are we gonna-”

“I-I dunno.”

“I don’t know shit about how to deal with this-”

“I don’t either- I think we just need to calm down.”

“How do we keep calm when Danny just-”

They’re so quiet I think I must’ve blacked out again. I open an eye to check, surprised to find it watering and slightly crusty. Crying? No, it’s too cold, and… green? I rub my eyes with a hand which gets their attention.

“Danny, are you okay?” I hear Sam ask. “I mean, okay enough to walk somewhere?”

“T’a ‘spital?” I slur.

I’m not sure they understand me until she replies. “Yeah, can you get up?”

I groan, mutter nonsense, and try to push myself up. Sam helps me sit and I let her hold me up. She lets go when I nod and I lean into the couch heavily. I rub my eyes again, feeling flakes come off on my hands.

“Maybe not then… Here,” I feel Sam prod my hand. She’s talking to me in that voice she uses on stray animals.

I stop long enough to see her holding out a tissue, process what I’m seeing, and then take it. I continue halfheartedly scrubbing down my face, picking the crusty gross stuff out of the corners of my eyes and eyelashes, even some that had been on the sides of my face and cheeks from when I was lying down.

I look down at the tissue, covered in green-yellow goop. Wonderful. There must’ve been ectoplasm literally in my eyes. Sam takes another tissue from the box and holds my face forwards, scraping off the spots I’d missed.

“You gave me a heart attack.” She says as she scrubs at my cheek. I never thought I’d see Sam like this- in fact it had never even occurred to me that I might ever see her like this. It feels weird.

“Mmm.”

“I’m serious. Do… do you even know what happened?” When I don’t reply she sighs. “Danny.” She looks me straight in the eyes and I notice the marks on her face, like her make-up was running.

Oh. It was, ‘cause she was crying. That I remember.

“You looked- you looked like a ghost- I…” Her eyes flick away for a second. “I think it was just some kind of side effect from falling in that stuff, but I swear to god-”

She clears her throat and I wait.

“I thought you were dead, Danny.” She leans back on the table and looks at me. “You… you took ten years off my life when that stupid gate fell.”

“Ih-t’was mm-melted?”

“Yeah, I noticed.” She says and despite the sarcasm I can tell she’s afraid.

“E’m fine, Sam.”

“I’m scared you’re- you’re not fine!” When I try to give her a mock exasperated look, she makes a hissing noise in her throat. “Danny, we have no way of getting you to the hospital. I don’t know if you’re gonna die from that stuff or even what it did to you before when you… and your leg-”

I squint my