Haunted Humans - Nina Kiriki Hoffman, ebook
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NINA KIRIKI HOFFMAN
HAUNTED HUMANS
ONE
Dorothy jean demain, presently known as Dorothy Jean Hand, sometimes called
Dot
by people who didn't know her and almost always D.J. by those who did, gripped
the phone handset between her ear and shoulder. Her right hand held a pen
poised
over a carbonless message pad; her left hand sorted the Mental Healing
Center's
mail. The four office hours following Friday's lunch break stretched ahead,
aggravated by dealing with the operator who had picked up when D.J. rang the
answering service.
"Sandy, have you checked account 551 for me yet?" D.J. said as patiently as
she
could, breaking in on two minutes of inane chatter.
She listened to Sandy splutter through a message for Dr. Arlene Bollings,
D.J.'s
boss, managing to extract relevant information with great difficulty. She was
just about to demand the phone number of the person leaving the message when
Sandy broke in with, "Uh, but-- hey, Dot, there's a message here for you,
too."
"Let's finish with the first one, please." D.J. could hear her voice
tightening.
She wanted to grab Sandy and shake the information out of her like salt. But
she
was in secretary mode right now, level, efficient, no matter what the
circumstances. She hunched her shoulders, then took a calming breath.
"But the one for you is creepy." Sandy's voice was high, her words slow. D.J.
wondered what she looked like; all she could tell was that Sandy chewed gum
loudly and snappingly, and occasionally smoked; the small sucked intakes of
breath were a giveaway.
"I still need the phone number on this one, Sandy." Sandy had purged vital
information from the files without communicating it before. D.J. had learned
the
hard way to persist with her.
After three tries, Sandy managed to tell her the phone number. D.J. wrote,
sighed, and said, "Is that it for this message?"
"Yeah, I guess. There's one from that psycho nutcase Dr. Kabukin's seeing--"
D.J. resisted an urge to ask just which psycho nutcase. Dr. Kabukin handled
therapy cases, while Dr. Bollings did divorce, custody, and criminal
evaluations
for the courts. D.J. generally liked Dr. Kabukin's patients better. Most of
them
were interested in changing. Most of Dr. Bollings' patients were interested in
fooling the doctor.
 "-- a couple real boring messages for the other doctors, and then this one for
you. It's pretty weird, Dot."
"Why don't you read it to me? And get it over with? D.J. poised her pen at the
top of the next message blank, wondering if Sandy would communicate any of the
information in order.
"To, uh, Dorothy Jean, from Chase. Do you suppose that's a first or a last
name?"
To stop her hand from shaking, D.J. pressed the pen down on the message form
so
hard it punched through several sheets. "Go on."
"There's, like, no number. It just says, 'You know what I need and I'm coming
to
get it.' Don't you think that's weird?"
D.J. said nothing.
"Well, I do. Kind of creepy. Did you get that? 'You know what I need and I'm
coming to get it.' Dot, you still there? Darn, I bet she hung up. Why do
people
always hang up on me?"
Deciding to take this as a suggestion, D.J. quietly lowered the phone's
handset
until it clicked into the cradle. Chase? It couldn't be Chase. She stared over
the four-foot-high divider that separated her desk and computer hutch from the
office waiting room, her gaze finally settling on the crystal vase of Double
Delight roses Dr. Kabukin had brought in that morning and set among the
magazines and self-help books on the glass-topped table between the two
blue-and-white striped couches. Look how pink and white the roses are, D.J.
thought, just like a baby, perhaps, or the hopes of a young girl on her
wedding
night.
From the white walls, colorful abstract pictures glowed in the sun slanting
through the picture window. Leftover Oregon raindrops glistened on the lawn
out
front. Everything in D.J.'s view looked cool and clean and calm. Untouched
tranquility, like her life before Chase.
She shuddered and lifted the phone again. For a moment she closed her eyes
tight, concentrating on crashing all the thoughts she didn't want to
entertain.
She pressed autodial for the answering service, and smiled down at the message
pad when Poppy picked up.
"Account 551, please," D.J. said, and took the rest of the messages without a
hitch.
Morgan Hesch sat on one of the puffy striped couches in the Mental Healing
Center waiting room and stared at the bits of dirt he'd tracked on the white
speckled rug. Why did they have a lawn out front if they wanted to keep the
rug
clean? Well, yeah, there was a brick walk that wound across the lawn, but what
if you were coming from the other direction? And the lawn was green and
healthy,
but there were those flower beds. Somebody must rake the edges all the time to
 make the dirt look so -- so clean. Like nothing had ever stepped on it since
the
dawn of time. Morgan hated that kind of clean. If blackboards were bare in his
college classes when he got there, he always chalked something on them before
he
sat down. If the dirt were blank he just had to put a footprint in it. If
things
were wide open, any force, good or evil, could enter and control them.
So the floor was no longer blank, either, not peppered with those chunks of
earth that had fallen out of the waffle-stomper soles of his hiking boots.
Morgan looked at the bits of squared dirt and slid his left hand in between
the
third and fourth buttons on his shirt, hiding it against his chest. One of his
insiders, Shadow, always wanted to hide Morgan's hands.
"Miss Deej?" Morgan said, his knees knocking against each other, not because
he
was cold, just to be doing something.
He could only see the top of her head over the wall that hid the desk from him
and everybody else. She had messy frizzy brown hair that she parted in the
middle. He watched the part lean back until he could see Deej's eyes, green
like
the devil's, over the divider as she looked at him.
"Yes, Morgan," she said. One of her better voices. Not the first-time-&phone
voice which said, I'm-here-to-help,-don't bother-to-know-I'm-human. Definitely
not the I-can't-have-a-relationship-with-you-because-it-wouldn't-be-prof
essional voice. She'd given up on that one after he'd been seeing Dr. Dara
Kabukin for two months. Not the don't-bother-me-I'm-in-the-middle-of-something
voice, and not the okay,-okay-yes-I-guess-I-can-look-up voice. More of a
I-don't-know-what-I'm-doing-but-I'm-glad-for-a-distraction voice. Actually he
didn't think he'd ever heard her use this one before.
Morgan figured Deej must have insiders since she had lots of voices like he
did.
Also, she was one of the few people who could recognize his insiders just by
the
way they talked. Even Dr. Dara got confused sometimes, but Deej always knew
who
was talking if it was anybody she'd ever talked to before. Timmy liked to play
tricks on Deej, but even he was happy when the tricks didn't work. Morgan
wondered if Deej had ever thought about being a doctor. Even though her hair
was
messy and she had the devil's eyes, he might go see her if she was a doctor.
"I'm thirsty," he said.
"Would you like some water?"
"Yes, please. And paper? Pencil?" The voice that asked the last part belonged
to
the newest insider, who wasn't used to using Morgan's vocal cords and wasn't
supposed to talk until Morgan had gotten to know him, anyway. The new
insider's
voice hadn't sorted itself out yet; it sounded a lot like Morgan.
Deej stood up so he could see about a third of her, the top third. She was
wearing a blue and white shirt, and some little bits of color on her lips,
 just
the outside edges. Mostly if she had any color on her lips it was all over
them.
Today was not like other days.
She held out some white paper and a pencil with a blunt tip. After he took the
things from her, she headed into the other room, the one with the sink and the
little baby fridge and the table where you took tests.
The new insider was clamoring to get its hands on the paper and pencil.
Morgan's
appointment with Dr. Dara wouldn't start for another fifteen minutes. Morgan
asked this anxious new insider if fifteen minutes would be enough, and the
insider said he'd do what he could, if it was okay with Morgan. Sure, said
Morgan. He sat back and let go of his hands. The insider used the left hand to
draw a picture real fast of a man's face. The man had dark thick eyebrows and
shadowy eyes and his mouth was wide but it sure wasn't smiling. What
interested
Morgan as he watched the picture form in front of him was that it looked like
a
photograph, with gray places under the nose and eyebrows, like parts of the
face
stuck right out of the paper and had shadows. He had never drawn anything like
this before.
He finished. Deej brought him a cup with water in it, then looked at his
picture
without asking and dropped the water. The water splashed on Deej's sandals.
Some
hit Morgan's hiking boots, but most of it hit the rug.
"Miss Deej," said Morgan.
"Ah, ah, ah, oh, I'm sorry, Morgan," she said, breathing like a dog on a hot
day. "I'll get you another."
"Miss Deej, you having a seizure?" he asked.
"Well, maybe, yes, maybe," she said, and ran into the sink-fridge-test room.
Today was definitely not like other days. Morgan had never seen Deej upset
before.
When she came back, she handed him the water without spilling any and said,
"Morgan, who is that a picture of?"
"I don't know. One of the insiders did it."
"Which insider?"
"Now, Miss Deej," said Clift, "you know it would be unprofessional of us to
discuss our case with the secretary."
"Oh, come on, Clift," said Deej. "I'm not asking you for a diagnosis or even
intimate personal details. I was just wondering which one of you did it."
Clift thought that over, and said, "Well, the truth is, Miss Deej, we can't
tell
you which insider. Somebody new is all we know."
 "Do you know who the man in the picture is?"
"Do you?" asked Mishka in her little baby girl voice. She thought it was a
game.
She was three and thought most things were games.
"Do you?" Deej repeated.
"I asked you first," said Mishka.
"I asked you second, and two is bigger than one."
"Well, I don't know," Mishka said, but at the same time the left hand was
writing something on the piece of paper. Morgan looked down. "Chase Kennedy,"
the words said.
Deej put her hands over her mouth. Her eyes got wide.
"Somebody you know?" Saul asked, with an ugly edge to his tone. Saul was mean
to
everybody. Morgan didn't like it when Saul took the voice because he made
people
not like Morgan.
"Somebody you know?" Deej said, right back. She'd met Saul before and she
still
liked Morgan. One of the few.
"No," said Saul.
"How could you draw a picture of somebody you don't know? Did you see his
picture in a magazine or something?"
"There are some things mankind was not meant to know," said the Shadow in his
creepy echoey voice.
"How about woman kind?" asked Deej, but just then the phone rang and she
disappeared back behind her desk. Her voice turned into the polite-to-company
voice she always used on the phone as she said, "Good afternoon, Mental
Healing
Center, may I help you?"
Dr. Dara came out of the door to the back hallway, smiling and leading a young
fat woman toward the door to outside. "All right, Elena, same time next week?"
she said, her voice faintly accented. Only two of the insiders had accents
that
Morgan could hear, and they were Valerie, the Southern one, and Saul, who was
from New Jersey. The rest of his insiders sounded pretty much like people on
TV.
Dr. Dara was from somewhere else. England? England, even though she had narrow
black eyes and totally black hair like people from Japan.
The fat woman stared at the floor, mumbled something, glanced up quickly at
Dr.
Dara and then away again. Morgan remembered being like that when he first
started seeing the doctor, not being able to look anybody in the eye, not
being
able to talk clearly, not wanting anybody to look at him. When the insiders
had
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