The Bride Wore Black Leather

direction, one I could sense but not make sense of. They’d been pushed aside by what was happening, forced out of the way to make room for what was pushing in. I was pretty sure the patients were still alive. But I couldn’t tell if they were still human any more.
    I yelled back to Julien and Dr. Benway at the doorway, telling them what I was seeing, trying to make sense of it. They’d managed to get inside the Ward but couldn’t force themselves any further in. They didn’t have my gift—to find a way forward, in the face of everything.
    I concentrated, focusing my gift on the human-shaped gap in our world. I tried to reach into the gap, to find the link between the patients and the beings from Outside, so I could break it . . . but it only took me a moment to realise that the patient was the link. I couldn’t break the link without killing the patient. And I wasn’t ready to that. Not until I’d tried everything else I could think of first. I couldn’t sacrifice one life to save many. Julien wouldn’t approve. He always was a good influence on me, the bastard. So, since I couldn’t touch the alien influence, I found the man and grabbed on to him. I could feel him, held half-way between this world and the other. And the more I held on to him with my gift, the more real I found him, until finally it was the easiest thing in this world to haul him all the way back into reality. And suddenly there he was, hanging in mid air, where the gap used to be. One hundred per cent real and solid and human. I let go, and he fell to the floor. And so did the beings from Outside that had been attached to him, that I’d found and dragged into this world with him.
    All of Ward 12A snapped back to normal. The light was soft and even, the awful howling was gone, and the room was room-shaped again, with only the three usual dimensions. Patient John Doe X 47 lay curled up in a ball on the floor, breathing harshly, eyes wide and staring. I’d rescued his body, but someone more experienced in these matters would have to bring his mind back after everything the poor bastard had been put through. I looked at the aliens I’d dragged through into our world, and my lip curled. Rewritten and restructured by the laws of our reality, there were floppy bits of meat, each the size of a man’s head, with protrusions that made no sense, squirming and oozing across the floor. They whined and squealed with every movement, as if being in our world hurt them. I only had to look at them to know they were suffering and dying, unable to withstand human conditions. One by one, they fell silent and lay still, and within moments they were rotting and falling apart. I looked back at Julien as he came forward to join me.
    “That enough of a message for you?”
    “That will do nicely,” said Julien. “They’ll think twice before trying that again. You did well, John.”
    “It’s a shame they died so quickly,” said Benway. “I wanted to stamp on them first.”
    I had to raise an eyebrow. “Hard core, Doc.”
    She surprised me with a brief, happy smile. “No-one messes with my patients and gets away with it.”
    She moved over to the patient lying on the floor, knelt beside him, and spoke reassuringly to him as she checked his vital signs. He didn’t even know she was there.
    “We are but flies to alien entities,” Julien said. “They use us for their sport.”
    “Bastards,” Dr. Benway said succinctly, without looking up.
    “You’re thinking of the Sun King, aren’t you?” I said quietly to Julien.
    “Aren’t you?” said Julien.
    Dr. Rabette and Dr. Burke stuck their heads through the open doorway, attracted by the reassuring quiet. Benway saw them as she stood up, beckoned them into Ward 12A, then drove them to check on the other patients with a furious glare and a fusillade of bad language. Most of the other patients seemed more confused than anything. Having been pushed so far-away, they hadn’t been affected by the released energies. Most of them were too preoccupied with their own problems anyway. And once I could see them clearly, I didn’t blame them.
    One bed was full of three people who’d been mashed together in an ungainly tangle of limbs, their pallid flesh stretched taut, while three faces stared from different sides of the same head. I don’t know what their staring eyes saw, but I knew it wasn’t anything I wanted to see. A man sat stiffly upright on the next bed, strapped bodily to the headboard.