Ghost Town

She’d just clomped down the steps and switched on the lights, and he hadn’t moved.

“Myrnin?” She said it reasonably loudly, but he didn’t stir. “Myrnin, are you okay?” She was getting a sick, strange feeling about this. He looked . . . posed, almost. Like a corpse laid out for burial.

After what seemed like an eternity, his eyelids slowly raised, and he stared blankly at the roof of the lab. “I think I was dreaming,” he said. His voice sounded drugged and slow. “Was I dreaming?” He turned his head and looked at her with strange, luminous eyes. “I thought you were gone.”

“I went home,” she said, and her uneasiness intensified to a prickling all over her skin. “Don’t you remember?”

“No,” he said softly. “No, I don’t remember. I’ve been feeling . . . tired. I wish I could sleep. Sleep must be a very nice thing.” In the same distant, contemplative voice, he said, “I loved her, you know.”

Claire opened her mouth, then closed it without saying anything. Myrnin didn’t seem to care either way. “I loved her and I destroyed her. Don’t you ever wish you could take something back, Claire? Something terrible that you wish never happened?”

He really wasn’t well. She just knew it. She could feel it. “Maybe I should call Dr. Mills,” Claire said. “Or Theo. You like Theo. You can talk to him.”

“I don’t need a doctor. I’m perfectly fine. I checked my blood for any signs of degeneration, and I’m free of any sign of the disease that afflicted us before.” He shut his eyes again. “I’m just tired, Claire. Tired and . . . tired of everything. It’s a mood. It will pass.” To prove it, he sat up and hopped off the lab table—from depressed to manic in one leap. His heart wasn’t in it, but he rubbed his hands together and smiled at her. “Now. What do you have for me, my little mechanic?”

She hated to say it now, because she knew it was absolutely the worst time to try to talk to him, but she had no real choice. “I think there’s something wrong with the machine,” she said. “I think maybe we did something wrong.”

His eyes opened very wide. “And why would you say such a thing? I’ve run all the tests, I tell you. There’s nothing wrong.”

“It’s not something that’s obvious; it’s just that—” She couldn’t quite think how to phrase it, so she just blurted it out. “People are acting crazy. I think it’s the machine.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. It’s not the machine; it can’t be,” Myrnin said. “Don’t be so overdramatic, Claire. People in Morganville regularly go around the twist, normally in fairly spectacular ways. It’s really not all that unusual. Perhaps it’s unusual to see so many acting oddly at once, but odder things have happened here.” He smiled and spread his hands. “There. All explained. No cause for alarm.”

“Well—but there was this boy, Alex. I saw him yesterday morning. He didn’t know where he was. It was really weird, and he was really upset.”

“Don’t young men these days constantly seek new ways to obliterate their brains? They certainly did in my day, although the most they had to work with were fermented beverages and exotic herbs. Young Alex almost certainly had a blackout that can be perfectly explained by drugs and alcohol.” Myrnin turned away to pick up his Ben Franklin spectacles, balanced them on his nose, and looked over them to say, “Don’t do drugs. I feel I ought to say that.”

“I don’t,” Claire said, exasperated, and sat down across from him on a pile of boxes. “Okay, then, never mind Alex. Michael actually thought I was his mother! How weird is that?”

“Hmm. Less explainable, but when did this happen?”

“Yesterday morning.”

“Don’t you ever wake up and think yourself in a different place, a different time? It happens to vampires fairly often, actually. It even happens to me occasionally, when I manage to sleep.” Myrnin studied her for a few long seconds. “He’s fine now, I assume.”

Claire hesitated, then had to nod. Michael had been absolutely normal ever since. So maybe she was putting things together that didn’t belong. It might even explain the vamp in the diner, if vampires were prone to sleepwalking. . . . “There was another one at the hospital,” Claire said. “He said he was a doctor, but he wasn’t. Michael said later that he used to be a doctor, before he had a breakdown.”

“Aha, a breakdown. I believe that might be called a clue.”

It was so frustrating. She just knew . . . but Myrnin’s arguments were so logical and practical that she felt stupid. “And this morning,” she said. “Laura Landau. She was looking for her mom’s office. But her mom’s been dead for a year. And Laura went to the funeral and everything. It was like she just woke up and . . . forgot.”

That made Myrnin pause for a moment, considering. He touched his earlobe, tugged it, and finally said, “I acknowledge that I have no explanation for that. I’ll run another set of diagnostics and review the logs, I promise you, but I can’t see any way that these incidents could be co

“Are you sure?” she asked. “Are you really, totally sure?”

“Yes,” he said. “I am sure. I double-checked everything after you went home yesterday. I even made a few improvements, just in case.”

The first part of that reassured her. The second part . . . not so much. “What kind of improvements?”

“Oh, nothing, really. Mostly just streamlining. You really did very well; I certainly don’t want you to think that I am one of those people who has to be in control all the—Oh, well, I suppose that’s actually true—I do have to be in control all the time. But only because I am in charge, of course.” His manic chatter wasn’t fooling her; there was a strange look in his eyes, and something was off about his behavior, too. “It’s all fine, Claire. You should just leave it to me.”

She swallowed a mouthful of dread. “Can I take a look? Not that I don’t trust you. Only because I’m really worried about my friends.”

“Aren’t I your friend?” he asked, very softly. There was a cold light in his eyes, something that seemed so alien to her, it was like seeing him possessed. “Friends trust each other. There’s nothing wrong with the machine. In fact, for the first time in years, I actually feel . . . rested. I feel better.”

But five minutes ago he’d said he was tired. This was scaring her. “Myrnin, you are my friend, but there’s something not right about this. Please. Let me see it.”

He debated it for a moment, and then nodded. The cold light was gone from his eyes when he blinked, and his body language shifted back, subtly, to the Myrnin she knew. “Of course you can. I’m sorry. I don’t know what I was thinking. Well, I moved it downstairs and installed it below,” he said. “I’ll show it to you just this once. I put in safety protocols to protect it against any unauthorized tampering, so be warned. I don’t want you down there alone, all right?”

“All right,” she said. The “safety protocols” were, no doubt, something that would eat her or burn her face off. She wasn’t eager to go poking around downstairs. “I just won’t feel good about it until I check for myself.”

He tapped his pen on his lips. “I heard your father is unwell.”

“He’s in the hospital. They . . . they were moving him and my mom today to Dallas, to a heart hospital.”

“And yet you’re here, talking to me about all these vague suspicions,” he said. “I would have thought that you’d be at his side, still.”

She felt terrible the instant he said it; she’d been feeling guilty about it all morning, but her dad had texted her at four a.m. and said, No need to come, they’re already getting me ready. Love you, sweetheart. And she’d texted him back first thing when she woke up, but the ambulance had already left.