9

“I was there.” Hyde was slumped against the window. “They were alive… I got them out…” Everyone was relatively quiet. Valerie was glad to be out of that place and on US Highway 1 South surrounded by late evening car-poolers, gridlock and commuters. It was late evening, almost midnight and traffic was moving fairly. The lights along the road lit the road up and turned it into an orange blanket dotted by every model and color of car. The sky was a dark blue and the clouds obscured the moon. Peering into cars driving by them, Tammy nervously and delicately trembled after her horrible experience. She had felt Jackie in her and liked it. She had liked it! All that dark power at her control, and it was lurched from her in a second. She wanted it back, but… not at the expense of her soul. By her side, Loren reached to his leg. It was still bothering him from the fall. One second, he saw Donna lurching after him, her possessed face searing into his soul, her inhuman strength ripping him apart, and then he woke up from that nightmare and Hyde was pushing him up the stairs out of the basement.

“Okay…” Kevin was focused on the road, driving for the hotel and turning back to Long Beach. “Say it again. You rescued everyone?”

“It was 1978 again…” Hyde depressingly mumbled. “Eric and Donna were alive, so were Fez, Kelso and Jackie and I was pushing them up the stairs and out of the place…” He lapsed back into depression. He had beaten that place, and yet, it didn’t matter. His friends were still gone.

“Hyde…” Valerie spoke up as she leaned to the front seat. “You were hallucinating. You were pushing us out of that place!”

“But it seemed so real…” The former bad influence wondered why he was allowed to live again.

“You know…” Loren had lost a camera, three rolls of film and all the research on that place in the basement. “Some researchers believe that ghosts are trapped in time, and that they’re just place memories getting replayed when the weather is right. Maybe you were back with them again… in spirit.”

“I wasn’t just with them…” Hyde looked up as Kevin drove off the interstate for the hotel. “I’m telling you… I got them out!”

“Jackie too?” Her eyes rounded in fear, Tammy was scared to death the demented diva was still inside her waiting to take over again.

“Maybe you did…” Kevin rolled to a stop at the front entrance of the Hotel Tipton in the city’s theater district. “In spirit…” Bellboys rushed to assist them with smiles, and the doorman tipped his hat to them, but the five Point Place visitors were not quite as willing to be genial. They tried to be polite in return, but they were tired and emotionally exhausted.

“Excuse, Mr. Chapman…” Gerald Olin, the hotel manager, called to Loren.

“Yes…”

“Mr. Pritchett dropped this off for you.” He produced the lost packet with his camera, film and research. Did Pritchett really drop that stuff off? He highly doubted it.

“Torch it.” Loren turned back around and entered the elevator with Hyde and the others. On some level, he wanted it back, but he was scared to death of the price he might pay for it. He just wanted to forget about ghosts, time warps and Vannacutt Sanitarium all together. When the elevator opened again, Valerie and Tammy retreated to their room on the seventeenth floor, mumbling something about the food in the hotel while the guys wandered to their room down the hall from them. Hyde never even went to bed. Kevin took one room, Loren the other and he collapsed into the chair at the window overlooking the city, pulled out a flask of scotch and thumbed the photo of himself and his friends during happier times. He had a hard time saying good-bye to them. He lifted his flask toward the sky outside the window.

“Rest in peace, guys…” He drifted to sleep dreaming of jumping out the window to join them beyond. When he woke, sunlight was hitting him across the face and telling him to wake up. They had two hours to get back to his father’s Cessna at the local airfield. Breakfast was brief, their hotel luxuries cursory and their feelings and confused and different. Point Place was eight hours away, and the only thing Hyde was relatively sure of was that he’d never return to Vannacutt Sanitarium.

For the plane ride home, almost everyone had started to relax and forget their memories of the deserted mental hospital on the cliffs overlooking the ocean. Kevin and Tammy were discussing their nuptials to occur in March, and Valerie was gently swirling and sipping wine trying to forget that the ghost of her sister had tried to kill her. Loren was wrapped up in the latest Stephen King book, correcting it for errors and occasionally looking up to take some crackers and cheese from the on-board snack tray. Upon landing in Wisconsin, Hyde pulled his overnight bag over his shoulder, thanked his new friends for coming with him and supporting him. In some way, they were exactly the people they had replaced. Loren represented Fez grown up and sure of himself, a person knowing where they were going. Kevin and Tracy were the love affair that Michael and Jackie never had but could have had and Valerie was Donna all over again, the type of girl Hyde might have had a chance without Eric around to take Donna from him. Hyde drove back to the Forman’s house a bit more shattered than before and wishing he could have had better news. Struggling with his pack, he unlocked the door and wandered in tiredly. He was thinking of shaving off the beard.

“How you doing, Steven?” Eric’s father sat in his chair and looked up from his newspaper. His extremely round head still bald and what little hair he had snowy white. “Have a nice trip?”

“I wouldn’t call it that.” Hyde dropped his bag off the landing at the front entryway. “You talking to me?”

“Of course, I’m talking to you…” Red actually grinned. He actually grinned! “It’s not like you killed my son or something!” He rose from his seat chuckling and prodded the young man’s shoulder as if they were friends.

“Did you get into Mrs. Forman’s sherry or something?” Hyde was suspicious.

“Steven…” Eric’s mother emerged from the kitchen and noticed him while grinning ecstatically happy. She couldn’t control her giddy nature. Maybe the both of them had been in the sherry. Her little wiener dog, Schotzie, had raced from the room under her feet as she hugged Hyde and vanished into the den.

“Steven, you’ll never guess who called!!!” Kitty was especially effervescent. “This morning Eric called. My son, Eric called me. Me!!! Oh, how I’ve missed him!!!”

“What a second…” Hyde shuddered a bit. “Eric called you???” He reacted confused and started wondering what was going on.

“He and Donna have been living in Ohio for the last fifteen years.” Kitty giddily recalled a very happy and joyful phone car that had lasted over three hours. “He’s a teacher, Donna’s the editor of a newspaper and they’ve got two little girls. I’m a grandmother!!! They’re coming home for Thanksgiving and Christmas!” She was so happy her little heart could barely hold it. She kept grinning wider and wider, her little round cheeks about to burst.

“Forman’s alive??” Hyde froze. Maybe he did get them out of that place after all….

“I’m going to put my foot up his ass!” Red rolled his eyes and mulled a bit disgusted. “He vanishes on us for twenty years and then calls us out of the blue just because Donna convinces him to bury a feud he has with me. What did I ever do to that dumb-ass?”

“Well…” Kitty turned round upset. “You called him a dumb-ass!” Red looked up at her in disbelief.

“Wait a second…” Hyde was still reeling from the alterations to the timeline he had caused. If he had saved everyone from the hospital, why was he still in a fog over the last forty years, and if he had got them all out, why didn’t they all just come back to Point Place with him and the others? Was it because they were still trapped in 1978 and he had escaped to the present? Did everyone survive? What about Kelso, Jackie and Fez?

“Forman’s alive…” He still tried to figure it out in his head. “And he and Donna are married and living in Ohio? Who goes to live in Ohio?” He really started hating time travel. His cell phone started ringing on his belt. He took it and held it aloft.

“Please be Kelso, please be Kelso, please be Kelso….” He prayed into it as he paced the living room. “Kelso?”

“Hyde, you’re not going to believe this…” It was Kevin Kelso, Michael’s little brother, fresh from their surreal trip down the rabbit hole. “I think you really did somehow save the guys. I just got a phone call from Michael in New York City!”

“New York City???” Hyde sounded like the guy in the Pace Picanti TV Commercial. “He’s in New York City???”

“He says he became a cop after high school!” Kevin paced through the living room of what had once been his parent’s house and was now where he lived with Tammy. “He’s working with the New York City Police… and get this, are you ready for this, Fez is an actor! The two of them have been living in an apartment off Forty-Fifth Street for almost twenty years!”

“Wait a second, wait a second…” Hyde turned his secret but crazy conversation away from the Formans and into Red’s study on the other side of the staircase. “Donna and Eric are in Ohio, Kelso and Fez are in New York City… Did Kelso say anything about Jackie?”

“No, he didn’t mention her.” Kevin looked to Tammy. She was finally going to meet his brother. “Eric and Donna are in Ohio?”

“If I really did save everyone, and if everyone made it…” Hyde wondered while rubbing his head. “I wonder where that little psychopath is.”

Far to the west on the southwest shore of California on the Pacific Palisades, the looming edifice of Vannacutt Sanitarium reached to the sun in the sky. The giant tombstone was the imposing memory of a demented surgeon consumed by personal demons. Dried leaves rattled through the courtyard and dead gardens. Vines choked off the old fountains, fallen branches littered the weed-filled yards and cars drove by under the cliffs in the shadow of the place. Dying trees swayed in the oceanic breezes blowing against the cliffs. Toward dusk, the incredible shadows reminded everyone around why it was called Haunted Hill. Deep inside the catacombs of the basement, open doors creaked on rusted hinges. Shadows moved around and the silent sounds of sobbing came from empty corners. Psychotic, possessed and dangerous, Jackie Burkhart walked through her home with long black skirts dragging behind her, her superhuman figure jutting proudly from her chest. Her hair was dark as a moonless night, her skin graveyard white and her lips blood red. Her pitch black eyes were a symbol of her possession, her long unholy vestments composed of living shadow and tainted dark energies churning and storming within and across her body. As she walked through, wheelchairs rolled out of her way, light bulbs lit up and exploded, doors slammed shut and the huge structure groaned from her powerful presence trying to explode outward from its walls. In this place, she could do anything she wanted, be anyone she wanted, become as tall as she wanted and control everything around her. As she turned back to the morgue, she paused… stepped back and listened from the darkness. She had heard something. There were noises that shouldn’t belong. She thought she heard the voices of living people near her, their delicious life energies ready to be absorbed into her. Did she have more guests? She crawled and ascended up the wall with unnatural proclivity like a giant parasite once more becoming one the structure, her body sprawled across it flesh to concrete and plaster. The possessed diva ascended up to the ceiling, pulling her body attracted to the wall toward the archway with her legs and skirts spread out behind her. She crawled across the ceiling and traversed the length of the hall before hanging upside down from the vaulted ceiling and looking upon her guests with her eyes blinking over completely blackened irises. She looked up upon them mulling around confused and bathed in the light of the main chamber down from the stairs.

“Guys, guys…” Jackson Stewart called out. “Where the heck are we?” He looked around the room. His sister, Miley, and her blonde best friend, Lily Truscott, were standing to his left looking around them as their friend, Oliver Oaken, wandered off to the side to peer down a long dark corridor. Raven Baxter made a face which sparked her attitude. The twins Zack and Cody Martin were aimlessly walking through the area. Zack was a bit spooked, but wanting to race a wheelchair through the place. His brother, Cody, was reacting a bit more analytical; trying to rationalize how they got here. Blonde and attractive Lizzie McGuire moved closer to her friend, David Gordon. Raven-haired Chelsea Daniels spun round once after dusting her blue jeans off from the floor, and Keely Teslow stayed close to Phil Diffy looking for his computerized gadget which should have been at his belt. Where was it?! Blonde and beautiful, Maddie Fitzpatrick fussed with her hair a bit, pulling it into a ponytail to keep the cobwebs out of it as Eddie Thomas checked her over. Heiress London Tipton suddenly shot her hand up to respond to Jackson.

“How many chances do I get?” Her vacuous stunted mind thought Jackson was playing a game.

“London…” Maddie was never exactly helping her by indulging London’s ignorance. “Try and get this through your head. We’ve been abducted by someone and dumped here!!!”

“Uh-uh….” Raven marched through the center of them forming her own opinion. “I ain’t staying here. I’m finding the way out.” She started wandering off in the wrong direction.

“Raven, don’t be wandering off…” Chelsea went after her.

“Uh, uh… Jackson, is it?” Phil checked his name and tried to give some advice. “I don’t think we should let them wander off.”

“I agree…” David Gordon, know as “Gordo” by Lizzie, joined them. Lizzie huddled near Maddie and Keely trying to fight off the chill of the basement.

“Guys…” Oliver looked at Miley and Lily then back to Jackson and Phil. “I don’t think we’re alone here…” He thought he’d seen Jackie Burkhart in her dark succubus form with all her unholy power slipping from one dark room for another. An excited glimmer of evil from her eyes, a glint of light from her vampiric teeth, she looked at Phil then to Jackson beckoning to them to come and be a part of her. The group of confused teens gathered en masse at the opening of one of the dark halls. There was pitch black all around them. The shadowy expanse of endless halls and confusing corridors stretching out all around them, the location had been definitely created to stir fear and terror to all who dared to enter this place. Something was out in those shadowy halls, and she was very hungry…

END