He said he peeked around the corner to see who might be playing a joke on him but the beds were all empty; no one was there. He went back to his work; a few minutes later the bell rang again. Again Sebastian went to see who was kidding around.

Again he found no one. Just as he was turning to go back to his work he heard someone say, �Water please.� He stopped and looked back at the beds.

There was an odd glow surrounding one of the beds and lying on it was �Something with the form of a man yet not a man; more like a vapor that you could put your hand right through,� Sebastian whispered.

He added, �He was holding out a hand toward me as if he was begging. The frightening thing was that the hand he held out was gone; amputated. What he held out to me was nothing more than a stump of an arm.�

Mikhail was about to protest that what Sebastian had described did not mean he had seen a ghost. It might well have been his imagination when Sebastian said, �I found out later that the man I saw had been in that very bed a few days earlier and had died there.�

�Yes, so,� Mikhail said warily.

�So,� Sebastian said, �he had died of an infection. An infection that he got after they amputated his arm!�

�I've got to go back to work Mikhail. Just know that I am not the only one. Many others have seen. Why did you ask about al fantasma Mikhail? You been seeing things from the other side too?� Sebastian asked.\

�Yes, maybe, oh I don't know. I just wanted to know what you think,� Mikhail said, wishing instantly that he had not.

An hour later Mikhail received another page. It was the ICU requesting he come there to clean and prepare a room for its new occupant.

On his way Mikhail passed the ICU waiting room and got an ominous feeling as he saw the women he had seen earlier visiting the patient in room five. They, along with several others in the waiting room, were crying.

When he arrived in the ICU, the charge nurse pointed to room five. Mikhail was dumb struck. He stared at the nurse incredulously.

�Well?� the nurse said, �where have you been? The patient passed away over an hour ago and we paged you just after they took the body to the morgue. Clean the room as quickly as you can. The new patient is being held in the ER waiting for us to take him in up here.�

It was as if he had gone deaf. Mikhail could not hear a thing the nurse said after she told him the patient in bed five had been taken to the morgue. His heart was like a hammer, beating so hard that it blocked out any sound.

He cleaned the room and remade the bed as quickly as he could. The nurses' words, �They took the body to the morgue; the morgue; the morgue,� echoed in his brain. Satisfied that the room would pass any inspection he left.

The next few days were hell for Mikhail. It didn't matter whether his eyes were open or closed; they constantly held his vision of the woman from ICU-5 floating into the morgue. He couldn't sleep, could barely eat and if it had not been for his job and his church he would not have left the safety of his home.

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