One evening the hospice's heating failed. The temperature dropped close enough to make the pipes moan. The generator thumped into life, and in the pale emergency light the shadows pooled long and wrong. Patients murmured as if from far away. Martin moved from room to room like a shepherd counting sheep. In Room 12 the air tasted of incense and iron. Samuel Grady, who had died fifteen years earlier in a house fire he might have started, sat up in bed when Martin entered and looked at him with a face that had the wrong age—young and burned and older by regret.
The hospice staff began to notice. He was uncanny in the mornings: recounting minute facts about patients that were never said aloud, knowing exactly when someone would reach for water. Some called it empathy on a supernatural level; others called it a helpful fluke. Martin shrugged and kept moving. The Nightmaretaker- The Man Possessed by the Devil