by Vivian Shaw
CHAPTER 3
She had thought the interior of the spa would be oppressive, or at the very least remind her unpleasantly of the time she had spent in another rock-cut complex underground, but whoever had built the place had taken the danger of claustrophobia into consideration. The surface sections of the facility were airy-bright, all pale golden wood and floor-to-ceiling windows and warm stone, accented with the deep blue of lapis and the red-orange of carnelian; but the parts of Oasis Natrun that were carved into the mountainside were not only high-ceilinged and cleverly lit, but also painted with exquisite care. Tomb paintings, Greta thought, and a moment later, That’s perfect.
Ed Kamal had introduced her to the chief of nursing, Sister Brigitte, who was approximately eight feet tall and gorgeous; she wore white scrubs that didn’t look like pajamas so much as some kind of ceremonial garb, brilliant against her deep brown skin. Greta had had to look quite a long way up to meet her gaze, feeling extremely small and unimportant, while Sister Brigitte gave her a narrow-eyed once-over; it was a considerable relief when she abruptly smiled and offered her hand. “I have heard good things about you, Dr. Helsing. Welcome to Oasis Natrun.” Her accent was French, noticeable but not distracting.
Now—having seen Dr. Kamal off in the helicopter, which Greta still could hardly believe was real—Sister Brigitte was showing her around the facility.
“We have a nursing staff of twenty,” she said, walking with Greta through the administrative offices into the underground section of the complex. It didn’t feel underground; the corridor felt just like any corridor in a nicely appointed office building, except for those gorgeous mural paintings. “Six of those are nurse practitioners,” Sister Brigitte continued, “which is why we generally don’t have more than one physician in residence. At any given time we have up to ten patients—our capacity is fifteen—but generally it’s closer to six, about evenly split between clinical and resort.”
“What kind of cases do you see most often?” Greta asked.
“A lot of it’s cosmetic and relaxation—we have a patient at the moment who’s had a total rewrap and is on complete rest for a couple of days, and one who always comes in every autumn just for the hot sand treatment—but on the clinical side it’s mostly reconstructive.” She looked down at Greta with a sideways smile. “Your paper on the use of layered elastic bandage to replace missing muscle is required reading, by the way.”
Greta went pink. “Oh, God, I wrote that years ago, the field’s come on a lot since then.”
“Nevertheless,” said Sister Brigitte. “Would you like to meet the staff first, or tour the imaging suite?”
Imaging suite, she thought, and had to work hard not to wrap her arms around herself in glee. Even after her clinic’s recent refit, she didn’t have a ton of high-end equipment at home: being here was a little like being handed the keys to a Ferrari. Still—it could wait. “Staff first, I think. And the patients. How many do you have right now?”
“Seven,” said Sister Brigitte, and there was for the first time a faint hint of concern in her voice. Greta looked up at her; the beautiful face was briefly clouded. “Three resort, four clinical. One of those is partly quarantined—canopic teletherapy for TB—and we have one complicated reconstruction case.”
She’d never actually seen canopic teletherapy in practice—treating the patient’s individually preserved stomach, intestines, lungs, or liver separately from their body—and the clinician in her was jumping up and down in excitement. Nonetheless, that brief expression of uncertainty on the nurse’s face was bothering her. Greta had a feeling Sister Brigitte was ordinarily very certain indeed.
“Is something else wrong?” she asked.
“No,” said Sister Brigitte, and then, “… not really. It’s—you’ll see, Doctor.”
That wasn’t ominous in the slightest. Greta raised an eyebrow, and then had to walk a little faster to keep up as Sister Brigitte quickened her pace. They had been walking through the rock-cut section of the complex; now Sister Brigitte led her back toward the external pavilions. “The nurses’ ready room is this way, as well as the residential quarters—all the areas assigned to humans are outside the mountain; some people find it oppressive to spend all their time underground. You have a separate residence from the rest of the staff, but there’s a state-of-the-art communications system in place so that you can be contacted if a situation arises that requires your attention.”
A separate residence, she thought. And it’s probably luxurious as hell, given the fact that this place apparently has pots and pots of money. A holiday house in the south of France, and I get to do my favorite part of my job at the same time. She couldn’t help smiling, even though the chief of nursing’s you’ll see suggested that all was not completely well in the state of Oasis Natrun.
Sister Brigitte checked her watch. “It’s eight o’clock,” she said briskly. “The night shift’s begun, but you’ll get to meet most of the day shift, they’re likely to be having dinner—which, of course, you can have brought to your residence, we have room service.”
“I’ll say hello now, and talk to all of them individually in my office over the next few days,” said Greta. “And the administrative staff. I like to know all the people I’m working with, even if we don’t interact all that closely.”
Sister Brigitte nodded with a hint of approval. “It is—good to have you here,” she said after a moment. “Dr. Kamal was so relieved when you agreed to come; he trusts you.”
Greta could hear the unspoken and therefore we can trust you, too, and smiled. “I am enormously happy to be here,” she said. “For a great many reasons. And I can’t wait to get started, so lead on.”
After saying good-bye to Greta at the entrance to airport security—he’d been overcome by an attack of sudden, awkward shyness, not sure what to do after such an extraordinary experience as the one they’d had in the car—Varney had driven back down to Dark Heart in the pouring rain, glancing over every now and then at the empty passenger seat, running over in his mind the way she had sounded, saying yes.
Asking her had been the sort of almost-impulsive decision that had characterized a lot of Varney’s more terrible life choices—he’d said it and then been flooded by a vast horrible wave of terror that had tightened his fingers on the wheel and lifted all the little hairs on the back of his neck—and the moment when she had not said no, where she had—smiled at Varney, the way she smiled sometimes that made him feel as if all the insides of his bones were glowing warm—she’d smiled and she’d said yes and that meant, didn’t it, that meant that oh God, could this actually happen? To him?
By the time he got back to the estate, melancholy-grey through the veils of rain, Varney had almost convinced himself it was impossible. Almost, but not quite; the past year and a half had been so remarkably different from anything he’d ever experienced that he had begun to develop the edges of a different sensibility. Instead of always simply assuming the worst, he was sometimes—not always, but sometimes—capable of noticing that he was assuming the worst, and capable therefore of deciding not to.
He had spent the evening going through his collection of ancient jewelry: treasure he’d accumulated throughout the ages, which had been locked away in various chests for centuries, forgotten and cobwebbed. Half of it he barely recognized: old-fashioned rose-cut diamonds, a parure of garnets like frozen wine, emeralds, pearls, a pair of sapphire earrings he couldn’t imagine where he had acquired, or when. None of it, of course, was any good for the purpose Varney had in mind, which was—well, causing a ring to exist that Greta could actually wear.
And that she liked. He’d stared at the heap of gems scattered across the table and it had glittered back at him, utterly unhelpful. He realized that he’d never seen her wear a ring—and then thought, as he so often had, She hardly knows me.
That had set off another cascade of catastrophizing; and Varney had retired that evening absolutely sure that he’d get a text from her in the morni
ng to the tune of, Of course I won’t marry you, what the hell was I thinking, and taken that down with him into disturbed sleep.
In the morning he’d had to deal with another handful of small domestic crises having to do with the monster menagerie he and Greta had rescued from Paris in the spring, and spent some time with Emily tracking down and capturing several escapees from the water-garden enclosures. It was difficult to focus on one’s own personal shortcomings while trotting around in Wellington boots scooping small amphibious monsters out of the undergrowth, and by the time all of the creatures had been restored to their proper enclosures and the holes in the netting repaired to ensure they remained there, Varney’s dolorous mood had lightened considerably. It had lightened further to discover a text from Greta waiting for him: This place is brilliant but I miss you.
Not, Actually I’m not ready for this, or I’ve changed my mind. Just I miss you.
And so having stared for a little while longer at the mismatched collection of gems on his writing table, Varney had shoved the lot of them into a small case and driven back to London—and miraculously enough found a place to park on Harley Street itself.
Inside Greta’s clinic—he’d been there once or twice before, of course—everything was warm and bright and dry, cheerful, ordinary. The reception desk was manned, or womanned, by a blonde whom Varney thought he’d seen at one of Ruthven’s parties a few months ago; there was no one else in the little waiting area, and he paused to set his damp umbrella in the holder by the door before approaching the desk.
She looked at him with a brisk talking-to-patients smile, which broadened after a moment or two in recognition. “Sir Francis Varney?” she said, his name sounding thoroughly foreign in broad American tones.
“Er, yes,” said Varney, trying like hell to remember who she was and whether he ought to have this information at his fingertips. “I’m terribly sorry to bother you but I was wondering if, ah, Miss Serenskaya was available?”
“She’s in the back,” said the blonde. “Just a sec, I’ll get her—did you want to hang your coat up?”
“I won’t take up too much of your time,” said Varney, very glad she hadn’t asked him precisely why he’d come in. “Thank you so much.”
“No problem,” she said, and disappeared through the swinging door to the part of the clinic where medicine actually occurred. Varney hadn’t been back there himself; the times he’d visited while Greta was working had been limited to bringing her pastries or picking her up in his car—she’d never gotten around to replacing the ancient Mini that had been effectively destroyed during that business with the Gladius Sancti last year—and he hadn’t quite wanted to intrude on the business end of her job.
The waiting area was cheerful and pleasant: mismatched armchairs of varying size and shape sat along the walls, and a collection of brightly colored toys lurked in the corner to entertain small patients. He had enough time to wander over and inspect the magazines stacked on a side table before Nadezhda Serenskaya emerged in a white coat, most of her hair knotted neatly at the back of her neck. “Sir Francis,” she said, smiling. “It’s nice to see you. What brings you here?”
“I, ah,” he said. “I wondered if I might speak with you for a minute or two about—well, about Greta.”
Her eyes narrowed slightly, but the smile stayed. “Is anything wrong? We heard from her this morning. She’s settled in over at the spa and apparently having a fantastic time in the not-pouring-rain repairing mummies—”
“No, no,” Varney interrupted, “as far as I know, she’s fine, I just—would like to ask your advice on a matter of some importance.” He knew she’d been friends with Greta for years; if anybody could offer him useful information regarding her taste in jewelry, this woman could.
Nadezhda and the blonde, whose name Varney could not tease out of the recesses of his memory, exchanged a glance he wasn’t sure he liked: there seemed to be rather a lot of communication going on in that brief visual exchange. “—Of course,” said the witch. “Come upstairs, we can talk in the office.”
“Thank you so much,” said Varney, tucking the little jewel case under his arm.
The approach to St. Peter’s Square in Vatican City is—in every universe—a triumph of design, engineering, and aesthetic manipulation. It does not matter that the pale gold massifs of architecture flanking the entryway have been partly taken over by expensive boutique shops; the effect of the lines of roof and balcony and window, creating perfect orthogonals that converge in the center of the distant basilica’s facade, is unchanged. It does not matter that cars and souvenir-sellers and herds of tourists blur the hallowed emptiness of the vestibule that holds its breath just before the great, open, curving arms of the colonnade begin, spread in welcome; it does not matter that the space directly before the vast stairway leading up to the church itself is blocked off with movable barricades and folding chairs. The visual and emotional impact of Bernini’s peculiar genius is exactly the same.
Almost.
Look, now, from the very top of the pediment surmounting the central third of the basilica’s main facade, down into the elliptical space of the piazza. Look down at the pair of individuals standing just in front of the central obelisk, stolen from Egypt thirty-seven years after the birth of Christ. Observe the way in which they stand, shoulders slightly stiffened, as if to bear the weight of something heavy sprouting from their backs.
Observe, further, that while they appear identical in their achingly chic grey clothes, one of them looks as if it is going to cry, and the other, its arm around its companion’s shoulders, looks as if it would like to hit something. Both of them are staring up at the basilica’s facade with an air somewhere between puzzlement and frustration—and, perhaps, something quite like betrayal. Something about all this beauty is, apparently, wrong.
Watch as the tearful one turns to bury its face in the other’s shoulder and is held close. Watch as the angry one strokes its companion’s white-gold curls. It is impossible to make out what it is saying, from this distance: presumably some attempt at comforting, phatic utterance.
And watch as the weeping figure raises its head, and looks around. Even this far away it is easy to see an expression of determination on its lovely face.
A cloud passes over the sun; briefly, momentarily, all the warmth of mellow stone and tile seems to drain out of the day. It is over quickly, but a sense of chill lingers, even after the two figures in grey have disappeared into the drifting disorder of the tourist crowd; in the square, people shiver and pull their jackets closer around themselves, absently, unconscious.
Time passes.
About four hundred miles away, Greta Helsing stood in a pleasant high-ceilinged room furnished with comfortable chairs, looking through a glass dividing wall at something she’d hitherto only ever heard about. On the other side of the wall, in what looked like a perfectly ordinary clean-room laboratory, a counter ran the full length of the room; on this counter, surrounded by monitors and equipment, sat a large rectangular glass dish about four inches deep, full of cloudy liquid, and in this dish lay something greyish and crumpled and unmistakably organic. A tube led from it to a thin green cylinder marked O2.
A little farther down the counter, a beautiful alabaster canopic jar sat with its carved baboon-head lid next to it: the god Hapi, son of Horus, protected by Nephthys.
Beside her, Sister Brigitte was explaining, “Mr. Antjau is resting in his private room at the moment; when he feels well enough, he is permitted to visit them—only to view, of course.”
“It must be an extraordinarily odd experience,” Greta said. “So—tell me the sequence. Lab tests to confirm TB diagnosis, and then what—how do you get the lungs out of the jar?”
“Dr. Kamal has come up with a particular solution to rehydrate the tissue that maintains preservation,” said Sister Brigitte proudly. “It’s—”
“Glycerine, sodium bicarb, alcohol, and a dilute aldehyde,” Greta said. “Possibly also various oils an
d spirits?”
The chief of nursing narrowed her eyes briefly. “Yes, in fact. It took several months of experimentation to get the correct proportions.”
“It took me almost a year of messing around with it,” said Greta, “but I eventually came up with something quite similar to soften skin and muscle tissue without compromising preservation. So after the lungs are soaked in this solution, you very carefully remove them from the jar?”
“Very carefully indeed,” said Sister Brigitte, “and it is rather unavoidably unpleasant for the patient at this step of the process. Once removed, they are placed into a prepared tray, as you see.”
As they watched, a nurse in cap and gown and mask and sterile shoe covers entered from a side doorway and came along to inspect the treatment setup. “The solution contains a combination of streptomycin and isoniazid,” Sister Brigitte continued, “drained and replaced once a day until bacterial titers drop below detectability. As most of our patients are completely antibiotic-naive, we don’t run into many difficulties with resistant strains: streptomycin alone knocks out a good percentage of our cases.”
“Makes sense,” said Greta. The Mycobacterium tuberculosis present in Mr. Antjau’s lungs, like so many mummies’, had last been active thousands of years before the discovery of any useful chemotherapeutic agents; it hadn’t had the chance to mutate into drug-resistant strains. “What about all the other comorbidities? I’ve seen so many papers in ordinary human medical journals about evidence of silicosis in mummies. I don’t suppose there’s a damn thing you can do about it, though.” Lung disease caused by inhaling fine sand or dust particles was practically unavoidable in an environment like ancient Egypt, Greta knew.
“There is very little that can be done,” Sister Brigitte agreed with a sigh. “Mr. Antjau does show signs of silicosis, as have many of our other patients, but fortunately it does not seem to bother any of them very much; in a few cases we’ve had to do the Opening of the Mouth ceremony again, which can help a little.”
