The Phantom Limb

by William Sleator

  Isaac realized that if he told Kravetz about the phantom limb, Kravetz would think he was hallucinating and immediately discount the whole story. So he simply said, “When Esther worked at that camp, she found some of the girl’s mutilated dolls. I’ve got to get my mother out of there before that happens to her.”

  “What about the doctor?” Kravetz wanted to know.

  “Whenever the doctor’s there, my mother’s asleep or unconscious. And somebody tampered with the lab results so it looks like my mother has bone cancer. The doctor can easily log in whatever lab results she wants. My mother has a big sore on her arm that’s getting worse, and it wasn’t there at all when she entered the hospital.”

  Kravetz sighed and shook his head. “Geez, it sounds pretty bad,” he admitted. “But I still don’t get why you want the twins on your side.”

  “You didn’t know they have to volunteer at the hospital? Community service, I think—as punishment for something they did.” Isaac shrugged. “But I don’t know for sure.”

  “Oh, I know. They were caught shoplifting,” Kravetz said. “So what do you expect them to do to help get your mother out of there?”

  “I’m not sure,” Isaac replied, shrugging again. “But I know that they know their way around the hospital and that they have access to places I can’t get to. If they were on my side, it would be three instead of just one against the hospital staff. And the twins are pretty good at being sneaky.”

  The bell rang.

  Kravetz stood up and picked up his tray. “I don’t know what I can do about the twins—you know how they can be.” He thought for a few seconds. “If … if you spin that spiral thing faster, does it—”

  “It can make people fall down. That’s what I want to do to the people who are hurting my mother at the hospital—incapacitate them so I can get my mother away from there. But it has to be at the right time and the right place, so it will really have an effect. That’s where the twins come in.”

  Kravetz’s eyes widened. “You have the nerve to do that?” He sounded impressed. “Listen, I’ll try to get them to cooperate. I’ll see if I can find out how they feel about the hospital. But I can’t say too much. They have big mouths, you know. Meet me at the bike rack after school.”

  Isaac smiled and nodded in agreement.

  SAAC HURRIED TO THE BIKE RACK AFTER HIS last class. He was sick of the guilt trips he was getting from teachers. Kravetz wasn’t there yet. He unlocked his bike and waited impatiently. He wanted to hear how it had gone with the twins, but he also wanted to get to the hospital as soon as possible to make sure Vera was safe.

  Finally, Kravetz came out of the school building and jogged toward him. He reached the bike rack and got right to the point. “Sorry. Out of luck, pal. The twins wouldn’t listen to me about you. They have this fixation. They said they’re having too much fun messing with you. If I keep trying to convince them that you’re cool, then they might turn on me.” He shrugged.

  What else could he say? More and more it was becoming clear that Kravetz really was a decent guy, and interested in some of the same things Isaac was, despite being a jock.

  “Well, thanks for trying. I’ll … see what I can do on my own. Maybe I can change their minds.”

  “Maybe,” Kravetz said, with no emotion in his voice. “I have to get to practice. Sorry again.” He jogged away from Isaac.

  Isaac checked his bike for any more tampering, hopped on, and rode away quickly. Now he was worried about Kravetz as well as everything else. Why had he become so cold all of a sudden? Had Isaac told him too much? But he had to push that out of his mind and stay focused. His priority right now had to be to win over DCynthia. He didn’t have much hope about Destiny.

  The twins were seated at the desk at the entrance to the intensive care unit, checking visitors’ IDs. “We were expecting you, tool,” Destiny said with a smirk.

  “Don’t you have a life?” DCynthia said, but she had a guilty expression as she said it. At least her voice was soft, not braying. They both had to be careful that the staff didn’t hear them taunt a visitor.

  “Why did you think Matt would ever help someone like you?” Destiny asked. She put her hand over her mouth and giggled. DCynthia looked away. When Destiny got her laughter under control, she continued smugly, “We told him to shut up about you. And it worked.”

  Isaac had to fight the urge to smack her. It had been a vain hope to think he could get them on his side, but he had to try one more time. “What about Dr. Ciano?” he said. “What do you think of her?”

  “We know how to play everybody here so we get what we want, not like the other candy stripers. The staff gives us the easiest jobs, like sitting here and checking in guests. We’ve talked to some of the other candy stripers. They’re always running around getting exhausted. That’s not for us! We’re getting out of here as soon as our time is up. Hasta la vista.”

  He sighed and gave up. “Gotta go check on—”

  “Your mommy!” Destiny mocked him.

  Candi was at the nurses’ station. “I’m afraid your mother won’t have much to say to you today, dear,” she said pleasantly. She clucked her teeth and shook her head. “I have to tell you that the doctor’s very worried about her.”

  He wanted to say, None of you seem worried about her. Instead, he controlled himself and said determinedly, “I need to see her.”

  “I’m afraid you can’t,” Candi replied. She smiled at him. “She’s going to have a procedure in the basement soon.”

  He felt scared, but he was determined to fight back. “It’ll just be for a minute. OK?”

  Candi’s voice had a steely edge to it. “Well, all right. You can open the door and peek in for a few seconds.”

  As he feared, Vera was unconscious. The bandage on her arm was even larger than before. Her body seemed almost lifeless. There was no more time.

  Isaac rushed home and immediately got out the mirror box. He needed the phantom limb’s help before it was too late.

  The phantom limb slid into the mirror. It was holding up three fingers again. Was it really trying to say “triad,” as Grandpa had suggested? Isaac knew he had to search the net to find out what Joey was trying to tell him.

  Grandpa had known only two meanings for the word, the musical term and the group of three people. How could he find out if it had any other meaning?

  He went downstairs and found Grandpa reading. He asked him about the term “triad” for the second time. After thinking about it, Grandpa said, “If it refers to that doctor, maybe it has something to do with psychology.”

  Isaac went back upstairs, opened his computer, and went to Google. He typed in “triad and psychology.” Several entries appeared with the title “Macdonald Triad.”

  “Yes!” Isaac said to himself. He’d found it!

  “The triad” referred to three childhood behaviors that were often displayed by children with psychopathic tendencies who were prone to becoming serial killers. Most kids with one, or even two, of these behaviors never became a serial killer. But almost every serial killer who had ever been studied possessed all three. One trait was cruelty to animals or other small creatures—like the way the girl in the mirror treated her dolls. Another trait was enuresis, or bed-wetting, which was why the other girls in the cabin had made fun of her. The third trait was arson, the deliberate starting of fires. If Isaac had ever seen someone look happy, it was when that girl was preparing to burn down the cabin—with the other girls in it.

  He went over to the mirror box again. He wrote down two questions. “Did that woman kill other people before she killed you? Does she want to kill my mother?” He held the piece of paper so that it was reflected in the mirror.

  The phantom limb didn’t merely read the paper, it sucked it into the mirror box. It had done the same thing with the licorice. How was that possible? How was any of this possible? He would have to do research on mirror boxes as soon as he could. Forget about homework—this was more important.

&
nbsp; The phantom limb reappeared. It gave a vigorous thumbs-up, meaning the answer to both questions was yes. Isaac felt more scared than ever now that he had found out about the triad and had seen that look on the girl’s face as she prepared to burn down the cabin with the girls in it. Horror stories about famous serial killers bombarded his mind, the things they did to their victims before and after killing them. How some kept severed heads and other body parts in their fridges. It terrified Isaac to think he was dealing with some kind of sociopath.

  He had to tell Grandpa, so he hurried down to the kitchen.

  Grandpa was bent over the oven. “I was about to call you to come down and eat,” he said. “The steaks are just done.”

  Isaac was shocked. It had been months since Grandpa had cooked a meal. But he didn’t want to say anything about it—he didn’t want to do anything that might interfere with his progress. “Thanks, Grandpa,” he said, “but I’m too worried to eat much. There really is a serial killer at the hospital. Whoever killed Joey Haynes has killed other people. And Mom is next. Besides the doctor, there’s another suspicious woman there too. We’ll have to sneak Mom out. I don’t know any other way to get her discharged.”

  “Isaac, we can do it,” Grandpa said. “But you have to calm down. We can’t accomplish anything if you’re in a panic.”

  Isaac sighed. “I’ll try. But it’s not easy after all that’s happened—to her and to me.”

  “Just get control of yourself. We have to be precise about our plan. I went to the hospital today and saw it for myself. They hardly let anybody into the intensive care unit. The nurses there seem afraid. We have to be very careful.”

  “Yes, we do,” Isaac said. “I don’t know who we can trust. There’s one nurse named Vicky. Maybe we can trust her. But she’s afraid too. I think she’s sort of a victim. If we could convince her about what’s really going on, she might be on our side.”

  “We don’t have a choice,” Grandpa said. “We have to get her on our side. No doctor or police officer will believe us about that mirror box. And the person is very clever and covers their tracks well. We have to be around as much as possible.”

  “I’ll go there early again tomorrow morning,” Isaac said. “You can go again during the day. We can hang out there for the whole weekend. We’ve got to collect as much evidence as we can.”

  After dinner, Isaac went up to his room and got back on his computer. He felt relieved that there was now an outline of a plan and that Grandpa was well enough to help. He went to Google and typed in “Magic Mirrors.”

  There were a lot of results, from ancient times to modern, from facts to folktales. He stayed up late reading as much of it as he could.

  The earliest information about magic mirrors was reported by Saint Augustine. An area of Greece called Thessaly, a region surrounded by high mountains, was famous in ancient times for the large number of witches living there. The magic in the mirrors belonging to these witches put the witches into a trance. While in this exalted state, they wrote puzzling predictions in an obscure language on the mirrors. The predictions would come to pass—providing they were written in human blood.

  Roman generals also had magic mirrors. They used them to look at the results of battles. With the information from the mirrors, they could better plan their battle strategies to conquer their enemies.

  In the eleventh century, the bishop of Verona was burned at the stake after a magic mirror was found under his pillow. Written in reverse on the mirror was the word “Fiore,” which proved collaboration with the devil, because Satan often appeared in the shape of a flower. A powerful family in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the Medicis had mirrors that they used to find the location of their enemies, so that they could poison them.

  Isaac found pictures of fun-house mirrors that warp and distort the viewer. There were mirror mazes, which can look six times as big as they really are because of the reflections. That made them much more confusing than any other kind of maze.

  Everyone knows the story of Snow White, in which the vain evil queen has a magic mirror that tells her who the most beautiful in the land is—the mirror is the reason the queen tries to kill Snow White. Isaac learned—he didn’t know this until now—that dance studios always have at least one mirrored wall. Dancers watch themselves in the mirror and check that their arms and legs, their heads and shoulders, are in the correct position.

  But the mirrors didn’t act on their own—they needed a living person to make them work—the same way Joey needed Isaac. The witches of ancient Thessaly used magic mirrors to put themselves into a trance; today, mediums and clairvoyants use the mirrors, Isaac read, to put themselves into a different kind of trance, in which they can communicate with the dead.

  Isaac logged off the computer, yawning. Communicating with the dead through a mirror—that’s exactly what he had been doing.

  SAAC DIDN’T SLEEP WELL THAT NIGHT. Thoughts of what serial killers did to their victims kept running over and over again through his mind.

  Of course, being in the hospital, this killer was limited. She—if it was a she—couldn’t blatantly torture Vera with knives and whips. No, she had to be cunning and subtle. Her form of torture was psychological as well as physical. She could order procedures like endoscopies, which Isaac knew from his own experience were very painful. And who knew what other procedures she was capable of inflicting on people? As with most psychopaths, it was the thrill she got from her victims’ suffering that gave her pleasure—because she must be in so much pain herself. And if she actually did kill her patient, she couldn’t chop him or her up the way other psychopaths did. Which meant that she had to get her kicks in while Vera was still alive.

  Was it a good idea for him and Grandpa to spend as much time at the hospital as possible? Isaac was nervous about provoking Dr. Ciano. But it was the only way to collect more evidence. It was clear that he wasn’t welcome at the hospital. He had been forced to undergo that endoscopy and then the MRI without sedation or painkillers of any kind, even though he wasn’t a patient. If someone was willing to do that, how far would that person go?

  Isaac didn’t fall asleep until four A.M. At five thirty, he could hardly bear to get up, but things started early at the hospital. At least it was Saturday and he didn’t have to go to school. The weather was getting cooler now, but Grandpa had been thoughtful enough to crank up the heat, so that taking a shower was not frigidly uncomfortable, and it sure helped wake him up. So did the brisk bike ride to the hospital.

  Vicky was at the computer when he got to the intensive care unit. She looked exhausted.

  “Were you on the night shift?” he asked her.

  She nodded unhappily. “And I’ve got to work the day shift too, without a break. Candi’s orders.” She dropped her voice. “Candi gives the twins the weekends off. That means more work for the rest of us.”

  “How’s my mother?”

  “Actually, she’s pretty good … mainly because the doctor has been busy for the last couple of days and hasn’t been in to see her much—so she hasn’t been medicated.” Vicky looked around nervously. “I’d better shut up. I shouldn’t be telling you this. Go see your mom.”

  She knew she shouldn’t be telling him these things, but she was. That was a hopeful sign. Maybe she was on their side, after all; she also knew that Vera was in trouble. She was tired, which caused her to let her guard down. Isaac made a mental note to remember that.

  Isaac peered into Vera’s room and saw that his mother was sitting up in bed and eating a little. The bandage on her arm looked smaller now. It was amazing how much she’d improved in such a short time.

  She looked up and saw him. “Hi, Ize. Yes, I’m awake, and I feel like eating. The pain in my arm is almost gone. It’s great.” She dropped her spoon onto the plate. “But they sure know how to ruin oatmeal in this hospital. Just get me out of here, please.”

  “We won’t leave you alone, I promise,” Isaac said. Then he sighed. “If only we could get some
other doctor to come in, now that they’re not drugging you all the time. I bet another doctor would let you out of here. Otherwise, we’ll have to escape on our own. I’ll be back later today, and Grandpa will be in. He made a steak dinner last night.”

  Vera shook her head. “Amazing.”

  Isaac left Vera’s room and walked back to the nurses’ station.

  “When does the doctor come to this floor?” he asked Vicky.

  Vicky shrugged. “Hard to say. Usually late in the morning. But don’t expect to see her on weekends. She won’t be back until Monday.”

  “Are there any other doctors in the hospital today? Can you page whoever’s on call? I think maybe my mother can be discharged.” He lowered his voice. “We have to get her away from here, and a good doctor can get her out.”

  Vicky looked worried. “That’s not going to be easy, but let me think about it. Since your mother’s a little better, why don’t you go on home?”

  Vera did seem a little better, so Isaac followed Vicky’s suggestion and headed home.

  On Sunday, Isaac and Grandpa took turns sitting with Vera. Both agreed that she was looking healthier and acting more alert.

  Isaac had been planning to catch up on his homework over the weekend, but he found he still couldn’t concentrate. He got out the mirror box Sunday evening and stuck his hands in. Immediately, he felt sleepy.

  This time the woman in the mirror was an adult. Her face was clearer now. She was mixing pills again and, as always, muttering to herself in front of the mirror—maybe to distract herself from her own reflection, which she clearly hated.

  “It feels good to get back to being productive,” she said, smiling almost pleasantly. She was wearing thick turquoise rubber gloves as she worked. Whatever liquid she was working with seemed to be caustic—she didn’t dare touch it herself. Was that what she had been putting on Vera’s arm? Isaac knew he had to get to the hospital before school in the morning.