Perhaps it was true. But at that moment that was not how I felt and I certainly wasn't going to advise him of it. I edged away from him again and looked for the door, now outlined by the hallway light shining through the cracks.
"You'll soon acknowledge the power you have over life and death," he said. "And suffer the guilt true gods bear with it. When you do, you'll help me."
I quickly found the door and opened it, warm golden lights spilling on my legs. As I walked into the hall I heard him again say, "You'll know. You'll feel." His voice rumbled like running water.
Footsteps clapped down the hall. The chief neurosurgeon, Greg Armstrong, arrived smiling. "Tim," he said, "good work with the Roberts girl."
My body slumped, suddenly sluggish. I checked my watch and, to my astonishment, some nine hours had passed since I spoke with the Roberts family and their attorney.
"You must have chosen the correct dosage," he said as I listened through a haze of exhaustion. "She's awake."
I thought I'd just been to Rachel's room, but my nightmare occurred on the opposite side of that ICU floor. When I arrived, the crowded room tittered with happy relatives and friends who had previously only held vigil. Now the dead awoke and even their pastor joined them to witness the miracle.
"It was G-g-god, Mommy," Rachel said, her speech slightly slurred, as her mother wiped her soft, pink cheeks with a damp wash cloth. "She saved me and brought me into a big cave where it was foggy and gray and cold."
It's quite normal for those who come out of coma from traumatic brain injury to attribute their waking to the hand of God. They often become hyper-religious and evangelical for some time thereafter. But clearly whatever Rachel was evangelizing did not sit well with the Roberts' pastor, who grinned through coffee-stained teeth.
"Dear child," the pastor said, taking her hand, "God is a man. Our Father. You mean 'he' not 'she'."
"No, Pastor W-williams," she protested. She pulled her hand away, shaking her head. This level of agitation was normal. "It was a really scary lady." Rachel clawed at one side of her face with her freshly clipped fingernails. "Her face peeled and smelled bad, like the r-rabbit we found in the ditch one day. She said her name was Hel, and her daddy is L-l-loki." Almost vacant from her injured intelligence, the little girl's eyes wandered earnestly from relative to relative.
Just as Pastor Williams began to correct that "hell" was a place and not a person, Mr. Robert's eyes widened, ringed with fear, and his cheeks blanched. He pulled Rachel close, desperately whispering lilting words - undoubtedly from his bestemor - in her ear. Her mother, Pastor Williams, and the rest looked at one another uneasily.
"Hello, Rachel," I said, entering the room cautiously. With each step I felt slightly more sane, more grounded in the real world, with so many mortals around me. The hem of my white coat certainly felt holier. "How are you feeling?"
The bruises had mostly healed, but ghostly yellow splotches clung to her temples. She focused her shining eyes on my face solemnly. "Dr. Samuel," she said unsteadily, "Hel sends you a message."
For my life and my sanity, I could no longer dismiss quasi-religious missives. Images of the large old man and the ravens flickered in my memory like that television screen as I crouched by her bedside. Listening intently. My heart beating savagely…
Rachel leaned toward me, her breath sour with thrush but her voice oddly and infinitely steadier. "Hel says, 'It is better for you to hang yourself from the tree than to release my father from his sentence.'"
*** ***
I went home.
Before I left, I instructed the staff to watch Rachel carefully for signs of epileptic activity. I told the nursing staff to page me should there be the slightest change in her condition. I asked Greg to reassign my trauma center call duty and I took a cab to my house, my nerves too worn to drive.
The cab dropped me off at my lovely, two-story home, not far away. A local, award-winning architect designed and built it three years ago. Generous skylights and vaulted ceilings covered the dwelling; I rejected the terrarium and tall trees she'd suggested. Geologists claim Sacramento lies in a floodplain that floods every two hundred years, making insurance for my home almost prohibitive. I live there alone. I've little social life, by necessity and choice. After Maggie's death, I was shunned, so I made solitude my practice for life.
I wearily ambled up the concrete pathway to the oak door with the stained glass inlay of a curling rose and unlocked it.
I opened the door and walked into a river.
Huge winds beat colossal trees and scolded the earth with vicious howls. Fingers of rushing air probed my mouth, nose, and ears as I screamed. "Maggie! Maggie!"
I couldn't see her. Then: "Timmy!" Faint but clearly her voice. "Timmy!"
I ran gawkishly toward her voice, my tennis shoes alternately sliding and sticking in the mud. Sheets of water unfurled from the river's edge as the depths rose from the rain. Angered that I would dare to press onward as quickly as they drove, the winds turned against me. The cold and the wet punished me almost as harshly as my panic and guilt as I ran down the river's embankment, blinking against the wetness in my eyes.
And then I saw her, just her blonde hair and frail hands. She clutched a jagged tree root for dear life, waist high in the torrent. She was so small the river could carry her away like a paper boat and fold her body under one of its rippling arms. I cried out to her again as I straddled the root, digging my fingers and heels into the flaking bark. "Hold on!"
Her wiry little fingers gripped my outstretched hand and the sleeve of my windbreaker as I grasped her wrist. The last time I had held that wrist, I pulled her close and told her I didn't care if we were cousins. I didn't care what the adults said. When we were old enough, we would get married. She kissed me on the cheek with those raspberry lips and smiled at me with dandelion-green eyes. If I knew love, it was then in the blue veins under the peach skin of her wrist and in the gentle ping of her giggle as it echoed along the river before the rains began.
All I knew now was terror. Her wrist slick with mud and river water, it slipped from my hand. Before she could scream, the current pulled her under and away. As I ran downstream, frantically scanning the turbid, rushing water for flecks of peach and blonde, I wished we hadn't run away. I wished we hadn't fought. I wished…
A flash of lightning. Then, thunder exploded in the heavens and a tremendous groan creaked above. Blindly I fled the falling tree's crushing limbs as they crashed toward me in a swell of leafy whispers. My weaker ankle twisted painfully beneath me and mud smashed against my neck and cheek as I slid over the edge into the water.
Cold. Weightless. Dream-like. What seemed so terrifying, so threatening, now soothed me. I relaxed, bits of leaf and debris scraping my skin, as my body settled into the freezing dark. I inhaled.
Not air. Death…
I opened my eyes. No longer floating, I awoke on a stretcher in an ambulance, vomiting leaves and water and dirt.
And pain.
I opened my eyes. No longer on a stretcher, I twisted in the sheets of my bed, crying out hoarsely. My throat scratchy, my skin hot. I'm over-worked. I'm exhausted. I'm hallucinating…
… but thou hush thee now, thou breeder of ill wilt be bound…
For ten years, I had little to fear. I knew the human body, and now the human brain. I knew all there was to know and I should not have been afraid.
But I was.
And, buried somewhere in my clothes, my cell was ringing.
*** ***
Mrs. Roberts flung herself at me as I entered the waiting room. Grief-stricken spittle flew from cracked lips as she beat my chest with her fists. "Why did you reduce the dosage?" she shrieked. "You knew this would happen! You knew!"
Friends and family mourned loudly throughout the waiting room. Mr. Roberts pulled her away from me and Dr. Armstrong stepped between us, exuding expensive aftershave and hospital authority. In his late 40s, he was a formidable surgeon, but a better administrator. "We're de
eply sorry for your loss, Mrs. Roberts. But you were informed of the risks," he told her firmly but gently, "and you signed the forms. You chose to take those risks."
"But you knew what would happen!" she cried. "You shouldn't have let us do it!" She broke down, repeating the last bit over and over.
Her father's grieving body uncurled from its silence, fists clenched. His twisted face raised heavenward as his wail echoed in the death-stained, godless halls…
"LOKI!"
I excused myself ineptly, and, as soon as I broke through the door to the ICU halls, I ran. Like that frightened little boy, I ran stumbling down the halls of the ward, anguish breaking through my skin in a sweat. I knew Rachel had suffered an atonic seizure, a lightning strike to her injured synapses that generalized and short-circuited her brainstem. I ran to her room and knelt by her now empty bed. I placed my forehead against the mattress edge and cried in long heaving sobs, for the first time at all since Maggie's funeral.
The room grew dark around me. The television screen flickered, the ravens swarming over the neon grains. I raised my head and found my patient in the bed beside me. He cried out in agony, and the ground shifted beneath me.
"Cut the serpent's head!" he gasped as the last throe passed. "Cut it! It will end everything. It will bring Ragnarok," he intimated. "Save us both the pain."
"I'm no god," I sobbed. "I am no fucking god!"
"Oh, but you are," he growled luridly. "Your actions saved that girl and then killed her. And you lied to them. You tricked them. You're a trickster god… like me. The only one fit to cut the serpent's head!"
"I haven't power over life and death!" I cried, choking on the tears of self-condemnation in my throat. My face close to his, I saw deep into his pupils - snowy caves of malice and trickery. Then, the tears subsiding to hot anger, I remembered Rachel's words. "I've been warned about you," I told him. "Warned well."
"By a brain-damaged little girl," he said coldly, "babbling about God and hell."
I backed down, doubting. I was arguing with hallucination. I knew what this meant: I was insane. I must have been. My practice was over. My life… was over. Overwhelmed with this realization, I wanted to die. My body was never worth living in since Maggie died, but my mind was - until now.
"A brain-damaged little girl," he said, his voice drawling and spiteful, just like the sheriff who cursed me at Maggie's funeral, "worth no more than that blonde-haired, white trash little cunt you let die in that river." He licked his lips, then said cunningly, "You never really loved her, did you?"
The television screen exploded and glass rained on my back in a bedlam storm of blackened wings and otherworldly shrieks. Howling with me-hate, god-hate, all-hate, I grasped the tubing with both hands and pulled madly with all my strength. The giant roared triumphantly, the caitiff cry of the trickster. The skin of his nostrils tore, broken and bloodied, and the ivory spikes emerged venous, scaled and slithering…
Inhuman all were they, crying into the night. And inhuman all are we, struggling in the twilight. The twin-headed serpent bore into my skull, driving deep down, down, down once called the alimentary canal to my lungs and bowels. It drips its poison in pearly, glistening drops as I writhe in the gray, bound far beneath the ground. I see above me a beautiful young woman with raspberry lips and dandelion-green eyes. With her wiry fingers she removes a cup (or is it an NG bag?) and I scream. She says, "Loki," and I scream.
For here I am and here I will stay. Someone must suffer, they say. Until Fenrir the Wolf swallows the Sun and kills the light of day. Only then the gods each other they will slay. The gods of Ragnarok.
Until the gods die, I writhe here in the gray.
In pain.
Maria Alexander
Maria Alexander is a recovering blond who lives in Los Angeles with three ungrateful cats, a pervasive sense of doom, and a purse named Trog. By day, she writes for Disney. By night, she pursues an advanced degree in snarkiology. You can read more about her published work and other shenanigans at www.mariaalexander.net
The Last Resort
by Lisa Morton
"I can tell you how to get what you want."
Emmie dries her eyes and listens, intrigued. "You can?"
The woman with the brittle hair and bad teeth grins and starts talking.
*** ***
It was just a few minutes past ten when Emmie came home and found George eating out some other girl's pussy.
Emmie was tired when she parked the car before her tumbledown shotgun house (that looked just like about a million other Florida shacks); she'd worked a ten-hour shift down at the supermarket today, and everything below the knees ached. She was moving slowly as she headed up the walk towards the front door, and she thought later on (while nursing a beer in the bar) that her hearing must have been tired, too.
Because that's the only way she could have missed the moans and squeals of pleasure coming from her own bedroom.
She stopped for moment, forgetting her sore feet as she focused on the sound, first in disbelief, then in growing anger. She couldn't hear George, but she thought the neighbors three houses down could surely make out the woman.
She strode through the unlocked front door and stopped again to listen. Who the fuck is that? Jesus, I think it's Tessa from the beauty parlor…
She was walking down the hall towards the bedroom when she caught herself and stopped. What was she going to do? Scream, demand they stop immediately? Order George to move out? Tell them both how disappointed she was? Tell Tessa she'd be finding a new manicurist?
Instead she ended up gawking.
The bedroom door had been left open, and as Emmie approached she could see a couple on the bed, their figures outlined by the flickering glow from the bedroom television set. Now she could make out a second layer of sound, more moaning voices and a cheap musical accompaniment. It took her a few seconds to place it:
It was that sleazy porn flick George always tried to get her to watch. Apparently he'd found someone else to share his interest.
Except they weren't watching the movie. The woman, who Emmie could see now was definitely Tessa the manicurist (she could tell by the teased blonde hair spread across her pillow) was naked and spread-legged on the bed, her eyes closed, head thrown back in ecstasy. George was sprawled near the end of the bed, his head bobbing up and down as his tongue worked on Tessa's crotch.
He never did that with me, Emmie thought.
Then she ran, all thoughts of confrontation having vanished. She slammed the front door on the way out, hoping they'd heard it, wiping tears from her eyes as she stumbled to the car. She gunned the engine too strongly and then peeled rubber as she shot down the street, heading for the interstate and…
…she didn't know.
A quarter-hour later she found herself in a lowlife bar.
She'd picked it completely at random. Or maybe she'd liked the name - "The Last Resort". That felt right, tonight.
Normally it wasn't the kind of place she'd ever go into, but it'd been open and there'd only been a chopper and two pickup trucks in the dirt lot (it was a Tuesday night, after all), and there'd been an empty table near the rear. She'd ordered a beer (or three), taken a chair facing the wall, and cried into the solace of a cocktail napkin.
"That bastard," she'd muttered, uncaring of what anyone thought about the sobbing woman alone in the back muttering obscenities to herself. "That lousy, stinking, sonuvabitch."
She'd supported him for the last six months, and she thought they'd been a good six months. He was so handsome, with his easy grin and wavy brown hair, that at first she couldn't believe he cared about her. Their life together had been for the most part easy, and he seemed to like the sex, even if Emmie secretly thought it was a bit dull and found his interest in porn embarrasing. Sure, she didn't like all of his friends, and he had a tendency to drink too much, but she'd believed him when he'd sworn (with that gorgeous grin) that there'd be no other girls for him.
Jesus, what an idiot s
he'd been.
And now…they hadn't even tried to hide it, hadn't even had the decency to go to a motel. And right when George had known Emmie would be coming home from work - had he wanted her to find them? Or had they just been so lost in their sexy hijinx that they'd lost track of time?
And what would she do now?
She couldn't picture herself facing him. She was still burning in shame from the customer at the store who'd called her a bitch when she'd told him they were out of his favorite cigarettes. She hadn't even been able to respond; she'd just fled to a restroom, locked herself in a stall and cried for ten minutes.
She hated herself.
"Don't hate yourself, honey, it's that dickwad's fault."
Emmie looked up, surprised to find a woman now sitting at the other side of the table. Emmie was already on her third beer, a little drunk, and so it took her a few seconds to wonder: How did she know I was thinking that?
"Caught him with another chick, huh?" the woman asked.
Emmie nodded, then wiped her eyes again and looked at the woman more carefully. She wasn't attractive - in her thirties, with bad skin, worse teeth, and dirty blond hair; but there was something about her, something familiar, as if she was a movie star that Emmie had seen once in something, or…
Then Emmie gave up on trying to place her, and asked, "How'd you know?"
The woman grinned and waved a hand about the room. "Please, you're a young girl sitting by yourself in a biker bar and crying. You don't have any bruises, so I know it's not that he beat on you; so what's that leave?"
There was a strange sympathy in the woman's tone, and Emmie relaxed, even smiled herself. "Yeah, I guess so. He was…well, he was in bed with the woman who gives me my manicures."
The woman threw back her head and roared. "Hey, that's good - he was nailing your nail expert!"
Emmie chuckled, bitterly, then thrust out a hand. "I'm Emmie."
Brimstone Dreams: A Horror Anthology Page 4
