‘Where from?’
‘We had to collect him at a doctor’s own home. Ugliest individual I ever saw.’
‘The doctor?’ I laughed, feigning ignorance.
‘No, the patient.’
‘You mean something happened to his face?’
The second man shook his head.
‘There wasn’t a face for anything to happen to,’ he said, and I felt something slither through the pit of my belly. ‘The doctor had him on a stretcher. The poor beggar was already anesthetised and couldn’t move. Whatever’s wrong with him, it’s serious. Could’ve been an accident, I suppose. While we were moving the patient into the back of the ambulance truck the sheet covering his face slipped off. The doctor put it back fast. But we saw.’
The two men glanced at one another.
‘Yes,’ Andreas spoke, ‘we saw.’
‘And what did you see?’
‘I’ll only say this once. Then I want to forget it forever. There was nothing. Nothing. Isn’t that right, Stefano?’
The second driver, Stefano, nodded and offered his opinion: ‘These things happen from cursed births. Babies born with two heads, or an extra hand, or a third eye here.’ He indicated the centre of his own forehead.
‘That’s what you saw?’
‘No, no. Nothing. We saw nothing. Just a white head and no hair. Like a wax doll. No features at all. And that means no eyes either.’ He shuddered. ‘Skin pale as milk.’ They both shuddered. ‘It was just a glance before the doctor put the sheet back. He told us that people with such disfiguring defects usually die very quickly after birth, but this one had miraculously survived into adulthood.’
I took a deep breath. Stefano’s words had hit me hard. They made me recall what Domenico had said when I’d laid wrapped up and bleeding on the mountain: My spirit might be featureless and somewhat pallid, but it certainly gets the job done.
Could this be it then – or be something like Domenico’s vision brought to life? There wasn’t much information to go on, but my suspicions were aroused. Doctor Vliegan’s involvement, what did that mean? And Rosa’s? The hair on the back of my neck literally bristled. And in my mind were the words, Run. Run away.
‘So you brought him in. Has this patient gone out again?’
They looked at one another.
‘There’s only one way that poor beggar’s leaving here.’
To hide my astonishment at everything these men had said, I ate a cookie from the plate on the table but immediately wanted to retch it up. The illusion of not being all that interested was now almost impossible to maintain. I forced myself to say nothing. My thoughts were electric with images and possibilities, but the most dominant sensation inside me was fear itself.
Andreas and Stefano started to discuss a recent football match in the main stadium outside town that had attracted thousands of spectators and had ended in a dubious draw, then one of them stood to brew more coffee. Neither man was interested in bringing up the case of the patient without a face again.
‘You know,’ I started, interrupting them, ‘I’ve got an interest in things like this. In the mysteries of what can go wrong in the physical development of the body. It’s part of what I study at university.’
Stefano looked up. He’d started cutting cards for a game.
‘That’s what you study?’ he asked.
‘Yes.’
‘What a waste of time.’
‘No, the human anatomy,’ I improvised, ‘how else can we help people?’
Stefano looked at Andreas. ‘Another saw-bones in the making.’
Andreas shrugged. ‘The world always needs more doctors.’
‘I’d like to see this man you’re talking about.’
‘He’ll be somewhere around,’ Andrea replied, waiting by the small stove for his water to boil. I knew by the look that now passed between these two men that they’d been sworn to secrecy. They’d probably have their termination papers handed to them by morning.
‘If the doctor you mentioned was going to operate on this individual,’ I told them, watching for their reactions, ‘I suppose he’d want to do it quietly. And if the patient came to grief he might even want to dispose of the cadaver privately.’
‘They all think alike, these medicos,’ Andrea said with some resentment, studying me as he would a ghoul.
‘But I’d love to see the patient before he leaves this earth completely.’
I took out the pay packet again. My wage and severance. I stacked it by the cookie plate. The men made up their minds with the barest eye contact. Ambulance officers were always of a mind to make a little cash on the side, though the people who greased their palms were usually journalists or private investigators, not lowly university students like me.
Stefano had a key ring in his belt. He unclipped it and carefully flicked through until he found the key he wanted.
‘You’re right about using the quietest theatre in the hospital,’ he said, and described the old room I’d attended. ‘You know this wing was the asylum, until our more enlightened days? My money is on one of the cells in the basement. Haven’t been used since before the turn of the century.’
‘Which basement?’
‘Here, in this building.’ Stefano took a sheet of paper and the nub of a pencil. He wet the end with his tongue and drew a rough sketch of corridors, steps and rooms that existed, supposedly, behind that section housing the main furnace.
Observing my scepticism, he said, ‘It’s there all right, we’ve seen it for ourselves.’
Andreas poured steaming water over his coffee grounds. ‘If someone finds you down there, tell them you got lost looking for the boiler.’
‘You won’t be able to explain having this skeleton key,’ Stefano added, flipping a key across the table with the practiced air of a card sharp flipping up the Joker. ‘If you’re found, we’ll be saying you stole it from our belongings.’
I thanked them both. Stefano divided the lire equally and handed Andreas his share. When I was gone I knew they would discuss me as one would discuss members of the lower and uneducated classes who giggle and shiver at circus showings of two-headed goats and bearded ladies.
Maybe that really was me.
I passed several staff members, but none of them were people I’d worked with. Through open windows I saw the dawn had started to rise. Better placed patients were already out and taking their constitutional in the grounds. Family, friends and well-intentioned visitors would be arriving in order to assist loved ones with breakfasts, bed-baths, the changing of bandages, and so on. In the general Italian way few trusted the staff to do their jobs properly and, in truth, to the running of these public hospitals such assistance was crucial.
The daily general theatre schedule would soon commence and there would be an influx of disposal activity making use of the furnace. If I wanted to take a look at this strange one-armed man then I had to hurry.
Heading into the bowels of the building, I examined the rough pencil sketch Stefano had made for me. It was clear enough and soon, in the huge unused laundry next to the furnace room, a place good only for breeding rats and other vermin, which I could see was more than living up to its unintended purpose, there was a thick metal door.
The skeleton key turned in the lock, then there was a corridor exactly as sketched and rough-hewn steps descending into more corridors that ran underground. What the map didn’t show was that the walls and ceiling were cut from dark rock, as if they formed the battlements of a great castle. The hospital was old but I would never have guessed that there was this infinitely more ancient sector. If Andreas and Stefano were to be believed then this was where lunatics and the depraved had once been incarcerated.
I shuddered, but it wasn’t the physical place that unnerved me. Only the possibility of what it might still ho
ld.
Stefano hadn’t told me the corridors would be well-lighted with electric globes, all of them burning. Electric light could have been added only within the last ten years, which was curious, given that the area was supposed to have been long closed-off and unused. And why were they illuminated now? Either Doctor Vliegan and Rosa, perhaps others, were still down here, or they’d left the lights on as a matter of course. Why – for their return? Or because they were still needed?
If someone was here to catch me spying, let them. I wouldn’t resort to more subterfuge. I wasn’t the one conducting activities that demanded secrecy. I looked at the paper in my hand – this left corridor that I’d turned into was the limit of Stefano’s sketch. I went down its narrow path and took another equally ancient corner. Here the ground was so cold that it chilled my feet through my shoes. My breath hung like mist.
Then I came to the cells.
Every old battered metal door was open and every room inside was hewn from rock. Each cell was perfectly bare and windowless, offering not the slightest human amenity. I walked on more carefully, imagining the echoing howls that once must have filled this place. Here now was a closed door, the only one that had been shut. I went to it and pressed my hands against the metal. Freezing. There was a handle and an eye for a key and nothing else. I stood back. No, there was one more thing. At the base of the door was a hinged metal flap which bygone nurses and warders must have used for sliding daily trays of food. I went down on my knees and carefully lifted the flap. There was nothing to see; there was no movement. Just a bare stone floor.
I rose to my feet and slid Stefano’s key into the eye. The lock was heavy but the tumblers moved decisively. When I turned the handle there was no ghastly creaking and as I pushed the door open there was no monster-house screech of rusted metal against metal.
The one-armed man stood in a corner and he was turned towards me. Though he had no features other than two holes for his nostrils and a very small crooked line that was his mouth, without lips, he was attuned to the movement of the door and to my presence. There were bandages over the stump of his arm and he was dressed in rough hospital clothing. His head wasn’t shaped like a human head, but was instead elongated and quite narrow. There were slight ridges where his forehead and cheeks and chin should have been. His blankness didn’t have the effect of a man wearing a featureless mask. Features simply weren’t there. They weren’t a part of the picture and never would be.
Now I was certain that this was Domenico’s dream creature come to life. My temples pounded. I could have doubled over for the pain in my belly.
What accident of nature had caused this creature to be? I stared in amazement, then it struck me that nature hadn’t had much to do with what was before me. I stepped into the cell and he – it was a he – followed my movements with sharp jerks of the head. I didn’t go closer; I leaned back against a cold wall and simply took him in.
Though I felt ill, I wasn’t frightened by this man-thing. Instead, a strange affinity rose inside me. It was the sort of empathic reaction that often escaped me in daily life. The people of the outside world, my fellow university students, the great swell of life itself, all of it left me cold.
But this.
Then there was a welling in my eyes and how useless that was, to let tears run freely when I was whole and this being was not.
How did he eat and drink? That gash must have been enough for sustenance to pass through. He didn’t see and he didn’t speak: two blank nubs where eyes should have formed and two small snot-caked holes for breathing. It seemed impossible that this creature had survived to become fully grown. How had it looked as a baby, as a boy, an adolescent? And by what sense did it understand that someone was here?
I wiped the tears off my cheeks. I had to stop thinking of ‘it’. This creature was a man, maybe young or old, but human. ‘He’. He.
Stepping away from the wall I went to the metal door and pulled it shut. In the cell there were two chairs facing one another. I guessed one place was for Doctor Vliegan, where he’d sat to address this patient and care for it.
Care for him.
This man, or this half-man, had been allowed one further amenity: a steel bucket in the corner already stank of workmen’s latrines. There was no hand basin or running water by which to wash. I sat in one of the chairs. Presently this man, this thing – this individual – edged forward with his one white hand extended. He found the back of the second chair and felt his way around so that he could sit facing me.
We sat. He reached out carefully until he found my face. He touched it, then touched his own, and I was certain he knew I wasn’t the doctor or Signora Rosa.
Looking at this individual’s waxen head was like looking into some unfathomable purity. The sight moved me so much that I felt more tears. I forced them back. By some transference I couldn’t understand, the individual seemed to understand my reaction. Those two tiny holes of his flared and moved. Soon a clear, watery substance emerged from one.
A droplet, then another.
The individual sniffed and drew heavy breaths. His shoulders shuddered, then for a moment his entire pale body was wracked with spasms. That gash of a mouth twisted, revealing no teeth, only the bright redness inside. The individual was weeping. My head was light, as if I was living some unimaginable dream. This creature was crying – and why shouldn’t he?
Suddenly the individual stood up fast, and his chair toppled backward. His head twisted on that slender neck, twisted this way and that way, turned upward to the ceiling. His milky fist was clenching and unclenching.
The individual shuffled backwards to the same corner where I’d first found him and he stood there trembling. He wanted me to come forward; that single hand made a small beckoning gesture. Slowly I did as he wanted. I moved forward until I was standing right in front of him. The mouth worked as if trying to form words. None came.
The individual was wearing a light-blue hospital smock beneath a more conventional masculine dressing robe. Doctor Vliegan’s, I imagined. The belt holding the robe together had come undone and the smock was now twisted aside, revealing a patch of his white, smooth, waxen chest without a nipple, and the wrapping of bandages that went around the right shoulder. The smock’s twisting also revealed ample masculine genitalia, but without any hint of pubic hair. I wanted to help him, and straightened his clothing for him.
What else could I offer this man-thing?
Not food or water or wine or conversation. Not comfort – I wouldn’t know how. But now he let me know what he wanted, and he wanted it more than anything in this world or the next.
The individual’s hand felt blindly around until he found my right wrist. He pulled it up to his throat. I pulled my hand away. With strength, the individual struggled to regain my hand and he pressed it into his throat once more. He tried to spread my fingers around his delicate windpipe. Again I snatched my hand back from him. The third time he fought my hand up to his throat, a high mewling sound emanated from his tiny mouth. A cry, a scream, an appeal. With a shock I realised that I was now the one weeping, drawing gasps and sobbing. My hand stayed where it was, and the individual reached for my left hand and closed it around his throat also, and pushed hard against my hands, willing them to squeeze.
How many times had he begged Doctor Vliegan? How many times had he begged Signora Rosa? Would this have started when he was a boy or had the desire for death only come later, when all hope in its spirit had finally disappeared?
In his spirit.
He pressed harder and harder into my grip and he tried to hold it there as if in a panic that I’d let go. The mewling sound was soft and high, not even that of a newborn kitten. I wanted to run but I didn’t. I shouldn’t have accepted the responsibility, but I did. Good sense told me not to acquiesce, but I did it.
I did.
The strength and determinati
on in my hands were things I would never have believed myself capable of turning against a creature that lived, against a creature that I was certain possessed a mind and a soul. As I squeezed I felt his gratitude and longing for release, for this eternal nightmare to end. I was sure I wasn’t imagining it.
To this day, friend, I’m certain it was there.
So I didn’t allow myself to relent, even when the strength went out of the individual’s body and he dropped to his white knees. Still, his one hand held onto mine as they squeezed. The head fell forward and spit crawled from a corner of his mouth. I followed him onto the cold floor and kept on until the body finally lay to the side and no rasping or whispering breath emerged from the holes of his nostrils. Only then did I pull my hands away. They were cramped with effort. I collapsed beside the individual. His hand was limp and still milky, but the head had darkened to the colour of hay.
I held him.
I held him and in a corner of my mind wondered if I’d also destroyed the spirit guide and protector who lived between Domenico and me.
Then I wept for so long I thought I would simply stay where I was until someone found us. Time passed, and when I was able to get myself together I stood and hefted that sad corpse into a fireman’s lift. I opened the metal door and laid the body outside, then re-entered the cell. I don’t know why I straightened the chairs, but I do know why I hurled the foul contents of the steel bucket around the walls and floor – so that in their scrawl Doctor Vliegan could read my message to him.
The furnace room wasn’t being used. I unlocked and opened the grate and fed the corpse into the licking flames. He weighed perhaps half what a man his size ought to weigh, but still I had to push hard and use the poker to get him in completely. My eyebrows were singed as I struggled to shift the body even more deeply inside. I hurled the grate shut with a heavy clang, then slammed the locks and stood back from the pervasive heat, my eyes closed and my lungs burning.
I don’t know how long I stood like that before I was disturbed by the familiar rattle of trolley wheels. Two of my fellows were coming, now here they were in the furnace room with great mounds of soiled and bloodied bandages.
Black Mountain Page 16
