The Calling

by Inger Ash Wolfe

'And what about Marty?'

  'Are you serious?'

  He breathed out heavily. 'Christ.'

  'I have another test coming up in two weeks. After that, they'll schedule me for surgery if I'm a candidate.'

  'I wish you'd told me it was this bad.'

  'Andrew, it's this bad.'

  'And what do I tell Glynnis when she says you're a manipulative witch who'd submit to surgery if she thought it would get me back under your roof?'

  'Tell her you'll see her in ten weeks.'

  He laughed, but his eyes were not smiling.

  On the way home, the pain was so intense that she drove with her fist balled up under her right buttock. There was a point there a chiropractor had shown her that was supposed to relieve some of the pain in her leg, but if anything, it only gave respite because it meant she wasn't sitting all the way down on the seat. She was a shade away from drunk now, probably over the limit, but still alert enough to drive. The surging pain in her back and leg counteracted some of the effects of the liquor.

  They'd left the topic alone when the steaks came, but Hazel still had the impression that it had been left open. Before any final decisions were made on either side, she knew she was going to be sitting down alone with Glynnis, and she also knew what the suggested compromise was going to be. This appealed to her about exactly as much as having to manage on her own, but managing on her own after surgery was going to be impossible as opposed to unbearable, and unbearable was subjective. She already knew that if Glynnis agreed to her husband nursing his ex-wife, there was no way it was happening under the ex-wife's roof.

  When she pulled into her driveway, she was in a black funk. She tried to think of a single part of her life that was in complete working order, a part she had control of, where she was actually exercising that control in a measured, intelligent way. Ahead of her: pills, bed, morning. Days scattered across a landscape of weeks and months.

  'How's the one that got away?' said her mother, looking up from the television.

  'Four decades of marriage is not "getting away", Mum.'

  'The escapee, then.'

  'He was fine.'

  Emily Micallef twisted away from the television to see her daughter better. Hazel recalled herself turning in the chair at the Laughing Crow, nervously looking around for her ex. 'I'm having a moral dilemma right now,' her mother said. 'You need to take your medicine and go to bed. Your day needs to be over right now.'

  Hazel stepped into the living room. 'What happened?'

  'See, this is what I'm struggling with right now.'

  'Mother.' Hazel followed her mother's sightline to the portable handset on the sideboard.

  'You have a message.'

  'Thank you.' She picked up the phone and dialled into the voicemail. 'I'm the chief of police, Mother, not the president of the glee club.'

  'How come I'm the one who doesn't get your cell number?' said the voice of Howard Spere. 'It's nine o'clock. In case you've ever been worried about how safe your personal details are on Bidnow.com, you may shop with confidence. They wouldn't give out your shoe size without a notarized release from your podiatrist.' She pushed the 3 button to fast forward. Howard said, 'Practically had to send them a blood sample before they'd—' and she pushed the button again until, at last, he informed her that the website's management had given in. The shipping address Delia Chandler had intended to use for the duvet cover she was bidding on the day she was murdered definitely was not Maitland Avenue in Port Dundas, Ontario. It was for a postoffice box in Port Hardy, the last town before the Pacific, high up in the northern wilds of Vancouver Island.

  13

  Saturday 20 November, 3 a.m.

  He continued driving through the night after resting at the roadside. His hunger pangs had turned into cramps, and every couple of hours, in the static dark through the countryside of central New Brunswick, he'd pull over and squat in the brush to push out a hot stream of shit into the dirt. It stank of bile. His body was starting to eat itself.

  He drove the highway crouched over the steering wheel, his stomach tortioning inside his gut. He could smell his breath bouncing off the inside of the windshield: a combination of wet dog and tooth rot. An undertone of acid. He was very sick, he knew this now. He knew it could become an obstacle.

  The headlights pushed along the road surface, the cracks in the old asphalt rolling toward him, an ever-changing, wild line moving like an endless branch under the car. He fought his exhaustion and reached inside his mind to find his brother, and he spoke to him. Be with me now, my brother. Sit with me and look at this night with me, this beautiful, empty night. He saw his brother lying racked in his bed. The flower of his beloved body, sudden in death's preawakening, ready to seed. We are drawing the spore of your soul from one ocean to another, like a lace cinching us together.

  He pulled his head up suddenly and saw the road again, forced the car hard back onto the flattop, his breath as thin as the buzzing of a fly. He saw the pale, blinking light of the gas station that marked the halfway point of this road that slid through the dark between the two main highways. There lay the promise of a few empty calories, perhaps a toilet with a light, but he blew past it, pushing his foot down on the accelerator. He would be in Pictou by mid-morning as he'd promised. He'd emailed Tamara Laurence from a library in Quesnel to say he would arrive on 20 November at one o'clock in the afternoon, and he had been late only once in his travels, and early just once. He tried to keep his appointments to the minute. He had even waited in his car on the streets of Port Dundas for half an hour the afternoon he'd arrived to take Delia in order to be at her door precisely at three. He could not ask for the trust it entailed to join him in this profound chain if his first gesture was to break his word.

  His stomach folded over on itself and he had to stop again. He stumbled out of the car and hurriedly pulled his black pants down around his ankles and shat into the gravel, heard the explosion of pebbles underneath him. He cleaned himself, and in the rising steam he smelled meat and he carried the soiled tissue around to the front of the car and held it up in front of his headlights. It was drenched with blood.

  He drove through the rest of the dark in a stew of dreams and agony, but when he saw the ocean at eleven o'clock in the morning, his stomach settled like a storm lifting and he was able to sit up straighter behind the wheel. There was the compulsion to take any one of the little dirt roads that led north to the shoreline now, but by the map he saw that he would arrive at Pictou with only minutes to spare and he kept his eyes forward. Back in Amherst, a tang of salt had suddenly manifested in the air, an Atlantic salt, though, lighter and more acrid than the smell of the ocean from back home. Still, it woke him, thrilled him to the root. From a well he knew he could draw on when he had to, strength returned to his muscles. The sunlight processing through the windshield went into him like sugar.

  He followed the curving road through the shore towns, their houses stacked up on the hillsides like loose teeth. Finally, he saw the signs for Pictou and went through the town to the other side, just where the forest began again. He passed a golf course and went right, bearing down toward the harbour. A huge plume of white smoke hung over the trees from the paper plant across the water, puffing out its scrubbed toxins over the inlet. Sulphur and salt in the air. He saw Tamara's house as she'd described it in her message to him and he pulled over.

  A hard surface, a sensation of rope. Gullivered. His eyes would not open. There was an irregular surface beneath him. Wood or straw. He pushed his eyelids together to moisten them and then forced them open and he was looking up at a stucco ceiling inlaid with rough planks. The air was cold on his face. Someone had tucked a heavy blanket around his body and the weight of it was somehow immobilizing him. His mouth was crusted, and he lifted his hand to wipe his lips and heard the dull clack of a tangle of tubing that, to his great surprise, he had pulled up with his arm. He was attached to something; he turned his head slightly upward and saw a metal stand behind him. Two bags, o
ne with a clear liquid, the other containing blood. A transfusion. Someone was saving his life, a great transgression: the blood of strangers. He managed to lift his shoulders and he craned his neck forward to see it was not the blankets that were holding him in place, but cloth straps over his shins and his pelvis. They were ratcheted tight by means of belt clasps cinched against the surface of the bed.

  This was not a hospital, however. A house. He was in a basement. The lights were dimmed, but through a doorway halfway down the wall on his right, he saw a quiet yellow glow. He called out and something blocked the light momentarily and the door opened. A woman stood in it with a burning cigarette in one hand and his gun in the other. The room was warm, but she was wearing a sweater and a thick burgundy shawl lay over her shoulders. She was as thin as a crack in a wall. 'You're a dangerous man, aren't you, Simon?' she said.

  'Where am I?'

  'You drive up right on time. I watch you from the window, you go to the back of your car, open the hatch, and drop like someone's cut the legs out from under you. Half-dead behind your own car. You were hunched over a leather kitbag full of neat things.' She held the gun up. 'This for one. Although I found the hatchet and the hammer interesting backup. I guess hatchets don't jam.'

  She came farther into the room and sat at the foot of the bed. She moved with great difficulty and when she sat, her knees and hips crackled. 'You're Tamara,' he said.

  'You'd better call me Dr Laurence for now. I could get into a lot of trouble for doing what I'm doing. But I'm already in a lot of trouble, so what the hell. Death removes your hospital privileges anyway, doesn't it?'

  'Why am I restrained?'

  She tugged on one of the straps. It barely moved. 'Who knows what you might do to me if you weren't restrained, Simon.'

  'You're frightened of me?'

  'I wasn't until I found your medicine bag. Then I started to wonder what I'd signed up for.'

  He struggled against the ties until he was almost sitting up. He felt a tugging under the covers in his groin. 'You shouldn't be smoking, Tamara.'

  She laughed in disbelief. 'I know. It's bad for me. Look, I want to know what you were planning to do once you got here.'

  'I was going to kill you. You know that. That's why you invited me here.'

  She shifted on the bed to face him. Her eyes were set back in her head and the smoke drove them farther away from him, as if she were wearing a veil. He was finding the farther east he went, the closer his supplicants were to the edge. He was arriving in the nick of time. 'I signed up for mercy. Or at least I thought I did. What is all that shit in your bag?'

  'Medicine.'

  'Since when did the healing arts include hand-to-hand combat?' She coughed heavily.

  'Release me, Tamara.'

  'I thought that was your job.'

  'Tamara.'

  'You're not wearing any pants,' she said. 'You've got a tube up your prick. A catheter. Didn't want you wetting my rattan.'

  He lay back down to take the strain out of his lower back, looked at the tubes in his arm again. The one in his hand delivered the clear liquid. The blood was flowing into a port on the inside of his arm. 'I gather you're having second thoughts,' he said.

  He heard her get up and leave the room, then reenter. She put his medicine bag down on the floor beside him and opened it. 'Take me through this,' she said, removing a couple of glass vials from within. 'Foxglove?'

  'I've done nothing to deserve being held prisoner.'

  'This is like, herbal digitalis, right?'

  'It's for my heart.'

  'Or someone else's. This stuff can stop you like a clock.' She tossed it back into the bag with a clink and took out a vial of powder. 'What's this?'

  He strained over his shoulder to look at it. 'It's a fungus.'

  'Shrooms, huh? What's it do?'

  'It sedates.'

  'How much of this to kill a person?'

  'Not a lot. Look ...'

  'No, you look, you fucking sicko.' She stood up with his kit and tossed it into the corner of the room. He heard something inside the bag shatter. 'I thought you were some kind of shaman. But obviously you're a right fucking lunatic and I don't know how many people have fallen for your—'

  'TAMARA.' His voice filled the room and covered her up. She fell silent. 'If you'd like to stand there speculating on the evil I represent, then go right ahead. But given that I can't pose much of a threat in the position I'm in, perhaps you'd be willing to let me address your issues.'

  'Address my issues? I'm a bag of cancer, Simon. A tumour with a face on it. What's to address?'

  'You can't go about killing people even if you have their permission,' he said. 'It's a crime. And given that I'm committing crimes, I think it best to at least hide my purpose. I deliver a painless death in the name of something quite profound, Tamara, and then, if I think it advisable, I cover it up another way. I leave no trail but the one I am laying down and the one that you've asked to follow.'

  She laughed now. 'Do you give this speech to all your victims?'

  'None of them seem to require it. But you, in witnessing my weakness now believe me to be capable of a great insult. You invited me here, Tamara. To be a part of something. What is it to you that my methods seem strange? Either you want to join us, or you don't. Whichever, you'll still die. I only offer an alternative.'

  'An alternative to death.'

  'An alternative meaning.'

  She was silent a moment. He remained on his back, looking upward. He had the desire to pull the tubes out of his arm, but he wanted to bring her back. He had no one else in this area to call on: it was Tamara followed by Carl Smotes in Trinity Bay and then he was done. She said, 'So just let me get this straight. You've been showing up at people's homes, gently euthanizing them, and then, let's see, committing unspeakable desecrations to their dead bodies. Is that right?'

  'Sometimes,' he said. 'I would be breaking my word to all of you if I got caught. Would that not be worse?'

  She thought about it. He was aware that she was shuttling from anger and disbelief back toward where he had met her. She was almost with him again. 'So what were you going to do to me?'

  He raised himself back on his elbows so he could look at her. She was sitting in a chair on the other side of the room, her shawl pulled tight across her chest now. 'I would have made you some tea. Something to settle you. Then I would have examined you to ensure your physical body was complete—'

  'Complete.'

  'Yes. As I said in my messages to you, only those who are whole in body can be a part of this. Whole as God made you.'

  'I've had about fifteen pounds of tumour removed from my body.'

  'I'm more concerned with surgeries of vanity, Tamara. Stomach tucks, breast enlargements. I want a body as God intended it to be. I make room for some things: tonsils ... tumours.'

  'What about a new heart valve?'

  His own heart sank. 'Have you had a valve replaced, Tamara?'

  'No. I'm just asking.'

  'It would probably be too much. Is there something you want me to know?'

  She shifted in the chair. It seemed to creak as much as her body did. 'After the tea, then what?'

  'I'd make a tincture of some kind. It's always different. An opiate in your case, to help you deal with your pain, followed by something to stop your heart.'

  'And then what.'

  He stared at her, willing her to tell him she didn't need to know, but she calmly returned his gaze. 'In your case, Tamara, I was going to remove your arms and legs.'

  She blinked at him a couple of times and then broke into a broad, if nervous, grin. 'Really? How were you going to do that?'

  'I have a flensing knife in the car. I don't keep it in my kit. The blade's too long.' He watched her face. She wanted it all. 'Before rigor mortis sets in, I'd take your limbs in my hands and pull hard to loosen the joints. It's easier to cut through the ligaments and cartilage if the joints are pulled apart manually. Then I'd slice through y
our arms just below your shoulder sockets and your legs just below your pelvis.'

  She swallowed. 'And what are you going to do with my arms and legs?'

  'I'm going to put them in the oven, Tamara. It's going to look like a madman was here. Just like you said.'

  She pushed herself up to standing with difficulty and approached the bed. 'But you're telling me you're not a madman.'

  'I'm no madder than you. I'm suffering the pains of death, but they have not made me mad.' She stood at the side of the bed, her hand playing over one of the cloth straps. She slipped a forefinger under the steel latch that locked the clasp beside his shin and flipped it. He felt the belt loosen and she tugged on the cloth to pull it through the clasp. Then she loosened and removed the one on his pelvis. 'I'd like to be taken off your medicines,' he said.

  'You took four pints, you know. I had to steal them from the hospital's blood bank. Luckily I'm not afraid of being fired.' She screwed closed the port on his arm and tied off the saline going into his hand. 'You were practically hollow when I found you.'

  He grieved the thought of having taken sustenance from unknown bodies. 'I'm not supposed to take aid. I'm to go forth on my own strength.'

  'You'd be dead, then,' she said. He felt the plastic stent slide out of the vein in his hand. 'This last one is going to be a bit uncomfortable.' She reached down below the sheets and he felt her hand, warm, on the inside of his leg. With a sudden motion, she ripped tape from his inner thigh and then he felt the painful sensation of the catheter being drawn out of his urethra. He felt as if he were pissing fire. 'Sorry,' she said.

  Like most of the houses he entered, Tamara Laurence's was spotless. He could never be sure if these houses had been cleaned for his benefit, or if a terminal illness naturally made people want to simplify their lives. He appreciated the respect it showed, whether for him, or for the coming of these many ends.

  Her home was modest. Furnished in a spartan manner, with a couple of adornments about: an antique clock, a painting over the fireplace. No mirrors anywhere. He sat at her bare dining-room table as she put her kettle on and then came to join him. The hair she'd lost over a failed course of chemotherapy had grown in again, although it was new hair rather than old growth: it was soft and loose and thin. It had grown long enough that she could tie it back into a short ponytail that came down only to the nape of her neck.