Among You Secret Children

by Jeff Kamen

  She shook the gauze and lowered it and added a small quantity of water and powdered bark, Grethà seeming to detach herself a moment to survey the counter top and shelves. Noting the other options there. Phials and sealed jars of chemicals.

  Jaala paused a moment, sweating. To let her intrude or push her away ...

  This ... this ...

  Her dark brow creased.

  No. Keep her for now. Repay the Nassgruben.

  Grethà seeming to relax at this, to smile ...

  To spread and grow ... grow in influence ...

  Still she stirred, adding ingredients; the air grew heavy with fumes. She noticed coughing breaking out, her audience composed of surgeons and scientists and a few people from the command group brought in to observe the operation, some of whom were pulling on masks. She waited, then stirred the pot again, catching yarrow there and other smells that brought through the flickers an image of terracotta dust, the ragged hides of a village on a baking yellow plain.

  ‘That should be it,’ she said, as steadily as she could manage, turning to the clinicians and nurses watching her at close quarters, Nina among them. Like herself, they were scrubbed and wearing gloves and grey robes, and were gathered around the trolley where Lütt-Ebbins lay. The med team garments felt strange and very light on her, but were no less comfortable for that. On checking there were no outstanding questions, that the nurses were ready with cloths and towels, she asked the patient how he was doing. He was clad only in trousers and appeared to be shivering.

  ‘I’m okay,’ he said, smiling tightly.

  ‘Remember, it’s not so much the treatment as your reaction to it afterwards. To get that I’ll need your help. Whatever happens, you have to keep breathing it in.’

  ‘Right. Sure. Just want it over with.’

  ‘You might bleed from the start,’ she added, ‘but it shouldn’t be for long.’

  ‘What about my glasses?’ he said, and with a nod Nina came forward to remove them, placing them on a trolley tray as Jaala returned to the counter.

  As she ladled the pot’s contents into a bowl, a metal box was brought across, in which, at Vonal’s insistence, bags of blood had been packed in ice water. A tall stand hung with trailing tubes was wheeled next to it and then the staff resumed their places under the bright lamps.

  She then turning with the bowl at the ready as Grethà had done for that long ago visitor ... rumours of an old abandoned cave at the edges of her thoughts ... breaking like dry and echoey water on a cracking shore ...

  This … this ... the greatest of gifts ...

  Lütt-Ebbins lay watching her anxiously through the steam, following every movement as she placed the bowl on the trolley. Watching as if to ensure no ill could befall him. She adjusted his head on the pillow, and as a towel was draped over his head, she bid him to inhale as deeply as he could. ‘You’ll need to hold him still,’ she advised the nurses, who nervously seized his limbs.

  As soon as he took in the vapour, his hands flexed. His body tautened. She spoke quiet words of encouragement, cupping his head with unmovable fingers as he resisted. He started to cough and kick, and as he did, she ignored the concerns being voiced in the room, ignored the faces of the nurses gripping his wrists and ankles, forcing him to lie back on the waterproof sheet he was squirming on.

  He tensed again, breathing noisily, harshly, and she saw his skin turning waxlike and jaundiced in the naked light, the sweat shining on him in a greasy film. ‘More,’ she urged, ‘as deeply as you can,’ and it was then that he began to fight it.

  ‘Feet!’ a nurse said as he thrashed about, ‘take his feet!’

  ‘Keep it in, Mihael,’ she said, pinning him down beneath the towel, ‘just hold it in.’

  They were the last words she uttered before the seizure. As soon as the blood came up, there was yelling chaos in the room, with clinicians and nursing staff locked in argument over who was doing what and who was to be listened to, and she begging the nurses to keep their positions and maintain the application of the cure. Fighting for room to work in, she lifted his head to keep his airways clear, to stop him from drowning in the bloody spume erupting from his throat.

  ‘He’s shaking!’ one of the clinicians cried. ‘Do something!’

  ‘I’m trying to,’ she retorted. ‘Just give me some room.’

  ‘He’s going to die, he’s going to die, he’s —’

  ‘I said give me some room,’ she yelled, and then Nina intervened on her behalf, helping her to keep the clinicians back, to keep the nurses organised, and once some kind of order had been restored, Jaala left her to calm Lütt-Ebbins too, the pale doctor assuring him that this was exactly what was to be expected, telling him that the more of the vapour he inhaled, the easier it would be to breathe — all of this brought to silence as a wild scream left his lips.

  As he strove to free himself, lashing out, Jaala held his head in place while the grimacing staff wiped his body clean, mopping up the blood leaving his tragic mouth and running down the narrow white grooves of his ribcage.

  ‘Hold on, Lütt,’ Nina urged. ‘Hold on, I’m here.’

  Blood coming out of him in slow black fountains …

  ‘The gauze,’ Jaala said with difficulty. ‘Pack it across his chest. Keep it there.’

  Up the rich blood sprayed ...

  Lava, she thought, staring, it looked like lava. And when she turned and saw the other Nassgruben their eyes were hollow and their mouths full of teeth and she did not find one friendly countenance there ...

  ‘That smell …’ someone gasped, coughing violently, and she could smell it too, and when she raised the towel to check on him she began to wonder at it, for he was beastlike and unrecognisable.

  She saw rings of blood in the bowl and noticed they were throbbing … throbbing with light …

  ‘It’s ... it’s just the fungus,’ she said, to whom she did not know, and when she looked at the body again it was like the moment she first saw Sandor lying there, so darkly soaked. The world spinning away without her; spinning without air, without sound.

  The humid stench intensified, grew like a sea, a fog, some foreign entity.

  ‘Hold him.’

  ‘More cloths, more cloths.’

  ‘Nurse,’ came another voice, ‘she said pack the gauze down. Hold it in place.’

  ‘Please, Mihael,’ she begged, ‘keep taking it in,’ and when she spoke after that she did not know if it was herself or the old lady talking, and when she moved, the trace of her hand seemed to trail in the air like a lamplit shadowplay, a slow shudder of afterimages. Time and place were dissolving ...

  And she was standing there in strange isolation, with people crawling around her like busying insects ... while outside, in the cold and sacred day, she caught the noise of the crowd that had been gathering in recent hours. People praying for the life of one of their leaders, and for what might be bestowed upon them all were he to live. A ring of grimy figures around which, in a murk of effluent, stood the huge corrugated boxes they dwelt in, along with their webbed and dripping supplies and spluttering machines. The fumes rose again, mushrooming, and as a fierce stench filled the room she found her thoughts ascending, the old lady’s twining with her own, and as they drifted aloft and she looked down upon the camp and the leaking black eye of the entrance in the hills ... as she looked down at the inky lake below ... she wondered if this alone would be the Nassgruben’s legacy, this fatal heritage of black smoke and dredging and wheezing ... or whether they’d be lifted, would want more from the upper world, would want to know it and hold onto it and throw themselves into its arms so they could finally belong ...

  Soaring upwards, and she wondered if they would ever climb to the mountains ... would ever see the sun rise over the land as a crystalline flame, driving round its long shafts of light so as to dazzle its creatures into consciousness, urging all things that breathed to stir themselves, to reach out and touch its radiance for one more day, one more day, forever one more day
...

  The steam rose steadily and for a while she thought that they were running together, sprinting naked through the woods. She and the old lady reaching out to one another across the years; Anya leaping up and falling, receding to nothing, and the dry walls of the cave spinning like the walls of a racing cyclone ... the kind-eyed man appearing in a whorl of fire and hope and ever-growing love ...

  ~O~

  Lütt-Ebbins’ long day of bloody trauma was followed by an overnight sleep under medical observation. It was followed in turn by several more checks, during which time she sat waiting, looking on anxiously, until it was determined that the bleeding had stopped. In all this time, he’d been given just a single dose of oxygen. ‘Let’s go again,’ she said, rising. ‘While his lungs are open.’

  After his next treatment, the bleeding stopped more quickly. A day on, she encouraged him to go out walking, and on completing a tour of the camp away from any smoke pollution, he found that he could breathe without pain. Not easily, he admitted, but he no longer flinched with each breath. It was another couple of days before he dared risk exposing himself to the air outside the bubble, and when finally he did, she was at his side. A restless group accompanied them as the flapping seal was opened and he stood contemplating his next steps. ‘Just take it steady,’ she said, and he nodded.

  He left them behind and walked slowly across the packed dirt of the terrain. For some time he roamed about alone while he tested himself, tested the cruel cold air, his breathing gear dangling from a hand. Then he turned around to face them.

  A long moment passed. She stood watching him closely, clad in her grey gloves and surgical hat, her plain uniform lightly bloodspeckled. ‘What’s he doing?’ someone hissed, as he looked out again to the mountainous west, then up at the huge clouds welling beneath the stratosphere.

  ‘He’s gonna faint,’ a man rasped. ‘Look at him.’

  ‘That’s right, he’s going red.’

  Vonal turned to them irritably, saying, ‘Give it a rest,’ and then over him a senior female nurse shouted, ‘Lütt? You okay?’

  ‘Just leave him,’ Nina cut in, ‘he needs time to —’ and then all fell silent as he raised his hands. He held them there as if in salute or praise of something. Then he lowered his head a fraction. Someone gasped. Then with a croak of joy he extended his hands as if to embrace the world in a single sweep, and he strode back to them gesturing and grinning. The moment he returned behind the flapping sheets, the lead doctor declared in trembling tones that it was official: a Nassgrube could breathe outside unaided. Accompanied by Jaala and the group, as well as growing numbers of well-wishers, Lütt-Ebbins was escorted back to the med room so that the news could be relayed to the staff who’d been working with him. ‘It’s happened,’ Nina kept saying, running from one colleague to another, ‘don’t you realise? It’s happened.’ Cheers erupted in the room, and people wept helplessly as they embraced each other. Here and there clinicians sat making notes. Jaala was shaken by the hand. Kissed. Jostled about. Offered food, water, rest. Someone ran outside, shouting proclamations to the crowd surging their way, whose delirious members began whooping and whistling, crying slogans. ‘It was you, you let it through,’ Jaala said as Nina hugged her, and both stood laughing through their tears.

  ~O~

  Following these events, she found Lütt-Ebbins becoming an object of greater scrutiny than herself for once, a curiosity more regularly visited than the mule. He seemed to her like some model specimen unleashed upon the world to examine it anew, even as he was examined himself. A man born of pungent steams; a man of the future.

  To begin with he could scarcely speak, and had to write notes to convey his various thoughts and pronouncements. Each scribbled word received as bold and talismanic by his people, who treated him as a figure whose brow had been touched by storm and fate and omen; like someone who’d landed among them from the sky. Yet to watch him, as she did carefully — noting each scalding breath he took, the way he gazed out at the desolate dunes and the winds launching the ash from them, even the manner in which he received his visitors, grinning bloodily at friends and comrades, pointing and motioning, urging them to be treated themselves and not delay, to seize the opportunity while it was available — was to observe a man deeply humbled by his experiences, filled with a new reverence for the planet he walked upon; a man who, released from the curse he’d been born with, was now able to go about the world freely, and freely explore.

  As a result of this success, the Nassgruben got to work on a mass treatment programme. She agreed to take on a role as general overseer, her initial task being to lead researchers into the hills to show them which ingredients to collect — and which to avoid at all costs. Following that, when there were sufficient supplies of the cure available, she supervised the surgeons’ work in a designated row of containers, freshly cleaned and sanitised and kitted out with dressings and equipment.

  The treatment was crude work; barbaric, even. It seemed that such a transformation would only come at the price of agonised blood. The camp was rent with shrieks that were horrible to hear, shrieks that were ceaseless, the Nassgruben’s flaccid bodies unprepared for the onslaught, their lungs so puny and raw. She went daily among rows of half-naked figures sprawled on beds or tables to check on them, entering what at times resembled the scene of some terrible indoor butchery, with children and adults alike lying with their feet strapped down, struggling and bellowing, writhing in their blood, so that a dark foam was slick upon them and all those present were screaming in fear of dying, no matter what they were told otherwise — and no matter that without the treatment, a far worse fate lay in store.

  Absorbed by her work, she did not notice the weeks passing. With her hides and woollens packed away, she went among the Nassgruben dressed as one of their own: their food now her food, and her vocabulary orientated to match those she spoke to — as nurse, as counsellor, and occasionally as friend. In spending so much time with them, she came to better understand their background, and through sharing a container with Stoeckl and the woman he lived with, she came to adjust to habits and attitudes she’d struggled to tolerate at first, having found it painful, almost humiliating, to accept their ways as normal.

  She was just starting to enjoy the couple’s company when they were assigned to work on the overnight salvage shift. From then on she saw them only in passing, usually on rest afternoons. Waking one night towards the end of the third moon, she lay in bed listening a few minutes, thinking they’d come home early, then realised it was people talking outside. When the group had moved on she tried to sleep again but was unable to. Muttering, she left her bed and groped about until she found the light cord.

  The coil of light overhead glowed and brightened, flattening back the riveted metal walls and their rust patches. She returned to the bunk and sat a while. Drank from a carton. Then realised she was shivering, her feet curling away from the frozen metal floor. It was nothing like as cold as her tent had been in the caves, yet all the same she’d gone to bed in a work shirt and overalls. She pulled the covers around her and looked straight ahead, concentrating.

  Her hair was down, and she drew it round her neck in a tail and sat pulling at it absently.

  She was beginning to remember why she’d woken: a strange dream had come to her and it took some time to let it float back to a point where she could view it again.

  Then as it came into focus, her face altered. She decided from the feel of it to make notes, to get some details down for later reflection, but when she looked for the notebook Nina had given her, it was not there. She hunted about for a minute, then realised she’d left it in one of the treatment rooms. Muttering again, she went to the heavy grey sheet of the partition and tugged it open.

  From habit, she peered round it before entering. Whenever she’d had to interrupt the couple before, she’d made a discrete noise of warning beforehand; tonight though, the metal bed was empty. The unit was almost bare: there was clothing hung on a rail and
little else but chairs and a table and a tall metal cupboard. She tugged the sheet across so she’d have light to see by, and went quickly to the cupboard and opened it.

  Curiosity had driven her to search it shortly after moving in, something she’d done a number of times now, always hastily, beset by guilt and the fear of being discovered. Now the same guilty feeling returned.

  The cupboard was packed with their possessions, among which were back-up tubes and masks, a handful of tanks and several cartons. She opened a draw, listening for footsteps outside, then spent a few minutes picking through its contents, certain she’d once seen paper there. She dug out pens, sachets, a clock with large black digits that scrolled down with a click as the minutes changed. Among the items she paused to study was a small canister of the sort they used for washing themselves, to remove the bacteria from their bodies. When she’d first smelled something like it, it had struck her as horrible, repulsive, unnatural; yet she now used such items without hesitation, and she quickly sprayed inside her shirt and put it back again. She closed the drawer and went to the next one down, and after sifting through some other items, she found a notepad with some unused sheets. She was removing it when she noticed an image sealed behind a square of glass. Photoplates, they called them. She hesitated, then took it out. It was a picture of the couple themselves, standing with an older couple, parents perhaps, before the steps of a great building constructed of smooth square blocks of masonry. The scene was lit by harsh beams dotted around the tops of buildings, over which hung a vast expanse of rock that dipped darkly away into the distance.

  Moving into the light, she found herself staring into a grid of otherworld streets that were now submerged in a pitchblack deluge she could not bear imagining; and it was as much from discomfort as pity that she returned her focus to the people being photographed.

  The subjects were facing her with blank, even smiles, a few blurred figures in the background. At the bottom of the print someone had written with love, followed by a name. She studied the picture a minute longer, strangely moved by it, then put it away and pocketed the notepad. She was closing the drawers when she noticed a mask gazing directly at her from a shelf. Intrigued, she took it out. Even now their masks remained inexplicably fascinating to her. Every aspect of them: the dead white colour, the smooth plastic hardness, the nozzle under the chin where usually the tubing was connected. She noted the stains and scratches it bore. Marks that individualised it, which made it itself. It was much lighter than she thought it would be, and when she brought it up to her face, the protrusions built to accommodate the chin and nose seemed well designed, the feel of it as she pulled it on surprisingly natural. On securing it with the strap, she stood there shaking her head a little to see if it held, and as she did, she caught her reflection in the polished metal door.