by Dias, Jason
“What are you talking about?”
She stepped very close to me now, looking up into my eyes. Her sclera were clear and white. Something in me responded sexually and I took a half-step back, disturbed.
“I would listen to the seminarians arguing about this. In the end, they could only agree that His ways are mysterious. It seems cruel. Does the chicken think the farmwife is cruel when she twists off its head? Does it merely fail to understand her purpose?”
The metaphor seemed a little close. “I don’t believe in God.” Rote, no passion behind me.
Her answer surprised me. “Neither do I. Now you should sleep, dear, stubborn Dominique.”
“I am exhausted, but I don’t see how sleep is possible.” I yawned. “I suppose you can put yourself to bed. I don’t keep much food here. Shit. You wouldn’t need it anyway.” I made myself not say anything else stupid or banal, like, “See you in the morning.” I only shuffled away along uncarpeted floors that could have done with sweeping. I shut my bedroom door, set an alarm for five-hundred hours, and lay down on the bed, fully dressed.
She wouldn’t leave me alone. The dreams started as soon as my eyes were shut.
Rousseau, in the dungeon cell. His arm stank, putrid. Once, I had come home from work to a stench. I had cleaned everything twice and the stink had not gone away. After two days, it intensified. I pulled the kitchen apart searching for a source. Mouse. Under the stove. Crawled under there and died. His arm stank like that.
He lay on his wooden bench, Bible on his chest, arm dangling so that his knuckles brushed the dirt floor. He moaned in what passed for sleep, sweat on his brow and gooseflesh on his other arm – hot and cold at the same time. He wasn’t going to make it.
Nobody else around. How did Ysabeau know this part to show it to me? Had she eaten Rousseau, in the end?
The old priest came down the stairs, a stranger in tow. The younger man said, “…should have called upon me much sooner. After so long, these wounds can be debilitating if not fatal. How did you say he was burned?”
“Scalded. And no concern of yours how. Save him if you can, how you can.”
“Yes, Bishop Clearey. It occurs to me that people around you frequently incur such injuries. And they know you too well at the home for indigent women. Is this the cell? Why is a wounded man down here, Bishop?”
The door opened. The two men came in. No room for me with all three men; I stood partially inside the Bishop’s right arm and the new man’s left side. They didn’t seem to notice. The new man knelt by Rousseau’s side.
“I need a light.”
The Bishop brought a lantern from outside the room and set in on the floor. The glow illuminated skin gone black and swollen, like a sausage too long in the fire.
“This is no good. A miracle he has not died.”
“Miracles are our bread and wine. Such a miracle is well for him.”
“Perhaps not. I am going to have to take it off. Here.” He prodded the arm just below the shoulder. Rousseau moaned again in his fevered unconsciousness. “He will not thank me for it.”
“Best do it quickly. Did you bring your kit?”
“I had not thought to need it much after the Casteldelfino flap. I have needed it much too often. It is in the carriage in a black kit bag.”
The Bishop went out and shouted up the stairs, then came back in. Moments later, a junior priest hurried in with the tool kit. The new man, evidently a doctor, unrolled a set of knives from the case. He tied a tourniquet around Rousseau’s arm, just above where he had indicated earlier. “You will need to help. Hold him down. I will give him opium to keep him under, but still he will thrash.” He started a preparation.
I wanted to leave. I was rooted to the spot, an unwilling observer, unable even to blink because the scene entered through my mind, not my eyes.
“Stop it.” I said it. Nobody heard. Nobody there to hear. These were just figments, people long-dead if not merely imagined. “Stop. Don’t make me see this.”
“This is going to make a mess.”
“Not the first time this dirt has been bloodied, good doctor. Or these clothes. It is God’s will that you save this man.”
Bishop Clearey all but sat on Rousseau’s chest. The doctor held the putrid arm between his knees, kneeling on the floor. First came a curved knife and a quick cut all the way around the arm, severing muscle and tendons. The blood flowed slowly, thick and viscous. The doctor pulled down on the skin and the gore inside, exposing bone.
He took out the next tool: a bone saw. Working quickly and with precision, it still took half an hour to grind through the bone. The arm finally dropped off with a jerk. He cast it against the back wall. It spattered, making an obscene noise that I knew would always haunt me. The limb seeped dark blood into the dirt.
The world of dreams muted the horror but still I felt it. I had no stomach to be queasy - a blessing. But the violence and gore wounded my soul. I wanted to scream and rant and kick the whole tableau over. I wanted to run. Howl. I felt pain in sympathy. Had it been real and contemporaneous, the horror might have driven me over the edge.
I was wrong. It was not done. The arm festered in the corner but the surgery continued. The doctor had left a flap of skin hanging. He used a big needle and a dark thread to sew the skin over the wound, making a neat stump.
“A miracle his heart is still beating, and another miracle yet if he survives three more days. If so, he should live a long life.”
The Bishop had no visible reaction to this news. With the surgery done, he stepped down, brushed off his cassock, and said, “Compliments on a neat procedure. No need to fear for this man. God has marked him out to be saved.”
The doctor packed up his bloody kit. The basement had no facilities to wash it. “I disapprove of your methods.”
“Such is of little account.”
“Perhaps true. In the war, I made many friends and a few enemies.”
“So?” The two men were on the stairs now, the Bishop ahead.
“I did surgery with many doctors. One of them is in Paris now.”
“Do you wish me to bless him?”
The dead arm continued stinking. Ysabeau’s dream dragged me along now behind the two men, the stink receding behind me.
“You might have a care to do so,” the doctor said. “You are master of this domain, I cannot argue. And yet, this domain is part of a larger one. I will see that the Prefect hears of this incident, as well as the others.”
“You think he does not condone this treatment.”
“I know it. You, Bishop, are a relic, an outdated monster best forgotten by civilized men. Men like you caused the war of succession in Austria. I will see to it that you make me no new cases for surgery. Good day to you.” At the top of the stairs, he left through the great front doors into a wintery street, trailing bloody footprints behind him in the snow.
Clearey stood in the open doorway for a time, rubbing his chin. When he finally shut the door and turned inward, a bloody mark stained his face.
Hate
I awakened groggy and trembling. The events of the previous night faded like a nightmare: the motion nags through your morning while the images themselves lose power. Each event had been impossible. They added up to madness.
I presided over a murder investigation in which I abetted the murderer, a supernatural being beyond my reach. In deep, no way out. Ysabeau’s truth held: she was a storm to be weathered, a natural force that could not be controlled or turned aside. What was my responsibility?
My tablet flashed with so many messages I imagined they must have mass and weight. That I could feel the heft of them. Lab reports. A complaint from Jolene that I had missed Christmas Eve. Shit – today was Christmas. Notes about crime scene sketches for me to sign and file. Photos, same.
I sat on the edge of my bed. My hands shook and not just with nerves. My stomach chewed at my ribs. Gray invested my vision when I stood. I just swayed there a moment, one hand on the end table. A
quick toilet – some things are unavoidable, no matter how surreal the world grows – then I strode into the guest bedroom. Tore the lid off the tiny coffin in there, exposing the contents to the light.
What contents?
A smattering of dirt. Nothing more.
From an old cemetery in Paris. I could collect a sample, have it analyzed. But then it would have to go into a file. Exhibit ninety-seven: dirt from a coffin I stole from the funeral home run by the lady who knows the suspect is a vampire. The shrinks would assign me a room right next to hers at the hospital.
I went to the kitchen and started coffee, sat at the table there to wait for it. An incoming call flashed on the screen. Burt.
“Yep.”
“What are you doing up early on Christmas Morning? Thought you’d take a day off.”
“The bad guys aren’t.” A standard reply. Bob Marley’s answer when questioned about doing a show two days after being shot. In truth, though, the bad guy was taking the day off, on a plane of existence I could not access. “You?”
“More murder. You brought in a funeral home director last night.”
“She hurt somebody?”
“She’s dead.”
“Like the others?”
“Yep.”
Lucky I was already sitting down, the toilet as good a place as any. “On the psych ward?”
“Even better. In full view of a camera. Her head just twisted itself off. Spinal cord snapped, all the neck bones intact. I think we’re off this case, Sanchez. What we have here is a bizarre medical outbreak, a seizure of some sort. You’ve been in contact with two bodies and one live victim. Need you in right now for a full medical work-up. Whatever your plans were for today, cancel them.”
“No plans.” Jo would be mad but I hadn’t been headed there in any event. “Thin theory, boss.”
“You got something better? Maybe an invisible murderer that dries up a person’s blood with telepathy? A toothless vampire?”
“Guess not.”
“Jolene is going to take lead on this, OK? Until she rules out everything medical. For now, focus on the priest, find closure for the families. It’s just a coincidence, luck of the draw.”
I didn’t know how she could think a seizure could turn someone’s head around. I called Jolene.
“Hi, Dom. Looks like your Grinch-heart got it’s wish. Christmas is cancelled.”
“The girls will be disappointed.”
“They know how it is. We’ll do it tomorrow. When are you coming by the office?”
“What?”
“Lieutenant wants a full work-up on you.”
“I thought I’d head to the usual sawbones.”
“No way. My office. Thirty minutes?”
Damn. “Yeah. Thirty. Let me drink some coffee.”
She ruined my day. Ruined it more. “No coffee. Clear liquids only. Beef broth if you’re starving. I’ll give you a cookie when you’re done.”
“Okay. Hey. You know a geology guy who could run a sample for me? Discretely?”
“Maybe. Friend up in Boulder. She’s finishing a thesis. What’s it about?”
“Personal. You mind?”
“Get to the office. I’ll call her on the way.”
I hung up. No coffee. But at least the investigation no longer put me in conflict. Very convenient. Of course Ysabeau had been busy while I slept. Nothing I could do about it, though. Cancer had killed some people in the night, somewhere in the world. And lightning, cold, hunger. All things outside my sphere of influence. Natural phenomena, nothing to feel guilty about. The wind blew, trees fell, and people died.
I changed clothes quickly. Sweats, as if headed to the gym. Formless and gray, not the tight, body-accentuating things people wear these days. Gym shoes and a longshoreman’s cap. I strapped my gun on under my sweater as a matter of rote. The department required me to carry it even off-duty.
Short drive to Jolene’s office - the county morgue. She had a literal office space, a workroom with a couch and a pair of armchairs, and the medical room where she saw patients. She stuck me in the workroom. An exam in the big room would have been too evocative.
“Strip,” she said.
“You think there are going to be marks on me?”
“No, but I need to check. Stack your clothes on that little table there.”
I did, setting everything on top of the medical journal taking up the table. “Now what?”
“Now try not to blush as I go over all your parts.” She stared at my face first. Each eye. She put on latex gloves as she stared at my cheeks, then came at me with a tongue depressor to look down my throat. Circled around, checking my neck and throat, hairline, spine. Shoulders. She made me lift my arms, checked the nodes in my armpits.
“Can you hurry this up? I’m getting gooseflesh.”
“It’s not that cold.”
“You have pants on.”
“I’m done with the top half. Put your shirt on.” That after some poking and a stethoscope as cold as they usually are.
“You aren’t going internal down there, are you? We’re close, but…”
“Sorry. Needs to be done. Going to take a shitload of blood, too.”
My gooseflesh amplified. I didn’t want to give any blood.
“Lift your right foot.”
“I could sit down.”
“No need. Left foot. Actually, yeah, take a seat right there. Wait.” She went to the bad room, came back with one of those blue sheets they use to cover exam chairs. She put it down on the armchair. “There.”
“Okay.”
“Left foot again. Do you remember stepping on anything painful? Or maybe a spider bite while you were sleeping one night? Does this hurt?”
“I don’t feel anything. And no to all of that. What is it?”
“Funny mark right here. Looks like a couple of spider bites, for sure. Folks usually never notice. I’ll have to go back over the other bodies, but this doesn’t look relevant. Actually, I’m not even sure what would be relevant.”
She came at my personal parts with those gloved hands.
“A seizure can’t disarticulate your neck, can it?”
“Never seen it before,” she said. “You ever hear of personal grooming? Jesus Christ, it’s a barnyard down there. There are cases of seizures breaking bones. They can be pretty intense. You remember that scene in The Exorcist, with the girl spinning her head around? We think cases of demonic possession are usually some kind of tonic seizure pushing the body into weird positions that look unnatural. OK, I’m done here. You can dress, but roll up your right sleeve.”
“I’m right-handed. That’s my shooting hand.”
“Fine, left.”
It felt like a little victory, probably why Jo had started with the other arm.
She went on, “Long way from a fractured femur to a snapped spinal cord, of course. There’s some more research that spinal cord injuries are more common in people with intractable seizure disorders.”
“Meaning what?”
“Probably nothing. Maybe that seizure meds cause bone loss, making people more susceptible to injury when they fall. This will hurt.”
She stuck me with a needle and my blood ran into her plastic vial via a rubber tube. After what I had seen last night, watching my own blood did not seem that disturbing. “Hey, I had this dream.”
“Yeah?”
I told her about the amputation.
“Vivid,” she said.
“Yeah. So what did my subconscious get wrong?”
“Lots of stuff. That sounds like a Civil War surgery. Also, too slow. But if you watched a procedure like that without knowing much about it, that might be how you’d describe it.”
Neither here nor there. More ambiguity. Not that it made any difference, in the end. That coffin certainly resided in my guest bedroom. Jo took two more vials.
“What are you going to test for?”
“Haven’t decided yet. I’m going to call some colleagues at a
more reasonable hour for advice. First a quick look under the microscope for any obvious blood problems. I’ll call you later.”
“You reach your geologist?”
“Yeah, she’s a bit of a ghoul. Going to come down for lunch. You ought to join us.”
“Busy. Can I leave this with you?” I produced a teaspoon of soil trapped in the finger of a latex glove. “I need to know where it comes from. Discretely.”
“Fine. Go eat something. Christmas tomorrow.”
“You promised me a cookie.”
“You know I’m a liar, Dom.”
I gave her the stinkiest of stink-eyes. That didn’t make cookies appear. No other option but to head home.
I put on the radio in the car. Commercials. Snapped it off again. Drummed fingers on the wheel. Halfway home, I veered off the bypass and towards the office.
That folder from Enrique. I could pull a step ahead of Ysabeau, maybe.
I went in the back door. Carla grunted acknowledgement and I nodded back. Nobody bothered me. I went into my office, unlocked the steel gray cabinet in the corner, and retrieved the file.
“Doc clear you?”
I jumped. I haven’t startled in years. The work has made me rock steady. “Burt. Lieutenant. Ah, Jolene did a full exam. Every inch inside and out. Nothing to say yet. I gave her about a pint of blood. Want to keep working the clergy end.”
“What’s that?” She indicated the file.
“Leads.”
“You should hand it over. I don’t want to see you around here until Jo says you’re not contagious.”
“It’s, ah, it’s private. Deep sources. I promised.”
“Enrique?”
I just stared at her, not confirming or denying. Not with words.
“OK,” she said. “But do it from your house and don’t leave there until you’re cleared. All right?”
“Yeah.” She left. I followed right behind her, out the back door with my prize tucked under one arm. I sat it on the passenger seat and fired up the motor. A short drive would get me home. I could have used some coffee and a sandwich but I didn’t want to go to the convenience store if I might have something.
