by Jeff Chapman
“Welcome back,” she said.
Abram grasped her fingers. The fight left him, pushed out as peace surged from her touch. Strength hid behind her thin appearance. She pulled him to his feet with little effort.
He mumbled thanks.
“You’re bleeding,” said the Triplet.
Blood oozed from the wound in his arm. The Proprietor said he would fix it and retrieved a white tackle box marked with a red cross. He dabbed the wound with peroxide and then covered it with a bandage.
“Find what you were lookin’ for?” asked the Proprietor.
“No. A total waste. Did I actually go anywhere?”
“You most certainly did,” said the Triplet.
“Mr. Dire claims he can find anything lost,” said the Proprietor.
“I don’t think Mr. Dire will be coming back.”
The Proprietor chuckled. “I wouldn’t bet on that.”
The Triplet touched his hand. “Do you really want to know Pearl’s fate?”
“What do you know about her?”
“More than you can imagine.”
He looked past the Triplet to her sisters eating the banana split. “Are you some of the friends she wouldn’t tell us about?”
The Triplet smiled. “I’m afraid you won’t like what I have to show you.”
He shrugged. “Where are we going?”
“The woods,” answered the Triplet. “But first, have some chocolate.”
“Comin’ right up,” said the Proprietor. “Premium vanilla with that special sauce.”
“What’s in the woods?” asked Abram. “We’ve already searched them with dogs.”
“You’ll see.”
The Proprietor served him a single scoop mantled with thick chocolate sauce. “Best stuff in town.”
“So I’ve heard.” Abram turned to the Triplet. “You want me to eat this?”
She nodded.
He carved a spoonful of ice cream dripping with chocolate and let it melt in his mouth. The Proprietor and the Triplet watched him finish and scrape the chocolate sauce from the sides of the bowl.
“Okay,” he said. “Now what?”
The Triplet smiled. Movement stopped. The diner stilled, captured as a painting or a photograph. The Triplet’s face sank, followed by the counter, the range, the calendar on the wall. Everything lost its distinct edges, dripping and running like a watercolor left in the rain.
When his vision cleared, he stood in a forest. Sunlight filtered through the leaves and holes in the canopy. The Triplet held his hand.
“Where are we?”
“The border lands of paradise.” She dropped his hand and pointed ahead of them. “What you seek is up there.”
He plodded through the undergrowth, pushing saplings aside, ducking below outstretched limbs. Ferns and bushes slapped his shins. The gurgle of rushing water grew louder. The stream sang a sweet melody, a trembling alto calling to him and he hurried in its direction.
A fallen limb, or so he thought, tripped his foot. He fell on a low mound of loose dirt and withered leaves, long dead from seasons past. As he pushed himself up, his fingers contacted the unexpected, cold flesh. A gray wrist and hand, its fingers clinched, protruded from the mound’s edge.
Abram recognized the interlocking chain tattoo around the wrist, a source of so much strife between father and daughter. He pawed the mound, pushing handfuls of dirt to either side, sniffling, staunching tears with the back of his wrist. Pearl’s head, neck, and naked shoulders emerged from the dirt. A partially open eye, as green as the forest leaves, stared at him. The other remained shut, a slit at the center of a purple bruise streaked with black and gray. A gash marred her nose where the killer who had stolen his little girl had ripped out her nose ring. A ligature cinched her neck.
He dug his hands beneath her shoulders, buried his face in her hair, and wept.
The Triplet touched his shoulder. “I said you wouldn’t like it.”
“You knew. You damned bitch.” He stood, ready to beat her with all his anger.
“Look.” At the end of a narrow path through the woods, a stream glittered in the sun, its rippled surface catching the light at odd angles. The air above the water shimmered and beyond the stream, a young woman waited. She wore a dress of pure white. Her auburn locks cascaded down her shoulders.
“Is it?”
“Go and see, but you may not cross the river.”
He sprinted down the path. With each stride the young woman’s form sharpened in his bleary eyes.
Pearl lived.
He halted at the edge of the stream, its bed strewn with sapphires, rubies, and diamonds. Pearl stood on the water’s edge at the end of a path paved with white pearls. A forest spread along the stream on either side of her.
“Pearl?”
“Yes, Daddy.” She looked every bit a bride on her wedding day. He expected her to spin around, letting her pearl-beaded rolls of fabric billow in circles.
“Thank heavens. I thought I’d lost you. You don’t know what I’ve been through to find you. But what—”
“Lost me?” she said, interrupting him. “Was I yours to lose?”
“You’re my daughter.”
She sighed. “Do you like my dress?” She raised her arms and smiled and he saw the little girl who posed as Cinderella on a Halloween many years ago.
“Yes. It’s beautiful, Pearl. But what happened? Who?” He hesitated over the words, pointing toward the shallow grave. “Did that?”
Her smile faded. “It’s of little consequence to me now. Why waste our short time together?”
“Short?” He stepped forward into the stream. The water crackled and smoked at his touch. He jerked back his foot which throbbed with burning.
“You can’t cross. Didn’t they tell you? Your time hasn’t come.”
“Can you cross?”
“I was told not to.”
“I just want to hold you.”
“But I’m not yours to hold, Daddy.”
“Try, for your father’s sake, just for a few moments.”
Pearl stared at the water. “I’m sorry, Daddy, but I will not disobey my Father.”
“Your father? I’m your father.”
“We are both children, supplicants, brother and sister, just as we are both royalty.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“How can I disobey Him? He has made me the queen of heaven.”
“You never wanted to go to church.”
Pearl frowned. “You don’t approve. You never did approve. He said you wouldn’t understand. How did you want to find me? Injured? In desperate need of your help?”
“No, Pearl, no. You don’t understand.”
“This was not about finding me. I am found. It was about you finding me. He’s calling me. I have to go now. I love you and He loves you, too. You’ve been given a tremendous gift, meeting me here. Please don’t waste it.”
“Pearl! Don’t go, please.”
“I’ll wait for you, mother as well, but don’t hurry. We know no tomorrow or yesterday here.”
Abram watched her disappear amid the trees arching over the white path. He sat down on the edge of the stream. “We argued,” he said aloud to himself. “What we always do.”
“It’s time to go back,” said the Triplet.
He slapped her hand from his shoulder. His head ached. He shut his eyes and pressed his hands to his temples. He felt himself spinning, feeling sicker. When the spinning stopped, he was sitting on the sidewalk outside the diner in the gray light of early dawn. A closed sign hung in the door.
A police car pulled to a stop near the curb. “You all right, buddy?” said the officer.
“Tired. I was looking for my daughter.”
“Did you find her?”
“I think so. I don’t know. Maybe.”
The officer frowned at him. “Get on home. There’s no loitering.”
The Facts in the Case of M. Hussman
October 31, 1890
To the Science and Engineering editors at The Chicago Times Weekly and to all interested parties, both legal and scientific,
The bizarre events respecting the untimely deaths of Professor Arnold Hussman and his wife Cordelia have prompted a firestorm of ignorant speculation equal in destructiveness to the Great Fire. As a friend and assistant to Professor Hussman, I believe a first-hand testimony is required to counterbalance the slanderous invective tossed about as objective truth and to reaffirm my mentor’s scientific credentials. The experiment was conducted in good faith and with the most noble intentions. Scientific progress often wends through dark forests and over crags. It is not the pursuit of the timid, and one can hardly fault a husband for loving his wife too much.
For fifteen years Cordelia Hussman stood by her husband’s side, from the early days when family questioned her choice of a man with dreams but few prospects to the wild success of his later inventions. Her family connections with bankers and investors procured the capital so essential to Professor Hussman’s projects. I knew her only briefly through my association with Professor Hussman and the many suppers I shared in their dining room. She held her own in any conversation, employing her formidable wit and impeccable manners, and I daresay beneath that veneer of beauty and breeding that she could be as single-minded and “ruthless” as Hussman, himself.
As attested by the eminent Doctors Laslow and Dunbarton, Mrs. Hussman suffered the wasting disease, and with great sadness we watched as eight months ago she entered that affliction’s final stages. Her lips and extremities assumed a bluish hue, her breathing slowed to intermittent gurgling gasps, and her eyes lost their moist luster, remaining open or closed for hours at a time. Her heart fluttered so faintly that only the most sensitive stethoscope could detect its pulsing. It is unbearably cruel that the world should be deprived of such a woman in the prime of her life, but Professor Hussman did not wring his hands at her bedside. The master engineer and his assistant had much to do.
Many of your readers are doubtless familiar with the celebrated case of M. Valdemar in which a man near death was mesmerized. For several months he persisted in a mesmeric sleep and the decay of his body was thwarted although Valdemar exhibited no signs of vitality save a vibrating, swollen tongue. Suspended in time, his corpus remained in a steady state until a disastrous attempt to awaken him occasioned instantaneous decomposition. Hussman and Dunbarton theorized that failure to maintain Valdemar’s tissue doomed the experiment.
“If there is anything, anything at all that we can do to thwart death’s greed,” Hussman confided to me. “We will do it.”
We labored day and night for a month. I don’t know when the man took rest or sustenance. When we were not pouring over diagrams or grinding and fitting metal pieces, he sat with Cordelia, comforting her with poetry: Shelley, Byron, whatever came to hand. One of Hussman’s miniature steam engines, with a dual hairspring redundancy, powered the life-giving machine: a two-piston pump to mimic the heart and a bellows to inflate and deflate the lungs. I daresay a machine of such intricacy, precision, and power has never been seen and with the passing of such genius will not likely come to light again in the near future.
As her increasingly stertorous breathing knelled death’s approach, Dunbarton, Hussman, and I gathered round her bed in an upper chamber on the west wing of Hussman’s mansion. The white washed walls and scrubbed floor smelt of carbolic acid and ethyl alcohol and was the polar opposite of the rich and varied wallpapers that decorated the rest of the house. A shared anxiety, like static electricity, crackled among us. Dunbarton’s previous attempts at mesmerizing Cordelia had failed. This would be the last attempt.
Dunbarton fixed his gaze on her fading eyes and passed his hands above her body, first along its length from head to toe and then across her abdomen and chest, repeating the passes until her eyes glazed over and followed him. If the reader has ever witnessed a snake charmer, he will have a ready example for comparison. Dunbarton raised each of her arms without the merest physical touch as if the thinnest thread of silk connected them to his will. He closed her eyes with a mere pass of his hands above her face.
“She was very receptive today,” Dunbarton said.
Hussman knelt beside the bed and clasped her hand in both of his. “A good sign, yes?”
Dunbarton frowned. “Her strength has ebbed. She may have been resisting on previous attempts. Are you asleep, Cordelia?”
We waited. Dunbarton repeated the query.
A raspy hiss emanated from her parted lips. “Yes.”
Hussman kissed her hand as if his most ardent prayer had been answered.
“Cordelia, are you prepared to continue?” asked Dunbarton.
Another raspy hiss. “Die.”
“No, darling,” said Hussman. “We’re going to cheat death with whatever is in my power. Have faith. This can be done.”
Dunbarton glanced at me, his brow furrowed and his lips set in a decisive frown. He shooed the nurses out into the hall and took Hussman to the far corner of the sick room out of my earshot. An animated but hushed conversation ensued. I know from experience that Hussman can be stubborn and single minded, such is the character of inventive genius.
Hussman turned from Dunbarton and ordered me to attach and ready the machine.
“You are making a mistake,” said Dunbarton. “Her will is not with us.”
“That is your learned opinion and I respect it,” countered Hussman. “But with respect to the feelings of my wife, I think I know them better than you.”
Dunbarton shook his head. “Nothing clouds a man’s judgment like the death of a loved one.”
“I concede your point, but we will proceed with or without you. My friend, we have little hope without your help. Please. I implore you to stay.”
I stood with the bellows in hand, awaiting instruction. Dunbarton and Hussman stared at one another. Would all our work on the machine be for nothing? Would Cordelia slip away without a fight? After an interminable period of silence, Dunbarton nodded.
Hussman inserted a copper tube attached to the bellows into his wife’s trachea. I attached tubes to vessels in her arm to draw and push blood through the pump and back into her body and then readied the machine’s boiler while Hussman sat with his wife, clasping her hand as her body’s functions slowed to a stop. Dunbarton stood at the foot of the bed, watching us work.
Cordelia Hussman’s case progressed much as Valdemar’s although attempts to elicit further speech failed, perhaps a result of the tracheotomy. Hussman found that his wife could communicate by gently squeezing his hand. As with Valdemar, the mesmeric sleep slowed her decline. She responded to questions from Dunbarton and Hussman after working out a code of two squeezes for yes and one for no. She answered that her approaching death brought no discomfort. As the end neared, only a ticking clock and the sporadic hiss of steam from the boiler disturbed the pregnant silence that suffused the sickroom.
After hours of vigil, Mrs. Hussman’s lower jaw slackened and her tongue pushed between her lips. Dunbarton found no pulse or heartbeat. He repeated his question three times before Cordelia’s arm trembled, apparently summoning its last bit of strength, and confirmed her death.
One of the nurses swooned. I set the engine in motion at Hussman’s command. The bellows rose and fell as did Mrs. Hussman’s chest. Blood flowed from her arm and back into it. Almost immediately a rosy blush drove the pallor from her cheeks as a spark of her former loveliness took hold. The effect was nothing short of miraculous. Her eyes remained closed and she responded only to the questions of Dunbarton, but warmth, reported Hussman, had spread through her hand which now gripped with living strength.
For six weeks we tended her, sleeping on cots and keeping vigil in shifts. Only a solitary, daily stroll through the back garden, Cordelia’s pride and joy, relieved our strain. If only we could have taken Cordelia to the garden, but such a move was impossible. I monitored the machine and stoked the boiler. Dunbarton inserted a tube down her th
roat at intervals to provide broth. How long she might have persisted in this state of conscious, post-death vitality seemed unbounded. At Hussman’s direction, Dunbarton relayed news of family and friends. I admit excitement inhibited my judgment and that of Hussman. We should have given more attention to the clear discharge draining from the corners of her eyes, which Dunbarton likened to tears.
On the forty-third day following her death, her mouth closed so tightly that Dunbarton could not feed her. The three of us gathered, fearing that some contagion had stiffened her facial muscles. To all queries she answered no, gripping with enough strength to crack Hussman’s knuckles.
“Tell her I love her with all my heart and mind,” implored Hussman.
Dunbarton relayed the message. Cordelia squeezed once.
“My love,” said Hussman.
“You are not content,” said Dunbarton.
No.
Still gripping his wife’s hand, Hussman doubled over and pressed his eyes to his forearm, ineffectually hiding his sobs.
“Do you wish to die?” asked Dunbarton.
Yes.
“No,” shouted Hussman. Everyone in the room, so focused on the patient, startled at his outburst. “No, darling. No. Not yet.” His eyes flashed with the wild intensity of a rabid beast. I thought for a moment that I didn’t know him, that he had succumbed to the strain of his despair. He fell on her breast to smother her face in kisses.
Where she found the strength, we know not, but her arm snapped over her husband’s shoulders, pressing his neck to her face. Her movement disconnected a tube. I slipped on the floorboards slick with blood pulsing from the pump. Hussman cried out in a scream that terminated in a hideous gurgle. With the help of two nurses, Dunbarton freed Hussman from his wife’s preternatural grip. Blood, Professor Hussman’s blood, streamed from Cordelia’s mouth down her cheeks. Her eyes, closed for so many weeks, were now open, staring at the unornamented, white ceiling. The nurses ran shrieking from the room. I stopped my efforts with the machine. Blood splashed on the floor behind me, draining from Cordelia. In his arms, Dunbarton held the limp remains of Professor Hussman, whose dead wife had ripped his throat with her teeth.
