I shut her out of my mind, went back to the table; Andrew had already staunched the bleeding and turned my patient over. The red swamp of Ruth’s face lay under my shaking hands. I was trying to force myself to concentrate, to think.
“Ruth can hear me. Deep inside herself,” Regina whispered from the doorway.
I glanced up.
“She’s crying with it,” Regina made a fist and struck her chest. “But her tears aren’t enough.” Regina shook her head. “She was a worm using my shame against me to burrow inside my daughters, to usurp my place, make them her own. What if I did hate the sight of them? Freaks squeezed from my body. ‘Poor Regina,’ they said. ‘Look what she gave birth to.’ Ask yourself how many mothers can look on monsters with love? Oh but Ruth loved them, did she? She is suffering, and I will make her suffer more.” Her smile was a shark’s grin. “I will see her dead, Doctor.”
Was it Abby or Ellie? I peered harder looking for a clue—the now-familiar habit Abby had of pushing her hair back from her damp forehead with the inside of her wrist; a slight sway in the walk, the psychic residue of Ellie’s amputated limb.
But she was already gone, the door vibrating in her wake, shutting her from my sight—but not my thudding heart.
Andrew had prepared the graft site, and we laid the first strip, fat-side down along the length of Ruth’s sunken cheek and jaw. My hands still trembling, my mind seething, I stitched as neatly as I could.
It was long and messy and, with a sinking heart I knew— less than half way through—it was a botched, miserable job.
- 17 -
September first, a week after her surgery, the large black mortified patches on Ruth’s cheeks, forehead and throat told the tale. The newly grafted skin was dying, it had to come off.
“Now what?” she asked, lying groggily against the pillows. The faint odor of decay overlaid with bactericide clung to her.
“Debridement—”
“Meaning—”
“Meaning, I have to scrape the rotting tissue, or there’ll be an infection and it will kill you.”
“No anesthesia,” she said wearily, her good eye hunting mine.
“No,” I said, getting up to pace the length of her bedside. “No. The pain—it’s impossible.” I paused looking at her directly. “It wouldn’t be surgery, Ruth, it would be torture—”
“Listen to me, Doctor Granville,” she interrupted. “Every time she comes out, Regina gets stronger. We both know I can’t hold her back if I’m unconscious. You shoot me full of morphine, or whatever drug will deaden the pain, and then you give me a local—or whatever you call it, and you operate.”
“Very few people can stand being awake and cut with the scalpel in such a personal delicate area,” I said quietly. “It’s the intimacy, our faces are us.”
“And what is my face now?”
I couldn’t answer that.
“Regina can’t have it all, Stuart,” she said. “She can’t keep winning. You shilly-shallied around and look, here it is September, and I’d hoped the girls would be off somewhere at school.” Her voice trailed away.
“I was taking care of you,” I put in.
She made a snorting noise. “You’re like the Dutchboy runnin’ here and there plugging endless holes in the dam.” She held up two bandaged fingers, lightly stabbing them in a random pattern. “But let’s not forget it was Regina who sprung those leaks. Give me what you can to take away the pain—but no general anesthesia,” she said.
- 18 -
It was only in 1886—seven years before—The British and Colonial Druggist had come out with an article hailing the use of cocaine injected as a local anesthetic as revolutionary. Andrew kept up with things like that. There was a subsequent article in one of the journals, Lancet, I believe, demonstrating the technique. Two tiny raised wheals were made, and you advanced the needle while injecting fluid beneath the skin; you stopped pushing the point deeper when you got to the place where you made a slight indentation with your finger against the flesh. Then, still injecting the cocaine, you slowly withdrew the needle. It looked straightforward, it was supposed to be painless.
But I’d never done it.
“Ready now?” Ruth asked.
I’d been in the library the last two hours poring over Andrew’s articles and textbooks. Despite what I’d read, I didn’t feel confident about the surgery. Regina took that from me, too, I mourned inwardly. Andrew was closeted in his bedroom drinking. We were in his office-turned-surgery, the tray laden with instruments. An apothecary in Poughkeepsie kept the cocaine solution on hand and, while I was familiarizing myself with the procedure, Gabriel had brought me the white paper-wrapped package.
“Sure,” I said, taking her hand briefly. “Just keep that brown charmer of an eye closed, and we’ll both come through fine.”
Ruth squeezed my fingers for an answer.
“Well, then go ahead,” she said, and I saw her hardswallow a lump in her throat. “Poor Gabriel. Much as he took on, I don’t believe he bargained for this.”
“There, there now,” I soothed, at the same time I watched the colorless liquid squirt up from the syringe when I cleared it of air bubbles. I winked at Ruth, then I made the first injection.
She gasped a little, wincing at the penetration of the needle, but when I stopped and stared at her, she waved me off as if to say, Pshaw, it’s nothing keep going.
I allowed time for the cocaine to numb her, and few minutes later I began to cut.
***
The first half hour, I’d swear that between the morphine and the subcutaneous injections of cocaine she felt nothing. She was doing her job of lying still and I was doing mine of cutting away the failed graft tissue.
But the infection had run deep and maybe it was in the moment I forgot she was live and awake under my fingers, and I incised more deeply.
“Ahhhn,” Ruth groaned.
“Okay?” I asked from behind the gauze mask and looked down at her.
“Keep going,” she whispered, and I felt her hand squeeze my wrist.
Certainly, I should have noticed that she was flinching, biting the inside of her lips. Instead I was conscious of the juncture of old and new skin, of grayish areas teeming with spent cells. I thought I saw signs of what we call necrotic—a fancy word that means dead—tissue. I should have given her more morphine, injected her again. I held the scalpel blade at a flat angle, slicing close to the bone.
Ruth gave out another short sharp cry.
When I looked at her again—looked at her as a total patient—it was too late. Stoic that she was, she’d finally passed out from the pain, and Regina was in the room.
***
“You’ve certainly made her look far worse than anything I ever did,” Regina said, peering over the table. The air was hot and heavy, she was plying a lavender and black lace fan.
“No, there’s a difference. You hurt her. I’m trying to heal that damage.”
“The way you healed Ellie?” she taunted. “Ellie’s certainly better off one-legged and confined to a wheelchair.”
I saw the fan fluttering just below the level of those mocking jade eyes. Tendrils of the auburn hair swirled around her face. Without thinking, I seized her wrist, squeezing hard. “Bitch. You want to play games?”
The fan clattered to the floor between us.
“Which one are you, which poor child have you tucked inside your rotten heart this time?”
She laughed and, instead of resisting my grip, she nuzzled her chest against mine, ground her hips against the arch of my pelvis.
“You’re not a real woman,” I said, shaking her off and pushing her away. She stumbled slightly, then caught her balance. She stood facing me, her face bright with malice.
“Maybe,” she said. “But I’m the only one you’ll ever have—unless you count Abby and Ellie,” she giggled.
“I can have my bags packed in half an hour and be a hundred miles from here before sunset.”
“Try it,” s
he said, leveling her gaze at me.
Something in the way she stared made me think of those times last winter I’d tried to break away, about the feeling I had of being tethered to the house by some invisible cord. Something that drew me back—almost against my will. True, I’d run a few small town errands while Ruth was down, but even then I was uneasy. The house loomed large in my mind. I would hurry back, telling myself I needed to check on her, on the girls. More and more I’d fallen on the hired woman’s habit of having what we needed delivered to the door—
“Even shoes for the girls,” Regina whispered. “Imagine what Mr. Cramer and his fat frizzy wife think when a letter comes to their store with a foot traced on it, saying, `I’m not certain of the size but please send two pairs of good black high button shoes and two pairs of white kid to fit.’”
I felt my face go red; I thought of my scrawled notes to the library, the candy shop, the hatmaker…it never occurred to me how strange it must look.
“Even stranger if the Cramers knew one shoe of each pair was wrapped neatly in paper and stored in a trunk. Why don’t you tell them to send a pair and a half, hmmm?”
“Go away,” I said, suddenly tired, scrouging my fists against my eyes. “I have work to do.” I turned my back on her and returned to the operating table. Ruth stirred when I injected the cocaine in the raw wounds, but she was still unconscious. I worked on removing the infected flesh, told myself I would finish what I’d begun—
“So will I,” Regina said, giving voice to my thought.
When I looked up some forty five minutes later, she was no longer in the office. But overhead, from the nursery, I heard the muted tones of a low song.
***
I stayed by Ruth’s bedside all that night, watching over her. At first, I thought she was drifting in and out of consciousness; she moved, spoke—muttering through the cocoon case of bandages swaddling her head. It was only later on I realized something else—some otherworldly intelligence—was using the dead space of her mind to communicate with me.
“Regina has a plan,” she whispered. Her hand, lightly resting in the cradle of mine, twitched. I squeezed gently.
“I’m here, Ruth, I’m listening. Jesus, I was afraid I’d lost you.” I felt a clot of fear and sorrow rising in my throat, my voice hitched a little, and I paused. “How’s the pain?”
“I been seeing visions and things a while now,” she said, not answering my question. She was lying on her back, one hand a limpid starfish spread just over her heart. “Since the burning.” The white balloon shape of her head churned slowly against the pillows as if she were straining to see the landscape inside her mind. “It’s cost me some strength, holding Regina back; but I wanted to give the girls their chance, wanted to give you time to heal.”
“Me?”
“You been hurting a long time—these scars, this burnt up, half-blind face—they’re just Regina’s way of showing you your own heart and mind, Stuart. And I’m afraid,” she said softly. “Afraid it’ll get a lot worse before she’s done…with all of us. She wants to kill Andrew,” Ruth began.
I leaned closer to hear: her voice had taken on a strange muffled quality. It wasn’t the weight of the bandages; she sounded as if she were speaking from the other side of a heavy pane of glass. I felt a low vibrating tone that gave me the shivers.
“But first she wants your child in her belly.”
“How is that possible?”
“I don’t know,” Ruth said, and her head swiveled and shook against the pillows. “Some things are not given for me to see. But I hear the word “false” hissed over and over in my mind, moving like writhing vipers in a pit.” Ruth passed a shaky hand over her good eye, its light winked out behind the white scrim of bandage. “Regina is playing out an old drama…as if…as if you were John Price the young tutor whose baby she carried and Andrew cut from her. This time she means to bring the child to term. I see her in an empty garret room—like a fat spider weaving dreams and plots. She sits rocking, singing to herself, waiting. That waiting has been her hell—and she means to escape it.”
Visions of Regina—full-blown and pattering through the house—rose in my mind. I thought of the night I heard her story, of the girls mewling Only one can be chosen, only one can live.
“Does she mean to divide the twinship, to pit Abby and Ellie against each other?”
“She has done it already.” Ruth said, and her voice was a low sigh, the lonely sound of wind in ancient pines. “It will be up to you to bring them together—and suffer the consequences.” She opened her good eye, her look—filled with dread and sorrow—pierced me. “I don’t envy you, Stuart. I’m only going to my death—your path will be much harder.”
“Don’t I have a choice?”
“There is always choice; but what looks like salvation is often just a darker web.” She paused, gathering her thoughts and went on. “You got to keep a lid on your fears and suspicions, Stuart—if you don’t you’ll be caught in her trap—and the only way out will be your own destruction.”
“Ruth,” I begged. “Help me. Tell me what else you see.” But she had gone inside herself again, and there was no rousing her.
- 19-
“The Missus won’t stay another minute,” Gabriel said, his head hanging, his fingers clenching the brim of his felt hat. He kept his eyes fixed on the shabby colors of the carpet in the library, shuffled his feet. “I just come to say goodbye, Stuart.”
I nodded. Six months had gone by since Ruth’s original ‘accident,’ six weeks since I’d tried to repair the damage. There was no overt sign of infection, but she was growing weaker. She would end what was left of her days still wearing the heavy veil, venturing out at nightfall in the deepest shadows. I knew she wasn’t leaving because of the vile mass of tissue scarring, but because she was afraid if she died in the house, Regina would be able to dominate the girls completely.
“There’s things she says she’s got to make up for yet” He stopped.
“Where’ll you go?” I asked.
“Does it matter?”
“To me, yes, it does.”
He sighed. “I’ve a brother up New Hampshire way; he’s a kind of farmer. Oh the house ain’t much more than a shack compared to the elegant monstrosities up and down millionaire’s mile here.” He waved one arm in the direction of Route 9 and the huge mansions and fields where Roosevelts played and Vanderbilts sported. “We don’t want elegance, now. Just a certain solitude. No one knows Ruth up there—don’t know a thing about her. Probably won’t, ’cause she’ll stay close to home, and my sister-in-law, Claire’ll look after her.”
“Will you write, sometimes?”
He smiled at that. “I spose you and the girls can look for a card come Christmastimes.”
We shook hands. From the window I watched him striding toward the curtained carriage parked in the dooryard. I knew Ruth’s bundled up figure was already inside. A thickly gloved hand showed briefly, parting the drapes, softly turning in a short farewell.
“Ruth,” I whispered.
Then Gabriel snapped the whip, the horse trotted forward, and they were gone.
It was Autumn now; the library was darkly quiet, the ticking of the clock too loud. The sound of the coal furnace exhaling heat through the pipes rattled me.
I got up and paced, briefly. Now there were only four of us locked in with the demon; a third of my protection gone, I mourned. Regina had been quiet lately, biding her time I thought, while Ruth recuperated from the last of those miserable surgeries.
I’d only seen her a few times since that day. Once she came to supper in Abby’s place and Andrew never noticed a thing. Another dusk toward the end of September, I glimpsed her evil features leering at me from the wheelchair Ellie had been slumping in just a minute before. When I looked again, there was only the misty lawn shimmering in the twilight, the curtains billowing out from the open windows, and she was gone, leaving Ellie’s thick lumpish body in place.
Childishly, I
wished the Wickstroms had stayed on. It was wrong of me, but I knew that some primitive part of me believed if Regina had Gabriel and Ruth to torment, she might leave me alone.
My answer to these thoughts was the sight of Regina wearing a low cut rose-pink gown entering the library. Her dress swished as she moved through the door. I started, seeing that just below the neckline of her gown—in the place where her breasts jutted outwards—someone had drawn red inky circles over her nipples. She was smiling broadly. More ominously still, I thought, she carried a pair of long silver scissors, the light glinting malignantly on the metal shears.
- 20 -
“A thought is a summons, Stuart,” she said. “And, I’m so very glad you called me.” Laughing, she began to snip through the bodice of her dress. “I’m only showing you what you want, Stuart.” The top of the dress fell away, she cupped her breasts, fingers splayed around the heavy nipples.
“Well, you’re wrong. Dead wrong.” I looked away.
“It’s the dark whispering part of your mind, Stuart. Not what’s on the surface. See?” She hissed. “There’s no red circles of ink drawn on the dress.” She turned the flaps of cloth upwards.
My glance snagged on the shiny satin. There was nothing there.
“Undercurrents, Stuart. The things you don’t even let yourself think. You wanted to see my breasts, caress them. Believe it.” She began to squirm out of the gown, pushing it down towards her pubes. The soft scritch of the satin was maddening.
I swallowed uneasily; certain when I looked again, she would be nude. Which of the girls was it? I wondered. Which one had let her in?
“Which one do you want, Stuart?” Regina said.
Her mechanical laugh pierced my flesh like hundreds of sharp pins.
I hesitated, saying nothing. In that brief waiting, I saw Abby’s eyes—large and sorrowful—looking into mine. I saw her small form—the tiny buds of her breasts, the not-quite fleshed thighs. I even saw her left knee and the purple bloom of a bruise where she’d accidentally run into the newel post not two days before. A moan ran out of my throat like water gushing from a pump. She flew into my arms; or maybe I took her up—but she was there, realer than real—and we held each other once more.
Deathwatch - Final Page 7
