“Sure, sure,” he said. But he wasn’t. He felt like he was going to burst like an overripe berry. He couldn’t sit here and make polite chitchat. “But let me just go ahead and tell you right now that this isn’t going to work out. So you enjoy your drink, and I’m going to say good night.”
“Now wait just a second,” Emma said. “You’ve barely even talked to me. It’s way too soon to figure out whether you think I’m an interesting person or not. So tell me, how do you know this isn’t going to work out?”
Was she going to force him to say it? Apparently she was. “Okay, Emma, I’m sure you have a great personality. But when you post a picture of yourself on a dating site, it needs to look like you, not you twenty-five pounds ago.”
Emma’s mouth dropped open. “I can’t believe you have the nerve to say that to me! First of all, it’s shallow and offensive. But second of all, have you looked in a mirror lately? Feel free. They’re everywhere in this place. Your picture online is at least thirty-five pounds ago! Did I notice that when you came in? Sure. But it didn’t bother me. What does bother me is that you’re a gigantic hypocrite!”
“Fine. Well, I think the one thing we can mutually agree on is that this date is over!” Matt stood up, and when he did he heard an odd pop-pop-pop sound as though someone were making popcorn. Then he felt a cool breeze over his torso. Looking down, he realized that his bloated belly had caused all the buttons of his shirt to pop off and was now exposed for the general public to see.
Emma laughed. She laughed so hard she snorted. She laughed until her eyes watered. “I can’t believe it!” she said between giggles. “This is the best bad date ever. Wait till I tell my girlfriends!”
Matt tried to clutch his shirt closed, and fled the premises. As soon as he hit the sidewalk, the pressure from his belly snapped his belt buckle, and he had to hold up his pants with his other hand to keep them from falling down.
He relinquished his grip on his shirt long enough to get into his car. He just needed to get home so this terrible night would be over.
Back at his apartment, Matt changed into a baggy T-shirt and a pair of elastic-waisted pajama pants. Tomorrow he would have to go shopping for new clothes. But what could he wear while he shopped? Was he going to turn into one of those tacky people who wore pajamas in public?
The pressure in his stomach was getting worse, and the weird knot on his head was hurting where it was stretching the skin of his scalp. Maybe he had some medicine that might help him. He went to the kitchen, chewed up a couple of antacid tablets, and drank a glass of water.
He waited for relief, but it didn’t come. Instead, the pressure increased. Even the soft T-shirt he was wearing felt irritating. He took it off and looked down at his watermelon-shaped belly. The pressure from inside was pounding, pummeling.
He looked at the skin of his belly. There was movement underneath. When he felt the pounding, a faint imprint of an indeterminate shape showed up on his skin. Matt stifled a scream as he realized the truth: something was inside him, and it was trying to get out.
The painful pounding became more insistent, a drumbeat of agony. If it was out of him, whatever it was, the pain would stop. Get it out, get it out, he thought as he squeezed his eyes shut and clenched his jaw. He grabbed his discarded T-shirt and bit down on the fabric just to have some kind of outlet for the pain.
If he got it out, the pain would stop. But how? There was no place for it to go.
Another surge of pain hit him, this one crushing. He doubled over and grabbed the kitchen counter for support. His gaze turned to the kitchen knives hanging on a magnetic strip on the wall. He could cut it out. Cutting would relieve the pressure and get whatever it was out. He would be free of whatever this burden was. He wanted to be free.
He grabbed the largest, sharpest kitchen knife and lay on his back on the floor. Starting the incision was the hardest part, but the pain inside him was greater than any pain he could cause himself. He sank the knife’s tip into the top of his abdomen and then drew the blade downward, biting down on the T-shirt so the neighbors wouldn’t hear him scream.
There was pain, but there was also relief. The pressure stopped, the blood flowed, and Matt saw, emerging from the incision, one long green rabbit ear. The whole rabbit emerged, wet and slimy with mucus, a perfectly formed Springtrap the size of a healthy, newborn infant. But unlike a newborn infant, the rabbit could pull itself out of the incision, land in a kneeling position on the kitchen floor, and then rise to stand.
The blood loss was making Matt fade in and out of consciousness, but even in his addled state, he could see that the creature he had spawned was Springtrap but somehow not Springtrap. This one was realer, more organic than the one in the video game. Matt’s mind drifted back to a story his mom had read to him when he was little about a stuffed toy rabbit that had wished so hard to be real that it became real.
The Springtrap that stood over Matt’s bleeding body was not an amalgamation of code that somebody like him had programmed into a computer. This Springtrap was real.
The green rabbit sat down on the floor beside Matt and rested Matt’s head in its furry lap. It felt nice. Matt was losing so much blood. Could a person lose this much blood and still stay alive?
The rabbit stroked Matt’s cheek. Matt didn’t know if he heard the word come out of the rabbit’s mouth or if it was only in his own head:
Daddy.
“So you entered the apartment and you found him like this?” The police officer was taking notes as they talked in the blood-drenched kitchen.
“Yes, officer.” Jason was shaking, and he could feel his heart thudding in his chest. “I was moving out of the apartment, and I came here about ten o’clock to get my stuff.”
“Ten a.m.?” the officer asked.
“Yes, sir. I thought Matt would be at work, but instead I found him … here.” He heard the sob in his voice. He was trying to hold it together, but he wasn’t succeeding.
“So you were roommates, but you were moving out of the apartment,” the officer said. “Had you had a disagreement?”
“Yeah, kind of, but just a little one. Nothing that would lead me to do something like … this. And I mean, I’m not a violent person. I could never do something like this anyway.”
Jason wished somebody would cover up the body, but even when they did, he knew he couldn’t unsee it. Matt was gutted like a fish, his shirtless torso a gaping hole. Blood had gushed from the sides of the wound and now formed a large, congealing puddle on the kitchen floor. The now-bloody kitchen knife Jason had used countless times to chop vegetables was in Matt’s lifeless hand.
“Did your roommate have any enemies, anyone who would wish him ill?” the officer asked.
“Well, I mean, Matt was a prickly guy, not always the easiest person to get along with. But just because he could be annoying doesn’t mean that anybody wanted him dead.”
The officer nodded. “Had he shown any signs of depression or suicidal thoughts?”
“I think he was kind of depressed, yeah,” Jason said. “He’d had a nasty divorce and breakups from a few rebound relationships after that. I also got the feeling there was a lot of stress at work, though he wasn’t the kind of person who’d talk about that kind of thing much.” Jason looked down at his friend’s body. It was the last thing he wanted to see, so why did he keep looking at it? “Why would someone do this to themselves?”
The officer looked up from his notes. “Well, son, in my line of work you never stop being surprised about what people are capable of.” He looked down at the body, then squinted as if he was seeing something he hadn’t noticed before. He put on a plastic glove, then squatted on the floor, reaching for something.
It was a clump of something green and fuzzy, like the artificial fur from a stuffed animal. “Do you have any idea what this could be?” the officer asked.
Jason looked at the unfamiliar green fur. It was covered in an unpleasant slime, like a clear mucus. “I have no idea,” Jason
said.
The officer rolled slimy hairs between his finger and thumb, looking at them with apparent confusion, then shrugged and wiped his hand on a clean paper towel.
Standing at the smudged window in room 1280, the nurses deliberately kept their backs to their patient and watched the priest approach the hospital. They all breathed as shallowly as they could, trying to ignore the sensation of being observed … and judged.
“He has to be warned,” one of the nurses said.
“He won’t believe us,” the second one said.
The head nurse’s face was hard as stone. “Then he’ll find out the hard way.”
Arthur pedaled his vintage bicycle, Ruby, through the stone archway at the base of the drive leading up to Heracles Hospital. The archway, like much of the hospital itself, was engulfed in thick, green ivy.
The bicycle’s antique balloon tires chuffed at the moist pavement, spitting fallen leaves in their wake. A black SUV passed Arthur, and the little boy in the back seat turned to stare, watching Arthur until the SUV rounded the drive’s curve for the columned entrance of the imposing medical center.
Arthur knew that he and Ruby made a striking picture. Arthur didn’t have to wear the long, flowing black cassock that fluttered out behind Ruby, but he liked wearing it. It buoyed him, made him feel like he was being lifted by angels’ wings. Or maybe he just thought it looked good, in which case he needed to do better with the first deadly sin. Ruby was evidence of that as well. A priest didn’t need a fully restored 1953 bicycle with gleaming chrome fenders and shiny red paint, but a priest could enjoy what he had, couldn’t he? Ruby was a gift from a dying man. How could Arthur refuse to accept her?
Arthur smiled to himself. The truth was that neither his nor Ruby’s appearance interested him much. He was really just a meek man who allowed himself a couple of indulgent flairs because they made him happy.
A few drops of rain hit Arthur’s face, making him regret leaving his felt saturno hat, sized large enough to fit over his red bicycle helmet, at home. “It’s going to rain,” Arthur’s housekeeper, Peggy, had warned him.
“The sun loiters behind every cloud, Peggy,” he’d told her. “It just needs a little faith to coax it out.”
Peggy had laughed at him … as she often did.
Arthur glanced up at the roiling steel-gray sky. Layered behind the gray were inky wisps of cirrus clouds that curled like beckoning fingers.
Arthur put his head down and pedaled faster. Just another couple hundred feet, and he’d be under the hospital’s portico, sheltered beneath the dubious protection of the stone Cerberus statue that hunched atop the columns at the hospital’s entrance.
Heracles Hospital was one of the more imposing hospitals to which Arthur had been called. The structure had been built centuries before using rough-hewn stone painstakingly extracted from the local quarry at the cost of countless men’s lives, and it held generations of pain, struggle, and sorrow within its walls. But Arthur knew it also held hope and love and joy. That was always what he chose to see.
When he looked up from the road, Arthur’s gaze was drawn to the sky above the hospital. He smiled. One streaming, golden ray of sunshine touched the back side of the red tile roof, spearing the blackness and slicing through the gray clouds pressing down on the building.
“See, Ruby?” Arthur said, “Like I said—it just needs a little faith.”
Ruby didn’t respond, but Arthur had to laugh at himself when, just as he pulled up to the bike rack under the portico, rain began to fall in heavy drops. They splatted the pavement and filled the air with a sweet ozone smell.
“Well, rain is good, too,” he said as he flipped up the hem of his cassock and got off Ruby’s cushy leather seat.
“Excuse me, Father? Were you talking to me?” someone said.
Arthur turned around to find a young woman in a rain slicker, her blonde hair pulled into a taut ponytail, juggling a pink backpack, an orange tote bag, and a red umbrella. She had a square face and a wide mouth that were spared from looking masculine by her lively blue eyes and the bright makeup she wore. She smiled at Arthur tentatively.
“Hello, young lady,” Arthur said. He gave her a half bow.
Arthur had turned just forty-seven the previous spring, but he looked older because his hair had turned mostly gray a decade before, and deep emotions had carved lines on his face. Recently, he’d decided he was now old enough to refer to younger women as “young lady.” When he was a young man himself, he was always befuddled by what to call women. “Miss” and “Ma’am” seemed to offend more often than not, for reasons that confused Arthur. “Hey you” was always inappropriate.
“Hi,” the young woman said.
Arthur held out a hand. “I’m Father Blythe.” Inwardly, he cringed at the formality. He preferred being called by his first name, but his bishop had made it abundantly clear that only so many of Arthur’s idiosyncrasies would be tolerated.
“I’m Mia,” the young woman said. She shook Arthur’s hand.
Mia’s hand was small, soft, and very, very cold. Arthur held it slightly longer than he should have, willing some of his warmth into the chill of her fingertips.
“Mia Fremont,” Mia said when Arthur released her hand. “I’m a nurse here. Or I’m going to be. Or, I mean, I am. Well, as of fifteen minutes from now I am. I guess. Or I am because I was already hired?” Mia’s voice was mellow and sweet and filled with endearing uncertainty.
Arthur smiled. “Congratulations,” he said. He looked at Mia more closely and saw that a dark blue nurse’s uniform was hiding under her yellow rain slicker.
“Um, thanks?” Mia looked at the hospital’s entrance and frowned. Her lower lip quivered for just a second.
Arthur pulled a bicycle chain and lock from the satchel he wore slung across his body. He bent over to secure Ruby. He was all for faith, but prudence had a place in the world, too.
A car pulled in under the portico and let out a large woman barking orders at a smaller woman, who followed her into the hospital. An older couple walked slowly toward the entrance, hand in hand. A janitor sat on a nearby bench, staring at his feet. Two fat pigeons hopped along the walkway, pecking at invisible morsels.
The rain was coming down harder now. It thrummed on the pavement and hissed under the tires of passing cars. A metallic trickling sound came from the downspouts at the bottom edge of the hospital’s columns.
Arthur straightened and realized Mia was still standing next to him. She stared at the hospital entrance.
“Are you okay, Mia?” Arthur asked.
Mia blinked. “What? Me? Sure. I mean, I will be. I hope. Well, yes, I’m better than I was. I …” She stopped and turned. “Why is the dog that guards Hades up there?” She pointed at the portico’s ceiling.
Arthur frowned. He wasn’t sure of that himself. In Greek mythology, Cerberus was tasked with preventing the dead from leaving the underworld. Arthur didn’t know whether the Cerberus statue was meant to suggest it was going to keep the dead from entering the hospital or whether it was going to keep the people who died in the hospital from moving on. The symbolism was made even murkier by the hospital’s name. Heracles, the son of Zeus and Alcmene, was a mythological hero. One of his “twelve labors” was capturing Cerberus. The hospital’s name and statuary left Arthur wondering if he was in a place of good or evil. Either way, he had a job to do.
“I’m not exactly sure,” Arthur said. “But it’s just a statue.”
Mia didn’t seem convinced.
Arthur glanced at his plain black-banded watch. “Shall we?” He indicated the hospital’s automatic sliding doors, which had swished open and closed at least a dozen times since Arthur had locked up Ruby.
Mia lifted her chin. “Yes, I guess I have to.” She glanced at her own watch. “I made sure to get here early, and I’m going to be late if I don’t go in now.”
Arthur took a step, but Mia didn’t.
Arthur stopped. He wanted to get on with why he
was here, but Mia seemed to need help. And helping was what Arthur did.
“Do I perceive a hesitation?” Arthur asked.
Mia sighed. “This job wasn’t my first choice. I wanted the position at Glendale, you know?”
Arthur nodded. He visited Glendale Hospital often, and he had to admit that he preferred it as well. He’d only visited Heracles the one time so far, just the previous week, and he already knew this wasn’t going to be his favorite place.
But Arthur couldn’t be choosy. He was called to where he was called.
“Heracles is actually far more modern than Glendale,” Arthur offered as encouragement.
Ten years before, Heracles had been bought by a billionaire, who practically gutted the old hospital before renovating it into a state-of-the-art medical center. The renovation made sure to keep all the original exterior architectural details, and even the hospital’s interior was designed to be reminiscent of an older era, with crisp white walls, black-and-white tiled floors, thick baseboards, and crown molding. The result was a sort of time-whiplash where cutting-edge technology shared space with crystal chandeliers and wrought iron scrollwork.
“I know,” Mia said. “But …” She sighed again. “I guess it’s better than the prison hospital. That’s where I was before.”
Arthur was surprised. “Really? I never saw you there.”
“You go out to the prison?”
“I go where I’m needed,” Arthur said.
A siren screamed, squawked, then burbled into abrupt silence as an ambulance rocked to a stop in front of the hospital’s emergency entrance, fifty feet from where Arthur and Mia stood.
“Shall we go inside?” Arthur suggested. He put his hand lightly on Mia’s upper back in an attempt to propel her forward.
It didn’t work. Mia grabbed the sleeve of Arthur’s cassock. “What do you mean, you go where you’re needed?”
Arthur stepped back to avoid two teenage girls carrying a bouquet of balloons that looked big enough to pick them up and carry them away. He motioned for Mia to join him next to a cluster of panicle hydrangeas, the plants’ large, white cylindrical flowers hanging on valiantly even though early fall’s chill pressed upon them.
Bunny Call Page 10
