Once tucked out of the way, Arthur faced Mia. “I give the dying their last rites.”
Mia shivered. “But you seem so cheerful. So kind. How can you be that way and be around … death?”
Arthur smiled. “Death isn’t a sad thing. It’s a transition. And I’m kind of like a tour guide for people making the transition. Or maybe more like a traveling companion. Instead of letting fear take people away, I step in and take fear’s place. Once fear is gone, the soul can reach the other side in peace.”
Mia gazed into Arthur’s eyes, and he wondered what she saw there. He perceived his eyes to be the boring, brown eyes of a simple man. But what did others see?
Arthur waited, sure he was still needed here more than he was needed in the hospice wing that had summoned him. At least for another moment.
Finally, Mia took a deep breath and nodded. “I’m glad I met you, Father.”
“Me too, Mia.”
She held up her arm, elbow out. “Well, could you escort me to my first day on the job, then? I’ve been assigned to the hospice wing, and I bet that’s where you’re going.”
Arthur smiled and took Mia’s arm. “Indeed I am, Mia. Let’s go.”
At the curved desk at the nurse’s station in the hospice wing, Arthur passed Mia off to a tall, sharp-edged woman with too many teeth and a dark-eyed gaze that unsettled Arthur. Nurse Ackerman was the head of the hospice wing, and Arthur had met her last week when he came to introduce himself. He’d admonished himself for disliking her immediately, although to be fair, he doubted many human beings did like her. He said a silent prayer for Mia—and for Nurse Ackerman—then he followed the nurse’s rigid, bony back down the wide hall.
As they passed open doorways, Arthur occasionally glanced into rooms when he felt moved to do so. Some rooms felt heavy and somber, and Arthur said a prayer for the patients and families in them. Some rooms felt ebullient, sometimes even effervescent. The people in those rooms didn’t need Arthur’s help—they understood the truth of the journey ahead. He prayed for them, anyway. You could never have too much support.
Nurse Ackerman led Arthur past room after room, so far down the long hall that he wondered if they’d somehow passed through an invisible barrier into another hospital. The longer they walked, the denser the air felt. The worse it smelled, too. Arthur was used to the hospital smells of bitter medicine, sharp urine, fetid waste, and pungent antiseptics. But this was something else, something acrid and ancient.
“The patient you are about to see,” Nurse Ackerman said, “is a special case.”
Arthur almost jumped out of his skin when Nurse Ackerman opened her mouth. He was already surprised by her escort down the hall—he hadn’t expected her to speak, too. She’d barely spoken to him the last time he was here, and then only to give him a room number and send him on his way. Her voice was as sharp as her appearance, and it held a disturbing sibilance that made the hairs stand up on the back of Arthur’s neck. Every consonant sounded like it was being spit on and then stabbed with a forked tongue.
She continued, “The man has been on life support for years.”
“How many years?” Arthur asked.
Nurse Ackerman’s shoulder blades rose in annoyance. “Irrelevant,” she snapped.
“He’s been here all this time?”
Nurse Ackerman ignored Arthur. “When the state finally took him off life support.”
“Why did the state do that? Where’s his family?”
Nurse Ackerman whirled around and impaled Arthur with a searing look. “He has no family!” she nearly shouted. Her tone suggested Arthur should have known that, somehow. Yes, he’d done a little research on this place, talked to a couple colleagues. But he hadn’t heard of any special case.
Nurse Ackerman rubbed at the large mole under her left eye. She took a breath, turned away from Arthur, and resumed walking.
Arthur glanced back over his shoulder to be sure he was still in Heracles Hospital and would be able to find his way back to Ruby. At the moment, his bicycle seemed impossibly far away.
“As I was saying, the state took him off life support,” Nurse Ackerman continued with the air of someone long-suffering. “Even so, he wouldn’t die.”
“A miracle.” Arthur said a quick prayer of thanks.
“Hardly!” The word sounded like a shot, reverberating off the stark white walls and closed doors around them.
Closed doors. Arthur looked at the old-fashioned, wide, six-panel dark wood doors with frosted glass windows. All the doors were closed on this end of the hall, and none of the panels revealed light from within the rooms. Why? Arthur opened his mouth to ask, then thought better of it and remained silent.
Nurse Ackerman stopped before a door that looked strangely darker than all the other doors they had passed, but the glass panel indicated the room’s light was on. He glanced up to check the overhead lights—was one of them out? Before he could confirm his suspicion, Nurse Ackerman pushed the door open. “He’s in here,” she said unnecessarily.
Arthur glanced at the number by the door: 1280.
As soon as the door was open, the origin of the smell Arthur had noticed was obvious. It came from whatever lay in the hospital bed on the other side of the room. Up close, the smell was even more noxious, and it was more easily discerned. It was a smoky smell but not like any smoky smell Arthur had ever encountered. It was like smelling burnt meat, smoldering plastic, and molten steel all at once. Arthur picked out the disturbing odors of carbon and sulfur. What was in this room?
Arthur didn’t have long to ponder the question, because Nurse Ackerman stepped aside and made a sweeping hand gesture at the bed in front of her. She reminded Arthur of those women on game shows, the ones who elaborately indicated potential prizes.
Lying there was the man Arthur had come to see. Arthur stopped breathing. He clutched the doorjamb. He ordered his legs to keep holding him up.
This patient could not be called a prize … except perhaps in hell.
Arthur had seen a lot of horrible things in his tenure as a priest. He’d been to car crashes and airplane crashes and all manner of natural disasters. He’d prayed over people missing limbs, missing eyes, missing large chunks of their bodies. He’d seen so much disfigurement and physical horror that he would have, until this moment, been fairly confident in saying he’d seen every misery that could be thrust upon the human body. But this …
It wasn’t the appearance of the man alone that took Arthur’s breath away. It was … what?
Not the smell.
The incongruity? The impossibility?
Arthur’s brain begged for oxygen, and he remembered to inhale. Sucking in a lungful of rancid, decay-tinged air, Arthur swiped at the tears that suddenly filled his eyes. They weren’t emotional tears; his eyes were reacting to a puzzling acidity in the room.
Arthur worked his tongue around in his mouth, gathering up enough saliva to speak. He looked at Nurse Ackerman and noticed that her eyes were squinted and her nose was more pinched than usual.
“What’s his name?” Arthur asked.
“We don’t know. No family has claimed him. He has no records.”
“What about fingerprints?” Arthur asked, and then immediately realized what a stupid question it was.
Nurse Ackerman let out a gurgling snort that Arthur supposed passed for a laugh.
“A DNA sample was taken, but it matches no individual in existing DNA databases,” she said.
Arthur nodded.
“As you can see,” Nurse Ackerman continued, “he has brain function.” She gestured at a monitor upon which a series of jagged green lines played out across a dark screen. “That’s a REM sleep pattern.”
Arthur stared. He’d take her word for it, as the tall spiky lines meant nothing to him.
“According to Dr. Henner, the hospital’s sleep expert, that particular REM pattern indicates nightmares … horrific nightmares.”
Arthur’s gaze, which had been locked on the man in the
bed, whipped to Nurse Ackerman. Was there just a little too much glee in the tone she used for “horrific nightmares”?
Yes. Her mouth twitched at the corner as if she wanted to smile.
Arthur frowned, and she raised an eyebrow at him.
An overhead speaker right outside the door of room 1280 blasted out, “Nurse Ackerman, please come to room 907.”
“I’ll leave you to it,” she said. “But I’ll be back. There’s more for us to discuss.”
They were discussing? Arthur didn’t feel like he was discussing anything. All he was doing was trying to accept what his senses were telling him. He was also trying to remember his training, his humanity, and his decency.
Nurse Ackerman’s footsteps slapped the floor as she retreated down the hall. Arthur didn’t let go of the doorjamb.
He knew he needed to. He had to enter the room.
But not yet.
First, he wanted to see if he could get his brain to understand the facts his eyes reported as being real. A disconnect had to be bridged before he could step into the situation and do something, anything, besides whimper like a small child.
The man—Really? Could Arthur truly call this a man? Wasn’t it more corpse than man? Well, no. Some of the facts weren’t consistent with a designation of corpse—the REM monitor, for example.
Fact one, the man appeared to be burned to a crisp. What lay in the bed in room 1280 resembled a human being only vaguely, in that it had the requisite shape. It had a head, a torso, two arms, and two legs. There, the similarity to humans ended.
Fact two. The burning had been so pervasive, so complete, that the only thing remaining was essentially a charred skeleton. Almost. Actually, Arthur wished the man was just a charred skeleton. If he were simply blackened human bones, he’d have been easier to look at. But the ruinous fire damage could be seen throughout the body. Although he had no hair, the man did have skin, or … was it skin? Arthur had never seen anything like the dermis on this man. It looked like fire had scorched away so many layers that his skin was just an ashy covering far too translucent for comfort. Arthur guessed that fire had siphoned all moisture from the body’s covering, leaving it with extensive cracks, like the surface of a dried-up lakebed. Through those cracks, Arthur caught unwelcome glimpses of uncharred tissue.
Fact three. The man’s organs worked, at least the ones Arthur could see. And that in itself was repellent in ways Arthur had never experienced before. Through the translucent skin’s cracks, Arthur could literally watch this man’s desiccated and blackened heart pumping. He could see the heat-shriveled lungs expanding and contracting. He could glimpse the seared kidneys and a bladder so carbonized it seemed like it was about to collapse in on itself.
Fact four. The man had no face. A hole in his skull indicated where his nose used to be. Dark cavernous pits lacking eyes looked at nothing. A toothless mouth gaped without lips to protect it.
Fact five. The man did have a brain. The REM pattern suggested this, and unfortunately Arthur could see bits of gray matter between the cracks in the man’s burned cranium.
Fact six. The man had blood flowing in his veins. What looked like scorched worms creeped above and through toasted tissues, pulsing under the skin and around the crisp skeleton. Arthur assumed these were veins. The blood on the sheets seemed to confirm it.
Fact seven—and this was the most disturbing fact of all. It was the culmination of the other facts. It was the fact that Arthur couldn’t fit into his understanding of the world, his understanding of the universe, his understanding of the power that governed everything. This was the fact that this man was alive against all odds.
What was he?
Arthur returned to his original question. Was this patient a man? Again, brain function would suggest he was. But what truly determined humanity and life?
The soul.
Did this gruesome collection of bloody, incinerated human remains have a soul?
Arthur decided it was time to enter the room. After all, it was his job to find out.
Peeling his fingers from the doorjamb and rubbing them to put life back into them, he took a hesitant step forward. Arthur could hear the suck and rush of his respiration even over the sound of the monitor’s rhythmic beeps and the wheeze and click of the man’s implausible breathing.
Stopping, Arthur looked around the room for the first time since Nurse Ackerman had opened the door. There wasn’t much to see.
The room was white walled, like every other room in Heracles Hospital. The man’s bed sat in the middle of the room, surrounded by monitors. On one side of the bed, an IV pole held one pouch of … what? Fluids? Nutrients? Did this man need either? An IV line ran into a port taped to the man’s radius, or his ulna—Arthur couldn’t tell from where he stood. Even though he wasn’t on life support, the man did have electrical leads affixed to his head and his heart. It was surreal to see this life-affirming equipment attached to what looked like something in a morgue. The man even had a pulse-ox monitor on his left index finger bone. How was that working?
Pushed off to one side of the bed, a high-backed, padded vinyl visitor’s chair was next to an empty rolling tray. The chair was positioned so its user could see out the narrow window that overlooked Heracles Hospital’s parking lot. The wall opposite the window held a whiteboard; in other rooms, you might see medication schedules written there, but this one was clean. Next to the whiteboard, an LED X-ray viewer hung on the wall.
When Arthur stepped over to the window, he looked out and saw the long driveway he and Ruby had pedaled up just twenty minutes before.
Why did it feel like that had happened in another reality? Maybe in another lifetime?
Standing by the window, Arthur suddenly felt an icy rawness bore a hole through the middle of his back. The feeling was so powerful that Arthur spun around, awkwardly reaching behind himself and trying to rub the assaulted area. What was that? It had felt like something was trying to reach into his soul.
“You felt it, didn’t you?” Nurse Ackerman was back.
“Felt what?” Arthur asked.
“You know what.”
Arthur ignored the nurse and sat down in the vinyl chair. He couldn’t look at the man again quite yet, so he looked at Nurse Ackerman. Her uniform pants were too short. He could see her black socks and an inch or so of white skin between them and the hem of her pants.
“We’d be remiss if we didn’t warn you,” she said.
“We?”
“Myself, Nurse Thomas, and Nurse Colton. We’ve worked in the hospice wing the longest. We know what he”—she wrinkled her nose at the word—“what that is.”
“And what is it … h-he?” Arthur stammered.
“Evil, Father Blythe. Evil pure and simple.”
Arthur shook his head. “Just because he looks like that—”
“That’s not the evil,” Nurse Ackerman cut in. She waved her hand at the revolting mass in the bed.
“Then what is?”
“It’s what’s inside of that.”
“Inside? As in, under the bones? In the organs?”
Nurse Ackerman flicked her hand as if Arthur was asking stupid questions. “Who cares? It’s in there.” She shook her head and sighed. “I knew you wouldn’t believe me.”
Opening a file Arthur hadn’t even noticed she was holding, she crossed to the X-ray viewer. There, she slapped three brain scan images into place and pointed. “Look.”
Arthur gingerly stepped around the man’s bed as if it might attack him.
Nurse Ackerman lifted her chin toward the brain scans. “See? There,” she pointed at one part of the scan, “and there.”
Arthur leaned forward. He had no idea what he was looking at. “I’m sorry. You need to explain.”
Nurse Ackerman sighed. “These are coronal, sagittal, and cross-sectional scans of the man’s brain. You can see the same thing in all of them.”
Arthur couldn’t. So he said, “You’ll need to tell me what we’re seeing.”
She sighed again. “Our brains have four lobes, the frontal, parietal, occipital, and temporal.” She tapped areas on each of the scans. “Unless a brain has a tumor or damage from a trauma like an injury or a stroke, signals in each of the four lobes should be relatively coherent. Although this man shows no sign of tumors or brain injury, the lobes’ signals aren’t coherent.” She tapped the scans again.
Arthur focused on the sagittal scan, which showed the man’s brain in profile. There he could see what looked like two different colors or textures in each area. He pointed at them. “Is that what you’re talking about?”
Nurse Ackerman nodded. “The doctors believe each lobe of this man’s brain has two distinct electromagnetic signals. This is unheard of.”
“What does it mean?” Arthur asked.
Nurse Ackerman made a clucking sound. “The doctors claim they don’t know. But we know.”
“We?”
She gave him an eye roll that clearly indicated he was daft. “Me and my fellow nurses.”
“What do you think it is?”
“We don’t think. We know.”
“What do you know?”
“Two signals,” she jabbed each lobe, “means two living things. Two entities. They’re both vying for control of the brain; that’s why they’re present in all of the lobes. But they’re at odds with each other. We think they’re tormenting each other.”
Arthur had no idea what to say to that, so he blurted out the first thing that came to his mind. “Where’s the evil?”
Nurse Ackerman threw up her hands. Then she waved at the scans. “There! How can one brain have competing signals? It’s the very playground of evil.”
Arthur thought maybe Nurse Ackerman should visit a different wing of the hospital, perhaps the psychiatric wing. But no, that wasn’t kind. He should have more empathy for the woman. Anyone who was taking care of the man in this room was entitled to have a crazy theory or two. At least she and the other nurses had a theory. Arthur had nothing.
Bunny Call Page 11
