Deathwatch - Final Read online

  I smiled, felt my eyes crinkling at the corners to show my pleasure at this small token of her love and esteem, but before I could comment, she went on, holding her small hand up to stop me from breaking in on her determined mood.

  “I do love you, Stuart. And I know you have to reattach me and Ellie.”

  My mind went blank. It was as if someone had told me I must go down to Andrew’s cabinet, fill a syringe with a lethal dose of opium and put it into her. I couldn’t get it straight; no, I could not do it.

  “It’s the only way,” she said, her voice barely audible.

  “You say I must do a surgery that is anathema to me.” I turned on her. “Do you know you’re asking me to go against everything I believe in, everything that was ever a dream to me?” I put my hands on my hips. I was suddenly furious. “Yes.” I shrieked, “Yes! I almost threw it completely away for absinthe and liquor in piano bars and the sleezy red lace that covered the white limbs on the whores in New Orleans.” I knocked my fist against the center of my chest: “But that doesn’t make the dream of being a doctor—a healer!—less real. It doesn’t! Abby, however I hurt myself, whatever I did wrong—it doesn’t make my dream less real!

  “I came here because I thought there was a speck of a chance I could salvage what was left of that dream and find myself!

  “I cannot do what you are asking—not even if Regina swoops down on me like some wild harpy and kills me tonight.”

  “She won’t.” Abby began to cry. “She won’t because that would be too quick and easy and she needs your suffering.”

  Our eyes locked, and Abby suddenly raised her slim, hairless arms towards me.

  “Hold me, Stuart,” she whispered.

  Her breasts were the merest buds; her child’s round belly was only beginning to flatten, to be drawn smooth by the slight adolescent flare in her hips. I gazed at her, and I saw a face that was caught between the dreams of girlish youth and womanhood.

  And God help me it was her innocence that spoke to me.

  I took her with the part of me that was man enough to be slow and gentle and sweet. I told myself I was Poe with his Virginia.

  Let them kill me for that crime, I thought.

  I took her.

  And we both loved it.

  ***

  “Ewing Eberhardt’s evidence is going to send you the gallows,” Abby said. “I know Ellie loves you. It’s such a little thing, my darling.”

  Abby’s small hand crushed the flesh between my jaw bone and my temple. It was not her touch—that was featherlight. It was the tingling sensation of her fingers sweeping over my flesh with tenderness and love—that was crush enough for me.

  “How can I?”

  “Because I ask it, because you must.”

  I was young in those days, so instead of giving myself over again immediately to my beloved, I trusted I would have stamina enough later.

  I wiped the dampness from between my legs with a crusty towel, and I went to the room down the hall where her sister slept.

  I woke her, saw those blue eyes fill with something like the hope of the world.

  I lay down next to her; at the same instant I felt Regina breaking through, and it was hers—the adult body I made love to for the second time that night. I heard her moans when my tongue pressed deep inside her. I felt her woman’s wet damping my chin in the hard crinkly curls of her pubes.

  It was Regina—and yet whenever I happened to look up from the business I cared not a damn about, I’d have sworn, it was a child’s adoring blue eyes I looked into.

  “You chose me,” she whispered, her swollen crippled body pressing against mine. “You love me.”

  I did not have the heart to tell her it was her sister’s love that brought me to her bed, her sister’s wish that for this one and only time Ellie would have what she wanted.

  So, in a way I do not understand even to this day, I satisfied all three women and myself.

  ***

  I came back to sleep with Abby; wanting no more than to feel her slight weight lying in my weary arms. But the minute I skinned back the covers to lie next to her, her small palm was mashing the curls in the center of my chest above my solar plexus.

  “No—you have to get up.”

  “Abby, I’m dead dog weary, and all I want to do is crawl between clean sheets.”

  “Tomorrow is the funeral.”

  “Uh huh,” I said, fatigue making my eyelids droop half mast. “And that sonofabitch, Eberhardt will be measuring my hide for just the right size trophy to span his chimney piece.”

  My head was crashed into the pillow; it was so late at night I could feel my beard stubble scraping the soft cotton of the pillow slip. I began to drift downwards, skimming the edges of that dozy, pre-sleep state.

  “Wake up! You have to hurry while she’s still inside Ellie!”

  I felt Abby shaking me hard.

  “Now, Stuart! You have to do the surgery now while the demon sleeps!”

  - 29 -

  You will think I’m mad—utterly mad—and that without knowing for sure, I might have taken my chances with Wing Eberhardt and his evidence against me. Ruth would have defended me—and foolishly optimistic as that might sound, there were people who respected Ruth. Even if she’d supposedly taken carnal advantage of teenage girls, it had been a long time ago, and some of them believed the charges had been trumped up. Gabriel had a reputation for a steady head, all those years of marriage counted. Ruth was a good woman. I had no doubts about her innocence.

  All of those are true things, but the most compelling truth was what I told Abby: Regina was a cancer, and there was no stopping her anymore.

  I believed then, I was going to face the hangman’s noose. It was the preferred method of execution in New York until they built Sing Sing and decided juicing a man ’til his brains boiled out his ears was a better way to kill.

  ***

  I went into the small room where Ellie slept. It was dark, and I had to grope blindly, my left hand riding the cool plaster of the walls. In my right I carried a syringe—the same sort Regina had filled with morphine to kill Andrew. But inside this brittle glass tube was a scant centimeter of valium. I drew my arm back, then plunged it lightly and delicately as I could into the second large vein on the back of Ellie’s left hand.

  She started to cry out—I saw her lips draw back in a rictus—but the drug shut her down. Then I gathered her thick, bee-shaped body—the midriff bloated, her live leg still stick thin and spindly—into my arms.

  And silently, my feet making no sound, I carried her into what had been Andrew’s office.

  - 30 -

  I tilted my head back and took a long swallow from the dark green bottle, set it on the floor behind my tottery legs, then wiped my mouth.

  Before I could adjust the gaslamps and get Ellie properly prepped, I heard Abby’s light barefoot tread just beyond the door.

  She was wearing a white, long-sleeved cotton nightdress with delicate ruching around the throat and tiny pin tucks— like the bib on a tuxedo shirt—across the bosom.

  Her large round eyes met mine. She crossed the threshold, and before I could utter a word, she was slowly and methodically hoisting herself onto the makeshift operating table that had served us too well in the past year. She slid her bottom across the crisp ground sheet, answered my unspoken thought.

  “You have to do it now, because tomorrow my father will be buried. And after that—”

  I cut her off. “He’ll be buried in any case.”

  There was no denying the drink had gone to my head. I took another swig. Ease the pain, it’s more than any man can bear, Stuart, I droned inwardly.

  I upended the bottle, which was one of the last three the doctor had left in his cellar. Not fifteen minutes earlier, I’d gathered up all I saw after lurching down the open wooden slats that served as steps. Now, in the office, I was not drinking champagne or brandy or even a bottle of something common like gin or whisky. The stuff I tippled, feeling t
he warm brown liquid course down my chin—and Christ I licked those drops—was from a bottle of Sicilian Arini. The cork was sealed in ancient black wax and a tiny metal cage, jammed so tight and hard against the long green neck, I’d nicked the skin on my thumb trying to get past it. The liquor was as sweet as the scuppernong I’d grown up with and twice as potent.

  “It’s Regina making you drink like that,” Abby said.

  “What do you know about it?”

  “I know what she did to my father. She made him drink. I see what she’s doing to you—”

  “Eh, you say, you say.” I sat back, convinced I was aiming for the seatback—but my buttocks missed Andrew’s stiff-staved barrel of a chair by half a foot. The castors shot out from under my lumbering body.

  “I say you have no choice: unless you reattach us, you’re a lost man, and there’s no going back—not ever.” She lay back on the operating table.

  My mind was clouded with liquor and regret. I didn’t understand, but I believe in that moment I loved her more than ever I’d thought possible.

  Abby seemed to read my mind.

  “You drunken ass—you said it yourself—she can’t come through if we’re attached! Ruth knew it!”

  Ruth.

  I heard her quiet voice suddenly cutting through the haze in my brain. You got to keep a lid on your fears and suspicions, Stuart….

  I stood up, moved toward the supply cabinet. I reached for the glass knob on the door, then stopped, pressing an unsteady hand up to an already aching brow. “I can’t do this!”

  “Please,” Abby said. “They’ll take you away—no matter what happens to me and Ellie. You’re going to your death or to jail. But I’m still a child and I will not live whatever life I have in her shadow. I cannot be my mother’s prisoner…not now, not anymore. The next time she comes through, it will be forever! Please, if you love me…save me, save us both,” she said.

  It will be up to you to bring the two of them together, Stuart. The hired woman’s voice echoed in my head. I had to learn to love my girls in a different way….

  I think Ruth meant as if they were her own, as if they had no infirmity. But I couldn’t make my mind fit around the confusion. “Ssh,” I said aloud, returning to the operating table. “Ssh.”

  I was sobbing, cold tears burning my cheeks, when I lowered the ether-soaked flannel against her face.

  ***

  My mind went back to the first surgery: Andrew’s fierce gray eyes looming over his white mask, the smell of blood, the sound of the metallic saw blade rasping against the thick bridge of bone.

  Now of course, I was alone, and the ‘reattachment’ would consist of simply sewing them together skin to skin—like pelts placed side by side in a fur piece.

  If that surgery was brilliant, the kind that broke new ground, this was simple scut work. Ellie’s missing leg dictated they would be joined as they were before—Abby on the left, her right leg inward to compensate for the amputation.

  I undressed them, swabbed the surgical sites with mercurochrome.

  They lay unmoving, as pale and still under the harsh light as the waxy figures in the death tableau of a Renaissance painting.

  For one brief instant, I smelled sherry in the cool air and I shuddered. I put the thought of specters and apparitions out of my mind. No, I told myself, it was only my own liquor-drenched breath behind the mask.

  I inhaled deeply, cleared my mind in order to visualize the incisions: The first, from just below the ribs down; next I would make a series of transverse cuts across each abdomen and buttocks. Then, when I was sure there was an adequate blood supply, I would peel the “skin flaps” back and attach each to the opposite twin.

  I injected Abby with a combination of valium and morphine, I plied both her and Ellie with more ether, and taking a deep breath, I began.

  - 31 -

  It was a blood bath. Whether it was because I was working alone, or because my mind was both conflicted and addled with drinking—it was a mess right from the start.

  I sponged and sponged away the fast-welling blood that bubbled like red oil out of Ellie’s side, obscuring my sight of muscle and tissues, of the gaping wound itself—

  “Oh piss in the moonshine!” I shouted, working at top speed. “Dammit, stop bleeding” I shoved a metal hemostat inside her blindly, then another and another, until they hung out of her like long silver leeches.

  My skull was throbbing. Her blood pulsed in steady rhythmic wavelets over my gloved fingers. I probed; clamped again, snapping the jaws of the instrument shut in frustration.

  “Oh, fuck me,” I said.

  “That’s what we all want, Stuart.”

  A sigh.

  I stopped, puzzled.

  Giggling.

  Abby’s lids fluttered briefly, a sinister cat-smile twitched across her lips, she opened her eyes, and Regina sat up.

  ***

  Except, except, my mind whirled, it was not exactly Regina. The body was Abby’s, but the eyes looking at me were the sharp green of polar ice. I stepped back in confusion, shut my eyes, raised my hands, the blood-slimed fingers covering my face. “No,” I whispered. “She can’t be—”

  “Ah, bright lad, I knew you’d understand,” Regina said. She rolled on her side, snapped her fingers, idly flicking a pill of invisible lint from the bottom sheet.

  The voice was husky, thick with seduction. I smelled violets—but the scent was sour now—as if they’d rotted in the dark of an abandoned hothouse. “Abby—”

  “Call me that if you want—in fact, I expect you to. After all, everyone else will.” She laughed, then spun herself off the table. Naked, she gave a slight twirl. “Whatever shall I wear to Father’s funeral tomorrow,” she said, propping one childishly shaped finger under her chin. The voice was an imitation of a girl’s—and close enough to fool outsiders. “I haven’t any black, do you suppossse,” she lisped faintly, “mauve will be all right?” Then she tilted her head back, the great mass of red hair hanging down her back, and gave out a throaty laugh.

  “Stop it, stop it!” I screamed. I lunged forward, seized her narrow shoulders, felt the pads of my fingers sinking deep in her flesh.

  “Stop what, Stuart,” she jerked herself away from me, then rubbed her upper left arm. There were red marks from my fingers that would turn blackish blue. “I’m not going to stop anything,” Regina said. She glared at me, her eyes hot, phosphorescent like a poisonous fungus glowing in a jungle. “Don’t delude yourself that when the ether wears off, your precious Abby will return.” She paused. “There is no Abby—not any more. Have you forgotten what they told you?” She snicked her head toward Ellie’s sprawled body, “Only one can live, only one will be chosen—”

  I gave a gasp, my eyes moving in frenzied arcs staring at her, at Ellie.

  “And do you think I’d choose to live out my days inside a mutilated cripple? Your child is in me,” she passed the flat of her hand over the tiny mound of childish belly.

  “But, Ellie is—”

  She cut me off. “Ever hear of pseudocyesis, hmmmm, Doctor Granville? Never saw a hysterical pregnancy, I suppose,” she said. “Such a pity you didn’t study obstetrics before you were pitched out of medical school.”

  I had though. I pivoted my head slowly, heard the tendons creaking in my neck. Ellie’s abdomen had a deflated look—like a squishy balloon with its air slowly leaking out. Printed words spiraled up at me: Usually seen in abnormal mental states. Prevalent when the young woman desires or imagines she has had sexual intercourse with a man she wants as a lover or husband. Under anesthesia the enlargement of the abdomen disappears.

  “I’d say a crippled girl with a crush who’s infatuated herself and jealous of her identical twin’s romance with their tutor qualifies in spades—wouldn’t you?”

  She was reading my mind again. I went to Ellie’s torn body. The bleeding had slowed to a light trickle—not a great deal more than you’d see if you pricked your finger on a sewing needle. But the lo
ng ragged cut I’d made haunted me. “It was you, wasn’t it? You pretended to be Abby, pretended to want the surgery. Tell me why, goddamn you!” I whirled on her, my arm swung back ready to strike.

  “Look at the time, Stuart,” she said rising on her toes. “You’ll never finish before they come!”

  The windows were covered with wooden shutters, put up I’d always supposed, for the sake of a patient’s privacy in the days when Andrew Saunders might have been optimistic about having a regular practice. Now I saw golden light glowing around the thin edges of the slats.

  “You better hurry. It’s nearly eight in the morning,” she said, and I heard the hall clock chiming the three quarter hour. Her laughter made a tinkling sound around the saccharin notes. She rose higher on her toes—looking for all the world like some diminutive version of a fairy godmother in a tale. I thought dreamily, this is a demonic version, a story that runs in reverse, so now she’ll dash from the room, disappear, run up the stairs to dress for the funeral. Instead, she sprinted forward and seized the nearest scalpel from the sterile tray.

  “No!” I screamed.

  Before I could stop her, she made a long gash that was the twin of the one I’d carved into Ellie. Then she slashed again and again, across her belly. The knife flickered and descended behind the crest of her hip. Blood poured down her thighs, the blade fell from her fingers, she swayed.

  Andrew’s plaintive voice wailed in my head, she’s bleeding, she’s bleeding.

  I gathered her up, hoisted her onto the table, and feverishly, like a man possessed I set about sewing up the wounds—first hers, then Ellie’s.

  - 32 -

  When the clock struck nine that was how they found me. It was John Madison coming early to oversee last minute details before Andrew’s wake.

  I never heard his knock, never heard anything ’til the doors slid open and he was teetering on the threshold, gasping with shock. His oldest son stood just behind his father’s black serge-clothed elbow, his mouth open to reveal his crossed teeth.