Deathwatch - Final Read online

  “Did you ever hear the expression, ‘Be what you want to become,’ Mr. Granville?” She paused while I shook my head, stunned by what I was seeing but could not really believe. “No? Well it’s more popularly known among actors, I suppose, than medical students.” She laughed lightly. I saw the red tip of her tongue protrude; she was wearing a set of small rice-sized freshwater pearls, and then, very delicately, she plucked the loop from her throat and absently put the necklace between her teeth to lightly suck and bite on. I felt my heart speed in my chest, then caught the drift of her words.

  “…I suppose there are moments when even a student sees himself as a full-fledged surgeon, but actors—those who live—truly come to life—on the stage, they become what they must be. Have you heard, Mr. Granville, of those who live the parts they play, who eat and drink and fuck inside those minds?”

  I was startled, and I flinched. This was 1893 and it was the first time I’d ever heard a woman say that word, and if you must know, to this day, even in this place where I am confined, where I’ve routinely seen women handle themselves—plunge their own fingers up the bloody tunnels of their raw and aching vaginas, I’ve never heard any woman say it out loud.

  She went on. “Yes, to emotionally understand the part, those actors simply be what they must become. So even the simplest action…walking, or say, eating a meal in character—handling two dessert spoons primly or gaily tossing popcorn from the striped pasteboard box to their flung back mouths—becomes an exercise in being.” There was a faraway look in the green eyes as if she were seeing deep into some other life. “But whether I have become Abby or she has become me, I don’t know….”

  “Ah. Abby,” I said, and I heard the quiver in my own voice.

  Regina fastened on that note, and I felt in that minute I was somehow hers.

  “You love her,” she said.

  It was true. I knew it was wrong, had sweated night times that I was twenty and she was barely twelve; at the same time I’d played a thousand fantasy games while my hands caressed myself: Abby was a respectable nineteen, and I was twenty-seven, and after she took my garnet ring beneath a fat yellow July moon, I made love to her in the deep shadows of lawn and hedge—the greens nearly black, the grass damp beneath our churning bodies.

  I listened to those words from Regina and I wanted to sob: I did, I did, I loved her.

  I’d told myself a hundred times that it was absurd; that I only felt I loved the child because I was trapped in this madhouse with no companionship, nowhere to go, nothing at all to ease my foolish undergraduate heart. I chided myself that I was aroused only because my sympathies were being played on. Here was a poor crippled girl…who became whole when my hands touched, healed her—

  “I—” I stopped. What was there to say? For every voice that shamed me, cried it was lunacy, there was another part of me seeing her heart-shaped face and brilliant blue eyes looking seriously into mine the first night and telling me to have compassion for her poor father—he was not himself because he drank. There are cripplings of all kinds. And I knew without trying or meaning to, Abby had touched the part of me that understood the silky sinister thought she could not say out loud: and if he’s tied to his obsession, then so am I.

  “What you don’t understand Mr. Granville,” Regina said, “is that there are no hauntings without the consent of the human who participates.”

  “Yes, I do, Mrs. Saunders,” I answered, feeling a certain steel rising inside myself. “You’re going to trot out that old chestnut—if a tree falls in the forest but no one hears it, does it make a sound?” I snorted in protest, but she cut me off.

  “But it’s true—do you think I’d be here without their fantasies? Their fantasies of being with you—and more to the point—of being me—of being a grown woman with whole limbs?” Her hand went to the white liquid of the silk gown she wore, and she began rubbing the column of her thigh. “If most girls want to be their mothers, then how do you think crippled girls melted inside their own bodies feel, hmmm?”

  I knew she was seducing me, and yet, I could not help being drawn in. Perhaps if Abby had been older—an eligible perfectly normal young lady of eighteen who had a crush on her school master—I might have turned on my heel and left that room to pack my bag and never have given her a moment’s thought. Not even if her crush permitted her to send me sentimental puppy dogs cards at the holiday season, or vacation scenes with deserted beaches from the Jersey shore. But Abby was, by virtue of her great infirmity, a child with a woman’s mind, and I loved her mind.

  Regina’s huge shiny olive eyes bored into me. I don’t know which of us unlaced the slippery tie that held her gown closed I only knew that she was in my arms, and that it was Abby I held, the child grown tall. And although I let myself be lost in the moment, and shut out the part of me that knew precisely what I was about when Regina fingered the buttons of my fly and begged for the whole hard length of me, and though the higher, better part of my mind knew that taking her was sad and wrong…in truth in my heart it was Abby I loved, and Abby I made love to.

  - 9—

  I woke sometime later under a drift of quilts and counterpanes that cozied up the girls’ bed in the nursery. The room had gone very dark; the only light was the low reddish glow from the fireplace on the opposite wall.

  The bed was warm, and only half-aware, I snuggled into the heat, burrowing into the featherbed and under the covers. Part of my mind searched for the webby outline of some delightful dream I’d just emerged from.

  Then suddenly and all at once, I remembered what had happened and I sat bolt upright, my heart pounding in my chest hard enough so that I heard the pulsebeat thudding in my ears.

  I could see the humped and scattered shapes of my clothes lying pell-mell on the carpet, but I was alone. I threw my head back, snuffling the air for the scent of Parma violets. All that came back to me was the doggy odor of sweat and sperm. I imagined the stains that would lightly green the nursery sheets; Ruth did the laundry, what would she think? Then I was aware not only of the bed’s warmth, but of a heavier dampness. In my mind’s eye I saw my jaw pressed greedily between Regina’s full thighs.

  I pushed the covers back quickly. Running my palm lightly across the spread of white fabric, it seemed to me there were dark blotches and smears among the wet.

  I lit a candle, found my suspicions immediately confirmed, stifled the groan rising in my throat. Blood. It was blood, and I wondered if was a full-grown woman’s menstrual flow or the hymeneal blood of a virgin child.

  - 10 -

  I was dressing when I heard the unmistakable sound of a child sobbing. It was not loud, but it was the kind of terrible weeping that went heart deep; ragged, hitching, the breath coming out in violent broken gasps. It seemed nearby. Feeling my face flush hotly, I went to the cherry armoire that stood in the corner and jerked the door wide. Nothing. Ranks of clothes, gossamer slips. A row of black leather high-topped shoes on the floor, all neatly buttoned.

  Then I recalled there was an attic room just overhead on the third floor. Seldom used, it was known simply as Regina’s closet. I snatched the short fat nub of an old candle stuck in a wax-clotted saucer from the dresser. Then, shrugging my arms into my jacket, I left the room, crossed the hallway, and began to climb the stairs.

  Abby was sitting in the small white gabled room, her knees drawn high, her head bent under the tent of her arms, her hair hanging down like a nun’s veil. She raised her face at the sound of my footsteps, and I saw her eyes were hideously glazed with confusion and pain. The skin of her cheeks and lips and chin looked raw and abraded, and unconsciously my hand went to my own jaw and I felt the burn of stubble. No, I told myself, that red chapped skin was because she’d been crying; my eyes went to the small eyebrow window. It was closed, but the attic room was unheated, chilly.

  “I thought you cared, but you hurt me,” she whispered. I set the candle on the bare floorboards, and stared at her. “I wanted you to kiss me, but what you did—that th
ing—it tore me—” she stopped, and my heart jagged sharply in my chest. A child, you took a child. Raped her. No. It was Regina—a woman’s heavy scent, full breasts, birth-widened hips—

  “I hate you,” she hissed.

  “Abby,” I said, stooping close to her. I wanted to touch her shoulder or her hand, but I was afraid. “I saw your mother—”

  “My mother.” Her voice was bitter, her small mouth twisted into a harsh line. “My mother is dead!” She screamed, her face was contorted, she lunged at me. I held her elbows, felt the tiny hard knots of her fist striking my thighs. I held on, lifted her up. Her hands pummeled my chest over and over.

  “Ssssh, sshh, now Ab, Abby,” I crooned mindlessly, feeling the fury pulsing out of her. I let her pound her pain into my flesh.

  “She lied—she lied to me, to Ellie—to us!” Abby wept.

  “Lied how, darling?” I asked. She was quieter against me now, I stroked the soft fall of her hair, felt her cheek in the hollow beneath my rib. “How did she lie?” Abby made a muttering sound, something I could not quite comprehend, I tilted her shoulder away so that her face was turned to mine. “Say again.”

  “I didn’t know what it was.” She blushed, and I knew if she’d had the nerve, her eyes would have fallen on the full space in the fork of my crotch; but she was too ashamed and fearful. “I didn’t know what men had, what it was between men and women,” her voice was the hiss of a writhing snake.

  Not anger—but terror and shame, I told myself. I heard her tiny helpless voice in my head: I wanted your kisses, Stuart. It jibed badly with the joking obscene voice I’d heard begging and felt breathing hotly against the soft smoothness of my ear, a husky woman’s plea:

  Fuckme, Ochristfuckme.

  A kind of peculiar understanding knifed through my brain, and I turned the child’s chin up, made her eyes meet mine.

  “Abby, do you remember that night in the nursery when you and Ellie told me the story of your mother’s death?”

  “No.” She shook her head, holding back tears; bravely, I thought. Her reddish curls swished softly against the thin shoulders of her bleached muslin nightdress. “Didn’t you tell us stories? That woman, Scheherezade—how she saved her own life beguiling the sultan?”

  In my mind’s eye I saw them, Ellie and Abby, like twin dolls gazing blankly at the ceiling, their faces immobile, their arms lying woodenly at their sides. Who, what was there, listening, and sometimes talking to me? I raked my hand through my hair; Regina’s green eyes, sharper features rose in my mind. No. It couldn’t be! I tried again.

  “You told Ellie we had to put the maggots inside her hip to clean out the infection….”

  “Ellie…maggots?” Abby’s face was blank—as if what I was saying made no sense. There was no connection between writhing white worms and her sister’s condition in Abby’s mind.

  I was getting panicky. “You told her,” I insisted more loudly. “Now she’s hysterical!”

  “It wasn’t me!” Abby’s face turned with a sudden dreadful quickness towards the nightsky blackened window. I saw her small freckled brow, the mane of her reddish hair and the white knobs of her shoulders reflected like fragmented ghosts in the dark panes of glass. She cried out and, heaving herself, I felt her jerk her body, trying to leap and run towards the window. I caught her, held on tightly.

  “No, no,” I said. My mind was a whirl. Had Regina possessed the child? Had Abby’s mind been broken somehow? Or is it you, Stuart? A voice mocked inside me. Did you rape a child and tell yourself you gave a grown woman what she wanted? One of us was mad—one, I mourned—or maybe all.

  “Let me, let me die,” she cried. Her skin scalded my chest.

  I had heard of possession, of demons, of the dead reaching out to snatch at the souls and bodies of the living. Is that what it was? Impossible. Such things were the stuff of inmates’ dreams.

  There is no such thing as haunting without the consent of the human who participates.

  “I feel so dirty, I didn’t know anything could feel so dirty. I want to die. If I die it can’t hurt—not like this, not this much.”

  “No,” I rocked her gently, waiting for calm to take her. “Have you seen Regina?” I asked Abby.

  “Something.” She touched the center of her chest with a small dimpled fist. “In here. Not seen, but felt and heard. In the wind at night, in the small voice that whispers in my dreams. I hear her call my name. But she says her own name until she and I and Ellie are the same. No division. A strange and peculiar joining, odder than the freakish twist of nature me and my twin shared.”

  She said those words—things no child could ever say, and again I felt my mind twirl. Who spoke that pain? Woman? Girl?

  God, it was madness. I felt my own tears, hot and hard. If there was even a chance that Regina Cahill Saunders was real, had come back, if there was a chance she was some organized intelligence, then I knew she held us both in her thrall.

  I led Abby away from the window. “Here, carry the candle,” I said. She snuffled for an answer, and though she picked it up, she was still lightly crying. She sniffed, scraped the sleeve of her cotton nightdress under her nose, and the gesture was both so child-like and unselfconsicous it went straight to my heart, as children’s innocent movements often will.

  I hugged her—a father leading his child to safety—round the shoulders as we slowly descended the narrow wooden stairs. She held the candle aloft, her eyes following the careful track of her bare, blue-veined feet. At the bottom of the stairs we shut the thick attic door, and turned toward the nursery. Abby wept, and I did, too.

  But whether I cried for her confusion or my own, I did not know.

  - 11 -

  “Stuart! Stuart!”

  I heard my name bellowed in my ear, and I woke groggy and tense all at the same time. I’d been dreaming that Regina Cahill was walking down a blue walled corridor, a mauve silk dress swishing around those infernal hips. Her smiling rosy mouth was a bud. “It’s not over, Stuart,” she was saying. A frilled parasol popped wide with an audible sound over the glossy auburn curls. Her green eyes, meeting mine, were saucy. “No, it’s not over till I say it’s over. And it’s not over.”

  I was attracted—oh what a lie! I could feel myself throbbing while we sauntered; and casually, I folded my palms behind my back. All the better for you to see my hard-on my dear, the slavering big bad wolf spoke up in my dreaming mind.

  “Stuart!”

  Now the dream fell away in shreds and tatters and I was sitting up awake, aware that whoever was calling my name was real. I heard that shrill cry again. It was Saunders, he was at the bottom of the staircase and he was screaming for me. I knew at once he was desperate and the fear that was coloring his voice was because Ellie was in mortal danger. I did not even bother to check whether I was dressed or naked. I sprang from the bed, bolted from the room.

  My shirt was flapping round my bare thighs as I sprinted for the hallway, but the chill I felt as gooseflesh came from his words:

  “Ellie! Ellie! We have to do it now! Now! Her fever is 104! If we don’t try and take it now, she’s going to die.”

  Before I was slamming my bony heel onto the third step I saw the surgery clearly in my mind: The first cut—the dark line of maroon blood like melting red pearls— transsecting just beneath the iliac curve, the silver clamps like metal butterflies sipping at the juncture of the femoral artery. Ten minutes and it would be done. Irreversible. Over. I saw the careful black sutures, stitching through fascia, tendon, muscle, flesh. The hideous flap of free-hanging skin from buttocks and thigh folded up to cover the gaping hole. In a few days there would be swelling at the wound sight. The wound we inflicted. We would have to drain the swell of her stump.

  ***

  Ah Christ.

  We were going to amputate her leg.

  Take it.

  Her leg. Ellie.

  But it was that or her life.

  ***

  “Please,” he begged, “close i
t.” Saunders coughed deeply, his hand palmed the center of his chest, and although I knew these days had taken a toll on him, what I saw more clearly was that his grey eyes had the desperate burned out look of a man who understood only one thing: there was pain, and that pain could be lost in the bottom of a glass. There were drugs in his closet that would carry out the same chemical command faster and quicker, and we were living in a time when drugs that can’t be got now for love or money…heroin, morphine, cocaine…were available, and yet he wanted his alcohol. It was the craving for the smooth liquid brown of brandy I saw on his face, as clearly etched as if he’d said the word. He flapped his hand, the hem of his always proper black frock coat faintly echoed the motion, and he sailed out the door. I heard the cellar door open with a sloppy scraping sound—he wasn’t drunk—not yet. But his mind was disordered; his movements, jerky.

  “Gabriel,” he bellowed. I heard the smash of glass. In my mind’s eye I saw ancient green bottles pulled from their diamond-shaped slots in haste, exploding on the hard cement of the cellar floor.

  “Gabriel! Christ, come and help me!”

  There was broken weeping coming from a distance, but I knew the hired man would answer the summons, uncork the bottle; and though his mental state would essentially be in no way different, now Andrew Saunders would drink. And drink. ’Til the fevered part of his mind let him sleep.

  I turned to the job he’d asked me to finish. In essence we were done. Ellie’s leg—the whole god-sculpted lovely length of it—from just below her hip was gone. Before he’d decided there was no more a doctor—a father could stand—Andrew had wrapped it in a sheet and placed it on the bed her sister had lain in when we’d done the initial surgery. My eye snagged on the sight of it, a long tubular hump hidden under the drift of white. Dead. Useless. I looked away, concentrated on my work.

  I stitched; small neat silken sutures. I did it as carefully as I could because I was blocking the fact from my mind that there would be no prosthesis for Ellie. No wooden leg that could make up the deficit. Andrew was right. The cut was too high.