Aaaiiieee (4 page)

Though she was not religious, and though her musical tastes ran more toward The Cure, Devin liked Gregorian chants and medieval music, so the background of very old Christmas music was agreeable to her. She left
Chapel
on
while pulling toward herself a rumpled woman’s magazine someone had left in the top drawer of her side chest.

*     *     *

Devin awoke to silence. A glance to the wall clock; it was ten-fifty. She’d slept for hours, but given her day, she was surprised it hadn’t been longer. The lack of music finally registered, and she looked to the TV.
Chapel
was still on, but the taped music had ceased. No sound came from the television.

Off down the hall somewhere, a baby cried. This was postpartum recovery, and a woman must have had her baby brought to her for nursing. The nursery was down the hall, but the babies in there were few tonight and quiet behind their glass wall. Devin was glad for that.

Out the window, the snow had become thick, muffling the world under a caul.

Devin was thirsty, and buzzed the nurse’s station. No reply after five minutes. She didn’t ring it again, reluctant to spoil their Christmas eve down there. If she got thirsty enough there was a bathroom in here, although she knew getting out of bed was discouraged.

She switched through the TV channels. Jimmy Stewart was praising Clarence. A stupid dating game of wall-to-wall innuendoes. On the movie channel,
Dances With Wolves,
which she’d already seen twice. Peter looked like a prematurely bald Kevin Costner. Dating Peter was dances with werewolves, she reflected.

Searching, she passed channel Eight again, on to channel Nine, but she switched abruptly back.

Was that a person seated in the front pew, on the left?

Devin frowned. Yes, had to be, though the dark shape’s stationary pose didn’t help her much. Some old patient gone into the chapel for a bit of comfort? Must be. It looked as though the person was a woman wearing a kerchief on her head…unless that was a nun’s habit.

Well, this development hardly made channel Eight any more exciting. Devin moved on…

A nurse came in to take Devin’s vitals again. Once more, Devin did not inquire about her baby’s whereabouts. The young woman asked, “Can I get you anything?”

“I wouldn’t know where to begin,” Devin said. “Lonely in here tonight, huh?”

“It’s real nice and quiet up here, but I hear there was a horrible scene down in emergency. This young woman was brought in…dead on arrival. Somebody strangled her.”

“Strangled?”

“Yeah. Horrible. They said the cord cut right into her neck. They don’t know who did it. Scary. Glad I don’t live in this town.”

“I guess.”

The nurse left, and Devin frowned at the doorway after her. Strangled. Yes…horrible.

It was now eleven-fifteen, and Devin again grew restless with the meager offerings on TV, jaded as she was by cable. She switched around the dial. In so doing, she grew curious about whether that woman was still praying in the chapel.

There were several figures in the pews now. Three? Four? Devin wasn’t sure in that grainy gloom. But at least two of the newly-seated people seemed also to be nuns. Well, it was St. Andrew’s Hospital. Was there to be a midnight mass, after all?

Even as Devin watched, that indistinct door in the corner opened and a figure moved out of it, a shadow against shadows. It drifted to the altar. The priest, no doubt. But when were they going to put the lights on? Maybe this was yet another nun, judging from the conical look of  the head. Well, whatever…Devin lost interest again, flicked forward to Eleven.

The news was on. A space heater fire had killed three children. Merry Christmas. Devin hurried onward. Where was Ernest when you needed him?

A distant baby wailing again. Devin was tempted to get out of bed to go close her door, but she had had an episiotomy to facilitate delivery and the pain-killers had diminished. Soon enough, however, the crying faded away.

God, even the poor offering of channels conspired to narrow her world, aggravate her sense of isolation, of being trapped in this bed. She clicked through the selections, impatiently going in circles. Seven again, Eight…

Pious assholes, she thought; something was indeed up tonight. She watched the silent scene. Where was the sound? What comfort was watching services if you couldn’t hear them? Might a microphone be on but the people in the chapel so quiet that their movements were inaudible?

A few new shadowy forms were gliding out of that vague door in the corner, slipping into the pews. The priest or nun was now sitting at his throne behind the altar, resting perhaps until everyone arrived. Was that the bottom of a great cross above his head? Was it an all-denominations chapel? Devin hoped so; where would Jews, Buddhists, Muslims take their comfort, otherwise? Only because it was Christmas eve and this a hospital founded by Catholics did she assume it was a Christian service.

Devin glared at them, her fingers on the dial. Sure, celebrate the birth of a baby born two thousand years ago…but my son is in hell right now, according to you, because he didn’t live long enough to have a little water sprinkled on his head.

Some would say only limbo, not hell. How comforting. The bottom line was, the unbaptized infant didn’t die in God’s good graces. Born with the sin of the world already in him…baptism a kind of exorcism. Wasn’t that how it went? Do something compassionate, you elitist scum, she mentally raged at the screen. Baptize my baby. Cleanse him of these so-called sins so he can be free. Go on—you’ve got your magic water in there, don’t you?

Good thing she didn’t really believe he was cursed to some void…damned to eternal suffering. That would be a horror too great for her to recover from, short of remaining in a hospital of another sort forever.

Eleven thirty-five now. She was not at all tempted to go down to the end of maternity to the chapel and sit in on their midnight mass…but maybe, just maybe, she’d watch it on TV. Just for the hell of it.

*     *     *

A woman sobbed softly, in forlorn moans. Devin was awakened by the sound, her first thought having been that it was the voice of a woman in another room, a woman who had lost her baby tonight. Then she wondered if perhaps it had been her own voice. But also, for some odd reason, she had the impression that the sound had come from the speaker of her television. However, that was impossible, of course, because there was still no sound coming from channel Eight.

Devin sat up. Apparently mass had not yet begun; the pews she could see were nearly full, though the lights had yet to be brought up. She glanced to the time. Eleven-fifty.

Ah, something was happening now. A robed figure proceeded up the central aisle toward the dais, carrying something behind him. Another figure had its end, as if it were a stretcher they transported between them. Indeed, it looked like a stretcher. Were they bringing in some poor old woman who couldn’t walk to mass? Why not a wheelchair, then?

God, Devin thought. Perhaps this wasn’t a Christmas mass after all…but a funeral mass. The shape upon the stretcher the two figures carried resembled nothing so much as a human body covered entirely by a sheet.

She pulled the TV nearer, squinting at the screen. Shut off her personal light, the resultant gloom making the image slightly clearer. Watched as the stretcher was brought up upon that stage. They lifted the sheet reverently, like a flag folded at a military funeral, and spread it out on the floor at the foot of the altar. Then the body—yes, it was a body—was lifted from the stretcher and laid upon the sheet on the floor.

Granted, Devin was not a religious person, but she had never heard of this ritual before.

The figures set a candle at the head of the body, another at the feet, and lit them. The light didn’t do much to illuminate the chapel or its congregation, but it did define the body on the floor a bit better. Devin saw bare feet outlined; she could imagine how cold they must feel. The toenails were so dark, they must be painted. The feet of a young woman. Devin never painted her nails in winter…but this mundane thought was quickly gone from her mind as she concentrated further on the head of the corpse.

The young woman’s long dark hair was draped around her neck and across her shoulders. Her mouth hung open wide. Devin couldn’t believe that her features hadn’t been made composed. This body hadn’t been prepared for a funeral. Was this to be some ceremony prior to the mortician’s work?

The candlelight seemed to glint on something at the woman’s throat. A necklace under her hair? No, Devin realized. It was a wet glistening.

That wasn’t entirely her hair across her throat, darkening it, hair upon the shoulders of the white gown she wore. It was blood so dark it looked black. Soaking into the gown. Winding down her neck. Still drying. And now Devin knew whose body this was. She didn’t know the young woman’s name…but she knew how she had died. Been murdered, rather.

“What is this?” she breathed aloud, then regretted her words, as if afraid the congregation would hear her eavesdropping and turn to face the camera in unison. And then, as they stared back at her, she would see their faces. And suddenly, intuitively, Devin did not want to see those faces.

A final figure had come up the aisle carrying a smaller bundle, which was passed into the hands of the officiating priest, who had risen from his throne. The new figure helped unwrap the parcel, and then the priest held it high above his head.

It was too dark to make out what he held. But something dangled from it. A short length of…rope?

Again, intuitively, Devin knew. It was a length of umbilical cord, sliced at one end but the other still wound around the neck of the infant the priest held above his hooded head.

Devin screamed, twisted, jabbed her finger into her buzzer and held it there.

“Help me, oh my God, help me! Stop them, STOP THEM! Hurry!” she shrieked. And her eyes darted to the time.

Eleven fifty-five.

They were going to take him. Those who claimed the unblessed.

Devin didn’t wait for the buzzer to be answered. There was no more time to spare. She flung the blanket off her and swung her bare feet to the cold floor. She didn’t even bother with slippers. Bare feet offered better traction. She ignored the pains that lanced her and just bolted for the door.

At the end of this floor, the old woman had said. Past the cafeteria…

If God would not intervene, then she would have to do it. And if she could not stop them, then she would go with Christopher, wherever they took him.

At the very end of the hall were twin doors she hadn’t noticed when she’d first come in. The end of the corridor was in gloom, but she could read the gold letters that spelled: St. Andrews Hospital Chapel.

The doors were locked.

Devin jerked at the knobs, cursing, screaming. She pounded with her palms. “Let me in, you bastards! Let me in!” She turned, looked wild-eyed around her. There was nothing to use as a battering ram. No fire axes on the walls. Devin threw her weak hurting body against the blank panels and wailed, “Oh, God,
help me!”

She pounded with both fists, seized the knobs in both hands, and turned them. They clicked.

Shocked, for a moment she nearly hesitated. Then she flung the doors open.

None in the congregation had admitted her; they were too obviously surprised as they whirled toward her. She did not look at them, being too close to madness already. Instead, she turned to the left and right, searching for something she knew must be there. A fount…

The figures were shadows, and the shadows poured at her like dark winds, reached out hands to her that even before they could touch her were arctic cold. But Devin still didn’t look. She cupped both hands into a wall-mounted receptacle of cool water.

Then, she walked up the aisle, carrying her dripping chalice of flesh before her. The reaching hands withdrew sharply, the dark forms recoiling like a black parted sea. There was a gasp of revulsion from their throats more like a rustling of autumn leaves. Devin ignored them. She wanted to run to the altar, but didn’t dare spill the water. The tears in her eyes made the candlelight scintillate, but she saw the head priest more clearly now. She saw that in the time it had taken her to reach and enter the chapel, he had set the nude little body of her son upon the chest of the woman on the floor, and draped one limp arm of the woman over him. It was not the umbilical cord around his neck—of course, the doctors had removed that. It was a black rope, representing that life line. Devin knew, then, that it was a black cord with which the young woman had been strangled.

They were an obscene Madonna and child for this Christmas eve. It was not a funeral mass, but a midnight mass, after all. See? The great cross above the altar—out of her range on TV—had even been inverted for the occasion.

The head priest recoiled, lifting one arm to shield himself—itself—from Devin’s offering. But it was not for him anyway. She knelt before the bodies of the sacrificed, gently positioned her hands over the brow of her son, with his sad, troubled face.

Much of the water had wound down her wrists, despite her efforts. Only drops remained, but they splashed his small round head. Devin even shook loose the last two drops onto the head of the Madonna.

A howling of wind or voices erupted, and the congregation rushed into that dark doorway in the corner. The head priest went last, casting one last hateful look over his shoulder. The touch of his gaze made Devin scream.

The door slammed shut.

*     *     *

One of the nurses found Devin there, on the floor of the chapel. She screamed also.

It was first thought, naturally, that Devin had somehow stolen both the body of her stillborn son and that of the woman from the emergency ward, and moved them into this room. After all, a nurse had inadvisably told Devin about the victim. But after interviewing her, and talking with the nurses from postpartum recovery, police were willing to at least accept the possibility that some sort of cult had broken into the hospital and transported the bodies into the chapel. After all, one drugged and hurting woman could scarcely have turned that heavy cross upside-down by herself.