Aaaiiieee (7 page)

When my arms grew too tired he gently took the cutters from me and broke the last few chain fragments off their hooks himself, then he handed the tool back to me with a smile of gratitude and a relief so deep I nearly broke into tears. I had to look away from him, go back to pour a fresh coffee. I offered him a taste but he raised a palm to decline, and declined all nourishment I offered later, including water.

After a few sips of my coffee, however, I put down the mug and offered him my hand. He rose, and I led him into the bathroom.

I filled the tub with steaming water but he seemed hesitant to enter it, and I didn’t want to alarm him, so delicately I urged him into a kneeling position, and then knelt down beside him. I soaked a large sea sponge, and then began running it gently along his folded wings, washing layers of dried blood out from under and between the feathers, so that the floor tiles pooled with pinkish water. I didn’t care. And as I bathed his wings, he made a great effort to unfold them. I could tell it agonized him. The bathroom was also too small to contain them. I made him follow me into the kitchen and kneel down once more, and I filled a plastic basin with soapy water. This time he spread his trembling wings to their full span, and remarkably they filled the room, nearly touching opposite walls, majestic and black, narrow and tapered like those of a falcon. His shoulders shook with the strain of holding them aloft for me, and in reverence I stroked them with the sponge. And then I realized that his shoulders were shaking harder because he was sobbing. Whether he was sobbing in pain or in gratitude I could not know, but I put down the sponge and began to smooth his feathers under my bare palms, as if I thought this alone might balm his pain somehow. Without really willing it, I began to run my hands down to his back, where I caressed his marred white flesh.

He rose, turned to face me, tears streaking his face. They were tears of blood, making the whites of his eyes glisten red as well. But I took his hand, and followed him from the room.

I didn’t reach out from the bed to shut off the light. I didn’t care if he saw my legs. I was too intent on seeing him.

As we made love some of the barbs still in him scratched me, even drew blood, but in our passion I was needless, and it only made me feel closer to his pain, closer to him, merged as we had been in dream. He raised himself on his arms to look at where our flesh was joined, and then stared down at my eyes, and again his great wings spread, almost to their fullness, making a canopy over us. I kissed the brands on his chest to cool them, licked his nipples despite the rings pierced through them, slicing my tongue on their edges. When we kissed he sucked the blood from my tongue, and I in turn licked the blood from his face, kissed the blood from his eyes. Then he arched his back and moaned in climax, the first sound I had heard him utter. When he collapsed upon me, spent, his wings covered both of us in a blanket.

When at last he stirred he lay half atop me, his face almost shy with reverence as he stroked my breasts, my belly. Moving off me further to stroke me lower down, at last he noticed my legs, and I tried to take his chin and angle his face away. Instead, he gently slipped out of my fingers and shifted to the end of the bed. Bending over my legs, he lightly kissed my shattered knees, and then slowly began to trace his tongue along the white scar that wound up one thigh. I put my hands to his head to move him away, but then they held him there instead, as his tongue moved from the source of my pain to the source of my pleasure.

I did not go to my classes for several more days.

After those several days, Mrs. Hanson called to check in on me, since she hadn’t seen me about. I told her I had a slight bug. She asked if the brothers had come upstairs to see me. “Brothers?” I asked.

“From the monastery, I think,” she said. “I think they were monks. Priests, maybe; they had collars. They wanted to know if I’d seen anyone strange around the yard. I guess there’s a brother they keep locked up because he’s ill or something. I don’t know why they don’t have him in the hospital but I guess they’d rather care for him themselves…”

“Did he escape?” I asked, my heart blundering through its actions.

“Yes, the other night when it stormed.”

When I made love with the seraph that night my passion was clouded with fear for him. Lying in bed beside him, I begged him to talk to me, to tell me his story, to tell me about his former captors, the monks. And after a while of coaxing, he did try to tell me, but he spoke in tongues. Not in a frenzied rapture, however; his voice was deep, somnambulant, like a single voice lifted from a Gregorian chant. It was both weirdly beautiful and terrifying, and I put my finger tips to his lips to stop him.

I couldn’t avoid my former life forever, despite my fears, and after a week I returned to my classes. The first day was difficult, and I came back to check on him several times, but he was fine, either looking through the pictures in books or napping or stroking Virgil in his lap. The monks would believe him gone from the area by this time, I thought, and my unease lessened.

And then one evening I came home to find Mrs. Hanson dead on the landing outside my apartment door.

She was unmarked, but her eyes stared upward, glassy. The door frame was splintered, and I burst into the apartment with my blood roaring through my head.

At first I thought my vision was blackening, until I realized it was the blood sprayed and splashed upon the walls, Virgil sitting on the backrest of the couch contentedly licking the blood that matted his fur. I stifled a scream at the carnage strewn on the floor of the parlor. Two ruins, which appeared to have once been men, and which appeared from their shredded black garb to have once been clerics of some kind. My seraph still crouched over one of them, the corpse’s head cradled in his lap. Alarmed, he looked up with a lupine snarl, his teeth coated thickly in gore, and I knew that this was the sight that had stopped the old heart of dear Mrs. Hanson.

Trembling, relieved and horrified at once, I pulled the door shut behind me and managed to bolt it. Despite my terrible nausea, my feverish dizziness, I was not afraid of him. And he, also, stopped his savage growling when he recognized me. He lowered his head, as though ashamed, and lowered the mauled red ball of the monk’s head to the floor. I saw a dagger near this corpse, and a bottle of holy water spilled by the other, soaking into an already red-soaked throw rug.

He helped me drag Mrs. Hanson into the room, and by then I had arrived at the only decision I could come to. I helped him wash the blood from his hands, his body, his wings. This time he consented to a full bath, and it seemed to calm both of us.

I packed several suitcases. I selected a sweat-shirt and some sweat-pants I thought would fit him until I could buy him some clothing of his own.

From the generous tool box my father had lovingly equipped for me I raised a hacksaw. I showed it to the seraph. I moved it in the air to demonstrate its function. He sat on a chair and bowed his head in understanding, submitting to a cruelty worse even than those inflicted upon him by his captors. But we had no choice. In order to be free, both of us, I had to cut away the very symbols of his freedom…

And while I sliced them away, awash in my angel’s blood, I shook hard with sobs just as he did, tears blurring my vision like the tears of blood on his beautiful face…agonized, as if it were my own wings I was severing.

Mrs. Weekes

Mrs. Ferrin rested a hand like a ginseng root atop the smooth young hand of Kelly Bonham, who was new at Eastborough Nursing Home. Kelly leaned over the elderly woman indulgently, though she knew she suffered Alzheimer’s Disease quite severely. “Yes, Mrs. Ferrin?”

“She was here again, last night,” the emaciated creature whispered urgently in a creaky voice, as if autumn leaves rustled in her scarecrow’s throat. “I saw her come into the room…crawling on all fours. She stopped and looked over at me and, and hissed, then she went on again…she looked like a crab, scuttling…and she went over there, to poor Mrs. Carter’s bed.”

Kelly glanced over at Mrs. Ferrin’s room-mate, Mrs. Carter. She had deteriorated badly in just the one week since Kelly had started on the third shift at this hospital. For the first couple of days, Mrs. Carter had actually been quite charming, talkative and lucid, had shown Kelly pictures of her grandchildren. Now, her eyes and mouth gaped emptily at the ceiling, and Kelly might easily have taken her for dead. It was very upsetting, and something she doubted she would ever grow used to no matter how many years she stayed in this work.

Mrs. Ferrin went on, “Then she climbed up beside the bed, and put her mouth over Mrs. Carter’s mouth, as if she was…kissing her. Poor Mrs. Carter. I saw her legs move a little and I heard her moan, but she never woke up. And then that horrible woman crawled on all fours, out of the room again. Thank God she didn’t look at me again. Her eyes. Her terrible eyes…”

“And who was this awful woman you thought you saw, Mrs. Ferrin?” Kelly asked soothingly, as if calming a child who’d had a bad dream.

“It was Mrs. Weekes…that awful Mrs.        Weekes…”

Mrs. Weekes? Mrs. Weekes indeed. Mrs. Weekes was a vegetable, catatonic; Kelly had been wiping  the drool from her chin since she’d begun here. Yes, her blankly staring eyes were unsettling—the whites were so alarmingly bloodshot that they appeared entirely red—but she was as harmless as a flower vase, and no more capable of movement. Kelly straightened up. “Mrs. Weekes won’t harm you or Mrs. Carter, Mrs Ferrin, don’t you worry.”

“Watch her!” the old woman whispered. “Watch her!”

*     *     *

It was morning at last and Kelly would soon be leaving. Thank God. Third shift was a hard one to acclimate to. She craved coffee and breakfast in the cafeteria; she didn’t think she could wait long enough to eat at home. Her charges were beginning to awaken, and the first shift to trickle in. She finished up her final round…and out of some odd curiosity, poked her head into Mrs. Weekes’ room. She had peeked in on her twice during the night, but of course both times the elderly woman had lain there unmoving, a dark shape in the gloom. She was currently alone in her room; another nurse had told Kelly that Mrs. Weekes’ room-mate had passed away the week before Kelly started.

Kelly expected to again see a prone, silent husk, if this time at least lit by the gilded sunlight slanting through the curtains. Instead, what she saw plucked her heart half from her chest. Mrs. Weekes sat upright in bed, her back propped against two pillows, and she was staring at the door as if she had been expecting Kelly or at least someone to enter just then. Her red eyes were dark against pallid wrinkled flesh. The old woman’s mouth spread into a toothless grin.

“Hello, my dear,” she cooed softly in a British accent. “Would I be able to get a cup of tea?”

“Tea?” Kelly hesitated, strangely, before stepping into the room. “Mrs. Weekes…I thought…this is…this is the first time I’ve heard you speak.”

“Yes, well…I haven’t been well, I’m afraid, but I feel much better today. Might I also have two pieces of toast with marmalade? I’m dreadfully hungry, my dear!”

“Oh, yes…sure…of course.” And Kelly darted from the room to see to her patient’s needs, her thoughts all aswirl.

*     *     *

Kelly knew better than to grow attached to her patients, but how could a human being not? She’d grow tougher with time, she was assured, but she was not certain she ever wanted to grow so tough that the death of someone like Mrs. Ferrin would not affect her.

She’d only been at Eastborough Nursing Home three weeks, and already she had seen them take out Mrs. Carter and now poor Mrs. Ferrin. Kelly was so upset when she heard the news that she even cried in front of her boss, but she didn’t really care what the others thought of her. She found too many of them to be callous.

If it was any consolation, however, some patients apparently improved at the same time others declined. Mrs. Weekes, for instance, seemed to be strengthening every day. She was amicable and charming in the way that Kelly remembered Mrs. Carter as having been in the beginning. But despite this charm, Kelly found herself avoiding the woman more and more, looking in on her only when absolutely necessary. And at night, not at all…because a few nights ago she could have sworn Mrs. Weekes lay awake in the dark, her red eyes open and gazing at Kelly under the cover of murk.

But she couldn’t shirk her duties altogether, could she? So this morning she went to look in on the old woman’s needs.

But the bed lay starkly empty, for the first time since Kelly had started here. Had Mrs. Weekes, too, passed away, then? With a guilty twinge, Kelly realized she was relieved at the possibility. She turned out of the room and began walking briskly down the hall to search out her supervisor so as to inquire into just what had transpired. She was in such a hurry, in fact, that she bumped elbows with a woman who was walking down the hallway in the opposite direction. It was a nurse with her winter coat on, no doubt a third shifter like herself on her way home, but Kelly couldn’t tell who it was because of the dark glasses the pretty young woman wore.

“I’m so sorry,” Kelly apologized for their partial collision.

“That’s quite all right, my dear,” the young woman said in a pleasant British accent, and then she walked smartly down the hall and turned a corner. Kelly stood there watching her until the young woman was out of sight. For several minutes she couldn’t move, as if she herself had suddenly become catatonic.

Psychometric Idol

It wasn’t until a plastic replica was cast, perfect right down to the clasped plate in the ponderous skull—and a computer-generated imaging system that would reconstruct his flesh from every angle was installed—that the Museum of the London Hospital Medical College surrendered and sold the skeletal remains of John Merrick to the pop star Ricky Concertina.

Ricky was photographed at the opening of the new displays he had funded at the museum—was shown studying Merrick’s meticulous replica of St. Philip’s Church with an expression of reverence. But he was also photographed later with the gnarled, listing skeleton he had purchased, his arm slung around those jagged shoulders and a grin glittering from below his immense dark glasses.