Journals of Eleanor Druse, The (Digital Picture Book) (23 page)

Poor Peggy had a difficult labor interspersed by periods of fitful sleep fraught with nightmares. In the morning, her child, a little girl, was delivered stillborn. Tragedy enough for any woman to bear.

Then Peggy related the following to Madeline. While still in labor and during one of her erratic respites of sleep, Peggy had a graphic, terrifying nightmare. She told Madeline that she dreamed she was in a church with her newborn baby. The child was in her christening clothes, dressed in radiant white, awaiting baptism. Suddenly Peggy heard blasts from the organ in the choir loft. A pipe organ booming out a dirge, which made the very pews shake and the flagstones vibrate under her feet.

Peggy dreamed that out in the churchyard, a grave yawned open, and an old man dressed in tattered black clothes rose out of the earth. He was bald, with a hideous livid scar running the length of his skull-like head. He rushed into the church and tore the child from her arms. The deafening music made it impossible for anyone to hear Peggy’s cries for help. She chased the hideous old man back out to the churchyard, where she saw him carry the infant to the grave.

She stood by helplessly and watched as the earth closed over them both forever.

The music stopped. Peggy awoke, and the next morning—

A few years later, Peggy happened to look over Madeline’s shoulder while her mom was going through papers and files. Peggy pointed to the photo of Dr. Ebenezer Gottreich and cried out in speechless recognition.

I shook all over, blessed myself, and clutched at the crucifix on my necklace and my crystal. The true horror was imagining poor Madeline, thinking she had made a clean getaway from the horrors of this world, instead waking up in Kingdom Hospital, knowing that Gottreich still roamed there.

God never leaves us alone with such horror and desolation. He is always with us. Our faith tells us that. It’s true I could no longer look at those wrenching passages of Madeline’s papers, but another batch caught my eye, because I saw that it was captioned: “The Little Girl.”

In it, Madeline described how the little girl had saved everyone in the old hospital by ringing her bell the day of the fire in 1939. How Madeline hoped that the little girl had finally found rest. How Maddy and I had asked the little girl to tell us her name, but she was too afraid of us to let us help her.

Then a series of passages, wherein Madeline described how as little Maddy Kruger with the whooping cough in the Old Kingdom Hospital, she had tried to reach the little girl.

Maddy’s grandmother had fallen seriously ill and had been confined at the old hospital during the same time that we had been treated there for whooping cough. As I read Maddy’s descriptions, I seemed to remember the old lady. She’d had consumption and smelled of ashes and wax, as if she was already in a coffin. Like us, the old lady had a bad cough, but hers was different. She was old, and her disease had earned its name by consuming people.

Maddy’s grandma was going to die. Soon.

But before she did, Madeline told the old woman about the little girl. How Maddy had never heard a cry from anyone, living or dead, that was so sad. Maddy’s grandmother must have been a true believer in the world of the spirits, because she told Maddy that she would look for the little girl when she passed through the valley that separates this life from the next. Her grandma told Maddy to bring a candle to her bedside at the hour of her death, and the old lady would show her how to reach the little girl’s spirit.

Madeline described the session at some length. When the life was almost out of her grandma, the old lady told her to light the candle. Then she held Maddy’s hand and said, “I’ll be in the borderlands for only a very short time. A radiant light will appear and I’ll be drawn toward it. But for a few seconds, I will be in between. If the little girl is lost there and if I find her, I will try to lead her to the light. If I find the little girl, I will blow the candle flame and make it stutter for you. If I can get her to follow me to the light, I’ll blow it twice.”

I almost wept imagining little Maddy bravely holding her grandmama’s hand, eagerly watching the candle flame for some sign that the little girl had found rest. According to Maddy’s notes, she was talking to her grandma after she’d died.

“Did you find her? Did you find the little girl, Grandma?”

The flame guttered and blew sideways.

“Yes, oh, that’s good,” Maddy had said. “Can you show her the light? Can you show her how to cross over and find rest?”

The poor child stared at the candle and waited until the nurse came in and led her away.

Her grandma was gone and the little girl still lost. Her grandma had warned her that this might happen, because the light is magnetic and it pulls you into its divine warmth. Confused and frightened spirits can’t find it. They get lost in between in the First State after death, with no one to help them.

When I finished reading this passage, I felt as if someone had touched a bare electrical cord somewhere at the base of my spine.

I sat bolt upright, looked out the window, and cried, “Lenny!”

THE NEXT MORNING, I
was sitting at my window with the paper, sipping my tea, wondering how I was going to get back in to see poor dear Lenny. I’d called in to check on him, and Brick Bannerman reported that he was barely conscious, fading in and out—more out than in, lately. His primary physician was Dr. Louis Traff, who was not about to grant me permission to visit, and Lenny was not alert enough to do so himself. So I was momentarily bereft. He could go at any time, and I had to be there for that. We were soulmates, lovers, never mind that we didn’t have papers recognized by the police. I also needed to reach the little girl again by riding elevator
2
to the sunshine ward. She’d cried out to me how many times now? But she hadn’t found the courage to use words. I needed to know her name, needed to know the circumstances of her death, why and how she came to be lost in the land between, where darkness is the only light.

Bobby was late, and I was just starting to think he must have put in to work a double for the overtime, something he wouldn’t normally do. He’d just bought a new computer last month, which meant he was done with discretionary consumer spending for another two years at least, and I couldn’t imagine him working overtime to save for anything else. Sure enough, fifteen minutes later he pulled his pickup into the garage and came in looking more harried than usual.

“You’re late. Did you go out for some breakfast with Ollie and Danny?”

“No, Mum. It was hell night at the Kingdom.”

“What happened, Bobby?”

“Another earthquake, for starters,” he said. “Then the usual business hauling people here and there and cleaning up again. ”

“I didn’t feel any earthquakes,” I said. “You know I’m a light sleeper. I didn’t feel one the night Madeline died either, Bobby. How is that?”

“They call them focal earthquakes. They don’t affect the surrounding structures,” he said. “They have some seismologist coming in from Berkeley to measure them and see if anything can be done about them.”

I sat up and paid attention in a hurry.

“So it’s a peculiar sort of earthquake, is it, Bobby? As in it only affects the hospital? What else happened? Any medical emergencies? Any little girls get in trouble?”

His mouth fell open like an unhinged gate.

“Who did you talk to, Mum? Did you call Brick Bannerman this morning? Did she tell you about the trouble with the little girl in the operating room?”

I was up and out of my chair and gathering my things.

“What? Mum? What are you doing?”

“I’m going to the hospital, Bobby. It’ll take me just a few minutes to pack.”

“Pack?”

“I’m checking back in,” I said. “I’m feeling quite poorly. Very poorly. I’m pins and needles all up and down my left arm. Prickling sensations, stabbing pains. It could be the early symptoms of another seizure.”

“You don’t have seizures, Mum. Remember? You’re clean. You checked out. Your scans are normal. There’s nothing there to cause seizures any more. I think they gave up on you, Mum. They just think you’re daffy, not an epileptic.”

“Well, then I’m being admitted for daffiness and for tingling in my extremities. Bobby, it could be MS, for goodness sake. I’m still young, it could ruin the rest of my life.”

Bobby drove me to the Kingdom and filled me in on some of the particulars, although he hadn’t paid all that much attention to the details of yet another medical tragedy coming down the assembly line. A neurosurgeon, one of the recruits they’d brought in to staff the new neurosciences division, had performed emergency surgery on a little girl during the night. A Mona Klingerman. I knew the name because Renee Klingerman came from money and had been in the
Sun Journal
society pages, usually being recognized for her efforts at volunteering for various worthy causes. Now poor little Mona wasn’t quite waking up on cue, and the physicians were warning of various “deficits,” possibly permanent ones.

Bobby said the earthquake occurred during or shortly after the procedure, and that he and Otto had spent the rest of the shift downstairs cleaning up after it.

When I got to admitting, I was seen by a new doctor (fresh meat!), Christine Draper. I told her I’d been bothered for almost a week by a prickling sensation in my left hand and forearm—an annoying tingling, as if my arm had fallen asleep, then had never fully awakened and was stuck in some hypnopompic purgatory for accursed aged limbs. I also told her that I’d had an episode of vertigo. Several, and this time I almost pulled the refrigerator over on top of me. I made a pinch out of my index finger and thumb and told her I’d come
this close
to shattering my hip. Also, heart palpitations, skipped beats, chest pains.

Dr. Draper apparently heard enough. She admitted me for testing. I was ordered on bed rest because of intermittent vertigo, and she ordered some tests to rule out multiple sclerosis, Guillain-Barré syndrome, and other sensory neuropathies. She also ordered an MRI of my head, just to make sure that she wasn’t seeing new fallout from my previous head trauma.

After the MRI, I went to find Lenny on the sunshine ward.

Poor dear, he was nearly unresponsive. I smoothed his brow and whispered in his ear, telling him I would be there for him. I telephoned Bobby and told him to get to a florist and find me a nice big bag of rose petals, because if Lenny should suddenly take a turn for the worse, I wanted to be ready. We could keep them in the refrigerator up here if we had to.

I knew several of the other patients on the ward from my days as a volunteer, including Mrs. Eileen Kinney, a delightful woman with end-stage ovarian cancer. Eileen knew her Swedenborg like nobody’s business. She said that reading his descriptions of heaven were for her like reading a travelogue about a wonderful vacation spot where she’d already lived as a local.

She and I drew several of the others together around Lenny’s bed and began praying and meditating on the lives of those who had already gone before us. I decided that it was worth trying to contact any spirits that might be present. So I drew the shades and darkened the lights. Eileen and I began opening the lines of communication, in hopes of discovering a presence.

I felt Eileen’s hand twitch as I sensed what she also felt: Something cold and quite nearly reptilian was very near and approaching rapidly, a spiritual predator of some kind wearing the mark of the beast, no doubt. As he drew closer, I clutched my druse crystal and cried out.

I was certain it was Gottreich we would all be contending with soon. Dr. Rat with more Warfarin or a fresh ice pick, or on the prowl for another defenseless infant.

I couldn’t help but announce the presence to the others. “He’s getting closer. He has big blond hair. He’s tall. Ugly. Lost in his inner darkness. A terrible man! He means me harm.”

I gasped for air. I heard the presence at the door, angry, loud, abusive, full of hatred and wrath.

What came through the door left me winded and near circulatory shock. I again had the feeling that I was already dead and had fallen through the cracks to hell. Was I in Boston again? Sally Druse, are you so old and daffy that you can’t keep your infernal hospitals straight?

It was none other than the odious Dr. Stegman, he of Boston General Hospital, of which he had spoken so haughtily to me about. Almost a year ago? More? But how? Why? What diabolical confluence of malignant tides had washed him up on our shores? And why an entourage of physicians, including Dr. Hook and Dr. Draper, along with nurse Brick Bannerman? Again he swaggered out front, barking orders, just as he had in Boston.

I almost asked him.
Dr. Stegman, didn’t you once tell me that I would never find the likes of you in Lewisport? What are you doing in Maine, which is medically speaking nowhere near Boston, Massachusetts?

I had a feeling that it might have something to do with a fall from grace accelerated by a good plaintiffs’ lawyer.

I saw him glare at the others, so I promptly took full responsibility for the prayer circle.

He glared right back at me, and asked Brick, “Is this one Druse?”

The beast had forgotten me! I should have expected it. I had once been “interesting"; then I had been defined and billed and sent on my way. Now I was just another old biddy for him to vent his poisonous spleen upon.

As the drama unfolded, I learned that he was indeed in charge and that he was wroth to the point of apoplexy because new protocols, instituted by his highness, had been ignored, to wit: Dr. Draper had ordered an expensive new MRI scan of my noggin, without clearing the order through Stegman’s office. Furthermore, Stegman made it clear that the request would not have been approved because of my allegedly vague symptoms. He displayed the scan to everyone present and railed aloud about how it showed absolutely nothing in the way of abnormalities, as if only scans that found malignant brain tumors were worth doing. Then he turned the full measure of his ire on Dr. Hook, who, I later learned, had pretended that he’d ordered the scan to protect his lady, Dr. Draper, from Mussolini.