Shaman, Healer, Heretic (33 page)

“Oh gods,” Livvy whimpered.

It was her mother.

“No!” she screamed.

“Why couldn’t you save me, Livvy?” asked her mother.

Livvy tried to jerk free but couldn’t.

“She’s not really very good at saving people,” said Indra.

“She pawned your ring, you know,” said Sunny.

Her mom slowly shook her head with a sad little smile. “I know, honey, don’t worry about it.”

“I had to pawn the ring!” she yelled.

“It’s all right, honey. You just wake up now.”

“But I can’t!”

“Liv! Wake up!” SK shouted.

Suddenly, her eyes flew open and her arms flailed.

“Let go!” Livvy yelled, before she realized that she didn’t know where she was or what was going on.

“Take it easy,” said SK. “You’re all right.”

“SK,” she asked, searching for his face, breathing hard. The room was dark. “SK, is that you?”

“Yes, it’s me. You’re at my place. You’ve been sleeping on the couch. Here, let me get a light.” He turned on a small table lamp.

She blinked, sat up, and looked around the room, slowly recognizing it but feeling a strange dislocation.

“You were having a nightmare,” he said. “You were screaming.”

She pushed her hair back out of her face, and he sat on the couch near her feet.

“I’m sorry I woke you up,” she said, calming down. “What time is it?”

“Four in the morning. You’ve been asleep for nearly fifteen hours. I think you were tired.”

He was wearing black silk pajamas and a black robe but his hair was a mess. She thought for a moment about what she must look like.

“SK,” she said, hesitantly. “Do you think I did the right thing?”

“Look,” he said. “You can’t blame yourself for Sunny’s death. You weren’t even there.”

“She wouldn’t have been there if it weren’t for me.”

“She was a big girl. She was making her own decisions.”

“And what about Min?”

SK shook his head. “Liv, you were trying to do the right thing.”

“A lot of good it did,” Livvy said. “A lot of good it’s done everybody.”

“Hey,” he said, tapping her feet through the blankets. “Cut that out. At least you tried. You tried to do something. And, yes, I do think you did the right thing.”
 

He ran his hands through his hair.
 

“I just don’t know if there’s any real way to stop what’s happening,” he said finally.

“Tiamat in the Middleworld,” said Livvy. “No way in or out now. How did she get there? How did she get loose in the first place?”

“I don’t know. After all this time…” He shrugged. “But we’ve been over this. It comes down to finding Marduk, and that’s kind of where we left off.”

“Right,” said Livvy, but she was starting to think. “Nobody’s ever seen his ziggurat though. That’s what they were trying to confirm when…when Sunny died.”

SK nodded, stifling a yawn.

“It has to be in the Upperworld,” said Livvy.

“I imagine you’re right, not that it matters. Not with Tiamat waiting in the Middleworld now.”

“No, I suppose not.”

They were both quiet for a moment.

“Well,” said SK, getting up. “I think–”

“What if you didn’t have to go through the Middleworld to get to the Upperworld?” asked Livvy.

“What?”

“I mean, do you
have
to go through the Middleworld first?”

“That’s the only way I’ve ever heard of it being done,” said SK, thrusting his hands into his bathrobe. “From the little I’ve heard.”

“Me too,” she agreed, moving the blankets aside and putting her feet on the floor. “But what if there was a way to bypass it? I mean, they’re all Multiverse.”

“Not really,” said SK. “The Middleworld is the one most like this one. That’s why it’s the first one to be accessed. I’ve even heard that some shamans can only get to the Middleworld, not the others. They stop there.” He shrugged. “Not very good shamans, but shamans nonetheless.”

“Well, that’s kind of what I’m saying,” she said. “Maybe there are shamans who don’t need to use the Middleworld and can get directly into the others.”

SK thought about it. She watched his gaze drift over to the bookcase.

“There’s no precedent for it,” he said. “I’ve never heard of such a thing.”

“Me either, but the more I learn, the more I realize there are all kinds of things I’ve never heard of.” She considered for a moment. “But there might be someone that we can ask. And if she doesn’t know, she might know someone who does. I can ask Mamacita.”

“She’s not even a shaman,” he scoffed.

“Well, I wonder about that sometimes. Just little things she says, as though she’s been there.”

“She meets a lot of shamans, and wanna-bes. She can talk the talk, but so can I.”

“Well, it’s not going to hurt to ask,” she said flatly, standing up.

“We’re not going now, are we?” he asked, surprised.

“No,” she said, heading to the kitchen. She switched on the light, and they both blinked against the brightness. “I was wondering if there was anything to eat?”

“Sure,” he said, smiling. “I guess if we’re not going back to sleep, we might as well eat.”

“I feel like I haven’t eaten in a week,” she said, as he opened the refrigerator door.

“Look, we’re in luck,” he said, bringing out a plastic container. “Stew.”

He dished out and then microwaved two bowls. As he placed them on the counter, steaming, he yawned. Livvy realized that, even though this was SK, probably the last thing he wanted to do right now was eat. He probably wanted to go right back to sleep.

But the last thing that Livvy wanted was to be alone, and she definitely didn’t want to go back to sleep. She sensed that somehow SK knew that.

“What?” he said, taking his seat.

She realized she’d been smiling at him.

“Nothing,” she said.
 

THE POSTMORTEM SPASM wasn’t dwelt on much in medical school, but Dr. Dorsey had seen a thing or two while officiating in basement admissions, better known as the hospital morgue. Most of the time a review of the chart was all that was necessary for a doctor to establish the cause of death. Cancer was cancer. It didn’t take an autopsy to reveal that cancer had killed a patient. Even so, bodies could not be released to the funeral homes until he had signed off, which meant he was down here on nearly a daily basis.

The sheet twitched again.

The degree of rigor mortis was often used in forensic investigations to help establish a time of death. However, most people outside the medical and funeral home industries didn’t know that there was a progression to it, peaking at about twelve hours after death and then lessening. It was during that time that a postmortem spasm was most likely to occur.

Dr. Dorsey looked back to the chart at the end of the gurney. Before they bagged and tagged the cadaver, he would need to complete the paperwork, but he had never gotten used to the postmortem spasms. In fact, he hated it. This one was particularly twitchy.

He inched toward the chart. If any of his colleagues could see him now, they’d laugh him out of the lounge.

It wasn’t clear what produced the spasms. Directly after death, it could be explained by the residual firing of the neurons or the body relaxing, since rigor mortis didn’t start for three hours. This long after death, however, there was little data, only anecdotes.

As he reached for the chart, the sheet moved so slowly that he didn’t realize it at first. He stopped, hand in mid-air. The sheet was definitely moving. The far end of it was rising. The corpse was sitting up.

“Oh Jesus,” he muttered, as he grabbed the clipboard and backed up.

He had heard of cadavers jackknifing, in particularly violent spasms, and that was the last thing he wanted to see. Before the sheet could slip from the face, he turned and hurried to the exit. He slammed his hand down on the large metal button to open the double doors. As he waited for them to open, he saw a reflection in the window glass.

“Oh my God,” he said, as the door swung open.

He shouldn’t have looked. Its eyes were open.

He rushed out and hit the close button as he ran by. Fleeing through the outer door without turning around, he pounded his fist down on that close button too. Now moving at a full run, he reached the elevator and jabbed the call button several times before running over to the stairwell.

Forget the elevator. He’d take the stairs to the ground floor and the elevator from there. An orderly could come back down for the bag and tag.

LIVVY CREPT CLOSE to the door, knocking so faintly that no one would hear. She pushed it open slowly and peeked in. There didn’t seem to be anyone there at first, but as she came into Min’s room she saw Sam, the brother, dozing in the chair. He started awake when the door closed.

“Sorry,” she whispered.

“That’s okay,” he said, not quite awake. Then he realized who she was. “My parents aren’t here. They went home to take a shower and change.”

He had a hospital blanket draped around his shoulders and his hoodie was up.

“How’s she doing?” said Livvy, looking down at Min, who looked like she’d lost weight.

There still wasn’t a feeding tube, but there was a ventilator. At least her parents had allowed that.

“Not too good,” he said, sitting up.

Livvy went to the bedside, carefully lifted the blanket so as not to disturb the saline drip, and felt Min’s hand. It was cool to the touch.

“Some different doctor stopped by, and they want to run some test on her brain,” said Sam.

Livvy nodded slowly. They wanted to check brain activity, probably trying to decide if she was still alive. The breathing tube had been inserted but, without the feeding tube, she would starve to death.

It was a harsh fact of hospital life, but they were there to help those that could be helped. Those they couldn’t help would be referred to a hospice organization to make the end of their lives as comfortable as possible.

“I haven’t given up,” Livvy said to Min. “You can’t either.”

She squeezed her hand before putting the blanket back in place.

“She was breathing so hard,” said Sam. “It seemed like it was…painful.” His eyes had a haunted look. “That’s when they said it was okay to put in the breathing tube.”

“They still don’t want a feeding tube?” asked Livvy.

“No,” he said, flatly, as though he was imitating them, but it was subconscious. “They don’t want to put it off, if it’s going to happen.”

He was studiously avoiding the word ‘die.’

“Is she suffering?” he whispered.

Who knows?
thought Livvy. Wherever her spirit was right now, who knows.

“No, she doesn’t feel a thing.”

He sniffed and wiped his nose on the blanket. Livvy wanted to hug him, tell him that she was going to save his sister, tell him it was all going to be all right. Instead, though, she gripped the bed railing and stared down at her white knuckles.

“Can’t you do something?” he said finally. “I don’t care what happened. I don’t care how she got like this. I just don’t want her to die.” He wiped his nose again. “Isn’t there something you can do?” he pleaded.

“I don’t know,” she said and paused.

His eyes teared up as he stared at her and then he looked back at Min, as did Livvy.

“But what I do know is that I have to try. And I will,” Livvy said. Livvy looked back to him. “I will do anything and everything that I can. I promise you that.”

Some of the tension in his shoulders seemed to lessen.

The door opened without a knock, and a nursing aide came in, rolling a blood pressure machine. She paused when she saw Livvy. Livvy didn’t recognize her but, for a moment, she seemed like she was about to leave and call a nurse. Instead, she continued into the room.

“Time to take a blood pressure reading,” she chirped, although neither Livvy nor Sam responded.

Livvy watched as the cuff inflated and the machine beeped. The nurse’s aide seemed to be watching her out of the corner of her eye. The machine finished and deflated.

“85 over 50,” she said, as she coiled the tubing back up and placed it in the metal basket. She stole another look at Livvy.

That’s low
, thought Livvy,
very low
. As the nurse’s aide left, Min’s brother looked at Livvy. He also knew the readings weren’t good.

“Hurry,” he said, quietly. “I think if you’re going to help her, you better hurry.”

“Don’t let them remove the breathing tube,” she said, heading to the door.

“I’ll do my best,” he said.

“Me too.”
 

AS JACK GOT dressed for work, he heard the doorbell ring. He was pulling on his socks at the side of the bed and looked over at the alarm clock.