Deathwatch - Final (12 page)

- 27-

T
he day before the wake John Madison and Sons laid Andrew's corpse out in the library. I went in to introduce myself.

"Granville." Madison Senior, a stout fiftyish man built like a cistern, bowed. He was civil, but distant.

  There was only one son in the firm apparently. Young John. He was about my own age, knobby and thin. His chief duty seemed to be to look properly tragic and to hide a set of overlapped and slightly crossed front teeth behind lips that were pressed in a grim line.

"You'll excuse us now," Madison Senior intoned, shutting me out, banging the doors closed to get on with his work.

I told myself to calm down, to keep paranoia at bay, and watched surreptitiously from a crack in the double doors as they arranged Andrew in his mahogany casket. The rigor mortis had left the body; they were washing the flaccid skin with alcohol swabs.

"Do you think he did it?" Young John asked. "Eberhardt was right--there's no marks."

"Never jump to conclusions--it doesn't do in this business," the elder sniffed, unfolding Andrew's arms from his chest. Still, I saw his eyes riveted on the delicate inner crease of the elbow.

I didn't want to hear any more, and I crept away.

***

After they left I went into the semi-darkened room. Andrew was wearing a starched shirt, his best black cutaway coat. I guessed it was Madison himself who powdered the face, applied the pancake make-up, brushed the thinning hair. They'd inserted a gardenia in the buttonhole of his suit, but the scent of the funeral flowers--lilies, tuberoses, violets--was overpowering.

I found myself standing by the casket, staring at the little details. The stitching on the cuff of his jacket, the tufted blue upholstery Saunders lay on. His shoes--shiny patent leather evening slippers--were incongruously made for dancing.

I let my fingers curl over the edge of the wood.

Suddenly I smelled the heavy musk of sherry--as if the corpse had been drinking at its own funeral party.

Perhaps formaldehyde smelled more like alcohol than I realized.

I bent, intending to sniff gardenia.

Instead I felt a warm puff of air gently brushing my forehead and my right cheek. A cloud of sweet wine assailed me and I drew back in confusion. Could one ghost create another? No, it couldn't be. He was dead! That smell--it was from the chemicals!

"He wasn't embalmed," Ellie said.

I started at her voice, turned, staring through the open doors at taunting green eyes. She stared back.

Then, clumsily, Ellie wheeled herself down the hall.

- 28 -

"
S
tuart," Abby cried out, "Stuart!" she called again. It was perhaps two in the morning. I'd gone to bed with nothing resolved in my mind, but I told myself here at least was something I might follow through with, one thing I might be good at: comforting a child down with the nightmare.

"She came to me," Abby wept when I went in to ssh her. "In my dreams--oh God, Stuart she crept right in while I was sleeping and took me the way I'd pick up a ragdoll until I had no will and there was nothing of me at all."

Abby was crying hard, her hand slipped out from the blankets and her fingers stole into mine. "Why? Why does she do it? How can she do it, if I don't want her to?" Now the child's hand withdrew and she made a fist, pummeling it against her drawn up knee.

Abby was alone in the nursery. The wide empty bed, her wavy hair hanging down made her look younger, more innocent.  "Maybe at first I wished she'd come," Abby said, her voice thick with tears, "but I don't now and here she is--sucking up my soul."

"I've thought about it," I said. My hand went to her girl's bony arm. "I've thought about it late in the night, trying to understand same as you." I paused. "She's cancer, Abby. She's a cancer."

Abby's eyes looked deeply into mine. I saw the question lurking in her wide-eyed stare and I went on. "Cancer--it's a kind of madness--not of the mind--but of the physical self. Do you know why?"

"No," she shook her head, the strands of hair undulating gently over her upturned knees.

"Because it runs amok and doesn't know when to stop. Cancer--it can only live because it has a host in healthy cells. Yet every time it multiplies, it destroys. But it's so mindless, it doesn't care and it'll keep on going ’til all the healthy tissue—

’til the very body that supports it--is eaten away and cannot live," I said.

Abby looked up, uncomprehending, her tiny knot of a chin with its heartbreaking cleft tilted up at me.

"Don't you see what I mean?"

"No," she said. I saw her china blue eyes brim, the whites going the silver bright of a mirror.

"Look here," I said, thinking medical terms were beyond her. I would appeal to her imagination, but because I knew what I had to say would terrify her, I let my hand steal out to lightly caress the soft filaments of red hair, and to touch--ever so gently--the whitened brow. "I've done some reading about demons, possession."

She gasped--a hard short intake of breath, and now her hand, unwittingly I was sure, fluttered and lit on the bony cap of my knee. "Demons," she said.

"The thing about the undead--they're just like cancer. They'll go on taking from the host, getting stronger and stronger."

Her hand grazed my knee again, I couldn't look at her. "They're driven same as disease--so stupid, mindless they don't seem to realize if they kill what keeps them alive, they die too. All that matters to these demons is control, winning. They don't see the human side at all--that winning is really losing."

"Lost," she breathed. "Only one can live, only one can be chosen." Her hand fell away, her head and shoulders slumped downward.

And I saw that my words, like the cruelest of knives, sank inside the tender flesh of her understanding.

***

"Oh my God, Stuart, what can we do?"

Now, her hands clasped my wrist painfully, moving in opposite directions like those of a widow woman watching a stage melodrama and hanging mindlessly onto the velvet-clad bar in the first row of the balcony.

"Abby, you're hurting my skin."

"Oh, I've given you an Indian burn." The hands flew off my thick wrist. "Sorry."

I nodded.

"But what'll we do?"    

Without meaning to, I spoke my thought aloud. "Ruth said your mother was able to come back because you two were separated."

A light dawned in her eyes, her words came in a slow stammer. "Then--then you must do the surgery, beloved," she said, her eyes peering into the depths of mine.

"Surgery--"

"No one knows we've been separated. I've been thinking about what Ellie said. She's right. They'll accuse you of my father's murder. But if we...if we're reattached and Ellie and I are one, then my mother can't intervene."

"What are you saying? Abby, it will be the worse for me!" I shouted, panic rising inside me. "If they believe you two can't move about and are cripples, there is no other conclusion! That only leaves me to have done it! Don't you see, even if one of you was known to hate him---to despise him, wish him in his grave a thousand times a thousand days over--together, attached--she'd have to convince her sister to carry out the deed! Two in tandem." I held up my two fingers locked along the vertical of the knuckles. "All right, one might be mad, one might be vengeful--but two! It would take the two of you to carry out the crime!" I'd slipped to my knees and now my big head was buried between her slight thighs, and I felt her hands moving through the thatch of my hair.

"In your own way you're telling me because of the amputation they might think it was Ellie--"

"Regina had control, but it was her!"

"Are you protecting me, or yourself?"

"Both," I cried.

"Ssh, we have now."

"Now," I said, turning my own tear-streaked face up to hers.

"Yes, we have this moment." She paused. "But afterwards, you've got to take Ellie..."

"Take her--"

"Stuart," she pleaded, "it's her only chance...."

"But you don't make sense," I said. "How will taking Ellie prevent Regina from breaking though?" I got up to pace. "You said maybe she doesn't even need you--either of you--to come through!"

"I was wrong. She might not need our willingness or consent, but she needs a body. I have your love. And I'm afraid for Ellie, because if I can't control her--"

"Please." I stopped, took her hands in mine. "Forget this...so-called surgery. Let's just leave, go away--you and me."

She lifted her head, her eyes were bright. Her voice was the strongest, bravest thing I ever heard. Soft and resigned, it went to a place I could not understand with any part of my fallen mind, my guilt-tortured soul.

"No. Because I see the surgery now in a way that defies the sense, the logic of the thing, but I know in my soul it has to be done--the same way I know the bluebird that makes its nest every spring in yonder apple tree."

I'd caught the word--it was one of my own, and even if I was in country New York, ‘yonder’ was not a term of that place or time. I only fell into using it when my accent slipped through drink or fatigue--still, Abby had usurped my southernism.

I smiled, felt my eyes crinkling at the corners to show my pleasure at this small token of her love and esteem, but before I could comment, she went on, holding her small hand up to stop me from breaking in on her determined mood.

"I do love you, Stuart. And I know you have to reattach me and Ellie."

My mind went blank. It was as if someone had told me I must go down to Andrew's cabinet, fill a syringe with a lethal dose of opium and put it into her. I couldn't get it straight; no, I could not do it.

"It's the only way," she said, her voice barely audible.

"You say I must do a surgery that is anathema to me." I turned on her. "Do you know you're asking me to go against everything I believe in, everything that was ever a dream to me?" I put my hands on my hips. I was suddenly furious. "Yes." I shrieked, "
Yes!
I almost threw it completely away for absinthe and liquor in piano bars and the sleezy red lace that covered the white limbs on the whores in New Orleans." I knocked my fist against the center of my chest: "But that doesn't make the dream of being a doctor--a healer!--less real. It doesn't! Abby, however I hurt myself, whatever I did wrong--it doesn't make my dream less real!

"I came here because I thought there was a speck of a chance I could salvage what was left of that dream and find myself!

"I cannot do what you are asking--not even if Regina swoops down on me like some wild harpy and kills me tonight."

"She won't." Abby began to cry. "She won't because that would be too quick and easy and she needs your suffering."

Our eyes locked, and Abby suddenly raised her slim, hairless arms towards me.

"Hold me, Stuart," she whispered.

Her breasts were the merest buds; her child's round belly was only beginning to flatten, to be drawn smooth by the slight adolescent flare in her hips. I gazed at her, and I saw a face that was caught between the dreams of girlish youth and womanhood.

And God help me it was her innocence that spoke to me.

I took her with the part of me that was man enough to be slow and gentle and sweet. I told myself I was Poe with his Virginia.

Let them kill me for that crime, I thought.

I took her.

And we both loved it.

***

"Ewing Eberhardt's evidence is going to send you the gallows," Abby said. "I know Ellie loves you. It's such a little thing, my darling."

Abby's small hand crushed the flesh between my jaw bone and my temple. It was not her touch--that was featherlight. It was the tingling sensation of her fingers sweeping over my flesh with tenderness and love--that was crush enough for me.

"How can I?"

"Because I ask it, because you must."

I was young in those days, so instead of giving myself over again immediately to my beloved, I trusted I would have stamina enough later.

I wiped the dampness from between my legs with a crusty towel, and I went to the room down the hall where her sister slept.

I woke her, saw those blue eyes fill with something like the hope of the world.

 I lay down next to her; at the same instant I felt Regina breaking through, and it was hers--the adult body I made love to for the second time that night. I heard her moans when my tongue pressed deep inside her. I felt her woman's wet damping my chin in the hard crinkly curls of her pubes.

It was Regina--and yet whenever I happened to look up from the business I cared not a damn about, I'd have sworn, it was a child's adoring blue eyes I looked into.

"You chose me," she whispered, her swollen crippled body pressing against mine. "You love me."

I did not have the heart to tell her it was her sister's love that brought me to her bed, her sister's wish that for this one and only time Ellie would have what she wanted.

So, in a way I do not understand even to this day, I satisfied all three women and myself.

***

I came back to sleep with Abby; wanting no more than to feel her slight weight lying in my weary arms. But the minute I skinned back the covers to lie next to her, her small palm was mashing the curls in the center of my chest above my solar plexus.

"No--you have to get up."

"Abby, I'm dead dog weary, and all I want to do is crawl between clean sheets."

"Tomorrow is the funeral."

"Uh huh," I said, fatigue making my eyelids droop half mast. "And that sonofabitch, Eberhardt will be measuring my hide for just the right size trophy to span his chimney piece."

My head was crashed into the pillow; it was so late at night I could feel my beard stubble scraping the soft cotton of the pillow slip. I began to drift downwards, skimming the edges of that dozy, pre-sleep state.