by Dean Koontz
In Pax’s mind, clear as speech, he heard Bibi say, Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers—perfectly pronounced, Petronella. If he had not been looking at her, he might have thought that she had indeed spoken, so clear and resonate were those words. But her lips didn’t move, and her brow remained smooth. Her eyelashes didn’t flutter, although in spite of her untroubled brow, her eyes moved ceaselessly beneath the lids: the rapid eye movements of a dreamer deep in dreams…perfectly pronounced, Petronella. Nothing like an auditory hallucination had happened to Pax before, and he found it more disturbing than he might have expected.
When his gaze rose from Bibi to Petronella, where she stood by the IV apparatus on the farther side of the hospital bed, Pax must have appeared to be unsettled by something more than his fiancée’s condition, because the nurse regarded him with concern. She cocked her head and asked, “Are you okay?”
He was manifestly not okay. Being shot at wasn’t as bad as this. There had been hard moments in tight places, with the world crumbling underfoot, when he had imagined his demise, when he would have preferred death to some of the immediate alternatives. But if Bibi perished, Pax would suffer death by proxy, and having died, he’d nonetheless be required to live in a world for which he no longer had a heart, one of the living dead. He loved her, yes, and he had asked her to marry him, yes, but until now, until here, he had not understood how completely the very threads of her were woven through him.
“Are you okay?”
Before Pax could think what to say to the nurse, Nancy spoke from the foot of the bed, her voice wrung by emotion. “I brought Bibi here last Tuesday. The worst day of my life. Dr. Chandra gave her the diagnosis Wednesday. It was such a very busy day, a terrible day. We wanted…We wanted to have dinner here that evening, like a defiance dinner….”
“Just the three of us,” Murphy continued, when Nancy could not. “Only primo takeout, like cheeseburgers with jalapeños and chili-cheese dogs and every damn thing you’re not supposed to eat, like what Nancy said, in defiance. But Bibi said we were tired and she was tired. She just wanted to eat a little something and use her laptop to research this damn brain cancer, she wanted to know all about it and fight it with everything she had.”
Red-eyed, cheeks rivuleted, mouth soft with grief, Nancy said, “That’s the last we ever talked to her.”
“It won’t be the last,” Murphy said. “Our girl will come out of this.” He put a hand on his wife’s shoulder. “She has to.”
Nancy said, “Sometime Wednesday night, she went into a coma. They say coma never happens with this disease, at least maybe not until the final stage, not until the very end. But it happened with her.”
None of this was news to Pax. He’d spoken with Nancy and Murphy by phone a few times since the blackout had been lifted Friday morning and the news about Abdullah al-Ghazali had broken. But they seemed to need to go over it again, and because Pax was rocked by the sight of Bibi as pale and still as a corpse on a catafalque, he was glad they wanted to hold forth, giving him time to gather himself.
He had needed almost two and a half days to learn what had happened to Bibi, to get an emergency leave, and to fly first by military craft and then by a civilian airline halfway around the world, at last to come to the hospital by cab rather than delay long enough to arrange a rental car. This was 1:00 Sunday afternoon, the sky blue and clear beyond the window. She had been in a coma almost four days.
As Petronella finished changing the IV bag, she said, “I was on duty Wednesday evening. She wasn’t a complainer, so when she said she had a bad headache, I gave her the maximum allowable meds. Headaches, sometimes bad ones, come with this kind of cancer. That was shortly before seven o’clock. It’s been a strange case ever since.”
Looking up from Bibi, Pax said, “Strange? Strange how?”
“Strange everywhichway,” said Petronella. “First, they can’t find a cause. The glioma web isn’t so large that it’s putting enough pressure on the brain to induce a coma. Brain imaging doesn’t show any intracerebral hemorrhage. No hypoxia, no significant impairment of blood flow to any part of the brain. Liver or kidney failure would intoxicate the brain with poisons. But her liver and kidneys—they’re chugging right along. And it’s a profound coma. I mean, this girl is deep under, yet”—she gestured toward the five-wave readout on the illuminated screen of the electroencephalograph—“just look at her brain waves.”
Paxton looked, but he didn’t know what to make of what he saw.
“I’ll give it to you in a few bites,” the nurse said, “but it’s a whole lot more complex than this. The doctor should explain it to you—if he can. Your girl is exhibiting the wave patterns of someone who’s asleep and someone who’s awake at the same time. And they’re nothing like the wave patterns of anyone in a coma. She seems to be way under, in that deep place where she isn’t even dreaming—but look at her eyes. That’s REM sleep, dream sleep.”
Murphy sought reassurance anywhere he could get it. “I think it’s hopeful, how weird it is.”
“I don’t see how it’s hopeful,” Nancy disagreed. “I’m scared.”
Reaching across the raised bedrail, Pax took Bibi’s right hand in his. It was warm but as limp as if it were boneless.
“After I gave her the medicine for the headache,” Petronella revealed, “the last thing I said to her was, ‘I’ll keep checking on you.’ And I did. I thought she was just sleeping.”
As with the Peter Piper tongue-twister, Pax heard Bibi’s clear voice saying, Quick now, here, now…At the still point…Neither from nor towards…Where past and future are gathered.
He knew those weren’t her words, that she was quoting someone. Although he felt that he should recognize the source, he did not.
On first hearing her voice, he’d thought it must be an auditory hallucination. This time he knew it was nothing as simple as that, nothing for which he could fault either his hearing or imagination. But if he knew what it wasn’t, he didn’t yet understand what it was.
On the farther side of the bed, where Petronella had seconds earlier recalled the last thing she’d said to Bibi, the nurse turned her attention from Pax to her patient—and did something between a shocked recoil and a comic double take. It was one of those moments that sometimes caused Bibi to wonder aloud whether human reactions were these days what they had always been or if more than a century of movies had influenced our response to every stimulus, so that in the instant between the experience and our processing of it, we were unconsciously reminded of Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn, Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence, of how they had reacted in similar situations in films, tailoring our performances to resemble theirs, our natural human responses distorted.
Eyes wide, raising one hand to her breast, stunned by something that focused her intently on the left side of Bibi’s face, Petronella said, “What the blue blazes is this?”
On Bibi’s right, Pax could not see what was happening, but from the foot of the bed, Nancy saw, and Murphy saw, and they cried out.
Paxton released Bibi’s limp hand and circled the hospital bed in time to see the abrasions finish spreading across the helix and antihelix and lobe of her left ear, tiny beads of blood forming in the wake of the injury, which seemed to have no cause, appearing as magically as stigmata. The crimson drops swelled from the damaged tissue and, with impossible acceleration, thickened into the gooey coagulum of first-stage healing. As that occurred, with it came a bruise originating at her left temple, at first the watered red of a cheap vino on the darker end of the blush-wine spectrum, seeping through the flesh along her jaw line. Nancy said, “Ohgod, ohgod,” and shuddered with dread, no doubt thinking the same thing that had alarmed Pax: that this bruise and worse wounds would develop across Bibi’s face until before them would lie a woman afflicted with some bizarre disease, the effects of which mimicked a brutal beating. As the bruise reached her chin and spread no farther, as it darkened to burgundy and then to plum, and as the sticky clots of b
lood began to dry into a crust on her ear, a small cut bloomed crimson at the left corner of her mouth, and the flesh swelled slightly. This new wound would have bled down her chin if it had not, as the injuries before it, progressed in mere seconds from fresh laceration to first-stage healing. With that, the stigmata ceased forming, and the injuries stabilized. At least for the moment.
Paralyzed by the spectacle of Bibi’s transformation but then stung into action when the changes stopped, Petronella snatched up the call button that was looped by its cord around the bed railing, and she connected with the fourth-floor nursing station. With an authority born of years of patient crises successfully resolved, she told the responding nurse that she needed to see the shift supervisor urgently in Room 456. “We’ve got a situation here.”
“What just happened to my girl?” Nancy demanded of the nurse with uncharacteristic and unwarranted accusation. Reason had been frightened out of her, and anger rather than unreason had replaced it. “What the hell happened to her poor sweet face?”
Murphy put an arm around her and, in a voice pressed thin by anxiety, said, “Easy, honey, easy, she doesn’t know what happened.” When Nancy tried to throw off his arm, he held her tighter. “Nobody could know what that was. That was fully crazy. But Bibi’s going to be all right.”
“Look at her, look at what’s happening to her. She’s not all right, damn it.”
“No, but she’s going to be. She’ll walk the board as good as anyone, better than you and me, like always.”
Nancy held fast to her anger, bristled with it, and it seemed that her short shaggy hair responded to some electrical charge in the air. If her eyes did not actually flash, they appeared to flash, and the muscles bulged along her clenched jaws. But it was useless anger in that it had no target, human or otherwise, and was in fact less real than it was a desperate defense against the despair that a surrender to fate encouraged.
Regarding the traveling lines of light spiking left to right across Bibi’s cardiac monitor, Petronella said aloud but mostly to herself, “Her heart rate never changed. Or her blood pressure.”
Pax stood immobilized and bewildered by what he had witnessed, which was not good. Whether ambushed or leading a planned assault, he was always quick to respond to events, not the least reluctant to change strategy and tactics. Considered action was always better than considered inaction, but you had to have something to consider, hard facts and a set of circumstances that allowed commonsense analysis. He knew that the face of this beloved woman bore the marks of a beating, not evidence of disease. Having tracked down some of the worst psychopaths who had made the news in the past several years, trailing in the wake of evil, Pax had seen enough women and men after they had been beaten to extract information from them, to teach them to fear the new boss, and just for the pleasure of violence. He knew what he was looking at, and he yearned—with an adolescent passion for vengeance and with a grown man’s loathing of cruelty—to find and kill whoever had done this to Bibi. One big problem. Anyone not present for the flowering of the stigmata might think him insane if he gave voice to the thought, but the perpetrator seemed to be a ghost that attacked her in some realm to which Pax had no access, an Elsewhere that she at the moment occupied in addition to this world of her birth.
The shift supervisor, Julia, fortyish and pumped, with the glow and stride of a fitness fanatic, bustled into the room, received a report from Petronella, and regarded Pax with evident suspicion, no doubt because of his size but also because of the thunderstorm of an expression that had occupied his face since he had watched Bibi bleed and bruise. Any doubt that Julia might have had about Petronella’s incredible story evaporated when she took a closer look at Bibi’s injuries and saw that they were not fresh. She had been in the room less than an hour earlier, to reset the cardiac monitor when an alarm sounded for no good reason, which happened from time to time; and on that visit, Bibi’s face had been unmarked.
No less mystified than the rest of them, Julia nevertheless had the priorities of a good manager in this age of endless litigation. She wanted everyone to remain where they were until she could get the chief of hospital security to film interviews with them in situ. Nancy’s misplaced anger flared, but Murphy quickly soothed her, and Julia promised to return in ten minutes.
In the absence of the shift supervisor, the conversation did not become as animated as Pax expected. The four of them had been witness to an extraordinary event, and although they had seen precisely the same thing from the same angle, the normal human tendency in the face of the unknown was to rehash the experience until the life had been talked out of it, until they had spun off into a confabulation about such tenuously related subjects as UFOs, Bigfoot, and poltergeists. Perhaps they were constrained by the fact that Bibi’s life, already being stolen from her by brain cancer, suddenly appeared to be in even more immediate jeopardy from an enemy unknown and, for the moment, seemingly unknowable. What little they said to one another was less speculation than words of comfort, and their attention was less on one another than on the dear girl in the bed, to whom some other injury might at any moment be inflicted by a phantom presence.
Keeping her promise to the minute, Julia returned with the chief of hospital security, a former homicide detective who had retired in his early fifties to begin a second and less risky career. He was a white-haired long-faced large-boned figure with a natural dignity that might have made him seem less like a cop than like a judge, if judges these days had still been as reliably dignified as they had once been. His name was Edgar Alwine. He introduced himself to Nancy and Murphy and Pax, repeating his name and title to each, as if they could hear him only when addressed directly eye to eye. His handshake was firm, his manner warm, and Pax liked the guy.
Alwine asked Nancy and Murphy for permission to record close-ups of their daughter’s facial injuries, assuring them that the images would remain part of her file, not to be distributed beyond a limited number of the medical staff. He’d hardly begun to operate the camera, however, when he exclaimed at something, and everyone crowded around the bed to witness another inexplicable blackening of Bibi’s body, captured this time on film as it occurred.
This time Bibi’s face did not serve as the canvas, and the medium of disfigurement wasn’t bruising and abrasion. Her arms lay at length above the top sheet and thin blanket. The right sleeve of her pajamas was rucked up halfway to her elbow. On her bared forearm, about two inches above her wrist bones, neatly formed black letters began to appear one at a time, as if her skin were parchment on which an invisible penman were printing his brand, to lay claim to her, body and soul. Although the words included no curse or demonic name, the crisp black letters appeared one after the other with such implacable intent that they could be regarded only as an ominous sign, no matter what their ultimate meaning might prove to be.
Murphy cringed from this inexplicable imprinting as if the message were being carved into his daughter’s flesh with a knife, turning away repeatedly only to look back again each time, saying “This is wrong, wrong, this is wrong.”
Against fear, anger was an inadequate defense, and Nancy could no longer sustain it. At the foot of the bed again, she stood aghast, robbed of the power to move or speak, transfixed by the manifesting letters, as if they would spell out both her daughter’s doom and her own.
Pax hoped to hear Bibi’s voice in his mind’s ear as before, even if it might be as enigmatic as on the two previous occasions. But as the first two lines on her forearm completed a name, and as a third line began to form, he heard nothing except expressions of amazement from the two nurses. And from Edgar Alwine, an observation: “It’s a tattoo, isn’t it? A very simple tattoo, perhaps poorly removed by laser and now resurfacing. Is that possible?”
“Bibi didn’t have any tattoos,” Nancy said.
Nancy’s didn’t rather than doesn’t suggested an unconscious resignation, a despondency if not despair, that chilled Pax. When he spoke, his intention was as much to correct the
verb tense, regarding Bibi, as to clarify her position on tattoos. “She isn’t against them. She admires them when they’re really beautiful. But she doesn’t have any desire for one. She says a tattoo is a means of satisfying one emotional need or another, but she satisfies hers in other ways.”
While the chief of hospital security filmed, while the two nurses watched with the puzzled gravity of those whose fundamental certainties were proving uncertain, while Nancy stood benumbed by horror and helplessness, while Murphy bit on the knuckle of one fisted hand—the fist an expression of his desire to confront his daughter’s unknown tormentor, the biting of the knuckle emblematic of the confused child within the man—while the floodgates of the setting sun poured forth torrents of scarlet light that washed against the window, the fourth and final line welled into view on Bibi’s forearm, one black letter at a time, and the message—or the promise or the challenge, or whatever it might be—was complete: ASHLEY BELL WILL LIVE.
“Who is Ashley Bell?” asked Edgar Alwine.
No one in the room had heard of her.
“Where is Bibi, who is this name on her arm, how is any of this happening? Why? I don’t understand,” Nancy said.
Such misery informed the woman’s voice that her husband, usually quick to console and reassure her, evidently felt inadequate to the task. He turned to Pax with an expression familiar to any team leader in combat; he wanted guidance, and if not guidance, then confirmation of his own instincts, and if not confirmation, then reassurance.