by Riley Sager
Seeing it sends a stark, cold fear pulsing through me.
I’m still in the Bartholomew.
I have been the whole time.
The realization makes me want to scream even though my throat won’t allow it. Fear and thirst have clenched it shut.
I start to move, my bare feet slapping the floor in worried, hurried steps. I get only a few feet before a voice rises from somewhere behind me.
Hearing it opens my throat, despite the thirst and fear. A scream erupts from deep inside me, only to be pushed back by a hand clamping over my mouth. Another hand spins me around so I can see who it is.
Nick.
Lips flat.
Eyes angry.
To his right is Leslie Evelyn. To his left is Dr. Wagner, a needle and syringe in his hand. A bead of liquid quivers on the needle’s tip before he jabs it into my upper arm.
Everything instantly goes woozy. Nick’s face. Leslie’s face. Dr. Wagner’s face. All of them blur and waver like a TV on the fritz.
I gasp.
I let out another scream.
Loud and pitiable and streaked with terror.
It careens down the hall, echoing off the walls, so that I’m still hearing it when everything fades to nothingness.
ONE DAY LATER
44
I dream of my family in Central Park, standing in the middle of Bow Bridge.
This time, I’m with them.
So is George.
It’s just the five of us on the bridge, looking at our reflections in the moonlit water below. A slight breeze blows through the park, forming ripples on the water and making our faces look like funhouse-mirror versions of their true selves.
I stare at my reflection, marveling at how it wobbles and wavers. Then I look at the reflections of the others and notice something strange.
Everyone is holding a knife.
Everyone but me.
I turn away from the water and face them. My family. My gargoyle.
They raise their knives.
“You don’t belong here,” my father says.
“Run,” my mother says.
“Run away as fast as you can,” Jane says.
George says nothing. He simply watches with stoic stone eyes as my family lurches forward and begins to stab me.
TWO DAYS LATER
45
I wake slowly. Like a swimmer uncertain about surfacing, pulled against my will from dark waters. Even after regaining consciousness, sleep lingers. A fog curling through me, languorous and thick.
My eyes stay closed. My body feels heavy. So heavy.
Although there’s pain in my abdomen, it’s distant, like a fire on the other side of the room. Just close enough so that I can feel its heat.
Soon my eyelids move, flickering, fluttering, opening to the sight of a hospital room.
The same one as before.
No windows. Chair in the corner. Monet hanging from the white wall.
Despite the fog in my head, I know exactly where I am.
The only thing I don’t know is what will happen to me next and what’s already happened.
My body refuses to move, no matter how much I try. The fog is too heavy. My legs are useless. My arms are the same. Only my right hand moves—a weak flop against my side.
Turning my head is the most movement I can muster. A slow turn to the left lets me see the IV stand by the bed, its thin plastic tube snaking into my hand.
I can also tell that the bandage around my head is gone. My hair slides freely across the pillow when I roll my head in the opposite direction. That’s where the photo of my family sits, my wan reflection visible in the cracked frame.
The sight of that pale face sliced into a dozen slivers causes my right hand to twitch. To my surprise, I can lift it. Not much. Just enough to get it to flop onto my stomach.
I move my hand across the hospital gown. Beneath the paper-thin fabric is a slight bump where a bandage sits. I can feel it on the upper left side of my abdomen, slightly below my breast. Touching it sends pain flashing through my body, cutting the fog enough for me to really feel it. Like a lightning strike.
With the pain comes panic. A confused horror in which I know something is wrong but I can’t tell what it is.
My hand keeps moving down my side, slow and trembling. Just to the left of my navel is a different dreadful rise. Another bandage.
More pain.
More panic.
More smoothing my hand over my stomach, fingers probing, searching for yet another bandage.
I find it in the center of my lower abdomen, several inches below my navel. It’s longer than the others. The pain gets worse when I press down on it. A gasp-inducing flare.
What did you do to me?
I think it more than say it. My voice is a dry croak, barely audible in the room’s dim silence. But in my head it’s a full-throated sob.
At my stomach, the pain burns with more intensity. This fire is no longer distant. It’s here. Burning across my gut. I clutch it with my one working hand. My thoughts continue to scream. My weakling voice can only moan.
Outside the room, someone hears me.
It’s Bernard, who rushes in, his eyes no longer kind. When he glances my way, he looks not at me but past me. I moan again, and he disappears.
A moment later, Nick enters the room.
I let out another mental howl.
Get away from me! Please don’t touch me!
My voice can’t make it past that first word. A hoarse, haggard “Get.”
Nick removes my hand from my stomach and places it gently at my side. He feels my forehead. He strokes my cheek.
“The surgery was a success,” he says.
A single question forms in my thoughts.
What surgery?
I attempt to ask it, sputtering out half a syllable before the mental fog returns. I can’t tell if it’s exhaustion or if Nick again injected me with something. I suspect it’s the latter. Sleep threatens to overtake me. I’m back to being a swimmer, this time sinking into the murky depths.
Before I go under, Nick whispers in my ear.
“You’re fine,” he says. “Everything is fine. Right now, we only needed the one kidney.”
THREE DAYS LATER
46
Hours pass. Maybe days.
It’s hard to tell now that my existence has been reduced to two modes—asleep and awake.
Right now, I’m awake, although the fog makes it difficult to know for sure. It’s so overpowering that everything has the feel of a dream.
No, not a dream.
A nightmare.
In this maybe-nightmare state, I hear voices just outside the door. A man and a woman.
“You need to rest,” the man says.
I note the accent. Dr. Wagner.
“What I need is to see her,” the woman says.
“That’s not a good idea.”
“Ask me if I give a damn. Now push me in there.”
That’s followed by a hum. Rubber wheels on floor. Someone in motion.
Because of the fog, I can’t recoil when a hand, leathery and rough, clasps my own. My eyelids part just enough to see Greta Manville looking frail and small in a wheelchair. Her skin clings to her bones. Veins zigzag beneath the papery whiteness. She reminds me of a ghost.
“I didn’t want it to be you,” she says. “I need you to know that.”
I close my eyes and say nothing. I don’t have the strength.
Greta senses this and fills the void with more chatter.
“It was supposed to be Ingrid. That’s what they told me. During her interview, they asked for her medical records and she handed them over. Lo and behold, she was a potential match. But then she left and there you were. Another match. I had no choice in the matter. It was you or certain death. So I chose life. You saved me, Jules. I will always be grateful for that.”
I open my eyes again, just so I can glare at her. I see that she’s wearing a hospital gown si
milar to mine. Light blue. The same color as the bedroom wallpaper in 12A. Near the collar, someone has pinned a golden brooch just like the one Marjorie Milton was wearing.
An ouroboros.
I pull my hand away from hers and scream until I fall back to sleep.
47
I wake.
I sleep.
I wake again.
Some of the fog has burned away. Now I can move my arms, wiggle my toes, feel the painful intrusion of the IV and catheter that invade my body. I can even tell that someone’s in the room with me. Their presence pokes through my solitude like a splinter through skin.
“Chloe?” I say, hoping against hope that all of this has been a nightmare. That when I open my eyes I’ll be back on Chloe’s couch, heartbroken about Andrew and worried about finding a new job.
I’d settle for that kind of worry.
I’d embrace it.
I say her name again. A wish repeated. If I keep saying it, maybe it will come true.
“Chloe?”
“No, Jules, it’s me.”
It’s a man, his voice at once familiar and unwanted.
I open my eyes, my vision blurred by whatever it was they gave me. In that watery haze, I see someone in the chair beside the bed. He comes into focus slowly.
Nick.
He wears a new pair of glasses. Basic black instead of tortoiseshell. Beneath the frames, a wicked bruise circles his right eye. The spot where my foot connected with his face. I’d do it again to his other eye if I could. But all I can do now is lie here, a prisoner to his gaze.
“How are you feeling?” he says.
I remain silent and stare at the ceiling.
Nick places a plastic tumbler full of water and small paper cup on the tray beside the bed. Inside the paper cup are two chalky white pills the size of baby aspirin.
“I brought you something for the pain. We want you to be comfortable. There’s no need to suffer.”
I continue to stay quiet, even though I am in pain. It burns through my abdomen—a fierce, throbbing agony. I welcome it. That pain is the only thing distracting me from fear and anger and hate. If it goes away, I’ll descend into a dark swamp of emotion from which I might never escape.
Pain equals clarity.
Clarity equals survival.
Which is why I break my silence to ask the question I didn’t have the strength to utter yesterday.
“What did you do to me?”
“Dr. Wagner and I removed your left kidney and transplanted it into a needy recipient,” he says, avoiding using Greta’s name, as if I don’t already know it’s her. “It’s a common procedure. There were no complications. The recipient’s body is responding well to the organ, which is excellent. The older the patient, the more common it is for their body to reject a transplanted organ.”
I muster the strength to ask another question. “Why did you do it?”
Nick gives me a curious look, as if no one has ever asked him that before. I wonder how many people in this same predicament have squandered that opportunity.
“Under normal circumstances, we prefer that donors know as little as possible. It’s better that way. But since these aren’t normal circumstances, I see no harm in trying to clear up some of your misconceptions.”
He hisses the word with clear distaste. As if it’s my fault that he’s being forced to say it.
“In 1918, the Spanish flu came out of nowhere, killing more than fifty million people worldwide,” he says. “To put that in perspective, the Great War going on at the same time, killed almost seventeen million. Right here in America, more than half a million people died. As a doctor, Thomas Bartholomew was on the front lines of this particular war. He saw it strike down friends, associates, even family members. The flu didn’t discriminate. It was ruthless. It didn’t care if you were rich or poor.”
I remember that horrible picture I saw. The dead servants lined up on the street. The blankets over their corpses. The dirty soles of their feet.
“What Thomas Bartholomew couldn’t understand was how a millionaire could succumb to the flu as easily as a piece of tenement trash. Shouldn’t the wealthy, by virtue of their superior breeding, be less susceptible than people who have nothing, come from nothing, are nothing? He decided his destiny was to build a facility where important people could live in comfort and splendor while he kept them safe from many of the ailments that afflicted the common class. That’s how the Bartholomew was born. This building was willed into existence by my great-grandfather.”
A memory forces its way into my pain- and drug-clouded mind. Nick and me in his dining room, talking over pizza and beer.
I come from a long line of surgeons, beginning with my great-grandfather.
Another memory quickly follows. The two of us in his kitchen, having my blood pressure checked, Nick distracting me with small talk. After I told him the story behind my name, he shared the obvious fact that Nick was short for Nicholas. What he didn’t tell me—not then, not ever—was his last name.
Now I know it.
Bartholomew.
“My great-grandfather’s dream didn’t last very long,” Nick says. “His first task was to find a way to protect the residents in case the Spanish flu ever flared up again. But things went very wrong, very quickly. Some of the same people he was trying to protect got sick. Some even died.”
He doesn’t mention the dead servants. He doesn’t need to. I know what they were.
Test subjects.
The unwilling participants in a mad doctor’s experiment. Infect the poor to heal the rich. Clearly, it didn’t go as planned.
“When it looked like the police might get involved, my great-grandfather felt he had no choice but to end the investigation before it could even begin,” Nick says. “He took his life. But an ouroboros never dies. It’s simply reborn. So when my grandfather left medical school, he chose to continue his father’s work. He was more careful, of course. More discreet. He shifted the focus away from virology to prolonging life. With wealth comes power. Power earns you importance. And the truly important people in the world deserve to live longer lives than those who are beneath them. That’s especially true as we face another epidemic.”
Telling his tale has left Nick energized. Beads of moisture shine along his hairline. Behind his glasses, his eyes gleam. No longer content to sit, he gets up and starts moving about the room, passing the Monet and open door and back again.
“Right now, at this very moment, hundreds of thousands of people wait for organ transplants,” he says. “Some of them are important people. Very important. Yet they’re told to just get in line and wait their turn. But some people can’t wait. Eight thousand people a year die waiting for a life-saving organ. Think about that, Jules. Eight thousand people. And that’s just in America alone. What I do—what my family has always done—is provide options for those who are too important to wait like everyone else. For a fee, we allow them to skip that line.”
What he doesn’t say is that letting so-called important people move to the front of the line requires an equal number of unimportant people.
Like Dylan.
Like Erica and Megan.
Like me.
All it takes to get us here is one small ad. Apartment sitter needed. Pays well. Call Leslie Evelyn.
After that, we simply disappear.
Creation from our destruction.
Life from our deaths.
That’s the meaning behind the ouroboros.
Not immortality, but a desperate attempt to spend a few more years eluding the Grim Reaper’s inevitable grasp.
“Cornelia Swanson,” I say. “What was she?”
“A patient,” Nick says. “The first transplant attempt. It went … badly.”
So Ingrid and I had it all wrong. This isn’t about Maria Damyanov or the Golden Chalice or devil worship. There is no coven. It’s just a group of dying rich people desperate to save their lives no matter the cost. And Nick is here to facilitate it
.
I roll onto my side, the pain shrieking through my body. It’s worth it if it means I no longer have to look at him. Still, I can’t resist asking a few more questions. For clarity’s sake.
“What else are you going to take?”
“Your liver.”
Nick says it with shocking indifference. Like he doesn’t even consider me a human being.
I wonder what he was thinking that night in his bedroom, when I let him kiss me, undress me, fuck me. Even in that moment, was he appraising me, taking stock of what my body offered, wondering how much money I would make him?
“Who’s going to get it?”
“Marianne Duncan,” he says. “She’s in need of one. Badly.”
“What else?”
“Your heart.” Nick pauses then. The only concession to my feelings. “That’s going to Charlie’s daughter. He’s earned it.”
I figured there had to be a reason people like Charlie willingly worked at the Bartholomew. Now I know. It’s a classic quid pro quo, exploited by the upper classes for ages. For doing their dirty work, the little folks will get something in return.
“And Leslie? Dr. Wagner?”
“Our Mrs. Evelyn is a believer in the Bartholomew’s mission,” Nick says. “Her late husband benefitted from a heart transplant during my father’s tenure. When he died—years later than was expected, I might add—she offered to keep things running smoothly. And, of course, to be first in line if she should ever need my services. As for Dr. Wagner, he’s simply a surgeon. A damn good one who lost his license more than twenty years ago after showing up for surgery drunk. My father, in need of assistance due to growing demand, made him an offer he couldn’t refuse.”
“I pity you,” I tell Nick. “I pity you, and I hate you, although not as much as you hate yourself. Because you do. I’m sure of it. You’d have to in order to do what you’re doing.”
Nick stands and pats my leg. “Nice try. But guilt trips don’t work on me. Now take your pills.”
He grabs the paper cup and holds it out to me. I have just enough strength to knock it out of his hand. The cup drops to the floor, the pills bouncing into the corners.