by P. W. Child
“I know you understand, Mama,” he said quickly, looking up. “Her husband will give her more.” Making amends to his late mother’s spirit when he robbed people did not bring much peace of mind, but he did it anyway because he knew his mother was watching.
Radu found some things in the woman’s purse he had not found before in any of the others he had swiped.
For one, he found a strange key that resembled a dragonfly, bronze in color and far too large to unlock anything smaller than an unsolvable riddle or a universal secret. It was not even considered for a door’s lock, not any door, anywhere. He marveled at the piece with a gaping mouth. It felt somehow magical between his fingertips, yet it did not exhibit any of those traits magical things possessed – not obviously anyway. To Radu the strange key felt heavy, not in weight, but in substance. He decided to keep it.
The rush of his thievery had the child sweating, so he pulled off his sweater and put it on the ground next to him before he opened another compartment of the woman’s bag and shoved his hand inside.
Another oddity he pulled from the purse was a card, missing from the rest of its deck. It was much bigger than the cards he was used to playing with some of the hobo’s in the park and it looked more like a painting than a mass produced item with two dimensional suits and numbers upon it. This one looked like it was hand painted by a consummate oil paint artist from one of the museums in Bohemia or Italy. His mother used to give him art books to page through while she prepared dinner or washed their clothing, hoping to cultivate a taste for culture in her son. One of her books featured the art museums and galleries of the Louvre, Prague, Rome and Vienna, among other ancient cities and countries of artistic treasure. This card could easily have represented a replica of any of the pieces he had seen in their inventory, expertly hand drawn by any of the grand masters whose names were revered by scholars and philosophers of the ages. The picture upon it frightened him, yet he stared in a state of thrall and thrill. It depicted a boy about his own age holding an eyeball upon one open supine palm, the eye being his own. Above him a pitch black circle with rays like tentacles to which his other hand was reaching.
Radu got the sensation of treasure from it and he imagined that the card was charged with some form of life force. He could feel the current of tiny electrical sparks permeate from the card into his fingers, playing gently with his nerve endings in such a way that it caused a playful sting throughout his hands. Had he known better, Radu would have interpreted the sensation as a mild shock, but his curiosity doused his alarm and kept him spellbound. With the money he could eat for two weeks, but still he was ransacking the inner pockets of the bag for more loot.
To his disappointment, the owner of the purse had nothing more than crumpled tissues, sunglasses, cosmetics and a hairbrush to offer. For a moment Radu was extremely curious to learn her name, just this once. He opened the other section of her wallet slowly so that he could still resign from his silly idea should he feel that knowing her name would ignite his guilt. But what he saw immediately struck fear into his little heart, from tales told by his grandparents when he was small.
Long before they died, his mother’s parents talked about the terrible misdeeds of the Austrian man who led the German army in the days of their youth, who attacked their villages and committed unspeakable atrocities on the Jews. Radu’s big dark eyes blinked rapidly with uncertainty and terror as the red Swastika presented itself under his thumb, securely held back by a plastic pocket as if he feared that its evil would char his skin. He shut the wallet and cast it aside to display his displeasure and revulsion at the contents, but like the big card he had claimed, the object seemed to call to him, speaking from where it lay abandoned.
Once more he crept closer to see the woman’s name on the open wings of the leather wallet.
Two men’s voices suddenly spoke from the side of the building, growing louder as they approached. They would certainly catch Radu red handed with the stolen goods, so he shoved the card and key into his pocket with the money and he jumped up, bolting around the corner as fast as his legs could carry him. Unfortunately, in his haste he neglected to take his sweater.
Chapter 4 – Déjà Vu
Nina waited for the doctor in his office. Her skin still hurt from the pricks of needles and the unpleasant bruising that came from over-hasty hospital staff who could not give two shit about their patients, because they never got into the private health care facilities. Sure Nina had the money to go to private clinics and such, now that she was the object of her boyfriend’s financial doting, but she did not care for the exuberant charges to get the same procedures done. It had always been a festering boil on her logic and sense of justice that these medical professionals employed their capitalist gluttony on the needy and the terminal. There was no way she was going to be part of their fat pay checks or their spoiled undeserved riches. Instead she supported the local clinics in Edinburgh who were decent enough to run an efficient ship, yet catered to the working class people of the city.
The office was unusually cold where she sat looking at all the wall mounted pictures of pregnancy, the effects of smoking on a bona fide lung and some displays of hideous skin disorders. This was not altogether a fun place to sit with nothing to do while your skin burned from awkward attempts to draw blood and your body shivered from the cold atmosphere in the old building with its pale walls and exterior plumbing, painted in the same leaded paint from the 60’s. Nina blew her breath out hard through her pursed lips and sounded oddly like a horse just as the doctor entered.
“Dr. Gould,” he jested, “shall I refer you to a good veterinarian?”
Nina laughed and the doctor, a lean and attractive Pakistani man of her age, smiled as he rounded the desk to sit down. He was always absurdly calm and Nina often hoped he would be around if she ever had a heart attack. Not only did he know his stuff, but his mellow demeanor, she imagined, would be a psychosomatic blessing on anyone panicking in the throes of impending death.
He sat down with his folder and had a look at the details presented by the lab. Nina hated this part. The foreboding silence while the professional came to a verdict in the company of the buzzing luminescent tubes fixed to the ceiling. She imagined this was what a corpse felt like – if it could feel - on the cold steel slab of the morgue just before they switched on that bone saw.
He let out a scoff, but kept his eyes glued to the paper.
“What?” she asked quickly. It was a natural response to the sound, after all. He looked up.
“Oh that was not a bad news grunt, Dr Gould, don’t fret,” he reassured her before returning to his scrutiny. “It’s just that, for one thing, we still cannot identify this strain and secondly, we cannot seem to figure out how your body is combating it.”
Oh god, here we go again, Nina thought. Now she would have to act dumb and be vigilant about her words.
“Were you born one of twins?” he asked unexpectedly. Nina almost swallowed her tongue at the uncanny question which proved the man’s expertise. But she could never tell what the blood platelets in her veins meant. Not only would it open a whole trunk of rattlesnakes, but it would become the focus of a worldwide medical spill and she would no doubt end up a captive test subject.
“I don’t know. I don’t think so,” she chuckled in amusement, acting uncharacteristically indifferent.
“Hmm,” he replied as he read further, “that is strange. But nevertheless, your treatment is helping, I see. The unknown arsenic based strain seems to be regressing, disappearing rapidly now. Have you been having spells of dizziness, confusion, hallucinations?” He looked her dead in the eye, so certain of what he wanted to know that the unshakable Dr Gould oddly found herself slightly intimidated by another human being for a change.
“Now and then I get a little light headed, but then, I have been working on a dissertation and had some late nights,” she replied, trying to sound as un-crazy as possible. She dared not tell him about the foul nightmares, because that woul
d certainly force her current treatment into a psychological direction. And that was a dangerous path for any unstable adventurer to be found on. It would be the shortest path to ending her much loved freedom for good.
While he was explaining the effects of the treatment on the poison in her system, Nina found her mind dwelling towards this morning at the mansion. It was difficult to remember what had happened, but she recalled waking from a particularly wicked dream the details of which eluded her now. In fact, the entire morning was a blur, apart from the good cigarette she had after walking through the dark house at a desperately early hour.
Finally the doctor sighed from the last part of the report he had read and gave her a concerned, but composed look.
“Nina...” he started in an earnest tone of voice, and Nina felt her heart drop to the floor. It sounded typically like the speech TV medical professionals gave terminal patients, while the somber score played its piano melody in the background.
Oh my god, please don’t tell me I’m dying. I have too much to do, still, Nina begged behind her poker face.
“...your charts are looking good...” he continued.
“But?” she chipped in quickly, more because she needed to interrupt him to not have to hear the news yet, but he lifted his open hand to silence her.
“...but, I am afraid a part of this compound had made its way to your brain and you might find yourself being very confused, perhaps, maybe you will forget what you did or where you parked your car, things like that. This compound has caused what we call a mild form of delirium tremens.”
“Delirium?” she snarled, but her anxiety trumped her intolerance with their ineptitude at telling her like it was. This he could see. His petite patient was terrified of the repercussions, as anyone would be.
“Well, either it is surfacing now because it has progressed into your sensory receptors, or....the good part is that your mind might be pestered by confusion or time mix-ups only now, because it is the tail-end of the malady,” he explained. His calm tone did not fool Nina. She was the sharp kind of patient, the one whose common sense could not be impaired by reverse psychology or a smooth delivery. His voice was his method of lightening the blow, she was certain.
“Bullshit,” she said under her breath, looking down at her badly bruised forearm where the damned circular scar mocked her. The Black Sun’s medical freaks wanted her to see that emblem every day for the rest of her life, what was left of it, because she dared defy them. But if she had voiced this, she might have been seen as paranoid or delusional.
“You think I’m lying to you?” he smiled.
“Yes, doctor,” she said with a measure of gloom in her reply. “I think you are sugar coating a turd and asking me to lick it like an ice cream cone, frankly. Just tell me the truth.”
“I am. Do you want to hear bad news?” he asked.
“How can you not know if this thing is killing me or withering away? It is a pretty important thing to know, doc!” she exclaimed, trying not to shout.
“We don’t know, because we have never seen the likes of it before. I mean,” he sighed, his hands stretched open in defeat, “we know that it is arsenic, but that means nothing if we don’t know what the rest of the chemical consists of, Nina.” He sighed again, thinking of a better way to make it clear to her. “Look, what we have here is yellow. But that is all we know. We don’t know if it is yellow because it is fire or if it is yellow because it is a sunflower. Am I making sense here? We don’t know if it can be contained or if it is absolutely destructive, just because we know one of its components. Do you understand our predicament?”
Nina nodded. It made sense what he said. His comparison was quite effective and she felt defeated all over again.
“Dr. Gould,” he said gently, almost whispering. “If you know what this is, you have to tell us.”
“What makes you think I know? I am a historian, not a micro-biologist,” she frowned, but inside her she could feel the truth probing.
“You have to know where you got this,” he argued, “because it was a surgical procedure that put it there. It is not some accidental ingestion, it is not a prick from an exotic plant during a hike...it was done deliberately by people you have seen, people you had firsthand contact with. Now who is sugar-coating the turd, hey?” The doctor gave her that piercing stare of imploring. His words were not mockery or retort to her earlier remark, but genuine interest.
‘Tell him. It could save your life,’ she thought to herself. ‘Yeah, but what if you are recovering already? What if the arsenic is almost gone and now you tell them that it was put there by Nazi scientists to kill you? You’d screw yourself royally and get locked up.’
“I don’t know when it happened. They must’ve roofied me, doc,” she replied casually.
“Where did you wake up, then?” he asked.
“I woke up in my car in the parking lot,” Nina lied. Her doctor nodded, but she could see that he was not buying it. “I have another appointment soon. I have to go. Is that all, doc?” she asked.
“Yes, just make an appointment with Jackie in front and come see us in a month, alright?” he said as Nina opened the door. “Oh, and Nina,” he called after her just before she left, “I don’t care what you are hiding. If things get bad I want you to call me. Call me, no matter how trivial you might think.”
“Thanks, doc,” she said and pulled the door shut before he read her mind any further.
Another nightmare had Nina yelping like a pup as she was jerked from its dark realm into the uncertain security of her bedroom. The last image of her dream, an old woman with pearly eyes and no jaw under the roof of her bleeding mouth, fell in perfect sequence with a particularly shattering crash of thunder. It rattled her windows as she sat up in the dark, grateful that she had left her curtains drawn wide open to let in the outside street lights to clarify her surroundings. In black shadows and blue light the hues danced against her walls and ceiling, over her covered legs under her bedding and on her drenched face.
Nina looked around for remnants of her dream, but fortunately it was an entirely different world she had escaped from and not a single item in her bedroom resembled the evil atmosphere of the striped tent or the witch inside who read her palm. Only the stripes in the shape of her window’s burglar bars fell askew across her room while the hard rain clattered against the glass. The melting shadows of splattered droplets that ran down the outside of her window gilled the parts in between the stripes in rippling movement that Nina found quite pretty. It reminded her of those old toys, made of cut paper into a merry-go-round, the pictures inside animated by the movement of shadow and light as it twirled.
Her clock said 5.45am, but the weather and the season bought the darkness more time in Edinburgh. Nina had never been afraid of thunder, having grown up in Scotland and lived briefly in Ireland and England. It had always been part of life, but this morning in particular, the thunder made her uneasy. It felt as if the rumble in the heavens above her was the portending of something hideous to come. She lit a cigarette and took a long drag on the filter, watching the darkness momentarily illuminate from the glow of the burning tobacco.
Nina sat down in the quiet that played host to the roaring clouds and the patter of the water against the window and switched on her laptop.
Suddenly the intercom buzzed and jolted her body backward in a start.
“Jesus!” she exclaimed.
She took the last part if the cigarette and shoved the butt hard into the soil of the potted plant. With heavy feet she limped over to the device on the wall. She knew it would be Security. Somehow Nina knew that she had a female visitor.
“Dr Gould, so sorry to wake you,” the security guard said over the hissing signal, “but there is someone here to see you.”
“Is it a woman, perhaps?” Nina said sarcastically, wondering if she was dreaming again or if this was what her doctor was talking about – an episode of temporal disorientation? “Yes, Dr Gould. The lady says it is very urge
nt. She needs to see you before...”
“She leaves for an Amazonian expedition?” Nina finished his sentence.
He reacted with a moment’s pause. “Yes, madam....precisely.”
Nina could not believe what was happening, but she intended on riding it out nonetheless until she started being wrong. So far she was spooking Security quite a bit.
“Does she have a title, like Doctor or Professor? Um...with....with with a...wait....like an Eastern European name?” Nina asked in a shaky voice. Now she was beginning to scare herself. ‘Déjà vu,’ she heard from her inner voice, and with it came a crash of thunder as if to emphasize her observation.
“I am Professor Petra Kulich, Dr. Gould,” she heard a strong woman’s voice over the speaker and Nina collapsed to her knees.
“Dr. Gould?” the voice of the woman spoke again over the radio connection. “Are you there?”
From the deep blackness three voices echoed loudly through Nina’s skull. A deep scowl crossed the historian’s face from the sharpness of their words in her still waking mind.
“Easy! Easy,” she moaned before even opening her eyes. Nina inadvertently held her hands over her ears and curled up like a fetus. “Keep your voices down, for God’s sake!”
“Shhh...” she heard a man hush the others. Then a scuffling and the feeling of hands hooked under her arms and a cold washcloth on her face. All the while she could hear the woman with the heavy accent direct the two security men to place Nina on the couch.
“Professor, I’m afraid I am going to have to stay here with you. I can obviously not allow you to be alone with Dr. Gould as long as she is unfit to permit you herself,” Nina could hear the security guard explain in a whisper.
“Of course. I understand,” Professor Kulich agreed softly.