Sparks of Light

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Sparks of Light Page 21

by Janet B. Taylor


  Something creaked behind me. I whipped around, eyes on the double doors at the far end. “Take the keys so you can unlock the door to the outside.”

  Doug nodded and hugged me hard. “Hope,” he said. “I can never thank you enough. You could have snuck out. You didn’t have to come after me.”

  “Are you kidding?” I told him. “If I left here without you, Phoebe would take those knives of hers and use me for target practice.”

  Doug grinned, then maneuvered his head and broad shoulders through the opening. It was barely wide enough. He wormed inside until only his legs protruded. His voice echoed back to me. “Looks like a fairly steep drop-off here.”

  The lock at the far end of the ward clicked, loud as a shotgun in the quiet. Doug froze, but I shoved him as hard as I could until, cursing, he dropped away.

  The chute snapped shut on its tight hinge. I whipped around just in time to see the ward door open. The stunned look on Dupree’s weasel face was almost, almost worth it.

  “Well, well. Ain’t this a pip.” Hands on his hips, he bared his rodent teeth. “Whatcha doin’ up here, girlie?”

  Without turning, I eased the chute door down until it mawed open behind me.

  “Don’t. You. Dare,” he warned, then turned and shouted, “She’s here! I got her!”

  Boots pounded on the wooden floorboards as I turned and thrust myself headlong into the dark opening.

  Go! Go! Go!

  Far below, I heard the rustle and soft “Oof” of Doug’s landing. I scrambled forward, hands grappling for the spot where the rough wooden boards veered off into the vertical descent that would take me to safety.

  There! Flat on my belly I squirmed, hands outstretched. My upper body tilted downward at a sharp angle. Gravity was winning. I began to slide. Yes. Yes. Yes!

  Hands closed around my ankles, ripping me backwards. My already sore head cracked against the lip of the entrance as Dupree dragged me from the chute. I hit the floor flat on my stomach. Air exploded from my lungs.

  With one twist he flipped me over onto my back. His greasy hair hanging down on either side of my face, he fell on top of me. Yellow teeth showed in a leer as he pressed down. I tried. I tried to shove him off, but I was too weak.

  Always too weak.

  “Knew you’d be a hellcat,” he grunted, grappling for my wrists. “We are going to have us all kinds of fun. With Peters gone, I’m in charge, and oh . . . I’ll be seeing you on the regular.”

  Light from oil lamps bounced off the ceiling. Dread and terror mixed and swirled inside my head as Dr. Alexander Carson stormed down the hall, trailed by the matron, two guards, and Nurse Hannah.

  “Caught her, Doc,” Dupree panted as he rolled off me and jerked me to my knees. “I was just about to—”

  “Thank you, Dupree,” Carson interrupted with a hale clap to the wiry guard’s shoulder. “You’ll make a fine sergeant.”

  “Yeah,” I snarled. “You two make a perfect match.”

  “The rest of you,” Carson said, ignoring me as Dupree and another guard hauled me to my feet. “Bring Miss Walton straight to the surgery suite. We proceed at once.”

  Chapter 32

  DRIFTING . . . DRIFTING . . .

  Am I dead?

  I thought the words, then decided to test my theory by speaking them aloud.

  “Excuse me,” I said politely to the white-capped figures bustling around me. “Am I dead?”

  When no one answered, or even acknowledged my existence, I decided it was a distinct possibility.

  They’d strapped me to the table in the operating theater. Of course, since they’d forced some vile black liquid down my throat, nothing had really bothered me much.

  A sharp jab in my arm. Fire flowed into my veins. Just like that—​the muzzy, comfortable state vanished.

  I’m not dead, I realized as everything that had ever happened to me pulled itself into strident focus in my mind. I remembered everything. Everything I’d ever read, seen, heard blew into my brain all at once.

  I’m not dead. I’m not dead. But oh God, I wish I was.

  I felt it all now. The operating table a block of ice beneath my back. My hands and feet cinched tight. Leather restraint buckled across my forehead, and a thin sheet covering the shapeless hospital smock. The stringent odor of rubbing alcohol rose around me, making my eyes water as a series of uncontrollable shudders racked me from head to toe.

  Whatever the doctor had just pushed into my arm began to sing through my veins. My pulse raced faster and faster until it roared with an unnatural speed. And I was suddenly and utterly wide awake. My eyes popped open.

  “Ah.” Carson’s face loomed over mine. “I see you’re back with us. Apologies for the abrupt awakening, but I’ve found I get better results when the patient is hyper-alert. Cocaine works fine for now, though I am fiddling with other concoctions.”

  Above my head, six huge Edison bulbs blazed to life inside a metallic hood. The brilliant lights blinded as the drug inside me made my muscles twitch and shake.

  The surgical doors opened and a red-faced, uniformed guard dashed up to the table. The man’s jowls waggled as he gave his report.

  “The mulatto boy got away, Doc,” he huffed. “Found the door to the laundry room wide open and tracks leading to the fence. The gate was locked, so he must’ve climbed over. But he had help, that’s for sure.”

  Doug got away? Oh, thank God.

  I beamed up at the now-livid Carson.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Sorry about that.”

  I felt Carson’s fists twist in the sheet that covered me. His jaw tightened as he glared at the guard. “That,” he said, “is disappointing, Mr. O’Neill. Quite disappointing.”

  O’Neill’s mouth opened and closed. “I am sorry, sir. I don’t know how—”

  “Just go,” Carson snipped. “You are contaminating my environment.”

  The guard slunk out of my field of view. Carson stared after him. Then his gaze slipped down to meet mine. “The boy was incidental to the arrangement, and therefore of no consequence.”

  It was the second time he’d mentioned an arrangement. One I assumed Celia had ordered her goon squad to set up. I wondered if Bran knew yet about his mother’s involvement.

  Instruments clanked against metal trays as the doctor and his team set up. When Carson appeared again, he didn’t meet my eyes. My teeth chattered. From cold. From terror. From the drugs.

  “Look.” I tried to take a deep breath, but the claustrophobia and clink of metallic instruments held my lungs in a vise. “Don’t do this. We have money. Lots of money. We can give you all you want. Please, just let me go.”

  Carson spoke to the man across from him, his face set in counterfeit sincerity. “Poor thing. She doesn’t realize we’re only trying to help her.”

  I heard a scrape as he selected an instrument. I struggled and fought against my bonds, but it did no good. I was trapped like a rabbit in a snare. And unlike the rabbit, with my head strapped in place, I couldn’t even gnaw off my own foot to get away.

  “Dr. Perkins,” he said to the young bearded assistant on my other side. “Cover the right half of the patient’s face.”

  A cloth came down, covering my right eye. When I screamed and tried to squirm, Carson nodded to his assistant, who jammed a leather bite plate into my mouth, flooding it with the taste of tannin. I ground down, weeping at the familiar smell of the stable. Of saddles and stirrups and freedom.

  No. No! Please. Please, God help me!

  Fat overhead bulbs glinted on the silver instrument as Carson’s hand came into view. An ice pick. Sharp. Lethal. Permanent.

  My stomach lurched. Nausea rolled up. I was going to puke. I was going to choke on it and die right here before he could ever touch me.

  Terror as pure and undiluted as glacial ice surged beneath my skin. I screamed through my gag, clamping my eyes hard shut, as if that would protect them.

  “Hold her!” Carson commanded. “I cannot work this way!�
��

  “Doctor,” the assistant said. “Perhaps sedation would be prudent for—”

  “No,” Carson snapped. “Nurse. Hold her head.”

  Rough hands came down on either side of my face. Thumbs dug into my cheekbones, stretching the flesh of my face so tight it felt as if it would split in two. With the back of my head pressed to the table, another set of callused fingers pried open my left eyelid. Carson took a breath and brought the pick closer. When cold steel touched the inside of my eye, next to my nose, I howled behind the chunk of leather.

  His other hand appeared, clutching a small wooden mallet. Helpless, furious tears streamed down to soak my temple as cold metal pricked the tender inner corner of my eye socket. Carson nudged the eyeball away to fit the tip firmly into place.

  Pressure. Burning.

  No.

  The doctor’s jaw flexed. The hammer rose. Higher. Higher, as he prepared to slam it down and drive a splinter of sharpened steel up through my sinus cavity and into my brain.

  Let me die. Let me die. Just let me—​

  Boom! Pop! Crack-crack-crack!

  The hand holding the ice pick faltered. It jerked, scoring a path down the side of my nose as one after the other, the massive light bulbs above Carson’s head erupted in a shower of sparks and shattered glass.

  The room plunged into blackness. Ozone choked the air. A nurse screamed. Chunks and slivers of burning glass rained down on my thin covering, tinkling on metallic trays and scalding me in a hundred places. For an instant, I wasn’t sure if all this was only my imagination. If even now, Carson’s ice pick was severing the connection between the two halves of my brain. If the darkness was only my mind’s way of checking out.

  “What in the hell is going on here?” Dr. Carson shouted. “Someone fire up a lamp. I will not be delayed.”

  The nurse’s coarse hands retreated from my face. “Must be the fuses again, Doctor,” she said. “I’ll send someone over to look—”

  Shouts from outside the door. Thumps. Bangs. A muffled scream.

  A blue flash licked up from the tray nearest my head, the sparks igniting a metallic bowl filled with rubbing alcohol. A nightmare’s worth of masked faces bloomed around me before someone threw a damp cloth over the dancing flame, snuffing it out.

  In the darkness, everything went very, very still.

  “Did you hear that?” Carson’s assistant whispered, just as something heavy bashed through the surgery door.

  “Hope?” a voice yelled. “Hope! Are you in here, lass?”

  Chapter 33

  JOY, STRONG AND BRIGHT AS THE SUN, BLAZED TO LIFE inside me when I heard Collum MacPherson’s hoarse shout. I screamed his name through the gag.

  “What is the meaning of this?” the doctor yelled. “How dare you interrupt an ongoing surgical procedure? Remove yourself!”

  “This is it!” Collum called to someone outside the room. “She’s here!”

  A concentrated beam of white cut a swath through the darkness, illuminating the perturbed faces of the medical team. It snapped off. Three long seconds passed before it flashed again.

  Off. On. Off. On. The light ruptured the darkness in short strobes, until it landed on my face, blinding me.

  “Jesus, Mary, and St. Bride!”

  The wonderful sound of Phoebe’s voice renewed my struggles. My back arched against the table. Phoebe rushed to my side as the light faded.

  When it flashed again, the bright beam glinted off Phoebe’s knife as she jabbed it toward the enraged Carson. “Get away from her with that thing, you slagging monster,” she snarled as she felt down my legs and sliced through the bonds around my ankles. “You touch my friend again and I’ll carve you up like a bloody Easter ham.”

  Before the light faded again, she’d sawed through the thick strap holding my head in place. Behind her, light blazed from a hole cut into the side of a wooden box that Collum cradled under one arm. My mind pinged, matching the object with a science-journal article on Nikola Tesla, and the diagram of a primitive flashlight.

  Collum’s other hand clasped a brutal leather-wrapped club. My throat closed as the afterimage burning inside my lids revealed the comforting sight of Mac’s outline next to Collum.

  Flash.

  Mac moved to cover Phoebe, a pistol aimed at the doctor’s crew.

  “Hope,” said his gravelly voice in the dark. “Are ye hurt, lass?”

  I felt the strap give. As Phoebe freed my hands, I ripped the gag from my mouth and scrubbed the taste of leather from my lips.

  “I—​I’m okay.” I tried to sound brave, but my teeth were chattering, chopping the words into micro-bits.

  Phoebe’s nimble hands roamed my face. I heard a growl as her fingertips slid in the blood that was oozing from the scratch near my nose.

  “Oh, Hope.” Her voice was low, scared.

  With the drug still shrilling through my veins, I started babbling. “I’m okay. You got here just in time. He just scratched me. God, I’m so glad to see you. Did Doug get out? Please tell me he did. And can you get me the freaking hell out of here?”

  “Doug’s fine. He’s out—”

  Screams. The pound of fists and footsteps. Shouts that seemed to come from everywhere.

  “Sir!” I turned as the red-haired O’Neill threw open the door at the rear of the room. Uplit by the oil lantern in his fist, there was no mistaking the fear on his dour features. “Doc Carson! Something’s happened. The prisoners—​I mean, the patients—​they’re free. Running the halls, they are. And someone’s set a fire. It’s chaos out there, sir. What should we—”

  The rest of the guard’s words died in his throat as his mouth dropped open into a dark oval. A confused expression squinched his eyes. One hand rose to wipe away the blood that suddenly trickled from the corner of his lips. He dropped to his knees, the oil lamp slipping from his fingers and rocking on its base as he slumped face first to the floor. I saw it, then. A knife that protruded from the back of his neck.

  The lamp uplit the macabre figure that loomed behind him. Terror sunk icy claws into the muscles around the base of my spine as the blank, empty eyes surveyed the room.

  On the opposite side of the table, his back to us, Dr. Carson had gone very, very still.

  Blood rimmed Eustace Clarkson’s mouth. It dripped from his chin, staining the chest of his hospital smock. I had no idea whose it was, but when he swiped a careless arm across his face, I knew it likely wasn’t his own.

  “Holy Mother, save us.” Phoebe reflexively crossed herself. “Is that—?”

  “Yeah.” I eased off the table, never taking my eyes from the crazed man as I slid into a crouch and pulled Phoebe down beside me. “It is.”

  “But I thought he was—”

  I shook my head as we peered over the edge of the table.

  Eustace leaned down and jerked the serrated kitchen knife from the guard’s neck. When he stood, strands of lank white hair stuck to the gore on his cheeks. One of the assistants approached him, but backed up fast when Eustace’s arm rose, wraith-like, to point the knife at him.

  Behind us, Collum and Mac were fending off more guards, but I couldn’t look away.

  “Lightning. Lightning. Lightning in my head,” Eustace was singing, the words tuneless as he advanced into the room. “And it burns. Oh, doesn’t it just.”

  Alexander Carson made a sudden, scuttling move to escape, but Eustace’s head snapped in an oddly reptilian gesture. His sunken eyes fixed on his tormentor.

  “Mr. Smith.” Carson tried to sound authoritative, but the whine in his voice undercut the words. “G-get back to your cell at once.”

  “I knew this place for hell.” Eustace spoke without affect, eyes never leaving the doctor’s. “Oh yes. Soon as I arrived, I knew it. The air, you see? It smelled of burning. Burning souls. Where dragons steam their foul breath upon the water and the fires, they burn all night to cast their greasy soot into the sky. Mountains of brick and stone and oh . . . I knew then I’d been cas
t down to the fiery lake.” He pointed the knife at Carson. “And I knew you, devil. I knew you.”

  Tears rolled down the creature’s ravaged face, tracing two clear paths through the red. “But the lightning. Over and over and over, the lightning and the smell, it never leaves me and my own flesh, it burns away, bit by bit.”

  The old man who’d once been Eustace Clarkson picked up the guard’s lantern by the handle. He held it out before him, then pressed the other palm against the scalding glass. In seconds the stench of burning meat drifted to us.

  “All those years,” Eustace said as he advanced slowly toward the frozen Carson. “You and all your demons sticking me, sticking me with your devil thorns and I tried . . . I tried to beg God’s forgiveness for my sins.” His head shook violently back and forth. “No use. No use. Then the wires and the lightning and the burning, ohhh . . . the burning was the worst of all.”

  From the other side of the table, we heard an odd crackling. Phoebe gagged and I realized the noise was the sizzle of Eustace’s hand as it cooked down to bone and sinew. Barely seeming to notice, he stopped only a yard from the terrified Dr. Carson. Emaciated cheeks pulled back from gory teeth in an eerie, almost child-like smile. “But I think this time, it is you who shall burn.”

  With a motion so fast I could hardly follow it, Eustace Clarkson raised the oil lantern high and slammed it to the ground at the doctor’s feet. It shattered in an explosion of glass and kerosene and flame. Alexander Carson writhed, screaming as lines of fire began to race up his body. Nurse Hannah ducked beneath the table, her eyes squeezed shut as she shrieked the doctor’s name over and over.

  She buried her face in her hands, and I caught the glint of a silver chain around her neck.

  Nope.

  Staying low, I crawled to her.

  “What are you doing?” Phoebe hissed, though she stayed glued to my side.

  “She has my lodestone,” I whispered. “I’m getting it back.”

  Phoebe gave a sharp nod. “Damn straight. Let’s grab it and get the bloody hell out of here.”

 

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