Cleaving Souls

by Chauncey Rogers

  “Thank you,” Dr. Wiser said. “It’ll probably be another few minutes until we’re ready. You’re welcome to just wait in here.”

  Dr. Wiser stepped to the door and disappeared through it, not waiting for Alex’s distracted “Thank you.” When the door had clicked shut, Alex slumped down into the seat next to Kat. He debated about putting an arm around her, about trying to comfort her, but he couldn’t stop thinking of the knife and Geegee, and the thoughts made him shrink away from her. They sat together in the quiet room, Alex absorbed in his worries, Kat walking a line between being asleep and being painfully awake, her headache probably only worse for her crying and lack of sleep, Alex guessed. In either state, she groaned intermittently, nothing more than a soft sound of hurting. Just as Alex started to believe that she had fallen asleep, she moaned again, raised her head, and looked around the room.

  “Where’s the fire man?”

  “The firefighters are back at the cabin. Or probably back at the fire station by now,” Alex said.

  “No,” Kat said, shaking her head. “Not the firefighters. The man. The one from the cabin. He’s close. I can feel that he’s close by, Alex. The fire man is around here somewhere.”

  “Who?”

  “The fire man.”

  Alex put a hand to his own head now and rubbed at his temples. “Kat, I can’t....” He sighed. “Who are you talking about? Did you see somebody else at the cabin? Other than that crazy witch woman?”

  “She’s not crazy. She’s right.”

  Alex slammed his hand back down onto his armrest. “Dammit, Kat, what the hell is going on?!”

  Kat cringed away from him, and Alex immediately felt bad. He didn’t swear, especially not at her. It wasn’t like him. Kat drew her legs up until she could rest her chin on her knees, hugging her legs against her chest and grabbing her head. “I don’t know,” she said. “Suzzane was right, though. I think that the fire man is what is making the problems to happen.”

  Making the problems to happen, Alex thought. He shook his head. It was probably pointless to argue with her or try to talk through things. Not right now. All they’d probably accomplish would be to upset one another, especially with her nonsensical talk of a fire man. He’d been there. He’d seen what had happened. There had been no fire man involved. Just her.

  Alex lifted his head as a sharp rapping came at the door, then Dr. Wiser pushed the door open.

  “Okay,” he said, smiling, “I think we’re ready to begin.”

  17

  Kat felt like herself again. She felt like the woman she had been several months ago, before the pregnancy, even. She had forgotten what it had felt like, to be herself.

  It was dark. Everything was dark. The walls, if there were any, were black and felt distant. The ceiling, too. Even the floor was black. If it weren’t for the fact that she was standing upon it, she probably wouldn’t have guessed that it was even there.

  “Hello?”

  Her voice floated out into the darkness, with no echo and no response returning to her. She took a tentative step forward, found more black ground there to walk upon, and continued. Her bare feet slapped against the floor, but otherwise it was silent.

  “Hello?” she called out again. She wasn’t sure why, but she felt as though she wasn’t alone. Someone else was there, too. Somebody close to her, familiar. If she could just find them, then maybe....

  She stopped and listened. There was another sound, somewhere in the darkness.

  Tapping. She could hear it clearly now, away to her left. Something tapping very quickly, almost like a woodpecker’s staccato.

  Kat started walking in the direction, pausing every now and again to adjust her course towards the tapping sound. It seemed to shift some, coming from farther to her left, or back to her right, but all in all she felt as if she was making progress towards it, the sound growing louder and clearer.

  Then she saw it.

  At first, she thought it was a small, pink mouse and almost ran. Then, realizing it was no mouse, she stepped closer.

  It lay on the black floor, looking cold and vulnerable, no bigger than the end of her thumb—but, in a place where everything was black, the reddish-pink ball stood out with stark contrast. She stopped above it, confirming that it wouldn’t leap up and attack her, then bent down for a closer inspection.

  The closer sight of it disturbed her. A pinkish blob of skin with a few thin, black hairs sprouting out and lying wetly across it. A purple swelling on one side, but not like a bruise. More like an exposed organ, veiled over with a latticework of blue and red veins. On the opposite side, the pinkish thing curved like the outside edge of a bean, but it appeared to be stretched nearly to the point of bursting the thin skin. A single leg curled up and around, twisting at an unnatural angle, its complete foot resting near the surface of the black ground. As she watched, the leg twitched and convulsed, thumping the foot against the ground in the pitter-patter tapping that she’d heard before. Then it was still once more, and she could see the foot more clearly—the delicate arch, the round ankle bones, the five tiny toes. A human foot.

  “Get back.”

  Kat looked up at the voice, startled. A man stood in front of her, only a few feet away. Somehow, engrossed in looking at the abomination on the floor, she had not heard his approach. But as soon as she saw him, she knew him. The dark, glaring eyes, the hunched stature, the anger.

  The fire man.

  He stepped towards her. Kat, still crouched over the pink mutation, stumbled backwards and fell on her butt, her eyes fixed on the man’s face. But he didn’t come towards her. Instead, he huddled over the thing on the ground.

  “Haven’t you done enough to her already?” He spoke to Kat, but he looked at the thing on the ground, and though his words were accusing, his voice was soft as it was directed towards “her.”

  “I—”

  She started scrambling to her feet, unable to look away from the man. He reached out a thick, blackened finger and gently stroked the thing. Kat saw that the dark finger had split open, almost as if it had burst a seam, like a sausage left in the microwave too long. He ran it down the length of the few slick, languid hairs.

  “She didn’t deserve this,” he said, looking back up at Kat. His voice suddenly grew hard and angry again. “Neither of us deserved this. But you. You!” He stepped over the little, malformed body on the floor and started after Kat. “You’ve destroyed us! We didn’t even get a chance for happiness!”

  Kat tried to run, but her feet slipped over the ground and she fell, twisting as she went down so that the back of her head slammed against the ground. Stars exploded in her eyes, but she stayed conscious and awake, recovering herself just in time to see the fire man reach down and grab at her with those charred fingers. Her hands shot out to protect herself, but there was nothing that they could do. He latched onto them and yanked her upwards by them, then held her face inches from his own.

  His breath against her reeked of death and rot. She tried to shut her eyes, tried to look away, but found that she couldn’t. She was frozen in fear, staring into his dark and angry eyes. And, now that she was close, she could see the darkness around his eyes clearly—flies. Dozens of them, almost piled on top of one another, gathered wingtip to wingtip and pressed head to tail. And across his face, his skin bubbled and roiled beneath the surface, twisting from....

  She finally managed to shut her eyes.

  “But,” he whispered with his dead breath, “maybe we do have a chance at happiness left, after all.”

  Then he was gone, and Kat was alone in the dark room, with no other sound besides the pounding of her own heart.

  18

  The nurse wheeled Kat in behind Alex, parking her wheelchair beside an empty seat. When the nurse had left, Dr. Wiser walked in. He gestured towards the chair.

  “Please, have a seat.”

  Alex eyed the chair as if it were an evil omen. “Is it so bad I need to be sitting?”

  “Oh, no,”
Dr. Wiser laughed. “It’s not bad at all, actually. Just thought you’d be more comfortable.”

  Alex took the seat next to his wife, who leaned heavily in the wheelchair, still more asleep than not. As Alex settled himself, Dr. Wiser pulled a rolling chair out from a small corner desk and guided it to rest in front of Alex and Kat, then sat in it. He held up a new clipboard, this one with some images printed on glossy paper pinned to it, and smiled.

  “Thank you for letting us sedate her,” Dr. Wiser said. “The images turned out great—clear and crisp. And, I’m happy to tell you that your wife’s brain is perfectly healthy. The cut should heal up fine on its own, so long as you keep it clean. But, so far as I can tell, we don’t need to worry about her brain. She’ll just have a headache and some sensitivity to light and sound for a while, but it’s nothing time and rest won’t take care of.”

  Alex waited for him to say more, then nodded when he didn’t. “Okay,” he said, “that’s good.”

  “Yes, it is,” Dr. Wiser confirmed. “Now, we went ahead and also scanned her neck and shoulders to check for injuries there. Fortunately, we didn’t find any. But, we did find this,” he said, flipping the clipboard so that Alex could see the pictures stuck to it.

  The blue, black, and gray pictures meant nothing to Alex—he could barely tell which were of her head and which weren’t. Just the same, his stomach dropped and he thought, Cancer. On top of everything else, now cancer.

  Dr. Wiser, after seeing the blood drain from Alex’s face and watching his eyes jump from one picture to the next, leaned forward. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Long day for me. Uh...let’s see.” He stuck a finger onto one of the prints. “Right there. That’s what we noticed. It’s—”

  “Cancer,” Alex said aloud.

  “What? No. Oh, goodness no. No, it isn’t cancer, Mr. Harris. It could be an advanced type of teratoma—just a bundle of cells that has some components of surrounding organ tissues. Not dangerous to Mrs. Harris, though. Or,” he said pointing at another picture, “if you look here, see that extension right there? The one that kind of curves back and has that little nob thing on the end?”

  Alex nodded.

  “I think that that might be a leg—just my guess, though. What I think we have here is a disappearing twin that didn’t completely disappear.”

  Alex raised an eyebrow. “What do you mean?”

  “Well, sometimes when babies are developing in the womb, and there are twins, one of them will ‘disappear,’ so to speak. They’re competing for space and resources, one of them wins, the other loses, and the loser is swallowed and absorbed by the winner. Now, what can happen is that, occasionally, the loser doesn’t get absorbed—they just get swallowed. I think that’s what may have happened here.”

  Alex looked at the picture again. The grainy little thing in the printout didn’t look too much like a baby to him.

  “So,” he said, “you’re saying that Kat might have her twin living inside her?”

  Dr. Wiser nodded. “That’s right. The twin wouldn’t have fully formed—and in this case, seems to be pretty malformed, by my judgment. But I think she’s in there, living off of your wife’s blood as a parasite.”

  Phrasing it like that turned Alex’s stomach. He grimaced as he looked at the pictures again, then asked, “How big is it?”

  “Oh, it’s small. Smaller than a grape, I think. It’s in a pocket of tissue near her left armpit. She probably wouldn’t have noticed it before, and I don’t think it would have bothered her.”

  “Okay,” Alex said, nodding. “So, is there anything that we need to do about it.”

  “That depends,” Dr. Wiser said. “Usually, we do try and get rid of things like this, though sometimes people just let it stay. The big question is whether or not it is affecting your wife’s health. Does her arm seem weak, or maybe have less flexibility or anything?”

  Alex shrugged. “I don’t think she’s ever complained about anything like that.”

  Dr. Wiser looked down at the pictures. “Hmmm.... Okay, well, another cause for concern, then would be what kind of interference the twin is making on Mrs. Harris’s body.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Dr. Wiser gave a little shrug. “I mean that, even with a CAT scan, we really can’t tell exactly how developed that twin is, or what it’s developed. There’s a chance, for example, that it’s produced some glands that are leaking hormones into your wife’s bloodstream. During pregnancy, when there’s already so much business going on with hormones and changes to the body, there’s an increased chance of something like that little twin messing things up.”

  Alex nodded, then said, “Is there a chance of something like that, I don’t know, messing with people’s brains? Or, like, making them paranoid or something.”

  Dr. Wiser nodded. “Sure. The body is ran by a number of hormones. If your hormones are off, it can mess up a lot of things.”

  “Well, I think that we want to have it removed, then,” Alex said.

  “I would argue strongly in favor of doing that,” Dr. Wiser said, “but you’ll probably want to talk about it with your wife, first.”

  “Of course,” Alex said. “Is there a letter or a pamphlet you could give me, or something, so that she won’t think I’m just making this up.”

  Dr. Wiser laughed. “Of course. You can take the pictures. I’ll circle the twin in them. And then I’ll have the receptionist run some things off for you. And, if your wife wants to, she can give me a call here at the office, and I’ll be happy to explain it to her.” He stood up squirted some hand sanitizer from the desk into his palms, then rubbed them together. “That’s all I’ve got, unless you have other questions for me.”

  “I do, actually. About having it removed—should I schedule that here, or...?”

  “Well, it’s a surgery. A little more involved then just removing a mole, with how far into the tissue it is. But, since it isn’t a real emergency, I’d guess that you’d be able to schedule it for a week or two from now? You’d have to check—I’m not the one who keeps the schedule.”

  Alex nodded. “Okay then. I’ll do that. Thank you.”

  Dr. Wiser finished rubbing his palms together and opened the door. “My pleasure.”

  19

  Alex pulled into the driveway, switched off the engine, and rested his forehead on the steering wheel. Beside him, Kat shifted and mumbled, “The fire man.”

  He didn’t really know what to think, much less what to do. They had to get the twin out. It seemed like such an odd thing, such a small thing, but maybe it really was the root of all of these problems. Cut the twin out, and then decide where to go from there.

  But what to do until the surgery?

  That, he didn’t know.

  Going somewhere hadn’t really done anything. Tomorrow, they’d meet with a psychologist, but if the issue was this disappearing twin, then what good was that going to do?

  Another thing he didn’t know.

  He rolled his head to the side and looked at Kat. It was amazing, he mused, how quickly your thoughts could change. How fragile relationships were, and yet how enduring emotional ties could be. He didn’t know what to do for Kat, and some part of him already thought about what would happen if he jumped ship—if he left and started anew somewhere else with someone else. He’d never have thought that before, but now....

  Now he’d have reason enough. She went completely crazy, he could say. She killed the dog with a kitchen knife. Just absolutely out-of-her-mind crazy.

  But he didn’t want to. Still, thoughts like that came—it was inevitable. But come though they may, he didn’t have to entertain them.

  Besides, even if he’d wanted to run through that scenario in depth, there was still the baby. His baby. He couldn’t just leave Kat with a child, even if she weren’t going insane. He wasn’t that kind of man. But, if Kat really was dangerous and unstable? It would be no situation to raise a child in.

  He shook his head. This hadn’t even been go
ing on for a week. They’d fix it. They’d get it figured out.

  He reached over and brushed some of the hair out of Kat’s face, tucking it gently behind her ear. Her mouth twitched and she rolled her head, then mumbled again, “The fire man.”

  Alex wasn’t sure if it was the drugs the doctors had sedated her with, pregnancy exhaustion, or her hormonal imbalance, but she’d been pretty much asleep since hitting her head, it seemed. But then she had looked so tired, anyway. Probably because she’d been up all night with that storm she claimed rolled through.

  It didn’t make much sense to him. None of it did.

  He’d be here to figure it out, though. To work through it all. They could work through it together. That was what a couple did with problems. In the little chapel, the priest hadn’t said, “Through minor sickness and smaller inconveniences, until death do you part.” They’d agreed to the long haul. He’d made that choice and was going to stick to it.

  Wasn’t he?

  He smiled, but it was a painful thing. Then he sighed and opened the car door, letting the humid air wash over him. Whatever else he was going to do, he needed to get Kat inside. And then he probably needed to make sure she didn’t hurt herself.

  Or anyone else, for that matter.

  ACT III

  1

  When Kat came to herself, she was in her bedroom, back in Peascombe. She’d been asleep and dreaming, she realized. And, by the look of things, rather deeply asleep, too, since she’d been moved all of the way home and changed into new clothes as well.

  Her stomach growled angrily.

  Good grief, when did I last eat?

  She rolled off the bed and walked to the door, then tried the handle.

  Locked.

  Locked from the other side—the handle had been reversed, and she’d been locked up in her own room.