Fiction
Friday, January 21, 2005
Virgin’s Prayer
(Horror / fantasy. This is a story from one of the novels in my Onteora Canon. Among its other features of note, Onteora is a place where magic and miracles occur frequently. Most people take no notice of them, or wish them away as hallucinations, just as they do in our “real world.” But those who accept that what they see is real are led inexorably to some critical questions: What powers stand behind magic and miracles? Are those who perform them more trustworthy than the common run of man, or less?)
"Miss Iervolino."
Lori turned from her hamper full of used bed linens to confront the dour visage of Karen Arnulfson, Hamilton General's head nurse. Trailing her by three paces was a stranger: a tall, broad-shouldered but gaunt middle-aged man in a khaki work shirt and faded blue jeans. He was good looking, in an ascetic way. His red-gray hair was cut in a short, caplike style, as if someone had jammed a bowl onto his head and clipped off anything that protruded beneath it. His eyes were a remarkably deep blue. He had his hands jammed deep into his pockets, accentuating his angularity, and he kept shifting his weight from foot to foot.
The nurse-administrator jerked her head at the tall man. "You're going to have help in the evenings. Mr. MacLachlan will be joining you at seven PM. Show him where everything is." She turned and strode swiftly back through the ward to her office at the far end. The door closed emphatically behind her.
Lori and the newcomer watched the nurse's white bulk recede until she'd disappeared into her fortress. MacLachlan was first to recover. He put out a hand and smiled diffidently. "Andrew."
She clasped and shook it, and tried to smile back. "Lori. Uh, it'll be nice to have some company."
"You would have preferred someone more your own age, I'm sure." She started to protest, but he waved it aside. "It's okay. What can I help you with?"
His tone conveyed the assumption that she would be directing him. Lori, twenty-two years old and an orderly of no status whatever, was a lot less comfortable with the idea than he seemed to be.
"Well, I'm in the middle of changing the beds for Ward G, but first we have to get you some scrubs."
"Scrubs?"
"Hospital duds, like these." She plucked at the shapeless blue garment that covered her from the shoulders down. "Gotta have 'em. Arnulfson didn't tell you?"
He shook his head.
What's he doing here, anyway?
"Let's hit Supplies and get you fixed up." She started to lead him down the corridor, stopped abruptly. "You sure this is where you want to be?"
He looked at her questioningly, but remained silent.
"Ward G is oncology, Andrew. Cancer patients. Most of them are terminal."
He nodded. "I know."
Well, at least Arnulfson didn't try to put one over on him.
"Okay." She started down the hall again, and he followed a few paces back. "Thanks, Andrew."
"For what?"
"It's been pretty lonely."
"Are you a volunteer?"
"No, I get paid for this."
"Well, you're still here by choice, aren't you?"
She looked over her shoulder at him. "Yeah, why?"
"Just curious. Why do you want to be here, Lori?"
"It fills my time."
Aaron Loesser had picked up the scrap bucket and was about to slip out of Operating Room B when Dr. Eugene Hempner waddled in and caught him.
"What the hell are you doing here?"
Aaron smiled as brightly as he could manage. "Just cleanup, doctor."
The portly chief surgeon moved slowly toward him, then looked him up and down. "You're not surgical. Who detailed you to this?"
The young orderly waved dismissively. "One of the nurses said this room needed to be picked up. I had a few minutes, so I thought I'd see what needed doing."
Hempner's suspicious eyes stabbed down at the pudgy young man. "Did one of the nurses send you in here, or not?"
"Well, not exactly..." Hiding his movements from the surgeon, Aaron let his free hand wander into the scrap bucket. He felt around in its contents. "Like I said, I just had a few minutes to spare, and I thought I could help."
Hempner's face clouded with doubt. He appeared to be on the verge of sending Aaron on his way with a warning not to tread on holy surgical ground a second time when his gaze caught on the orderly's name tag. Simultaneously, Aaron's questing fingers closed on what they sought.
"I've heard a great deal about you, young man, and none of it is to your credit. Just what did --" The surgeon gagged, wheezed weakly, and jerked his arms toward the ceiling like a marionette whose strings had been yanked. A shudder passed over his girth and his arms settled to his sides. His face had drained of expression.
"You walked into this room to look for something you dropped," the orderly murmured. "Your wallet. You found it in the corner, underneath that ventilator." He glanced around Hempner's bulk at the operating room doors, willed them to remain shut. Further arrivals while he covered his backtrail would be disastrous. The scrap of flesh he'd found emitted an accelerating stream of heat. It was turning to jelly in his palm. "You saw no one and spoke to no one. Now go."
The doctor's face remained blank. He shook himself like a dog just in from the rain, turned awkwardly and tottered through the swinging doors.
Aaron pulled his hand from the bucket and shook the liquefied remains of the tumor from his half-scalded fingers. He inspected the burn mark it had left.
That was a good one. Too bad I had to waste it on that fat asshole. Hey, maybe there are others.
He hefted his prize, resisted the urge to paw through it immediately, and ran for the doors.
Lori got back to her apartment at half past midnight, thoroughly exhausted. The work had been no heavier than usual, but introducing her new sidekick to the ward's procedures had been an unexpected strain. He'd been candid about knowing nothing. As quick a study as he'd proved to be, having to explain everything she did as she did it was more fatiguing than the work itself.
She locked the door behind her, dropped her bag by the coat tree and collapsed into her recliner. It was the only upholstered seat in the room, but it was a good one. She luxuriated in its leather embrace. Food could wait. Laundry could wait. She needed a moment of complete stillness.
I should do my exercises. I should answer Jimmy's letter. I should try to finish that damned poem. Maybe I'll close my eyes and fall asleep right here, instead.
Andrew MacLachlan's face had borne an expression of accommodation to pain. She hadn't asked him why he was there. He hadn't uttered a word beyond their opening exchange of pleasantries.
At least he isn't Jimmy, or Aaron. I could get used to him, given time.
Silence wasn't a problem for Lori. Her roommate Christine had worn silence like a custom tailored suit. Yet Christine's had been a silence that sounded like home. She had the gift, invaluable to those who must share a roof, of allowing you to be comfortably alone in her presence.
It had been three months since Christine's departure from Hamilton. Lori hadn't yet started to look for a new roommate. Despite her meager finances, she wasn't sure she wanted one.
She said it was time, that I was getting to be too much like her. She said she had to go and I had to learn to be on my own. I'm glad I didn't let myself cry. I probably wouldn't have stopped yet.
Maybe it would be easier without the mess with Jimmy.
Her eyes flicked toward her desk. His latest letter rested on her blotter, beckoning to her. Next to it lay a half-empty box of letterhead and the fountain pen Christine had given her as a high school graduation gift. The wastebasket beneath the desk was filled with crumpled beginnings.
I loved him when he left. I wanted him. I remember what it felt like to want him.
When she was busy at work, or occupied with a poem, she could keep from thinking about Jimmy for hours at a time. Lately her poetry had been no shield. At work, Aaron Loesser's importunings had begun to dent her serenity. She didn't want to hurt him, recognized in him a sort of kindred spirit despite the crawling-flesh sensation he inspired in her, but his pursuit of her, never particularly subtle, was beginning to get out of hand.
Thank God Jimmy scares him enough to keep him in line.
There was Jimmy again. How to explain to him?
How do I explain it to myself? I only know what I want, not why I want it.
She thrust herself from her chair and shuffled into her tiny kitchen to scratch together a late dinner, making as wide a circle around her desk as her living room would allow.
Chris would be ashamed of me.
At least Lori's former roommate couldn't see her cringe away from a few sheets of paper as if they might rear up and bite.
Aaron stared at the bottom of his locker. He wanted badly to bring his collection home. He couldn't think of a safe way to do it.
More than four pounds of cancerous tissue was sealed within the white paper package. It was securely wrapped, and gave no indications of its nature to the casual eye. A spell of preservation kept the tissue from deteriorating, and a spell of repulsion kept away the attentions of the curious. Those spells had used up the last of the mana from Aaron's own tumor, the one that had gotten him started.
I need a repulsor spell that doesn't depend on immobility, but none of the books have mentioned one. If I can't find one, I might have to sneak out a little of it at a time. But that means renewing the binding spells every time I open it. What a waste.
Every time he pushed a new scrap of tissue through the magical barriers, the ecstatic rush of contact as it melded with the larger hoard saturated all his senses, made him feel omnipotent. There was enough mana here to lift the hospital off its foundation and spin it like a top. Probably no sorcerer in history had possessed such a cache.
They just knew how to use it. I know where to find it.
His grimoires and the stagings of a dozen different sorcerous projects were all in the basement of his home, but the power source he needed for them was here at the hospital. All his plans would remain on hold until he could bring them together.
He shut the sheet-steel door, twirled the combination lock and hefted his tote bag. He wouldn't solve the problem tonight. He'd have to think it through better, then come back at a time when no one else was around.
The middle of the graveyard shift, maybe.
On his way out of the hospital, he took note of the positions and attitudes of all the monitor personnel. The security guards were few and unobservant. He worried far less about them than the nurses at their center-hall desks and the doctors that roamed the corridors. There were some very sharp eyes and noses among them.
Maybe I should transfer to the graveyard shift. Got to be fewer doctors loose then.
He nodded genially to the nurse-receptionist at the emergency room desk and headed out to his car. She took no note of him. The night air was clammy and cool.
But then I wouldn't get to see Lori.
Lori had become quite a temptation. Four years earlier, when she'd joined the staff, she'd been nondescript, soft and shapeless, with unkempt frizzy brown hair parted down the middle. She'd walked hunched over, as if she wanted to hide. He hadn't spared her a second look. In the four years since, her transformation had been total.
Earlier that evening, when he'd found himself alone with her and apart from that damned volunteer for the first time in a month, he'd yielded to temptation and done something he might come to regret.
Aaron's hand rose to rub at the rough-surfaced welt that covered the right side of his face from cheekbone to jawline.
I've got to learn some healing spells.
He hadn't found any of those yet, either. But he had a hunch that there were things they wouldn't help with.
Lori dropped the stack of bedpans into the slop sink and twisted open the hot water tap.
A month today, and he has yet to say more than hello.
"So what do you do in real life?"
Andrew looked back over his shoulder, eyebrows elevated. "Isn't this real?"
Too real. "I mean for a living."
He closed the cabinet of cleaning supplies and faced her. "I used to design autopilots and navigation systems for airplanes."
"What about now?"
"I guess you'd say I'm retired." He picked up his bucket and brush and returned to the main room of the ward.
You aren't old enough to be retired.
She scrubbed savagely at the pans, concentrating upon them in the hope that the monotony of the work might float her away to a place where there were no cares, no mysterious strangers, and no ardent young men pleading for her favors. It didn't work.
Aaron's getting to be more than just a nuisance.
He'd run his hand up her leg. He hadn't even tried to pretend it was accidental. Even Jimmy had never given her a look of such naked longing.
Chris would have said to enjoy the implied compliment and let the rest of it go.
It wasn't as easy as it sounded. Holding Jimmy at arm's length would soon get harder, too. She ground away at one of the badly stained pans.
Jimmy's always wanted more of me than just what's between my legs. He's held on long enough, but lately things have changed. Has he changed? Have I?
She knew she'd changed. The exercise regimen Christine had prescribed for her had stripped her of the layer of excess flesh she'd worn like a parka, revealing a sleek, muscular body that still didn't quite feel as if it were rightfully hers. Christine's instruction in grooming and carriage had been just as transforming. In forty-five minutes, Lori could go infallibly from Kitchen Scullion to Belle of the Ball.
She'd changed inside as well. She had less to say to others. Her poetry had refined, become involute, folded back upon itself to become a kaleidoscope vision that hypnotized and compelled...but she'd become unwilling for anyone else to see it. Not even Jimmy, who'd shared every experience, every achievement, every tiniest emotion with her in a ceaseless stream of letters, for nearly four years.
He graduates in six weeks. He's going to appear at my door with an engagement ring in his hand and a world of expectations in his heart, and I'm not going to be able to face him.
He's going to want to take me to bed at last.
She couldn't allow it to happen. It would set the seal on his expectations, make it impossible for her to refuse him the commitment he wanted.
The bedpan clutched in her red-knuckled hands flexed and broke. The crack of splintering plastic jolted her out of her trance. A moment later Andrew returned with his bucket and brush, closing the door carefully behind him. He saw her standing frozen and moved to her side.
"Hurt yourself?"
"No...no." She stared down at the fragments of the bedpan in her fists. A few traces of soap clung to them. "I just broke a bedpan."
He looked into her eyes, then reached past her to turn off the water. She stood motionless, staring down into the sink at the shards of plastic she clutched. "So what's the problem?"
"Nothing. I just wish I hadn't bothered to wash it." Yet she stood there gripping the remains of the stupid thing, staring down at them, as if movement were impossible.
He gently pulled the pieces from her hands and deposited them in the trashcan. She looked at him curiously, still oddly empty of volition. He stood unspeaking, waiting for her to regain herself.
The spell was broken by a series of anguished grunts and wheezes from the adjoining room.
For an unprecedented moment, it appeared that Aaron was the only hospital employee at large on Ward G. There were six patients on the ward. All of them were deep in the terminal stages of their cancers. All of them were kept so full of painkillers that they'd sleep soundly through the end of the world. None had more than a month to live by the most optimistic estimates.
Aaron's brain was on fire with images of Lori. Even through her scrubs and the jeans beneath, the feel of her leg under his hand, the warmth and vitality of her, had jolted him like hot lightning. All his nerves had reported in an instant. It was just like touching his hoard. He might have lost control of himself, pulled her down beside him to rut on the supply room floor, if she hadn't started and backed away.
A cold thrill ran through him as he made his decision. He darted quick glances up and down the ward corridor, then dived through the door into room 357 where Arnold Berglund lay rotting away.
The television was on, talk show guests chattering softly, but Berglund paid no heed. He was far distant from his cares, having been dosed with Brompton's Cocktail less than an hour earlier. The enormous teratomas that protruded from his neck swelled and shrank in rhythm with his labored breathing.
Aaron had coveted those tumors since the day the old man was admitted.
Berglund had made it into the most prestigious medical journals in the country on the strength of his tumors. He'd yielded enough samples from them to stock a small lab refrigerator all by himself.
Surely he wouldn't begrudge Aaron a few grams of tissue just a little early. Under all that Brompton's, he wouldn't even know he'd lost them.
Aaron pulled out his pocket knife.
As the orderly tried to deploy the blade, Berglund stiffened and his eyes flew open. Fierce pain twisted his gray features. He emitted a low, anguished grunting that steadily grew louder. One spasm followed another. The old man had chosen his moment to die.
Aaron backed away. By reflex he groped for the red button on the wall that announced a code to all the hospital. His hand found it, but he did not press it. He shrieked inside at the thought of his golden opportunity lost to simple bad luck.
He pried at his blade again, but it stuck in its recess. Lori and Andrew crashed through the door seconds later. Aaron slid the knife back into his jeans pocket.
Lori took in the situation with a glance, glared at Aaron, and immediately slapped the code call button. Andrew went to Berglund's bedside and sank to his knees. Incredibly, he groped for the patient's flailing hand and folded it between his own. The volunteer's eyes closed and his lips moved rapidly.
The etheric sense Aaron had cultivated over his years of exploration of the dark forces quivered like an alerted hunting dog. A miasma of power was forming in the room, hovering over Andrew's head. It was not a familiar one. Aaron's inner eye watched it wax in potency. It grew blindingly bright, then descended and wrapped itself around the thrashing, dying man.
Berglund's eyes closed. His spasms slowed, became progressively gentler. By the time the team with the crash cart had arrived, the old man was still and his breathing had ceased.
The glowing cloud of power was gone.
Andrew rose from his knees and deposited the limp hand onto its owner's motionless chest. He turned to the crash cart team, who had frozen in place upon first confronting the strange tableau.
"He's gone." The technicians started forward, but the volunteer held up a hand. There was an ineffable authority in him that halted them where they stood. "Let him be."
Lori was trying to jam her fist into her mouth.
Andrew slipped past the emergency team, wrapped an arm around Lori's shoulders and coaxed her from the room.
"Were you praying for him?"
Andrew nodded.
"Where did you know him from?"
"I didn't."
"Well, why, then?"
The broad shoulders shrugged. "What else was there to do?"
Lori started to answer, stopped herself.
"Andrew, are you a minister or something?"
The volunteer's face twitched. "No." He dropped onto a nearby couch and stared at the floor, elbows on his knees.
She went to squat before him, tried to look into his eyes, but he turned away from her gaze.
"Just religious, then?"
"No!"
She surprised them both by taking his hands and clasping them. "Then why?"
He ceased to avert his face, met her eyes with his own. There was something odd there, something that teased at her memory.
"Just an idea I had. Have you read any classical history?"
"You mean Greece and Rome, like that?"
He nodded.
"A little. Why?"
"Both societies had virginity cults. Groups of women, and a few men, pledged to maintain their virginity lifelong. They believed that the prayers of a virgin could banish pain, dispel confusion, and prepare the soul for its passage to the next world. An aristocrat who felt the approach of death would pay the cult a heavy fee to ensure that one of its members would be at his side until the end." A brief grin. "I've always wondered if there was anything to it."
She peered at him. "You're what, about forty?"
His mouth quirked. "About."
"And you're a virgin?"
Another nod.
She released his hands. The suddenness of it brought him to attention.
"Andrew, do you think it worked?"
His expression did not change. "You saw what I saw. You should draw your own conclusions."
"I didn't feel what you felt. What was it like?"
His jaw clenched. He appeared to be struggling to hold something down.
"Try it yourself sometime. Come on, we've still got work to do." He rose and strode down the corridor.
"Hey, wait a minute!"
He stopped and turned toward her as she closed on him. She clamped a hand around his wrist, surprising them both with the strength of her grip.
He has to be a warlock.
That glowing cloud had held more power than Aaron had managed to harness yet.
Where did he come from? Never mind that, what's he doing here?
It was too much of a coincidence to accept. Aaron had to get his prizes out of the hospital at once. The likelihood of discovery was much higher than he'd thought. Though his shift still had three hours to run, he started for the orderlies' locker room. He had to fetch his parcel of mana-rich tissue and get it out of the hospital, whatever the consequences.
The thought of Lori rose and stopped him. The electric onrush of desire he'd felt when he caressed her leg surged back, making him weak and dizzy. He stood motionless in the hallway, remembering. Her look of revulsion had hurt him badly.
He still wanted her, and he was very angry.
I'm likely to get canned for taking off in mid-shift. Too many wills to bend, too many memories to erase and reprogram. So why not go out with a bang?
Berglund is probably in the morgue by now.
He turned and headed for the basement stairs.
"There's no great story in it. I was going to become a priest."
Lori bit her upper lip. "But you didn't."
Andrew nodded and leaned back against the wall.
"Why did you say you're not religious?"
"Because I'm not. I haven't been in a church since I was eighteen years old."
An almost-priest who isn't religious. When do the dancing pink elephants arrive?
"Andrew, what's it like to pray?"
It threw him visibly. "Haven't you, ever?"
Blood rushed to her cheeks. "I don't know how."
The midnight blue eyes roamed her face in confusion.
"How can you not know? You open yourself. You surrender the burden of being you and call out to, to whatever's out there. You're asking to connect. You're asking for help. It's not rocket science."
A flash of insight. She reached up and laid her palms against his shoulders. "But it's hard, isn't it? Especially for someone who's deliberately closed himself off to the world and the flesh. It's the exact opposite of virginity."
Astonished comprehension bloomed on his face. "Yes. But it gets easier, with practice."
"A lot of things do. And when you pray for someone else...?"
His body trembled against her hands.
"When it works," he whispered, "it's like being a high-voltage line. There are forces...I can't describe them, but they're huge. They take you over completely, use you in ways I don't have words for. But they pass over you and through you, and when they let go, you're back to what you were before."
She let her hands slide down the length of his arms, took his hands in her own.
"Andrew," she said, "I've learned not to question the provenance of knowledge. Sometimes it comes in odd wrappings. Sometimes it looks like damned foolishness. But I know it when I see it." She squeezed his hands and marshaled her courage. "Can you teach me this?"
He swallowed hard. "I can try."
The ward was utterly still.
"Would you mind coming with me to the morgue? I want to say goodbye to Mr. Berglund. He was always nice to me, and I'm going to miss him." Her throat tightened. "Thank you for doing what you did for him."
His eyes misted over, and he murmured assent. She pulled him toward her and led him down the stairs to the basement.
Lori drew back the sheet over Arnold Berglund's face and immediately saw the jagged wounds where his tumors had been. Blood leaked down his neck and stained the cover of the gurney. She staggered backward and would have fallen had Andrew not caught her and steadied her.
"What the hell -- ?"
Andrew's hands turned her toward the morgue doors. A thin trail of blood droplets connected them to Berglund's gurney.
She looked up at the volunteer. "Do you think they wanted them for the lab?"
Andrew shook his head. "No civilized person would have done this. We'd better check it out."
She nodded.
Aaron savored the weight of the freshly harvested tissue: more than two pounds, every milligram of it near to bursting with mana. The richness of the lode, no longer obscured by Berglund's life-field, pulled commandingly at his etheric sight. His awareness of the power trove all but locked out the signals from his normal senses.
A pinch of this and the right words in Lori's ear, and I'll be a virgin no more.
He caught a few grams of the rubbery flesh between finger and thumb, tore it from the larger mass and shoved it into the pocket of his scrubs. He pushed the rest through the magical barriers that protected his main cache. As he did so, the door to the locker room swung open. He whirled in surprise and irrational fear.
Lori and Andrew stood there watching him.
His fear spiked and he almost started to gibber, before he remembered what he had decided and had armed himself to do. He smiled.
"Now that's what I call service. And timing."
His hand slipped back into his pocket as he started to murmur.
A stream of guttural nonsense syllables flowed from Aaron's lips. One bloody hand rose in an arcane gesture, and the room grew immediately cold. Lori sensed a threatening presence at the edges of her vision, but her eyes detected nothing. Beside her, Andrew's gaze was glued to Aaron Loesser. The volunteer was trembling again.
Behind Aaron's pudgy form, at the bottom of his locker, a paper-covered mass the shape and size of a throw pillow had begun to glow in a color for which she had no name. It radiated malice as an open fire radiates warmth.
Something she couldn't quite see streaked past her and struck Andrew in the midsection. The volunteer doubled over and flew backwards. He crashed through the locker room's swinging doors, tearing them partly off their hinges, and sprawled stunned on the corridor floor.
"They say three's a crowd, Lor." Aaron's grin was the essence of juvenile malevolence. "Now if he'd been as pretty as you -- !"
The orderly slid toward her, one hand still held aloft, the other squirming in the pocket of his scrubs. That pocket glowed like the bottom of his locker, but at far lesser intensity. The luminance from his locker continued to grow. The phosphorescent mass there seemed to be swelling in size.
She backed toward the doors, but found herself blocked by an invisible barrier. It kept her from moving to either side, as well. Aaron continued to ooze toward her.
"There are compensations to being short and unattractive, Lor. Not many, but a few. You should try it sometime. Oh, wait, I forgot, you have. Well, then you remember. You get to move around unnoticed a lot. You get to try things without being watched. Sometimes, you make a discovery other people were too busy, or too squeamish, to make themselves."
The burgeoning glow had emerged from Aaron's locker and was rising behind him, assuming an ovoid shape. He took no notice.
"Ever notice how the pictures of famous witches always show a big lump on the face or neck somewhere? Cancers, probably. But back when they believed in witchcraft, they didn't know about cancer. And now that we know all about cancer, only three-year-olds believe in witches."
The glow was moving forward and spreading to blanket the room. Shimmers and stains swam across it like oil slicks across a pool of water.
"When I had this thing removed" -- he rubbed at the scar on his cheek -- "I asked for the tumor as a keepsake. The surgeon asked why I'd want to keep something like that, and I told him it would remind me of how lucky I'd been. So he gave it to me, and I took it home and did some tests. Not the kind they do in the labs upstairs, though."
A thread of ghostlight leaped from the mottled glow and attached itself to the thing in his pocket. It rapidly grew thicker and brighter.
"When I was sure of my findings, I started a new hobby. I became a connoisseur of scrap buckets. I studied the OR schedules the way a tout studies the ponies, and I made sure I was always first to the leftovers. And over the years, I've put together quite a little collection."
The thread began to pulse.
"Turns out all malignant tumors are rich in mana. Facial and neck tumors are the best. With enough mana and the right incantations -- and the balls to put it all together and try it, of course -- you can do all the things the witch hunters wrote about. Hell, you can do things they never wrote about. Like erasing your enemies' memories, or making them into robots that have to leap at your command. Or making the girl of your dreams lie back and spread her legs."
She huddled behind her crossed arms and shrank as far away from him as she could. The hot curtain of color behind him was rippling and waving, coming nearer to him with each instant. The thread that linked it to his pocket had swelled to a thick, pulsing rope of light.
He noticed her looking past him and turned to see what she watched. His eyes went wide in wonder and terror as the auroral mass surged forward and enveloped him.
No sound that resembled Aaron Loesser's scream had been heard on Earth in two hundred years. The flesh sloughed from his body in sodden sheets, his bones crumbled into fragments, his eyes melted and ran from their sockets, and still he screamed. Every shard and driblet of him dissolved gradually into vapor, and the vapor disappeared into the glowing curtain. When nothing but the echo of that scream remained, the destroying light surged toward her.
Lori Iervolino, in the extremity of fear, felt an internal barrier part. Her terror streamed from her as she yielded herself to eternity.
The annihilating curtain halted. It passed through a sequence of angry colors, pulsed its hatred at her, but advanced no further.
Something new was forming in the meager space between her and the malevolent light. The room warmed.
The curtain of chaos fell back a few inches, perhaps a foot. Its edges sparkled, pulled in slightly toward its center.
Threads of blue-white light were forming across the evil glow, crosshatching it in a complex pattern from some cosmic loom. As they grew denser, their purity gradually occluded the purulent glow of the demonic mass.
Something was weaving a shroud of containment for the killer thing.
The process accelerated. The patchthreads multiplied and drew tight. The edges of the evil aurora pulled steadily inward. It pulsed and surged against its accumulating cage, but in vain.
When it was down to the size of a basketball, an unseen hand yanked closed the mouth of the shroud of light. With a final burst of brilliance and a shockwave like a silent thunderclap, it and its captive were gone.
Footsteps pounded in the corridor outside. Hospital staff members crowded around the doors. Andrew had picked himself up and was leaning heavily against the wall, regaining his breath and strength.
The babble of a thousand voices assaulted her ears. All of them seemed to be directed at her. A forest of hands reached toward her, to hinder or help. She swept them aside and went to Andrew, slipped an arm around his waist and shepherded him from the building.
"You too, eh?"
Lori nodded. "Been a hassle, now and then."
Andrew looked away.
They sat on the curb outside the emergency room entrance, the night silent around them. The scurrying still going on inside the building in the wake of the incident had become irrelevant to them.
"What was it, Andrew? What did he unleash?"
He grimaced. "How can we know? Maybe his collection of tumors reached some sort of critical mass and no longer needed a human will to activate it." He picked a pebble out of the grass and tossed it into the street. "It doesn't seem to have felt it owed him anything."
"For sure." A fresh shudder jagged through her, but she forced it down. "Andrew, why? Why did you remain celibate after you decided you weren't going to become a priest?"
The digression took him by surprise. He was slow to answer.
"It's not just a condition. It's a set of habits. You get used to being closed off. The bodies of other people start to seem threatening. Even your own can seem like it belongs to someone else. If you let it go long enough, it colors everything. You don't think about the same things other men do. You don't enjoy the same kinds of pastimes, or entertainment, or jokes. What you are changes completely. The bonds..." His eyes held a bottomless sorrow. "Lori, they say we're all connected, but we're not, at least not permanently. Those connections can be snapped, and if they're not reestablished fast enough, maybe they can't be remade ever again."
It was a message from the edge of the world, and it chilled her to the core.
"So why are priests celibate, then?"
He scowled and looked away. "In theory, to take our minds off the concerns of the flesh so that we can focus on matters of the spirit. We're supposed to have one foot in each world. In practice...I looked into it a few years back. It was part of a set of compromises between the European nobility and the Church, back when the Church exercised temporal authority."
She took his hand. "Andrew, you're not a priest, but you keep saying 'we.' You're not bound by any oath or obligation, but you deny yourself as if you were. It isn't us out here who've cut you off." A squeeze. "We want you."
His head swiveled slowly toward her. His face had gone pale and his eyes wide.
"You don't know me. You don't even know what I am."
She snorted gently. "I don't even know what I am, Andrew. What did I do in there? Do you have the faintest idea? I don't."
He started to speak, caught himself.
"Let me tell you a little story," she said. "I have a boyfriend, name's Jimmy. We've been an item for about four and a half years. He finishes college next month, and sure as sunrise he's going to pop the question. Jimmy's been probing for an early decision from me for most of this year. I love him, Andrew, I really do. I couldn't be happy if I knew he wasn't. But I can't marry him. I've gotten so used to being alone that when I try to imagine becoming half of a couple with him, my insides freeze up and I stop being able to think."
She paused, tried to force coherence on her thoughts. "I have to learn my way back into humanity. I have to identify my shields and find ways to lower them. And I know I can't do that alone, but I can't do it in company with someone who has no idea what I'm going through, either."
His eyes pressed her, assessing, measuring. She met them with more than a little fear, but without flinching. She caught herself praying for the second time that night.
It does get easier.
"Where do we start?"
His voice came as a surprise after the long silence.
"I don't know." She tried for a casual tone. "Dinner and a movie?"
He scowled again. "Don't think it's going to be easy."
She stiffened a little. "I'm not stupid, Andrew."
"No." He grinned ruefully. "I'm twice your age, you know."
"Okay, no ice hockey. Can you walk?"
"Sure. Where to?"
"How about that diner?" She pointed.
He turned to follow her gesture, peered at the squat metal building on the corner, then gathered her arm against him and pulled her down the street. His stride was that of a man determined to commit himself irrevocably before his courage could desert him.
"Done."
She struggled to keep up.
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