Of Daughter and Demon (14 page)

“Just lemme rest a minute, I’ll be fine,” I
said, when she started tryin’ to lift me outta the booth and on my
feet. She let go and I leaned back, tired, so tired, and hot. How
could I have missed that fever before, feel like I’m burnin’ up.
And my arm, oh Jesus it itches so much. I manage to shrug outta my
Mack and go to push my shirt sleeve up when I realize it’s gone,
gone with the arm, probably, down the gullet of the beast. I hear a
gasp.

“Harry, my god, what happened to your
arm?”

What do I tell her, Alice? That during my
fight with a demon that killed you I got it bitten off? Instead a
answering I just look at the stump. It itches, itches, itches. It’s
like ants crawlin’ around right under the lumpy scar tissue. I go
to scratch it and the lightest contact from my fingers brings on a
burnin’ like I ain’t never felt.

I think Fifties Chick says somethin’ about me
needin’ a doctor, and I said somethin’ about I thought you
was
a doctor. Then I didn’t really pass out, it’s like my
body just started shuttin’ down. I couldn’t really move my arms or
legs, or talk, or turn my head. It was hard work just breathin’,
just blinkin’ or movin’ my eyes, it seemed to take hours to look
from one end of the room to the other.

I musta slumped over in the booth cuz
everything looks sideways now and there she is, ain’t she
beautiful? She’s on the phone and looks scared. Help her, Alice, I
don’t think there’s much you can do for me right now but give her a
hand, huh? Tell her everything will be OK. Tell her your ol’ man’s
a fighter and he ain’t givin’ up, he just needs to rest.

I don’t know how much time has passed. I open
my eyes and see I’m in a hospital. Prolly the same one as Bobby
Johns, it’s the closest one to the bar. I still feel weak, but my
fever is gone, I think, or down quite a bit at least, and I think
I’m gettin' better.

My arm still itches though; I think it’s what
woke me up. It’s all wrapped up, the bandage stops a few inches
below my elbow and it’s drivin’ me crazy. I start rubbin’ it
through the bandage, careful at first, mindful of what happened the
last time I tried to scratch it, but there ain’t the burning this
time, not near as bad anyway. I make myself stop scratchin’ at it,
I put my good hand, hell, my only hand, under my head and close my
eyes, and think of a thousand different things, but they all seem
to come back to that stump, where something is twisting and moving
just under the surface of the skin, where it’s gritty and full of
sand, where the soft cotton of the bandage wrapped around it feels
like steel wool or that insulation stuff, the spun pink fiberglass
that works its way under the skin and festers. There’s a colony of
bugs under there, I can almost see ‘em movin’ under the bandage and
I want to scream. Instead I reach out for the call button and hit
it over and over, down the hall at the nurses’ station I can hear
it, ding ding ding, soon a nurse comes in with some cold water and
says I had a visitor but she stepped out to get some breakfast, so
I guess it’s the next morning. The nurse tells me the doctor will
be in shortly.

I’m biting my hand to keep it from scratchin’
that stump by the time he comes in, a bald dude with a stethoscope
around his neck and a clipboard.

“Ah, Mr. Mitchell, welco--”

“This arm is drivin’ me crazy, doc, you gotta
give me somethin’ for the itch.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Mitchell, there’s not much we
can do, the itching you feel means you’re healing.”

“Nah, somethin’s wrong I know how it itches
when you heal, an’ this ain’t it. Can you look at it at least?”

“Mr. Mitchell, I’m telling you--”

“I know, an’ I know I’m prolly wrong on this,
and I’m bein’ a pain in the ass an all, but if you don’t look at it
I’ll end up scratchin’ the rest of it off.”

The doctor sighed and without a word put his
clipboard down on the bed and began unwrapping the stump. I heard
of that ghost pain, where once you lose somethin’, your body still
keeps tellin’ you it’s there, and I swear I could feel a couple of
my fingers. I always figured you was supposed to feel ‘em where
they always were, but I could feel mine right on the stump. The
doctor pulled the last of the wrappings off.

“Dear god!”

“Is it gangrene? I got the ‘grene, don’t I
doc? I seen it in the war, I smelt it, that’s the worst. You gonna
have to cut the rest off? Doc? Hey. Doc? Doc!” He was still starin’
at the stump, I don’t who taught this prick his bedside manner but
they should be beat within an inch, and I reached out with my good
hand and tugged on his sleeve.

The doctor jumped, let out a little scream,
and moved away...but his eyes never left the end of what was left
of my arm. He took a step forward, moved back again, and just
leaned in real close without movin’ forward, so he was as far as he
could be and still get a good look.

“What the hell, doc?”

“It’s your arm, I--”

“Gangrene?” I asked. This time he looked at
me.

“Gangrene? No, Mr. Mitchell, it appears to be
growing back.”

I brought the stump toward me, the fresh air
feeling good on it, it seemed to work its way beneath the scar
tissue and ease the itch. But it don’t really look like scar
tissue, as I looked at it closer, I realize it’s not, it’s skin,
and I can see a couple fingernails starting to grow here and there,
and what I think will be a pinkie finger has forced itself up outta
the ruined pink wasteland of the stump about half an inch, just the
very tip, but it has a full nail, there’s even a calcium spot on
it. There are little hairs sprouting in random places, one thick
black one right next to the pinkie stub. The doc moved forward
again, right next to the bed, and I know now why he wasn’t
answerin’ me before.

“Can you wiggle it?” he asked, pointing at
the little stub of a pinkie finger.

The little tip of it wiggles back and forth
just a little, and when it does it seems to pull itself out a
little more, grow a little longer.

“This is impossible,” the doctor said. “I’m
getting a camera.” He walked backward to the door, his eyes and
mine both still locked on the stump. He pushed the door open and
called out for a nurse and without letting her in to see anything,
told her to go into his office and get his digital camera, it’s in
the top drawer on the right.

I flexed my left hand, my left hand that
really isn’t even there, and I could see tendons and the beginnings
of fingers working beneath the stump. To actually see it made me
feel a little sick, but the more I watched it the more I couldn’t
stop tryin’ to wiggle fingers that weren’t there.

The doc got his camera from the nurse and
closed the door behind him, after tellin’ her to make sure no one
else came in.

“How do you feel?” he asked. “Other than your
hand, I mean?”

“I feel pretty good, all around. For waking
up on a Monday morning in a hospital bed with one arm, I
guess.”

The doc took a couple pictures from one
angle, then from another.“Wednesday,” he said.

“What?”

“You said it’s Monday, and it’s Wednesday.
I’m sorry Mr. Mitchell, I was going to--can you turn it a little,
toward the, yes, perfect, now don’t move--I was going to tell you
you’ve been unconscious since you were brought in on Sunday night,
but...”

“Wednesday?” I said it again. This was bad. I
still had places to go, people to kill. Problem was, I feel too
weak too even stand yet, not for too long, anyway, I’m weak like a
kitten, like I just got over some kinda major flu or somethin’.

“I gotta go, doc.” I tried sitting up and my
head spun, but I made it.

“Go? Mr. Mitchell, you can’t go! You still
need care, and this--” click, flash, whir. “This is amazing, this
is medical
history
! I’ve got colleagues that will, medical
journals will kill to put this in, we’ve got to monitor this and
record every step of this process!”

“Where’s the girl what brought me here?”

“She, the nurse said she was out.”

“She comin’ back?”

“Of course. She’ll be back any minute.”

Now, I could tell he didn’t know a thing
about it, he’s just tryin’ to keep me calm and under his care so he
can be some hotshot doctor, like he had anything to do with these
weird little fingers comin’ back. I don’t wanna look like some
freak, shit, havin’ one arm is bad enough, but I don’t want just a
stump with some fingers on it, like some kinda weird flipper or
something. I mean, I know there’s people like that an’ it’s a
terrible thing, and I’m sure they don’t want it, and neither do I.
Soon as Fifties Chick comes back I’m getting outta here, Alice, cuz
I still got some work to do. And I know where to find him, finally,
this Father Valentine. Sorry I been out for so long, and that I
didn’t listen to you before. By the way, what you was tryin’ to
tell me. How was I supposed to know? No, don’t you apologize,
Alice, like you said, you got rules up there and you couldn’t tell
me everything, not all at once. I understand that. But you gave me
a couple pretty good hints, and I even got that scrap of cloth that
you figured I’d recognize for sure. Part of me did, I think, but I
ignored it. I guess it was just too terrible to think about, and
I’m sorry.

But don’t worry, Alice. As soon as I get
outta here I’m gonna pay them both a visit.

By the time Fifties Chick got back to the
hospital I’d grown another fingernail, and by the time we got home,
I had all five. The stump was longer too. I don’t think I’m gonna
end up with some flipper at the end of a stump, I think it means to
grow all the way back. Damned if I know why. That demon, its eye
grew back after I punched it out, and maybe when he was inside of
me it transferred some of this power to my arm. Hell, I’d rather
have one arm and just get rid those 15 or twenty years, hard years,
from the look of me, that the fuckin’ demon gave me. Can’t ask for
too much though, am I right, Alice?

I covered the stump up, wrapped a bandage
around it for the ride home because it looked so damned weird. The
bandages made it itch more though, and the burning was coming back,
so as soon as we was walkin’ up the back stairs to my little
apartment over the bar, I unwrapped it, and the relief was
huge.

Fifties Chick tried askin’ me about it, and
about everything that had been goin’ on. I got the feeling she
knows this ain’t just about a couple pederasts that done took my
little girl, but I still don’t know what to tell her. The truth? I
don’t think it’s as easy as that, Alice. Sure, to me an’ you, we
know these demons is out there, and all this somehow now seems like
normal. It’s like I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know about
these real monsters, even though it’s only been a week or so since
I found out about ‘em, and most a that time I sopent half-sure I
was losin’ my mind. I feel like I been goin’ after ‘em my whole
life, like it’s my mission in life. This feeling is why I went and
became a cop, and I ain’t never really been anything else. Except
for four years or so, I wasn’t a cop, not really. Not for them four
years when I didn’t know what become of you, Alice. I was just a
desperate lug who was lookin’ for people to blame for what happened
to his daughter. But now that I know, and now that I have the faces
and names of the people I’m after, I finally feel like I’m off
autopilot and back livin’ my life again. I don’t care if it takes
me another fifty years to find these last two people, Alice, I’ll
find ‘em, I’ll make everything right, and then we can both move on
to something else, something good.

But it won’t take me no fifty years, not if
they’re still where that demon showed me they was, it won’t. All it
will take me is a twenty minute drive.

“Then wait, Harry.” Fifties Chick said when I
tole her. “Wait until your arm is better; wait until you get your
strength back.”

“I can’t,” I said. I wanted to wait, but I
knew one day would turn into two, two to ten, ten to the rest of my
life. I might get to spend them years with Fifties Chick, hell, my
chances are better than might. But them years would be empty for me
Alice, I would be empty, and you would be lost forever, there in
the limbo you tole me about. I hafta make sure you get all the way
up to heaven where you belong.

By the time I showered and dressed, I had a
left hand again. It was small, smooth, and crippled looking, like a
deformed child’s hand, but I could move it. And still it grew,
though when both arms was at my side, the left one was still about
eight inches shorter than the right. I could sit and watch it grow;
watch the forearm getting longer, the muscles on it trying to grow
to what they had been before. I think I know what Gimpy must feel
like, having that little kid leg of his, cuz now that’s what my
left arm looks like, below the elbow at least. It’s like a Popeye
arm in reverse, big bicep, weak, tiny forearm. I can’t imagine
bein’ this way my whole life like Gimpy been. Count my blessings,
right Alice?

I ate a big meal and by the time I was
getting ready to leave, my left hand was functional enough to where
I could pop the clip outta my gun, check it, and pop it back in.
The left hand wasn’t big or strong enough to hold the gun by itself
and reach the trigger, let alone pull it, but I always been right
handed anyway. The growing was still happening, but it had slowed
down. Jesus I hope it don’t stop at this, I’d rather cut the whole
fuckin’ thing off than be left with just this weird little kid
arm.

This is all I’m takin’ with me tonight,
Alice. My gun and that little baggie with that one scrap of
evidence that Joe gave me, the one that was in your little hand the
night I found you.

I get back in Fifties Chick’s car and drive
again; along them same roads I’ve driven for years, past the bums
and the socialites, the perfectly shaped cobblestones and the trash
filled gutters, the tiny little shacks and the huge multi-wing
mansions, the driveways with cars in ‘em that cost two-hunnert
dollars, and two-hunnert-thousand. It’s all the same to me now.
There ain’t no status left. No matter how I end up, if I get every
dollar in the world or become some drunk slob with a cardboard
sign, it don’t matter, not as long as I can finish what I started,
Alice, it won’t matter cuz I’ll be happy.