Red Right Hand (12 page)

The room
breathed.
Slow and labored, the air dragged kicking and screaming into lungs too tired or frail or weak to do it themselves by machines that gave no consideration to the comfort of the people tethered to them.

Along each wall were beds, hospital beds, with people in them. They lay twisted, curled in on themselves, each person strung with wires, tubes, and hoses like human-sized science fair projects.

Or bombs.

I stopped walking. The room closed down around me like a hand on a throat. My mind teetered at the edge of a cliff; the sight, the sound, the
smell
of the ward pushed against it, trying to tip it over the edge and down the chasm of insanity.

I had woken up in a ward just like this one after that night.

It's not you.

This is not then.

Keep it together.

Keep it together.

I didn't feel my hand clenching and unclenching until Daniel grabbed it.

His brow creased with concern. “Hey, are you okay?”

His hand felt warm against mine, the skin soft. “I don't like hospitals. Hate them, in fact,” I said.

“I know. I don't like them either. They remind me of the time I separated my shoulder in a match. Damn, that hurt.” He shook his head, shaggy bangs falling across his eyes. “Pain sticks with you, ya know?”

I did. I had woken with the pain of three cracked ribs, a broken hand from fighting back, a dislocated jaw to stop me from fighting, and a dislocated hip from what they did after I passed out. Contusions, abrasions, tears, and lacerations had covered my body inside and out. I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that pain sticks with you.

Breathe.

I pushed past it.

“Hopefully we won't be here long.” Daniel pulled me along after the Man in Black.

I followed and we moved to the first bed in a row. Nyarlathotep stood on the other side of the bed. He was a face and a front; the rest of him disappeared into the inky black. It was an illusion, a trick of my mind, but I believed I could see him swirling into the darkness. He was the Man in Black, the Midnight Man, the original bump in the night.

A shell of a man lay on the bed between us, wearing striped pajamas stretched over a bulbous, rounded stomach. It jutted in a deformed dome over his midsection. From it extended spindly arms and legs; the pajamas flapped around them like a canvas sack full of sticks. The man looked like the pictures of starving children in Africa that come up on the late night TV screen, except he was adult and all the more horrible for being here in front of me instead of locked away in a digital display.

The skin of his neck was wrinkled, lying in loose folds under his chin; an oxygen mask covered his face. It fogged with moisture from his mechanical breathing, leaving only sunken eyes and lank greasy hair to see. An IV pole stood next to the bed. From it hung bags attached to tubes that ran down and disappeared under the pajama sleeves.

One bag, the size of a large purse, hung half filled with a transparent fluid I guessed was probably saline. A second bag looked purple in the low light, the fluid in it thick and opaque.

Blood? Possibly plasma?

I didn't know. My time in the hospital hadn't made me an expert on medical stuff, but I couldn't think of anything else it could be. I didn't think they gave you blood or plasma except in emergency situations. Again, not an expert.

The third bag on the pole disturbed me. The fluid in it cast a low phosphorus light over the bed. The fluid bubbled and gurgled and glowed a sickly green color inside the bag. I could see small shapes moving in it. Leaning closer, I saw the shapes were tiny things, each one smaller than a grain of rice, swimming in complicated patterns through the liquid. As I watched, one of them rushed at the side of the bag and splayed itself against the plastic. I had a sea monkey colony as a child, and I had loved watching the miniscule shrimp frolic through their water, feeding them, counting them every day to see if they'd made any more minuscule offspring. Then one day I came home from school and found that I had forgotten to move them off the windowsill that morning. The cruel summer sun had boiled them alive, and I found them floating in a mass grave on the top of the aquarium.

This little creature brought back that memory.

Its body was a narrow oval surrounded by hairlike fibrils. The center of the tiny, squirming thing held an orifice filled with what looked like a jagged ring of miniature teeth. It opened and closed, opened and closed, opened and closed.

Chewing at the bag. Trying to get to me.

One by one the other creatures began to plaster themselves against the side of the bag, slapping against it as if they had been thrown there, splaying themselves and chewing, chewing, chewing.

Fighting a shudder, I turned away.

The man on the bed hadn't moved aside from his slow, labored breathing, oblivious to our presence. Large plastic padded cuffs swallowed the lower halves of his arms and legs, shackling him to the bed. They had enough slack that he had turned awkwardly, his knobby knees and elbows pulled into the swollen, distended sack of his stomach. This close he smelled like a bedsore: a moist, musty odor of dead skin and open wound.

“He looks horrible.” Daniel said it, but I thought the same thing.

“He is food slowly consumed.”

I looked at the Dark God standing on the other side of the bed. “Food for what?”

“Let us find out.”

His red right hand came out of the coat pocket holding a long knife, much too long for the pocket it came from. Black iron with a thick spine and trianglular point, it rested delicately between raw, red fingers. The edge gleamed in the low fluorescent light of the ward. It was a plain knife, not one drop of decoration wasted on it. It looked like the knife of someone who
used
it, a tool well cared for and utilized.

Not the knife of the Crawling Chaos.

My eyes were drawn to it, locked on it. I felt the pull of it somewhere deep inside, near the base of my spine. The Mark on my right palm began to tingle, as if electric shocks ran in the lines and whorls carved there. The same tingle ran underneath the heavy iron ring around my neck. It was uncomfortable but not unpleasant, making me
feel
things.

“Why does that knife make me feel weird?”

The Man in Black raised a sharply sculpted eyebrow. He didn't speak for a long moment, studying me. “This is the Aqedah.”

“I don't know what that means.”

“It is the Knife of Abraham.”

“Lincoln?”

“I think he means Abraham from the Bible.” Daniel's voice came from the side of his mouth. His eyes were pinned to the knife too.

“That is correct, minion. This is the blade held by the first Israelite when he attempted to slaughter his very own child. He received it from the hand of his father before him who used it to carve idols to Moloch. Abraham stained it with his own blood and the blood of his children by performing their circumcisions with it.”

Beside me, Daniel shuddered.

Pulling my eyes from Daniel to the knife I ask, “What does that history have to do with me feeling weird?”

The Man in Black turned the knife in his hand, examining the blade. “It has drawn certain kinds of men to it since it was forged from the meteorite that fell from the edge of the universe. Tsar Peter the Third castrated himself and members of his Skoptsy cult with it. I took it from the hand of a Nazi doctor after his own castration went badly.” A look passed over his face, a small smile of fond memory.

“And what are you planning to do with it?”

Please don't say, “Castrate the man on the bed.”

I should have known it would be worse than that.

The blade waved over the man's distended stomach. “Minion, undo the buttons on his shirt.”

Daniel stretched out his hand, fingers fumbling with a large round button. He pulled it up and the soft cotton, already stretched wide over the highest point of the stomach, slipped over it, popping free. The cloth folded like the skin of an autopsy, caping to either side. I looked away as Daniel undid the rest of the buttons, not wanting to see the revelation of what lay underneath. I knew I would look—I would have no choice—but watching the slow unveiling, button by button, was too disturbing.

My eyes swept over the beds across from us, lining the other wall. They were also segregated in pools of dim light, also occupied by the shapes of contorted humans. In the dim light I could see that they were also shackled to their beds and hooked up to the same three bags of fluid as the man in front of me.

Before I could think about what that might mean, Daniel's voice drew my attention. “It's done.”

The man on the bed lay exposed from the waist up. His stomach had looked big under his pajama top; with the covering removed it looked ludicrous. Enormous, it seemed as though it should crush the man beneath it. The skin stretched pale, appearing blanched, the color of chicken boiled too long. Wide red stretch marks radiated from the navel like angry fever lines. Here and there they were pockmarked with pustules, pockets of infection seeping in crusty yellow lines. A network of blue varicose veins throbbed around the bottom and sides of the belly, obscene pipelines of sluggish blood. It was horrible, an anatomy lesson in the grotesque.

The back of my throat burned with stomach acid as nausea swept over me.

The Man in Black put his left hand flat on the man's chest, pinning him to the bed. Softly, almost gently, he laid the edge of the knife against the skin where the man's stomach jutted from his chest at a near ninety-degree angle. He leaned forward, his face low to the man's skin, his arm wrapped around the stomach.

“Wait,” I said.

The Man in Black paused.

“You can't kill him.”

“I will not.”

“That knife is a killing thing.”

“One thing has nothing to do with the other, Acolyte.”

“Charlie,” Daniel said, “there aren't any heart monitors or nurse call buttons here.”

He was right. Just the bags, the breathing machine, and the bed over and over and over again.

“I think they might be dead.”

“Is this true?” I asked the Man in Black.

“Near enough that you may consider this a mercy.” He licked his lips. “Now, may I continue?”

I nodded.

Dark eyes glittered deep in their hollows. “You may want to step back.”

I moved at the same time Daniel did. My heart beat against the inside of my rib cage like an animal trapped in a too-small cage. I took another step.

The Man in Black nodded once then drew the knife around in a quick vicious slash.

The skin parted under the edge of the blade. The air filled with the soft whisper-crackle of separating skin, subcutaneous from cutaneous, fat from flesh. A gush of brackish fluid splashed across the edge of the mattress, soaking the bedclothes and splattering on the tile floor. We were suddenly standing in a puddle of something disgusting.

Something that stank of rusty iron, moldy bread, and stagnant water.

My stomach lurched, empty and unable to do anything else.

The Midnight Man grabbed the flap of skin he'd carved out and flipped it back, revealing what lay inside the man's stomach. The man never moved other than to continue his slow, labored breathing behind the mask.

I didn't want to look. I didn't. I tried to turn away, to look somewhere else, to not witness what lay before me.

But I couldn't. I had to look. Driven by a sick fascination I
had
to see what had been revealed.

I had no idea what I was looking at.

I'd taken basic anatomy in school, and none of the charts I had ever seen looked like this. The inside of the man had been turned into a cocoon, the hollow coated with layers of glistening, fibrous threads. They overlapped and crisscrossed each other to form a cushion on all sides. A mass of discolored flesh the size of a small child nestled in the batting. The tumor clung to the spine and rib cage with finger-thick tendrils, fleshy nooses that were wrapped and hung and strung from it, tethering the thing to the bone. It had no symmetry, bulging and protruding out of geometry, disturbing to the eye.

Disturbing to the mind.

Revulsion rippled my esophagus, the lining of my throat closing in disgust that this thing, this malignant mass, this
tumor
could grow inside a fellow human being—stealing his life, devouring his humanity, consuming his body for its own, farrowing cell by cell, molecule by molecule, replacing him with itself.

It was absolutely the most horrifying thing I'd ever seen.

And then it opened its eye.

 

19

“W
HAT THE HELL
is that?”

Daniel jumped away from the bed rail. His elbow caught the IV pole, knocking it to the floor with a crash and a clatter. The tubes connecting to the man on the bed stretched and pulled and ripped out. They
thwhip
ped up and around, the sharp silvery needles at their ends slicing the air in a razor-sharp arc.

The air in front of my eyes.

I jerked back, fast enough for the needles to miss, not fast enough to avoid the noxious liquid that slung across my face.

I immediately rubbed my sleeve on it, my skin already crawling with the thought of the little black shapes swimming in the green fluid.

Nyarlathotep looked down at us from across the bed, his voice lashing quickly. “Be more careful, minion. You draw attention to us.” Magick tingled in my stomach from the power behind his words.

Attention from whom?

Daniel dropped to his knees, ignoring the puddle of fluid we had been standing in, now soaking into the legs of his jeans. “Forgive me, Master.”

“Take your feet and make yourself useful.”

Daniel stood, pulling himself up on the bed rails. “What can I do?”