The Twins of Noremway Parish (23 page)

Mica was old. She had no delusions about her continued existence in this world and strongly suspected that this little adventure to help Rita would lead to her death. Her body would just give out like an old broken-down machine. She’d used most of her energy getting there and now felt the pain of the strenuous ride. A wave of pain and paralysis engulfed her. Her vision blurred, and her legs weakened; she couldn’t move; she couldn’t breathe. Her head spun and before she knew it she was eating the dry sand at Boris’s feet. She died immediately; so fast that she didn’t have the opportunity to register the salty grains on her tongue.

When she hit the ground her brittle bones crunched. Her head shattered as the fragile, old skull gave way to age and impact. Sharp shards of bone pushed their way into the delicate flesh of her brain. The absolute last thing she saw before dying was Rita Morgan standing over her, a look of abject horror on her face. If she had had a choice about it, Rita’s face would not have been the last image she saw in this world.

The oft-forgotten—and doting—husband James Morgan, meanwhile, continued his descent into oblivion. He crumpled to the ground, never fully understanding what had just happened. He died there beside his wife, who didn’t even notice.

She saw Mica’s crumpled and dead body lying on the ground, immobile, with no life to speak of flowing through her. She quickly untied Boris from the carriage, hopped atop him, and pushed him the several miles into town as fast as he would go. She needed Plague.

As she pushed onward, she was completely unaware that the events that had just transpired were of her own doing.

***

Meanwhile, back in the jailhouse, Ortega Gool sat in his cell, thinking about what to do. There wasn’t much else to do but stew in his thoughts. He had heard the exchange between Phoenix, Urey, and Plague, and wasn’t happy about it. Was his life really that worthless to everyone in Noremway Parish? He didn’t have a family; he had chosen to be a bachelor. No wife, no children; his parents had recently passed on. No one had a close connection to him. As he thought about it, he understood that was how he had ended up in this situation in the first place. If he had had anybody close to him, he never would have been so taken in with Rita Morgan’s ravings—her rants about evil conspiracies and the lost ways of the friar and parochial vicar. There would have been more for him in this world than soaking up these hyperbolic tales of a disturbed mind.

After the doctor’s exit, Phoenix and Urey discussed the probable execution and seemed to come to some sort of agreement; what that agreement was, he didn’t know. They had kept their voices low, but one thing he knew for sure, he wasn’t going to stick around and find out—not without a fight anyway.

“
Hey, let me out of here!” he demanded. “I know what you’re planning to do, and I’m not sticking around for it. Let me out now!” He gave the bars a tug; they didn’t budge. The door’s hinges were strong: its lock stronger. There was no getting out unless they let him out.

Franz approached the cell, holding the lantern with one hand, the club in the other. “So you want another round? Fine by me, Buddy.” He tapped the bars with the club. The sound within the cell was deafening and Ortega fell to the floor, holding his ears and pleading for mercy. Even though Franz was amused, he didn’t show it. “Get up!” Rarely was he able to hide the extent of his amusement, especially in the face of human suffering.

Gool attempted to obey the order, but in the mental anguish he had already been suffering, he was on the verge of completely losing his mind. He writhed on the floor with his feet at the front of the cell and his head toward the back, attempting to sit up. The muscles in his abdomen were strong, but he was weakened from the onslaught of the sonar bars. He had momentarily forgotten the pain in his broken arm.

Despite the horrific damage—which would become more than evident within mere moments—he could no longer feel it at all. Perhaps the pain receptors had shut off; maybe a short circuit had occurred somewhere along the nerve pathways to the brain. A child quickly learns not to put his finger into the flickering light of a lantern fire. The pain is a reminder that fire is dangerous. With that friendly reminder gone from his arm, it did not even register in his mind that he should not use it to pull himself up.

The dead receptors came alive as an immediate, fast, furious pain shot through the arm and throughout his body. He cried out as the flesh ripped open. There had already been significant tissue damage underneath the skin from the sharp shards of bone, so as he attempted to pull himself up on the bars, the flesh could not withstand the weight and pressure. Nerves fired, causing his hand to grasp the bar tightly.

He didn’t realize his arm had torn off until Franz started laughing at him. “Keep it up, Gool! We won’t have to worry about whether or not to execute you! Ha!” The sheriff had lost his stern composure, and he couldn’t regain it. To be fair, it was for a lack of trying; Franz wanted to laugh at his maimed prisoner. He wanted to get in his face, degrade him, maybe even beat him to death with the severed appendage–nothing like kicking him while he was down. That would be…different, and the idea of it excited him. He loved it. He was so mesmerized that he briefly forgot where he was. He had forgotten the chancellor was looking on.

What has happened to the good old sheriff?
Franz wondered comically. That must be what Urey was thinking.
What has happened to the good old sheriff?
Of course such a thought would neglect the fact that Urey didn’t trust him one bit, and probably never had. Not to mention the “good old sheriff” wasn’t the only one these days that had an inner darkness.

Either way, the chancellor stood motionless, probably unable to do or say anything at all. Knowing his own problems, he could have been looking on and wondering if his own personality and conduct would reflect the darkness growing inside him.

Or maybe he was too stunned by the events themselves to think about deeper, darker implications. What do you do when your prisoner tears his arm off in his cell? That was the question.

Gool looked down in horror at the bleeding stump and then at his forearm that still clung to the steel bars. “Please. Let me go,” was all he could say to the hysterically laughing sheriff. The blood poured from his arm, soaking his prison-issued shirt a dark crimson.

Suddenly, a swirl of black mist blew through the jailhouse door and flew into Gool’s cell, surrounding him. Then as suddenly as it had appeared it was gone.

“
What was that?” Urey asked, but both Phoenix and Gool ignored the question. Franz was too busy laughing, and the prisoner was gasping in horror at his bleeding stump. The sight of the dark cloud was quickly forgotten by all. There was just so much going on that Urey, for one, assumed he had just imagined it.

Remarkably, despite his profuse bleeding, Gool seemed to be wide awake, unaffected by the shock of significant blood loss, and seemingly unaware of the black cloud that had just swarmed around him. The pain hurt him, to be sure, and it kept him reeling on the floor, but the amount of blood loss should have killed him by now.

The chancellor stood in the doorway, looking like he wasn’t sure what to do. He was in shock, terrified; first, for the event itself, and second, for the sanity of Franz Phoenix. He questioned his own sanity as well. Maybe he was the one who was cracking up. The more he thought about recent events, the less certain he became about anything.

“
Chancellor, either stay or go. Makes no difference to me,” Franz said as he continued laughing uncontrollably. His wide smile reminded Urey of the joker in a pack of playing cards. “Whoo-wee! Gool, I’ve
never
had
this
much fun!” He calmed just enough to say: “Before you rush to get the doctor, just ask yourself this: would you condemn an innocent child to a certain death in order to save the life of a man who threatened the life of the friar of Noremway Parish?” Then he reverted back into hysterics.

Urey honestly did not really care about the survival of either twin. To him, they were both freakish abominations that probably belonged with the chaos.

“
Franz,” he finally said, “keep Gool alive until I come back with Plague. Wrap the arm, stop the bleeding. You know as chancellor, I have to determine Ortega’s sentencing on the deed alone. So ensure he lives until I can do so. You aren’t going to want him to die before Plague has a chance to save him.”

“
I guess that’s why you’re the chancellor,” he replied, laughed some more, and gave the bars another whack. Gool fell in agony once more, screaming, blood pouring out his ears in addition to the stump of his arm. “Shut up!”

“
Where is that damn deputy of yours?” Urey said. “Someone around here needs to take some control.”

“
He’s on the roving watch. He’ll be back. You think I can’t handle this?”

“
He should be here to make sure you don’t do anything stupid.” He then headed out the door, conveniently just as the deputy came off the rove. He tipped his hat at the chancellor, who advised, “You have a dying prisoner. Whatever you have to do, see to it that he lives long enough for the doctor to arrive. And try to control that monster—I mean the sheriff. He’s hysterical.”

***

“
So, here’s the deal, Deputy,” Franz whispered when the chancellor was out of earshot. “The chancellor is planning to order Ortega’s execution tomorrow so he wants us to let him die to save everybody the pain of a public hanging.”

“
But that’s not what he just said,” the deputy who was young, a little naïve, and more than just a little inexperienced said. He’d looked up to Franz Phoenix as a kind of mentor, despite the fact he seemed to have a corrupt streak running through him. He wouldn’t dare to be confrontational, so his challenge came off more as bewilderment than anything else, like he was honestly trying to fit what the chancellor and the sheriff had said into the same statement.

Franz could see what the naïve young man was trying to do, so he thought he’d help him along. “Oh do you really think the chancellor is going to walk out the door and say, ‘Let your prisoner die’? He said what he did for the same reason he’s going to get Plague: to cover his ass. And we have to make it look like we tried to keep him alive to cover ours.”

“
I get it,” the deputy said, noticeably relieved that he could now put these two things together in his mind. “But we can’t take the law into our own hands.”

“
We have to,” Franz said.

Like the naïve deputy that he was, he acquiesced to the sheriff’s reasoning despite how unsound it ultimately was.

From the cell, lying in agony on the floor, the prisoner moaned, “Just because I’m bleeding, it doesn’t mean I can’t hear you!”

“
Shut it, Gool! No one asked you to speak!” Franz glanced at the cell. Blood was everywhere, and Gool was lying in the middle of it. He held up the stub of his arm and waved it about surprisingly strongly. Splatters of blood flung from the stump, splashing both of them. This made Franz laugh even harder, but he was confused at one thing: how was Gool able to appear so strong and lively despite his massive blood loss?

“
So, what do we do?” the deputy asked, apprehensive at the prospect the sheriff had laid out, but also eager to please.

“
We try to save his life, of course,” he said, and for the moment stopped laughing.

Chapter 15

The underdeveloped twin would be missing a leg, an arm, a ribcage, and a myriad of internal organs. It would be nearly impossible to determine the extent of missing vitals and keep the child alive–
nearly
impossible, but still feasible. Either way, whether Plague could or couldn’t keep this child alive throughout the operation was a moot concern if he didn’t have the materials he needed. If he could harvest the organs from a recently deceased, otherwise healthy individual, he would be in business. The task of putting adult organs into a small child’s body would be a daunting one—as if the act of separating the twins wasn’t—but he didn’t foresee any
serious
complications. It was a far from perfect scenario, to be sure, but if he had healthy organs to work with, then it shouldn’t be an issue.

The limbs and the ribs would be a problem though. The use of prosthetics might be the solution there. They weren’t like a functioning liver or intestine. If only…

Medical science and procedure in Noremway Parish were a combination of traditional folk remedies and the advanced techniques of the ancients. The world of the distant past where doctors could cure any conceivable illness, re-grow amputated limbs, and even procure a clone was gone…a long gone age. But remnants of that great civilization showed up in the abilities and resources of Bartholomew Plague. He had to light his office with an oil lantern, but even so, Plague had the talent and the know-how to utilize some of the ancient medical techniques. Out of all the doctors currently operating a practice in the many parishes that dotted the Inner-Crescent, Bartholomew Plague was the only one who had
any
chance of saving the twins. Maybe it was fate. Maybe it was coincidence. Or maybe it was neither.

He stood over his notes, looking at them in the orange lantern light. What was he to do?

“
The doctor’s dilemma,” said a voice from the shadows. He looked up, but he was blind to the specter, unable to discern even a possible shape in the darkness. Staring at the yellow-white papers through the light of a lantern for hours had left his night eyes maladjusted to such a purpose.