Unraveled Visions (A Shaman Mystery) (33 page)

thirty-two

I didn’t scream.
There
was no hope for screamers. Papa Bulgaria was closed and empty downstairs. And in this part of Bridgwater, people were used to screams. Hordes of girls with too much bad white wine inside them screamed their way down the streets regularly, even on Tuesday nights.

Beside, I had no breath to scream. I could feel my lungs trying hard to work, panting tiny, useless sobs in and out.

I had time to look at Grace, at his
benign, almost
genial face. His hands were large but fine, long, tapered. Once they had gentled the sick. Once, surely, they had used their skills to help people get better. To cut out disease. His eyes still seemed to smile, as they had when I passed him his order in the driveway of his house and again in the changing room downstairs.

He closed the door behind him and moved towards us. He stepped like any doctor, that reticent tread, as if we were his patients.
As he
shifted his stance, a shade fell over this face. His otherworld image revealed itself. My panting fear had left me giddy and for a few appalling moments, I witnessed his subtle body, distinct and bright as buttercups, so bright it made me blink. This sort of yellow was not a good sign. The man was struggling inside himself. He longed for respect and prestige, and was terrified of losing it. I steadied my gaze. Rising from the base of his spine and coiling around his body was something serpentine. It reached the crown of his head, and at the place the aura glows most brightly, I saw its head. Yellow, flecked with green. At first I thought it was a spirit intrusion. I’d seen these many times before—misplaced energy from opportunistic spirits that rub off on those who are low in energy. His patients, who came to him desperate—not because they were sick, but because they were dead broke—would perhaps leave such intrusions behind. My own spine convulsed, as if I might become infected. But this wasn’t an intrusion. It was the man’s totem. A wave of nausea forced me to swallow bile.

Grace shifted stance. My view of his energy field was lost as he closed down the chink that had allowed me to see his true self. He looked across at Mirela.

Immediately, I ran the few steps from the window to where she was slumped. I stood in front of her. I had no idea what sort of protection I offered her, but I couldn’t help myself. I
stared up into his untroubled, guiltless eyes. There was no use in cowering. This had been planned for a long time. I’d been flagged—too curious, trouble. I’d dipped my toe and found the water was poison.

“You shot Abbott.” A tremble was in my voice. It was spreading through my body. But I spoke on. “Abbott was getting somewhere. He had his sights on you. You lured him into the alleyway. Kizzy helped you.”

As I spoke her sister’s name, Mirela gave a tiny gasp, almost a whisper of sound. Her eyelids fluttered. “Where is my Kizzy?” I imagined how she’d asked that question every time Grace had come near her. Every time she woke and was sedated again.

“Kizzy died,” I said aloud and clearly.

I could feel Grace’s eyes on me now. I’d been worried that Mirela would fall apart when she heard the truth about her sister. But she didn’t stir. She probably hadn’t even heard me, but even so I wondered if the news would really come as a surprise. Perhaps she’d known her sister was in mortal danger since she’d read the letter.

“She died when you took out her organs.” My heart was pounding. My entire body beat with the same fast
thud-thud,
but I didn’t take my gaze from the doctor’s face.

Grace sucked an impatient breath in through his nose. “All surgical procedures pose a slight risk. We do this donation surgery three, four times a week. A single kidney, sold to someone in desperate need. The risk is slight. Very slight. Sad about Kizzy, of course.”

“But you’re not sad, are you?” I tried to keep my voice even.
As long as he’s answering my questions
, I thought,
he isn’t cutting us up
. We were in an office, far from operating theatres. If I kept Dr. Grace talking, I might yet get us both out. If we all just kept talking. “You don’t know what sadness is. Or pity. You don’t know pity or love or healing. All you know is money.”

I thought of the narrow scar that ran around Kate’s ribs and belly.
The girl they’d found at the Dunball Wharf had no one, but Kate had friends, a community she belonged to. So with Kate, they took a kidney and left her,
dripping blood through her dressing, clutching her wad of notes.

And Kizzy, hanging on the gallows at Hinkley Point, had a sister who had never given up the search.

Not one kidney
, Rey had told me.
Almost all her organs. Gone. Swiped away
.
Packed in ice and shipped out of here.
Biological gold, sold on the black market to people hoping for life.

“You took everything.” The trembling had penetrated my entire core now
.
I looked into the doctor’s unruffled face and imagined my body floating out on the tide.
Tiny gasping cries came out of me. And then I was screaming
. “Every organ! Even her eyes!”

Grace didn’t like the truth yelled at him. He lurched forward, his hand raised and his fist curled. I flinched from the memory of Stan’s slaps, which were still ringing in my ears. The thought of being hit by this man buckled my body. I doubled up on the floor beside Mirela, holding my ribs as if they were about to be torn open.

I could feel my heart, beating so fast and weak it felt like the heart of one of my chickens when I put my palm over its breast.

The doctor
unclipped his black bag. I had not even noticed he had carried it in; the ubiquitous, invisible medical accessory. He lifted the lid. It was neatly arranged. A selection of vials and syringes, tourniquets and sterile needles. And, carefully wound into the lid like the snake around his
otherworld image
, was a stethoscope.

He stood erect for a moment, his eyes on us as he unbuttoned his shirt sleeves. He rolled up each sleeve, as if to get to get on with the job. A tattoo was worked along the entirety of his right arm. I remembered the tiny end to this tattoo, from the time he’d come to me in the changing room in his gleaming Italian suit. Its hidden edge had peeked from the cuff of his shirt. Now I saw it all. The colours had faded, but the tattoo was recognizable. A rod of brown with tiny sprigs of white blossom decorating it. A snake in shades of green entwined the length of the rod. As the doctor finished rolling his right sleeve, the snake’s head was revealed, the ink as bright a yellow as it had been on the day the tattoo had been given. Its single black eye was the strongest point on the tattoo.

It was a caduceus, the rod of healing.

At some time in the distant past, he had sworn to uphold the Hippocratic Oath. He had been young and impassioned and liberal enough to imprint his beliefs upon his arm. That must have been a long time ago. But Dr. Grace still gave the same performance of being a doctor as he had then. I recalled his
crinkly smile as he’d told me he’d given me a tonic.

I understood with a jolt that I had not collapsed in the changing room because I’d eaten something that Jimmy had mistaken for bouquet garni, or because of any kind of mistake.
The entire episode had been engineered; Stan slipping a simple sedative into a well-flavoured dish to make
me sick enough to call a doctor
…
sick enough not to
notice that the needle in my arm hadn’t given me a tonic, it had taken something from me—
my blood for cross-matching.

I might even have been sent to his house in
Westonzoyland
that first day for him to cast his eye over me. Even then, somewhere inside his house, Mirela’s sister had lain, waiting for death.
Do not go with him, if he comes for you, the man with the snake.
I could not believe that I had stood so close to where Kizzy was hidden. Grace’s charmingly pink house. The place of no escape.

He worked out of his doctor’s case with an unruffled calm, selecting a syringe, fixing on the green-tipped needle. His smile seemed to be full of humanity, but that was a trick of the wrinkles around his eyes—an ingrained professional response. It wasn’t empathy. It was satisfaction with his work. He wasn’t sorry for what he did.

The doctor snapped the head off an ampoule. It seemed minuscule in his large hands. He began drawing the colourless contents into the syringe, working with measured care, a doctor taking his time, like he was concerned to get the dose accurate.
The drug would be for Mirela and I had to think now of the best course of action: protect her or attack him?

He walked steadily. I watched his shoes approach. Black leather, highly polished.
“Please don’t worry. This is just something to keep you calm.” He was standing over me, as if quietly waiting for my consent.

I tried to speak. My jaw wouldn’t let me. My tongue felt swollen in my mouth, as if I’d already been administered a lethal dose. Panic knotted up my stomach, annihilating thought for precious seconds.

Vein. After a vein.
He
was after my vein. My whole body convulsed in terror. He bent towards me. Every muscle fought against his professional touch.
I screamed along a dried throat until m
y lungs were screwed up like a rung-out flannel.

“I didn’t know anything! I don’t know anything!” I was making no sense even to myself.
“I am not your PATIENT!”

My entire body was screaming, lashing out with arms and legs, feet and fists. I had to get out. Get past him. The sudden hope that he’d left the door unlocked ripped through me. I
caught the side of his nose and he rocked on his heels. A slow smile spread over his mouth. “I really didn’t want to hurt you unnecessarily.” He hadn’t raised his voice He didn’t have to catch his breath.

I’d become an expendable nuisance, like Kizzy. I was a bag of costly merchandise ready for sale.

Grace fell onto his knees and pinned me to the floor. One knee was in my chest
, stopping my breath. The other was trapping my hand, the one he didn’t want. Both his hands were free to work on me.

I squirmed under him, taking breath as best I could. I fixed my gaze on his hazel eyes. He smiled. It was his way. He’d probably been taught to smile in medical college, and it had become ingrained. He smiled encouragingly at his patient, while beneath him, I was a
helpless puppy, chastised for messing on the rug. He
tightened a tourniquet around my arm. I felt the numbing grip as he twisted it tight.

I was never going to give up. If I gave up, I was dead. Dead and empty. I kicked with my stockinged feet and with my knees. I heard him swear under his breath. But the muscles in his right arm hardened as he held my hand firm and flat to the ground.

The movement of muscle seemed to turn the head of the tattooed snake. It
looked directly at me with its one bright eye. It was so close to me now I could read the words that were inked along the body of the snake in letters which might once have been a navy blue:
Primum non nocere.
The words were Latin. I couldn’t’ve deciphered them, even if I’d been given a clear head and a book of translations
, but I could hazard a fair guess at what they meant.
First do no harm
. Creed of magician, witch, and shaman as well as physician. I knew it well.

The sharpness of the needle caught me, scratched at me. I heard the snake hiss
,
I will get you
. The hiss took over my thoughts. I was sliding down, down to
a different place.

_____

A dim-lit room with panelled walls, high metal-framed windows, and an ornate ceiling stained smoker’s yellow. My feet were on solid parquet and a polished wood bench ran along the wall, filled with rows of test tubes and roaring Bunsen burners that let off a smell of gas.

Coiled on the surface a hand span away from me was Anaconda. His head reared and he eyed me blackly.

“This is where I was given life.”

I had no idea where anacondas lived as a general rule, but an ancient laboratory didn’t seem any more ideal than an ice temple. I summoned up a drip of energy to speak to him inside my mind. “You belong in the jungles.”

“Time and place must change. Home may change.” The plaintive tone in his voice was not a sham
. He was sad. That made me sorrow for him.

“You are Dr. Grace’s totem.”

The snake blinked once. “I am the embodiment of his physician’s oath.”

“First do no harm. He had you tattooed down his arm.”

“And so can never be rid of me.”

The only way the spirits know to communicate is through mirrors and mist, conundrums and connections. But I hadn’t unravelled the mysteries fast enough. The spirits had walked me into mortal danger and left me with no defences at all.

Sabbie.

Trendle’s voice came to me.

I can’t lift my head,
I told him.
I can’t move my arms. I can’t breathe!

You must try. You must fight!

_____

I was sucked back to the world of knees and syringes. I’d been away less that a second in real time, but Grace had found my vein; there was blood in the barrel of the hypodermic. He began to ease the venom into me.

I powered my body into one last effort. I hurled myself about, flailing my legs to shift his weight off me until I dislodged his knee from my pinned hand. For a few precious seconds, his smooth action stuttered. I drove all my failing strength into my free arm. The syringe wobbled as my arm jerked. The doctor’s grip loosened as he tried to catch its fall. I used my free hand like a bat and hurled it across the room.