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05/20/01: Blasphemies
Observed (Part One) (Hi folks! Just a quick word before the story begins. What you're about to
read is based on an extremely long role-play session between myself and Radar.
We played out this story over nearly four years, and it was entirely adlibbed.
Neither of us knew where it was going, and as a result, we ended up in some
unexpected places before the end. The resulting story was written by both of as
well, though Jen handled more than I did. Enjoy! -Pieter/Plith)
A cold white light reflected from the thin
circles of the doctor’s spectacles, hiding his eyes completely.
The doctor worked quickly, ignoring the
occasional moans from his patient. His nimble fingers adroitly maneuvered the
surgical tools, making a cut here, clamping an artery there. The operation he
was performing would have been recognized by no medical student, and yet he
performed the various essential tasks efficiently and without pause for thought.
His whole body, apart from his arms and hands,
was almost entirely motionless. This, combined with the eerie effect of the
reflected light, gave the impression that he was more insect than human.
A rattling window pane caused him to look away
from his work briefly. His face fell into shadow, and the reflected glare
of electric light fell away from his glasses, revealing soft green eyes. And yet
something in the quality of his gaze, an unfocused and nervous darting, made him
seem somehow even less human than before.
The window pane clattered sharply in its
socket. Outside, a driving wind winged stinging pellets of ice and snow through
the midnight streets of St. Paul, Minnesota. The doctor shivered slightly and
turned back to his work. The patient stirred once more, and the doctor soon
forgot the sight of the black and deserted streets as he lost himself in his
work.
St. Paul is not an easy place to live in
winter.
That thought was foremost in Kathy’s mind as
she stamped her feet on the hard pavement. Her thin-soled boots and ragged
pea-jacket did almost nothing to keep out the biting wind. Another long day of
shoe-shining had finally dragged to its end. The last few weeks of bitter
weather had hurt her trade badly. Very few businessmen were about, and those
that were had the sense to wear the new rubber overshoes.
Her last ditch attempt tonight to catch the
late night theatre crowd had been unsuccessful. The few rich couples leaving the
opera had been quickly whisked away by waiting cabs. She was alone in the street
now...even California Slim’s whores were nowhere to be seen. Kathy rubbed her
burning cold hands together and decided to call it a night. She loaded her
polish and brushes into her thread-bare pockets and strode quickly down the
street, her shoulders hunched against the biting wind.
Her life had always been this way. Orphaned at
five, and raised in a series of drafty state facilities until her 16th birthday.
She’d never been adopted. Hopeful couples had overlooked the willfully morose
and bony child she’d been in favour of chubby, red-cheeked moppets. The
orphanages had been clean and healthy places...but cold and impersonal. She had
never been the object of anything more than casual pity and enlightened interest
on the part of the staff, and unfocused hostility on the part of her fellow
orphans.
She left the orphanage of her our free will at
age 16, without a single human contact or real friend. Kathy spent a month
wandering the Midwest, going from town to town, hitching rides from complete
strangers or simply setting out on foot across vast expanses of empty prairie.
She had floated like some rogue bit of cosmic
dust through a stellar void of farmers fields and grain elevator whistle stops,
slowly and inexorably being drawn towards St. Paul. It was as if the city was a
planet with a gravity all it’s own...an oppressive weight of wealth and
population that drew transients in and kept them from leaving.
There had been jobs, of a sort, for her when
she arrived. Two months as a bottle-washer - before she discovered what her
employer’s idea of an after hours discussion was. A month sorting machine
parts in a factory - before it went out of business, forced under by the
economic malaise that had seized the entire country.
Quite simply, there were no opportunities for a
girl without a family or education. At least, not any ones she’d wanted.
California Slim had made it clear that she was welcome to join his stable of
streetwalkers, and this offer still stood. The idea of joining those ranks of
sallow-faced coughing young girls who sold themselves for $10 a night did not
appeal to Kathy.
Franklin "California Slim" Dooley
struggled under the weight of a completely inexpressible and stoutly undrownable
sorrow. He’d been drinking heavily, and smoking the shit as well, but somehow
it didn’t help.
Now one of his girls was giving him grief. All
he wanted was a quickie, but the stupid cow was pretending she didn’t know
what he meant. Susan was her name...and even now she was slowly backing away
towards the door of Slim’s ground-floor apartment. He took another
burning gulp of the ***
Kathy sighed, trying to hurry as best she could
against the bitterness of the wind. The shelters closed at eleven and it
was already half-past ten. That is, if any beds were still available. The
shelters seemed more crowded now, the faces all beginning to blur into
something featureless and devoid of anything but despair.
"Hey, want to earn an easy twenty
dollars?" came a voice from the shadows of an alleyway. Two women,
shivering in their skimpy outfits, puffed on cigarettes as they huddled in a
doorway.
"Doing what?" she asked, rather
cautiously.
"Take this package across the street and
drop it in post box twelve six blocks up the street," said a male voice
from behind the women. They each stepped to the side and huddled behind the
burly man who clutched a plain brown paper-wrapped package with string around
it.
"Sorry, I'm not going that way. I'm trying
to get to the shelter before it closes," Kathy replied, her teeth
chattering in a sudden gust of wind.
"Fine. Go, if you're lucky to find a bed,
or even a shelf. The shelters usually fill by nine," one of the women
offered, stale smoke making rings around her face.
"All right, I'll do it," Kathy said.
Twenty bucks would at least garner a little bit of food and maybe a cheap single
motel room for the night. The man handed her the package, along with a twenty,
crisp and rolled-up. Kathy slipped the money into her pocket and hurried across
the icy street, heading for the post box.
"You there, stop!" came another voice
from behind her. She turned, full-well expecting to see the same man again.
Instead, as she turned, she was struck in the head by a well-placed brick. She
crumpled to the ground in a heap. This other man, dressed in a tattered suit,
picked up the package she'd been carrying and calmly walked away. Daisy,
one of the two hookers, went across the street to check if the package had
been delivered. What she saw was Kathy, lying prone on the ground with
blood on her head. "Carla, come help me."
***
"Fifty dollars, same as usual," Slim
muttered, picking up Kathy from the backseat of his car and staggering
half-drunk to the door of a large, dark mansion. He banged hard on the door with
his foot.
"Yes, what is...oh, it's you. Another
one?" the man asked, adjusting his spectacles. His name was Dr. Herbert
Plith, man of medicine, science, and something a lot more sinister.
"She got clubbed. Unwary drug run, I
imagine," Slim answered, placing Kathy's body on a gurney that was tucked
away in the shadows of the foyer. Plith wrinkled his nose at Slim reeking of
alcohol and removed his wallet from his jacket pocket, peeling off two twenties
and a ten.
"I imagine so. Goodnight, Franklin."
Slim muttered curses under his breath as he gave a nod and ambled back to his
car.
Plith unlocked the brakes and took the girl
down to the depths of the lab, where the pane of glass in the window still shook
with the wind. He took out a penlight, looking in her eyes before checking her
respiration and pulse. "You'll do nicely," he said to himself, setting
up an IV in her bony hand for nourishment before attending to her wound,
bandaging it and packing it with ice.
Two hours later, she awoke with a groan,
startling him from his cataloguing of supplies. "I see you're awake. How do
you feel?" he asked, checking her eyes again.
"I have a headache," she grumbled,
fingers absently making their way to the bandage on her head.
"Do you know where you are, the day, and
your name?" he asked, checking for her coherency.
"St. Paul, I don't know the day, and my
name is Kathy," she said. Last names really didn't matter much anymore to
people who had little or no identity. He handed her a cup of lukewarm hot
chocolate.
"Sip this," he directed. She did so.
"I am Doctor Plith. A concerned citizen saw that you had been attacked, so
he brought you here since the hospitals this time of year are quite full. You
suffered a minor concussion and you're malnourished and dehydrated, but I will
help you feel better."
"Um, thank you, Doctor, but I really can't
stay..."
"How much money will you make polishing
shoes before you become like the nameless girls found in the gutter by the
police? No, my dear girl, you're going to stay here and get well," he said,
drawing up a syringe with a small bit of from a vial left upon one of the many
slightly cluttered lab tables.
"I guess I could. I mean, I'll bet the
shelter is closed by now. I hate sleeping in the cold, but it's something you
get used to," she said simply. He placed a rubber strap around her arm and
tapped the vein a few times to bring it up, holding the syringe between his
teeth as he wiped her arm with an alcohol swab.
"This is a little something to help you
feel better. Don't worry, it won't hurt a bit," he said, smiling behind the
syringe as he slid the needle into her arm with smooth and practiced grace and
pressed the plunger. She slumped in his arms and he lay her down carefully,
covering her with a sheet.
He deposited the syringe in a container and
glanced back at her. ''There's something about this one...'' he muttered to
himself, thoughtfully tapping his fingers atop a lab table
***
Plith turned from the girl’s prone form upon
the table, and strode across the room. A semi-opaque smoked glass screen, 7 feet
long and 3 feet high dominated the rear wall of the operating theater, supported
by a polished wheeled brass frame. A pair of heavy insulated cables led from the
frame to a series of humming capacitors. Plith drew on heavy leather gloves and
activated a knife-switch…the screen began to glow and vibrate, faintly.
Plith took hold of the frame, and wheeled the
whole odd construct across the room, stopping by the bed. He adjusted a few
knobs, and the screen flipped horizontally from its bottom, becoming a kind of
elevated flat table. He slid this "table" over Kathy’s bed. The
faint glow on the screen changed - bright reds and greens highlighting the dimly
visible form of the shoe-shine girl.
Plith cut the room light, and returned to the
table using the glow from the screen as lighting. In the dimness of the room,
the highlighted form of Kathy on the screen was remarkable. It was as though Van
Gogh had painted portrait of her using light and glass instead of canvas and
oil. A ray of meadow sunshine seemed to have spilled into the cold winter of the
brick walled operating theater. The warm, yellow white light illuminated Plith’s
features, investing them with an unusually healthy glow.
The colours and details of the light-Kathy
shifted and ran into each other as she inhaled and exhaled gently - a painting
come to life. Below, the real Kathy was illuminated by a dim blue glow.
If Plith was impressed by the spectacle, he
gave no sign. He turned and made a few adjustments to the screen…the image
shifted into blue, then green, yellow, orange…before finally settling on a dim
red, brightest in the region of her forehead. The image on the screen was still
breathtaking, for now Kathy seemed to be made of glowing embers, tossing and
flying in a wind. The effect pleased him, though not for reasons of simple
aesthetics.
"A very strong connection, yes. She will
do nicely…an obvious physical element to the conection," he muttered to
himself as he turned away from his patient. He crossed the room, and switched on
a table lap. On the table top, steel instruments glittered in the light.
Plith selected a series of thin metal needles. "An obvious connection,
indeed."
He placed the needles on a tray, arranged in
length from shortest to longest before using black hair pins to hold her dark,
dirty locks of hair away from her face. With a few more cursory movements, a
thick black rubber mask was placed over her nose and mouth to deepen her sleep
and numb the pain as he used a tiny drill to make holes in her skull in which to
place the needles. The wounds bled little as he hooked the needles up to wires
and recorded the readouts from a clunky-looking machine onto a clipboard.
"Franklin ought to bring me more girls like these," he mused to
himself, even though Kathy was the first he'd seen with these kind of readings.
***
"Mmmmpphhh," Kathy grumbled, moving
her head slightly as Plith held an ammonia tab under her nose. "Time to
wake up," he said, gently patting the side of her face. Her eyes opened and
focused. "Mmmmmppphh," she reiterated. He handed her a glass of orange
juice with a straw and helped her sip.
"Where the hell am I?" she managed to
ask once the taste of dirty sock was clean from her mouth.
"You're at my mansion, child. You were
beaten over the head and brought here by a good Samaritan," he explained
gently. She tried to sit up and groaned. "Careful. You had some internal
brain trauma and I had to ease it," he said to explain away two of the
conspicuous holes near her temples.
"Oh...I remember now...Plith..." she
mumbled, clutching the sheet about her. She looked around, focusing as the last
of the anaesthetics purged themselves from her system. ''What the hell did you
do with my clothes?"
"Washed them, and you, as well as a good
solid delousing. How you have managed to keep relatively fair health is beyond
me, but it is also up to me to make sure you don't get yourself into such a
state again," he said.
"Oh, geez do I have a headache," she
muttered, for more reasons than one. "How long are you going to keep me
here?" she asked.
"As long as you want to stay. You seem
strong and able-bodied. Few young people nowadays are, with food and money in
short supply. I will give you room and board, in exchange for your assistance,
of course."
"I assume I'm already in your debt?"
she asked. Years in the orphanages and on the streets had taught her that
nothing came without a string.
"Yes."
"Well, I guess I can't refuse. A bed, a
roof over my head, clothes, and a bit of money. Hmm. I guess I really don't have
much choice, do I?" she asked, shoulders slumping some. Not having choices
always seemed to be the natural order for her.
"You have all the choices in the world. I
recommend them being here, however. I doubt you'd last long when the winter gets
colder and Franklin needs more girls on rounds."
"Okay, I'll stay. My name's Kathy. I think
I told you. I barely remember..." she said a bit more quietly, putting her
hand on her head. He stepped forward and shone his penlight in her eyes,
searching.
"That's only natural with a head injury.
You'll be fine, I assure you," he said with a smile...a smile that masked
unspoken volumes, and wasn't exactly the most pleasant thing to behold.
"You're in the best of care here. Get your rest now. I'll bring you lunch
when you wake up again." As he spoke, he was already adding medication to
the IV in her hand with a deftly hidden motion masked by the folds of his lab
coat.
"Okay," she said, eyelids already
drooping as she lay back in bed and slumbered. He retrieved an extra blanket and
gently covered her with it, finally taking some time to get some coffee and sit
down to look over the readouts from his gadgetry. He left her room, wiping his
spectacles on his lab coat, he turned his attention to his work, sharp eyes
skimming.
***
It was warm here. Kathy took a great deal of
pleasure in that.
She had barely heard the door close, sinking
quickly into a semi-drugged torpor. The brick walled room…it must be in the
basement, close to the furnace, it was so warm…quickly faded from her
immediate awareness. She was still semi-conscious, but aware of nothing beyond
the confines of her own skin. For the first time in several week the
stubborn numbness in her toes was beginning to subside. Her face, though
uncovered, was not chilled. The simple thrill of the goose bumps ran her entire
length at this realization was more wonderful than anything she had felt in
months. That was more important than the odd doctor. What was his name?
Her thoughts disintegrated, meandering and
flowing down the familiar wandering paths of a brain well on the road to sleep.
Images and words and memories linked with seeming illogic in her mind’s
theatre…it was warm here, unlike the cold porridge at the orphanage. The clean
floors were so dusty there….they would scrub and scrub and still see motes
dancing in the sun which was cold as well, somehow, being trapped and filtered
through a network of grimy stained glass. Light through glass. Stained glass?
There had been no stained glass at the orphan asylum. Glowing lights, muted by
colored glass. So pretty. I must be asleep. I must be…
Something nagged at her, still.
How could she be asleep? If she concentrated,
she could still hear the low hum of some machinery in the room beyond, though it
took a great act of will. A similar effort forced her thoughts to resolve
themselves and she took stock of her body. Her arms and legs she could feel.
They were there, feeling curiously light yet immobile. It was as though
something were holding them down, something so light and yet immovable. She had
a brief mental image of a being wrapped in softest spider’s silk, cocooned
from head to toe. And…there…a pressure…more than the blanket…something
on her chest?
The awareness of the pressure grew. What could
it be? Her heart began to race, and she found she could not force her lungs to
do anything but draw the steady, measured breaths of a sleeper. She felt as
though she were drowning. If only she could throw off the blanket with one
vigorous motion…she tried but could not. She must be dreaming, this was a
nightmare, surely…a horrible one. She had to wake up! With great effort she managed to open her lids
the barest crack. For a moment, she saw nothing, and feared that she had indeed
been buried. Then she became aware shadows on the stained plaster ceiling. Light
from the crack under the door cast a gray half illumination on the ceiling,
exaggerating the flaws in the plaster until it looked like a black and white map
of some broken land of canyons and stone hills. She could not see what was on
her chest…but the pressure was intense now, as though a full-grown man had
straddled her. She moved her eyes downward.
The light streaming from under the door was
intersected, blocked by a lumpen shape that perched upon her chest. Not a man.
It was nearly shapeless. A heavy pile of canvas? The beating of her heart
was almost painful now, and her head was throbbing. She forced her eyes open
further.
The lump was moving, silhouetted black against
the half-light from the doorway. It expanded, ever so slightly, in and out, in
and out…it was breathing. At the realization her oxygen starved brain finally
shut down…and she soon dropped into a heavy sleep..
***
A hole. There was a hole in her head…
She touched it with on finger, lightly. It was
raw and red, about one-eighth of an inch wide, scabbed over with blood.
Her head ached horribly. It was the headache
that had finally awakened her in some God-forsaken hour before dawn. She had
forgotten where she was, briefly, and lay quietly on the cot, waiting for the
pain to subside. It didn’t, and when she finally remembered that she was in
some kind of hospital, she had gingerly swung her legs over the side and walked
towards the door. It had been locked. She didn’t like that, but a quick search
of the wall beside it found the button for the electric lights.
Squinting in the sudden painful glare, she had
stumbled towards a small alcove where she half-spied a sink and toilet. She saw
the hole while splashing cold water on her face, an angry red blotch on her
unusually pale features.
There was a hole in her head. There was no
mirror in the washroom, so she simply stared at her twisted and distorted
features on the silver fixtures. Her eyes filled with tears, and the horrible
reflection softened and blurred, and she saw It.
Reflected in the taps, she could see a yellow
shaft of…of…not light, but color, running from the centre of her head, up,
up, disappearing into the ceiling. She blinked and it vanished.
The doctor, she was convinced, was trying to
drive her mad.
***
Next month... part two! |
