“You disposed of her,” Marchey repeated tonelessly, unable to accept the offhanded way Fist had said it. Like her life had no more value than the wrapper around a stick of gum.
Fist shrugged. “I suppose it was wasteful, but I dared not try to bring here all the way out here. Too risky.” He gazed at Marchey, a malicious sparkle in his eyes. “Don’t look so crestfallen, Doctor. Rest assured that Dr. Izzak is still doing her part to hold up the traditions of medicine. As I understand it, she’s part of the concrete footers under a new hospital complex in Djakarta.”
Marchey absorbed this final hideous detail in silence, feeling utterly lost, weak, and doomed, as if buried up to his nose in concrete himself.
Fist cocked his head and adopted a pedantic tone. “Tell me, Doctor, what happens after one of your patients wakes up?”
“They remember,” Marchey answered, his voice drained of all emotion. “They have nightmares. Any patient who sees me afterward becomes acutely hysterical. In the beginning we had several patients nearly die of fright. One actually did, though we managed to revive him.”
Brother Fist clucked his tongue. “Not the basis for a very good doctor-patient relationship, is it? Such a shame that you’re not equipped to properly savor terror. Think how different your life would have been if you were! But I digress. Your patients must be unconscious while you work. Why?”
“In many cases they are that way to begin with, and most surgery is easier to perform on a nonresponsive patient. For the others we soon learned that what we do, and how we look and act in our working trance is so frightening that it’s easier that way.”
“So I’ve seen. One of my assistants had to be kept from shooting the late Dr. Izzak. A devout Catholic, he thought she was possessed by Satan. This extreme deep trance state you work in. Is it absolutely necessary?”
Marchey frowned. “Absolutely? I’m not sure.”
“Hazard a guess.”
“Well, the trance guarantees total concentration. When you first start out you need it to maintain your limb image.” A shrug. “I guess that technically I might be able to get by in a lighter trance now, but going deep helps shut out the reactions of the other medical people, and keeps me from getting too attached to the patient. But I don’t see—”
“Of course you don’t,” Fist replied archly. “No one did until I came along.” He looked enormously pleased with himself. “It’s really quite a wonderful thing, the way your life has been made so needlessly miserable. The irony is even more delicious because you’ll never get to use what I’ve learned on anyone but me,”
There was no way for Marchey to miss the implied message that he would never leave Ananke alive. But at that moment that didn’t matter. Fist was telling him that there was a way around the Nightmare Effect. All he could think was: What did we miss? What did we overlook?
“That’s it, think,” Fist whispered. “It’s in the air before you. Seize it.”
Marchey didn’t need him to push. His mind was working furiously, going over the hints he’d just been given, trying to put them together into the answer that had eluded them for so long.
“You—you’re saying that if the patient is conscious…”
An encouraging nod. “And?”
“And…” He racked his brain, his thoughts going in circles until they tripped over the obvious. The blood drained from his face. It was too obvious— wasn’t it?
He said it out loud, trying it on for size. “And I do my work in the lightest possible trance…”
Brother Fist nodded approvingly, as if he were a student who had given the correct answer to a difficult question. “Bravo, Doctor! You knew all along that your tightly focused concentration creates psychic scarring on a mind made especially impressionable by unconsciousness. What you failed to deduce was that the problem could be remedied by two simple changes in modus operandi.”
Marchey sagged inside. It couldn’t be that simple.
It just couldn’t! That was as simple and obvious as antiseptic procedure, as manual CPR, as the Heimlich maneuver—
—the oldest of which had been in use for just over two hundred years. The others were even newer than that; relatively recent innovations in the long history of medicine. It made perfect sense, and its very simplicity was what had made it so elusive.
He felt his pulse quicken. If this was true—
Everything would change.
No, not everything. The fear and mistrust and despite of other medical professionals would probably remain. He would still be regarded as a lunatic who had willingly mutilated himself to become some sort of bizarre faith healer. That opinion was too deeply entrenched to be changed quickly, if at all.
But he would no longer be forced to work on a blurry succession of faceless, senseless, unplugged meat machines who would remember him after only in their nightmares. He would be able to look patients in the eye before and after his work was done. He would be able to see them smile, see tangible proof that the price he’d paid had been worth it after all.
And that would make all the difference in the world.
“You must be eager to begin, Doctor.” Brother Fist purred, wrenching Marchey back to the here and now. “You want to know if this will work or not, don’t you?” It was not a question.
Marchey’s silver hands closed into fists. He nodded. Yes, I have to know.
A moment later he understood just how steep and high the walls of the crucible were built. The creature that called itself Brother Fist had known all along that he would treat him, if not for sake of his Oath or for fear of Scylla, then to see if his deepest desire was truly within his grasp.
Now that it was, and the moment of wonder had passed, he realized that Fist had turned the gift into garbage—if you could call something purchased with the life of a friend a gift—even as he gave it. There was no way for Marchey to use this to heal him and ever feel clean again.
Fist would methodically strip him of everything he loved and believed. He would probably keep him alive to be his personal physician, and to torment by forbidding him to treat those of his subjects who needed and deserved his services. That would be entirely in character.
He found himself pitying the people of Ananke more than ever. In less than an hour Fist had turned him into a helpless puppet, so entangling him in his webs that there seemed to be no way he could ever get free again. They had endured nearly a decade of his merciless machinations.
The old monster was more than a mere madman, more than another tinpot tyrant. He was like some awful destroyer from myth. A Shiva, destroyer of worlds. A gorgon, whose gaze was death. A brilliant, malignant Midas whose very touch spread corruption and ruin. A Circe who warped innocent beauty into monstrosity, just as she had when she turned Scylla—
Scylla. The fair maiden turned into a monster.
Marchey’s mood had been plummeting like a sparrow sideswiped by a supersonic fighter, the ground rushing up at it while tumbling helplessly end over end. But the thought of Scylla put air of possibility under its wings.
What and who had she been before Brother Fist laid his foul hands on her? Could some fragment of that lost soul still remain behind her horrific mask? Was there any way to reach her?
It was only the flimsiest straw of possibility, but there was nothing else within his grasp.
He remembered what she told him. Even if you are alone with him, I will know what you say and do. Was she listening? Hearing all this?