"At least she doesn't seem to be in pain now," I said to Charlie Mulderig, who's been a doctor at Mercy for as long as I can remember.
"No, she's not," Charlie said softly. "It wasn't easy. She's under very heavy sedation. For a while, I was afraid we were going to anesthetize her."
"You mean, like in surgery?"
"Exactly like in surgery. The pain centers of her brain were going crazy. And, apart from the humanitarian concerns, there was a real danger that she'd have a stroke if it continued."
"Jesus."
"Problem is," Charlie continued, "you can't keep someone under surgical anesthesia indefinitely without a substantial risk of brain damage. Fortunately, we found a combination of painkillers that worked, at least for the time being."
"What the fuck was causing it, Charlie? Far as I could tell before the EMTs got there, there wasn't a mark on her."
"There isn't a mark, in the sense you mean it. No evidence of trauma, anywhere on her body. And we found no evidence of anything internal that might have caused it, like a ruptured appendix or a kidney stone."
"It must have been the magic, then." I ran down for him what Rachel had been doing just before her collapse.
Charlie shook his head. "When it comes to magic, you're talking to the wrong guy. I don't pretend to understand that stuff. In fact, according to everything I learned in med school, magic ought to be impossible."
"Except that it isn't."
"No, I've seen too much evidence to the contrary."
"Yeah, me, too."
"I can imagine," he said. "Oh, yeah, that reminds me: I did find out something that may be of interest to you. As she was finally going under, Ms Proctor stopped screaming and started muttering intelligible words. Well, more or less intelligible."
Charlie produced a folded sheet of paper from a pock;&nbs his white doctor coat. "One of the nurses wrote some of it down, after they'd got her stabilized."
He unfolded the sheet and peered at it over the top of his glasses. "Apparently, she was saying something like I'll never tell you, you sick fuck. You'll never get the book, never. I gather it went on like that for a while, repeating the same stuff, over and over."
He refolded the paper and handed it to me. "Here, for whatever use it is. I wonder who she thought she was talking to?"
After a few seconds I said, in a voice that I barely kept from breaking, "She was talking to whoever tortured and killed George Kulick."
"The necromancy worked too fuckin' well," I told Karl the next night. "Not only did she raise the spirit of the late George Kulick, but he was able to get inside her head, somehow. That's gotta be what happened."
"I thought you said she'd set up protections against that stuff," Karl said.
"That's what she told me. But she'd never done one of these rituals before. Maybe she messed up somehow. If she did, it's my fault. I'm the stupid sonovabitch who pressured her into it."
"Or maybe Kulick was just stronger than she expected. The dude was a wizard, after all."
"Could be either one, could be both," I said. "She was trying to plug into Kulick's last moments, and it looks like she succeeded, big time. All of a sudden, she was right where Kulick had been, at the end."
"And Kulick was being tortured. Which means that Rachel–"
"Was going through the same thing – at a nerve level, anyway. Not so much as a bruise on her, but she still felt all the stuff that had been done to Kulick. I didn't think even magic could do that."
"Why not?" Karl said. "They do it with hypnosis."
I looked at him. "What the hell are you talking about?"
"My cousin Cheryl's a therapist. You know, like a shrink. I guess she uses hypnotism in her job. Helping people recover memories, stuff like that. She told me once that when she was in school, they had 'em watch movies of some of the experiments in hypnosis. From like thirty years ago. Stuff that you couldn't get away with today. One guy in this film was put into a real deep trance, right? Then the hypnotist told him he was on fire."
"Bet I can guess what happened then," I said.
"Fuckin' A. Cheryl said the guy was on the floor, screaming like he was being burned alive."
"Just like Rachel, who thought she was being tortured to death."
"Cheryl said it took days to get that guy's screams out of her head."
"I've got a feeling," I said, "that it's gonna take me a hell of a lot longer than that."
"It's Charlie Mulderig, Stan. I'm calling about Rachel Proctor."
"Hey, Charlie. How is she?"
There was a brief silence, then: "She's gone, Stan."
I felt an icy fist reach into my stomach, grab my guts, and twist them.
"Stan? Are you there? Stan?"
"Yeah, Charlie, I'm here." I cleared my throat, then did it again. "What happened? Heart failure?"
"No, Stan, I'm sorry for… Rachel isn't dead, as far as I know. She's just – gone. Missing. Her bed in the ICU is empty."
The icy fist loosened its grip, but only a little. "Did she regain consciousness, Charlie?"
"Not according to the nurses, and they were checking on her every hour or so. And if something had gone bad at any time – iegular heartbeat, sudden drop in blood pressure, something like that, the alarms built into the monitors would have gone off at the nurses' station. Those were still functioning, by the way. We checked."
"Could some nurse have missed something? Maybe forgot one of the hourly checks?"
"No way, no how. The ICU nurses are the best in the hospital, Stan. They do not fuck up, and that would constitute a major fuck-up."
I closed my eyes and tried to make my miserable excuse for a brain work. "You've got surveillance cameras over there, Charlie. I've seen 'em."
"Yeah, we do, and I know what you're thinking. There's one trained on the hallway right outside the ICU. Our security guy is reviewing the disc now."