Preston W. Child
The Babylonian Mask
Where is the sense in the senses when there is no face?
Where walks the Blind when there is but dark and holes, empty?
Where speaks the Heart without the release by tongue the lips to fare?
Where tracks the sweet scent of roses and lover’s breath when absent lies smell?
How will I tell?
How will I tell?
What hide they behind their masks
When their faces are secret and their voices compel?
Do they hold Heaven?
Or do they wield Hell?
Chapter 1 — The Burning Man
Nina blinked profusely.
Her eyes listened to her synapses as her slumber fell into REM, abandoning her to the cruel talons of her subconscious mind. In the private ward of the University Hospital of Heidelberg, the lights buzzed through the dead of night where Dr. Nina Gould had been admitted to reverse, if possible, the dreaded effects of radiation sickness. So far, it had been difficult to diagnose how critical her case really was, as the man who’d accompanied her had inaccurately relayed her level of exposure. The best he could say was that he’d found her wandering the underground tunnels of Chernobyl a few hours too long for any living creature to recover.
“He did not tell us everything,” affirmed Sister Barken to her small group of subordinates, “but I had a distinct inkling it was not half of what Dr. Gould had endured down there before he claimed to have found her.” She shrugged and sighed. “Unfortunately, short of arresting him for a crime we do not have any proof of, we had to let him go and deal with the little information we had.”
Obligatory sympathy played on the faces of the trainees, but they were only masking the boredom of the night behind professional guises. Their young blood sang for the freedom of the pub, where the group usually met after their shifts together or for the embraces of their lovers at this time of night. Sister Barken did not tolerate their double entendres and missed the company of her peers, where she could exchange actual cogent verdicts with those equally qualified and passionate about medicine.
Her protruding eyeballs combed them, one by one, as she imparted Dr. Gould’s condition. Slanting at the corners, her thin lips fell downward in an implication of discontent that she often mirrored in her harsh, low tone when she spoke. Apart from being a stern veteran of the German medical practice adhered to at the Heidelberg Uni, she was also known to be quite the brilliant diagnostician. It was a surprise to her colleagues that she never bothered to further her career by becoming a physician, or even a resident consultant.
“What is the nature of her circumstances, Sister Barken?” asked a young nurse, shocking the Sister with a show of actual interest. The fifty-year-old buxom superior took a moment to answer, looking almost happy to have been asked the question instead of having to stare into the comatose gaze of entitled runts all night.
“Well, that was all we could find out from the German gentleman who brought her in, Nurse Marx. We could find no corroboration as to the cause of her illness, save that which the man told us.” She sighed, frustrated by the lack of background pertaining to Dr. Gould’s state. “All I can say is that she seems to have been rescued in time to be treated. Although she exhibits all the signs of acute poisoning, her system seems to be able to combat it satisfactorily…for now.”
Nurse Marx nodded, ignoring the scoffing reaction of her colleagues. It intrigued her. After all, she had heard much of this Nina Gould from her mother. At first, by the way she babbled on about her, she had thought her mother actually knew the petite Scottish historian. It didn’t take long, however, for medical student Marlene Marx to find out that her mother was simply an avid reader of the journals and two books published by Gould. Thus, Nina Gould was a bit of a celebrity in her house.
Was this another of the clandestine excursions the historian had undertaken, like those she had lightly touched on in her books? Marlene often wondered why Dr. Gould did not write more about her adventures with the well-known explorer and inventor from Edinburgh, David Purdue, but rather hinted upon the many journeys. Then there was the well-accounted association with the world-renowned investigative journalist, Sam Cleave, that Dr. Gould had written about. Not only did Marlene’s mom speak of Nina as if she were a friend of the family, but speculated about her life as if the feisty historian were a walking soap opera.
It was only a matter of time before Marlene’s mother would start reading books about or published by Sam Cleave himself, if only to find out more about the other rooms in the great Gould mansion. All this mania was precisely why the nurse had been keeping Gould’s stay at Heidelberg a secret, fearing her mother would stage a one-woman march into the west wing of the 14th Century medical facility in protest to her captivity or something. It made Marlene smile to herself, but at the risk of provoking the carefully avoided anger of Sister Barken, she hid her amusement.
The group of medical students did not know about the creeping convoy of injury approaching the emergency room a floor below. Under their feet a team of orderlies and night staff nurses were surrounding a screaming young man who was refusing to be strapped to a gurney.
“Please, sir, you have to stop screaming!” the head nurse on duty begged the man as she cordoned off his furious path of destruction with her rather large frame. Her eyes flashed toward one of the male nurses armed with a shot of succinylcholine surreptitiously approaching the burn victim. The horrible sight of the wailing man had two of the newer staff members gagging, barely composing themselves as they waited for the head nurse to shout her next order. For most of them, however, this was a typical panic scenario, although every circumstance was different. They had, for instance, never had a burn victim running into the ER before, let alone one that was still exuding smoke as he skidded, losing clumps of flesh from his chest and abdomen along the way.
Thirty five seconds felt like two hours for the stumped German medical professionals. Soon after the big woman cornered the victim with the blackened head and chest, the screams halted abruptly, changing into rasps of choking.
“Airway edema!” she roared in a powerful voice that could be heard throughout the emergency ward. “Intubation, now!”
The stalking male nurse lunged forward, planting a needle in the asphyxiating man’s crisp skin and pushing the plunger without reservation. He winced as the syringe crackled through the epidermis of the poor patient, but it had to be done.
“Christ! That smell is sickening!” one of the nurses huffed under her breath to her colleague, who nodded in agreement. They covered their faces momentarily to catch their breath as the stench of cooked flesh assaulted their senses. It was not very professional, but they were only people after all.
“Get him to O.R. ‘B’!” the robust lady thundered to her staff. “Schnell! He is in cardiac arrest, people! Move!” They fitted an oxygen mask on the convulsing patient as his coherence waned. Nobody noticed the tall, old man in the black coat on his trail. His long, stretching shadow darkened the pristine door glass where he stood watching the smoking carcass being wheeled away. Under the brim of his fedora his green eyes glinted and his wasted lips sneered in defeat.
With all of the chaos in the emergency room, he knew he would not be noticed and slipped through the doors to haunt the ground floor locker room a few feet past the reception area. Once inside the locker room he escaped detection by eluding the bright luminescence of the small ceiling lights above the benches. As it was the middle of night shift, there would not likely be any medical staff in the changing room, so he procured a pair of scrubs and made for the showers. In one of the obscured cubicles the old man shed his clothing.