Chapter 5

 

Doctor Keller was the first surgeon available when they brought the young man in to trauma. Olive-skinned, possibly Middle-Eastern. He’d nosedived over the handlebars of his motorcycle half mile from the front gates of St Jeremiah’s Hospital, skidding out on the wet mountainside winding up towards the peak. A trucker found him, tossed him in the cab and rushed him to emergency, where nurses cut away his clothing with huge, blunt-nosed scissors.

Keller knew immediately that there was little hope - the rider had ploughed into the asphalt hard enough to leave his teeth and most of his nose behind. No response to light stimuli. Slack-jawed, drooling blood.

The doctor held the young man’s hand as he died. “Do we know his name?”

Both nurses shook their heads. “No ID. His wallet might’ve come out in the crash?”

“Leave it for the police. Poor kid.” He noted the time of death with weary resignation. Then, with blood still drying on his gloves, he went downstairs to see his private patient.

He’d left her alone too long. Time was growing slippery. Keller’s rostered hours were fluid, and sometimes he only slept four hours every two days. Sometimes less. That didn’t leave many opportunities to slip away.

The nurses couldn’t know where he was going. His private patient was a secret. Only he had the key. Only he knew.

He kept her in an old storeroom beneath the hospital, where racks of prescription drugs lined the walls and the only light was a flickering fluorescent tube. It got cold down there but his patient didn’t mind, so long as he fed her regularly and swabbed her wounds. He thought he saw a new light in her eyes, some days. Like she was glad to see him.

When the dreams came, when exhaustion threatened to tip him over, he found a plastic jar of Adderall on one of those dusty shelves and downed two pills. When his patient lashed out and dragged bloody furrows down his forearm, he chased the Adderall with Oxycodone.

Keller didn’t like mixing his meds, but there wasn’t anybody else he could ask for help. Some burdens were his to bear. Besides, he was a doctor. He knew the limits of the body.

Now, in the store room, with the patient thrashing in her straps, he tossed back a cocktail of uppers and opiates and went to work.

His patient grumbled as he took a scalpel to her sternum. “Shhh.” He stroked her hair back from her forehead as the waxy skin parted beneath the blade. “Quiet, now.” Her hands were strapped down, fingertips wrapped in duct tape to keep her from clawing free. Hadn’t taken long to learn that lesson.

She didn’t bleed much any more. It was for the best. He set the scalpel aside and readied his Polaroid camera.

In the glare of the flash, he documented her insides.

So much to learn from her. So many advances for medicine. He’d always wanted to write a book, and now he had his subject. He’d speak at conferences, be lauded by the establishment, have his name on plaques...

If he could just keep the world straight. The Oxycodone made it hard to keep track. Sometimes it felt like the days were bleeding into one another, that dawn and dusk were only concepts.

The nurses were getting suspicious. They looked at him sideways when they brought forms for him to sign, edged out of his office like they were wary of showing their backs. His regular patients were skipping appointments. Maybe it was the way he snapped at them when they complained about trivial pains, footballers bitching about aching knees and sore backs, housewives with blistered fingers from too-hot soup pots. It was like hypochondria was infectious, half of Rustwood coming down with migraines, insomnia and bad hayfever at once.

And on top of that, the looming certainty that something was wrong in town. Something even worse than his private patient.

A trolley rattled past upstairs as he stitched his patient back together. “Almost done,” he whispered. “This will help with the pain. One for you and one for me.”

The Oxycodone went down smooth. Didn’t help him sleep, though. Some nights he lay awake, hands folded across his chest, staring at the damp spreading cold fingers across his ceiling until dawn trickled through his bedroom and dragged him, yawning and cursing, back to St Jeremiah’s. He always checked his patient first. Took a lot of care to make sure none of the janitors saw him coming or going. Had to behave like a sneak thief in his own place of work.

They’d figure it out eventually. Until then...

The pills left Keller in a comfortable euphoria as he locked the basement door behind him. Everything from his neck to his navel was deliciously warm, like he was wrapped in a heavy blanket in front of an open fire.

He knew, dimly, that the Oxy was dangerous when paired with Adderall. It was his responsibility, he told himself. He had to keep working. The drugs kept the gears ticking. A doctor was no good asleep across his desk, or prescribing poison because he couldn’t tell his Foradil from his Toradol.

The drugs kept people alive. Kept the bad thoughts at bay.

These days, those thoughts were coming harder and faster and with greater frequency. Thoughts like - that nurse, Bo. He’d vanished the same night as Keller’s private patient arrived. Was it catching? Communicable? Could it breed?

And - Mrs Archer, who he still couldn’t quite decipher, always talked sideways. Sly remarks about going on holidays. Places across the bridge, places long forgotten.

She’d also arrived the same night as his private patient. Coincidence? Maybe, maybe. Could be the Oxy making him paranoid. But Keller had been trained to investigate. He didn’t carry a badge like the guy that’d brought Mrs Archer to the hospital, that po-faced Detective Goodwell, but a good doctor asked questions.

Maybe he wasn’t asking the right people. Maybe he should’ve been interrogating his private patient instead of treating her. Maybe...

He was back in his office. The walk from the basement was a blur. The clock on his desk ticked to 11:30. Time slipping again, and he was due to observe a surgery at noon.

It was getting harder, that he was sure of. But God, it was worth it. The papers he could publish...

Another dose. It couldn’t hurt. After all, there was so much to get done.

Four Adderall sent fire into his bones. Two Oxycodone took the fear away. In that electric fizz, there were whispered words.

Almost like a voice.

 

* * *

 

The little gas station was a goddamn criminal enterprise. Four bucks for a single pair of cheap flip-flops? It was opportunism, outright theft. Plus, they looked ridiculous with slacks and a blazer, but it wasn’t like Detective Goodwell had anyone to impress. Chan thought he was crazy and his boss, the old and true Queen of Rustwood, didn’t even have eyes.

Not that he knew about, anyway.

They wandered up the hill behind the gas station, headed for a smudge on the horizon. Chan kept her head down, black hair glued to her cheeks, the rain running down her neck and pearling off the ends of her cherry-red fingernails. “Where’re we going now? This little picnic has to end sometime.”

“You know the Balkan Circle?”

“Should I?”

“Not many do. One of the forgotten places. We need privacy for an audience with the boss.”

“The big cheese,” Chan grunted, making little quote-marks in the air. “Whatever you say.”

Goodwell was in too good a mood to be brought down by Chan’s attitude. Just having real rubber beneath his feet after a morning of walking with one bare, bloodied foot was better than any massage. He could’ve ignored the pain and skipped the whole way to the Balkan Circle if he hadn’t been so exhausted.

Behind him, Chan dragged her feet. He couldn’t blame her. Pulled back and forth across town, first with a gun to her head and then with the keepers of the Convent crawling behind her...

But not for long. Soon, she’d understand everything.

The Balkan Circle expanded from a blot nestled between distant hills into a modern art structure, a ring of eight tall steel girders twisted into pretzel contortions, then planted on end into the soil. It symbolised the fall of modern industry, or European destabilization, or some bullshit like that - art school wank, Goodwell always said.

Once, years before, it’d been installed in the forecourt of Rustwood Town Hall, but too many children had climbed the girders and twisted their ankles in awkward falls, or sliced their hands on corroded edges. The council smelled the spoor of incoming lawsuits and relocated the whole mess out to the bank of the Pentacost River. Council workers boarded up the structure on all sides, wrapped it in plywood like a Christmas gift and left it for the raccoons.

A lot of blood and pain had soaked into the steel that formed the Balkan Circle. Didn’t matter where it got moved - out in the wilds, stashed in a basement, disassembled and locked in crates. It’d carry that pain with it wherever it went. Now it was a circle again, and circles were powerful even before you salted them with the cries of terrified children.

“Hold up a second.” Goodwell waved Chan back as he crossed the last hundred yards to the structure, one hand on the butt of his pistol. No ambush waiting. They’d gotten ahead of their pursuers.

No telling how long that advantage would last, though. He had to contact the Queen.

Goodwell probed the plywood screwed into place around the perimeter of the Circle, looking for a weak spot. It’d been years since he’d last visited, but he was sure there was a point where the boards were loose...

Behind him, Chan kicked a coke can abandoned in the grass. “What is this place? Is your...” She stumbled over the word, lips curling in distaste. “...your boss in here?”

There. Goodwell’s fingers slipped between two boards, and he grunted as he lifted the planks aside and peered inside the sculpture. “The boss doesn’t come out these days.”

“Where is he-”

“She. I think.”

“Where is she, then?”

“Somewhere else.” The interior was a circle of ragged grey grass, Dr. Pepper bottles and cigarette butts, the litter of years tossed over the wall of plywood and steel. The grass was curiously dry despite the rain. It was as if an exclusion zone had formed above the sculpture, an invisible umbrella stretched out over their heads.

He whispered a quiet thank-you before crawling through the hole, into the centre of the Balkan Circle. Chan hesitated at the entrance, hands curling into fists in the scrubby grass. “This is some weird stuff, Goodwell.”

“Get used to it.” Goodwell was already rolling up his sleeves. He winced at the scars knitting across his forearms, the damage done by so many drags of the blade. Would it work without the candles and bowl, even in a place of power? Or was he going to bleed all over the ground for nothing?

At least he still had a blade - a miniature Swiss Army knife attached to his keychain, barely an inch and a half long. The blade was sharp not because Goodwell kept it that way but because he’d never found an opportunity to use it. Now, as Chan finally crawled into the circle and pulled the plywood flap closed behind her, he knew it was time to test that precious Swiss manufacture.

Chan was still brushing the muck from her suit pants when she saw what Goodwell was doing. “What the shit-”

The blade sank into the skin of Goodwell’s forearm easily, cutting through old scar tissue like a butter-knife through overripe fruit. He hissed in pain - the cut was deep, and he was out of practice, clumsy from lack of sleep. His stomach kinked as he saw the layers of flesh beneath the skin, strings of muscle working in the open wound.

He drew the blade back from his forearm just as Chan threw herself across the gap and slapped the pocket knife away. “Are you crazy? That’s bad, that’s close to an artery. We need to get pressure on it-”

“Not yet.” Goodwell struggled to keep his voice even as he crouched in the epicentre of the steel sculpture. There, he dug a hole with the toe of his new flip-flops and let the blood run down his forearm, dribbling off the end of his elbow and splashing in the divot.

It wasn’t quite a bowlful, but it would be enough. He went to his knees, clutching his injured arm tight.

Sometimes it took minutes. Not this time - the air pressure was already changing, the world tightening around Goodwell’s ears. He’d put the call out, and his master had heard.

Chan pressed against the inside wall of the Circle, one hand up to her mouth, the other grasping for a pistol that wasn’t there. “Is that a tornado? What the-”

“That’s her!” Goodwell turned his face up to the sky, shivering in the grip of the oncoming storm. It’d been too long since he’d communed, far too long. Feeling his employer and master form around him was heroin injected directly into the frontal lobe. “She’ll fix it. She’ll fix it all.”

Behind him, Chan was shouting into the wind. Goodwell couldn’t hear a word over the drumming in his ears, the voice unfurling, spreading warm tendrils through his brain and into his heart.

“Goodwell,” it crooned. “Tell me everything.”