Susan Nicholls was awake now, although she was still under the influence of the midazolam that Dr Macleod had prescribed for her to relieve her pain. Her eyes were misty, and she was speaking in a dreamy murmur, as if she were floating out to sea. However, her heart rate and her respiration were almost back to normal, and Dr Macleod wanted to operate on her as soon as possible, before the foetus implanted itself even more tenaciously into the lining of her womb.
The anaesthetic room was quiet and dimly lit. When Dr Macleod and Dr Bhaduri came in, a red-haired nurse was standing beside Susan’s trolley, holding her hand and talking to her.
Dr Macleod went up to her and smiled. ‘Hallo, Susan. How are you feeling?’
‘Like I’m dreaming. I still can’t believe that I’m pregnant again.’
‘As I said before, you are and you aren’t. This is not a normal pregnancy. It’s more like some invasive tissue that has to be removed.’
‘It’s not cancer, is it? You’d tell me if it was cancer.’
‘No, I promise you it’s not cancer. But we do need to remove it from your uterus immediately to relieve the pain you’ve been suffering and so that it doesn’t threaten your general health.’
‘It’s not a baby, is it? I mean, it’s not like a twin of the one I miscarried, that got left behind?’
Dr Macleod smiled again and shook his head. Before she was sedated, he had tried to explain to her why she had to have a C-section. He had told her that it was urgent, but he hadn’t gone so far as to tell her that she was carrying inside her a foetus that possessed the face of an angel but the writhing limbs of a sea creature.
The door from the operating theatre swung open, and Duncan the anaesthetist came in, wiping his mouth on a paper napkin. Dr Macleod had never seen him look so serious, but then he knew in advance what they were going to be removing from Susan Nicholls’s womb. It had been traumatic enough seeing it the first time, when it was lifted out of Chiasoka Oduwole.
‘Ready for a little nap?’ Duncan asked Susan, rubbing his hands together and trying to sound cheerful.
‘I will be all right, won’t I, doctor?’ Susan asked Dr Macleod, lifting her head from the pillow. ‘I’ll be able to have other babies after this, won’t I?’
‘Of course, Susan. Absolutely no reason why not. Don’t worry. You’ll be fine. I’ll see you later, when you come to.’
Dr Macleod and Dr Bhaduri left the anaesthetic room. They were walking along to the scrubs room to prepare themselves for surgery when Dr Macleod’s iPhone pinged. He had been sent a text from the front desk, telling him that two detectives had arrived in reception and wanted to talk to him.
I’m going into theatre, he texted back. Tell them to come back in an hour.
‘The police,’ he told Dr Bhaduri.
‘I thought you didn’t want to call the police.’
‘I didn’t, but Professor Karounis has been fretting about a possible malpractice suit or even a prosecution for sexual assault and infanticide.’
‘Professor Karounis is a good director but… I don’t know – he can be so cautious sometimes. I wonder if he has an incident in his past that haunts him.’
‘Nothing that I know of. The Warren Trust think very highly of him. But from my experience, you can get yourself into deeper trouble if you’re too worried about legalities. Personally, I think we should have euthanised that foetus as soon as we took it out of Ms Oduwole. We could have told her it was stillborn. It was my fault entirely. It was the way it looked at me – that sweet, sweet face. It reminded me so much of my own daughter, when she was a baby. And the way it started to cry. I had a nightmare about it last night. I dreamed that I woke up, and instead of my wife, Beverly, lying on the pillow next to me, it was that foetus.’
They walked into the scrubs room and hung up their jackets. Dr Bhaduri obviously didn’t know what to say, because Dr Macleod had never spoken to him so intimately before.
‘After today though, no more nightmares,’ said Dr Macleod, as he washed his hands and his forearms, staring at himself in the mirror over the washbasin and sticking out his lower lip as if he were challenging himself to a fight.
*
Dr Symonds and two nurses were already waiting for them when they entered the theatre, as well as the centre’s most experienced midwife, Janet Horrocks. Susan Nicholls was unconscious on the operating table, lit up by the 130,000 lx surgical lamps as if she were lying on an altar.
From his seat on the opposite side of the table, Duncan gave Dr Macleod the thumbs up. Dr Macleod saw that the largest size of stainless-steel kidney dish had been placed next to the instruments, ready as before for the foetus to be dropped into it. And what if it looks up at me appealingly, in the same way that it did last time? What if it starts to sob? I don’t even know if it’s human, but it has a human face, the face of a beautiful child. How am I going, cold-bloodedly, to kill it?
‘Right,’ he said. ‘Let’s do it.’
One of the nurses lifted the pale-blue sheet that was covering Susan Nicholls’s stomach. Her stomach looked swollen, but that was to be expected after she had lost her baby as late as nineteen weeks. The other nurse handed Dr Macleod a scalpel, and he poised it over her skin to make the first incision.
He had only just started to cut, and the first thin runnel of blood was starting to slide down Susan Nicholls’s side, when the surgical lamps started to flicker. He hesitated and looked across at Duncan, and then at Dr Bhaduri.
‘We’re not about to have a power cut, are we?’
‘Could be a loose connection,’ said Duncan. ‘It’s only the lamps though. The monitors aren’t affected.’
Dr Macleod hesitated. The lamps flickered faster and faster, and gradually they began to shine a lurid green, instead of white. He stepped back from the operating table, both hands raised as if he were being arrested.
‘What in the name of God is going on, Duncan?’
‘I have no idea, doctor. The monitors are still working fine. I’ll call maintenance. I never saw anything like this in my life.’
The whole theatre was lit with shuddering green light so that everything appeared to be jumping – the monitors, the operating table, even Dr Bhaduri and Dr Symonds and Janet Horrocks and the nurses. One of the nurses reached across and twisted off the light control, but the lamps continued to flicker just as brightly. She twisted it again and again, but it had no effect on the lamps at all.
‘I’m sorry, doctor,’ she said. ‘It just doesn’t work.’
‘Right,’ said Dr Macleod. ‘I think we’d better call a halt to this operation and get the patient out of here asap. Duncan? Have you got through to maintenance?’
Duncan held up his phone and said, ‘I’m getting nothing but a buzzing noise. I think the lamps are interfering with the signal.’
‘Nurse Harris… can you go and find somebody from maintenance, quick as you like,’ said Dr Macleod. ‘Janet… Nurse Yeom, let’s get the patient disconnected and into the recovery room.’
Nurse Harris went over to the theatre’s double doors, but when she pushed them, they stayed firmly shut. She pushed them again, but they still wouldn’t budge, so Dr Bhaduri went over and rammed them with his shoulder. He rammed them a second time, so hard that he rubbed his shoulder in pain, and then he kicked them, three times, but they refused to open.
‘It’s like they’re locked. But look at the bolts – they’re not locked at all.’
Dr Macleod was about to go around the operating table to help him when he became aware of a dark shadowy swirl in the corner of the theatre. He stopped and frowned at it through the flickering green light. At first it looked like nothing but smoke, but gradually it began to take on the shape of a figure. He reached over and touched Dr Symonds’s arm to get her attention, and pointed to it.
Within a few seconds, the swirl had formed itself into what looked like a tall, hooded woman in a long cloak, although her outline was blurred, and through her cloak, Dr Macleod could still faintly see the white metal cabinet in the corner behind her.
The woman raised her smoky left arm and appeared to point at Susan Nicholls, still lying anaesthetised on the operating table, although Duncan had now removed her oxygen mask. Susan Nicholls stirred. Her hands twitched, and she gave a violent shiver from head to foot. Then, as if somebody invisible had taken hold of her shoulders and lifted her, she sat up.
Janet Horrocks made a move toward her, obviously worried that she might try to climb off the operating table and hurt herself, but Dr Macleod held her back.
‘Wait… I don’t know what’s happening here, Janet, but wait.’
Duncan slowly rose from his stool, staring at the ghostly figure in the corner. ‘Doctor—’
‘Wait, Duncan.’
Dr Macleod felt that the whole world as he knew it was falling to pieces. He was usually so calm and sane and systematic: he had to be, for the sake of his patients. But what was happening now in this operating theatre – this flashing green light, these doors that wouldn’t open, the way in which Susan Nicholls had risen from the table – it was all madness. As mad as it was though, his logical mind told him that there had to be some reason behind it, and that they should hold back and see if that reason became clear.
Susan Nicholls opened her eyes. She turned to Dr Macleod and her lip was curled in contempt.
‘You will not touch me,’ she told him, in a throaty voice. ‘You will not cut me open.’
Dr Macleod took a step back toward her. ‘Susan?’
‘Stay away from me. Lay down your knife.’
‘Who’s that talking, Susan? That’s not you, is it?’
‘You will not cut me open. If you try to cut me open and take out my nestling, you will live to regret it for the remainder of your days.’
‘I’m going to ask you again, Susan. Who’s telling you to say that?’ He pointed to the shadowy hooded figure in the corner. ‘Is it her?’
Susan Nicholls didn’t answer. After a few moments she sank back on to the operating table – again, as if some invisible helper were gently lowering her down.
As soon as she lay back and closed her eyes, there was an ear-splitting crackle, and all the surgical lamps shattered, showering the operating table in hundreds of shards of glass. For a few seconds, the theatre was plunged into absolute darkness. Nurse Harris screamed.
The emergency lights blinked on. When they did, the theatre looked so utterly normal that it was almost a shock. The shadowy hooded figure had vanished from the corner, and Susan Nicholls was lying with her eyes still closed, breathing quietly and steadily. The only evidence of what had happened was all the glittering splinters of glass that were scattered over the sheets.
Dr Macleod and everybody else in the theatre looked at each other, stunned, not knowing what to say.
At last, Dr Symonds whispered, ‘Oh, my God. I mean – oh – my – God. What was that? I can’t stop myself shaking.’
‘I don’t know what it was. Some kind of hallucination?’
‘How could it be a hallucination if we all saw it?’
‘Perhaps it was a ghost,’ said Dr Bhaduri. ‘The spirit of some person who has died but who has not been able to leave this Earth. My grandmother used to tell me about such phantoms.’
‘Whatever it was, this poor young woman still has that thing inside her,’ said Dr Symonds. ‘What did she call it? A “nestling”. But we can’t leave it there, can we? Who knows what it might do to her, when it grows?’
Dr Macleod pressed his hand over his mouth. He didn’t know what to think. Dr Symonds was right; they couldn’t leave that creature to develop inside Susan Nicholls’s womb – not only for her sake, but for the creature’s sake too. He had aborted foetuses far less malformed than this thing, and the strange beauty of its face was no justification for allowing such a creature to live.
But he couldn’t help thinking about the threat that he had been given – by Susan Nicholls herself, or by some kind of ventriloquism from that hooded apparition? If you try to cut me open and take out my nestling, you will live to regret it for the remainder of your days.