Ashley Bell (Ashley Bell #1)(98)
Paralyzed by the spectacle of Bibi’s transformation but then stung into action when the changes stopped, Petronella snatched up the call button that was looped by its cord around the bed railing, and she connected with the fourth-floor nursing station. With an authority born of years of patient crises successfully resolved, she told the responding nurse that she needed to see the shift supervisor urgently in Room 456. “We’ve got a situation here.”
“What just happened to my girl?” Nancy demanded of the nurse with uncharacteristic and unwarranted accusation. Reason had been frightened out of her, and anger rather than unreason had replaced it. “What the hell happened to her poor sweet face?”
Murphy put an arm around her and, in a voice pressed thin by anxiety, said, “Easy, honey, easy, she doesn’t know what happened.” When Nancy tried to throw off his arm, he held her tighter. “Nobody could know what that was. That was fully crazy. But Bibi’s going to be all right.”
“Look at her, look at what’s happening to her. She’s not all right, damn it.”
“No, but she’s going to be. She’ll walk the board as good as anyone, better than you and me, like always.”
Nancy held fast to her anger, bristled with it, and it seemed that her short shaggy hair responded to some electrical charge in the air. If her eyes did not actually flash, they appeared to flash, and the muscles bulged along her clenched jaws. But it was useless anger in that it had no target, human or otherwise, and was in fact less real than it was a desperate defense against the despair that a surrender to fate encouraged.
Regarding the traveling lines of light spiking left to right across Bibi’s cardiac monitor, Petronella said aloud but mostly to herself, “Her heart rate never changed. Or her blood pressure.”
Pax stood immobilized and bewildered by what he had witnessed, which was not good. Whether ambushed or leading a planned assault, he was always quick to respond to events, not the least reluctant to change strategy and tactics. Considered action was always better than considered inaction, but you had to have something to consider, hard facts and a set of circumstances that allowed commonsense analysis. He knew that the face of this beloved woman bore the marks of a beating, not evidence of disease. Having tracked down some of the worst psychopaths who had made the news in the past several years, trailing in the wake of evil, Pax had seen enough women and men after they had been beaten to extract information from them, to teach them to fear the new boss, and just for the pleasure of violence. He knew what he was looking at, and he yearned—with an adolescent passion for vengeance and with a grown man’s loathing of cruelty—to find and kill whoever had done this to Bibi. One big problem. Anyone not present for the flowering of the stigmata might think him insane if he gave voice to the thought, but the perpetrator seemed to be a ghost that attacked her in some realm to which Pax had no access, an Elsewhere that she at the moment occupied in addition to this world of her birth.
The shift supervisor, Julia, fortyish and pumped, with the glow and stride of a fitness fanatic, bustled into the room, received a report from Petronella, and regarded Pax with evident suspicion, no doubt because of his size but also because of the thunderstorm of an expression that had occupied his face since he had watched Bibi bleed and bruise. Any doubt that Julia might have had about Petronella’s incredible story evaporated when she took a closer look at Bibi’s injuries and saw that they were not fresh. She had been in the room less than an hour earlier, to reset the cardiac monitor when an alarm sounded for no good reason, which happened from time to time; and on that visit, Bibi’s face had been unmarked.
No less mystified than the rest of them, Julia nevertheless had the priorities of a good manager in this age of endless litigation. She wanted everyone to remain where they were until she could get the chief of hospital security to film interviews with them in situ. Nancy’s misplaced anger flared, but Murphy quickly soothed her, and Julia promised to return in ten minutes.
In the absence of the shift supervisor, the conversation did not become as animated as Pax expected. The four of them had been witness to an extraordinary event, and although they had seen precisely the same thing from the same angle, the normal human tendency in the face of the unknown was to rehash the experience until the life had been talked out of it, until they had spun off into a confabulation about such tenuously related subjects as UFOs, Bigfoot, and poltergeists. Perhaps they were constrained by the fact that Bibi’s life, already being stolen from her by brain cancer, suddenly appeared to be in even more immediate jeopardy from an enemy unknown and, for the moment, seemingly unknowable. What little they said to one another was less speculation than words of comfort, and their attention was less on one another than on the dear girl in the bed, to whom some other injury might at any moment be inflicted by a phantom presence.
Keeping her promise to the minute, Julia returned with the chief of hospital security, a former homicide detective who had retired in his early fifties to begin a second and less risky career. He was a white-haired long-faced large-boned figure with a natural dignity that might have made him seem less like a cop than like a judge, if judges these days had still been as reliably dignified as they had once been. His name was Edgar Alwine. He introduced himself to Nancy and Murphy and Pax, repeating his name and title to each, as if they could hear him only when addressed directly eye to eye. His handshake was firm, his manner warm, and Pax liked the guy.