Ashley Bell (Ashley Bell #1)(99)
Alwine asked Nancy and Murphy for permission to record close-ups of their daughter’s facial injuries, assuring them that the images would remain part of her file, not to be distributed beyond a limited number of the medical staff. He’d hardly begun to operate the camera, however, when he exclaimed at something, and everyone crowded around the bed to witness another inexplicable blackening of Bibi’s body, captured this time on film as it occurred.
This time Bibi’s face did not serve as the canvas, and the medium of disfigurement wasn’t bruising and abrasion. Her arms lay at length above the top sheet and thin blanket. The right sleeve of her pajamas was rucked up halfway to her elbow. On her bared forearm, about two inches above her wrist bones, neatly formed black letters began to appear one at a time, as if her skin were parchment on which an invisible penman were printing his brand, to lay claim to her, body and soul. Although the words included no curse or demonic name, the crisp black letters appeared one after the other with such implacable intent that they could be regarded only as an ominous sign, no matter what their ultimate meaning might prove to be.
Murphy cringed from this inexplicable imprinting as if the message were being carved into his daughter’s flesh with a knife, turning away repeatedly only to look back again each time, saying “This is wrong, wrong, this is wrong.”
Against fear, anger was an inadequate defense, and Nancy could no longer sustain it. At the foot of the bed again, she stood aghast, robbed of the power to move or speak, transfixed by the manifesting letters, as if they would spell out both her daughter’s doom and her own.
Pax hoped to hear Bibi’s voice in his mind’s ear as before, even if it might be as enigmatic as on the two previous occasions. But as the first two lines on her forearm completed a name, and as a third line began to form, he heard nothing except expressions of amazement from the two nurses. And from Edgar Alwine, an observation: “It’s a tattoo, isn’t it? A very simple tattoo, perhaps poorly removed by laser and now resurfacing. Is that possible?”
“Bibi didn’t have any tattoos,” Nancy said.
Nancy’s didn’t rather than doesn’t suggested an unconscious resignation, a despondency if not despair, that chilled Pax. When he spoke, his intention was as much to correct the verb tense, regarding Bibi, as to clarify her position on tattoos. “She isn’t against them. She admires them when they’re really beautiful. But she doesn’t have any desire for one. She says a tattoo is a means of satisfying one emotional need or another, but she satisfies hers in other ways.”
While the chief of hospital security filmed, while the two nurses watched with the puzzled gravity of those whose fundamental certainties were proving uncertain, while Nancy stood benumbed by horror and helplessness, while Murphy bit on the knuckle of one fisted hand—the fist an expression of his desire to confront his daughter’s unknown tormentor, the biting of the knuckle emblematic of the confused child within the man—while the floodgates of the setting sun poured forth torrents of scarlet light that washed against the window, the fourth and final line welled into view on Bibi’s forearm, one black letter at a time, and the message—or the promise or the challenge, or whatever it might be—was complete: ASHLEY BELL WILL LIVE.
“Who is Ashley Bell?” asked Edgar Alwine.
No one in the room had heard of her.
“Where is Bibi, who is this name on her arm, how is any of this happening? Why? I don’t understand,” Nancy said.
Such misery informed the woman’s voice that her husband, usually quick to console and reassure her, evidently felt inadequate to the task. He turned to Pax with an expression familiar to any team leader in combat; he wanted guidance, and if not guidance, then confirmation of his own instincts, and if not confirmation, then reassurance.
But here Pax felt a lack of competence that he had never felt in battle. He did not know what to say to Murphy. He did not know what to do. He felt awkward. Awkward and useless and stupid, and he hated feeling all those things. That might be who he was at this moment, in this unprecedented situation, but it was not who he had been until now and, by God, would not be who he would be going forward. Since his earliest memories of his family and the horse ranch, there had been a rhythm to his life with which he had always been in step, no matter what changes in tempo might occur. The rhythm was still there. It was always there. The rhythm was a thing outside himself, not of his creation, and all he needed to do was hear it again.
Nancy went around to Bibi’s right side and took her hand. But she seemed either to be repelled by the limpness of that hand or, more likely, not repelled but dispirited by it, by the lifelessness that it implied. Perhaps the four simple and yet mysterious words, from which she could not take her eyes, suggested to her a previously unconsidered system to the world requiring that she follow a path of thought she found disturbing or daunting, for it seemed to Paxton that Nancy’s distress was of a complex character, that it was not solely grief prompted by the calamity that had befallen her daughter. Whatever other fears and worries might be troubling her, she turned from the bed and went to the window and stood staring out into the vast sky, where gulls rowed through an ocean of air or caught waves of wind and surfed without need to consider an approaching shore.
Edgar Alwine had yet to film anyone’s statement regarding the inexplicable appearance of the injuries to Bibi’s face. Just as he was about to start with Petronella, the door opened, and a youngish physician in a white lab coat entered, having been informed of the extraordinary stigmata but not yet of the four-word tattoo. He went directly to the patient and was equally astonished and concerned by what he saw. He brought himself up to speed by listening attentively as Petronella told her story to Alwine’s camera. The evident depth and sincerity of the doctor’s concern disposed Pax to like the man even before they were introduced.