For today. Tomorrow we have a few more tests. I’m going to need some tissue samples. Tell me, Alfred, have you ever had an operation?
They were going to put me under, open me up, and take samples of all my major organs. Dr. Mingus was particularly interested in my heart . . . He was going to slice out a piece of my heart.
You are blessed, Alfred Kropp. Do you believe that?
As he slid a needle into my groin.
A gift to all mankind . . .
As he shined a blinding light into my eyes.
The power of life, yes?
Like some horrible Halloween mask, his face. Wide and flat and blank. He barely had any eyebrows and his eyes were black, death-dark eyes, like a shark’s. The only expression I saw in them the whole time reminded me of a kid I knew in Ohio who enjoyed burning ants with a magnifying glass. The truly scary thing is there’s a lot of Dr. Minguses running around in the world, but I had the Dr. Mingus-iest of them all. He didn’t just like his work and he more than loved it. Like Nueve, he was his work.
The power of God himself . . .
The pillow on my bed smelled of lavender. Spit ran out my open mouth and I breathed that in, the smell of spit, the smell of lavender.
They brought me into the last room, the worst room, where a dentist’s chair was anchored to the floor. The two goons dragged me across the tile floor and my toe scraped across the metal drain cover in the middle of the room. They threw me into the chair and tightened straps across my arms and over my ankles. Dr. Mingus swung the chair around and brought his face very close to mine. His breath smelled very sweet, as sweet as cotton candy, and my stomach rolled.
One last test for the day, Alfred, more for my own benefit than science’s, for I am curious and I will confess a little skeptical. Like a Missourian, I wish to see it with my own eyes.
He stepped away and I saw Ashley standing between the two stone-faced goons. They were holding her arms out from her sides. I was still pretty dopey from the shot, and at first I thought I was hallucinating. What I was seeing couldn’t be what I was seeing.
Dr. Mingus stepped between me and Ashley, but I could see her face over his shoulder—she was at least a head taller than him—and I could also see what he held in his right hand.
A scalpel.
I jerked in the chair. The straps yanked me back. Mingus’s shoulder hunched and pivoted forward as he shoved the scalpel into the middle of Ashley’s chest.
Then he pushed the blade straight down toward her belly button. Her knees buckled, but the two guys kept her on her feet.
Mingus stepped away. Ashley’s chin dropped to her chest. A swirl of blond hair and the drip-drip-drip of her blood splattering on the cold tile, forming rivulets that ran toward the metal drain, and I remember thinking, Oh, that’s why there’s a drain in the floor.
Mingus turned to me.
Show me the gift.
Candy-breath, whispering.
Show me the power of God!
He cut a four-inch-long groove into my palm, threw off the straps, and flung me out of the chair. The men holding Ashley stepped away, and she crumpled to the floor as if in slow motion, coming to rest on her side, curled up like I was curled up now on my little bed in my little cabin, breathing in lavender and the smell of my own spit.
I crawled to her.
Her eyes were open, but I saw no spark of life in them.
Then a voice I had heard before whispered inside my head, Beloved!
My vision clouded. I was seeing her through a white film, a mist of shadow and light.
My beloved . . .
Something familiar and warm had come to me—or was it always there? I had felt it first in Merlin’s Cave, a being at once intimate and alien, so familiar but at the same time so terrifyingly different. The Sword of Kings, the gift passed down by heaven’s hands, was in this world but not of this world, my father had told me, and so was this presence around me now, between me and Ashley, joining me to Ashley.
Lying beside her, I pressed my bleeding hand into the gaping wound in her chest, and with my other hand I smoothed the blond hair away from her face.