Last Chance Idol Week 2: Incision
“If he doesn’t get this surgery, he’ll die.”
He noted Dr. Jago’s raised voice. He’d never heard his mentor yell before. Strange that when it happened, it should be on his behalf.
Turning his head on the pillow, he gazed past his morphine drip and out the window. The elder’s reply sounded as if from a great distance:
“You should have sent him home when he fell ill, butcher. Your people might have helped him.”
“I can help him right here!”
“Opening a body on these lands is a sin. It calls the hunger of the Demoness.”
“You’ve never had any issue with the cadavers we use.”
“Living blood is hot. She can smell it.”
“Oh, for the love of-“
Jago cut himself off, and he was grateful for it. The last thing he needed was a religious debate over his sickbed. He lay staring out the window, kneading his chest with his knuckles. Some growth was gnawing across the underside of his ribs, towards his heart. He’d endured the pain until he couldn’t, and now he was here, possibly about to be the object of a diplomatic incident.
This was not the first they’d heard of the Demoness.
“Elder, you know I respect the beliefs of the colony. But I can’t accept that a literal demon -a she-demon no less-somehow…spirits through walls and…”
“I don’t speak from a spiritual standpoint, but from bitter experience,” the elder interrupted. “The three who died before your coming, do you think they were our victims? A ritual sacrifice perhaps?”
Jago, who had voiced this exact suspicion to him in private, started to protest, but the old man continued:
“We are not so many generations removed from ‘civilized’ people. Those innocents, their hearts were taken, and devoured, by the Demoness. They were taken while they were still beating. Surely boy,” he was addressing him, now, for the first time. “Surely you would prefer to die whole?”
He could feel Jago’s eyes on him, pleading with him to be civil.
“I’m unconcerned whether or not my corpse is whole, Elder,” he said. “We are not of your colony. We can butcher each other as we please.”
His mentor groaned, but he didn’t care. His steel recommended him as a surgeon’s apprentice. Even practicing on corpses, even at the height of this pain, his hands never shook.
This allowed him to be thorough.
The elder was silent for a time.
“Once it’s done, none will remain here with you,” he said at last. “Good evening -and my condolences.”
“I won’t leave you,” Jago said, once the door had shut behind the elder. “Abandoning a recovering patient…I don’t support what people say about colonists, they aren’t savages, but sometimes I think the harshness of their lives wears down what’s good in them.
“Not all, of course,” he amended, remembering to whom he was speaking. “Not you and yours. But you came from a very different colony…whole other side of the map…”
Jago’s voice was slipping away. It wasn’t worth listening to.
His eyes slid closed.
#
He was six, and he’d run away from home.
Everyone in the colony warned against entering the forest. It was wild, they said, in the way only very old things are. But there was nowhere else to go, not if he didn’t want to be found right away, and so he slipped out one evening when no one was watching him. Not for any particular reason. In the self-absorbed way of a child, he’d assumed he’d be instantly missed, and whole search parties deployed to find him.
To give them proper chase, he pressed deeper into the trees...
#
A handful of colony healers agreed to assist with the surgery, on the condition that they were not required to make any cuts.
Even behind masks, he could see their wary looks. He was not well-liked. Well, they would have had antipathy for any ‘butcher,’ but he’d seen them occasionally summon warmth for Jago. Not for him.
He knew why. Jago was compassionate. His ‘depravity’ at least came from a desire to heal.
They sensed this was not so, in his case.
A snipping sound pulled him from his thoughts. One of the assistants was cutting away his shirt. Her brows knitted together, and he looked down to see what troubled her.
Up the center of his chest and across, like a capital ‘T,’ was a stretched and faded scar.
The assistant frowned at it. There was one other place she might have seen such a thing. The T-incision was common in autopsies, and if it was as they said, and the ‘Demoness’ stole the hearts of her victims-
--Well. They must have checked somehow.
“It’s not what you think,” he said. “Just a childhood injury.”
She gave him a look, as if she didn’t believe him, as if she thought city-folk must go around cutting each other up for the pleasure of it, and stepped back.
On his other side, Jago was fitting a mask to his face. He breathed in, and his limbs went heavy.
“It’s almost a shame you couldn’t perform this on yourself. You always make such clean lines,” Jago said. “Sleep, now. You won’t feel a thing.”
He turned his head to the window.
The sun was nearly
#
The sun was nearly set, and no one had come for him.
His shoes were soaked through with damp, coated with the mulch of dead leaves. Tiny sobs slipped out of him with each step. Crying felt like defeat. He’d been brave coming in here. Strong. Unafraid of punishment.
Now it was as if a small, frightened rabbit lived in his chest.
By the time night fell he was howling, stumbling forward in the dark like a toddler. His foot caught on a root and sent him reeling him to the ground. He didn’t get up. Instead, he curled his legs to his chest and wailed through ropes of spit.
He’d lain there nearly an hour when something shifted in the darkness.
His wails hitched in his throat. Because the motion he saw was not animal, and not monstrous. It was human, or human-like, and moreover feminine. A sway of the hips; a woman shifting her weight from one leg to the other.
“Mama?” he said.
The woman spoke.
#
He woke hours later to an empty room. Pain flashed across his chest. The morphine had worn off, and no one stood by to refresh his drip.
So much for not leaving him.
The door to his room was left ajar. That was odd. If a patient was sleeping, Jago usually shut the door so they wouldn’t be disturbed. His clipboard was lying face down on a chair, all the pages bent.
Frowning, in part from confusion and in part from the pain, he rolled his head on the pillow to scan the other side of the room.
A hand was pressed against the window. A woman’s hand.
This room was on the second floor.
He squeezed his eyes shut. He knew, but he could not say how he knew, that he was not meant to see. He didn’t want to see.
There was the cold, wet sound of flesh sliding down glass, and the scrabble of the latch, someone trying to jostle the rusted pane upwards-
(Please let it be locked)
It wasn’t.
He heard the window slide open, and cool air hit his face. The sounds of the empty streets filled the room, the hollow wind, the dead leaves skittering along the road. The window frame groaned, and something landed on the floor with a soft thump.
He was not afraid. He’d not been afraid for many years. And yet.
There was the pad of approaching feet. And then there wasn’t. And then someone exhaled directly above him, where there should have been just air.
He kept his eyes shut.
The Demoness said
#
“Why are you so far from home, child?”
He didn’t answer. The woman -the woman whose outline he’d barely glimpsed, before instinct made him push his fists into his eyes-had a voice like nothing he’d ever heard before. As if every syllable was made of sighs and wind and screams. The rabbit in his chest kicked and kicked.
“Child,” she said in her terrible voice. “Do you need my help?”
#
“You’ve broken my taboo.”
A finger reached down and trailed along his scar, making him hiss through his teeth. The incision must have been made in the same place, along the vertical strip. But then the finger crossed the top, completing the ‘T,’ and this was painful, too. But a deeper pain. Older.
“You’ve laid yourself bare to me, butcher,” the woman was saying, fingers poised above the center of his chest. “You’ve…”
She ripped her hand away, burned, the screams in her voice overtaking the sighs and the wind, cacophony above him. He kept his eyes shut. He kept his eyes shut.
“You…you’re not…you’re not whole…”
‘Yes,’ he thought. ‘Yes, I know.’
#
“You’re in such pain. I can take the pain away, if you want.”
He shivered on the ground. Surely he would hear his parents soon. Surely real people would come, and chase this apparition away. He couldn’t move until they did.
“Child.”
He yelped, scrambling at the dirt, trying to get away. The voice had whispered into his ear. It kept whispering:
“Or you can stay here in the cold, and the dark, and no one will find you. They won’t find you for fear of me. I want to help. I need your permission to help.”
He buried his face in his arms, terrified by her expectant silence.
“I just want to go home!”
Pain exploded across his chest, and he screamed, and the scream tore apart his thoughts, and the forest, and the woman’s voice. The pain was splitting him open, delving into the core of him, laying him bare…
A hand reached inside him, grasped the struggling rabbit, and broke its neck.
The pain stopped. It all stopped.
He opened his eyes.
#
“Your heart…has already been claimed…”
He thought that she would slink away, empty-handed. Instead she drew closer, and hissed:
“…but that is not all I can take from you.”
He was weaker now than he was then. The pain knocked him out instantly.
#
When he made it back to the colony early that morning, his weeping mother scooped him into her arms. His mouth pressed unsmiling into her shoulder.
When he got older, he became known as brilliant, but cold. The clarity that led him through the woods guided him in all things, revealed answers to him, kept his hands steady. It allowed him to be thorough. When he left the colony, his family told him how happy they were for him, how proud. He fixed his gaze on the city, and never turned back.
He became apprentice to a surgeon.
Other students avoided him. They said they did not like the look of him when he worked. They said that when he made his cuts, his famously clean cuts, that he looked as though he were searching…
#
Jago and the elder returned in the morning. They expected to find him dead.
He was not.
“I don’t understand,” the elder said, standing on one side of his unconscious form, while Jago stood on the other. “Why has she spared him, but not the others?”
“I couldn’t tell you. I didn’t know…if you had seen what was inside him, I…”
He’d pulled down the sheets to check on his work, and fell silent. The elder looked as well.
The bandages and stitches were gone. The old scar, the once faded ‘T,’ was now raw, red against pale skin…but sealed shut.
“I didn’t cut there,” Jago said. “I just made a line, I didn’t…”
The patient stirred in fitful sleep.
He noted Dr. Jago’s raised voice. He’d never heard his mentor yell before. Strange that when it happened, it should be on his behalf.
Turning his head on the pillow, he gazed past his morphine drip and out the window. The elder’s reply sounded as if from a great distance:
“You should have sent him home when he fell ill, butcher. Your people might have helped him.”
“I can help him right here!”
“Opening a body on these lands is a sin. It calls the hunger of the Demoness.”
“You’ve never had any issue with the cadavers we use.”
“Living blood is hot. She can smell it.”
“Oh, for the love of-“
Jago cut himself off, and he was grateful for it. The last thing he needed was a religious debate over his sickbed. He lay staring out the window, kneading his chest with his knuckles. Some growth was gnawing across the underside of his ribs, towards his heart. He’d endured the pain until he couldn’t, and now he was here, possibly about to be the object of a diplomatic incident.
This was not the first they’d heard of the Demoness.
“Elder, you know I respect the beliefs of the colony. But I can’t accept that a literal demon -a she-demon no less-somehow…spirits through walls and…”
“I don’t speak from a spiritual standpoint, but from bitter experience,” the elder interrupted. “The three who died before your coming, do you think they were our victims? A ritual sacrifice perhaps?”
Jago, who had voiced this exact suspicion to him in private, started to protest, but the old man continued:
“We are not so many generations removed from ‘civilized’ people. Those innocents, their hearts were taken, and devoured, by the Demoness. They were taken while they were still beating. Surely boy,” he was addressing him, now, for the first time. “Surely you would prefer to die whole?”
He could feel Jago’s eyes on him, pleading with him to be civil.
“I’m unconcerned whether or not my corpse is whole, Elder,” he said. “We are not of your colony. We can butcher each other as we please.”
His mentor groaned, but he didn’t care. His steel recommended him as a surgeon’s apprentice. Even practicing on corpses, even at the height of this pain, his hands never shook.
This allowed him to be thorough.
The elder was silent for a time.
“Once it’s done, none will remain here with you,” he said at last. “Good evening -and my condolences.”
“I won’t leave you,” Jago said, once the door had shut behind the elder. “Abandoning a recovering patient…I don’t support what people say about colonists, they aren’t savages, but sometimes I think the harshness of their lives wears down what’s good in them.
“Not all, of course,” he amended, remembering to whom he was speaking. “Not you and yours. But you came from a very different colony…whole other side of the map…”
Jago’s voice was slipping away. It wasn’t worth listening to.
His eyes slid closed.
#
He was six, and he’d run away from home.
Everyone in the colony warned against entering the forest. It was wild, they said, in the way only very old things are. But there was nowhere else to go, not if he didn’t want to be found right away, and so he slipped out one evening when no one was watching him. Not for any particular reason. In the self-absorbed way of a child, he’d assumed he’d be instantly missed, and whole search parties deployed to find him.
To give them proper chase, he pressed deeper into the trees...
#
A handful of colony healers agreed to assist with the surgery, on the condition that they were not required to make any cuts.
Even behind masks, he could see their wary looks. He was not well-liked. Well, they would have had antipathy for any ‘butcher,’ but he’d seen them occasionally summon warmth for Jago. Not for him.
He knew why. Jago was compassionate. His ‘depravity’ at least came from a desire to heal.
They sensed this was not so, in his case.
A snipping sound pulled him from his thoughts. One of the assistants was cutting away his shirt. Her brows knitted together, and he looked down to see what troubled her.
Up the center of his chest and across, like a capital ‘T,’ was a stretched and faded scar.
The assistant frowned at it. There was one other place she might have seen such a thing. The T-incision was common in autopsies, and if it was as they said, and the ‘Demoness’ stole the hearts of her victims-
--Well. They must have checked somehow.
“It’s not what you think,” he said. “Just a childhood injury.”
She gave him a look, as if she didn’t believe him, as if she thought city-folk must go around cutting each other up for the pleasure of it, and stepped back.
On his other side, Jago was fitting a mask to his face. He breathed in, and his limbs went heavy.
“It’s almost a shame you couldn’t perform this on yourself. You always make such clean lines,” Jago said. “Sleep, now. You won’t feel a thing.”
He turned his head to the window.
The sun was nearly
#
The sun was nearly set, and no one had come for him.
His shoes were soaked through with damp, coated with the mulch of dead leaves. Tiny sobs slipped out of him with each step. Crying felt like defeat. He’d been brave coming in here. Strong. Unafraid of punishment.
Now it was as if a small, frightened rabbit lived in his chest.
By the time night fell he was howling, stumbling forward in the dark like a toddler. His foot caught on a root and sent him reeling him to the ground. He didn’t get up. Instead, he curled his legs to his chest and wailed through ropes of spit.
He’d lain there nearly an hour when something shifted in the darkness.
His wails hitched in his throat. Because the motion he saw was not animal, and not monstrous. It was human, or human-like, and moreover feminine. A sway of the hips; a woman shifting her weight from one leg to the other.
“Mama?” he said.
The woman spoke.
#
He woke hours later to an empty room. Pain flashed across his chest. The morphine had worn off, and no one stood by to refresh his drip.
So much for not leaving him.
The door to his room was left ajar. That was odd. If a patient was sleeping, Jago usually shut the door so they wouldn’t be disturbed. His clipboard was lying face down on a chair, all the pages bent.
Frowning, in part from confusion and in part from the pain, he rolled his head on the pillow to scan the other side of the room.
A hand was pressed against the window. A woman’s hand.
This room was on the second floor.
He squeezed his eyes shut. He knew, but he could not say how he knew, that he was not meant to see. He didn’t want to see.
There was the cold, wet sound of flesh sliding down glass, and the scrabble of the latch, someone trying to jostle the rusted pane upwards-
(Please let it be locked)
It wasn’t.
He heard the window slide open, and cool air hit his face. The sounds of the empty streets filled the room, the hollow wind, the dead leaves skittering along the road. The window frame groaned, and something landed on the floor with a soft thump.
He was not afraid. He’d not been afraid for many years. And yet.
There was the pad of approaching feet. And then there wasn’t. And then someone exhaled directly above him, where there should have been just air.
He kept his eyes shut.
The Demoness said
#
“Why are you so far from home, child?”
He didn’t answer. The woman -the woman whose outline he’d barely glimpsed, before instinct made him push his fists into his eyes-had a voice like nothing he’d ever heard before. As if every syllable was made of sighs and wind and screams. The rabbit in his chest kicked and kicked.
“Child,” she said in her terrible voice. “Do you need my help?”
#
“You’ve broken my taboo.”
A finger reached down and trailed along his scar, making him hiss through his teeth. The incision must have been made in the same place, along the vertical strip. But then the finger crossed the top, completing the ‘T,’ and this was painful, too. But a deeper pain. Older.
“You’ve laid yourself bare to me, butcher,” the woman was saying, fingers poised above the center of his chest. “You’ve…”
She ripped her hand away, burned, the screams in her voice overtaking the sighs and the wind, cacophony above him. He kept his eyes shut. He kept his eyes shut.
“You…you’re not…you’re not whole…”
‘Yes,’ he thought. ‘Yes, I know.’
#
“You’re in such pain. I can take the pain away, if you want.”
He shivered on the ground. Surely he would hear his parents soon. Surely real people would come, and chase this apparition away. He couldn’t move until they did.
“Child.”
He yelped, scrambling at the dirt, trying to get away. The voice had whispered into his ear. It kept whispering:
“Or you can stay here in the cold, and the dark, and no one will find you. They won’t find you for fear of me. I want to help. I need your permission to help.”
He buried his face in his arms, terrified by her expectant silence.
“I just want to go home!”
Pain exploded across his chest, and he screamed, and the scream tore apart his thoughts, and the forest, and the woman’s voice. The pain was splitting him open, delving into the core of him, laying him bare…
A hand reached inside him, grasped the struggling rabbit, and broke its neck.
The pain stopped. It all stopped.
He opened his eyes.
#
“Your heart…has already been claimed…”
He thought that she would slink away, empty-handed. Instead she drew closer, and hissed:
“…but that is not all I can take from you.”
He was weaker now than he was then. The pain knocked him out instantly.
#
When he made it back to the colony early that morning, his weeping mother scooped him into her arms. His mouth pressed unsmiling into her shoulder.
When he got older, he became known as brilliant, but cold. The clarity that led him through the woods guided him in all things, revealed answers to him, kept his hands steady. It allowed him to be thorough. When he left the colony, his family told him how happy they were for him, how proud. He fixed his gaze on the city, and never turned back.
He became apprentice to a surgeon.
Other students avoided him. They said they did not like the look of him when he worked. They said that when he made his cuts, his famously clean cuts, that he looked as though he were searching…
#
Jago and the elder returned in the morning. They expected to find him dead.
He was not.
“I don’t understand,” the elder said, standing on one side of his unconscious form, while Jago stood on the other. “Why has she spared him, but not the others?”
“I couldn’t tell you. I didn’t know…if you had seen what was inside him, I…”
He’d pulled down the sheets to check on his work, and fell silent. The elder looked as well.
The bandages and stitches were gone. The old scar, the once faded ‘T,’ was now raw, red against pale skin…but sealed shut.
“I didn’t cut there,” Jago said. “I just made a line, I didn’t…”
The patient stirred in fitful sleep.