Chapter 7: The Black Hand
“It’s black!”
“Yes, Jeffrey,” Adelaide agreed. “It is. And there’s no way we know of to fix it. I am sorry.”
Kirby stared at his right hand. Amy—Dr. Lau had said to call her Amy—had removed the bandage from his hand to reveal the strange sight: his palm, fingers, thumb, and the back of his hand down to his wrist were now a jet-black color, blacker than a dog’s nose. As black, maybe, as the wolf-thing that had so very nearly killed him Wednesday night.
A thought occurred to him and he swung his gaze wildly between them, desperately. “Is it...is it infected? You can’t fix it? Is this—” and he held his hand up for emphasis “—going to kill me?”
Adelaide said, “Absolutely not, Jeffrey.” Her tone did not allow for uncertainty.
“Well, we’re not certain. It could be possible,” said Amy.
Kirby turned to look at her and, from the corner of his eye, saw Adelaide giving the slender Asian doctor a stern look.
“Almost no chance of that, really,” Amy rapidly amended. He still noticed Adelaide glaring until Amy added a reassuring smile. “Definitely not. You should be fine, dude.”
The women watched him study his hand. There were places along the edges of the stain that looked like splashes of black ink. The black area reflected no light. He rubbed at it without effect.
“It’s a stain, Kirby, not an infection,” Amy continued. “It’s startling to look at and we have no idea how to remove it—if it can be removed at all—but the stain itself shouldn’t hurt you.”
“Hmm.” He continued to look at his hand from various angles and inspect between his fingers. “You say this was caused by the thing’s blood?”
“Yes, Jeffrey,” said Adelaide. The older woman ran a gloved finger along the string of pearls she wore. “The blood of a living Abyssal wolf leaves a mark that will remain with you all the days of your life.”
“What the hell do I tell people?” A sudden anger inflected his voice. “How the fuck do I explain this to my friends, to my students, when they ask how this happened?”
“Miss Adelaide has had me looking into that,” said Amy. “Your best bet is to tell them it was some kind of industrial accident.”
“What, like I spilled some ink on my hand and don’t feel like washing it?” He ignored the part of him said he ought to cool off, to calm down and be rational. What the hell is rational about any of this?
“Actually, as Amy has explained it to me, no stain can really be permanent unless it gets beneath the outer layer of skin, the epidermis, like a tattoo.”
“Exactly,” the doctor agreed. “An accident that permanently stained your skin would have to involve something like indelible ink and something that might force it under your skin, a high-pressure water jet, like a power washer-type thing, or some kind of compressed air, or something like that. There’s no similar accident in the literature. If someone asks, try to be vague.”
He thundered. “Try to be vague? It’s my goddamn right hand! Is that the best you’ve got?”
“Actually, we were thinking that you might wear a glove,” Adelaide said, apparently unfazed by his outburst. She tugged at each of her gloves before continuing. “Tell people who ask about the glove that there was an accident and it involved scarring and chemical staining. Try to make them think that you’re self-conscious about it. They oughtn’t pry overmuch.”
“I won’t have to pretend to be self-conscious,” he countered with a bit less hostility than before. “And the thing’s blood is really what caused this?”
Both women nodded, then looked at each other. Amy said, “As Miss Adelaide just said, the blood of a living Abyssal wolf leaves a mark, a stain, that won’t come off. If we could get rid of it, we would.”
“I spent yesterday,” added Adelaide, “reaching out to some associates and doing a bit of discreet research. The last record we have of a similar such staining is from 1611 in Spain. You are unique among living men, Jeffrey.”
“Sixteen-eleven? As in ‘the year 1611’? How the hell do you find out what happened to some Spaniard four hundred years ago? I’ve never seen a history book that mentions fighting black wolf-things, ripped from your worst nightmares. How do you research something like that?”
The slender doctor glanced uncomfortably at Adelaide, before turning back to him. “Dude, just assume we have access to research materials outside the standard histories. The Spanish guy died from his wounds just a few days later, but he had lost a leg fighting the Abyssal wolves. The only other mentions anyone can find to the stain of the Abyssal wolf’s blood go all the way back to the fourth century AD and the first century BC—and the fourth-century one is probably bullshit.”
“The first cen—,” he said before interrupting himself. Both women seemed to take that as a cue and opened their mouths as if to speak, but he clenched his eyes shut and held up his hands. They waited for him. He took two deep, cleansing breaths. “Who—,” he began before stopping himself again. “No, that’s not the right question. Let me try that again. WHAT the FUCK are you people supposed to be?”
“Jeffrey,” said the older woman, with great calm in the face of his outrage, demonstrating a poise he could not fathom, “I understand that nothing that's happened to you since Wednesday night has made very much sense to you. I regret that sincerely—and you have no idea how much. It would make anyone overwrought. It is reasonable under the circumstances that you might shout and use profanity, but can you give me a chance to explain?”
“Can we skip yesterday’s philosophical doubletalk?”
“Yesterday, I was laying a theoretical foundation, the groundwork for today’s explanation. Now that you’ve had time to digest it, I’d like to proceed with some of the details. You won’t like them, but you’ll be able to accept them better for our having talked yesterday.”
He understood that he was being manipulated, being put into a position from which he would be more likely to buy what they were selling. Yet, knowing one was being manipulated and being able to resist that manipulation were not the same thing. With no small amount of skepticism, he said, “Go ahead.”
“Bluntly put, I am a sorceress.” Adelaide said this with no more to-do than if she had confessed to being a librarian. “Amy is one of my apprentices.”
It looked to him that she was pausing to gauge his response, read his expression, so he kept his face as expressionless as he was able and said, “Go on.”
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“On Wednesday night, someone—and it is unclear at this time who, but most assuredly another practitioner of sorcery—attempted to assassinate me. You got in the way. You made the choice to intentionally put yourself between me and harm. I’d be dead but for you, Jeffrey. You saved my life and paid a price for it. I am so tremendously grateful to you, and so terribly sorry for the pain you received.”
And there it was. What should have sounded like a batty old lady, who ought to have been receiving care in what his Aunt Priscilla would have called the “loony bin,” sounded instead like a rational, sober adult doing nothing but relaying a straightforward account of the situation. From the corner of his eye, he saw Amy nodding matter-of-factly in agreement as Adelaide was speaking.
“A sorceress?” he asked.
“A sorceress.”
He pondered that a moment. “And the ‘unnatural’ healing of my wound?”
“Sorcery,” said the women in unison.
The memory of Wednesday night came, unwanted, to fill his mind. Killing the thing. Walking around the dumpster. Two of the wolf-things on the ground. Adelaide with that cleaver, that gleaming cleaver, chopping…
“What happened to the other wolf-things, the Abyssal wolves, Wednesday night?”
“I killed them with sorcery, Jeffrey. I barely managed it.” She leaned forward and touched his knee for emphasis. “If you hadn’t been there, if you hadn’t stopped the third one, I would be dead, consumed by the Abyss.”
“The Abyss, as in where the Abyssal wolves are from?”
“Just so. The wolves are manifestations of the Abyss and what they devour, the Abyss devours.”
“Like the bite that thing took out of me.” It was not a question.
Both women nodded.
“Why aren’t you stained like this?” he asked, holding up his black hand again. “I saw you. You were chopping it into pieces. There must have been blood.”
“I have to admit that you are processing this far better than many people would. The things Amy and I are telling you are strange, alien even, but you can apply powers of reason to them—usually—and you can explore them, understand them better through experimentation. That’s what I do.”
“As a sorceress?”
“Yes, as a sorceress—and to answer your question, I’m not stained becau—”
“Because you said you killed them with sorcery. So, they were already dead when you started chopping on them. And you said that the blood of a living Abyssal wolf caused this stain.”
“Damn!” Amy said. “When I first got hit in the face with the weirdness and the sorcery, it knocked me for a fucking loop. You’re dealing with this so much better than I did—and your introduction was savage, dude.”
“I must confess that I, too, am impressed by and very happy for the fact that you possess such resilience,” agreed Adelaide.
“Thanks, I guess, but I’ve been teaching in Oklahoma City public schools for the past five years. It forces you to be more resilient than you thought you could be—and, if it doesn’t, it forces you to find another job.”
“Nevertheless—and Amy agrees with me on this—we both think that you need to take it easy, not try to get back up to full speed with your life right away. The physical trauma, despite Amy’s healing, can’t just be shrugged off. The same is true for the psychic trauma.” She patted his knee again. “We think you should rest here, where we can monitor your health and well-being.”
“Here, as in your safe room? Am I in danger from something besides what I’ve already been through?”
Adelaide shrugged, but it was not a flippant or a dismissive shrug. It conveyed regret and uncertainty. “We just don’t know. If whoever tried to kill me thinks you are somehow associated with me, then you may be in danger. It’s not very likely, but...”
“Wolves?” The stress in his voice was clear to everyone in the room—including himself.
Adelaide gave that same uncertain, regretful shrug. “That, among other reasons, is why I have you in the safe room. I want you to be safe and comfortable until you feel up to strength and until I know more about this situation. I’ve had some pajamas and robes in your size purchased for your stay. I can bring in a television or send down some books from the library. I could send someone to your apartment to discreetly fetch anything you might require.”
He thought of the awful state of his apartment and shook his head. “I can’t really form any rational response to this—any of this. But I will accept your hospitality. How long do you think I’ll need to stay?”
“That’s not clear yet,” said Amy. “Miss Adelaide has me working on something, just to be safe, and it shouldn’t take me too long to get it ready.”
“Should I ask? Or is it unnatural?”
Adelaide got that forthright look in her eye. “It’s sorcery, and it will be easier if you just called it that.”
“I’m not sure I want to. I still would rather not believe what you’re telling me.”
Adelaide’s voice held so much sympathy that it seemed she was speaking to a child. “I know, dear Jeffrey. I know, but it doesn’t change the fact that you don’t really have much choice, do you? Your hand, your wound, your memories of Wednesday night won’t let you discount what I’m saying. You don’t have a better explanation besides, perhaps, the possibility that you’ve gone insane—and we both know that if you begin your proof with your own insanity as one of the givens...”
Kirby grunted. He did not need her to finish the statement. If he started with the assumption that he was insane, how could he hope to use reason to prove—or disprove—anything?
Kirby’s friends sometimes joked that he was too rational for what they called his “artsy-fartsy Literature degree.” His rationality was a part of himself that he liked, that he cultivated. He felt almost betrayed by it, because the closest thing to a rational explanation for what he had been through—for what he was still going through—was the collection of irrationalities Adelaide and Amy, an alleged sorceress and her apprentice, had given him.
Adelaide stood. “I do have some things to attend to, but I’m going to leave you in Amy’s capable hands. She will endeavor to answer your questions the best she can.” To Amy she said, “Amy, dear, Jeffrey will certainly be safe in the house. If he feels up to it, take him upstairs and let him enjoy the sunshine through the windows at least. I think he’d probably enjoy a visit to the library.”
“But I really need to—" The look Adelaide gave her was not the glower she had used earlier, but it silenced her. “Yes, Miss Adelaide.”
When the older woman had gone, Amy said, “Let me get you something to wear.” And she opened the room’s second door, revealing white tile floors and a sink. She disappeared around a corner and reappeared a moment later carrying several soft packages. “Miss Adelaide said to get you pajamas, but you look like a guy who prefers sweats.”
She dumped brand-new sweatpants and a sweatshirt onto the bed, along with economy-sized packages of underwear and athletic socks.
“Good call.” He examined the packaging. “These should do. What did you do with the clothes I had on Wednesday?”
“Well, they were pretty fucked up when you arrived. It was a whole lot easier to cut you out of them than to try to undress you properly.”
“My shoes?”
She crouched beside the bed and reached under it, producing one of his expensive, used-only-once running shoes. “Miss Adelaide had it cleaned, but you were only wearing the one when she brought you in.”
He shook his head.
“Miss Adelaide has already had several new pairs ordered for you. With expedited shipping, they should be here tomorrow.” She added, in a tone clearly intended to tease, “And you, by the way, have some big-ass feet! Thirteen triple-E? Your feet are almost freaks of nature, dude.”
“Well,” he responded, neither for the first nor the last time to a comment about the size of his feet, “you know what they say about guys with big feet, right?”
“Dude, I’ve already seen your wiener,” she snorted. “You know, when I catheterized you? That takes a lot of the mystery out of it. But I’ll give you points for honesty. Those shoes aren’t false advertising.”
“Okay, then. It looks like any attempt to cultivate an air of mystery on my part is right out.”
“You’re free to cultivate as much or as little mystery as you like, big guy.” And she flicked her eyes meaningfully below his waist and back again with a smile. “But burly, bald, and bearded isn’t really my type.”
“Ah, the story of my life,” he said in mock resignation. “Well, why don’t you give me a sec to get dressed and I’ll let you take me on the grand tour?”
“That’ll work.” She made no move to leave the room.
“Umm…”
“Yeah?”
“I’d like to get up and get dressed.”
“You need a hand?”
“No. I might need a little privacy, though.”
“Oh, come on!” she said with exasperation. “I’ve already seen your wiener—or would you prefer I call it your ‘winkie-dink’? And besides, I’m a doctor.”
“The preferred term is ‘mammoth man-meat,’ but unless you change your mind about burly, bald, and bearded not being your type, I’m not inclined to give out free shows.”
“Fine,” she shot back with a snicker and an eye roll.
“Yeah. Fine.”
“Nobody wants to see you naked, anyway.”
“Then you’d better get out now.” He placed a pillow over his groin and threw back the sheets.
She backed towards the door. “Ewww! You’re so hairy. You’re like a walking carpet,” she teased.
He stood and walked towards the door, the pillow protecting his modesty. “Bye, Amy. I’ll see you in a minute.”
“And, gross,” she continued as she backed out of the doorway, “you’ve even got hairy shoulders! It’s so repul—”
He pushed the heavy door shut and noted the excellent soundproofing.