The room was still, a silent enclave within the bounds of the infirmary, the only sound being the steady drip of the tap as it hit the surface of the water. Sister Grace, the singular assistant to the doctor, lay unmoving in the bath, watching the stillness spread into ripples with every drop. As the steam rose it took with it the scent of spruce sap and juniper berries, coating the chrome tiles with a sweetly-smelling dew. Her body was weighted prone beneath a veil of conifer branches and needle-like leaves, fir cones floating and melted sap dotting the surface. It was medicinal. The sugar compounds in the sap produced a potent antibacterial salve, while the pine needle oil was, without refinement, anti-inflammatory by nature. The berries were just for perfume.
She closed her eyes and let the warm liquid caress her, the subtle movements of her heartbeat sending shivers of tickling branches over her abdomen. The pulse in her veins drawing the water ever closer, shifting the foliage to the beat of the drum, merging her skin with the trees.
Her chin had that peculiar scar which made other, less repentant, nuns giggle behind their hands to each other when she passed them in the dining hall. The triangular cut trailed down her neck, and the patch of skin around it was discoloured on one side, lighter than the rest of her face. It was always itchy, a burning sensation that alluded to nerve damage. Her constant scratching was also something the other nuns found humorous. The baths helped, though, and in this room nothing and no-one could reach her.
Someone outside began to scream. A dull sound, muffled by tiled stone and locked doors, but one that still somehow made it into her sanctum. She sank slowly into the water until her ears were covered, drowning out the noise.
She had been there when the wall came down. She had been present when Harriet was swinging from the tatter tree, red beads straining at her neck. She had seen Cesca flog her victims and noticed the malicious glee that sparked across her smile. She had watched and waited, disregarded by all. Even Doctor Belle was often unaware that she was in the same room as she conducted her experiments.
Sometimes, Grace would sit somewhere and wait to see how long it took until someone noticed her. She once spent the entire day sitting in an alcove in the cloister, observing. She discovered who was sleeping with whom, which nuns were caught out after hours, and all sorts of secrets, the kind that friends mention amongst themselves with knowing glances and hushed tones. She didn’t have to ask, information simply came to her. People’s private conversations were only private if they thought they were alone, and as most people did not see her as a person then she was not worth being careful around. They instead completely disregarded her existence. She had learnt, over years of taunts and jests at her expense, to become as unobtrusive as possible. The result was that she knew her tormentors better than they knew themselves.
The scream grew in intensity as the bathroom door swung open, and Sister Belle bounded into the room with her loping, long-legged gait. She pounced upon a pile of towels and left, the closing of the door returning the room to relative silence. Grace’s head was barely visible above the lip of the clawfoot tub, and her body was camouflaged by the forest. She wasn’t sure if Grace even knew the bath was occupied.
Out of sight, out of mind.
It had been this way for as long as she could remember, but there was a time, once, when she was vibrant. She could feel it, nestled deep in long-forgotten memories, a girl who had been colourful and gay. Someone clever and abrasive, not the dull-witted creature she felt like now. Once, some of the older nuns were entertaining the younger generation with an incident that happened when they were still postulants. A stray dog had somehow wandered into the courtyard and was chasing everyone, barking and snarling.
“No, no, it wasn’t snarling. It was just being playful. You remember, Sister, it was only a puppy.”
The group had become quiet at this new information, staring at her with exasperation and curiosity. Later, Mother Superior had taken her aside and explained that what she had done was inappropriate, that lying was something to be done skillfully or not at all. If she was to make up tales, she should do so in a way which was not offensive. Grace had nodded, and responded simply that the dog’s fur had been merled, with swatches of white and gray interrupting the browns and blacks. A villager came and took the dog away, with apologies, though it came back twice that year before it was trained.
“Enough now, Grace,” was all she had said. “Enough now.”
She wondered about that dog now as she lay back in the bath. It was probably gone where all the villagers had gone, somewhere not here. But it had been mottled, like her, with patches of odd coloured hide and she wondered if, indeed, this was not a real memory, that perhaps the dog had died and she was its reincarnation. She had prayed for dreams, for revelation regarding the link between her and the dog and all the other snippets of strange memories that came to her, but there was nothing. Unlike the others, she could not remember ever having had even a single dream.
“Grace! Grace! Where’s that gauze?” She heard Belle call, proving her suspicions that the good doctor had no idea where she was. Emerging from the branches she let the air dry her before climbing back into her habit. The buttons on her blouse slipped between her fingers more than once as she tried to hold them in place. She always had difficulty grasping the small things.
Out in the hallway the screaming had subsided, replaced with an ongoing, murmuring moan that trickled through the corridors and reverberated around the great infirmary hall. She walked the entire length of the place with the gauze in her arms before she found Belle, deep in conversation with someone at the entrance. The door was held firmly ajar, letting only her head, sat upon that long, looping neck of hers, peek out at the visitor.
“Yes, yes. A real shame it is.” The doctor drawled.
“And you’re quite sure?”
“Quite sure, yes. Certain, in fact. Her condition is only getting worse. No visitors. Not today, nor tomorrow.”
The door was shut without any further explanation, sending a small flurry of snowflakes into the room. Grace imagined the indignation on Cesca’s face, the furrowed brows of her assistant whose name she could never recall, out in the cold with their noses against the wood. There was a silence on the other side of the door which she knew was them debating whether or not they should knock again, followed by unhurried footsteps once they realised it was futile to argue with the doctor.
“What have you got there?”
“The gauze,” and then again after a moment had passed with Belle looking blankly, “The gauze you asked for.”
“Huh.” She didn’t seem to remember, and instead skipped past with that willowy gait of hers back towards the populated side of the ward. Grace followed.
Sister Inka lay slumped against a tower of pillows, her grey hair plastered against her face with sweat and streaks of rusty brown. Blood, perhaps, or mud. Either way it did not matter, it was her job to clean it up. She popped some hand towels into a basin of rapidly-cooling water while Belle examined the patient’s arm. All the other beds were empty except one, where privacy was granted with a long white curtain.
“Healing well, I see. Good.” Her long fingers traced the sutures across the skin, deep seams of thread that wrapped around her arm, tiny stitches made with a careful hand. Inka winced and shuddered, the movement sending her limp arm clattering into the bedside instruments.
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“Oh dear now, there you go,” Belle said as she tucked the arm back under the covers, “You’ll get the feeling back, sooner or later.”
She stood up tall for a moment to adjust her rose-tinted hair, bringing stray strands back under control. Grace was in awe of how tall she could be when she wasn’t stooped over, though sure enough once the errant wisps had been found and tied back, her frame retracted into its usual hunched state.
“See to her, will you? I must check on our little rock-girl.”
Grace nodded and watched the good doctor leave through the door to the private surgery. A few small pebbles were brushed into the room with its closing, plus a not negligible amount of fine grey sand. She shrugged, and turned her attention back to her basin. The water was far too cold, and so she began walking to the faucet on the far side of the room.
Inka clasped her arm as she passed, preventing her from going any further. She started, unused to being the target of such sudden attention. The movement must have cost her, she could see the lines of pain across her face.
“How long have you known?” Each word was ground out through gritted teeth.
“Not long. A while. It’s hard to say.”
In the bed behind the curtain, something cawed. A rattled, drawn-out gasp that resembled a bird’s call in only the slightest of ways.
“I lost my arm.”
“You did.”
“I lost my arm, but now it’s back.”
“Yes.” Grace nodded. She knew that Belle tended to keep her research to herself, but she had never asked her to swear secrecy, so she saw no harm in being honest. The cawing became louder and more insistent, so she extracted her arm carefully from Inka’s grasp (an easy task, given her frailty) and continued on her way. She walked past the faucet however, and instead opened a cupboard and removed a large, stoppered bottle with a dessert spoon tied to its side with ribbon. The glass was red with rust, the liquid inside thick and pungent. Not blood, or at least not the blood that flowed in human veins. This was the blood of the earth.
Grace pulled open the curtains ever so slightly, just enough so that the patient within could extend her reedy neck out towards the pearl iron tincture. She dipped the spoon into it like molasses, twisting it up and out and holding it aloft for a second before its beak snapped at the spoon with greedy gulps, sending droplets of crimson spattering over the sheets. It was clear this had happened many times before, as what was once white linen had become a distinct mottle of pink and brown. The protruding larynx moved up and down its neck as it suckled on the mixture, while newborn eyes lidded in a thin layer of white film looked at nothing in particular. It’s beak, if it were indeed a beak, was crowned with yellowing enamel and chipped in such a way that there seemed to be several different slabs all merged into one.
Inka began to moan.
“One moment. Please wait.” Grace said in her usual featureless tone. It did not seem to bother her that her sleeves were becoming pink with mixed iron and spittle. It wasn’t long before the beast sank back down into its bed, and the curtain closed.
“Who is that?”
“Sister Jenny.”
“Why?” This was the only thing she could think to ask. The ‘how’ seemed clear enough, what with the amount of pearl iron she had supposedly been fed.
“I don’t really know. You’ll have to ask Sister Belle, when she returns. She says it’s all a part of her research.”
As though on cue, there was a large thud from the surgery, followed by another, as though of a hammer hitting stone. A small trickle of mortar fell in a dusty swirl from the lintel.
“Whose?” Inka asked, looking at her arm.
“Um. I don’t know if I should…” Grace was wincing with every strike of the hammer.
“Who?”
“It’s Sister Harriet’s. Belle sent me to fetch it from the refectory, she said it was all arranged. We’re helping people get better. Don’t you feel better?” There was a nervous edge to her voice, a yearning for validation that threatened to unleash such a terrible inner turmoil if this part of her constructed world came crashing down.
Inka, for her part, was observing. Not merely looking, or seeing, or staring. She was using her skills as a hunter to break down her surroundings in a way no other could. She saw the sand on the floor and the avian shadow behind the curtain, but most importantly she saw Grace.
No-one ever looked at Grace.
She saw the mottled skin on her chin and the extending scar. She saw her hands on the end of her pink-tinged sleeves. One was darker than the other. She didn’t need to look at her own to know it was the same for her. Grace blinked, and her left eye was brown and her right eye was green.
“I know what she did to you. How far she’s gone, and how far she will go. You are just a doll to her.” It was hard to maintain such a flow of words, but luckily she didn’t have to. Grace was already crying.
“But where can I go? What can I do? This is my life, she holds it in her hands and all she has to do is squeeze.”
“Come.” It was not a command, nor question either. A proposal, suggesting a future unknown.
Grace nodded. Wiping the tears from her cheeks she walked out of the room without another word, returning shortly with wheelchair in hand. It was the better of the two they possessed, the one that did not squeak.
---
Bellemorde’s hair was in her face again, and with both arms deep into the craggy mess that was Sister Freya there was no way to fix it. She blew at the errant strands out of the corner of her mouth, but they refused to budge, drifting slightly but settling once again in the same places as before.
“I have to fix it. I can’t be lettin’ it fall.”
“Shush.”
She was up to her elbows in the cement-like gritty pulp, her hands grasping for the prize. A beating heart made of stone. She could feel it, could almost reach it, but the pulsating organ kept slipping through her fingers and embedding itself deeper into the wall.
Sister Freya, ever the engineer, was making manifest her desires by integrating herself with the masonry. Her legs had long since disappeared, their mass repurposed to brick up half the windows in the surgery. Every hole was a threat, every crack a potential devastation, and so Freya’s body plugged and sealed and filled its way across the room in ever more intricate spirals of rock formations and crystalline fractals.
The room was alive. Belle has been tracking the heart for some time now. At first she had assumed that it would lie close to the calcified remains of the chest cavity, but as Freya had spread herself so too had the walls, and the only thing she found inside the ribcage was a doorknob. Freya - or at least, her remaining facial features - looked down at her from the ceiling, her eyes dribbling with sandy mineral tears.
“Please, doc, you gotta let me go. I’m fine, honestly. It’s just a flesh wound, the cat has scratched me worse before.”
Every time she opened her mouth, which stretched across the entire opening of the western window frame, particles of rock and mortar would already be clamouring at the edges ready to fill in the gap again.
“Hush now.” She had no time to talk to the walls. Beneath her feet the floor thumped to the gentle rhythm of a human heartbeat.
“Grace? Grace?” She extracted herself and peeled off the rubber gloves, caked in stone, slamming them down upon the table. The cavity she had made was already repairing itself. Exposed to the air, her hands felt raw. Her skin was scrubbed pink from the rock and they stung when she rubbed them together.
“Grace! My word girl, where are you?”
She brushed away the creeping tendrils of gravel that had taken root against the door and swung it open, surveying the infirmary. Grace had disappeared, along with Sister Inka. In the corner, something cawed.
“Oh well at least you're still here. Whatever would we do without you, hmm?” Belle cooed as she flung back the curtains. The mattress had been gutted, goose down flurried into the air with the draft of the curtains. Jenny sat, bloated, within the hole in the bed, her beady eyes fixed on Belle. The pale membrane on one had popped open, whereas the other still stayed mercifully shut.
“Growing, are we? Oh, what’s this?” Belle cocked her head as the sight of the bulge between her patient’s legs.
“What have you got there? Let me see…”
Her fingertips only had a moment to brush against the egg before Jenny launched herself at the good doctor, beak pecking furiously with a singular driven instinct. Whether it was maternal in nature or merely automatic, a pathetic parody of the memory of birds, Belle did not know. She would have liked to have studied the phenomenon further, but alas, such a thing would require a brain, and hers was now sliding its way down the gullet of the protective parent.
Outside, the snow began to fall thick and fast.