Mark Katlic

PROLOGUE

“God help her,” said the nurse, crossing herself.

The girl, not yet four years old, lay on a simple wooden bed in the corner. Small for her age, she seemed dwarfed even by the narrow bunk, its rough planks rising above the mattress like the sides of a child’s wagon. She had kicked off the layers of wool blankets in her fevered thrashing and now lay on her back, breathing rapidly. She was wearing a thin white gown which was bunched above her knees. She heard the click of the door as it closed and turned to face the nurse.

The nurse suppressed a gasp.

The child’s skin was a deep red color, thick and smooth, her fingers like sausages about to split. Strands of hair clung in bas relief to the plum-colored face. Her lips were blistered and held apart as if it were painful for them to touch. A drop of thick, dark blood filled one nostril.

But it was the look of the eyes that held the nurse. Oh, she thought, not the eyes.

The child’s eyes were solid, bottomless black.

 

*****

 

“We must keep her in isolation,” the Doctor had said two days earlier when the rash began. “Take her to my lake house and stay with her.”

He had given directions and a key to Vasily, and somehow, they had managed to tuck the girl into the back seat of the orphanage car—an old but well-maintained Jeep-like UAZ—and drive the hour to the eminent Doctor’s property on the lake. Just south of the Arctic Circle in Russia, the roads were as frozen as the lake, but Vasily drove confidently, and the two nurses sat in back with the girl, mopping her forehead and offering sips of tea. They sailed through a sea of pine, the headlights casting pinpoint stars before them in the light crystalline snowfall. The day lightened some as they approached the lake, but since it was November, the sun would not rise yet for months.

The Doctor’s dacha was isolated and they became lost, but eventually found the turn-off. Overhanging branches made a tunnel of the narrow lane, the virgin snow crunching beneath treaded tires. After several kilometers, they emerged near the big house itself.

Only a wealthy man could own this property, the nurse thought. The main house stood before them, facing the lake. Constructed of thick wooden beams, it was as imposing and elegant as the Doctor himself; it might once have been a nobleman’s hunting lodge. The peaked roofs above the two floors and the decorative woodwork along the eaves took the nurse back to her schoolgirl days and folktales told by the kitchen fire. Immediately behind the house, the dark forest began, only willing to grant civilization a certain foothold.

The lane on which they drove passed to the right of the house as it faced the lake. They did not turn left into the courtyard at the back of the main residence but continued down along the edge of a field or lawn. The lawn sloped all the way to the lake itself, one hundred meters in front of them in its frozen whiteness, only distinguished from the land by lack of vegetation and by the lake house and dock on its shore.

The lake house emulated its larger neighbor up the hill but was much smaller, perhaps ten meters on each side. Its two stories were capped by a single peaked roof, and there was a narrow balcony on the lake side of the second floor. The wooden dock extended fifteen meters into the ice of the lake. In the failing light, only the unending pine forest was visible on the other shore three kilometers in the distance. A sudden wind from the lake filled the air with powdery snow as if a giant hand had turned a child’s globe.

Vasily pushed on his fur cap and unlocked the garage door in front of them. The sound of the door being pulled aside woke the girl. The red spots, originally on her arms and face, had seemed to enlarge and move toward her neck and trunk. She was apprehensive. The nurse wrapped the girl in blankets and carried her into the garage, past the small raised boat, and up the wooden stairs next to a sauna room. As she entered the main room on the second floor, Vasily stepped from a doorway and motioned her forward. The main room contained two daybeds, a table and four chairs, a fireplace, and a small kitchen area. Two closed doors likely led to the water closet and the separate bath. Vasily stood in the lone bedroom, and he helped lower the girl onto the bunk in the corner. Out the window and the thin door were the balcony, the lake, and the distant shore.

After Vasily unloaded the food and bedding, he started the UAZ for the drive back to the orphanage. The nurses watched the car drive past the big house and enter the single opening in the forest, a fly engulfed by the imposing pines.

 

*****

 

The next day the girl had been worse. The red spots had begun to merge, and her skin had taken on a puffy appearance, especially her face. Vermillion spots had also appeared in the whites of her eyes and it became difficult for the nurses to meet her worried gaze. Surprisingly, she still had an appetite and was able to eat some kasha and later some stew. The nurses had been inoculated by the Doctor months before but nevertheless wore masks and rubber gloves and vigorously washed anything that came in contact with the girl. They had seen disease, but never one so rapidly progressive, so blatantly visible in its virulence.

The two nurses worked in shifts, napping on the daybeds but seeming to get no rest. Why had this happened to this girl? A favorite at the orphanage since her addicted birthmother had given her up, she was due to be adopted by an American couple. Her eyes shone when she asked about “Momma” and “Poppa” who would be coming to get her.

The Doctor had gone to extra lengths with her to prevent infection, but something had happened, and here she was. He said there was no special medicine for this, no cure; she would either be strong enough or she would not. So far, she was not. And the worst of it was, in between periods of sweaty, fitful sleep, she was conscious and lucid, crying in pain as anything, even her light gown, touched her reddening skin.

That afternoon the whites of her eyes became as red as rubies, then swelled out around the central corneas as if ready to burst. The air in the room took on a foul, slightly sweet odor. She urinated blood.

*****

Now she stared at the nurse with eyes black as ebony, an inhuman, snakelike black. A red tear slipped down one magenta cheek as she held out her arms for the nurse. With a mixture of revulsion and compassion, the nurse held her, carefully, for the skin felt loose enough to slide off the tiny bones.

A call to the Doctor indicated they were doing all that they could do.

“God sometimes seems capricious, but we must accept His plan,” he said.

 

*****

 

Later that day heavy snow blanketed the roof, the balcony, and the dock. It should have given a fairy tale appearance to the big house up the hill, but somehow to the nurse, the structure seemed imposing and threatening, as if it had something to do with the girl’s suffering. Impossible, of course. The great Doctor had likely written one of his books in an upstairs study there, perhaps looking out one of those large front windows at some passing line of birds as he worked to improve surgical care.

She heard the other nurse call out and she ran back to the bedroom. Between the child’s legs, the sheets were full of blood.

“From the rectum,” her colleague said.

The little girl’s respiration was shallow and rapid now, interspersed with occasional deep, sigh-like breaths. At least the eyes were closed, the terror they both manifested and evoked hidden.

 

She seemed, finally, to be over the suffering. She would die this day.

And what suffering, thought the nurse. She turned toward the window and wept.