Deathwatch - Final Read Online Free PDF Page B

the train station and returned with the large brown-wrapped package, his nose wrinkling at the thin smell coming up from inside the layers of paper and glass.
    Or maybe she was peering through the keyhole when Saunders barked orders at me to hurry and I clawed at the layers of paper insulation to expose the large bell-shaped bottle. Inside was a huge greenish lump of rotting flesh shot through with holes like aged cheese. Winding and burrowing through the narrow tunnels--covering it in places like clots of moving string--were the pale bloodless maggots.
    I know my stomach heaved at the sight. And it was a thousand times worse when I uncorked the wide mouth of the jar and placed the foul meat on a white enamel tray, then watched as Saunders picked the worms up one by one with a forceps and inserted them deep in the bony pocket where Ellie's hip and thigh joined.
    I watched them dive, wriggling, beneath her soft skin that was a bruise of nacreous flesh and mottled trails of gentian violet, mercurochrome; and even if I knew that now we were fighting to save her life, that whether she walked without a limp was not the issue, I looked at the squirming mass and the gorge rose in my throat.
    Perhaps Abby heard the sound of my running feet when I dashed for the sink, or the thick ragged noises I made when I bent, vomiting, over and over and over again.
    In any case Abby knew, and she told her sister.

     
    ***

    "Please. You've got to take them out." Ellie's eyes--normally china blue--had gone the dark of a starless night with fear. "I can feel them gnawing at me," she whispered. "I close my eyes and I hear it...." She swallowed, and now I saw thin tears spilling over the crest of her cheek.
    "Do you want to lose your leg?" Andrew said. "If that infection spreads, it means an amputation."
    "I don't care, I don't care," she moaned. "I'm not dead, I'm not dead, yet!" Her neck muscles strained, she tried to sit up. Andrew eased her back down, no one spoke for a moment. Then Ellie said softly: "Every time I shut my eyes I hear that hideous song, ‘The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out, in your nostrils and out your mouth....’" Her voice, high and sweet, suddenly trailed off.
    I stared at her, her face tight and hollow with terror, her small freckled hands clenching and unclenching the hem of the white sheet, and I thought, it's not a healing, it's torture. We're going to drive this poor child mad--
    "It's so dark in my head," Ellie said. "Just as if I were dead."
    Andrew went to his medical cabinet. I watched him upend a vial of sodium veronal, plunge the needle inside the stopper and draw the liquid down into the glass syrette. "This will make you sleep, Ellie." He went to her side, took her arm lightly.
    She pulled away. "I don't want to sleep. Take them out or let me die," she wailed.
    "Hold her," he said to me.
    Then he pushed the sleeve of her nightgown up, quickly swabbed the skin. I saw the needle sink into the thin flesh of her arm, and she cried out briefly.
    A few seconds later, she was asleep.
    "I'll stay with her a while," Saunders said, rubbing his brow. "You go," he paused. "Go and talk to Abby, find out what she said to her sister. She--" He stopped, his gray eyes met mine. "She won't tell me--she won't even look at me," he finished.
    He sat heavily in a narrow straight chair next to his daughter's bed, his face tight with anxiety.
    I was nearly at the door when I heard him ask softly, "Stuart, do you think we can still save her leg?"
    I shook my head. "I don't know."
    "The cut," he said, his eyes going far away. "We would have to cut so high up." He rolled the bridge of his nose between his thumb and index finger. "It will be worse for her than if I'd never attempted the separation. She'll never walk. She might die. Oh, Ellie," he said, and his eyes went to her sleeping form, the soft rise and fall of her narrow chest. "Ellie. Never. I never meant it to be like this." Then he sank forward, lowering his face into both