The Wyrms of &alon

There were horrors in this world far worse than the mere macabre. Appearances could be deceiving. Not all pictures were worth a thousand words. The Quiet Ward was all of these things, and more. The Ward’s facilities were at the young edge of the new old: sleek, spick and span, streamlined, and eminently serviceable. The Second Empire’s Columbarium had nothing on the Letty Kathaldri Neurological Center. The Quiet Ward was the spiffiest sepulcher in the city; a house for hollow bodies, where hope went to die.

Here was where the comatose went, the place of last repose for the vegetable-men, the brain-dead, and the brain-damned: terminal organoquicksilver poisoning, prionic encephalopathy, adrenoleukodystrophy, fatal familial insomnia, hereditary chorea, the works. This was the place where the spark went out from people’s eyes; this was the place where the self was unmade. It was like Hell, only quieter and warmer.

Even if Mr. Kathaldri’s endowment ran out—which it would not; it was invested far too conservatively for that to ever happen—the Quiet Ward practically paid for itself, thanks to the plentiful research subjects it offered to the communities of neuroscience, neuropharmacology, and genetic disease, and, of course, to the bottomless pocketbooks of those with the kind of money needed to pay for years and years of hospice care.

Although I dearly loved my job—I wouldn’t have traded it for any other (except possibly a professional video game tester)—if there was one downside to it, being the chief physician presiding over the Quiet Ward was definitely it. It took an iron-guarded heart to keep the Quiet Ward from haunting you, from being eaten away by the blankness of their stares, the pain in the faces of the invalids’ loved ones, and the knowledge of who and what had been lost, and of what horrors were yet to come, and, unfortunately, I’d never gotten the “iron-guarded heart” perk.

Without contributions from people like Yuth, it would have been easy to let the poor souls entombed in the Quiet Ward dissolve into white-noise and objectivity.

Yuth and I stood by the reception desk, on which an icon of the Angel stood prominently. Whereas most of the hospital’s wards had at least two consoles mounted on their countertops, there was only one here. Emergencies were mostly strangers to the Quiet Ward. I leaned against the reception desk, tapping my fingers on the countertop.

“So… how can I help?” My breathing was a little heavy, on account of Yuth having rushed me the rest of the way over to the Quiet Ward.

“I’m sorry, Genneth, it’s just…” she raised her hand to the top of her head, clutching onto her nurse’s cap: a blue stripe on a white background. She lowered her hand and clenched it against her chest. “None of us knew what to say.” Yuth shook her head. “And how could we? Letty—…” but her voice trailed off.

Yuth Costran kept the Quiet Ward operating in one piece more or less single-handedly. Her personality shined brightly in the Quiet Ward’s dark clouds, like hot chocolate on a cold morning. Her skin was a rich yellowish brown, with hints of terra cotta red where she put the blush on her cheeks. She kept her dark hair in a broad, natural beret pleated down atop the back of her neck, ending in a little spigot of a ponytail that brushed against the back of her apron.

Nurse Costran’s eyes widened, and, a moment later, she was struck by a sudden coughing fit.

“Are you alright?” I asked.

“It’s nothing.” She waved her hand dismissively. “Just allergies, and stress.” She wiped her hand across her brow.

Yuth looked me in the eyes. “I mean… she’s asking for her papa.”

Oh God.

“How am I supposed to respond to that?” Yuth said. She glanced down the hallway. “Even after all these years, giving families news that their loved ones aren’t going to get better is still as tough as it was the first time around. But this?” She crossed her arms. “This is beyond my pay grade.”

It would have been one matter if she had awoken with amnesia. But, if she remembered…

I nodded. “I understand. That’s not a conversation anyone would want to have.” I smiled. “So, obviously, that means it’s the perfect job for me. I’m just what the doctor ordered. Well, nurse.”

Yuth smiled weakly at me, but it didn’t last for long.

“I guess I’ll be on my way, then,” I said, somewhat self-deprecatingly.

The orderlies eyed me silently as I walked to Room Q1. They were strong young men—always kind. But they too looked broken. Silence is just cold chaos, and it gets under our skin just as effectively.

I opened the door to Letty’s room and softly closed it behind me.

Room Q1 was different from most patient rooms. Modern hospitals were pastel-shaded and hypnopompic. There were liminal, the light at the end of the proverbial tunnel, out through which recovered patients would return to their lives. They always struck me as having a sort of staleness to them, a kind of necessary insufficiency, as if to subliminally message its patients: you need to get out of here, you’re not complete here; there’s a whole wide world out there waiting for you, and we want you to seize the day.

Room Q1 was none of those things. It was not a place of transience. It was like a garden, a summer garden in a cottage out by the countryside, in a county that time forgot. Almost without fail, the first thing a visitor noticed was the wallpaper. The usual dark, drab green was nowhere in sight. In its place were vivid vertical stripes of blue and white. Lace-curtained windows looked out onto the Medical Gardens of the old wing’s inner courtyard. On a clear-skied day like this, the breeze-rustled greenery filled the room with the sunlight’s dappled kisses. Fountains murmured in the gardens’ divine quiet. Herbs and potted cinnamon trees grew in the glass-walled greenhouse, surrounded by manicured roses and wistful willows. The light never came in too bright; the shadow of the hospital and the surrounding buildings blocked in part, but neither did they ever fully obscure the sun. The hospital’s walls insulated the garden from braying traffic and thrumming aerostats. You could even hear the birds sing.

But the woman in the bed was numb to it all.

To the extent Letty Kathaldri gave her surroundings any regard at all, they might have as well been strangers to her; not just unfamiliar, but unwelcome, even though they’d known her for a lifetime. Her skull a dusty plain, scattered through by tumble of silver wire and bleached seaweed that draped over skin wrinkled, ragged and splotched. You’d have been forgiven for mistaking her arms as dried sticks. Were it not for their volume, they would have almost fit in with the pale blue, flower-patterned bed sheets. The sheets depicted clumps of daisies growing among wildflowers and illustrated grass. The daisies themselves were as bright as the ones that sat in the vase on the simple wooden nightstand by the woman’s bedside, along with a plastic hand-mirror, cyan, though slightly discolored. It was about as old as she was, though far less worse for wear.

With a trembling hand, Letty reached for the mirror. Her fingers were weak and wizened as they grasped its handle and pitifully dragged it onto the bed. She could barely lift it. The reflective surface loomed before her, like a portal in the ground. Her other arm lay limply against her body, elbow anchored in her non-existent flank as she whisked her unbelieving fingers across her face’s alien geography.

Eyes really were miracles; the “constant jewels of our fickle countenances,” as the Poet wrote. They beheld our lives from beginning to end. A classic bit of folk-wisdom said that the eyes were where the Angel touched us in our mothers’ wombs, to infuse us with our souls. The truth, of course, was even more awe-inspiring than that; we a biological miracle, hundreds of millions of years in the making. I felt that awe as I looked into Letty’s eyes. Age had not ravaged them. I’d seen them in her films so many times, it was like I’d memorized them.

For what felt like the longest time, the old woman stared off into the distance without so much as a word. She seemed to be most focused on the spires and finials of our newest, tallest skyscrapers, just barely visible from where they rose up above the edges of the inner courtyard’s roof. It took her a while to fully acknowledge my presence, but, even after she did, she continued averting her eyes, as if that alone would have been enough to keep her from being seen.

Letty gestured toward her nightstand—or was it the window? She barely managed to flop her arm in its general direction as she muttered.

“T-Take it away…”

She spoke slowly, stumbling over her own tongue. Every word came out dry and rasping, but they also quivered, as if they were about to break. It sounded not unlike what you could expect to see in severely affected stroke victims, but incomparably more tragic.

“Take what?” I asked.

After several frustrated tries, she managed to point a bony finger at the hand-mirror.

I took it off the bed and put it onto the nightstand table with the mirror facing down.

“Papa isn’t coming, is he?” she said.

I shook my head. “No, Ms. Kathaldri, he—”

—I made a sound or two, but they came out halfway between a hiccup and a stutter. Quieting my tongue, I closed my eyes and swallowed. I took a deep breath before trying again.

Honestly, it was a miracle she was still able to speak. I could hardly believe my ears and eyes. Her muscles had atrophied terribly, despite the… undignified efforts the nurses had gone through in hopes of averting it, as per Mr. Kathaldri’s wishes. WeElMed’s access to the Kathaldri Foundation’s generous financial support had always been contingent on the Quiet Ward’s staff carrying out the old man’s wishes, down to the last detail.

How can I break it to her?

Taking several steps to the side, I reached for a chair and pulled it toward me, only to realize at the last moment that it was not on wheels. It was tough to say which was worse: the shoulder-twingingly grating noise of the wooden chair leg scraping against the linoleum floor, or Letty’s cold gaze—devastated, yet predatory—burrowing into my skull.

After what felt like forever, I finally took my seat in the chair by her bedside. “Letty…” I said. I leaned forward slightly. “Can I call you Letty?”

She tried to nod her head, but failed.

“You’ve…” pursing my lips, I adjusted my lucky bow-tie. “You’ve been in what we call a persistent vegetative state.”

“Wha…?” The way the sound of the vowel cracked in the air made me worry that her speech had torn open a gash in the back of her throat.

Exhaling sharply, I stiffened my back “A coma, basically.”

She blinked a couple times. “How long?”

I paused. “Sixty years.”

Her mouth opened wide. She gagged. Tears flowed down her wrinkle-cracked cheeks.

“Why can’t I move…?”

Triun…

I swallowed hard. “If—”

—But I stopped myself. I shook my head and squeezed one of my hands around my knee. “When you don’t move around for a long time, your muscles decay.”

I didn’t have the heart to tell her she’d probably never move again.

“Enri…” she moaned. “Where’s Enri?”

Her fiancée.

“You were in a car accident, Letty,” I said. “Do you remember that? Enri was driving.”

Her head trembled “yes”.

“He”—I held my breath—“He didn’t make it. You barely survived, yourself. Your father made sure you’d be taken care of for the rest of your life. Not a day went by where he didn’t visit you. He loved you more deeply than words can express. Revolutions in medicine came about thanks to the efforts he put into trying to bring you back.” In agitation, I let my eyes fall half-closed and then shook my head. “I’m so sorry for what you’ve been through. For what you’ve lost.”

I wiped a tear from my eye. “I don’t know if it’s any consolation, Letty, but… it’s an honor to get to finally meet you. I’ve been a fan of your movies for most of my life.” Gently, I let my hand come to rest atop her bed. The thread count of her sheets alone was enough to die for.

I wasn’t quite audacious enough to hold her hand in mine, but I got close.

“You haven’t been forgotten, Letty,” I said. “You’re loved by billions.” I dared to smile.

My words did not have the intended effect.

“P-papa. -Appa…” The decrepit actress sputtered. She closed her eyes.

I could see her eyeballs trembling beneath her eyelids.

“He did this.” It was both a question and an answer.

“He made me a doll. That’s… that’s not love,” she said. “He made me a doll. And dolls are beautiful. But…”

She looked me in the eyes.

“Am I still beautiful, doctor?”

At that moment, I made a terrible mistake:

I hesitated.

Letty’s face contracted, as if her whole face was a sneer. Her paper-thin skin seemed ready to tear open along her wrinkles.

She screamed.

Her body twitched piteously, too frail to give her rage and sorrow the voice they ached to have. Fate had made her body into a cage, and now, she had to live with that.

She flailed over the edge of her bed, floundering onto the floor in a futile effort to do… something. Maybe to strike me? To strike against the world?

I tried to help her up, but she cursed at me. For me, and her father, and everyone else, she had only the foulest words you could ever imagine. She was a rabid guard-dog without any limbs. She clawed at the floor with arms that no longer worked and fingers with knobby, arthritic joints that snapped like crushed styrofoam as she raged and wept. She screamed and wailed and wailed and screamed and kept on screaming, even as the nurses rushed in, pushed me aside, and pumped her full of sedatives. Then her eyes fluttered, and she fell into darkness.