Neither God nor the mythical Satan were the cause of our woes; if the culprits weren't ourselves or other people, they were time, circumstance, or nature.
Or so Bill had thought.
How did he explain what had happened—what was still happening—to Danny?
From everything Bill knew, from everything he had seen during the past few days, the answer was None Of The Above.
None of the above.
Sure, blame whoever had posed as Sara for taking a knife to Danny. She started it all. But what about the rest of it? The endless pain, the wounds that refused to heal, the unresponsiveness to anesthesia, the transfusions—almost fifty liters had been poured into Danny since his arrival—that seemed to be sucked down some black hole never to be seen again—what of them? Danny wasn't eating; his kidneys weren't functioning, so he was putting out no urine; his heart was beating but there was no blood for it to pump. It was impossible for him to be alive—every doctor who'd seen him had uttered those same words at one time or another.
Impossible… but here he was.
And what of Herb Lorn? A hollow man—not just spiritually, but without internal organs or a nervous system—who had dissolved when Bill punched a hole in his chest.
Good God!… the hole in his chest… the cold… the stench… the slime…
As much as his faith resisted it, as much as his mind saw it as a surrender of the intellect, he could not escape the feeling, the overwhelming belief that something supernatural was at work here.
Something supernatural… and evil.
And Danny was the target.
Why Danny? What had this child ever done to deserve this living hell? He was an innocent, and he was being put through unimaginable torture by a force beyond nature. Something dark and powerful had taken hold of him and was thumbing its nose at the laws of God and man and nature, keeping Danny beyond the reach of humanity's most advanced medical science.
And deep in his gut Bill knew that the torture would go on as long as Danny lived.
Where there's life, there's hope.
Bill had lived by that neat little aphorism for the four and a half decades of his life. He'd believed it.
But no more. Poor little Danny's case broke that rule. As long as he remained alive, there was no hope of relief for Danny. His life would go on—
No. Not life. Existence was a better term. For what Danny had now was not life. His existence would go on as it had since Christmas Eve—unhealed wounds, unremitting pain, with no hope of relief.
At least not from anything in this world.
Bill pocketed the Rosary and said a silent prayer of his own.
Help him, Lord. Something beyond the natural is causing his torment and so only something else beyond the natural can save him. That's You, Lord. We can bounce back from any blow Your world hands us, but we are helpless against the otherworldly. That's why Danny needs You to step in on his behalf. Not for
my sake—put his wounds on me, if that will do it. Just don't let him suffer anymore. If there's something that can be done that's not being done, let me know. Tell me and I'll do it. No matter what it is, I'll do it. Please.
Danny's rasping screams ceased and he opened his eyes.
Bill froze and watched as Danny's eyes stared about the room, searching, finally stopping when they found Bill. He grabbed the boy's hand and squeezed.
"Danny?" Bill said. "Danny, are you there? Can you hear me?"
Danny's lips moved.
"What?" Bill said, leaning closer. "What is it?"
The lips moved again. A whisper escaped.
Bill moved closer still. The breath from the parched tunnel of Danny's throat was sour as Bill put his ear almost against the dry lips.
"What, Danny? Say it again."
"Bury me… in holy ground… It won't stop… till you bury me…"
NINETEEN
How long could a week be?
Bill Ryan pondered the question as he swung into one of Down-state's parking lots. As the guard passed him through, a couple of rag-wrapped derelicts hurried toward his car, shouting and waving. They didn't appear to be the typical window-washing winos; they almost seemed to have been waiting for him. Bill drove on. No time today to figure out what they wanted.
He left the station wagon in one of the handicapped spots and entered the hospital through one of the employee entrances.
"Evening, Father," said the smiling uniformed black woman inside the door. "Happy New Year."
Bill could not bring himself to say those words. No way was the year that started tomorrow going to be a happy one.
"Same to you, Gloria."
Only a week here and already he was something of a fixture. The security people knew him, he was on a first-name basis with most of the nurses on all three shifts on Danny's floor, and the walks he took to stretch his legs between vigils at Danny's bedside had familiarized him with most of the building in which Pediatrics was located. All in one week. One endless week. Thank God Father Cullen had been available to fill in for him at St. F.'s.
But if the seven days between Christmas and New Year's had been an eternity for Bill Ryan, he knew it must have been longer by an unholy factor for poor Danny.
Bury me… in holy ground… It won't stop… till you bury me…
Danny's eyes had closed after those words and he hadn't spoken since. But those words, those words had tormented Bill for days, echoing through his mind every waking minute. He had asked for guidance, but the advice he'd received was unthinkable.
Or so it had seemed at first.
Things had changed since then. Bill was convinced now that modern medicine offered no hope. The doctors were helpless against whatever force had Danny in its grip. And during the span of Danny's hospital stay that helplessness had wrought a slow but unmistakable change in those doctors. Bill had seen their attitude mutate from deep concern for a savagely brutalized child to bafflement, and from bafflement to cold clinical fascination with a scientific oddity. Somewhere along the line Danny had stopped being a patient and become an experimental subject.
Bill thought he could understand them. The doctors were in the business of curing illness, treating disease, healing wounds, providing answers. But they could not heal Danny, could not help him in the slightest, could provide no answers to Bill's questions. Danny's condition confounded their skills and training, spat on their professional pride. And so the doctors pulled back and switched gears. If they could not help Danny, they would learn from him.
Bill could see it in their flat eyes when he spoke to them: Danny the boy had become Danny the thing. They wanted to experiment on Danny. Sure, they called their plans "testing" and "exploratory surgery," but their real aim was to get inside him and find out what was going on in there.
So far, Bill had been able to stand in their way. But all that would change the day after tomorrow. The head nurse on days had told him that by midmorning on January 2 the hospital would have a court order making Danny a ward of the state and giving it legal guardianship over Danny. The hospital then would have carte blanche; the doctors could experiment on him to their hearts' delight. He'd be the subject of clinical conferences; they'd bring in all the residents and show them The Boy Who Should Be Dead. And when Danny finally died—When would that be? Five years? Ten? Fifty?—what would they do? Bill envisioned Danny pickled in ajar where generations of fledgling doctors could view his still-unhealed wounds. Or maybe his remains would be put on display like the Elephant Man's.