“This, gentlemen, will guarantee her survival through this new millennium, and into the next, and probably for ever. The six doors will never close!”
Josh tried to pull himself free, but another Hooded Man grasped his other arm, and all he could do was kick and twist.
Mr Leggett turned to Mr Crane, and said, “Shall we begin?” Then he looked around at the audience in the theater and shouted out, “What you are about to see now is a miracle! Praise the Lord!”
The doors at the back of the theater opened again, and a paler blue light suffused the auditorium.
“Gentlemen,” said Mr Leggett, his voice cracking with emotion. “I give you the queen of all queens. I give you Boudicca.”
Six hospital orderlies slowly pushed a black-draped carriage in to the center of the operating theater. It looked like a moving tent, because it was completely covered, so that only the lower half of its wheels were visible.
After the tent came a stainless-steel trolley, laid out with dozens of surgical instruments – saws, clips, scalpels, and some extraordinary devices which Josh had never seen before, and whose purpose he couldn’t even begin to guess.
The theater fell completely silent as one of the orderlies pushed Nancy closer to the tent-like affair. Then, like a waiter whipping off a tablecloth, he removed the sheet that covered her. Josh struggled again, but the Hooded Men were holding him far too tight for him to break free. Nancy was completely naked, her pale skin shining blue in the light from the clerestory windows. The orderly secured her wrists and ankles with leather straps, and tightened them.
Now – on a signal from Mr Leggett – another orderly tugged a string at the side of the black tent. It resisted for a moment, but then it abruptly dropped to the floor. Josh looked at what was underneath, and felt a prickling sensation of utter horror, like centipedes running up his back.
The carriage was an elaborate construction of slings and pulleys and supports. Suspended on all of these slings were layer upon layer of coarse dried-looking fabric, the color of rotten linen. Out of these layers hung scores of gnarled sticks, hundreds of them, like the legs of long-dead spiders crushed between the pages of an ancient book.
At first, Josh couldn’t understand what he was looking at, but gradually he realized that the layers of fabric formed a pattern, like a huge dead chrysanthemum. Toward the center of the chrysanthemum, the layers appeared to be thicker, and paler, and the sticks much less gnarled. Josh peered at them more intently, and then he saw that they weren’t sticks at all, but human arms, their skin dried out, their flesh desiccated. Between them, there was a distorted, twisted torso, thick with ribbons of scar tissue, and another torso attached to it, at an angle, and a third torso beneath them.
This enormous flower was nothing less than the mummified bodies of literally hundreds of people, all sewn together to form a single, immense being. And most terrifying of all was the face that lay in the very center of it. A woman’s face, as white as if she had been powdered with flour, her red-rimmed eyes staring out of this concatenation of arms and legs and bodies as if she were right on the point of screaming. Yet the minutes passed, and she didn’t scream.
She blinked, and that frightened Josh even more, because that meant that she was alive. She was actually alive, in the middle of all of these layers of atrophied skin and time-brittled bone.
There was no smell of decay, only a haunting mustiness. As each new organ was attached to her body, she must have drained it of all of its blood and all of its mucus, until it became nothing more than human paper. So this is why Julia had been emptied; and why all of the girls that Frank Mordant had murdered before her had been selectively dismembered. Their mutilations had depended entirely on this creature’s particular needs. New heart, new lungs, new stomach – whichever had been drained of all of its nourishment, and started to fail her.
Her face was both alarming and remarkable. It wasn’t the face of a modern woman at all. It was broad, with a heavy jaw, and the faintest trace of freckles across the bridge of a small, straight nose. A wide black band of cloth had been tied around her forehead, but underneath it Josh could still see traces of reddish-gray hair.
Mr Leggett stepped forward and raised his hand for attention. “Today you will witness the removal of the donor’s legs, arms and head, and the attachment of her entire body to the queen. At the moment, the queen is breathing with only one lung, the other having been misplaced during her most recent transplant. Today’s operation will strengthen her respiration, her digestion – and something more.
“We have been planning for over a year to give her reproductive capabilities. Ovaries, and a womb. Today we are going to attempt to make it possible for her to have a child. It is possible that – if she can do this – her child will eventually be able to carry on her conscious existence in her place. In other words, she will have an heir to keep the six doors open for her.”
“You’re crazy!” Josh shouted at him. “All of you! You’re all fucking crazy! How can you think of killing anybody to keep that thing alive? How can you do it? And you call yourselves men of God!”
One of the Hooded Men clamped his hand over Josh’s mouth. Josh tried to bite into his glove, but it was too thick, and it tasted of sour, untanned leather.
“We will commence by removing the donor’s legs,” said Mr Leggett. “You will remember that this is a punishment as well as a surgical operation, so it is the law’s requirement that this young lady should suffer as much pain as possible. If she screams and begs for mercy from the Lord, then you will know that Master Spire’s judgement was true.”
Mr Crane handed him a black surgical crayon and he drew circles around Nancy’s upper thighs, as close to her pelvis as possible. Josh wrenched himself from side to side, almost blind with anger and fear, and with the Hooded Man’s glove clamped so tight over his mouth that he could scarcely breathe. This was a nightmare. It had to be a nightmare. He felt that he must have gone mad, and that he was hallucinating that he was here in this operating theater, with all of these faceless men and this grotesque thing that was lying in front of him, staring out at nothing with her death-white face.
Josh dropped to his knees, but the Hooded Men heaved him upright again. He tried to turn his head away so that he wouldn’t have to watch what Mr Leggett was doing, but they seized his hair and made him look straight toward the operating trolley.
Nancy herself said nothing at all – just lay on the trolley making no attempt to struggle. Josh guessed that she had put herself into a medicine-trance, which badly-wounded Modocs used to do to numb their agony. Whether it would be enough to anesthetize her when Mr Leggett started to saw through her thighbones, he couldn’t tell. God, please help her, he said to himself, with tears in his eyes. This one time, God, please help her.
Mr Leggett held out his hand and Mr Crane slapped a scalpel into it. “Now,” said Mr Leggett, “you should watch this closely. It’s always fascinating how quickly the human body protects itself against massive injury – how rapidly the bleeding stops of its own accord.”
He leaned over Nancy and started to cut. A thin rivulet of blood ran across her thigh. Because of the dim blue light, it looked almost purple. Nancy shuddered, but she didn’t cry out.
Josh raised his eyes to the tiers surrounding the operating theater. He couldn’t watch any more, even if the Hooded Men were gripping his hair. He saw tier after tier of faces, the Masters of Religious Observance, and apart from the hessian hoods with their torn-open eyes, all he could see were lit-up expressions of ghoulish curiosity, almost a sexual excitement.