A miracle…
If indeed you can speak to me, Christoph, I’d value nothing more. But as you know, I am a man cursed with common sense.
A miracle, Christoph. It will be a miracle if I can keep my wits about me through this ordeal.
She comes now, brandishing a bottle of brandy. “From Hastings,” she says.
January 17, 1898
Christoph? How can I continue to write coherently? To whom do I truly write? Surely not the Christoph I’d imagined. The Christoph of youth?
Or no — to myself. I write these letters to myself so that I might keep some semblance of sanity about me.
Do you understand that I am no longer the same man I was only days ago? Yes, I am still Brahm Zwick, but such a fundamental part of me has changed. How much like clay are we?
I must gather my wits.
The brandy was drugged. I should’ve guessed by the strange taste, but the drug overtook me so quickly.
I awoke to a sharp ringing in my ears. My brain felt full of broken glass. I didn’t know where I was, only that I was cold. A straightjacket bound me. My eyes adjusted to the light of burning torches, and I realized that I sat on the floor of a cave, my back against the rough stone wall.
Gerta kneeled before me. She brushed the hair from my eyes and stroked my face.
“Unbind me,” I sputtered, the words echoing painfully in my skull.
“Brahm, my husband, who committed me here against my will — how can I trust you not to flee?”
“This is madness.”
Gerta lifted a flask to my lips.
“Haven’t you drugged me enough?” I gasped.
“It’s only water.”
I sipped, and then gulped until Gerta pulled the flask away.
Other figures stood against the cave walls. I recognized the woman with the pulsing neck tumor, and the patient called James with the distended belly. And there were more.
As I looked from one to the other, bile rose in my throat. Everyone here bore a strange protrusion on his or her body. A man with an apple-sized lump on his forehead. A woman with a hump the size of a bread-loaf on her thigh. Another man’s shoulders rippled with tumors. In the flickering torchlight, all of the growths appeared to pulse.
Was the drug toying with my senses? For the growths not only pulsed,
“
I recognized Hastings voice immediately and saw his small frame enter the chilled cavern. At last someone sane come to rescue me from this nightmare!
“Hastings,” I said. “Unbind me.”
He adjusted his red velvet tie. He was a lone island of refinery in a sea of savages. Not only did he wear his double-breasted suit, but he sported a silver-headed cane, white gloves, and a black derby.
He pulled a curved dagger from inside his suit, and then mopped his forehead with a handkerchief. He kneeled in front of me. “You are here to take part in a miracle,” he said.
Gerta’s face beamed. “Tonight is the night that Christoph comes to us.”
I said to Hastings, “Why do you let this go on?”
Hastings stood and took two steps back. His hand disappeared into a crack of the cave wall and reappeared holding a thin book bound in goatskin. A look of joy spread across his face. “
“What?” I cried. “Stop this madness!”
Hastings nodded at the other patients, who stood by in silence. “These people give their lives for you, for your son. All of them were suicidal, Brahm, but I talked them into giving their lives so that someone else might live.”
Their malignancies pulsed with newfound vigor. Faster and faster they beat, as if each contained its own heart.
I feared for my sanity. I struggled within the straightjacket. “Do you use your patients as laboratory rats? You’re all mad!”
Gerta kneeled at my side. “Listen to him, Brahm. Christoph will soon be with us.”
I tried to bite her, but only managed to dash my head against the cave wall. A trickle of blood ran over my left eye, down my cheek, and into my mouth. I spat it onto the dirt floor. “I will not watch this!”
I squeezed my eyes shut, then heard Hastings in front of me. “I’ve waited years to perform such a miracle, studying, learning, practicing. And ever since Gerta arrived, she’s prayed to give your son back to you.”
I thrashed within my restraints.
“Surely, you wish to witness the rebirth of your son.”
Gerta took hold of my head. I tried to keep my eyes shut, but Hastings’ fingers dug into them, prying them apart. Pain pierced the soft, baggy flesh beneath each eye, and in both eyelids. Something now kept my eyes propped open. I could not help but see. I gasped when I realized the objects forcing my eyes open were two of the crucifixes pulled from Gerta’s necklace.
“An asylum is a wonderful place,” Hastings mused. “So many people wanting love and attention. And they’re willing to give so much in return.”
Hastings stepped from patient to patient with his ugly dagger. He opened his book and read aloud words I did not understand. He sliced open the tumors one by one.
From each freshly opened wound, something spilled.
They were appendages. Small body parts.
Each had grown to its present size within the protective ooze of the tumors.
I cried out. I raved incoherently.
Gerta gathered the pieces in front of me as the patients fell dead one by one.
The pieces of flesh pulsed in the maddening torchlight.
As the last patient fell dead to the ground, Hastings turned to me. Again, he lifted his dagger.
“It needs you, Brahm. It needs the life-force of your blood to complete the miracle.”
“What
“The mad know many truths. So many delusions are but images sent from God. So many mad ramblings are but His words, His voice speaking through these poor, wretched vessels. I am their translator. Through them, I hear God’s wishes. Be glad, my friend, for He wishes your son to be reborn.”
He drew the dagger swiftly across my forehead. Blood stung my eyes. Hastings cupped his hands beneath my chin to catch it.
I had screamed so much that no more sound came from my throat. I fell limp against the cave wall as Gerta lovingly stroked my blood-matted hair.
Hastings dribbled my blood on the pile of appendages. They writhed together, coalescing into one unit of flesh and blood. How much time passed, I do not know. But time ceased to matter when all sanity had left the world.
I remember Gerta gasping, then clapping with delight. “Oh, Brahm,” she said.
I remember hearing the wet, desperate cry of a newborn babe.
Here is the last of it. Here is where I write about what had to be done. Here is where I write what a sane man had to do, what a moral man must do.
