The Distant Home (5 page)

Bobby was warily moving along a corridor in the hospital. He knew he had to obey Mrs Webster’s orders and get Sally out of this place. He also knew that the full wrath of the adult world would descend on him if he got caught doing it. Indeed, if it had been anyone but Mrs Webster telling him to do this, he would never have made the attempt.

But here he was, slipping along the hospital corridor, his joggers squeaking on the polished floor, his eyes roving, checking for danger. In this case danger meant any other human being. He knew they would try to stop him and that explaining about Mrs Webster would get him nowhere.

A nurse appeared at the other end of the corridor, heading toward him with a trolley! There was no side corridor to dodge into, just a door. He opened the door, stepped inside and closed it after him.

He found himself in the dark, but that was not a big deal. Bobby went everywhere prepared for everything. In his pocket, alongside a Swiss Army knife and a length of cord was a small flashlight. He drew the flashlight from his pocket and twisted the head of it to switch it on.

The light revealed the interior of a cleaner’s cupboard. There were brooms, mops and, best of all, a white dustcoat hanging on a hook. Mrs Webster had said Castle of Zahan and she had been right. One of the keys to winning the Castle of Zahan game was disguising yourself as the enemy. Here was his disguise.

Swiftly Bobby took down the white dustcoat and put it on. The sleeves were too long, drooping down over his hands, so he rolled them up to wrist length, then buttoned the coat. It was kind of loose, but it would have to do. There were plenty of small grown-ups in the world, why shouldn’t one of them work at the hospital?

Now he looked around for a weapon. When you disguised yourself in Castle of Zahan, a weapon always came with it. What kind of weapon would a cleaner use? And there it was! A floor mop. The flashlight beam was showing him a floor mop with a broad hinged head like a pair of jaws. It was perfect. It gave him a reason for walking along any corridor in the hospital.

A moment later, a figure in a loose dustcoat stepped out of the cupboard and began pushing a mop along the floor of the corridor. As he made his way along the corridor, he would stop, stand on tiptoe and peer through the observation window of each door he came to.

Meanwhile, in the X-ray department, a radiologist and a senior nursing sister were sliding Sally into the central chamber of a huge X-ray machine for a full body scan. Dr Rosen stood by, clipboard in hand, watching as Sally’s seemingly unconscious body entered the machine.

What none of them knew was that Sally was wide awake. She had woken from what seemed like a deep sleep as she was rolled along the corridor toward X-ray. She remembered turning and seeing the blue car heading for her, she remembered the instant of impact, and then there was nothing until she saw the ceiling of the hospital corridor unreeling before her eyes.

No one had noticed her eyes open for that moment, no one had seen them close. Some instinct had told Sally that she should stay ‘unconscious’ until she found out more about what was happening to her.

Sally was an intelligent girl, and one who liked to think things through before making decisions. The impulsive one in the family was Bobby; sometimes his impulses got him out of trouble, but more often they got him into it. Sally was just the opposite: think first, then act.

So, having regained consciousness, she did not speak, but closed her eyes and took stock of things. One arm hurt between elbow and shoulder, and one leg hurt between knee and ankle. She had studied pictures of human anatomy, and she knew that the arm bone was the humerus and that there were two bones between knee and ankle, the tibia and fibula. Maybe she had a broken arm and leg, but they did not hurt as much as her friend Megan said her leg hurt when she broke it playing basketball. And the pain in both arm and leg seemed to be diminishing.

As the machine began to hum, she lay there, trying to work it all out. She knew from a magazine article she had once read that most people don’t actually remember the moment of an accident, that the mind erases that from the memory. But she could remember it quite clearly, and she wondered why.

For as long as she could remember, she had always felt different, and perhaps remembering the detail of the accident was part of her difference. She knew she could remember things way back, further back than other kids at school could remember. She could remember, for instance, being in her first cradle. No one else she knew could remember that, in fact she had stopped saying she could because no one believed her.

While Sally lay there in the X-ray machine, Dr Rosen and the radiologist and the nursing sister were staring at the screen in disbelief. What they were seeing was beyond their experience. It was impossible. If they had not been seeing it, they would not have believed it.

The skeleton was human, and as far as they could tell, perfectly normal. It was the internal organs that they were staring at. There were two hearts, one each side, both working, four small lungs, four kidneys.

Rosen just stood there, eyes locked onto the screen. ‘She’s got two hearts!’

The radiologist had seen the insides of thousands of people but he had never seen anything like this one. ‘Everything’s duplicated. Lungs, kidneys.’

‘All working,’ said Rosen.

Sally could hear them, hear the amazement in their voices, but also something beyond amazement. She could hear scientific interest. Now, scientific interest, that overwhelming curiosity to find out
how
things worked and
why
, was something that Sally knew a lot about, because she had it herself in abundance. She knew how strong it was. She knew it was this curiosity that allowed her to watch frogs being cut up in science classes long after other kids had turned away in disgust.

When she heard that curiosity in Dr Rosen’s voice, Sally felt her first tremor of fear. She knew she would not be getting out of here in a hurry. She would be here until Dr Rosen and the others knew how she worked and why.

The conversation between Rosen and the radiologist had also been heard by Mrs Webster as she drove toward Middle Street. The transmission device she had stuck beneath Sally’s hair was still doing its job.

‘All working,’ the radiologist was saying, and then there was a silence, and for a moment Mrs Webster was worried that something had gone wrong with the transmitter. But the radiologist’s silence was caused by amazement. When he spoke again, his voice was choked with raw astonishment. ‘This fracture in the right humerus,’ there was another pause as he pointed to the X-ray image of Sally’s upper right arm. ‘It’s knitting. Look. Left tib and fib were fractured too,’ he said, pointing to the lower leg, ‘and they’re knitting. She’s healing in fast forward!’

Rosen leaned in and stared at the X-ray screen. ‘You seen anything like this before?’ she said.

‘Of course I haven’t seen anything like this before!’ the radiologist yelled. ‘Are you kidding or something? It’d be in all the text books! No one’s ever seen anything like this before! This kid’s a medical freak!’

Freak.
Sally heard the word and winced. Freak is not a word anyone wants applied to them. Her eyes shifted and she caught Rosen’s movement as the doctor reached for the phone. She was punching in a number.

‘Dr Rosen here, would you please page Dr Chambers? It’s urgent.’ Then Rosen put the phone back into its cradle, and moved to Sally and looked at her. Sally had closed her eyes and now lay there, pretending to be unconscious. ‘Sally?’ said Rosen. ‘Can you hear me?’ Sally just lay there, and after a moment Rosen turned away, hands together, cracking her knuckles, waiting for her boss to answer her page.

In the hospital lobby, the desk clerk was leaning in to speak into a microphone. ‘Dr Chambers please. Dr Chambers wanted in X-ray.’

Bobby, pushing his mop along a corridor, heard it. ‘Dr Chambers please. Dr Chambers wanted in X-ray.’

In the waiting section of the emergency department, Maria and Jim heard it. ‘Dr Chambers to X-ray please.’ Maria checked her watch, looked around, not for the first time, and then said to Jim, ‘Maybe Bobby’s locked in the toilet. Would you go and look please Jim?’

‘Look for … ?’

‘Bobby. Our son. Remember him? He’s been gone a quarter of an hour.’

‘Oh, that Bobby,’ said Jim. He squeezed Maria’s hand, and then headed off to look for Bobby.

Bobby was still looking for Sally. As he pushed his mop along the corridor, two nurses passed him, talking, and ignoring him completely. He took that as a good sign. The disguise was working. Then two old men in pyjamas and dressing gowns came past and stared at him. Bobby hurried past them and as he moved on he heard one say, ‘You know you’re getting old when cleaners start looking younger.’

Along the corridor, a set of elevators doors opened and out came a small, compact man with dark hair and a very pink face. His name was Dr Chambers. Shortly Bobby would get to know and fear him but for the moment he was a stranger. But even though he was a stranger, he looked to Bobby like the sort of person who might not believe you when you said you were a cleaner who had just started work that day. He was preparing to run for it when Dr Chambers turned in through a door marked ‘X-ray’.

Seconds later Bobby himself reached the door, and stood on tip-toe to look through the glass panel in it. And there was Sally lying on her trolley!

Bobby’s instinct was to barge in and get her, but he knew from playing Castle of Zahan that if you barged through doors you stood a very good chance of being killed by Tenth Level Thieves, Members of the Assassins’ Guild, Warriors, Were-wolf Knights, Warlocks and Entities. He knew there was none of those in the X-ray department but figured that there might be creatures just as dangerous to his plans, so he checked the room out further.

There was the woman doctor who had taken Sally from the emergency department, talking to the pink-faced man who had just entered, and with them were another man in a white coat, and a sour-looking nursing sister. They were talking to each other like mad—everyone talking at once. There was a big machine between them and Sally. He decided he could get in unobserved. Bobby propped the mop against the wall of the corridor, opened the door slightly and squeezed through.

As he entered, he heard the woman doctor saying, ‘You’ve got to look at this, Dr Chambers, we’ve got something here I’ve never seen before.’

Then Bobby was at Sally’s side. ‘Sail?’ he whispered.

Her eyes opened. ‘Am I glad to see
you!’
she whispered back.

‘You okay?’

Mrs Webster, still in her car heading home, smiled. ‘Well done, young man,’ she murmured.

‘They’re saying I’m a freak.’ Sally’s whispered words came through loud and clear on Mrs Webster’s hearing aid. The old lady’s eyes narrowed and she drew in her breath with a hiss of anger. The person who had called Sally a freak would have been wise to steer clear of Mrs Webster for a while.

In the X-ray department Bobby smirked at Sally in a brotherly fashion, and whispered back. ‘They had to get you in hospital to tell that? I’ve always known you were a freak.’

Sally was not to be cheered up. ‘Not funny, Bobby. They’re saying all my organs are duplicated.’

‘Talk English.’ Bobby knew that Sally was much smarter than he was, but he wished she would not use all these big words.

‘Two hearts, I knew about them of course, but four lungs, four kidneys, stuff like that.’

This did not mean a lot to Bobby. Everyone he knew was different in some way or other, and he could not see that a few extra lungs meant all that much. The medical people were still talking, and Bobby peeped around the edge of the big X-ray machine at them.

The man with the pink face, the one all the others were treating as if he were Lord Muck, was saying, ‘Do we have a history on this kid? Sally, what’s her name?’

‘Harrison,’ said the nursing sister as she checked her clipboard. ‘Born in this hospital twelve years ago. Twelve years ago today, as a matter of fact. One of fraternal twins, her and a brother.’

‘I’ve been wondering,’ said Rosen, eager to impress Dr Chambers, ‘is that what we’re looking at? A multiple birth that went wrong? Was there a third child? Is this patient a kind of Siamese twin with the organs of two people?’

Bobby gulped and withdrew his head. He didn’t want to think about Sally being two people inside. He leaned close to her and whispered, ‘Mrs Webster says I’ve got to get you out of here. Can you walk?’

Having heard what Rosen had just said, Sally was keen to get out of there herself. She stretched out her leg and then winced with pain. ‘Still a bit sore,’ she said.

Meanwhile Dr Chambers was pointing excitedly at the X-ray pictures. ‘It looks like a back-up system. It was designed that way.’ He paused, trying to put a very strange idea into words that made sense. ‘It looks as if she’s this way because she was built this way.’ It was as well that Sally and Bobby could not see his face. He had a very intense, greedy look, the sort of look that a glutton might have at the sight of a cake, or that a fanatical stamp collector might have looking in a stamp shop window. ‘To be sure I’ll need to open her up and take a look around inside.’

Sally and Bobby looked at each other. The words had reached them loud and clear. The way he sounded, you could sense that he was already licking his lips at the idea of opening Sally up and taking that look inside.

The other medical people were staring at Chambers uncertainly. Feeling their eyes on him, Chambers looked from the X-rays to Rosen. ‘I’m going to have to.’

‘Operate?’ said Rosen. ‘There’s no internal injuries that we can see.’

‘Correct, Dr Rosen,’ said Dr Chambers. ‘No internal injuries that we can
see
. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t any there. We have to operate in the best interests of the patient.’ He smiled. ‘And while we’re doing it of course, we can record all this for science. Full battery of tests, video and photographic record. This specimen’s unique!’

At the word ‘specimen’, Sally jabbed a finger at the door, and Bobby started to push the trolley. As they went out the door, Chambers was continuing, ‘What’s her medical history?’

‘None,’ said Rosen.

‘Nonsense!’ said Chambers. ‘Everyone’s got a medical history.’

Rosen interrupted him. ‘With respect, sir. None. I just had the family doctor on the phone. She’s seen the parents, seen the brother, never seen Sally. The parents say she’s never been sick. Ever. From anything.’

There was silence for a moment and then Chambers looked at the radiologist. ‘You say the bones actually knitted as you watched?’

The radiologist nodded. ‘It was weird. I could see them knitting and straightening. They were already doing it when she came in. We just caught the last five minutes of it.’

Chambers was like a dog looking at a big steak—he was practically slavering. ‘You realize we could be talking Nobel Prize here? All those people I went through university with. The ones who put me down. The ones who won the medals. They’re going to have to look up to me after this.’ His eyes were distant. ‘Shelley Watson who wouldn’t go to the medical students’ ball with me, Kay McGregor who said I looked like a frog, Patti Brahms who said she wouldn’t date me if I put a bag on my head and gave her ten dollars, they’ll be crawling on their bellies to me after this!’

Chambers suddenly broke off, realizing that the others were watching him. Embarrassed at having revealed too much, he snapped out some orders to put them in their places. ‘No publicity on this. Absolute blackout. No one says anything. Rosen, I want a full batch of tests, I want to know everything about this kid that medical science can tell me.’ Then he paused, and a sweet, blissful smile spread across his face. ‘Then we’ll prep her and cut.’

He turned and moved around the X-ray machine, expecting to see Sally on the trolley.

His jaw dropped. His eyes bulged. For there was no trolley, and no Sally, just an empty space and the door still rocking slightly on its two-way hinges.