The Key

24

Davlat Hastenesi Hospital

Dusk brought the evening meds rounds in the hospital.

With one room now empty they were quicker than usual and Father Ulvi was eager to get them out of the way so he could concentrate on what else he had to do that night. He fiddled with the loose beads in his pocket as the nurse checked Kathryn Mann. Then they locked the door and headed to the last room at the end of the corridor.

The male nurse pushed the trolley slowly towards it, his large frame making surprisingly heavy work of the task. Ulvi knew it wasn’t the bulk of the mobile drug cabinet that slowed his progress but a bone-deep reluctance to step into the room and face what it contained. He had to admit there was something about the monk’s appearance that even he found unsettling. In the course of his own work he had witnessed some stomach-churning sights — savage knife attacks, burn victims, a whole freak show of human bodies warped beyond recognition by torture and violence — but even he had never seen anything like the patient in room 400.

Ulvi entered the room first, holding the door for the reluctant nurse to follow, being careful not to look at the bed until he had to. He could hear dry breathing, shallow and furtive, as though the thing lying there was stealing air. He closed the door, then turned to face the bed.

The sight never failed to shock him. The most striking thing about the monk was the colour of his skin. Where it was visible beneath the yellow stained dressings that covered most of his body, it was totally black, though Ulvi knew from his briefing notes that the man lying before him was a white Serbian monk named Dragan Ruja. He looked as though he’d been scorched or dipped in crude oil, so deep and dark was the colour of the skin hanging loosely on his shrunken frame. Whatever his disease was, it had gnawed him away, decomposing his living form until it was closer to that of a corpse. He resembled the mummified bodies they occasionally dragged from the mountains; climbers who had lost their way and slowly been desiccated over months or even years by wind and ice until nothing was left but a sunken, hollowed-out approximation of the living things they had once been. Except the mountain dead were brought to the morgue, not the hospital, and they did not watch you as you entered the room; or shrink away as cotton wipes dabbed at the rot that still oozed steadily out of them.

Ulvi studied the face, the long wild hair, sparse over parchment skin, the beard fringed around cracked lips, wasted like the rest of him and pulled back over a snarl of broken teeth made brown by bleeding gums. He looked as though he was howling, though thankfully he made no sound above the pant of his scratchy breath. The eyes — and thank God for this — were closed, for they were the things that unsettled Ulvi the most. If they were quick, maybe they could get out of here without waking him.

The nurse had clearly realized this too and was working swiftly. He took a fresh pair of nitrile gloves from a box, slipped them over his hands then swapped a new bag of plasma for the depleted one on the drip line. Next he laid out syringes loaded with Vitamin K and Thrombin to promote coagulation in the blood, as well as scalpels to cut free the pus-soaked dressings wrapped round his strange network of wounds. Then he made a mistake. He tore open a fresh package of dressings a little too eagerly and the sound of it ripped through the heavy silence. The thin, blackened lids instantly moved in response. Ulvi and the nurse watched, each hoping the eyes would settle and the thing would remain asleep. But it did not. The head rolled towards them and the lids parted, revealing the hellish eyes beneath. They were bright red, a result of all the blood vessels having burst and bled into the whites. Ulvi stared at them, transfixed by the sight of his brother monk and the demon thing he had become.

The light hurt.

Everything hurt.

When Dragan had first woken, here in this place, he had thought for a brief moment it must be Heaven; he was no longer inside the dark rooms and hallways of the Citadel, so therefore he must have died. But then pain had overwhelmed him, and he knew he was wrong, for Heaven could not contain agony such as this.

In the first few days, when he had realized where he was, he had waited for death — welcomed it even. He knew, through his agonies, that it had to be close — one way or another. Either his broken body would finally give up, or an agent of the Citadel would come.

The law was clear.

The secrets of the Citadel had to be protected.

And he was a Sanctus — a guardian of the Sacrament. There was no way they could let him remain in the world with what he held in his head. So they would bring him back, or they would send someone to silence him, as well as anyone else he may have spoken to.

But he had said nothing.

Not to the doctors, not to the police, not even to the priest who watched over him constantly, stealing into his room from time to time to whisper fresh news of what was happening outside and in the wider world. He wished the priest would leave him in peace. He didn’t care for any of it. He just wanted to keep his soul pure so he could face his God knowing he had kept his oath and carried the secret to his grave.

And he had heard Death in the corridor, shuffling outside his door, teasing him with his closeness, then slipping away and into other rooms to claim other souls. Although he wanted it, yearned for it, Death left him alone.

So he endured, waiting his turn, which could not — praise God — be long. For despite the transfusions of the blood of others, and the drugs that stopped it from flowing straight out of him again, he could feel the life leaking from him, tickling and dripping in the dark wet places between the dressings and his blighted skin where the nurse dabbed and cleansed.

But now he felt differently.

Now he feared the whisper of death at his door. Earlier, when he had drifted out of agonized sleep from a dream where his body was whole and he was back in the cool tunnels of the mountain, he had discovered a dark figure standing in the room with him. At first he had thought the shadow was death, come to claim him at last. But as his ruined eyes cleared and the figure stepped forward, he saw it was just the priest, delivering fresh news.

Death had come after all, it seemed, but not to him.

You are the last, the priest had whispered. The last…

And as he lay pinned down by this news, he had felt strength flowing back into him along with the realization that death was no longer an option. Now he had to live. He did not know who in authority was left in the Citadel but suspected there was no one. Why else had he been left in the hospital to rot without a word? Why else had he not been silenced earlier, unless there was no one to give the order? If the old elite had been smashed, then he was all that remained. He was the only one who could rebuild it again.

He looked down now as the male nurse peeled away the last sticky dressing to reveal his blackened, wasted body beneath. Seeing it was its own kind of agony; the ruined flesh, scored with his ceremonial scars, badge of his holy orders, red and swollen where blood and fluid leaked from him.

He had borne his suffering, as Job had done, and proved his worthiness for the task that had been reserved for him. He had been spared so he could restore the order once more. But a leader needed to be strong and there was only one place where his wrecked body could recover fully. If he were to live at all.

He had to get back to the Citadel.