The Medusa Amulet

Chapter 45

O’Hare was tied into one big knot.

David’s plane, like dozens of others, had been forced to circle the airport, flying out over Lake Michigan and then in again, as the controllers tried to safely land all the existing traffic before the wind and snow got any worse, or made any more of the runways inoperable.

The FASTEN SEAT BELTS sign had been on for nearly the entire hour, as David had huddled, invisible and anxious, against the emergency exit, occasionally peering out through the porthole at the turbulent clouds scudding across the night sky. Would the storm abate, or would it increase to such an extent that the moon was completely obscured? From everything he knew about the Medusa-first from his study of The Key to Life Eternal, the rest from the mouth of Sant’Angelo himself-the moonlight was as essential to his enterprise as the mirror itself. As he had translated the text himself, sitting in the silo of the Newberry…

“The waters of eternity,

Blessed by the radiant moon,

Together stop the tide of time

And grant the immortal boon.”

If his plan was to succeed… if the magic was to happen… he would need all the elements to come together.

And even then, what were the chances?

When the plane was finally cleared to land and David could hear the wheels coming down, he breathed a sigh of relief. There were still a dozen hurdles to go-on a night like this, just getting out of the airport was going to be tough-but oh, how he longed to get his feet on the ground. For that matter, he longed simply to see his own feet again. Being disembodied felt alarmingly close to feeling nonexistent.

It was a bumpy landing as the wheels skidded on the runway and the crosswinds tore at the plane’s wide wings; without a seat or seat belt to hold him in place, David was buffeted from one wall to the other. But with one invisible hand, he made sure he kept the wreath on his brow. His head ached from its grip, but now was no time to be discovered and hauled off to airport security as an undocumented passenger.

“ S’il vous plait sejour pose jusqu’a ce que nous soyons arrives a la porte,” the intercom announced, and the few impatient passengers who had already tried to retrieve bags from the overhead compartments dutifully sat back down. David used the opportunity to slink silently up the aisle and position himself directly behind the main hatchway. Getting the ramp in place created another delay, but as soon as the door was thrown back, David breezed past the flight attendant, who seemed to sense his presence somehow and put a worried hand to the base of her throat, before skirting a waiting wheelchair, running up the ramp, and out into the terminal.

Following the signs for Customs, David hurried along the endless corridors and escalators, and though a luggage cart was trundled over his foot and a baby carriage was shoved into his shin, he was able to pass through the automated doors without trouble by following close on the heels of a bulky businessman.

At the Customs desks, David looked around to see which officer was already occupied riffling through someone’s luggage, then shimmied past the girl whose guitar case was being given the once-over-“Yeah, I packed it myself,” she was reciting, “and it hasn’t been out of my sight”-and then raced down the concourse, past the big plate-glass windows where people were waiting to spot their visitors, and out toward the taxi stands.

The line was interminable, passengers huddled against the biting wind, stamping their feet to keep warm as the cabs were slowly motioned forward by the dispatchers, loaded up, and sent on their way.

But David had no time to spare on this, and renting a car would take even longer.

Across several lanes, in the section reserved for unloading private car service clients, he saw a maroon Lincoln parked, and the driver-a young guy with a soul patch-was helping an elderly couple to wrestle their bags onto a trolley. David loped across the lanes, dodging the cars that of course could not even see him, and while the driver was settling up, he slipped into the backseat and took off the garland.

For a second or two, as nothing happened, he feared he’d done himself some irreparable harm. But then, he felt a tingling in his toes, the same feeling he’d get when he’d been out skating too long and the blood had slowly started to return. His boots reappeared, drumming on the floor of the car. Then the sensation coursed up his legs, and they, too, gradually became visible.

But the driver got in sooner than David had expected, jumping into the seat to count his bills.

David prayed he wouldn’t look into the rearview mirror yet.

Reaching for the radio mike, he said, “Car 6, calling in.”

“Hey, Zach.”

“I’ve just made the drop-off at Air France.”

David felt the rippling sensation moving up his torso. Glancing down, he saw his coat coming into view, and then his chest. His arms prickled, as if each hair was standing on end, and he flexed the muscles gratefully.

“You got another pickup for me?” Zach asked.

“Looks like it,” the dispatcher replied. “Alitalia.”

“Cancel that,” David interrupted, and the driver whipped around in his seat. David hoped that the crown of his head wasn’t still missing.

“What the hell?” the driver said, dropping the mike. “Where’d you come from?”

David held up a fistful of bills. “Do it, and they’re all yours.”

Zach looked very confused.

“Hey, Zach,” the radio dispatcher said, “let me give you the name.”

“Tell ’em you’re busy,” David urged.

“Those are euros,” the driver mumbled to David.

“Zach, you still there?”

“True,” David said. “That means they’re worth more than dollars.” He leaned forward and handed over the whole wad of them.

“I do know that,” Zach said, as he thumbed through the bills. “I’m in grad school.”

“Then you can figure out how to get to Evanston hospital.”

Satisfied with the windfall, Zach pleaded engine trouble over the radio, then shut off the mike for the breakneck trip to the suburbs.

David fished Jantzen’s BlackBerry out of his pocket again, called Gary, and got his voice mail. “I’m in a cab,” David said, “and on the way.” Hanging up, he simply stared blankly at the phone. What if he was already too late? Nothing he had read suggested that the Medusa could reanimate the dead. It could bestow eternal life, but it could not return it to those already gone. He reached into his shirt just to feel its presence on his chest. The silver was cold, the silk backing slick. That was strange, he thought. It did not absorb any of his body heat. It remained unaffected, oblivious to its surroundings, as if in a vacuum of its own. His fingers traced the contours of the Gorgon’s face. He knew every tendril of its hair, every furrow of its snarling brow, but for the first time since acquiring it, he feared it, too. What great transgression was he about to attempt?

The cab slowed down, and David said, “Can’t you go any faster?”

“Not on the ice,” Zach replied, “and I’m not about to total the damn car.”

But something told him that Sarah was still alive. Some intuition, some sixth sense. The bond they had was so strong, and had always been so unbreakable, that if it had been severed, he’d have known. He’d have felt the break, no matter how far away he’d been, like a punch in his stomach.

Little cyclones of snow were whipping across the highway, and the wind was battering at the windows. Automated signs warned of delays up ahead and a maximum speed of twenty miles per hour. A Hummer, its warning lights flashing, had slid right into a traffic divider.

“Get off at Dempster,” David said. “It’ll be faster.”

Zach did as he was told, and David steered him toward several shortcuts to get to the hospital complex more directly. But every time Zach tried to engage him in conversation, David shut him down. He didn’t want him talking, he wanted him driving.

At the hospital complex on Central Street, David quickly scanned the various driveway signs and arrows for the one leading to the Hospice Care Unit. It turned out to be a separate one-story building, with a broad, covered driveway in front.

“Good luck, man,” Zach said, as David charged out of the limo, his backpack hanging from one hand, and into the revolving door; it was one of those doors that turned at its own speed, but David was shoving at the bar, anyway.

A nurse behind the counter looked up as he arrived, panting, and said, “Whoa there, partner. Slow down. This is a hospital zone.”

David dropped the backpack, and said, “Sarah Franco.”

The nurse looked uncertain.

“Sorry. I mean Sarah Henderson.”

“Oh, yes,” she said, her voice now taking on a more solicitous tone. “She’s down the hall, in Room 3. And you are?”

“Her brother,” David said, already moving on.

“Hold on,” the nurse said, as one hand reached for the phone. “I have to notify her caregiver. She might be sleeping.”

What difference did that make? He was here to wake her up.

Outside her door, he saw Gary, in a flannel shirt and jeans, pacing the hall.

“Thank God,” Gary said. “I had my phone on vibrate, and just picked up your message.”

“How is she?” David said.

“One of the nurses is in with her now.” He looked at David with enormous relief, tempered with a bit of reproach. “She’s been waiting for you. I told you she would.”

“I was counting on it,” he said, even as he swiftly circumvented Gary-who looked startled-and headed straight into Room 3.

“David, you might want to wait a minute!”

But that was the last thing he wanted to do.

The nurse, an African-American man with gray hair and a gentle face, was just adjusting an IV line. He turned and said, “You must be her brother. She’s been waiting for you. I’m Walter.”

But David’s eyes were fixed on Sarah, or what was left of her. In the time he’d been gone, she had changed from a woman hanging on to life, however weakly, to a woman already in the embrace of death. Her hands on the blanket were mottled and blue, her cracked lips were slick with Vaseline, and her face was a hollow mask. Even on seeing him, she showed none of the joy he had expected; her expression, instead, was querulous and uncertain. He wasn’t even sure she recognized him.

“We just upped her Halperidol,” Walter said, sotto voce. “In a few minutes, she may be more lucid.”

David had thought he’d been prepared for anything… but now he knew that he hadn’t.

“Can we be alone?”

“Sure,” the nurse said. “I’m here if you need me.”

David dragged a chair to the bedside and took her hand in his. The skin was cold and the fingers felt like twigs.

“Sarah, it’s David. I’m here.”

But she didn’t respond. Her eyes were glassy and staring off into space, her bare skull covered by a paisley silk scarf.

He waited, wondering what to do next.

“Remember that day at the skating rink?” he finally said. “When you told me you’d give anything, anything at all, for the chance to see Emme grow up?”

A humidifier hummed quietly in the corner.

“I’m going to give you that chance.”

Whether he was imagining it or not, her fingers seemed to stir in his grasp.

But how, he wondered, was he going to get this done?

The wind howled at the window, and it was then that he noticed the birch trees outside, in the little garden, and the frozen pond… glimmering dully in the moonlight.

He jumped from his chair. A wheelchair was folded up in the corner of the room, and he quickly opened it. He had to move fast, because he knew that if Gary or the nurse came in, they would surely intervene. He pushed the chair to the side of the bed, and tucking the blanket all around her, he lifted Sarah into it. She weighed so little, it was like lifting a bundle of rags.

Glancing out her bedroom door, he was glad to see that Gary and Walter had moved down the hall, toward the reception desk and its big silver coffee urn. In one swift motion, he steered the chair out her door and then out of sight down the hall. Now he just had to find his way into that garden.

In his haste, the first door he tried turned out to be a utility closet, the second one a dispensary. But the third, with a metal crossbar across it, looked more promising, and turning the chair so that he could press on the bar with his own back, he felt a rush of cold air. While he was dragging the wheels over the bump of the threshold, a corner of the blanket got caught in the closing door, threatening for a second to pull Sarah out of the chair altogether. David had to stop, bend down, and wrench it free.

When he looked up at her face, he thought he saw a glimmer of recognition.

“David? Are you… really here?” she said, her voice murky and slow.

“Sure looks that way,” he said, tucking the blanket back around her.

“Where are we?”

“We’re getting some fresh air,” he said, his breath clouding, as he pushed the chair out into the garden.

“Cold,” she said. “It’s cold.”

“I know that,” he said, his fingers scrabbling under his shirt to retrieve the Medusa. A gust of wind plucked the scarf off her head and blew it onto the frozen pond. “I just need you to do something for me,” he said, as he lifted the amulet over his own head, and brushed aside the black silk backing that concealed the mirror.

“Are we in the backyard?” she asked. “I bet Emme’s waiting for you upstairs-you should go and surprise her.”

“I will,” he promised, “I will.” He put the Medusa into her palm and helped her to raise her hand. “But right now I want you to look at yourself in this mirror.”

She seemed confused, and irritated. “No, I don’t do that anymore. I don’t look at myself in mirrors anymore.”

“You have to, just this once.” He glanced over his shoulder, past the roof of the hospice, to gauge where the moon was in the sky. A dark cloud was just drifting past it.

He angled the mirror to be sure to catch the emerging rays.

“The mirror,” he repeated. “Look in the mirror.”

Frowning, she did what he asked. “I can’t see a thing,” she said.

“You will in a minute,” he said, humoring her, as he bent low to see if the mirror was being held in the right spot. Its convex surface gleamed, like a shiny dark scarab, in the moonlight. He could see his sister’s reflection, hovering in the glass as if it were staring out rather than in, and he braced her hand so that the pose would be held. The waters of eternity, captured behind the glass, were receiving their blessing from the radiant moon.

But how long did it take?

He was startled by a thumping sound-a palm flatly smacking against a window-and he glanced back into Sarah’s lighted bedroom where he could see Gary, his shocked face pressed close to the glass, banging again and again.

“Keep looking,” David urged his sister, “just keep looking.” Any moment, he expected Walter to come barreling outside to rescue her.

But the hand holding the mirror suddenly dropped into Sarah’s lap and her head snapped back against the wheelchair, as if she’d suffered a seizure.

Had it worked?

David snatched the mirror out of her lap, wondering if he would actually feel any difference in it. Would it be hotter? colder? charged somehow?

But it was his own face he was seeing… his own eyes staring back at him from the bottom of its deep, dark well… and before he knew it, a jolt like electricity had sizzled through his limbs. His jaw clenched shut, his head went back, and his knees nearly buckled; if he hadn’t been holding on to the wheelchair, he’d have collapsed on the spot.

The courtyard door flew open, as Gary and the nurse came running toward them.

“Are you out of your mind?” Walter said, pushing the helpless David away from the handlebars of the chair.

David staggered backwards, his arms dangling loose, his legs shaking. He leaned, reeling, between the birch trees, afraid that he might pass out.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” Gary barked, as he snatched her scarf from the icy pond.

Walter whirled the chair around and headed back through the door. Gary, following him in, was so mad he didn’t even bother to look back at David.

And David didn’t blame them. He knew how insane this looked.

A bank of clouds obscured the moon, casting the courtyard into darker shadow.

Through the window of her room, he could see Sarah being lifted back into the bed, extra blankets being piled over her again. And he could only imagine what was being said about her distraught, but deranged, younger brother.

But none of it mattered. Not any longer. He had done what he had set out to do… and no one-no Greek hero, no Florentine artisan-could have achieved anything more. Come what may, he was at peace with what he had done.