Chapter 12 - Nurse Wretched

The trees are all dead outside. A hot, sulfurous wind tickles the last strands of hair on Nurse Wretched’s scalp. She sits next to Timotheee Gargantuan on the bench in the garden, overlooking the barren desert below. Her eyes are far away, watching the lightning dance in the black clouds.

“It’s peaceful out here, don’t you think?” she asks at last.

Timotheee dabs at his perspiring forehead with a handkerchief. “Yes, quite peaceful," he agrees. He says nothing of the stifling heat, for which his corpulent frame is ill-suited. He will bear anything for a few moments alone with Nurse Wretched. Even the hot winds of Hell.

“Were you impressed with Doctor Sciaticus?” she asks him, without turning her head.

“I was. Yes, quite impressed.” He hesitates. “And were you? Impressed with him, I mean?”

Nurse Wretched’s laughter is like the sound of a thirsty dog panting. “Oh, I suppose he is something special, in his own way. I’ve always had a soft spot for eccentrics. But he’s quite arrogant. It’s unbecoming of a surgeon.”

“And that hole in his throat,” Timotheee says, grinning. “Did you see the way it puckered when the Lich was introducing him? The man looked like he had just taken a leech bath.”

Both of them share a laugh. When they've finished, the nurse’s knee is touching the edge of his own. Timotheee stares at it, momentarily stunned, his heart swelling with joy—until she abruptly darts her foot away.

“Oh, Timotheee,” she says a note of sadness.

“What? What’s the matter?”

“This is foolish. You may be new, but surely you must know that romance is forbidden here.”

“Where? In the House of Yog?”

“No, everywhere in Hell.”

He nods his head slowly, ponderously. He does know, of course, that love is forbidden in the House of Yog. Love is a human disease, an illness that drives minds to madness. He wonders briefly when he may have been infected by love. How would he know? It may have happened long ago. Perhaps when he was taking care of the woman who strangled her infant. She had been demented with love—the strange kind of love that caused a mother to hastened her child's voyage into heaven. Hadn’t she grasped Timotheee's arm with her bare hand? Hadn’t she whispered God loves you too?

That may have been the moment, yes. He had felt dizzy afterward. He had staggered out into the hallway, and he…

He had seen Nurse Wretched for the first time.

Am I cursed? he wonders now, staring at his folded hands. Have I infected her too?

Quietly, he asks, “Should we get help?”

Nurse Wretched doesn’t answer for a long time. Her eyes are lost in the distance, as if searching for something out there in the endless miles of sand and dust. The ambulances are trundling over those hills, their carapaces gleaming in the lightning, bringing more patients with wicked hearts to the House of Yog.

“Do you ever wonder where they come from?” she asks.

“You mean the patients?”

“Yes.”

“I suppose I do. It must be a horrible place by the looks of them. Filled with butchery and murderers and rapists.”

She frowns. “Do you really think so? I’ve heard different stories over the years. Some of them talk about…”

Timotheee waits, but her voice has trailed off. Gently, he prods her with his knee. “About what?”

“Sunlight.”

The word hangs between them. His eyes wander to the horizon, where endless darkness furls around the rim of the earth. He imagines what the sun must look like. Whether he could stand to feel it. Whether he could learn to love it.

It would burn my skin, he thinks. And Nurse Wretched would fare no better in a world of blinding light.

It was insanity to think like this. Perhaps love was making them both crazy. Because as dangerous as it sounded, to flee these hallowed halls for the bedlam of the human world…

…if she asked him, he would go with her in a heartbeat.