Chapter 13 - The Cardiologist

Asystole! For centuries she’s been haunted by this long lonely note on the ECGs. A line flatter than a grave, with no rhythm, no spark, no dance. No electrical firestorm of life, the storied arrhythmias of elden books from above.

Supraventricular tachycardia.

Complete heart block.

Ventricular fibrillation!

The beautiful sounds of hearts choking in despair. How she longs to hear it!

But Hell offers no such joy for the cardiologist. Every patient is forever in trapped in cardiac death. There are no beating hearts down here. No beautiful percussion of Lub-Dub, Lub-Dub.

So day after day she stares forlornly at the ECGs brought before her. Every rhythm strip looks the same: a long line, a dead end. What is her purpose to read these things? Even the lobotomized clown could do it. There is no excitement here, no intellectual stimulation.

She’s tried everything to fire up their miserable hearts. Adrenaline injections. Spider bites. Techno music. Pictures of their children. Cocaine.

And still nothing. No harmonious drums thumping in tandem. No thrill of a pulse.

But there’s one last theory to test. It is an admittedly ridiculous theory, if not overtly cliche, but she’s tried everything else in the past three hundred years. Maybe the trick really is electricity. Like from a bad human horror story.

But she needs real power, not the tempered jolts of eelworms. What she needs is a bolt of high octane, high voltage lightning, blasted like a kidney stone from the orifice of Yog, the All-Eater. Just one jolt from the malevolent godhead, who drifts above the stormy clouds of Hell, would provide exponentially more energy than anything in the House of Yog. Yes, yes! A touch of the divine!

They will laugh at her, she knows.

They are already laughing at her from the courtyard below. They are gesturing at the roof of the hospital, where she is leaning out a tower window. They see only their deranged cardiologist, up to her usual tricks. They ridicule her for this obsession, her hunt for the human heartbeat, but she has long since ignored them. They are petty toads, hacks and quacks. They couldn’t begin to understand real passion for a profession.

She sees something else atop this tower. A miracle in the making. The first living heartbeat in Hell.

All this, of course, is still dream potential, currently in the form of her intern suspended naked by a large metal pole. He is grinning nervously beneath his metal helmet, capped with a conspicuous iron cross.

“Are you ready?” The cardiologist shouts through her cupped hands. The lightning storm is approaching across the desert.

The intern mouths something back that she can scarcely hear over the howling wind. She tries to call out again, but then she pauses. What does it matter? He is an intern. He has no say.

The storm approaches with almost surgical precision, beelining for the hospital on the hill. Yog is angry, no doubt. The little cross on the helmet has drawn his unfathomable rage, as she intended.

For a moment the cardiologist wonders whether she was making a mistake. Would the All-Eater devour the entire hospital in a fit of rage? He’s consumed entire worlds before for lesser offenses.

No doubt, the others fear the same, for the hospital staff scurries into the shadows.

Then the lightning comes. One bolt after another strikes the grinning intern on the head, until the sky looks like a blistering red waterfall, and the entire tower is glowing like a hot forge. The cardiologist blinks from the brilliant light and looks away.

After an interminable period, the storm moves on. The air sizzles with the smell of brimstone, copper blood and ozone. The cardiologist mounts the stairs to the belltower, careful not to touch the walls, for the stone is fucking hot!

She emerges to find the intern groaning from the pole. His skin is cindered black, one eye swollen shut, and the metal crown has half melted into his ghoulish scalp. It takes some doing to cut him down. Some real arm strength. But that’s why she has other interns.

“Get him,” she instructs.

They scramble up the pole like ants, clawing and snipping loose the cheesy flesh. When they’ve finished, they heft the body of the mumbling intern on their shoulders, forming a processional that spirals around the tower stairs. Down they go, into the basement, then further still, into the subterranean den where the cardiologist keeps her office. They are careful to avoid the Administrative Lich, who roams the depths of the hospital. The Lich does not care for rogue doctors or unlicensed experiments, and this feat is as roguish as it gets.

Thankfully, no one stops them. In the office, they lay their comrade on a stone slab and take turns, one by one, listening to his chest. The interns shake their heads, and the cardiologist feels her frustration mounting. She stabs her own stethoscope into the gluey folds of the burnt intern’s ribs. She can’t hear a heartbeat—not for certain. But it’s difficult to listen with the sound of the Pests blasting through the subterranean corridors. She hates that her office is down here, near this endless commotion, where the cunning little beasts burrow their tunnels beneath the House of Yog. She wishes that the Janitor would deal with these nuisances once and for all. How can a scientist work under these conditions?

“Shall we try an ECG?” one of the interns asks.

“With haste,” she snaps.

They place the leads on the chest. Her eyes wander to the dull screen above the table, which has forever and always demonstrated one long, flat line.

Her breath catches in her throat.

There’s a flicker on the screen.

Then another. And another. She watches in disbelief as the burnt intern’s heart forms an organized rhythm. It’s not quite sinus—she would be so foolish to except a normal rhythm from a thunderstruck heart—but she’ll settle for this. In a feverish whirlwind, she tears the textbook from the shelf and begins tumbling to the pre-marked pages. A minute later she has confirmed her suspicions.

“Doctors,” she announces in a quiet voice to her underlings. “We have atrial fibrillation.”

A gasp runs through the smattering of interns. One places their stethoscope back on the chest and her eyes widen. “I can hear it!” she says. “It’s shaking like an insect being eaten by a spider!”

They listen. One by one, they approach and listen. Until the cardiologist at last can hear that sweet song of life, lub-a-dub-dub. Dubba dub? Lub! Lublub! It may not be organized, but it’s something! It’s a good start!

The burnt intern has cracked open his one remaining eye. The capillaries have exploded in a sea of blood and his pupil is splotched with cataracts, yet he can surely see something, for he stares at them with a singular look of terror.

“Where am I?” he asks.

“You are in Hell,” said the cardiologist proudly. “But you’re alive! You have a heartbeat!”

“What are you? What are you?” His cracked lips widen into a scream.

The cardiologist points at the monitor and announces breathlessly, “Eureka! It’s tachycardia! Fetch the paddles, Quibbly, we’re going to cardiovert!”

“How do we do that?” asks the intern.

She smiles. “A simple shock.”