Journals of Eleanor Druse, The (Digital Picture Book) Read Free Page B

scent of alcohol on his breath, despite his attempt to speak out of the far side of his mouth.
    “Morning, ma’am,” he said. He did his best to look alert and steered the lamplight away from his red eyes.
    I looked into the dark room for some sign of Madeline.
    The orderly guided the dim beam of his reading light carefully into the darkness, first finding the foot of the bed and then slowly ascending to reveal the silhouette of the patient’s feet under the bedding. The head of the bed was raised and facing us, but shrouded in darkness.
    “She’s been asleep for an hour or so,” he said softly, “but she’s restless. If you stick around she’ll probably wake up and start talking about you and the little girl again.”
    “What little girl?” I asked.
    He shrugged. “She’s not making much sense. Why don’t you have a listen and see if you can tell what she’s talking about?”
    The nurse and I went ahead of the beam and into the room, and just as we did so, Mr. Charron’s shaky hand must have lost its grip on the lamp cover, for the beam of its light fell full onto Mrs. Kruger’s torso and face.
    On earth as it is in hell, may I never see such a death’s-head again. Madeline’s face was locked open in a rictus of stark terror, staring straight ahead as if into damnation’s gate. Her gaping mouth and bulging eyes left no doubt about whether it’s possible to literally die of fright. Some ghastly specter like the basilisks of old had killed her with a glance. Her head was thrown back, her palms up, open as if to receive the stigmata, which she had apparently inflicted with an ice pick, still loosely held in one bloody hand.
    Nurse Werling and I cried out and came near death ourselves, shaking, unable to breathe. We clutched at each other like scared little girls and held on, afraid one of us might run away and leave the other alone in this chamber with such a frightful corpse.
    There was another more terrifying complication.
    The wound she’d made in her throat gaped open like a second mouth, and boiling from that ugly gash were seething masses of black ants. Ants had likewise erupted from the gashes in her wrists and had eaten away the edges of her skin, streaming furiously in and out of her suppurating wounds, as if the entirety of her lifeless body had been colonized by vast swarming black armies.
    I heard harsh laughter coming in from the hallway.
    I knew that voice. It was the old man who’d come for his pills at the nurses’ station.
    Do you wanna know what love is?

NEAR DEATH
PILLARS OF SALT
    WHEN HUMAN INTELLIGENCE IS suddenly confronted by the supernatural, death (the purest of all epiphanies) may be instantaneous. Certain prodigies, wonders, abominations, monstrosities, freaks of nature, angels, demons, and other supernatural leaks into the material world are too much for us mere mortals to see. Such were Medusa and the serpent-haired gorgone Aeschylus wrote of, whom none could look upon without perishing. If we do not avert our eyes in time, we die.
    Sometimes instead of dying instantly from fright or shock, we may survive the initial horror and astonishment, only to slowly waste away in the thrall of some terrible or numinous image burned onto the faceplate of memory, a single fixed idea. Beauty only the first touch of terror we can still bear, and all that. The great Borges wrote of the Zahir, which in Arabic means notorious and visible (one of the ninety-nine names of God). In Muslim countries, the Zahir also refers to beings or things that possess the terrible quality of being unforgettable and whose image finally drives people mad. It’s as if the Zahir or some other unforgettable fiend infects the mind with a frightful fixation more hideous than its original shape, and memory suckles it along to a fatal obsession that in the end turns and devours the mind that fed it. Death comes because we forsake the entire universe for one autochthonous idea.
    Madeline Kruger’s ant-infested corpse