Pax stood immobilized and bewildered by what he had witnessed, which was not good. Whether ambushed or leading a planned assault, he was always quick to respond to events, not the least reluctant to change strategy and tactics. Considered action was always better than considered inaction, but you had to have something to consider, hard facts and a set of circumstances that allowed commonsense analysis. He knew that the face of this beloved woman bore the marks of a beating, not evidence of disease. Having tracked down some of the worst psychopaths who had made the news in the past several years, trailing in the wake of evil, Pax had seen enough women and men after they had been beaten to extract information from them, to teach them to fear the new boss, and just for the pleasure of violence. He knew what he was looking at, and he yearned—with an adolescent passion for vengeance and with a grown man’s loathing of cruelty—to find and kill whoever had done this to Bibi. One big problem. Anyone not present for the flowering of the stigmata might think him insane if he gave voice to the thought, but the perpetrator seemed to be a ghost that attacked her in some realm to which Pax had no access, an Elsewhere that she at the moment occupied in addition to this world of her birth.
The shift supervisor, Julia, fortyish and pumped, with the glow and stride of a fitness fanatic, bustled into the room, received a report from Petronella, and regarded Pax with evident suspicion, no doubt because of his size but also because of the thunderstorm of an expression that had occupied his face since he had watched Bibi bleed and bruise. Any doubt that Julia might have had about Petronella’s incredible story evaporated when she took a closer look at Bibi’s injuries and saw that they were not fresh. She had been in the room less than an hour earlier, to reset the cardiac monitor when an alarm sounded for no good reason, which happened from time to time; and on that visit, Bibi’s face had been unmarked.
No less mystified than the rest of them, Julia nevertheless had the priorities of a good manager in this age of endless litigation. She wanted everyone to remain where they were until she could get the chief of hospital security to film interviews with them in situ. Nancy’s misplaced anger flared, but Murphy quickly soothed her, and Julia promised to return in ten minutes.
In the absence of the shift supervisor, the conversation did not become as animated as Pax expected. The four of them had been witness to an extraordinary event, and although they had seen precisely the same thing from the same angle, the normal human tendency in the face of the unknown was to rehash the experience until the life had been talked out of it, until they had spun off into a confabulation about such tenuously related subjects as UFOs, Bigfoot, and poltergeists. Perhaps they were constrained by the fact that Bibi’s life, already being stolen from her by brain cancer, suddenly appeared to be in even more immediate jeopardy from an enemy unknown and, for the moment, seemingly unknowable. What little they said to one another was less speculation than words of comfort, and their attention was less on one another than on the dear girl in the bed, to whom some other injury might at any moment be inflicted by a phantom presence.
Keeping her promise to the minute, Julia returned with the chief of hospital security, a former homicide detective who had retired in his early fifties to begin a second and less risky career. He was a white-haired long-faced large-boned figure with a natural dignity that might have made him seem less like a cop than like a judge, if judges these days had still been as reliably dignified as they had once been. His name was Edgar Alwine. He introduced himself to Nancy and Murphy and Pax, repeating his name and title to each, as if they could hear him only when addressed directly eye to eye. His handshake was firm, his manner warm, and Pax liked the guy.
Alwine asked Nancy and Murphy for permission to record close-ups of their daughter’s facial injuries, assuring them that the images would remain part of her file, not to be distributed beyond a limited number of the medical staff. He’d hardly begun to operate the camera, however, when he exclaimed at something, and everyone crowded around the bed to witness another inexplicable blackening of Bibi’s body, captured this time on film as it occurred.
This time Bibi’s face did not serve as the canvas, and the medium of disfigurement wasn’t bruising and abrasion. Her arms lay at length above the top sheet and thin blanket. The right sleeve of her pajamas was rucked up halfway to her elbow. On her bared forearm, about two inches above her wrist bones, neatly formed black letters began to appear one at a time, as if her skin were parchment on which an invisible penman were printing his brand, to lay claim to her, body and soul. Although the words included no curse or demonic name, the crisp black letters appeared one after the other with such implacable intent that they could be regarded only as an ominous sign, no matter what their ultimate meaning might prove to be.
Murphy cringed from this inexplicable imprinting as if the message were being carved into his daughter’s flesh with a knife, turning away repeatedly only to look back again each time, saying “This is wrong, wrong, this is wrong.”
Against fear, anger was an inadequate defense, and Nancy could no longer sustain it. At the foot of the bed again, she stood aghast, robbed of the power to move or speak, transfixed by the manifesting letters, as if they would spell out both her daughter’s doom and her own.
Pax hoped to hear Bibi’s voice in his mind’s ear as before, even if it might be as enigmatic as on the two previous occasions. But as the first two lines on her forearm completed a name, and as a third line began to form, he heard nothing except expressions of amazement from the two nurses. And from Edgar Alwine, an observation: “It’s a tattoo, isn’t it? A very simple tattoo, perhaps poorly removed by laser and now resurfacing. Is that possible?”