He knew that Eleanor feared him when he was in this mood—black and challenging and itching for a fight. But ever since the Crimea, this dark side had been brewing in him, as inescapable and ungovernable as a shadow.
“I can’t imagine more suitable accommodations,” he said. He looked all around, then spotted a door with great black hinges behind the altar. The rectory, he wondered? His black boots ringing on the stony pavement, he walked around the side of the altar—littered, he could see, with ancient rat feces—and pushed it open. Inside, he saw a small room, with one square window covered by a pair of shutters. It was furnished with a few sticks of furniture—a table, a chair, a cot, whose blanket was rolled up in a ball at its foot…and a cast-iron stove. Dismal as it was, it was as if he had just stumbled into the drawing room at the Longchamps Club, and he could barely wait to show it to Eleanor.
“Come along!” he shouted. “We’ve got our suite for the night.”
Eleanor clearly didn’t like coming so close to the altar, but she also didn’t want to cross Sinclair. She came to the door and peered in; he threw his arm around her shoulders and held her tight. “I’ll get the things from the sled, and we’ll see what we can make of this, eh?”
Alone, Eleanor stepped to the window, parted the shutters, and looked out—a strong wind was blowing the snow across an icy plain, dotted with several more tombstones, most of them toppled and broken. On the far horizon, a ridge of mountains lay like the jagged spine of a reclining beast. There was nothing in any of it to greet the eye, or lift the spirit, or offer even a scintilla of hope; in short, there was nothing to persuade her that this was anything other than a panorama of damnation, lighted forever by a cold dead sun.
The wind rose even higher, whistling in the eaves of the church and rattling the very walls.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
December 13, 9:30 p.m.
“JUST HOLD THE BANDAGE,” Charlotte ordered. “Just hold it in place!”
Michael pressed it to Danzig’s throat—blood was still seeping through—as she cut off the end of the sutures and dropped her scissors into the pan.
“And keep an eye on his blood pressure!”
Michael watched the monitor—the pressure was low, and dropping all the time.
From the moment she had rushed into the kennel, Charlotte’s hands had never stopped moving with rapidity and assurance. She had bent over the gasping Danzig, and with her own fingers, closed the gaping hole in his throat. At the infirmary, she had inserted a breathing tube, anesthetized him, stitched the wound, and was now inserting an IV, to give him a transfusion.
“Is he going to make it?” Michael asked, not sure if he really wanted to know the answer.
“I don’t know. He’s lost a lot of blood—his jugular was severed—and his windpipe’s damaged, too.” She hung the plasma bag on the rod and, after making sure it was working, readied a syringe. “I told Murphy to call for assistance. He needs a lot more help than we can give him here.”
“What’s the shot for? Rabies?” The bandage he held was damp and stained a deep pink.
“Tetanus,” she said, holding it up to the light and tamping on the plunger. “We don’t even have rabies vaccine down here. But then, there aren’t supposed to be any dogs, either.”
She administered the shot, but before she had even withdrawn the needle, there was a mad beeping from the BP and EKG monitors.
“Oh, shit,” she said, tossing the used needle into the sink and ripping open a cabinet on the wall behind her. “He’s crashing!”
An ominously steady tone filled the room.
She charged the defibrillator pads—something Michael had seen done on a dozen medical shows on TV—then applied them to the barrel of Danzig’s hairy chest. His flannel shirt had been cut away, and the skin was orange from a coat of mercurochrome. One of the pads landed on a tattoo—the head of a husky—and Michael wondered if it was supposed to be Kodiak. Charlotte counted to three, yelled, “Clear!” then pressed the pads down while the sudden charge made the body jump. Danzig’s head went back, and his body arched upward.
But the monitors kept up their steady drone.
Again she yelled, “Clear!” While Michael hovered a foot away, she hit Danzig with another charge. The body jerked again…but the lines on the blue screens stayed flat. Several of the stitches had popped.
Breathing hard, her braids hanging down beside her face, she tried it one more time—there was the faint smell of barbecued meat in the room—but nothing changed. The body flattened out again, and lay perfectly still. Blood seeped slowly from his torn neck and Michael had nothing to sop it up with.
Charlotte mopped her brow with the back of her sleeve, glanced one more time at the monitors, then fell back onto the stool behind her, her shoulders slumped, her face wet with sweat. Michael waited—what were they supposed to do next? Surely this couldn’t be it.
“Should I pump his heart?” he said, rising from his own stool and placing his hands above Danzig’s chest.