The Blackstone Chronicles - By John Saul Page 0,63

the doctor.

As yet another contraction racked her body, she begged them to give her something for the pain, but they only went about their work, ignoring her pleas. “It’s not an operation,” the doctor curtly told her. “You don’t need anything.”

Her labor intensified, and then she was screaming, and thrashing against the restraints that held her strapped to the gurney. It seemed to go on forever, wave after wave of pain so intense she was certain she would pass out, until, with one last agonizing spasm, she felt the baby slip from her body.

She lay gasping, trying to catch her breath, her exhausted body still at last. Then she heard it: a tiny, helpless cry. Her baby, the baby for whom she had endured unimaginable pain, was crying out to her.

“Let me see it,” she whispered. “Let me hold my baby.”

The doctor, his back to her, handed something to the nurse. “It’s better you don’t,” he said. “Better for both of you.”

The nurse left the room, and she heard her baby’s wails fade away into the distance.

“No!” she cried out, but her voice was pitifully weak. “I have to see my baby! I have to hold it!”

The doctor finally looked at her. “I’m afraid I can’t let you do that. It would only make it much harder for you.”

She blinked. Harder? What was he talking about? “I—I don’t understand—”

“If you don’t see it, you won’t miss it nearly as much.”

“Miss it?” she echoed. “What are you talking about? Please! My baby—”

“But it’s not your baby,” the doctor said as if talking to a small child. “It’s being given up for adoption, so it’s better that you not see it at all.”

“Adoption?” she echoed. “But I don’t want to give—”

“What you want doesn’t matter,” the doctor informed her. “The decision has been made.”

Now a new kind of pain flooded over her—not the sharp pangs of the contractions, which, as violently as they’d seized her body, had quickly dissipated. This was a dull ache that she felt taking root deep within her, which she knew was never going to fade—a spreading coldness that would grow inside her cancerously, filling her with despair, slowly consuming her, leaving her no avenue of escape. She could already feel it uncoiling inside her, and someday, she knew, there would be nothing left of her at all.

There would be nothing left but the pain of knowing that somewhere there was a baby who belonged to her, whom she would never nurse, never hold, never see.

Left alone in the operating room under the cold, merciless lights, she began to cry.

No one came to comfort her.

When she awakened the next morning, she was back in her room, and though her blanket was wrapped close around her, it did nothing to protect her from the icy chill that had spread through her body.

Though she felt utterly exhausted, something drew her from her bed to the window. The landscape beyond the bars was no less bleak than the Asylum’s interior: naked gray branches clawed at a leaden sky. Only a wisp of smoke that curled from the chimney of the incinerator behind the Asylum’s main building disturbed the cold, silent morning. She was about to turn away when a movement caught her eye—a nurse and an orderly emerging from the Asylum and walking toward the incinerator. It was the same nurse who had been in the operating room yesterday, and the orderly was one of the two who had strapped her to the gurney.

The nurse was carrying an object wrapped in what looked like a small blanket, and even though she could see nothing of what was hidden within the blanket’s folds, she knew what it was.

Her baby.

They weren’t putting it up for adoption at all.

She wanted to turn away from the window, but something held her there, some need to see exactly what was going to happen, even though the scene had already played itself out in her mind. In the next few moments, as she stood shivering with cold and desperate fear, the scene she had just imagined unfolded before her eyes:

The orderly opened the access port of the incinerator, and the flames within the combustion chamber suddenly flared, tongues of fire licking hungrily at the iron lips of the door. As she watched, the nurse unfolded the blanket.

She beheld the pale, still form of the child she’d brought into the world only the day before.

A scream of anguish built in her throat, erupting in an agonized wail as