severed windpipe and then exhaled again; the little screams of air through the crude reed
of the vocal chords which no longer had a mouth to shape their sounds.
I wanted to run but I had no strength; I fell on my knees beside her on the ice, one hand
cupped to my mouth. A moment later I was aware of fresh blood seeping through the
lower part of her dress – and of movement there. I became suddenly, frenziedly convinced
that there was still a chance to save the baby.
‘Cheap magic!’ I roared into the sleet, and I believe that as I yanked her dress up to her
waist I began laughing. I believe I was mad. Her body was warm. I remember that. I
remember the way it heaved with her breathing. One of the ambulance attendants came
up, weaving like a drunk, one hand clapped to the side of his head. Blood trickled through
his fingers.
‘Cheap magic!’ I screamed again, still laughing, still groping. My hands had found her
fully dilated.
The attendant stared down at Sandra Stansfield’s headless body with wide eyes. I don’t
know if he realized the corpse was still somehow breathing or not Perhaps he thought it
was merely a thing of the nerves – a kind of final reflex action. If he did think such a
thing, he could not have been driving an ambulance long. Chickens may walk around for
a while with their heads cut off, but people only twitch once or twice… if that
‘Stop staring at her and get me a blanket,’ I snapped at him.
He wandered away, but not back towards the ambulance. He was pointed more or less
towards Times Square. He simply walked off into the sleety night. I have no idea what
became of him. I turned back to the dead woman who was somehow not dead, hesitated a
moment, and then stripped off my overcoat. Then I lifted her hips so I could get it under
her. Still I heard that whistle of breath as her headless body did ‘locomotive’ breathing. I
sometimes hear it still, gentlemen. In my dreams.
Please understand that all of this had happened in an extremely short time – it seemed
longer to me, but only because my perceptions had been heightened to a feverish pitch.
People were only beginning to run out of the hospital to see what had happened, and
behind me a woman shrieked as she saw the severed head lying by the edge of the street.
I yanked open my black bag, thanking God I hadn’t lost it in my fall, and pulled out a
short scalpel. I opened it, cut through her underwear, and pulled it off. Now the
ambulance driver approached – he came to within fifteen feet of us and then stopped dead.
I glanced over at him, still wanting that blanket. I wasn’t going to get it from him, I saw;
he was staring down at the breathing body, his eyes widening until it seemed they must
slip from their orbits and simply dangle from their optic nerves like grotesque seeing yo-
yos. Then he dropped to his knees and raised his clasped hands. He meant to pray, I am
quite sure of that. The attendant might not have known he was seeing an impossibility,
but this fellow did. The next moment he had fainted dead away.
I had packed forceps in my bag that night; I don’t know why. I hadn’t used such things
in three years, not since I had seen a doctor I will not name punch through a newborn’s
temple and into the child’s brain with one of those infernal gadgets. The child died instantly. The corpse was ‘lost’ and what went on the death certificate was stillborn. But, for whatever reason, I had them.
Miss Stansfield’s body tightened down, her belly clenching, turning from flesh to
stone. And the baby crowned. I saw the crown for just a moment, bloody and
membranous and pulsing. Pulsing. It was alive, at least then. Definitely alive.
Stone became flesh again. The crown slipped back out of sight. And a voice behind me
said: ‘What can I do, Doctor?’
It was a middle-aged nurse, the sort of woman who is so often the backbone of our
profession. Her face was as pale as milk, and while there was terror and a kind of
superstitious awe on her face as she looked down at that weirdly breathing body, there
was none of that dazed shock which would have made her difficult and dangerous to
work with.
‘You can get me a blanket, stat,’ I said curtly. ‘We’ve still got a chance, I think.’ Behind
her I saw perhaps two dozen people from the hospital standing on the steps, not wanting
to come any closer. How much or how little did they see? I have no way of knowing for
sure. All I know is that I was avoided for days afterwards (and forever by some of them),
and no one, including this nurse, ever spoke to me of it
She now turned and started back towards the hospital.
‘Nurse!’ I called. ‘No time for that. Get one from the ambulance. This baby is coming
now.’
She changed course, slipping and sliding through the slush in her white crepe-soled
shoes. I turned back to Miss Stansfield.
Rather than slowing down, the locomotive breathing had actually begun to speed up …
and then her body turned hard again, locked and straining. The baby crowned again. I
waited for it to slip back but it did not; it simply kept coming. There was no need for the
forceps after ell. The baby all but flew into my hands. I saw the sleet ticking off its naked, bloody body – for it was a boy, his sex unmistakable. I saw steam rising from it as the
black, icy night snatched away the last of its mother’s heat. Its blood-grimed fists waved
feebly; it uttered a thin, wailing cry.
‘Nurse!’ I bawled, ‘move your ass, you bitch!’ It was perhaps inexcusable language, but for a moment I felt I was back in France, that in a few moments the shells would begin to
whistle overhead with a sound like that remorselessly ticking sleet; the machine-guns
would begin their hellish stutter; the Germans would begin to materialize out of the murk,
running and slipping and cursing and dying in the mud and smoke. Cheap magic, I
thought, seeing the bodies twist and turn and fall. But you’re right, Sandra, it’s all we
have. It was the closest I have ever come to losing my mind, gentlemen.
‘NURSE, FOR GOD’S SAKE!’
The baby wailed again – such a tiny, lost sound! – and then it wailed no more. The
steam rising from its skin had thinned to ribbons. I put my mouth against its face,
smelling blood and the bland, damp aroma of placenta. I breathed into its mouth and
heard the jerky sussurrus of its breathing resume. Then the nurse was there, the blanket in
her arms. I held out my hand for it.
She started to give it to me, and then held it back. ‘Doctor, what… what if it’s a
monster? Some kind of monster?’
‘Give me that blanket,’ I said. ‘Give it to me now, Sarge, before I kick your fucking
asshole right up your fucking shoulderblades.’
‘Yes, doctor,’ she said with perfect calmness (we must bless the women, gentlemen,
who so often understand simply by not trying to), and gave me the blanket I wrapped the
child and gave it to her.
‘If you drop him, Sarge, you’ll be eating those stripes.’
‘Yes, doctor.’
‘It’s cheap fucking magic, Sarge, but it’s all God left us with.’
‘Yes, doctor.’
I watched her half-walk, half-run back to the hospital with the child and watched the
crowd on the steps part for her. Then I rose to my feet and backed away from the body. Its
breathing, like the baby’s, hitched and caught… stopped … hitched again … stopped …
I began to back away from it. My foot struck something. I turned. It was her head. And
obeying some directive from outside of me, I dropped to one knee and turned the head
over. The eyes were open – those direct hazel eyes that had always been full of such life
and such determination. They were full of determination still. Gentlemen, she was seeing
me.
Her teeth were clenched, her lips slightly parted. I heard the breath slipping rapidly
back and forth between those lips and through those teeth as she “locomotived”. Her eyes moved; they rolled slightly to the left in their sockets so as to see me better. Her lips
parted. They mouthed four words: Thank you, Doctor McCarron. And I heard them,
gentlemen, but not from her mouth. They came from twenty feet away. From her vocal
cords. And because her tongue and lips and teeth, all of which we use to shape our words,