Dean Koontz - From the Corner of His Eye

“No one is famous in the next world, nor glamorous, nor titled, nor proud,” she said, smiling as she quoted one of their father's most familiar sermons, “nor powerful-"

— nor cruel, nor hateful, nor envious, nor mean,” Phimie recited, “for all these are sicknesses of this fallen world-"

— and now when the offering plate passes among you-"

"—give as if you are already an enlightened citizen of the next life-"

"-and not a hypocritical, pitiful-"

"-penny-pinching-"

"—possessive—"

"—Pecksniff of this sorry world."

They laughed and held hands. For the first time since Phimie's panicked phone call from Oregon, Celestina felt that everything would eventually be all right again.

Minutes later, once more in a corridor conference with Dr. Daines, she was forced to temper her new optimism.

Phimie's stubbornly high blood pressure, the presence of protein in her urine, and other symptoms indicated her preeclampsia wasn't a recent development; she was at increased risk of eclampsia. Her hypertension was gradually coming under control-but only by resort to more aggressive drug therapy than the physician preferred to use.

“In addition,” Daines said, “her pelvis is small, which would present problems of delivery even in an ordinary pregnancy. And the muscle fibers in the central canal of her cervix, which ought to be softening in anticipation of labor, are still tough. I don't believe the cervix will dilate well enough to facilitate birth."

“The baby?"

“There's no clear evidence of birth defects, but a couple tests reveal some worrisome anomalies. We'll know when we see the child."

A stab of horror punctured Celestina as she failed to repress a mental image of a carnival-sideshow monster, half dragon and half insect, coiled in her sister's womb. She hated the rapist's child but was appalled by her hatred, for the baby was blameless.

“If her blood pressure stabilizes through the night,” Dr. Daines continued, “I want her to undergo a cesarean at seven in the morning. The danger of eclampsia passes entirely after birth. I'd like to refer Phimie to Dr. Aaron Kaltenbach. He's a superb obstetrician."

“Of course."

In this case, I'll also be present during the procedure."

I'm grateful for that, Dr. Daines. For all you've done."

Celestina was hardly more than a child herself, pretending to have the strong shoulders and the breadth of experience to bear this burden. She felt half crushed “Go home. Sleep,” he said. “You'll be no help to your sister if you wind up a patient here yourself."

She remained with Phimie through dinner.

The girl's appetite was sharp, even though the food was soft and bland. Soon, she slept.

At home, after phoning her folks, Celestina made a ham sandwich. She ate a quarter of it. Then two bites of a chocolate croissant. One spoonful of butter pecan ice cream. Everything was without taste, more bland than Phimie's hospital food, and it cloyed in her throat.

Fully clothed, she lay atop the bedspread. She intended to listen to a little classical music before brushing her teeth..

She realized she hadn't turned on the radio. Before she could reach for the switch, she was asleep.

Four-fifteen in the morning, January 7.

In southern California, Agnes Lampion dreams of her newborn son. In Oregon, Junior Cain fearfully speaks a name in his sleep, and Detective Vanadium, waiting to tell the suspect about his dead wife's diary, leans forward in his chair to listen, while ceaselessly- turning a quarter across the thick knuckles of his right hand.

In San Francisco, a telephone rang.

Rolling onto her side, fumbling in the dark, Celestina White snared the phone on the third ring. Her hello was also a yawn.

“Come now,” said a woman with a frail voice.

Still half asleep, Celestina asked, “What?"

“Come now. Come quickly."

“Who's this?"

“Nella Lombardi. Come now. Your sister will soon be dying."

Abruptly alert, sitting up on the edge of the bed, Celestina knew the caller could not be the comatose old woman, so she said angrily, “Who the hell is this?"

The silence on the line was not merely that of a caller holding her tongue. It was abyssal and perfect, as no silence on a telephone ever can be, without the faintest hiss or crackle of static, no hint of breathing or of breath held.

The depth of this soundless void chilled Celestina. She dared not speak again, because suddenly and superstitiously, she feared this silence as though it were a living thing capable of coming at her through the line.

She hung up, shot out of bed, snatched her leather jacket off one of the two chairs at the small kitchen table, grabbed her keys and purse, and ran.

Outside, the sounds of the night town-the growl of a few car engines in the nearly deserted streets, the hard clank of a loose manhole cover shifting under tires, a distant siren, the laughter of drunken revelers wending their way home from an all-night party-were muffled by a shroud of silver fog.

These were familiar noises, and yet to Celestina, the city was an alien place, as it had never seemed before, full of menace, the buildings looming like great crypts or temples to unknown and fierce gods. The drunken laughter of the unseen partyers slithered eerily through the mist, not the sound of mirth but of madness and torment.

She didn't own a car, and the hospital was a twenty-five-minute walk from her apartment. Praying that a taxi would cruise past, she ran, and although no cab appeared in answer to her prayer, Celestina reached St. Mary's breathless, in little more than fifteen minutes.

The elevator creaked upward, infuriatingly slower than she remembered.

Her hard-drawn breath was loud in this claustrophobic space.

On the dark side of dawn, the seventh-floor corridors were quiet, deserted. The air was redolent of pine-scented disinfectant.

The door to Room 724 stood open. Lights blazed.

Both Phimie and Nella were gone. A nurse's aide was almost finished changing the linens on the old woman's bed. Phimie's bedclothe's were in disarray.

“Where's my sister?” Celestina gasped.

The aide looked up from her work, startled.

When a hand touched her shoulder, Celestina swiveled to face a nun with ruddy cheeks and twilight-blue eyes that would now and forever be the color of bad news. “I didn't know they'd been able to reach you. They only started trying ten minutes ago."

At least twenty minutes had passed since the call from Nella Lombardi.

“Where's Phimie?"

“Quickly,” the nun said, shepherding her along the hall to the elevators.

“What's happened?"

As they dropped toward the surgical floor, the solemn sister said, “Another hypertensive crisis.

The poor girl's blood pressure soared in spite of the medication. She suffered a violent seizure, eclamptic convulsions."

“Oh, God."

“She's in surgery now. Cesarean section."

Celestina expected to be taken to a waiting room, but instead the nun escorted her to surgical prep.

“I'm Sister Josephina.” She slipped Celestina's purse off her shoulder—“You can trust this with me”-and helped her out of her jacket.

A nurse in surgical greens appeared. “Pull up the sleeves of your scrub nearly to your elbows. Scrub hard. I'll tell you when to stop."

As the nurse slapped a bar of lye soap in Celestina's right hand, she turned on the water in the sink.

As luck would have it,” the nun said, “Dr. Lipscomb was in the when it happened. He'd just delivered another baby under emergency conditions. He's excellent."

“How's Phimie?” Celestina asked, scrubbing fiercely at her hands and forearms.

“Dr. Lipscomb delivered the baby like two minutes ago. The afterbirth hasn't even been removed yet,” the nurse informed her.