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Horror
Little Hands, Little Feet
by Kenneth Yu
©2008

White and clean. He preferred his room and everything in it
this way. His pillow, his bed, his sheets. The paint, the
wallpaper, the curtains, the tiling of the floor. A bit of color
burst through here and there: the wooden furniture gleamed a
reflective, lacquered brown; the flowers, delivered fresh every
morning, could not help themselves but be yellow, peach, blue, and
their stems and leaves a deep, mottled green; the TV’s
aluminum-silver casing did not clash in the least, and in any case
he rarely if ever turned it on; but everything else stood out
white and clean. It was a comfort to him. Call him old-fashioned,
but a hospital should be white and clean. If not, well . . .
if his death was all left that lingered, let it come in this room,
his room, white and clean.

Time was, he used to be the one hovering over beds, not lying
in them. Ten years retired, he never thought he would ever have to
return to this hospital
—to any hospital. He had left his long,
successful, twenty-two year practice earlier than he had expected
to, and never looked back. No regrets. A hefty nest-egg tucked
away, with little to worry about except how to live out the rest
of his life. Ten years of doing anything and everything he had
ever wanted to do, or nothing at all. To hell with what
anyone else thought of him.
Then the pain had come and taken over his life, beginning as a
pinprick in the abdomen, turning in a matter of months into a
steady flow of blood and shit flushed down the toilet, and
writhing cramps that he could not banish.
He remembered being tested, but not at a hospital.
Instead, he had desperately sought an appointment at an
out-of-the-way private laboratory.
"It’s the digestive system," one of his old colleagues, still
practicing, had told him after agreeing to review his X-rays,
MRI’s, chemistry. "Stage three, going four. We can still give
treatment a try. We should."
"That would mean . . .,"
"We’ll need to do this in Radiology. At the hospital."
"No."
"I insist."
"No."
"What’s that saying we first learned in med-school, as froshes? ‘Doctors make the worst patients. ’"
"No."
"Come on. The hospital bought the latest equipment, just last
year. They don’t have that here. This place doesn’t even have
rooms."
He had held his ground and refused, that day. As the patient,
he knew his prerogative. But the following week the pain had
intensified, had taken him by the gut and beaten him down into
tearful submission. With pride
stripped and blood from his
rectum leaving a trail on the floor from bathroom to telephone, he
had made the call and agreed to be brought in.
"I’ll send the ambulance over for you," his colleague had told
him. "We’ll have you confined straight away so we can start
treatment."
Confined. While waiting to be picked up he had ample time
to reflect on the meaning of the word.
When they wheeled him into the hospital, the horror that had
welled from his heart almost killed him right then and there, even
before the cancer could. He didn’t sleep a wink, that first night.
But as his treatment progressed over the weeks, as his hair fell
out and his body shriveled, as his pain dimmed into palpable
fatigue, the uneventful regularity of daily routine overcame
everything else. Only then did his fear subside.
Now, lying alone in an uncomfortable and narrow hospital bed,
he realized wryly that though he no longer felt afraid, all that
remained to him was a steadily depleting bank account, and a
white, clean room.
Outside, the sun sank slowly into the horizon. On cue, the door
to his room opened and a nurse in an impeccably white uniform
entered. She smiled at him and crossed in front of his bed to the
windows. On his instructions for the end of each day, she
drew the white curtains shut with a pull on the drawstrings.
"Would you like the TV on, sir?" she asked.
"No, thank you," he answered, so she turned to leave.
He reached for a button on the control panel by his bed and
flicked it, switching on all the fluorescents, bathing the room in
soulless, antiseptic, white light.
The nurse, halfway out the door, paused, as if deciding on a
course of action. Having chosen, she turned to face him.
"Sir," she said, "I must say something."
From his propped up position on his pillow, he moved his head
to face her.
"Others in the hospital have told me who you are, and what you
did when you were still a practicing doctor. If not for people
like you, sir, we women would have had no choice. Sir, I just want
to say . . . thank you."
The nurse left. The door swung shut with a gentle click of the
knob’s latch. He lay back on his pillow and stared blankly
at the ceiling.
The price I have to pay, he used to say to himself when he was
younger; and with a nonchalant smile and a proud shrug of
acceptance, no less. But he had had to keep on paying it, over and
over again, until the pressure foisted on him nearly drove him
mad. Those who approved of what he had done were easier to deal
with. In fact, he used to welcome them, though not for decades. He
had grown tired of being their hero, their poster-boy, their
messiah. Now, he saw them all for what they really were: fanatics.
They were all the same, even those who hated him. He wished
they would all just go to hell and leave him alone.
To his surprise, the scar on his arm ached suddenly.
He had acquired that scar in the prime of his career, in the
years when he had made the largest part of his fortune. A
fanatic
—the non-approving kind—had cut at him with a knife one
morning as he had stepped out of his car.
If his reflexes
had been a tad slower he would be dead now, an alternative that,
when weighed against his current state, he found ironically
preferable.
"You murdering sonofabitch!" his attacker had screamed before
coming at him from his hiding place behind the neighboring
vehicle. Fortunately, his curses had provided sufficient warning.
He blocked the first slash with a reflexive sweep of his arm, felt
the blade cut through sleeve and skin. But even while hurt
it was easy enough to keep his large briefcase between him and the
fanatic
—the
lunatic—until
security could rush over to save him.
"You abortionists are all murderers!" his attacker had shouted
as he was being cuffed, the gleaming, giant crucifix around his
neck dangling on its gold chain like an insult.
"What about you?" The pain in his arm had spoken for him when
his mind had known silence would’ve been best. "You wanted to kill
me! That makes you a murderer too!"
"You can defend yourself!" the man had spat back. "They can’t!
God reserves a place in hell for baby-killers like you!"
"Tell your fucking God I’ll see him there!"
That statement had renewed his attacker’s fury, had made him
foam at the mouth and come at him again screaming incoherently,
but Security had a firm hold of him. He had watched with
pleasure as they hauled him, cursing and frustrated, away.
When his arm had healed he wore his scar proudly, and resumed
his work with renewed fervor. From then on, whenever he took
up his scalpel, his attacker’s face filled his mind.
"Cut me, will you?" he had thought as he sliced through flesh,
any flesh. "I’ll do the cutting around here."
The ache in his arm grew. He moaned. Why should it hurt now?
His brother and sister-in-law said they would visit tonight.
He hoped the pain would subside before they arrived.
He raised his head, looking to his bedside table for his water
glass. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw something beside his
aching arm that shouldn’t be there. With the surge and power
of an erupting volcano, his subdued fear exploded from the pit of
his gut to choke him like thick smoke.
The bed sheets were no longer white; they were stained red,
with blood, damp with it, glistening. Beside his prone form a
fetus, slick with placenta and mucus, considered him with a steady
gaze. It sat upright on the bed like a miniature person, studying
him with eyes that shouldn’t be able to focus, shouldn’t even be
open. Its skin was pock-marked and wounded, like it had been
prodded many times by a sharp, pointed instrument.
"Haah . . ."
His throat made a helpless sound. Filled with the sudden
strength brought on by panic, he pushed away from the fetus with
his legs. He bumped hard into his bedside table, tipping
everything on it onto the floor. His water glass fell and
shattered. With his good arm he reached for the call button
and pressed it madly.
I don’t believe what I’m seeing, he thought, hoping that his
mental defiance might make it disappear, but it did not.
The fetus remained, appraising him.
The same nurse who had drawn the curtains entered the room.
She took one look at his panicked state and called back down the
corridor for help before rushing in.
She grabbed him by the shoulders. "Doctor! Sir!" she said, but
the new fear had given him an adrenaline surge. He tried to force
himself off the bed while she tried desperately to hold him down.
His eyes never left the bloody fetus.
"Don’t you see it?" he screamed. She turned to where the old
man’s eyes were riveted but all she saw were bed sheets, white and
clean, if rumpled. "Calm down, please!" she said, ignoring
his ravings.
A beefy male orderly entered the room and moved to help the
nurse. Following him was an older couple, his visiting brother and
sister-in-law, both of whom had confusion etched on their faces.
"What’s happening?" they said together.
The orderly ran to the side of the bed where the fetus was, but
like the nurse he acted as if the bloody thing wasn’t there.
Completely ignoring it, passing through it, he reached across with
his strong arms and hefted the patient’s frail body back to the
middle of the bed.
"You! I know you!" he said, hysterical. Everyone in the room
paused to look at each other. Who was he talking to?
"It’s you! I know you!" he repeated to the same empty
spot on the bed.
Though he wished he could, and had spent his ten years of
retirement trying to do so, he never forgot the events of his last
day as a doctor. Alone in the lab, checking a patient’s tests, he
had looked up from his clipboard and caught sight of a specimen
jar on one of the shelves. Inside the jar a fetus, premature
and stillborn, floating in a murky, formaldehyde solution, had
shocked him by turning its head to him suddenly, blinking its
eyes, pressing its small hands up against the glass as if to reach
for him.
He had stumbled out of the lab in a cold sweat, leaning against
the wall for support. A passing intern had expressed concern, but
he had kept enough of his self-control to bark that he was all
right. He had stuck his head back into the lab to see if he had
been imagining things, and discovered that he had not. Upon
catching sight of him, the fetus had shifted its body in his
direction and reached out for him again.
That afternoon, he had quit medicine for good. There had
been enough money in the bank, after all.
He couldn’t move his scarred arm. It ached worse than ever. The
fetus
—was it smiling?—took one of his fingers into its own
small hand. From its touch a chill traveled up his arm and
through the rest of his body.
"Time to go," it seemed to say. "We’re here to bring you with
us."
He rolled his eyes around the room and more fetuses appeared,
of different sizes, races, stages of growth, of injury or
deformity, all drenched in blood. They were on the sofa, the
floor, his bed, in the air dripping, all around. His room was no
longer white and clean. Blood covered everything, its metallic
tang assaulting his nose. Gone from his vision were the nurse and
the orderly, his brother and his brother’s wife. Only those
things existed, bloody cherubim come for him.
"Call the attending . . .," the nurse ordered when she felt his body
turn rigid and cold in her grip. "I don’t know what’s happening!" His brother and his wife watched on in helpless fear.
The orderly ran out the room.
His vision dimmed, his consciousness faded. He could hear
nothing but his heart echoing in his inner ear, a dying drumbeat.
He died, his eyes rolling up into his forehead, saliva
dribbling from his open mouth.
***
The nurse pulled away, jerking back from his body. She saw
blood all over him, all over her uniform and hands. She licked her
lips and the taste of blood on her tongue made her gag. There were
thick pools of it on the floor, and countless small, bloody
footprints and handprints on the curtains,
the walls, and the
ceiling. At first, she doubted her eyes and thought she was
hallucinating, but the expression on the faces of the old couple
told her that they saw what she saw.
It lasted for only a few, brief seconds. Then the room
was once more what it was, what it had always been, white and
clean.
The orderly returned with the attending resident and a
stretcher; but the former doctor, the patient, was gone.

~ Kenneth Yu,
The Philippines
©2008
By day, Kenneth is a general
manager of a small printing press in the Philippines.
He spends his free time either reading books of various
topics and subjects, or writing. Being a reading
advocate, he is also the publisher of a small Philippine
magazine called, The Digest of Philippine Genre
Stories, which publishes genre fiction targeted at
young Philippine readers, with the goal of getting young
people in my country into reading.
This marks his second
publication in the US. His light-hearted sci-fi piece,
House 1.0, was published in The Town Drunk,
in 2007.