PART 1: The Doctor
PART 1: The Doctor
“She’s already dead Omri. The sickness has spread too far for amputation, and her body has rejected all forms of remedy I have. By dawn the disease will have run its course… I’m sorry, there’s nothing more I can do.”
Omri remained still, his glossy eyes fixed on the terribly dark blood leaking into the bowl on the floor. Each drop, another second closer of the irreversible end to the hourglass of thick crimson sand falling from his wife’s wrist. What was once young and indescribably beautiful. His blossom of joy and life. Now lay motionless in the stench of decay under the dimly lit candles. A hatful reminder of his ever-beloved lilac. His Lila. Her darkened eyes, receding in her skull, stared blankly at the ceiling above. Giving no indication that she still inhabited her shell beneath the animal skinned sheets.
“Why.”
Omri breathed out of his tightly clenched jaw, his gaze glued on his wife’s slowly draining body.
“Uh-um, w-well because of an imbalance in her humerus. Her body is simply overrun with bad air. I’ve been attempting to let it out through her wrists and the base of her head but it simply-”
“Why her and not me…” Omri said, interrupting the plague doctor. “How can it be that this sickness takes her and leaves a man like me untouched?”
“Who’s to say?” The plague doctor said removing his course leather gloves, drenched in the woman’s blood. “Perhaps the imbalance of bad air and yellow bile has been released and can do no further harm. Perhaps her body does not retain the same strength as yours. Perhaps this is a punishment from God, for some unknown sin. All semantics I’m afraid. She will be dead by the break of dawn, and you will remain untouched from its effects. That is all that is.”
Omri stood from his stool and made his way over to the soon to be corpse. He lifted a cloth soaked in vinegar to his nostrils in an attempt to mask the pungent odor of the sheets his wife had soiled the last few days. With the other hand he placed it on her sunken cheek. She felt cold, too cold. His large hand wrapped around her balding head, mistakenly slipping one of his fingers in a hole drilled into the back of his wife’s skull. It was nearly impossible to see how the figure before him was ever human in our sense of the word. And still, the tenderness he had for her never wavered.
“Is there nothing that can be done?”
“Omri, go home to your child. There isn’t an apothecary in all the world that can reverse what has occurred.”
“Icarus please! I’m not talking about apothecaries, herbs, or means of modern medicine that came from the ill-born stem of a garden plant! I could have received all the best care of ALL the physicians from the king’s own court if I-so-wanted! You’ve known why I’m here… And yet you play games and carry on like the others. I came, for you. I’m here for it. And you think I’d be content to sit here and watch, as you mutilate my wife’s body like those other damned fools? You’ve always known what I wanted.”
The plague doctor lowered himself into a mangled wooden chair in one exhausted motion. Grabbing the beak of his long-pointed mask, he lifted it from his face revealing a tired scowl directed toward the ground. He wiped the sweat and bits of crushed barley from his face and replied carefully.
“What use is adding the living to the dead. You will sooner join your wife in the afterlife than save her from the inevitable.”
“Either you give me what I want… Or I reunite with her by my own means. And give you a more formal introduction to her.”
The plague doctor did not look up to meet the ever-intensifying gaze in the eyes of Omri. He instead drifted his gaze over to his desk and he remained silent for a while before answering.
“You’ll be excommunicated as well…” The plague doctor warned with an ominous voice.
“If you can bear the burden how much more can I-”
“I’m not talking about the god forsaken church, a committee of unintelligible inbred physicians, or your pointless warmongering military generals.” The doctor interrupted with a scolding; his vision still fixated on the desk as his gaze hardened.
“Excommunicated by whom?”
“By God.” The doctor stood from his chair turning his back towards Omri peering down at his desk in displeasure. “’We forget that we are all dead men, conversing with dead men.’”
Omri looked at him perplexed by the doctor’s remarks.
“What do you know?” Said the doctor finally breaking his gaze from the desk now looking directly at Omri. This was the first time he had seen the doctor without his mask, and despite his relatively average features of your run of the mill elderly doctor, one pivotal feature stood out. His eyes. Dark eyes. Eyes like two shimmering spheres of obsidian deep like the abyss of the night sky. In their centers, instead of pupils, lay hot glowing orbs with flickering shades of vibrant orange like fire in a sea of black. The captivating oddity of these eyes seemed to render the remnant of his body obsolete.
“Icarus. I know that you had found what was cursed beyond the understanding of men. Something that could bring life…”
“And death.” The doctor added.
“... Yes… And death.” Omri replied with hesitation in his tone.
“Are you frightened, Omri?”
“... No.” He said in a confused, obviously expecting an explanation for the balls of fire he was gazing into.
“Your courage is your own demise then.” The doctor reached for a half-eaten apple on his desk and tossed it over to Omri.
“The stories you heard are true. I did find it. The key.”
“To life?”
“Whatever you Desire.”
“... What must I do?”
“The forbidden caves of the eastern trail mountains. Climb them. Before you get to the top you will find a cave with two markings on either side. Take a bite of the apple, then enter. Not before and not after. Only when you have reached the threshold. The monster of the cave will greet you when you enter. Defeat him and your Desire is yours.”
“What else am I missing?” Omri asked as he attempted to gauge the expressions on the doctor’s face for hints of deception.
“Why must it be more complicated than this? You make a gamble. Your life for your Desire. None survive his blade.”
Omri turned to his wife’s severely atrophied body. A shell of the woman with whom he had once shared a life, a home, a family. He knew the love that burned inside his heart could not be so easily buried alongside her. In the weeks that lead up to her death, Omri’s face had been a mess of tears. Sorrow for the life that was, and that would be no more. The agony that comes along with the inability to do anything as he watched the woman he loved suffer before his eyes. Sadness that came with the understanding that the life they had hoped for, would never be. To watch their son’s first steps, to hear him call out her name. He wouldn’t know what she looked like, how much she loved him. How she sang for him while he was still in her womb. It wasn’t just the death of some woman; it was the death of a dream. The death of a life never to be. A single tear ran down his expressionless face as he gazed at the life falling evermore out of his grasp.
“I am a dead man either way.” Omri replied.
