Journals of Eleanor Druse, The (Digital Picture Book) by Eleanor Druse Page B

her elevated pH.
    At this point, Stegman motioned for Tiffany to unfasten Nancy’s restraints so that he could move her arms. He demonstrated the range of motion of her shriveled limbs, tugging her this way and that while describing her interesting defects in Latin, using words like
dyskinesia
or
torticollis,
posing now and again to receive the admiration of the female residents.
    Then Stegman put a latex glove on his right hand, and Tiffany gave him a tongue depressor, which he used to probe Nancy’s mouth.
    One by one the eager young medical scientists were treated to a view of Nancy’s very interesting clinical example of oral thrush, a kind of white fur growing inside her mouth which, from the looks on their faces, must have been enough to make Job question his faith.
    I believe God or Satan provided me with a sudden premonition of what was about to happen. I suppose the other possibility is that I actually caused it to happen, by some as yet unexplained psychokinetic stimulation of the motor areas of what was left of Nancy Conlan’s brain. Precognition, or just good old-fashioned instinct shining through the medicinal fog, I don’t know which, but I knew it was coming and I can’t say I didn’t relish the prospect.
    Stegman used the tongue depressor to move aside the flap of Nancy’s cheek, so that yet another shameless professional voyeur of her pathology could feast his or her eyes on the manifold pleasures of the grotesque. Nancy suddenly lurched forward, opened her mouth in a hideous grimace, then clamped her teeth onto the gloved hand of Dr. Stegman. As I watched in horrified delight, I could see that the purchase her teeth had obtained on the meat of his right palm was at least as tenacious and forceful as the one she’d had on the cotton wrist restraint some days previous.
    Stegman howled in agony and gingerly attempted to withdraw his hand—“Ow, OW, OW, OWWWW!”—without leaving a piece of it behind in Nancy’s incisors, but he succeeded only in tugging her head up off the pillow. Her wide-open eyes swelled and flushed red in their sockets and her facial muscles bulged and flexed as her jaws locked and exerted increasing force on her teeth, which sank deeper, through the membrane of the glove, through the skin, and into the flesh of Stegman’s hand.
    Dark blood filled the semitransparent latex glove and then streamed in rivulets from the holes made by her teeth and dribbled around her lips and chin.
    Stegman howled louder and pulled again at his trapped hand, but it only brought Nancy up off the pillow and closer to his screaming face. She lurched again and her claw hands fastened onto his lab coat, those bony talons grasping the lapels with the blind fury of raw motor automatism. Now she had ahold of him, tooth and claw, and his panic was pure. He tried to step back, which had the effect of dragging her into a half-sitting position on the frame of the bedrails, from which she tipped forward and clung to him.
    Stegman tripped on his heels and fell back, dragging Nancy down on top of him, her teeth still firmly embedded in the flesh of his hand. She was growling and gnawing and clinging to him with the relentless vigor of unguided reflex-driven musculature. She was like a human drone missile who had found its target.
    The other physicians tried to help, but what could they do? Any attempt to pull Nancy off their leader caused him to shriek, “Don’t pull on her, damn it! She’ll take half my hand with her!”
    Jennifer and Tiffany hurried over and helped me out of bed.
    “Mrs. Druse,” said Tiffany, “this is an emergency situation. We are going to move you out into the hall so that the emergency team can bring in the crash cart and give Nancy some special medicine so she’ll let go of Dr. Stegman’s hand.”
    I can’t say for sure, but I may have seen laughter in their eyes.

NOBLE SAVAGERY
    By late afternoon, things had calmed down, and I was able to return to my bed. I’d missed my