The room spun about her as she stared at a pale, grizzled, wizened old man with thin white hair and sunken features.  His hospital gown seemed to lay flat against the mattress.  Wires and tubes ran under that gown, a clear tube ran into his right nostril, a ribbed plastic hose protruded from his mouth and was connected to a respirator that pumped and hissed as it filled and emptied his lungs.  His eyes were closed.

He looked dead.

She moved to the side of the bed, opposite of where a nurse was swabbing the inside of his mouth with some sort of giant Q-tip.

“What are you doing?” Carrie asked.

The nurse looked up, another young one, blonde.  They all seemed young in here.

“Just running a lemon swab over his oral membranes.  Keeps them moist.  Makes him more comfortable.  You must be his daughter.  Your brother’s mentioned you a lot but he said you couldn’t come.”

Carrie could only nod.

The nurse dropped the swab into a cup of water on the bedside table.  “I’ll leave you two alone.”

Carrie fought the urge to grab her and hold her here.

No!  Please don’t leave me alone with him!

But the nurse hurried off.  Carrie thanked God he was asleep.  She’d do what she came here to do and then leave.

“I forgive you,” she said softly.

Who knew what torment he’d been going through during Mom’s illness?  Perhaps something had snapped within him...temporary insanity.  There was a good chance he’d never done anything like that before or since.  One sick period in an entire life...true, that period had scarred both his children for the rest of their lives, but now, at the end of his days, it was time for forgiveness.  These were words Carrie had thought she’d never say, but her time with the Virgin had brought a change within her, a softening.

Humans are frail, and there is no sin that cannot be forgiven.

“I forgive you,” she repeated.

And his eyes opened.  Watery blue, struggling to focus, they narrowed, then widened.  He saw her, he knew her.  A trembling hand lifted, grasped her fingers where they clung to the side rail.

Touch...he was touching her again!

It took everything Carrie had not to snatch her hand away and run screaming from the CCU.  She hung on, quelling the urge to vomit as he squeezed her fingers in his arthritic grasp.

And then he loosened his grip and his fingers began to caress the back of her hand.  She felt her intestines writhe with revulsion but she kept her hand where it was.

He’s half out of his mind, she told herself.  Disoriented... doesn’t know what he’s doing.

But then she saw the smile twisting his lips, and the look in his eyes.  No repentance there, no guilt...more like fond memories.

Carrie pulled her hand away.  She wanted to run but she stood firm.  Maybe she was projecting.  Wasn’t that what they called it when you saw what you expected to see?  Maybe he was just glad to see her and she was misinterpreting his responses.  After all, she hadn’t laid eyes on him in fourteen years...

She couldn’t run now.  Not after she’d made it this far.  Besides, she’d come here on a mission.

To give him a chance.

She glanced around.  All the nurses were busy.  She pulled out the Zip-loc baggie filled with the filed nails from the Virgin and dipped a finger into the powder.  Originally she’d planned to mix it with a few drops of water and let him drink it, but with all these tubes running in and out of him, she didn’t see how that would be possible.  But that citrus swab looked perfect.

She pulled it from the plastic cup, transferred the powder from her finger to the swab, and then leaned over the bed.

He was still looking at her with that...that expression in his eyes.  She shuddered and concentrated on his mouth, slipping the swab through his open lips and running it across his dry tongue and up and down the insides of his cheeks.

His smile broadened.  His hand reached up to grab her wrist but she pulled back in time to avoid him.

“There,” she said softly.  “I’ve done my part.  The rest is between you and God.”

He continued to stare at her, grinning lasciviously.  She couldn’t stand it anymore.  She’d done her duty.  No use in torturing herself any longer.

“I’m going to go now.  I never—”

Suddenly his smile vanished and he began to writhe in the bed.  Carrie heard the beeps of his cardiac monitor increase their tempo.  She glanced up and saw the blips chasing each other across the screen.  She smelled something burning, and when she looked down, black, oily smoke was seeping out around the edges of his hospital gown.  The skin of his arms began to darken and smoke.

“Nurse!” Carrie cried, not knowing what else to do.  “Nurse, what’s happening?”

By the time the blonde nurse reached the bedside his writhing had progressed to agonized thrashing.  Smoke streamed from his now blackened skin and collected in a dark, roiling cloud above the bed as he tore the respirator tube from his throat and belched a stream of black smoke with a hoarse, breathy scream.

The nurse gasped.  “Oh, my God!”

At that instant he burst into flame.

The nurse screamed and Carrie reeled away, raising her arm to shield her face from the heat.

He was burning!  Dear sweet Jesus, the whole bed was engulfed in a mass of flame!

No...not the bed.  Carrie saw now that the bed wasn’t burning.  Neither was his hospital gown.  Nor the sheets.

Just him.

The CCU dissolved into chaos.  Screams, shouts, white-clad bodies darting here and there, shouting into phones, brandishing fire extinguishers, dousing the bed with foam, with white jets of carbon dioxide, but the flames burned on unabated, crisping his skin, boiling his eyes in their sockets, peeling the blackened flesh from his bones, and still he moved and writhed and kicked and thrashed, still alive within the consuming flames.

Still alive...still burning...

And then when it seemed that there was nothing left of him but his skeleton and a crisp blackened membrane stretched across his bones, he stiffened and arched his body until only his heels and the back of his head touched the mattress.  He remained like that for what seemed an eternity, exhaling his last smoky breath in a prolonged, quavering ululation, then he collapsed.

And with his collapse, the flames snuffed out.

All was quiet except for the long high-pitched squeal of his flat-lined cardiac monitor.  The nurses and orderlies crowded around the bed, covering their mouths and noses as they gaped at the blackened, immolated thing that had once been Walter Ferris, lying stiff and twisted in his unmarred, unscorched hospital gown.

Sick with the horror of it, Carrie staggered back, fighting to maintain her grip on consciousness.  She turned and stumbled toward the swinging doors, the voices of the CCU staff echoing above the howl of the monitor...

“Christ, what happened?”...”An oxygen fire?”...”Naw, look at the bed—not even scorched!”...”What happened to the smoke alarms?  How come they never went off?”...”Damnedest thing I ever seen!”...

Out in the hall Carrie stepped aside to let the hospital’s emergency crew pass.  She leaned against the wall and retched.

She’d come here to forgive him...she had forgiven him.

Apparently someone else had not.

Archdiocese to Close St. Joe’s

The Cardinal has announced that the Archdiocese of New York will temporarily close St. Joseph’s Church until the Diocese and Vatican officials have had time to evaluate the phenomena surrounding the relic displayed on the altar of the Lower Manhattan church.

“Let’s just call it a cooling-off period,” the Cardinal declared at a news conference yesterday.  “In the present climate of crowds, hysteria, and conflicting claims of right of ownership, clear, reasoned, dispassionate judgment is quite nearly impossible.”