You'd Better Not Shout, You'd Better Not Cry...

Thursday, 31st October 1996

VI

Bryan McGovan had been in full operative surgery for 107 hours solid. Drugs had been pumped into his body through a drip that was once a colostomy bag to keep him awake but immobile throughout the surgery. The Surgeon himself had needed no drugs; he hadn't slept in quite awhile and was perfectly used to being consistently alert.

There was considerably less doner matter hanging in the antechamber to the instrument room. What was left twitched intermittently in the near-dark. The Surgeon knew what to retain and what to throw away, and Remnant, his assistant, was living lumbering proof that the Surgeon never really threw anything away.

Remnant ran a double-nailed finger over the Bryan's face. The touch was loving and kind, like a sister to her newborn brother. Remnant smiled.

"You're beautiful," it said in her choral voice - the girl, the man, and the crone. Remnant rarely spoke in all voices at once, unless he really meant it. She knew she wasn't beautiful.

It thought of the tales of missionaries who came back from Darkest Africa in the earliest days of the Age of Discovery, publishing fantastical woodcut drawings of men with no heads and faces on their chests, women with one enormous leg each, the misappropriations of features and limbs abundant. How these pictures haunted history, nobody for once believing the stories of these encounters were anything but fantasy brought about by hunger, thirst, or madness.

They were all true, of course. And the Surgeon was justly proud of his work.

During the Bryan surgery, the patient had been awake, screaming and whispering as the secrets had been torn from his flesh. Remnant, in her role as secretary, had filled eight ringbound pads with notes of the conversations Bryan McGovan had had with Danny Allegro, forming a profile of the man and his movements. The Surgeon had once told it that a man's life, however fascinating, however long, was still only a man's life and could be cut from the tree taking its secrets with it. And lost secrets, the Surgeon said, were a crime against life.

Life was a gift. Remnant should know. Especially today, the Day of All Souls. She bent over and kissed the Bryan on the forehead with her many-hared lip, her one mouth of three throats. The creature on the table stirred, the new soul of All Souls, thought Remnant, and it will lead us to Allegro, and the Surgeon will have a friend to talk to. Another "antidesomething" - Remnant was no good with long words.

Or at least that's what it had been told. He turned and headed for the door. Tonight was the only night of the year Remnant could leave the surgery. Her friends were out there, abroad, tapping shoulders, screaming, pulling people silently from streets, showing their faces and scaring them; Masilei, the Lone, Oddfellow, Sister Triplet, the Family October... all having a lovely night out.

Remnant switched off the light as she left the surgery, and in the crone voice, scratched and ugly, bade the Bryan:

"Happy Hallowe'en."