And sometimes, later, there would be the ghostlight in her empty socket and deep inside the pits of her face. It flickered and flared ever more frequently as her convalescence went on, a spectral white fire that was the ghost making itself at home in my sister’s head.
* * *
Then, mid-morning after a sleepless night when Melory’s body had twisted itself over and over as though each limb was trying to wrench itself free, I started awake at her clasping my hand back. I’d held on to her for so long, her fingers limp in mine, but now she squeezed them, she, Melory, my sister. I opened my eyes and she was looking at me, or half of her was. The rest wasn’t her anymore.
I’d only known worn old Doctor Corto in my lifetime. I’d been terrified that whatever awoke from that transformation would not be my sister anymore, but just a vehicle for the ghost. But when I looked at her, at that first waking, I knew her smile. I knew the way the skin crinkled about her remaining eye. The rest didn’t matter. She was still Melory and the ghost could not make her otherwise. But it could make her more.
By the time she could get out of bed there were plenty of people who needed the skills of a doctor. Some had been living with pain and disability for a year or more, and there was scuffling and bartering over who would go before the ghost first. I was at the back, of course. I was nobody’s priority.
I lie. I was Melory’s priority. If I’d insisted, she would have turned the ghost’s cold light on me right away. But I’d had plenty of time to think about things, as I sat by her bedside. I had been in a frenzy of excitement waiting for the Electors to choose the new doctor, but as I waited out the long watches of the night, that had given way to a looming dread. I had pinned so much hope on a new doctor. What if the ghost looked at me and gave me up for a lost cause? What if the ghost wouldn’t even look at me, like half of Aro wouldn’t? How terrible to have that one chance snatched from me, to be ignored by the one entity that could heal me. And how much worse, if that entity lived within Melory’s skull and shared our roof, always at the edge of my consciousness, battened on to my sister like a parasite. I thought all of these things as she changed and twisted, and so I did not insist she see me. I waited for my moment and told myself all manner of lies about why I did so, that did not revolve around my fear.
The waiting made things worse, though. I got to see the doctor ghost working, and each sitting I witnessed only compounded my anxiety.
At first she did not call up the ghost; it simply came when someone asked for aid or when she saw a patient in need. Later she was able to conjure it a little, learning its ways and what inner rituals might draw it near. When it came to her, she would go still; mostly she would sit down, because otherwise her legs would go weak and the ghost would lose control over them and drop her to the ground. All expression would flee from her and the ghost would light her face up from within, the fire rising slowly in her eye socket and the surrounding burrows and marks as though it had come from far, far away in some direction we had no name for.
Sometimes she would just speak, where the affliction was something familiar. The ghost had seen generations in Aro come and go. It remembered epidemics and poisons, allergies and wounds. What remedy had sufficed before would be dredged up from that long and perfect memory and Melory would diagnose and prescribe with absolute assurance and accuracy. When she spoke, or rather when the ghost spoke through her, it was with her voice but without her character to shape it. I shivered every time I heard it, so like, so unlike my twin.
Where the ailment’s cause or nature was less clear, Melory would take the hands of her patient, who would flinch as though stung. She would bow her head, the ghostlight guttering low, then flaring back up as the doctor sifted through what it had discovered and came to its conclusions. At the start, it seemed that the doctor was groping its way, and there were several people Melory could not help. People began to whisper that Corto’s decline had only been the start of the doctor’s decline. Soon after, though, we could see that the problem began and ended with Corto, and those she could not help were mostly those who would have needed Corto’s aid earlier if they were to recover. All the others, those more recent sufferers, she spoke to and laid hands on and divined unerringly the best way to mend them. Sometimes it was plant extracts, prepared and treated in meticulous ways. Other times she would bind wounds and splint limbs, her hands moving with a jerky precision as the ghost manipulated her borrowed muscles. Still more needed no more than rest, sympathy, the care of their kin.
I watched all of this. I sat in as often as I could, when the ghost was conjured from my sister to tend the sick. Every night I had a moment of crisis, knowing that the more I put things off, the less likely it was that the ghost could help. And yet, if I never asked, I could believe in some notional future cure that would come as soon as I did ask. It was fear of certainty that held me back. I did not want to put myself at the ghost’s mercy and be refused.
But all things end, even my reticence. Thirty-one days after Melory became Aro’s doctor, I knelt before her and asked for the ghost’s help.
This was after dark, after she had played doctor for everyone else in Aro who needed her. I didn’t want witnesses if the ghost snubbed me or pronounced me incurable. I told myself that Melory and I would lock that shame up between us, nobody else need know. I would just go on with my painful, sickly, hungry life for as long as I could. And if I couldn’t, only Melory would mourn, and only that part of her which was not a house for the ghost.
And perhaps it would be easier for me to know I was beyond help. Perhaps I would be able to accept what I had railed at for so long, for surely the possibility of a cure had just sharpened the edge of my hurt. I had fought against becoming the village’s scapegoat and reject. Perhaps accepting my lot would give me at least the veneer of belonging, a role to play even in negative. And I would still have Melory.
So we sat there on the floor, cross-legged. Melory leant against the curved wall of the house; our knees were touching. Her face was cast slightly downwards as she concentrated, while I hunted her features for that resemblance to me that seemed harder and harder to find.
The ghostlight rippled within the swollen part of her face as the ghost answered her call, tireless in its service to the village even as it wore my sister down with its demands. Her lips parted and the words came out in that weird affectless voice that was still half hers. Some people said the ghosts sounded almost as though they were singing, when they spoke, but if so, it was a joyless song I never cared for.
“Partial decontamination detected. Analysing,” said the ghost and Melory together, and I had no idea what the words meant.
She reached out with that abrupt impatience the ghost brought to her hands. Her thumb moved to press against my palm, and I felt a stab of pain as though she had driven a thorn into me. I welcomed it. I had seen that wince from so many of her patients. I was getting what the others got, being treated as someone who belonged for the first time in years.
“Diagnostic link established,” she announced. The ghost liked to tell everyone what it was doing even though nobody understood its meaning. It made me wonder what sort of a world it believed it was visiting, when it rolled out its complex half nonsense for us. Nobody in Aro cared so long as the pain stopped or the fever broke. Did the ghost think us so clever, or was it just in love with its own cleverness?