The Organ of Darkness

The pitch-black operating room was no darker than any other. Not for me. 

As always, I allowed no one else inside. It hindered the Gift. 

I touched the large tray of instruments. I placed my hand on each one. 

I felt for the body. It was there, cold and breathing. I wished I could have sliced the throat right then and been done with it. But I had to push forward. There was a better way.

“Play organ,” I commanded.

Instantly, hypnotic music filled the room, a Frescobaldi toccata. The sound of the organ—the “organ of darkness,” Nils called it—helped me to “see.”

But there was another organ of darkness here. It belonged to my father. I picked up an electric implement and pushed it into his chest. 

The surgery was as routine as all the others. The automated assistants monitored anesthesia, blood pressure, and other vital needs, emitting soft electronic signals that all was going well.

With Father’s body lying open in the dark room, the thought flashed through my brain to run to the switch and turn on the lights. But that would be too easy. His death, whenever it came, should be conscious and painful. As the idea scurried away, I dropped his twitching heart into a biological waste can next to my feet. It landed at the bottom with a soft splash.

I patted my brow with a towel and reached into the refrigerated compartment beside me. I pulled out the good heart, the one retracted from an oblivious clone. Soon, it was beating anew. The body received it as if it had been waiting for it all its life. There was just one more thing to do.

. . .

#

He had come to me two weeks ago, asking if I would perform the heart transplant he needed to live. 

Such audacity.

He didn’t come because I was his daughter. He didn’t come to extend an olive branch for neglecting me as a child or mistreating my mother with his infidelities. He didn’t come because he loved me.

He came because he needed my Gift.

Oh, he said the right things about wanting to reconcile, about being sorry for putting my beautiful mother in an early grave, about being a Governor who had poisoned his people. But I knew better. 

“You have the disease,” I said. “Don’t you?” 

“Yes,” he said, and Nils, my beloved fiance, squeezed my hand.

I almost laughed. “Strangled by your own garotte.”

#

Several years ago, my father, the Governor of the province, ordered a special chemical agent added to the food supply. It was supposed to prevent cancer. It did, but a bizarre side effect soon emerged: photomalignant organosis—a disease that causes the internal organs to wither and die if they are exposed to light.

Records would show that my father knew early on of the possible dangers, yet he went forward with the experiment anyway, treating the populace as guinea pigs just so he could be known as the man who rid the world of cancer.

His defenders always argue that photomalignant organosis is not fatal, and it does not adversely affect the physical condition of those afflicted by it—at least not until an operation is required. There is no known way to perform open surgery on a person with the disease without it destroying the exposed organs. Some minor procedures can be performed in a dark room with surgeons using special lenses, but complex operations like open-heart surgery are a mortal risk. An organ transplant is certain death.

Except with me. 

#

I have been blind since birth, but I possess special abilities that help me overcome my handicap. It was my mother who suggested I could use those abilities to aid the people my father hurt.

Nils first called it the Gift when he met me in medical school. 

The Gift allows me to “feel” my way through a patient’s organs when performing surgery. I can sense the nerves and anatomical fibers that connect the organ to the rest of the body. I can feel it in my mind’s eye. I am like a skilled organist playing in the dark.

Nils and my other classmates watched in awe as I used the Gift on one patient after another. Unfortunately, my abilities waned after an hour or so, precluding lengthy operations. Then I found something that enhanced my endurance.

The organ. 

As a child, it comforted me to hear my mother play the organ in church. I discovered that if I listened to organ music while performing surgery, it extended my stamina and sharpened my senses. The doctors began calling me the Organ Girl, which had a dual meaning. One was the human organs on which I operated. The other was the music. Even if a patient was afflicted with photomalignant organosis, I—within a totally black room with only the music as my light—could perform an hours-long cloned organ transplant. 

That is exactly what my father asked me to do for him.

#

At first, I refused. I would not help a man who had hurt so many. Nils convinced me otherwise with one sentence: “You know what your mother would say.”

He knew my mother’s final words as well as I did. She often repeated them to me throughout her brief life: “My prayer is that his love for you will one day redeem him. Until then, Elora, you must turn the other cheek.” 

I could not resist my mother. I could not resist Nils. 

But I also could not resist my own black, bitter heart.

. . .

#

The surgery was nearly complete. I performed the final, secret step. 

When I sealed the open chest, I pulled off my gloves, listened to the ending of Bach’s “Fugue in D Minor,” and walked through the doors of the operating room.

“Congratulations, Elora,” my father’s Chief of Staff said when it was all over. “The operation appears to have been a success.”

“He should return to normal within two weeks,” I said. “Now, when can I leave?” 

“So soon?” the man said. “Where?”

“My fiance and I are leaving the province once and for all tonight.”

He hesitated. “You may leave as soon as you perform the surgery.”

I was confused. “What surgery?”

“The surgery on the Governor,” he said. “He was concerned that because of his past with you, you might take advantage of his vulnerability.”

“What do you mean?”

“The Governor had to test your loyalty, Elora. The surgery you just performed was not on your father. It was a stand-in.”

I held my breath.

Not my father? But it had to be my father. I had arranged it that way. I had injected the transplanted heart with cultures of anssura—biomodified bacteria that consume the organs they inhabit. They are undetectable for several weeks as they rapidly procreate and metastasize. What follows are months of multiple organ failure, excruciating pain, and death. There is no cure.

“Don’t worry,” the man continued. “The heart you gave the patient was a perfect match. In two weeks, he will be completely back to normal. And when you do the same work on the Governor, you will be free to go as you please.” 

“But ... if it was not my father ... who was it?”

“Your fiance, Nils.”

#

Now I sit in a mausoleum beneath the body of my mother, neither knowing nor caring whether it is day or night. Soon, I will be reunited with her.

“Play organ.”

The music is a comfort. The blade is cold. I feel the blood soil my dress.

I will close my barren eyes, sleep, and surrender as my own organ of darkness finishes its final fugue.