Asylum (31 page)

A far-too-loud scraping sound and his face swam back into my field of vision. He’d pulled up a chair next to the bed. “But enough of that. There’s still time to talk about the bench. Here’s something: I’ll bet you can’t guess where we are.”

“Ask me if I care,” I managed to say.

“Well, Martine, you really
should
care. I’d think you’d be curious. After all, you’ve been a busy little girl, running all over town, calling up Ottawa, figuring it all out. The police couldn’t solve it. The mayor couldn’t solve it. Of all people! The publicity director!
Very
good, Martine, very exciting indeed. So I thought you’d appreciate seeing one of the places you’ve been so obsessed with.”

My eyes went to the strange high rounded ceiling again.

“Not that you can see much,” he added. “We had to camp out here, since they’re using the rooms upstairs as a proper hospital. They renamed it, but you know, the patients there, they say they keep hearing little children crying in the night. It’s funny. Ghosts, they say. I wonder what kind of hallucination that is? Do you think—my goodness, could it be that they’re doing too many
drugs
?”

I tried to say something and couldn’t. I passed my tongue over my lips. “We’re at the Cité de Saint-Jean-de-Dieu,” I mumbled.

“Oh, I just love your accent when you say that, Martine,” he said. “So Francophone. Not like my accent at all, despite all my years of speaking French: I’ve worked hard to retain my Anglophone identity. And, of course, you got it in one. That’s exactly where we are.” He was fiddling with something, and as he moved, it caught the light: a hypodermic.

I guessed I’d be doing the floating thing again.

“Such a clever girl,” Robert was saying. “Yes, that’s where we are. We’re downstairs. All the way downstairs.” He shook his head. “Disappointing, I have to admit. I’d have liked to use one of the basement rooms. That would have made everything just perfect, you know? Maybe even the one where I worked all those years ago, where they used to try performing lobotomies—wouldn’t that have been fun, such great memories—but it’s all locked down now, closed up, and there’s a guard and security checks. I wonder if they were able to clean up all the blood. We couldn’t get it all, not every bit, it permeates everything, and it has such a distinctive smell, blood, sweet and metallic at the same time…”

He sighed, presumably with reminiscence. “No, my dear, we’re in one of the steam tunnels that connect the buildings. As close as I could get to my beloved basement. They used to use the steam pressure to run the electric generator, and to heat the buildings. All very practical. I explored them when I was a boy, I even got burned once or twice for my efforts.”

He laughed, and there was an echo. “But you shouldn’t be disappointed, my dear. I suspect your little orphans spent time here, too. Maybe there are even bodies. Maybe there were ones who tried to escape. Sometimes a child would disappear, and none of us had anything to do with it … and now some of the smaller tunnels have collapsed. Naked limestone does that when it’s not maintained. Who knows what—or who—we might find in the rubble?”

Steam tunnels. I tried to focus on what that meant. Tunnels that carried steam pipes to heat big buildings. I blinked and looked around me: this was a big one, the top of it ten feet up with pipes running along the curved ceiling. Something out of some steampunk nightmare, all industrial and cold. Concrete and metal. A great escape route, maybe, if I could only move something more than my eyes.

I focused back on Robert. “You’re enjoying this.”

“Well, of course I am! It’s like Christmas and birthdays rolled into one, all the Christmases and all the birthdays they never let us celebrate at the asylum. Well, I’m celebrating now, Martine. I’m celebrating now! Annie was my favorite, of course, but we had history, you can’t compete with a shared history. Still, you’ll do nicely. Maybe you’ll make second place. You’d like that, wouldn’t you, Martine? To be my second favorite?”

That did it. Gag reflex, and my system didn’t like it one bit. Lights flashing, and no breath, no breathing at all … “Whoa, there!” A clatter as the syringe was set down and then a sharp sudden pain in my arm and suddenly my airway cleared.

I’d never felt so grateful to breathe.

“You gave me a little scare just then, Martine,” Robert said. He, too, sounded a little breathless. “Can’t have you nodding off just yet, especially not permanently. We have so many games to play before you leave. So much fun and so many games. Like I had with the others. Are you hearing me, Martine? Give me a nod if you do. This is supposed to be a conversation. One just between the two of us. And I so hate talking to myself. It makes me look a little—you know—
crazy
.” He laughed. “Not that these walls haven’t seen their share of crazy, mind you. But I’m supposed to be one of the sane ones.”

I managed to nod.

“Good girl. So where was I? Oh, right. Talking about the steam tunnels. I brought them all here, just like you: Isabelle, and Caroline, Annie, and Danielle. All my lovely ladies. And you, of course.”

I steadied myself. “And who’s after me?”

“What makes you think there’s anybody else?”

I would have shrugged if I could. “You need this too much. This isn’t just about Lansbury anymore, it’s about you.”

“My dear, dear Martine. You’re cleverer than you look. I like that about you. We’re going to have such a lovely time together, Martine.”

Martine, Martine, Martine … He’d said my name more times in the last five minutes than Ivan had said it in the past month. Good thing it wouldn’t wear out from so much repetition. For some reason, I found that thought uproariously funny. I would have laughed out loud, only I seemed to be unable to move my vocal cords.

Robert noticed. “Yeah, it takes you that way, doesn’t it? Pretty much paralyzes your nervous system. Don’t worry, it’ll wear off. I don’t want you to
not
feel anything. I want you to feel it
all
.” A long sigh. “You’re thinking that only a deranged individual could do something like this, aren’t you? That’s what they all think. The bad apple. The evil seed. The monster that comes around a few times a generation, who gets arrested, sentenced, taken out of circulation, and leaves everybody safe and everything beautiful once again.”

Something like that, anyway.

“But corporations are far deadlier than any person, no matter how psychopathic he or she happens to be,” Robert continued. “You hear about things, you know, these public shootings, sixteen dead, twenty shot, oh, the horror. Well, corporations kill that many people before breakfast, girlie. And where’s the indignation over that? Where’s the outrage? Take my advice: you’re better off with a psychopath than you are with any corporation, Lansbury included.”

Whatever he’d injected me with had taken away the floating feeling and replaced it with numbness, a feeling of cold, like I was bathing in ice water. Ice water … They’d done
that
here, too, if I remembered correctly. Hydropathy, another of the mid–twentieth century’s torture treatments. They hammered their heels on the bottoms of the tubs. They passed out, their bodies racked by shock. Maybe he’d found some drug to simulate hydropathy. Like swimming near an iceberg … icebergs … must have been like this, for the survivors of the
Titanic
, the dark Atlantic Ocean surrounding them, the dark Atlantic night …

Whoa. I
was
drifting again.

Focus, Martine. Focus. On what? On his voice, still droning on, didn’t he ever shut up? I just wanted him to be quiet. I just wanted to be left in peace.

“We were doing a lot of work back then with neuroleptics,” he was saying. “Dreadful side effects, of course, but really, who cares when you see what we learned from it all. All in the aid of humanity, right? And, besides, what drug doesn’t have them?”

I closed my eyes. A thought started to make sense and then drifted away—I tried to catch the tail end of it, but off it went, taking a string of unrelated words with it as it went.

Maybe I’d catch the next one.

“They block the flow of neurotransmitters,” he said. “Chlorpromazine, phenobarbital, Thioridazine. All of them
interesting
, mind you, though not all of them interesting to the government, who were the ones paying us the big bucks for our experiments. And we needed the money. But I’m not going to give you the good stuff,” he added, his tone changing, as though remembering he was speaking to me. “The LSD-twenty-five that Cameron liked so much. That was definitely good stuff. He came here, not everybody knows that, but they couldn’t be transporting children over to the Allan, now, could they? So Cameron came here.” His voice got a little dreamy. “There was a whole protocol,” he said. “Administer the drug, wait fifteen minutes, then electroshocks. Sometimes I’d write it down for him, record the patient’s responses. I liked that, I liked being near him. He was a brilliant man, simply brilliant. And there were some very interesting responses.” He looked at me. “I’m not set up for it now, of course.”

Thank God for small favors, I thought.

His voice grew cheerful. “Well, time to get this show on the road,” he said. He came over and pulled my eyelids back, inspecting whatever he saw there. “Hmm. Coming out of it slowly, aren’t we?” He stepped back, did something out of my field of vision, and I realized that he was answering a smartphone. God knew how he got a signal down here. “Robert Carrigan.”

A length of time while he listened to somebody. “That’s not convenient. I’m taking care of it, but you have to give me some time.” Another, longer space of time. Fine with me: when he was on the phone, he wasn’t doing anything to my body.
Keep talking
, I urged the unknown person at the other end of the line. Just keep talking.

There was a decisive click, and immediately he was back with me. “A minor interruption, my dear Martine. It seems that my presence is required elsewhere. Lansbury calls, and I must obey. It’s only a mere postponement, I promise. But remember what I said before about anticipation: we’ll have to wait a bit before we begin the rest of our time together. You can stay here and think about it. Imagine it. Come to grips with it. When I come back, we’ll share. You can tell me what you imagined, and I’ll show you what I imagined. I wonder if our fantasies will have anything in common.”

“You could change your mind,” I told him. Perfectly silly thing to say.

He smiled, and leaned over me, tucking some of my hair behind my ear, gently, the gesture way too intimate, way too close. “My dear Martine,” his voice was thick, “there’s nothing in the world that will keep us apart. We have things to share, places to go together that you’ve never dreamed of.”

He must be planning to enter that phrase into the Bulwer-Lytton contest, I thought irrelevantly and a little hysterically. Do people even talk like that? “I can wait,” I managed to say.

“Oh, I won’t leave you alone,” he responded. “That would be rude of me, and I’ve always been a gentleman. Well, almost always. Here’s a little something to keep you company. Just sit back and enjoy. It’s very fast-acting, this batch. Into your system, out of your system. I won’t be too long.”

Another pinprick in my arm, and a rush of heat coursing through me, I could almost see it running through my veins, along my nerves. There had been drugs in the autopsy reports. I’d dismissed them; everyone had dismissed them. Bad mistake.

He was there, and then he was gone. Just like that. Who knew time was so slippery?

I became vaguely aware that there were hands touching me, tugging at my shoulders. “Come on, come on,” someone said.

I’m not going anywhere with you, buddy, I thought. You’re going to kill me. Not in the mood right now.

“I’m not going to kill you. But you have to come with me.”

I frowned. Had I said it out loud? And who’d answered? It was a different voice. Was he changing his voice to confuse me? I didn’t need that: I was plenty confused already. “I can’t possibly carry you,” said the voice. “You have to help me.”

Someone speaking French.

Oops, that wasn’t right. Robert Carrigan spoke English.

I squinted in the direction of the voice. “Violette!”

“Yes,” Violette Sobel said grimly.

“Violette Sobel!” I was still amazed that I’d recognized her. Or amazed that she was here in the steam tunnel. Or just pretty much amazed by anything that didn’t have to do with my impending torture and death.

“Yes,” she said again.

“I’d like to sleep,” I confessed.

“No time for that,” said Violette. “Come on, Martine. He will return soon when he realizes it is us who made the telephone call.”

“Us?”

“Come on,” she said again, and there was an undercurrent of fear in her voice. “We have to go.”

I swung my legs over the side of the table, and the tunnel tilted dramatically around me. I clutched at her and then realized that I was grabbing for balance at a woman who was nearly seventy. Yikes.

That didn’t seem to occur to Violette. “Come on, Martine, come on.” She pulled me off the table altogether and I stumbled and would have gone down if she hadn’t been holding me up. “It’s the yoga, isn’t it?” I asked.

“What are you talking about?”

“You’re so strong. Julian said you do yoga.”

“For heaven’s sake,” she said impatiently. “Come
on
, Martine.”

Her arm was around my waist, and she seemed to know where she was going. “This way, this way.” Standing up had cleared my head considerably, and after the first few stumbling steps I found that I could take on some of my own weight, which must have been a relief for her. “Where are we going?”

“Out of here,” Violette said grimly.

“How did you find me?”

“Later,” she said. “There’ll be time for that later.”

“Or not,” said Robert Carrigan.

*   *   *

He was standing over by the table I’d just vacated. There were bright lights trained on it and they were casting a tremendous shadow up on the tunnel wall. Was that Robert’s shadow?
Someone
looked very big and very scary.