Kiss of the Sun (11 page)

She reached the bottom of the stairs and stood at the end of the lobby. Across the room, she could see the glint of the oval glass of the front doorway. Along a wall next to her, an antique divan. She staggered over to it, held it to steady herself. The entire room was circling. She turned and swung her light beam back up toward the stair landing. A dark form stood there. Pale face, pink eyes.

Martha struggled to focus her thoughts. The front door would lead to the street, out into the open….

She scanned the counter with the flashlight beam. Cubbyholes. Mail slots with numbers. A hinged counter, and behind that, another door. She made a dash from the divan to the reception counter and ducked under the hinged segment. She pushed through the swinging door next to the mail cubbies and entered a small office area. She shone her light on office supplies, a fax machine, a copy machine, then an opening to a narrow corridor. She went through it and raced down a long hallway. At the end was a metal door with a plastic sign:
EMERGENCY EXIT ONLY.

She smashed her palms on the aluminum bar and went through. A battery-operated alarm began to buzz. The door swung shut behind her, and she scanned the alleyway—in one direction was the street that ran along the waterfront, in the other a street bordered by trees, their limbs naked in the moonlight. The alarm echoed against the brick walls.

She ran for the trees, passing dumpsters and plastic bags full of garbage, and came to the end of the alley. Although the streetlights were out, in the moonlight she could see that she'd reached a street that ran behind the buildings along the waterfront. On the other side, a grassy area enclosed by a wrought-iron fence and dotted with pale monoliths. A cemetery.

She ran toward it, climbed over the low fence, then jogged across damp grass toward a large, boxy shape under the canopy of a moss-hung oak. A crypt.

She went behind it and paused, her shoulder pressed against the cold granite wall. The front of her blouse felt warm and wet. The shrapnel wound had started to bleed again. She heard her own ragged breathing, and the rattle of the alarm, now hundreds of yards distant.

She flattened herself against the cool marble and peeked toward the way she had come, toward the street. A truck parked there, dark. Dumpsters. The back ends of buildings. Nothing moved.

She turned and looked the other way, slowly scanned the field of granite slabs. She spotted a human form, a silhouette next to the entrance gate. She wasn't sure if it was the man or a life-sized ornamental statue.

She pressed her body close to the marble wall and moved slowly, working her way around to the other side of the crypt, then to the front.

She pulled at the iron door of the crypt, but it wouldn't budge; she might as well have tugged at the door of a bank vault. She looked out toward another section of the cemetery, toward paths that led in other directions, between flower pedestals and shrines, to a place where a fat oak spread its canopy over a quad of benches. Beyond that, the shape of a building, perhaps a chapel.

She took a deep breath and bolted toward the oak tree. She stumbled once on an exposed root, caught herself, and ran on toward the chapel. She crossed a grassy area next to it, then came to a tall metal fence covered in vines. She shone her light where the fence met the chapel. There was a small gap between the fencepost and the masonry. A gap just wide enough for her to squeeze through.

She panted for a moment, standing next to the opening. Behind her, she knew the pale man had surely closed the distance between them. She slid her arm through the gap, then her chest and torso, and lastly her head. Her hair caught in the chain-link mesh, but she worked it free.

She popped out of the gap and onto another street. She looked around and caught a glimpse of movement on the other side, and then a pair of bright lights pivoted upward and shone straight into her face. Bright, blinding lights.

“Freeze!” a voice said from the other side of the street. “Hold it right there.”

Whiteness, everywhere. Like before.

Martha traveled, horizontal, through a bleached landscape. A chaos of bright lights. Pallid, unfamiliar faces. Strangers all. White walls and uniforms, antiseptic smells, acoustic ceiling tiles, sterile corridors. And through all of it she struggled like an animal, clawing, shrieking, biting, and flailing at anyone and anything she could reach.

She was being taken down a corridor, strapped to a gurney.

Her voices were everywhere now, shouting at her, booming, demonic.
You are evil. You are a murderer. You filthy pig. You will be dragged down to hell.

Scenes floated in and out of awareness—a ceiling sliding past, a sequence of recessed light fixtures glaring like car headlights, and then a space where all was dark and she could remember nothing, and then she awoke again, unbound, balled up in the corner of a small square room with only one door.

She crawled across the floor, imagining herself a she-wolf. She howled, rose up, and clawed at the material on the beige walls, punched at it, but it was soft and absorbed her blows with muted thumps. She pounded her knees and fists against the door, also padded, then clutched at the material and looked through the only window, a tiny square, which was recessed in the door and embedded with triangular wire filaments. Beyond it, another bright corridor. She yelled and kicked at the door, the thick material absorbing her voice as well as her punches, preventing her from generating the storm of noise that she desired. All around her the demons roared and laughed, and they were loud, the voices echoing as though inside a vast cavern, mocking her impotent screams. She banged her fist against the thick glass of the small window until her knuckles ached, then sank to the floor and pulled her knees to her face, balling herself up like a turtle. She roared and howled until her voice grew hoarse.

Outside the door, she heard a cart being pulled up. She heard a rattle of ice cubes.

No.

The door opened and she shrieked at the site of two burly men—one black, with a flattop, the other white, with a crew cut and muttonchop sideburns—and a wiry, older nurse whose hair was pulled into a bun so tight it looked like a bulb of garlic. The trio came through the door and the two men grabbed her by the arms and pulled her out of the room. A needle went into her forearm. She kicked and bit and fought as they pulled off her shirt and her pants, left her naked except for her underwear. Some part of her watched in horror, some tiny corner of her mind that was still lucid and stood apart, floating above the scene, unable to exert control over the possessed, raging animal that her body had become. That disconnected part of her was humiliated by her white nakedness under the fluorescent lights.

The two men heaved her up onto the table, where a sheet soaked in ice water was spread out. They strapped restraints onto her wrists and ankles and she kicked at them, the demonic part of her believing she had the power to escape, if only she could fight hard enough.

She managed to wrench one arm free and swung her body upward for a moment. She came face-to-face with the orderly with the short dun-colored hair. Silver wire-framed glasses, muttonchop sideburns. He clamped a heavy hand on her shoulder and pushed her back down on the gurney. “Oh, my…you're feisty.” He was grinning.

Then the wet sheet was wrapped over her, burning her with its coldness. Scalding her alive. She screamed until her throat went hoarse, and then she started to shake violently. Her teeth began to chatter.

Her entire physical being involuntarily marshaled itself to fight the cold, taking all her energy, until she was quiet, shivering. She felt the drug they had injected working its way through her system, forcing her to become calm.

The nurse with the garlic-bulb hair came in to observe her, watch her tremble and quiver helplessly.

“Please,” Martha said, weeping, craning her head so she could see the woman.
“Please…please…please…”

When she woke again, a dull cloud hung over everything. Martha felt as though her brain had been pickled in formaldehyde. Her limbs were meaty tumors at her side.

She was in a different room now, semi-dark. She turned her head to take in her surroundings. A machine with gray hoses on the wall, an aluminum trash can. She catalogued the other items in a slow torpor: Chrome stool with wheels. A metal door. On the wall across from her, one rectangular window, dark, laced with wire mesh. Outside the room, a muffled trill. Phones ringing. Announcements over a PA system.

The mantra of Jamba played in her head obsessively, like the throb of a migraine, like a broken record:
he looks forward he looks back he looks forward he looks back.

Martha lifted her head, tried to sit up. A broad strap across her abdomen prevented her from rising more than a half inch. She was able to raise each arm a couple of feet before the movement was arrested by straps connected to leather cuffs that encircled her wrists.

She dropped back, lowered her arms, squinted at the squares of acoustic tile on the ceiling. She tried to rally her sluggish brain into coherent thoughts, grasping at fragments of memories, trying to assemble the trail of events that had led her to
this.
She closed her eyes, and the first clear image that came to her was a face. A handsome face. The image filled her with longing. Worry. Love. Feelings so powerful they penetrated through her sedation.

Jarrell.

She wasn't sure how long she'd clung to his image when the door cracked and a nurse, the one with the tight hair bun, stuck her head through the door. “Checks,” she said, and then left.

Martha's head felt full of cotton, floating on a hazy sea of whatever sedative they had given her, fading in and out of consciousness.
Jarrell?
She mouthed the word soundlessly.
JarrellJarrellJarrellJarrell.

She drifted in and out of sleep, haunted by images from her past. Her father. Her journalism professor. At one point she woke to see Lady Albertha seated in the vinyl chair across the room, smoking her pipe. Silent. Later, she woke to see the figure of Jamba, now six feet tall, standing at the foot of her bed.

She woke to see a familiar face on the television mounted on the wall. Anderson Cooper. She'd met the CNN newscaster in person once, briefly, after he'd given a lecture at her college. He'd autographed his book for her.
Dispatches from the Edge
. On the screen he was talking about endangered orangutans in Borneo. Their eyes met.

“Haven't you learned to accept what others know about you?” Cooper said.

“I'm trying,” Martha said.

“You have to be careful in here and do what they say, or they might rape you,” he said.

Martha yanked against the leg and arm restraints, looked at the cuffs on her ankles. “I have to get out of here. I need to find Jarrell.”

“You can't find him. No one can find him,” Cooper said.

The scene cut away to footage of apes cavorting in a tropical forest.

“Come back,” Martha said, straining upward against her straps. She watched the screen for a moment longer, until her neck grew tired from the effort, and she let her head drop to the pillow.

The next time she opened her eyes, she saw pale sunlight through the window on the wall opposite her. The door clicked and an orderly came through, wearing pastel blue scrubs and pushing a rolling cart with an aluminum cover. She looked at his face and recognized his features—the muttonchop sideburns, the hairy limbs. It was one of the gorillas who'd pinned her down for the shot, the packing in the ice-cold sheet.

“Good evening. How about a little dinner? They said I could try taking your arm restraints off, but only if you promise not to claw.” He was smiling in a way that made her insides clench. “You've got a heck of a left hook, you know that?”

“Where am I?” she asked. The inside of her mouth felt like dry Kleenex.

“Middle State Hospital.”

Martha read the name from the square plastic badge clipped to his uniform:
REGINALD SIZEMORE.

Martha mouthed the words back to herself. “Middle State…”

“Better known as Zanesville, though that hasn't been the official name since 2010. This is the Forensic Services Unit.”

Zanesville. In Georgia, the name was a virtual synonym for “loony bin.”

“Did you know, when this facility was first opened, it was known as the Georgia State Lunatic, Idiot, and Epileptic Asylum?” the orderly said. “There's a lot of fascinating history here.”

“How did I get here? Why?”

“Your chart says acute psychosis, honey drop.”

“Where's Dr. Goodwin? I need to see my doctor.”

“All things in due time, honey drop.”

“My name's Martha.”

“And I'm Reggie.” He winked at her. Behind the silver wire frames, his eyes looked wet and glassy, fishlike. “I'm on the evening shift. Now, what about those wrist cuffs?”

Reggie stripped off the sheet that covered her. She lifted her head to look at herself. She was wearing a gown and two wide restraining straps, one across her chest, one across her ankles. Reggie balled the sheet and pushed it into a hamper on the cart, then pulled a fresh linen over her.

“I don't need these,” Martha said, nodding at the straps.

“Well, we'll just have to see about that,” Reggie said.

She nodded.

“Are you going to try to hurt me?”

“I'm not going to hurt anyone. I'm okay now.”

“Let's see how you do.”

Reggie reached for his key ring and found a small, pointed key that he used to unlock the wrist cuff. She laid her arm along the side of the bed.

“Attagirl. Now, if you're very good, I'll undo the other one.”

Reggie picked up a control pendant attached to a thick cord on the side of her bed and pushed a button. A motor whirred and the bed tilted upward. He lifted the metal cover on the food cart to reveal dinner: a chicken wing, a serving of emerald peas, a dome of rice that retained the shape of the scoop used to dispense it. Reggie rolled the cart over the bed and stepped back.

“Well, what do you say?” he asked.

“I'd prefer to eat alone.”

“Okay, tigress. I'll be back in about an hour to see how you did. Don't make a mess, all right?” He winked at her, then turned and left.

Martha took a sip of orange juice from the box, letting the sugar in it reactivate her brain. She struggled to pull together the flapping tatters of her memory. One thing at a time.

How long had she been here? How had she gotten here? She touched her face with her fingertips. The skin below and beside her right eye was tender and swollen.

Jarrell
—
oh, dear God, please let him be all right.
The last she'd seen of him was—where? At the hotel. Then, other images came flashing back, like a series of horrors glimpsed under a strobe light: The crawling walls. The man with the pink eyes. The wrought-iron gate. The tombstones. And then…what?

Martha clenched her fists. How much time had passed since then? For that matter, what time of day was it?

She ate the meal without tasting it, just to fill the void in her stomach, to help her bloodstream process whatever numbing chemicals had been pumped into her. She needed her brain to focus. She needed to concentrate.

After she'd finished she fixed her gaze on a metal utility cover on the wall and struggled to reconstruct everything she could remember. She started on the island, where she'd been working on her notes when the old couple had come along with the photo of Peavy. The symbol on the frottage. The pendant, which she now believed depicted an eclipse. She'd never gotten a chance to tell Jarrell about that. It was all a series of small, interlocking puzzles that fit together somehow into a larger, malevolent mosaic.

She heard the door click open. Reggie stepped in and rolled the meal cart aside. “Looks like you've been a good girl.” Reggie came around the bed to where her free hand lay. He reached down and held up the cuff strap. Martha pulled her arm under the sheet.

“I don't need that now. I'm calm, can't you tell?”

“Oh, you're okay until the lorazepam wears off, but then there's no telling what you might do with that hand. Or your mouth. You're a biter.” He started to pull the sheet up to find her hand.

Martha grabbed the hem of his scrub shirt. “I need to make a phone call. I've
got
to speak to my doctor.”

“Ah-ah-ah,” he said, holding his index finger up. He put the cuff around her wrist, cinched it tightly. “My job is to just make sure you don't hurt yourself or anybody else.” He went to the end of the bed and tugged at her ankle straps. Then he gave the chest strap a tug. “Good.”

He leaned across her to check the other wrist strap. When he stood up, he let the back of his hand graze her chest. “Nice.”

“Help!” Martha tried to shout, but her voice was hoarse, phlegmy. She strained against the chest strap. “Someone help me!”

“Now, now,” Reggie said. “You're not going to go ape on us again, are you?”

Martha glared at him. She
did
want to go nuts. She wanted to claw his eyes out, tear the room apart…

Reggie clipped the key ring back onto his belt and went back around the bed, whistling, then rolled the cart out of the room and left.

Martha collapsed against the bed, tears welling in her eyes.
Don't lose it. You've got to hold it together. Stay calm. So you get out of here.

So you can find Jarrell.