Mania (21 page)

“Mr. and Mrs. Hamlin are retiring to their bedrooms now.”

“I’ll see them in the morning, then,” Sara said.

“Good night, Ms. Hamlin.”

“Yes. Good night, Todd. Tell Catharine good night, too.”

Todd Wheeler disappeared inside, taking the bright yellow light with him as he closed the door. Nick and Sara stood where they were, staring up at the moon fading in and out of the clouds, then continued toward the house.

The moon was red. Bathed in blood, it had fled to the horizon. When Nick opened his eyes, it seemed to be floating at the very edge of the empty sky, casting an orange, coruscating glow over the water. Nick kept his eyes trained on the shimmering disk, puzzled by its savage, gory color. It dawned on him that he had no idea where he was.

He sat up, expecting to find himself in bed next to Sara. Instead, he found himself in a narrow single bed beneath thick covers in a room he didn’t recognize.

It’s just a dream. The moon has never been this color before. Wake up, Nick. You’re having a bad dream.

His hands felt sticky, and he rubbed them on the bedspread, then threw off the covers and set his feet onto the floor. He was surprised to find himself clothed in his jeans and socks, wearing one of the T-shirts he had packed. Hadn’t he and Sara already undressed and gone to bed? His skull was throbbing where he had been bruised the night Sam had been killed, and he raised his fingers gingerly to his forehead. A wave of dizziness washed over him, so intense that he thought he might pass out, and he closed his eyes. When he opened them again, Jason Hamlin was lying next to him in the bed. Nick looked at him, becoming aware bit by bit that the man was dead. His throat was slit from ear to ear, and the bed was soaked in blood. Nick leapt from the side of the bed, stifling his own scream.

It’s just a dream, Nick. You’re having a dream.

When he looked back down, the corpse was gone. The bed was empty. He reached down, touching the sheets to make certain. They were dry. There wasn’t any blood. He straightened up and looked around the strange room. There was a desk against one wall and a dresser against another. A knit rug on the floor. He recognized the windows belonging to the Hamlin house and the view over the lawn, stretching down to Puget Sound. This was not the same room, though, where he had gone to sleep.

An image of the brown bottle filled his mind. The last thing Nick remembered was taking a glass of water from Sara’s hand and swallowing one of the pills, then lying down onto the comfortable double bed in the room that had been made up for them. He had wrapped his arms around Sara, burying his head into the cool, silken mass of her hair. He must have fallen asleep seconds after his head hit the pillow. He became aware again of the stickiness on his hands, and he wiped them on his T-shirt. Had he been walking in his sleep?

It’s just a dream, Nick. You’re still in bed with Sara. Wake up. Wake up, and everything will be fine again.

He took an uncertain step toward the door. It was open a crack. He could see its edge glinting in the moonlight. Its painted surface felt cold and slick as he drew it toward him. The floor creaked, startling him, as he took a step into the hall. He stopped walking, listening. The house seemed to be humming. A quiet buzz filled the air, like the steady murmur that an old electric clock makes.

It was darker in the hallway. Nick waited until his eyes had adjusted, then took a hesitant step down the corridor that ran the length of the second floor. “The third bedroom on the hallway,” he said in a whisper, remembering what Todd Wheeler had said to Sara. His voice sounded so raspy and guttural he wasn’t certain that it belonged to him.

Nick was ten steps down the hallway when the corridor vanished, replaced by a vision of his hand on a doorknob. He was twisting the cold, painted knob, pushing the door open, entering a large, elegantly furnished room in the Hamlin house. The curtains were drawn back from the windows, and the moon was shining into the room through a myriad of small glass panes from the very peak of its arc, at the top of the sky. Hearing a rustling sound, Nick stopped, frozen where he was. When he looked down at his hands, he saw that he was holding a kitchen knife. Its blade reflected the silver rays of the moonlight with a sinister glint. The rustling sound resolved itself into someone moving beneath blankets. The shadows directly in front of him shifted, and Jason Hamlin’s silhouette became visible against the wall behind a large bed. Hamlin cleared his throat. “Sara?” he said, peering at Nick through the moonlit darkness.

Nick’s foot got caught on the long Oriental runner, and the hallway reappeared in front of him. He stood where he was, trying to catch his breath. His hands were damp with sweat, and he became aware again of how sticky they were. Deliberately, he lowered them and rubbed them on the thighs of his jeans and then the sleeves of his T-shirt, trying to clean them off. He wanted to turn on a light. He wanted to see his hands. He looked down the hallway, searching for the door to the bathroom, trying to remember which one it was.

His heart began to race in his chest as he reached for the white porcelain knob of the bathroom door. An image of his hand reaching down to pull open a drawer and then lift out a knife flashed through his mind. He hesitated, then grabbed the doorknob and pushed the door open, frantically searching for the light switch. The sink, too, felt sticky, just like his hands. His fingertips stuck to its surface, as though they were tacky with glue. He found the switch on the wall next to the sink, and the room was abruptly flooded with light.

The white tiled room was smeared red. Strawberry veins streaked the walls, interrupted with handprints the color of scabs. The sink was awash with drying blood. Nick closed his eyes.

You’re imagining this. This isn’t real. You’re still in bed. You’re asleep. Hallucinating.

He opened his eyes again, barely able to recognize his own reflection in the bathroom mirror. His face, too, was covered in blood. His clothes were soaked red. He looked down at his hands. They were stained, caked with drying blood and bits and pieces of sinew and flesh and gore, as though he had plunged his hands into the carcass of a dying animal. He began to shake.

Barely able to find the strength to turn the taps, he thrust his hands underneath the faucet. The water turned bright red, swirling down toward the drain like a fountain of blood. He grabbed the soap and tried to wash his hands clean. The more he scrubbed, though, the more blood was loosened from his skin, the more red the sink became. Finally, his hands clean, Nick splashed his face with water and rinsed the stains from his cheeks and forehead as well.

You murdered Sam.

He took a white towel off the bar next to the sink and dried his face. The towel turned red, as though it had been dipped it in paint.

And now who have you murdered, Nick: Sara?

Terror welled up inside him, taking his breath away. Had he murdered Sara? Would he kill everyone he loved? His brother first, now his girlfriend, too. He let the towel drop, then, leaving the light switched on, stepped back into the hallway. The floorboards creaked underneath his feet. He tried to move stealthily but couldn’t. He was panicking, certain that he had killed his lover. He had gone downstairs to the kitchen. He had taken a knife from the drawer. And he had killed her.

An image of Hamlin sitting up in his bed once again filled his mind, followed by an image of the man lying in a tangle of blood-soaked sheets, his throat slit from ear to ear. Nick stopped walking, straining to hear. The house had remained silent, but he was breathing heavily now, panting. The sound of his panic filled the corridor.

They’re all dead. You’ve killed them all, Nick.

“Shut up,” Nick heard himself say. His raspy voice echoed through the house. “Shut up, Nick,” he said more firmly. Then he walked to the door of the bedroom where he had gone to sleep with Sara. She was sitting up in bed when he pushed the door open, the blankets held to her chest, looking in his direction. She squinted as the light shone into the room from the hallway.

“Nick?”

It felt to Nick as if his legs would collapse underneath him. He was filled with relief. “You’re okay,” he said.

“Nick, my God,” she said. “What is it?”

“I think I’m having a nightmare,” he said.

Sara leapt out of bed, unable to mask her terror. “What is that, Nick? What is that all over you?”

Nick looked down at his freshly scrubbed hands. Thin red streams were trickling down his arms. Dried blood at his elbows had turned to liquid again in the water from the sink. His shirt and pants were covered with dark stains. “Do you see it, too?” he asked her.

Sara rushed to Nick’s side. “Have you hurt yourself? My God, Nick, what have you done? What’s happened?”

“I’m okay. I don’t know.”

Sara was fingering the bruise on his forehead. It hurt so much that Nick pulled his head backward, away from her. “All this blood.” Sara looked down at his shirt and then his jeans. “What happened, Nick? What have you done?”

Nick shook his head. “I don’t know.”

Sara backed away from him, her face turning white, her lips becoming two thin lines. Nick understood what she was thinking.

“I must have done it,” he said.

“My God, Nick.” Sara’s voice was a whisper. She hesitated, then, dressed in her panties and a T-shirt, pushed past him and ran into the hallway. She screamed when she saw the blood in the bathroom, then continued to run down the hallway. “Mom!” she shouted. “Mom!” Nick was right behind her when she pushed open the door to her mother’s room. Jillian sat up in bed, dazed and scared in the sudden light from the overhead lamp. “Mom!”

“What is it, Sara?” she asked. When Nick stepped into the room next to her daughter, she cried, “What’s happened? What is it? What’s happening?”

“Where is Jason?” Sara demanded.

Dazed, her mother pulled her blankets to her chest. “He sleeps in his own room, Sara. You know that.”

Sara didn’t wait for her mother to get out of bed. She pushed past Nick into the hallway and crossed to a room on the other side. The instant she switched the lights on inside, she began to howl.

“Get away from me! Get away! Don’t touch me!” she screamed at Nick when he tried to stand next to her. Nick took a faltering step into Hamlin’s room, then stood gaping at the corpse. Exactly as he had pictured, Hamlin’s head was nearly severed from his body, and the mutilated carcass was lying in a confused tangle of bloody sheets on his antique bed.

Downstairs in the house, lights were being switched on, followed by footsteps and voices. Seconds later, Todd Wheeler, his clothes pulled on and wearing his boots, was ascending the stairs two at a time. He marched down the hallway in their direction, his shotgun in his hand. The huge house seemed to quake beneath him.

“Call the police, Catharine. Now!” he shouted when he reached the doorway into Hamlin’s room. Then he took the butt of his heavy steel rifle, gripped it in one of his callused hands, and swung it across Nick’s face, dropping him like a puppet.

Nick woke to the roar of a helicopter descending on the front lawn. Its landing lights flooded the house through a multitude of small-paned windows, papering the walls and floors with a brilliant checkerboard. Nick’s first conscious thought was that he had been dreaming, and he imagined that he would be waking up into a better reality. Then he became aware of the rope wrapped tightly around his wrists, cutting into his skin, securing him to a large wooden chair. He tried to free himself, but his legs and arms were tied so tightly that his hands and feet were swollen. His blood could barely circulate. He heard voices behind him, and he tried to turn his head to see who it was. “Sara?” The voices behind him were silenced. “Sara, is that you?” He struggled against the ropes, tried to twist in the chair.

“He’s awake,” he heard Todd Wheeler say.

“The police are coming inside now.” This was Sara’s voice.

“Sara!” Nick shouted, helpless. Outside, he could see the helicopter touching down. Its motor began a slow, thumping decrescendo into a high-pitched whine.

Sara appeared in front of Nick. There was a look in her eyes he did not recognize. “I’m sorry, Nick,” she said. “We had no choice.”

“My face, Sara,” Nick heard himself say. He felt an intense throbbing in his jaw where he had been struck. After that, the room became a blur. Nick was only vaguely aware of the three uniformed policemen streaming into the house, of Stolie standing in front of him, reading him his rights. Stolie leaned down, shining a small flashlight into his eyes. A man dressed in white stood next to him and measured something out in a small vial. When he stuck a syringe into Nick’s arm, Nick tried to pull his arm back. He tried to scream. But he couldn’t move, and he couldn’t speak. He was floating, drifting away. The last thing Nick remembered was lying down on a cloud and being swept up toward a bloody moon. He didn’t remember the stretcher. And he didn’t remember the helicopter ride back into Seattle, buffeted by the approach of a cold front.

The chaos disappeared, and the frenzy of sounds vanished. From time to time Nick sensed someone standing next to him, or caught glimpses of a man flicking a syringe held up to a fluorescent light or examining a clipboard and whispering secrets to his shadow. That was all he was conscious of for days, until he finally opened his eyes, awake, in an uncomfortable bed in a green tinted room that smelled like disinfectant, his arms fitted securely into the tight sleeves of a starched white straitjacket.

“Where am I?”

A man dressed in a white polyester uniform was holding a small Dixie cup toward him. By now Nick understood that the cup would contain three tablets. A large one that was difficult to swallow. A small one that tasted acridly bitter. And then one of the medicines Barnes had given him, a tiny daisy-yellow pill that left a strong aftertaste in his mouth. At nighttime, before he went to sleep, the cup would include a fourth tablet as well, one of the orange tranquillizers from the brown bottle with the white cap. Nick had begun craving these pills. He would wait for them in the windowless room as nighttime approached, trying to measure the hours, a growing hunger yawning inside him that could only be satisfied with the grains of the miniscule orange pill.

Nick took the Dixie cup from the man and obediently dropped the pills into his mouth, then took another cup from him and swallowed them down with the rancid-tasting water it contained. He had learned a couple of days before that it was pointless to refuse the medication. The straitjacket had come back into the room, and, unable to resist, Nick had been tied back down to the metal bed. A man with strong hands that smelled like iron had squeezed his nose while another man had force-fed him the pills like a dog. After that, he had spent twenty-four hours in restraints. It was better to take the pills voluntarily and remain free in the room. The door was locked from the outside. There was no TV, and they had left him nothing to read. There wasn’t anything at all to do. Without a window, he couldn’t even look outside. The pills they were giving him kept him asleep most of the day anyway, but time hardly passed when the straitjacket was on.

The orderly froze for a split second when Nick spoke, then looked at Nick with eyebrows raised. He was a short, wiry Hispanic man. These were the first words Nick had uttered since his incarceration, and it stunned the man to hear Nick’s voice.

“This is Western State,” he said as he took the cup back from him, answering Nick’s question. He crumpled the cup in one of his silicone-clad hands. “You’re inside.”

“The asylum?”

“It’s a psychiatric hospital, man,” the orderly said.

Nick became aware of the pills he had just swallowed breaking down in his stomach. He could feel microscopic particles of the medicine beginning to circulate through his system, dulling his senses. “How long have I been here?”

“Five days.”

“I want to see a lawyer,” Nick heard himself say.

“I don’t know nothing about that, man.”

“How long are they going to keep me here?”

“From what I understand, they can only keep you here fifteen days,” the orderly said. “For a psychiatric evaluation, to make sure you can stand trial.”

“Stand trial for what?”

The orderly was straightening his bed. He shook his head, deciding not to answer. “You got questions, ask the doctor.”

“The doctor?”

“Dr. Barnes, man.” The orderly glanced at his watch. “He told me to give you your medicine now so he can come see you in an hour.”

“Barnes is here?” Nick felt a wave of relief course through his body. “Dr. Barnes is going to see me?”

“Yeah, man. Dr. Barnes is here. Dr. Barnes runs this place.”

“He’ll be here in an hour?” Nick’s question was interrupted by the sound of happy laughter. It took seeing the startled expression on the orderly’s face for Nick to realize that it belonged to him.

“Lie back down,” the orderly said. “Some of this shit can make you dizzy, man. You better be lying down when it hits your blood.”

Nick acquiesced. “Dr. Barnes will be here in one hour,” he said, settling back onto his uncomfortable bed, repeating the words like a mantra. “Dr. Barnes will be here in one hour.”

“That’s right, man. Take it easy. I’ll see you again at three.”

Nick closed his eyes. “Dr. Barnes will be here in one hour,” he said one last time as the orderly shut and locked the huge steel door behind him.

Nick was dreaming about the flight to San Juan Island. The sky was crisply blue, without a cloud in sight, and the state of Washington spread out beneath them like a gigantic diorama. The water of the Sound was a steely sapphire plane, and the mountains were covered with the growth of the Pacific Northwest rain forest. Sara turned to him and, burying her hands between his thighs, gave him a kiss. Nick’s heart burst with happiness as the aircraft soared over the undulating landscape as effortlessly and gracefully as a giant eagle. Then, interrupting the gentle solace of his vision, out of nowhere Jason Hamlin’s hand shoved Nick aggressively backward.
You’re one hell of a lucky son of a bitch to get a taste of lips as sweet as that.

Barnes had unlocked the door and stepped into the room. Nick’s eyes were moving rapidly from side to side beneath his eyelids. The doctor shook him, yanking him from his sleep.

The orderly was looking at Nick over the doctor’s shoulder. “He’s been sleeping eighteen or nineteen hours a day,” he said. “Sometimes I have to wake him up with a cold towel on his face to feed him the pills. I could get you a wet towel if you want.”

“No, thanks,” Barnes said. “His eyes are opening. He’s coming out of it now.” Nick became aware of the doctor’s bright blue eyes—as bright, he thought, as the sky had been the day of that flight. The memory brought him back into his dream. “Nick? Can you see me? Do you recognize me?”

A smile spread across Nick’s face.

“That’s good,” the doctor said. He turned to the orderly. “I’m going to be taking him outside for a little walk. I think he needs some air.”

“That’s up to you, Doc.”

“We’ll need a wheelchair. One of the chairs fixed with restraints.”

“Sure, Doc.”

Barnes turned back toward Nick. “Can you speak, Nick?”

Nick nodded.

“That’s good. That’s really good. I’d like to have a little talk with you.”

Once again Nick’s face lit with a weak smile. He was grateful for the doctor’s presence, grateful for a friendly face. “I just have to close my eyes for a minute,” he said. He was aware of the medicine working its way through the membrane of his brain. The room went dark. He tried to cling to the thought that Barnes was here at last, standing with him in his room, talking to him. But the pull of the medicine was too strong, and he was abruptly gone.

Nick awoke in weak sunshine. A few rays of light were filtering through the branches of a giant maple tree in the hospital gardens. Nick squinted at the fiery ball of flames peeking at him from between the tree’s branches, then became aware of the doctor’s face hovering above him, looking down at him curiously. Nick tried to raise one of his hands, to shield his eyes from the glare, but he couldn’t move his arms. He tried harder to lift them, then began to struggle, trying to pull his legs free as well. “You can’t move,” the doctor said to him. “You’re strapped in, Nick. It’s pointless to try.”

Nick stopped moving. He looked down at his arms, imprisoned by wide black Velcro straps against the steel rails of the wheelchair. His body and legs were strapped into the chair as well, too tightly. Nick looked up at the doctor, a weak appeal shadowing his eyes, but Barnes shook his head.

Gradually, Nick took in the surprising beauty of the hospital gardens. It felt good to be outside in the sun. The doctor had wheeled him to the far side of the property, to a remote area behind a chain-link fence that required a security clearance for entry. The lawn was carefully tended here, and the rolling landscape was artfully planted with shrubs and trees. “How long?” Nick heard himself say.

“Good, Nick. It’s nice to hear your voice.”

“How long have I been inside?” he asked the doctor, forgetting that the orderly had already told him.

“Five days, Nick.”

Nick heard himself laugh. “It feels much longer,” he said. “I almost don’t remember—”
Being anywhere else
, he thought, finishing the sentence in his mind.

“Luis tells me that you started speaking again today.”

Nick nodded his head and tried his best to smile at the doctor. He congratulated himself for figuring out that the orderly’s name must have been Luis. “How is she, Doctor?” he managed to ask.

The doctor ignored his question. “I was surprised to hear it.”

Nick fought to remember what the doctor was talking about.

“And I’m surprised to find you so coherent now.”

“How is Sara, Dr. Barnes?” Nick repeated, unable to follow what the doctor was telling him.

“I’ve got you on some pretty heavy meds, Nick. I’m surprised to find you awake at all.”

Nick shook his head. “I’m starting to remember things.”

“I know you are,” Barnes said.

“There was someone else there,” Nick said. “The night Sam was killed.”

“Who, Nick?”

“And in Hamlin’s room.” Nick’s hand was on the doorknob. He was twisting the knob, pushing the door open, entering Hamlin’s large, elegantly furnished room. The curtains were drawn back from the windows, and Nick looked down at the kitchen knife in his hands, shimmering in the moonlight. Next to him, a dark figure seemed to emerge from the shadows, too blurry to see.
There was someone there in the room with him
. Someone standing next to him.

The doctor smiled. “Your schizophrenia is progressing pretty aggressively, Nick. Much more dramatically than I ever would have predicted.”

Nick looked up at the doctor, trying to make sense of what he was saying.

“You only think there was someone else there.”

“No, Dr. Barnes.”

“Yes, Nick. You know who that other person was?”

Nick’s blood suddenly turned cold. He knew what the doctor’s next words were going to be.

“It was you, Nick.
You
. You watched yourself kill Sam. You watched yourself kill Hamlin, too.”

The image of Sam’s body lying on the asphalt burst back into Nick’s mind like a slow-motion explosion. His hand was on the handle of the knife, and the blade was sinking into his brother’s chest. Just like the doctor said, he was watching himself murder his own brother. “I killed Sam,” Nick said, shaking his head from side to side, trying to bring the doctor back into focus in front of him. “I killed him, Dr. Barnes. I killed him.”

“Yes,” the doctor said quietly. “You did.” Hitching his trousers up on his thighs, he squatted down in front of the wheelchair so that he could look Nick in the eye. He rested his hands on the wheelchair’s armrests, just in front of Nick’s fingers, balancing himself. “The thing is, Nick, I wouldn’t blame myself too much if I were you. You killed Sam, yes. But it wasn’t really your fault. Not with all the Zarconia he was feeding you. It’s kind of ironic, really. Sam pretty much brought the tragedy onto himself.”

Tears sprang into Nick’s eyes, blurring his vision. He wasn’t able to follow what the doctor had said. He understood, though, that Sam had been poisoning him somehow, with the drug that Matrix Zarcon had been developing.

“Your brother was doing genetic research to create a drug to treat advanced forms of schizophrenia,” Barnes explained. “He needed subjects to test the drug on. The FDA would never allow the kind of testing a company like Matrix Zarcon needs to perform. So where else would a man like your brother turn?”

Nick didn’t want to hear more.

“He turned to me, Nick. I’m sitting on hundreds of cases of schizophrenia in the free clinic, manifested in people without families—people without a past or a future, people without friends.”

Revolted, Nick pulled hard on his restraints. He torqued his arms from one side to the next, twisting them against the tight bands. The Velcro on his right arm crackled a little as it began to give. Vigorously he wriggled, struggling to get free.

“There’s a lot of money in a new drug, Nick. More millions than you can conceive of. Your brother knew, though. And he knew that I would understand, too.”

Nick felt the Velcro begin to loosen, and, laboring to keep his face from reflecting the effort, he twisted his wrist even harder, until it felt as if his bones would snap.

“The drug worked wonders at first. Sam and I thought we were sitting on a gold mine, and we convinced Jason Hamlin of it, too. The problem was, Nick, that a few of our test subjects began developing a proclivity for violence. You met a couple of our failures. Henry Dean in New York. James Warren, now incarcerated in Wisconsin.”

You’re the one who told me to do it. Aren’t you, Doc?
James Warren, Nick realized, had mistaken him for Sam. Just like Daniel Scott, too, had confused him for one of the doctors treating the homeless.

“We needed a control subject to test the drug on. You know what a control subject is, don’t you, Nick?” The doctor looked at Nick expectantly, as if he thought Nick would answer. “A control is someone without schizophrenia. A subject whose reaction to the drug we could test and analyze apart from any mental illness. It was Sam’s idea to test the drug on you, Nick. Not mine.”

“No.” Nick’s teeth were gritted together. The Velcro made a loud scraping noise as he levered his forearm. All he had to do was get one hand free, and he would be able to tear the other restraints off as well. “No. You’re lying.”

The doctor was undisturbed by the rip of the Velcro. “You must be able to see the irony, Nick. Not only did the drug give you—a relatively normal subject—exacerbated schizophrenic symptoms, it brought out a very definite violent tendency in you, too. I don’t know the history between your brother and you, but as a psychiatrist I’d say there wasn’t too much love lost on either side, eh, Nick? Jackson Ferry—another one of our subjects—attacked Sam. It seems he didn’t like being a human guinea pig. It seems he didn’t like your brother any more than you did, Nick. He attacked Sam and you. You defended yourself. But then when Ferry left, you finished the job. You killed your brother yourself.”

At last, with an abrupt rip, the Velcro gave under the force of his effort. Nick’s arm flew up from the chair’s rail. His fingers attached themselves to the doctor’s throat. They dug into the doctor’s flesh, rending his windpipe, ripping his arteries. But the doctor continued smiling. He didn’t even move to react.

Nick looked down at his hands, realizing with a shock that he was still strapped to the chair. He hadn’t busted through the Velcro at all. He began to cry, whimpering, tossing his head from side to side.