The Horses of the Night (34 page)

I let the file remain open on my lap.

Too late
.

I looked around myself with new eyes. It was late afternoon, the bay taking on the neutral gray that would soon fill with darkness and begin to reflect light.

Anna's touch had reminded me of the woman I loved.

“You look so tired, Mr. Fields,” said Collie.

She was just leaving, buttoning her coat. “I feel great,” I said, barely recognizing the sound of my own voice.

“You look just a little bit weary, if I may say so. I made something for you, just a beef burgundy, because I didn't know really where you were …”

“That will be fine,” I said. I was not hungry. I had not felt any appetite for what seemed like a long time.

“Please let me stay and see you comfortable, just a little bit longer. It troubles me to see you so—”

“I have never felt better in my life.”

“Things are shipshape here,” she said. At some point in her personal history Collie must have known and admired someone whose life took him down to the sea. It might have been this naval tradition that allowed her to accept my polite but firm insistence that it was time for her to leave.

I knelt and shaved kindling, and lit it. Gradually I nursed the fire into a blaze. Here, I reminded myself, was where I once burned a feather.

This was where I burned my work.

Now what I needed more than anything was to have that audience again, that court of Presences.

“I've needed you so badly,” I breathed.

I was trembling, sweating, unable to hold a thought in my mind, except for a sensation of self-loathing.

I continued, speaking as though to the fire, “I need to ask you some questions.”

There it was at last, that faint flicker of light. A woman's figure, a distant galaxy, a wrinkle in my own aura—a thing I could barely see.

I whispered, “There are things I need to know.”

She did not make a sound.

“The people I love,” I said. “I can barely remember them.”

She did not have to respond. I could sense the answer: What did you expect?

Is that what happens when there is no soul? With its loss, does memory go, too? Because love is in large part memory, bringing the absent voice, the absent face, into being.

This is what I had exchanged for my fortune. Exchange: That was the essence of life, giving one thing for another.

I turned to speak to the source of light, but she was gone.

I supported myself against the mantel. I knew what I would have to do.

Hurry, I told myself.

There is a way to bring Nona back.

52

“Dr. Montague asked us to call him if you dropped by,” said the receptionist. “And your brother wants you to give him a call, Mr. Fields, and—” But I had given a wave and a smile and was in the elevator.

I glimpsed the receptionist as the doors slid shut. She was reaching for the phone.

“Good evening, Mr. Fields,” said an orderly.

“It's a quiet night,” I said.

“Yes, sir,” he agreed, pushing the rolling bin of laundry, “very quiet.”

Then he called back to me, “Did you report in, sir?”

“Of course.”

But I could sense him watching me as I hurried away from him.

The tile floors gleamed. A buffing machine hummed far off, a man directing it methodically from one side of the corridor to another. The hospital at night was subdued, but still very much a place of power, a place where lives were lost.

The floors gleamed
too
brightly. The murmur of the machine was an orchestra.

“They told us to get permission before we let anyone see her,” said the rent-a-cop at the door.

“I don't think you have to worry about me,” I said.

His eyes were full of apology. “Dr. Montague mentioned you especially,” said the tall, dark-skinned man.

“You know just a look won't do any harm,” I said.

The man was pained, leaning to one side, unable to give permission.

“Everyone has procedures,” I said. “You have to have them. Otherwise, you really wouldn't know what to do when something unexpected happens.”

“This is true,” he said.

“I won't really go into the room. I'll just stand in the doorway.”

There was a hesitation of just a second or two. “Right,” he said with a smile, letting me into the room.

She was no longer curled up, but her head was still swathed. Her eyelids were sunken. She had resolved into a creature at once less tortured in appearance, and even further removed from life.

There was a long whisper in the half-dark, and then, after a long time, another long airy syllable. She was breathing. But her breath was so slow it nearly stopped during the turn-around, the waiting period between inhale and exhale.

The word came to me out of old tales, legends: deathbed. A commonplace-sounding word, but the actual bed, the actual death, has the feel of an abyss as one stands at the edge.

There was another sound, too. It was insistent, approaching, a squeak and patter, soles against waxed surface. I could hear the footsteps of people hurrying closer behind me.

Now I knew what it was I had to do.

“Nona,” I said. “Everything will be all right.”

The words had always been sincere, when I had murmured them after lovemaking, uttered them with delight or affection in my voice. Now they were a promise, a truth, a change in my life brought on by the advance of my own knowledge.

I knew the secret.

Life was an exchange, a cluttered trading pit. I knew what I could trade for Nona.

As I left the room Barry ran down the corridor, slowed when he saw me, and fell against a wall, panting heavily. Security guards ran along behind him. The tall, dark-skinned man tucked a transmitter into his belt, and looked at me with something like apology.

When he had recovered his breath, Barry gave my arm a squeeze as he passed me. He switched on a light and bent over Nona's recumbent body.

“You seem to think you can do anything you want,” said Barry. He switched off the light and tucked in his shirt, still winded, trying to pull himself into something like professional appearance. His eyes looked puffy, and he had that new-born look of someone who has been asleep. I knew what he was about to say. He was about to say how concerned he was about me, how worried he was about what I might do.

Whatever he said, I didn't hear it.

I was gone.

53

The door to the stairwell was locked, despite the fact that the door was labeled
EXIT
, in glowing green letters.

I knew this hospital. I had stood with my father while we contemplated the blueprints of the new wing, the new laundry facility, the new emergency room, my father's fingers slipping across the vacant rectangles that indicated the chambers of refuge and healing.

I found another door, to another stairwell, and this one opened.

My steps echoed in the shaft. I bounded up the stairs, from time to time gripping the handrail as I leaped three or four steps at once. Below, far below, was the slam and echo of pursuers.

The lower stairs were well worn, the rail's paint flaking to bare steel. As I climbed higher, however, the steps were newer in appearance. Each doorway was surmounted by a green exit sign, and I kept climbing, beginning to breathe hard, all the way to the top.

The stairs ended. I struck the barrier with my fist and the resulting sound was loud. This was a trap, a cul-de-sac. I had run so far to end up nowhere. The top door was padlocked and chained, and the links rattled as I tugged at the latchbar of the door.

I plunged downstairs, and a door I had raced past was labeled, clearly and in bright red letters:
OPENING THIS DOOR WILL SOUND FIRE ALARM
.

Footsteps slapped the stairs below me. The sound of the steps had a continuous, reverberating quality, like the splash of water in a cave.

As I tugged at the door I heard a faraway trill, a very faint shrill of fire alarm, which I knew was connected to my activities here in the musty air of the stairwell. A further notice on the door read:
DOOR TO REMAIN UNLOCKED AT ALL TIMES
.

The pursuers were closer. There were voices, gasps. Far-off doors were flung open, a metallic thunder.

I pushed. The barrier gave way, barely. It was unlocked, but it stuck. I slammed into it with all my weight. It burst open with a steel chuckle, scraping the crushed rock that had somehow worked its way under the door.

My feet crunched gravel.

Everything was quiet, open. There was freedom—air, sky. I was on the roof.

So you understand at last
.

Her steps did not stir the crushed rock of the roof. She hovered there, as though a wrinkle of skin, a shrink-wrap sheath over the earth, kept her from touching the fragments of stone.

She was indistinct, then, and just as quickly distinct, a source of pain now as well as light, as though the early symptoms of petit mal seizure had blossomed into hallucination.

I was panting hard, unafraid. “It's all a matter of cost, isn't it? It's all a matter of what a person is worth.”

Her voice was the sizzle of surf on sand, the flutter of wing. “Nothing more. But, Stratton—you still don't understand what I am.”

“What you are? What difference does it make what you are? I know what you can do.”

I took no pleasure, anticipating what I had to do. And yet I was sure of myself. I had that clarity of vision that comes from having no choice. I ran.

Did I hear that voice in me, that source of light, calling me, telling me to go no farther?

This was the sort of roof that should have been a garden, a landscape away from the tumult in the building below it. Instead, it was another waste. The roof in the dark was a disorienting desert. Vents brayed and vibrated, big metal hoods and domes. The smell in the air was like the clean, starchy smell vented from a laundromat.

I stumbled, and recovered my stride. There was a walkway across the gravel, flat slabs of cinderblock set as steppingstones across the rough gray mesa. I followed this path, running easily.

It was all a business, all a carnival, a noisy flea market, a brawling auction. I had guessed the secret. I climbed the dull, rough-surfaced edge of the roof, a low wall.

For her. To bring her back. I was paying a life for a life, and in the blathering stock exchange of souls I had guessed right.

54

As I fell forward, something hooked my throat.

A force tugged me back, and upward. The pressure increased. Something had my arm, a warm, bruising grip. Then something had my other arm, grasping, squeezing.

“I have him!” I recognized Barry's gasp.

I was dragged back. Gravel scraped the heels of my shoes. Arms held me.

There were voices, commands. These were people—nothing supernatural. People! I wanted to laugh. Human strength was nothing. The grasp of three men was not enough to keep me there. I climbed to my feet encumbered by their weight, but barely slowed by it.

They could not stop me.

Barry fell away, the exertion having spent him, sending him sprawling over the stones at my feet. Two more orderlies joined the men who held me, and they tried to wrest me off my feet, back to the roof's surface where they could pin me. I could escape them easily, I was certain, but Barry's eyes made me hesitate.

His eyes beseeched me, and his hands clenched my pantlegs. “For God's sake, Stratton, please!”

His voice switched off a current in me.

I relaxed, and with something like instinctive understanding, the men released me. I backed away. I fell to my knees.

More figures joined us, and they played the nervous beams of flashlights into my face, around the metal vents on the lunar wilderness of the roof.

I saw what Barry was, at that moment. Not simply the harried, work-wasted man. Not simply the man who could play a capable game of tennis. He believed in saving lives. Medicine was not a moneymaking career for him. He was a friend.

I gazed through the twitching pools of light cast by the flashlights. There was Rick, beside a vent that resembled the great head of a robot. Rick was watching, and I did not recognize the expression in his eyes.

All I could think was: Nona.

Had to help Nona.

The two men were talking. I sat in a chair, gazing at the floor. I was trapped. Outside the door was a very large orderly who kept looking in as though to make sure all was well. Barry had given me a shot, a syringe of what I imagined was Thorazine, in the muscle of my thigh. I could feel no effect from it, but perhaps that in itself was a result of the chemical. If the patient wonders if the drug is taking effect he is already calmer than he was.

Trapped. Can't help Nona.

Gradually the drug made me feel thick-tongued, mildly concussed. I stood, and both men froze.

The best scheme was to try to seem completely peaceful. I would express regret at having caused such a fuss. I spoke as calmly as I could. I took a deep breath and managed to clear my head. “Don't you see how ridiculous this is?”

“Sit down,” said Barry, “or I'll have you put into restraints.”

This formal way of putting it made “restraints” sound old-fashioned and grim, something out of Bedlam and the most remote
gulag
.

There was a flash of anger inside me. I did my best to disguise it. “You'd be overreacting,” I said.

“Hardly.”

“There's no reason for me to be here.”

Even now there was a measure of caution in the way Barry treated me. I was, after all, Stratton Fields. “Please sit down,” said Barry. “You make me very nervous.”

“I'm not even trembling. Look at my hands. Steady.” I looked over at Rick. “Have you ever seen steadier hands?”

“Maybe you should sit down, Strater,” said Rick, with iron in his voice. “You're giving Barry a nervous breakdown.”

I sat once again, and knitted my fingers together. “Penning me up here will do no good. It's not necessary. I suffered a fit of anguish.” I deliberately used a phrase I thought Barry would respond to.