The Madman's Tale (56 page)

But Peter, who’d been watching and listening, suddenly leaned forward. “Why not?” he asked.

Francis turned to the sound of the Fireman’s voice. Peter was grinning. “Why not?” he said again.

Evans looked upset. “We don’t encourage delusions here, Peter,” he snapped.

But Peter, fresh from the padded walls of the isolation cell, ignored him. “Why not, Francis?” he asked a third time.

Francis waved his hand about, as if to indicate the hospital.

“But C-Bird,” Peter continued, his voice picking up momentum as he spoke, “why couldn’t you be an astronaut? You’re young, you’re fit, you’re smart. You see things that others might fail to notice. You’re not conceited and you’re brave. I think you’d make a perfect astronaut.”

“But Peter …,” Francis said.

“No buts at all. Why, who’s to say that NASA won’t decide to send someone crazy into space? I mean who better than one of us? I mean, people would surely believe a crazy spaceman a helluva lot quicker than some military-salute-the-flag type, right? Who’s to say they won’t decide to send all sorts of folks up into space, and why not one of us? They might send politicians, or scientists or maybe tourists even, someday. Maybe they’ll find that when they send a crazy guy up, that floating about in space without gravity to hold us on earth, well, it helps us? Like a science experiment. Maybe …”

He paused, taking a breath. Evans started to speak, but before he could, Napoleon hesitantly added, “Peter might be right. Maybe gravity makes us crazy …”

Cleo jumped in. “Holds us down …”

“All that weight right on our shoulders …”

“Prevents our thoughts from zooming up and out …”

From around the room, patient after patient started to nod in agreement. Suddenly each seemed to find his tongue. There were first murmurs of assent, then abrupt acclaim.

“We could fly. We could float.”

“No one would hold us back.”

“Who would be better explorers than us?”

Around the group, men and women were smiling, agreeing. It was as if in that moment they could suddenly all see themselves as astronauts, hurtling through the heavens, their earthbound cares forgotten and evaporated, as they slipped effortlessly through the great starry void of space. It was wildly attractive, and for a few moments, the group seemed to soar skyward, each member imagining the force of gravity being sliced away from him, experiencing an odd sort of fantasy freedom in those seconds.

Evans seethed. He started to speak, then stopped.

Instead, he tossed an angry glare at Peter, and without a word, stomped from the room.

The group quieted, watching Mister Evil’s back. Within seconds, the fog of troubles fell back upon all of them.

Cleo, however, sighed loudly and shook her head. “I guess it’s just you, C-Bird,” she said, briskly. “You’ll have to head to the heavens for all of us.”

Dutifully, the group rose, folded up their chairs and placed them against the wall where they belonged, making a rattling, metallic clanking sound as one after the other was lined up. Then, lost in his own thoughts, each member made his way out of the therapy room, back into the main Amherst corridor, blending into the tidal flow of patients that maneuvered up and down the hallway.

Francis grasped Peter by the arm.

“He was here, last night.”

“Who?”

“The Angel.”

“He came back again?”

“Yes. He killed the Dancer but no one wants to believe that and then he held a knife to my face and told me he could kill me or you or anyone he wanted, whenever he wanted.”

“Jesus!” Peter said. Whatever leftover exhilaration Peter had felt at out-maneuvering Mister Evil disappeared, and he bent to every word Francis spoke. “What else?” he asked.

Francis, hesitantly, trying hard to recall everything that had happened, could feel some of the remainder of fear that still lurked about within him. Telling Peter about the pressure of the blade on his face was harsh. He thought, at first, that it might make himself feel better, but it did not. Instead, it merely redoubled anxiety within him.

“He held it how?” Peter asked.

Francis demonstrated.

“Jesus,” Peter repeated. “That must have scared the hell out of you, C-Bird.”

Francis nodded, unwilling to say out loud precisely how scared he’d been. But then, in that second, something struck him, and he stopped, his brows knitting as he tried to see through a question that was murky and clouded. Peter saw Francis’s sudden consternation, and asked, “What is it?”

“Peter …,” Francis started, “you were the investigator once. Why would the Angel hold the knife against my face that way?”

Peter stopped, thinking.

“Shouldn’t …” Francis continued, “shouldn’t he hold it against my throat?”

“Yes,” Peter said.

“That way, if I screamed …”

“The throat, the jugular vein, the larynx, those are the vulnerable spots. That’s how you kill someone with a knife.”

“But he didn’t. He held it to my face.”

Peter nodded. “That’s most intriguing,” he said. “He didn’t think you would scream …”

“People scream all the time in here. It doesn’t mean anything.”

“True enough. But he wanted to terrify you.”

“He succeeded,” Francis said.

“Did you get a look …”

“He made me keep my eyes closed.”

“How about his voice?”

“I might recognize it, if I heard it again. Especially close up. He hissed, like a snake.”

“Do you think he was trying to conceal it somehow?”

“No. Funny. I don’t think so. It was like he didn’t care.”

“What else?”

Francis shook his head. “He was …
confident
,” he said cautiously.

Peter and Francis walked out of the therapy room. Lucy was waiting for them midway down the corridor, near the nursing station. They headed toward her, and as they maneuvered through the knots of patients, Peter spotted Little Black, standing not far from the station, a few feet away from Lucy Jones, and he saw the smaller of the two brothers bent over, jotting down something in a large black notebook attached to the metal grate with a modest silver chain, a little like a child’s bicycle lock. In that second, he thought of something, and he stepped toward Little Black rapidly, only to have Francis grasp at his arm and stop him.

“What?” Peter said.

Francis looked pale, suddenly, and there was a nervous hesitancy in his voice. “Peter,” he said slowly. “Something occurs to me.”

“What’s that?”

“If he wasn’t scared of speaking to me, that meant he wasn’t worried that I might accidentally overhear his voice in some other location. He didn’t worry about me recognizing it because he knows there’s no chance I’ll ever hear it.”

Peter stopped, nodding, and gestured toward Lucy. “That’s interesting, Francis,” he said. “That’s very interesting.”

Francis thought that
interesting
wasn’t the word that Peter really meant. Francis pivoted about and thought to himself:
Find silence
.

He noticed a slight quiver in his hand when he thought this, and he realized suddenly that his throat had dried up. There was a noxious taste in his mouth, and he tried to swirl saliva around but he had none. He looked at Lucy, who wore an expression of annoyance; he thought it had little to do with them, but much to do with how the world she had entered so confidently now proved more elusive than she had first guessed.

As the prosecutor approached them, Peter stepped toward Little Black.

“Mister Moses,” he spoke cautiously, “what are you doing?”

The slender attendant looked up at Peter. “Just routine,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“Routine,” Little Black continued. “Just making some notes in the daily log book.”

“What else goes into that book?”

“Any changes ordered by the head doc, or Mister Evil. Anything out of the ordinary, like a fight or lost keys or a death like the Dancer’s. Any switches in the routine. Lots of little, stupid crap, too, Peter. Like when you take your bathroom break at night, and when you check the doors and when you check the sleeping dormitories and any phone calls that come in or anything like I say that just about anybody who works here might think was out of the ordinary. Or you notice, maybe, one patient making progress for some reason or another. That can go in here, too. When you get on station at the start of your shift, you’re supposed to check the overnights. And then, before you clock out, you’re supposed to make some entry and sign it. Even if it’s only a couple of words. This goes on every day. Log book is supposed to make things easier for the next folks that come in, so they’re up to date on anything happening.”

“Is there a book like that—”

Little Black interrupted him. “One on every floor, by every nursing station. Security got their own, too.”

“So, if you had that, you would know, more or less, when things happen. I mean, the routine things?”

“Daily log is important,” Little Black said. “It keeps track of all sorts of things. Got to have a record of everything that happens in here. It’s like a little history book.”

“Who keeps those logs, when they get filled up?”

Little Black shrugged. “Stored down in the basement somewhere in boxes.”

“But if I were to get a look at one of those, I’d know all sorts of things, wouldn’t I?”

“Patients not supposed to see daily log books. It ain’t like they’re hidden or anything. But they’re for the staff.”

“But if I did see one … even one that had been retired and put in storage, I’d have some pretty good ideas about when things take place on what sort of schedule, wouldn’t I?”

Little Black slowly nodded his head.

Peter continued, but now he was speaking to Lucy Jones. “For example, I might have a pretty good idea when I could move around the hospital without being detected. And I might know the best time to find Short Blond alone at the first-floor nursing station in the middle of the night and drowsy because she routinely worked a double shift one day each week, wouldn’t I? And I’d know, too, that Security had long since been by to check on the doors and maybe gab a little bit and that no one else at all was going to be around, except a bunch of drugged out, sleeping patients, right?”

Little Black didn’t have to answer this question. Or any of the others.

“That’s how he knows,” Peter said softly. “He doesn’t know absolutely for certain, with military precision, but he knows enough, so that he can guess with a great deal of certainty, and with a little bit of foresight, can wait and pick the right moments.”

Francis thought this was possible. He felt cold inside, because abruptly he began to think that they had just taken a step closer to the Angel, and he had already been too close to the man, and he wasn’t sure that he wanted to get that close again to the knife and the voice.

Lucy was shaking her head back and forth, and finally said to Peter and Francis, “I can’t put my finger on it exactly, but something is wrong. No, that’s not it, it’s more that something is right and wrong, both at the same time.”

Peter grinned. “Ah, Lucy,” he said, almost mocking the way that Gulptilil liked to begin his sentences with an elongated pause, and adopting the Indian physician’s lilting accented English. “Ah, Lucy,” he repeated, “you make the sort of sense that belongs here in the madhouse. Please continue.”

“This place is getting to me,” she said quietly. “I think I’m being followed back to the nurse-trainees’ dormitory at night. I hear noises by my door that
disappear when I get up. I sense that someone has been into my belongings, although there is nothing missing. I keep thinking we’re making progress, and yet, I can’t point at what it is. I’m beginning to think that I’ll start hearing voices any second now.”

For a moment, she turned and looked at Francis, who seemed not to be listening, but was lost in thought. She peered down the corridor and saw Cleo holding forth on some incredibly important issue or another, waving her arms energetically, her voice booming out, not that anything she said made particularly cogent sense. “Or,” Lucy said, shaking her head, “I will come to imagine that I’m the reincarnation of some Egyptian princess.”