The Madman's Tale (76 page)

And Lucy, so few feet away, but alone with the man who’d thought of nothing except her death for so long, feeling the knife at her throat, knew that she needed to keep stealing seconds
.

Lucy tried to think past the cold of the knife and the sharpness of the blade as it dug at her skin, a terrible sensation that reached deeply into the heat of the moment, and crippled her ability to reason. Down the hallway she could hear the noise of metal being bent, as the locked door was savaged, groaning with complaint as Peter and the retarded man assaulted it with the bed frame. It yielded slowly, hesitant to open up and let loose rescue. But above that noise, rising into the air beyond, she could hear the word
Apollo
being sung by the men in the dormitory, which gave her a wisp of hope.

“What does it mean?” the Angel demanded fiercely. That he had patience amid the sudden arrival of noise in what had been such a sleeping world, frightened her as much as anything.

“What?”

“What does it mean!” he asked, his voice growing lower, harsher. He did not need to attach a threat to his words, Lucy thought. The tone was clear enough. She kept repeating to herself
buy time!
and so she hesitated.

“It’s a cry for help,” she said.

“What?”

“They need help,” she repeated.

“Why do they …” and then he stopped. He looked down at her, his face contorting. Even in the blackness of the floor of the nurse’s station, she could see creases in his face, lines and shadows, each that spoke of terror. Once he’d worn a mask as he terrorized her, but now, she understood
he wants to be seen because he expects that he will be the last thing I ever see
. She gasped for breath, and she moaned beyond the pain of her swollen lips and ravaged jaw.

“They know you’re here.” She spit the words between blood. “They’re coming for you.”

“Who?”

“All the crazy men down the hall,” she said.

The Angel bent down to her. “Do you know how quickly you can die here, Lucy?” he asked.

She nodded. She didn’t think she should answer that question because her words might invite the reality. The blade of the knife bit into her skin, and she could feel her flesh parting ever so slightly beneath its pressure. It was a terrifying sensation, and one that she remembered with an awful intimacy from the first terrible night that she’d had with the Angel so many years earlier.

“Do you know that I can do anything I want, Lucy, and you are powerless to do anything about it?”

Again, she kept her mouth closed.

“Do you know that I could have walked up to you at any point during your stay here in this hospital and killed you right in front of everyone, and all they would have said was ‘He’s crazy …’ and no one would have blamed me? That’s what your own law says, Lucy, surely you know that?”

“Then go ahead and kill me,” she said stiffly. “Just like you did Short Blond and those other women.”

He put his head down closer, so that she could feel his breath against her face. The same motion that a lover would make, leaving his partner asleep as he went off in some early hour on some distant task. “I would never kill you like them, Lucy,” he hissed. “They died to bring you to me. They were simply part of a design. Their deaths were just business. Necessary, but not remarkable. If I’d wanted you to die like them, I could have killed you a hundred times. A thousand. Think of all the moments you’ve been alone in the dark. Maybe you weren’t alone all those times. Maybe I was at your side, you just
didn’t know it. But I wanted this night to happen in my own way. I wanted you to come to me.”

She did not reply. She felt caught up in the vortex of the Angel’s sickness and hatred, and she spun around, feeling her grip on life loosening with each revolution.

“It was so terribly easy,” he hissed. “Create a series of murders that the hotshot young prosecutor couldn’t help but be attracted to. You just never knew that they meant nothing and you meant everything, did you, Lucy?”

She groaned in reply.

From down the hallway, the door being torn at emitted a great rending sound. The Angel looked up, searching with his eyes in the direction of the noise through the darkness that hung in the corridor. In this moment’s hesitation, Lucy knew her life hung in balance. He had wanted minutes in the deep of night to luxuriate in her death. He had seen it all, right from the way he’d approached her, to the attack, and then beyond that. He’d fantasized and envisioned every word he would speak, every touch, every slice, every awful cut along her path to dying. It had all been a hallucination, in his mind every second of every waking moment, that he was compelled to make real. It was what made him powerful, fearless, and every inch the assassin that he was. Everything in his being had been directed to that space in time. But it wasn’t happening quite the way he’d perfected it in his mind, day after day, through every turn, planning, anticipating, sensing the deliciousness of death when he delivered it. She could feel his muscles tensing as he was caught in a contradiction between what was real and what was fantasy. All she had left to hope for was that the real would take over. She didn’t know if there was enough time.

And then she heard a second sound, penetrating past all the terror that cascaded around her. It came from upstairs, and was the sound of a door being slammed, and feet pounding against the cement of the stairwell.
Apollo!
had done its job.

The Angel blasted out a great scream of frustration. It echoed down the hallway.

Then he bent back down. “So, this night Lucy is lucky. Very lucky. I don’t think I can stay here any longer. But I will come for you some other night, when you least expect it. Some night when all your fears and all your preparations will mean nothing, and I will be there. You can arm yourself. Guard yourself. Move to some deserted island or some forgotten jungle. But, sooner or later, Lucy, I will be there at your side. And then we can finish this.”

He seemed to tense again, and she could feel him hesitate. Then he bent down toward her and whispered, “Never turn out the light, Lucy. Never lie down in the darkness alone. Because years mean nothing to me, and some day I will be there for you.”

She breathed in sharply, almost overcome by the depth of his obsession.

He started to step off of her, dismounting like a rider off a horse. But then he coldly added, “Once I gave you something to remember me by every time you looked in the mirror. Now you can remember me every time you take a step.”

And with that, he plunged the knife blade into her right knee, twisting it savagely a single time. She screamed as pain far beyond any she’d felt so far in any moment of her life seemed to constrict her every muscle and tendon. Black unconsciousness swept over her, and she rolled back, only vaguely aware that she was alone, and that the Angel had left her beaten, wounded, bleeding, barely alive and possibly crippled and with a promise that was far worse.

The metal in the door screeched one final time and a sliver of darkness grew between the frame and steel. Francis could see the corridor beyond, gaping like some dark mouth waiting open. The retarded man, suddenly straightened up, tossing the makeshift crowbar down to the floor, where it clattered aside. He reached out and pulled Peter away, and then he took a few steps backward. For an instant, he lowered his head, like a bull in an arena, infuriated by the matador’s preening, then he abruptly charged forward, bursting out with an immense cry of attack as he did so. The retarded man threw himself against the door, which buckled and gave way with a huge booming sound. Staggering, shaking his head back and forth, panting, a thin line of dark blood dripping down from the edge of his scalp, running between his eyes across the bridge of his nose, the retarded man retreated. He shook his head, and for a second time, he braced himself, his face set like iron with the singleness of his task, and then a second time he bellowed a great sound of fury, and charged the door again. This time the door burst open, swinging free, and the retarded man tumbled into the hallway, skidding to a halt across the dark gap.

Peter jumped forward, with Francis close behind him, followed by the rest of the crazy men, who were swept forward by the energy of the instant, leaving behind much of their madness as the need for them to step ahead became clear. Napoleon was rallying the men, waving his arm above his head as if he carried a sword, crying “Onward! Charge!” Newsman was saying something about the next day’s headlines and becoming a part of the story, as they all tumbled into the corridor, a flying wedge of men, bent on a single task.

In the momentary confusion of their arrival, Francis saw the retarded man rise up, dust himself off and steadfastly return to the dormitory room, his face wreathed in glowing glory. Francis caught a half glimpse of the man plopping himself down on his bunk, taking his Raggedy Andy doll up in his arms and then turning and surveying his destruction of the door with a look of utter satisfaction.

Then Francis turned away, and he saw Peter racing ahead, toward the nursing station, moving as fast as he could, sprinting with the necessity of the moment. There was a faint glow coming from the station’s single desk lamp, and Francis spotted a figure stretched out on the floor. He instantly pushed himself in that direction, his own feet slapping hard against the floor, beating a drummer’s pace of emergency. At the same moment, he saw the Moses brothers burst through the far stairwell door, and as they tore past the women’s dormitory, cries from that room started to rise up, high-pitched notes that combined in a symphony of confusion and panic, with an allegro of unknown fear keeping the beat.

Peter had pitched himself down toward Lucy’s form, and Francis hesitated for an instant, afraid that they were too late, and that she was dead. But then, through all the other noise that had suddenly overtaken the entire hallway, he heard Lucy groan in pain.

“Jesus!” Peter said. “She’s hurt badly.” He had taken hold of one of her hands and was cradling it, as he tried to guess what to do. Peter looked up at Francis, and then to the Moses brothers as they arrived breathless at the nursing station. “We need to get her help,” he said.

Little Black nodded, reached for the telephone, and immediately saw that it was worthless, with its wires sliced. He seemed to think hard, surveying the entirety of the nursing station in a single long glance and then replied, “Hang on. I’m going back upstairs, call for help.”

Big Black turned to Francis, his own face a mask of worry and anxiety. “She was supposed to say the word over the intercom or on the telephone … it took us a couple of seconds when we heard all of you …” He didn’t need to finish what he was saying, because suddenly the preciousness of those few moments seemed to be in the same balance as Lucy Jones’s life.

Lucy felt rivers of pain flooding over her.

She was only peripherally aware that Peter was at her side, and that the Moses brothers and Francis were close by. They all seemed to her to be on some distant shore, one that she was struggling against tides and currents to reach, as she battled against unconsciousness. She knew that there was something important she had to say, before she gave in to the agony that enveloped her, and let herself fall blissfully into the abyss of darkness that beckoned. She bit down hard on a bloody lip, and squeezed a few words past all the hurt that had arrived that night, and all the despair that she’d known, thinking only of the promise that she’d been given a few seconds earlier. “He’s here,” she spit out softly. “Find him, please. End it here.”

She did not know whether what she said made any sense, or whether anyone could hear her. She wasn’t even sure that the words that she’d managed to form in her imagination had actually made it past her tongue. But, she understood
stood, at least she’d tried, and with a deep sigh, she let unconsciousness take her over, not knowing whether she would ever emerge from its seductive grasp, but understanding, at the very least, that all the pain she felt would be swept aside, if only for a moment.

“Lucy, damn it! Stay with us!” Peter screamed in her face, but without great effect. Then he looked up and said, “She’s out.” He put his ear down to her chest, listening for her heartbeat. “She’s alive,” he said, “but …”