18
A Hole in the Picture
“No!”
Grove awoke in a paroxysm of sweat and aching muscles. His head jerked on the pillow, his arms flexing against the metal rails of the hospital bed, making the hardware creak. His hands were heavily bandaged, a diastolic pressure clip pinching his right forefinger.
He slammed his head back down on the bed and lay there for a moment, winded, as if he had just run a sprint. He crackled all over, as if he were wrapped in cellophane, and half his body felt as though it had been amputated. He swallowed his panic and licked his dry, chapped lips. He gazed around his darkened room and realized he now lay in some kind of subterranean cavern or catacomb, his bed pushed against the stone wall of some forgotten tunnel that stretched as far as he could see in either direction.
What kind of hospital was this anyway? You would think they could afford some fluorescent lights, maybe a few chairs. Hell, this place didn't even look like it had indoor plumbing. Grove swallowed acid and took deep breaths in a futile attempt to ease the terror that was suddenly constricting his heart. He gazed around the tunnel and realized just exactly what he was seeing. The moist stone walls, leprous with mold and decay, rose maybe ten feet over Grove's hospital bed. Dimly illuminated by faint torchlight, the ceiling was capped with gray stalactites of human bone. Skeletal feet and brittle gray icicles of femurs and knuckle joints dangled down from the rotting sediment overhead.
To Grove's immediate right stretched a row of mummified human remains, each embedded vertically in the wall, emulsified like sardines in files of human sarcophagi. Emaciated hands and shoulder joints stuck out here and there. Partially fossilized skulls lay congealed in rotting limestone, their empty eye sockets gaping up at the nothingness. At their feet, nestled in little crumbling baskets, were desiccated offerings. Grove recognized the powdery remains of
injera
bread, Sudanese beads,
katanka
stones. Icons from Grove's childhood, from his motherland. The sight of them pierced his soul, flooded him with sorrow.
He closed his eyes. He could hear a terrible sound in the darkness, and he knew it was coming for him.
Faint, shambling footsteps
âapproaching with a monstrous certainty that touched some inchoate nerve ending at the base of Grove's skull. He kept his eyes shut, willing the vision away.
Please. Please not yet, not now
. The footsteps were nearing him, the rancid-sweet smell of the tomb in Grove's nostrils. He opened his eyes and saw the figure in the dark blue nylon raincoat emerging from the depths of the tunnel.
It was maybe fifty feet away now, coming for him, and it was no longer human. Its long, cadaverous faceâstill obscured by that oversized hoodâhad transformed into a masque of putrid, rotting death. The long patrician nose had curved into the monstrous ulcerated beak of a demon, the dull gleam of its teeth elongated into eldritch fangs. Grove was paralyzed because the thing in the hood was lifting its arm toward him, a black skeletal hand jutting out, inviting Grove to clasp it in supplication, to make contact, to touch it.
No, not yet, not now!
The deep, guttural voice that growled suddenly from the depths of that horrible hood was like the shifting of tectonic plates:
You're the one!
Grove slammed his eyes shut then, slammed them as tight as rivets welded shut by his tears.
Now unfamiliar noises filled his ears. Watery beeping noises, metallic clicking sounds. He heard a breathy noise like a bellows breathing in and out, and finally he found the strength to open his eyes again.
All at once he found himself in an ordinary hospital room, his pulse racing, his chest rising and falling rapidly. He lay back against the pillow and breathed through his nose, struggling to calm himself, struggling to steady his heart rate and get his bearings back.
At last he managed to glance around his bed: he now lay in a small private room with rubber drapes drawn across its single window. The only illumination came from a bank of pilot lights and indicators next to his bed. The soft ticking of a pulse-temp monitor provided the only sound. Grove turned his head far enough to glimpse a digital clock on a bedside cart: it said 4:07. Judging from the stillness and the dark, it had to be a.m.
He found a Call button on the end of a cable hanging off a bed rail, and awkwardly pressed it with a bandaged thumb.
A moment later a nurse swished through the door. Fluorescent lights stuttered on, making Grove jump, making his eyes pound.
“Mr. Grove, good morning,” the nurse said as she approached the bed with the nubs of a stethoscope in her ears. A plump, graying woman in a white uniform, she gently placed the contact on Grove's sternum and listened intently.
“Not to be melodramatic,” Grove croaked in a rusty voice, “but what day is it?”
“Tuesday the seventeenth, you've been here going on forty-eight hours.”
“Terrific. And âhere' is . . . where? Portland?”
“Olympia General. The great state of Washington. How do you feel?”
“I'll get back to you on that.”
The nurse pondered the monitors for a moment, taking readings. She reached under the bed's carriage, then flipped a switch that elevated the head. “The doctor's on his way down. Been having some wallopers the past day or two, huh?”
“Pardon?” Grove felt the bed raising him into a sitting position, and found his midsection set in concrete.
She looked at him with a wan smile. “Bad dreams?”
“Um . . . yeah.” Grove let out a sigh. “A few.” He remembered only fractured moments over the last two days. He remembered waking up in the chopper only minutes after the confrontation in the cave, glancing over his shoulder at the storm clouds falling away from the belly of the aircraft. He remembered falling in and out of consciousness as he was rushed through the harsh light and noise of the trauma center. He even remembered familiar faces hovering over him in recoveryâTom Geisel, Walt Hammerman from Justice, FBI Director Louis Mueller. They had muttered their comforting words, awkward and stiff, inhibited by the politics and protocol of the situation. Grove had made futile attempts to stay awake against the tide of Percocets and lingering shock, but mostly he had slept. For two days. Slept and occasionally awoke to experience horrible hallucinations. Ordinarily Grove would have written off such hallucinations to simple blood loss, hemorrhagic shock, and oxygen starvation. But over the last two days he had come to believe there was a deeper dimension to his visions. He had come to believe the visions were not merely being generated by his own nutrient-starved brain but were coming from
outside
himself. Organic, self-determined, telekineticâwhatever the source, it didn't matter. They were messages meant to penetrate Grove's psyche. He had never believed in the paranormal, and to some extent he still didn't. But skepticism, when faced with the irrefutable, turns to madness. That's why, as he groggily returned to the living that morning, he was so damn rattled.
“There's our star patient.”
The voice rang out from the doorway, shattering Grove's ruminations. The white-jacketed doctor was stunningly youngâbarely out of his twentiesâwith a thick shock of moussed hair. Approaching the bed with his furious smile and metal clipboard under his arm, he looked like a young insurance salesman about to give Grove a pitch on the benefits of term over whole-life.
“How ya doin', Doc?” Grove had sketchy memories of seeing the youthful face hovering over him, partially obscured by a sterile mask.
“I should ask
you
that question. Take a deep breath, please, and hold it.”
The doctor's stethoscope was cold on Grove's chest as Grove dutifully breathed in and out. The profiler's right side was still fairly numb. His groin tingled from a hasty shave in surgery. His throat was sore, and his hands were stiff and cold under all the gauze and white tape. He had pressure bandages around his waist that bulged on his right side. The rest of him was covered with an assortment of butterfly bandages.
Grove looked up at the man-child doctor. “What's the prognosis, Doc? Am I gonna live or what?”
The doctor smiled at him. “Somebody up there likes you, my friend.”
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The Sacramento Northern Pacific Railway runs along the attic of America like a calcified, forgotten length of plumbing, the fossilized tracks rotting in the earth. Once in a great while a freighter will trickle down the central line with a load of iron ore, making very few stops, passing through the pockets of civilization like a ghost ship in the night. In the wee hours of Wednesday morning, just such a train made an emergency stop outside Eureka.
The engineâa backward conglomeration of loose bolts and greasy platformsâhissed and sputtered to a standstill in the pitch-darkness, disgorging a soiled little man in filthy dungarees. The engineer's name was Jurgens, and he hopped off the runner and into the cinders with the practiced nonchalance of a lifelong railroad rat.
Jurgens marched along the length of rolling stock, tapping his hickory switch against the couplers like an elephant tamer. The problem was the subtle tics he had felt in the curves, the slight weight displacement in the middle boxcars. He suspected hobos. The old-style stowaways had all but vanished in recent years, but lately young street kids from down South were riding the rails, smoking crack or pulling tricks or doing whatever ne'erdo-wells do, and Jurgens had been told by the yard manager that he had to keep the cars clean.
A noise in the darkness yanked at Jurgens's attention, and he picked up his pace to a jog.
Something stirred in the second-to-last boxcar, the Quaker car, the one with the broken hasp and gaps in the slats, and as Jurgens approached, he saw litter trailing off in the darkness along the rails. Shreds of newspapers and food wrappers. Jurgens's heart started thumping, and he wished he had brought along something more substantial than a whittle branch, something like a crowbar or maybe a shotgun, because he saw the blood then. It looked black in the moonlight, splattered across the trash and looping over the dull gleam of iron rails.
“Who's there!” Jurgens barked.
The two kids in the boxcar had been dead for some time, posed in the style of supplication that scholars had been pondering over the ages. But Jurgens would not see their bodies for several moments. He was too preoccupied by the blood-spattered litter on the ground along the gravel rail bed, and down the craggy embankment along the tracks.
He knelt down and picked up one of the ribbons of newspaper. It was speckled with a mist of blood. The headline said
PROFILER KILLED IN THE LINE OF DUTY.
Underneath the text was a formal portrait of Terry Zorn. Another photograph showed a second profiler who'd been wounded in the shoot-out, but most of the picture had been torn out. Jurgens tossed the shred of paper aside and picked up another. Here was the late edition of
USA Today
showing the two profilers. Grove's face was missing. Another one showed the exterior of the Regal Motelâpolice cars scattered across the ravaged parking lotâand an inset of the two FBI profilers, the shot of Grove with a hole where his face should be. Another one, dotted with drying blood, Grove's face missing.
Another, and another, and another. Each with Grove's face torn out.