Leonard nodded. “I did notice her looking out the peephole at us. I guess
that
makes sense.” He wiped his forehead. “My imagination’s working overtime. For a second I was thinking that her feline cover-up might’ve had something to do with our little mystery.”
“Well...don’t get me wrong, boss. I haven’t ruled that out either. I’m keeping all avenues open at this point. All I know is that I had a very definite allergic reaction to a cat that didn’t seem to be there.” He hesitated, then said, “Tell you what...I’ll bet you that Pam Bergin had a cat in her apartment, and that she lied to us about it.”
“That a wager?”
“Lunch.”
“You’re on.”
Kevin picked Leonard’s cell phone up off the seat and dialed information, got the number for Presidential Studios and dialed the main office. “Hi, could you tell me if your residents are allowed to keep pets? They are? Okay then, thank you for your time.” He hung up. “Yep. Pets allowed.”
“Weird,” Leonard said.
“Very. So she either lied, for no obvious reason other than to cover up something. Or the people before her had cats, which I feel is very unlikely. Since we know she lied about her involvement with
Sparke
this morning, I’d lean towards the former. I think we’re gonna have to check up on her again later.”
Leonard nodded in agreement. They sat in silence for a moment, staring at the door to Delaney’s office, each checking their watches. “
Sparke’s
got another five minutes,” Leonard said.
“What’s your guess on where he heads to next?”
“Pam’s place, for sure.”
“You think? I have a feeling he might go right home. After all, we did ask him to stay there.”
“He didn’t listen to us the first time around.”
Leonard looked at his watch in silent agreement. “Almost three.”
“Hope he didn’t leave while we were gone.”
The idea had crossed Leonard’s mind, but his intuition told him otherwise. “Don’t worry. He’s there.”
At the awful sight of the kitchen knife--the very damn one missing from the upper left-hand slot in the butcher block his mother bought for him long ago--Richard staggered backwards, heels sliding in the blood, arms outstretched in a vain attempt to maintain some sense of balance. He banged his thigh against the left arm of the couch, then reeled sideways into the bookshelf, legs teetering and unsure of how to guide him. He grabbed onto the top shelf, knocking over some books in the process, his blood-slicked grip faltering but preventing him nonetheless from plunging to the floor. Once semi-stable, he stood his ground, fiery breaths heaving in and out of his lungs and triggering an anxiety more intense than anything he’d ever felt before. Severe symptoms, taking his body to new levels of fear, dizziness, tunnel vision, rubber muscles, migraine, overpowering him to a point of near-swoon. His body slumped and swayed, his proximate dead weight a burden in itself, and he clawed at more books in attempt to preserve his equilibrium. It did him no good. The books spilled down, and Richard toppled back, a victim of sinking momentum.
Halfway to the floor, someone caught him beneath the arms, and squeezed him tightly around the chest.
Richard struggled but failed in his attempt to escape the strapping grip. He made a weak effort to turn, to see who had hold of him, but couldn’t so much as budge. He was held
fastly
in place, two powerful hands clamped securely around his blood-splattered torso. They lifted him--rather smoothly to his shock; he surely expected his ribcage to be crushed under a like force--and placed him back against the bookshelf.
He heard a voice behind him.
His
voice. The man in black. “You best get moving,
Sparke
. Until we meet again...”
The man in black released him and once more Richard grabbed onto the bookshelf to hold himself up. He heard quick, muffled footsteps passing to his right, but dared not turn to view their source for fear of seeing...of seeing
him
. Here in
his
world. The
real
world.
I am awake, aren’t I? Then how is it that he is
here? A circular gray tunnel closed out his peripheral vision, but even through the limited sights he could see a passing shadow fleeting alongside him like a swooping bat. Then across the room, staring straight ahead, he saw the door to the office slowly opening, and the shadow of a body exiting.
Leaving him alone with the notably dead doctor.
Sharp light, brutally foreign, blasted through the open door into the gloom of the office. Richard’s vision fought for clarity, and as he blinked and tried dearly to focus in on the carnage that had become of the doctor’s place of service, he thought of what the man in black had said:
You best get moving,
Sparke
. Until we meet again...
What did this mean? Why didn’t the dream-intruder kill him at that moment? Isn’t that what he’d planned to do all along? He certainly took care of Delaney. Now it seemed as if he’d given Richard a reprieve, as if the game he was playing had some time remaining on the clock. Richard rubbed his eyes, smearing sticky blood on his brow and eyelids. When his eyes started burning, he used an
unmarred
part of his sleeve to clear away the mess. He sucked in a series of painfully deep breaths in an effort to regain his composure. His vision cleared more, and he could plainly see the ruin and bloodshed he had unwittingly become an integral part of, through his
dreams
.
With the exception of a few books on the floor by his feet, everything remained as it was before he went under hypnosis. The furniture, the items on Delaney’s desk and on the coffee table, the lamps. All left in place, unmoved and undamaged. Of course there was blood on everything, a heavy concentration of it near the body, slight
spatterings
of it as far as ten feet away. It was on the couch, the chairs, the damn papers still neatly piled on the good--dead--doctor’s desk.
And then--oh dear God--the body. Apparently the man in black had been considerate enough to make the doctor’s death a quick and quiet one. A clean incision ran along Delaney’s throat, deep enough to split the
voicebox
in half. A second swipe was evident, this one at the side of his neck,
criss
-crossing the first and going so deep that tiny bone fragments speckled the glistening wound: an indisputable affirmation of steel blade and spine converging. From this point on, the man in black tested the resilience of the human skin, not to ensure death but to seemingly earn his performance a spot in the record books. The stab wounds were uncountable, impaling the face, torso, and abdomen, making a gross mockery of the man’s appearance and revealing to the world what pure madness could very well do to you should you cross its path. Richard, fully paralyzed, could only stare in shock and realize that, if given the chance, he’d effortlessly find new horrors amid the spectacle every second he stood there.
Whether shrewd or cowardly, he felt the need to flee.
All of a sudden, a woman’s voice.
“Doctor, shall I send in your next patient?”
Richard’s eyes probed Delaney’s desk, pinned the phone intercom sitting alongside the blood-speckled blotter. “Dr Delaney?” The voice called again. “Are you ready to see your next patient?”
Miraculously, Richard’s sights came back into focus, and his mind, still full of fear and confusion, told him--sans his conscience--that he better get his ass moving because the secretary out front was about to come back here to see what all the silence was about, and it would be best not to let her see him in the sad and rather guilty-looking state that he was in.
Tentatively, yet with urgency, he let go of the bookshelf. Although still lightheaded, he successfully stepped across the carpet, away from the blood puddle and the stagnant Dr Marcus Delaney and everything else in the office that had become fouled and tainted. He went all the way to the door where the fluorescent lights from the hallway passed through the office in all their striking glory. Using a bloody hand, he shielded his eyes, knowing very well that the doctor’s blood was not only on his hands but on just about every other inch of his body as well.
He stepped out into the hallway.
And collided with the receptionist. She’d been coming to see why the doctor hadn’t answered her page--that much Richard was sure of. And soon enough she’d find out.
But not before Richard made a quick and frantic escape. Thrusting his hands into her face, he shoved her aside before she had a chance to get a good look at him. She screamed of course, her wail lasting only a split second before her body slammed back-first against the wall. She doubled over, hands against her midsection, her sudden silence making it clear that he’d knocked the wind out of her. Her eyes disappeared into the back of her head, and she slid to the floor, gasping for air. Richard heard others responding, calling for her:
“Carol? Are you okay? Carol?”
He ran in the opposite direction from the ensuing hubbub, down the carpeted hall away from the waiting room.
He’d never coursed the building beyond Delaney’s office, and discovered two closed doors with doctors’ names on them.
At the end of the hall, Richard found what he’d hoped for: a stairwell.
The sign on the heavy steel door read:
In case of fire, use these stairs
. In addition to fire escapees, Delaney’s band of claustrophobic patients could use these stairs every day--one floor up in an elevator would be just cause for hysteria should they be forced to endure the ride. Richard decided that a man in his condition (frenzied, in a bit of a rush, and full of blood) shouldn’t ride the elevator either. He pulled the door open and moved on.
He raced down the single flight of stairs, taking them two at a time. Reaching bottom, he slammed out the fire escape door and found himself in a crowded and sunny parking lot. He ducked down between two parked cars, took a deep breath, then started maneuvering about, flitting in and out amidst a number of vehicles in an effort to keep from being spotted. Once a hundred or so yards away from the building, he began checking the doors of the parked cars until the passenger side of an old pickup popped open. He scrambled inside and at once shed his bloody clothing, nervously eyeing the comings and goings of a few of Fairview’s shopping community. He found a greasy tee shirt behind the front seat and put that on, shoving his bloody clothes in its place so the driver wouldn’t find them until a later time. Rifling through the glove compartment, he located a screwdriver and allowed a few moments to pass, praying for a decent opportunity to escape.
But would he get just that? A chance for escape? Not likely. He was nearly naked. Bloody. And rather crazed, given the circumstances. And very soon, just a hundred yards away, a dense flurry of activity would break up Fairview’s mindless routine, attracting folks of all associations to peer into the interruption as if it were the greatest attraction since the carnival came to town.
And then, they would start looking for him.
He knew exactly what he needed.
No sooner did the thought enter his harried mind that a great stroke of luck appeared like an angel from the heavens. It came in the form of a thin middle-aged man. He was holding a
Miller’s Clothing Store
shopping bag, whistling absentmindedly as he passed in front of the pickup truck.
Adrenaline rising, Richard did what he felt he had no choice to do: he leapt from the pickup. He made quite an impression, of course--a rather bloody man in his underwear yelling and waving a screwdriver doesn’t usually appear out of thin air. The man froze at first, then tried to run when he realized this was no joke, a gag perhaps being played on him by some drunken friends hiding in the bushes. Richard latched onto the shopping bag before the man was able to create any distance between them. The man’s eyes bulged and he yelled out something unintelligible, then hightailed it across the parking lot, forfeiting his merchandise without the slightest argument.
Richard scurried away and slid down between a black SUV and a station wagon. He quickly emptied the contents of the bag on the ground. He found a pair of size thirty-four dress pants and a large long-sleeve mock neck shirt, both in black. There were a few pairs of socks, a belt, and a package of underwear as well, but he had no time to fuss with those. He dropped the screwdriver and hurriedly put the pants and shirt on, all the while peeking through the windows to see if anyone had started after him yet. Nobody. Yet.
He checked out his reflection in the station wagon window. His face still showed dried blood around the mouth and eyes, something that wouldn’t pass as food, or paint, or even a simple wound. He used the sleeve of his new shirt to clear most of it away, then rubbed his hands against his pants legs to clean them as best as he could.
You best get moving,
Sparke
...
Was that my conscience, or the lingering advice of the man in black?
“Good idea,” he said aloud, anxiously peering around.
What to do. Where to go...?
Across the parking stalls, not fifteen feet away, he saw an elderly woman approaching. She stopped behind a gray
Altima
and started putting her shopping bags into the trunk.
Richard picked up the screwdriver. He stared at it for a daunting moment and found that he was barely able to grip it--not because of the blood on the handle, but because he was trembling so much. He closed his eyes, swallowed, tasted blood, then begged for forgiveness for what he felt he had no alternative to do.