The Madman's Tale (30 page)

Peter, though, was nodding his head, as if he could see something that was obvious to himself and should have been obvious to Lucy, but which still eluded Francis. “He can do that, I’m sure. He’s a natural. A teacher-in-training. Can’t you C-Bird?”

“I’ll try.” Deep within him, he heard a rumbling, as if there was an argument going on within his inner population, and then, finally, he heard one of his voices insist:
Tell them. It’s okay. Tell them what you know
. He hesitated one second, then spoke, feeling as if his words were being directed from sources within. “There’s one thing you should realize,” he said slowly, cautiously. Both Lucy and Peter looked at him, as if they were a little surprised he was joining the conversation.

“What’s that?” Lucy asked.

Francis nodded to Peter. “Peter’s right, I guess, about being strong, and right, too, that there aren’t a lot of people inside here who would appear to have the physical strength necessary to outfight someone like Short Blond. I mean, that makes sense, I guess. But not completely. If the Angel were hearing voices commanding him to attack Short Blond, and these other women—well, it’s not true that he would have to be as strong as Peter suggests. When you hear these things, and the voices are telling you to do something—I mean, really screaming and insistent and without compromise—well, pain, difficulty, strength, all these things become secondary. You simply do what they demand. You overcome. If a voice told you to pick up a car, or a boulder, well, you would do it, or kill yourself trying. So it is not necessarily true when Peter suggests that the Angel is a strong man. He could still be almost anyone, because he could find the necessary strength. The voices would tell him where to find it.”

He paused, and he heard a deep echo within saying
That’s right. Good job, Francis
.

Peter looked deeply at Francis, then broke out into a smile. He punched Francis on the arm.

Lucy smiled, too, followed by a long sigh. “I will keep all that in mind, Francis. Thank you. I think you might be right. It just goes to show that this isn’t your ordinary type of investigation. Rules are a bit different inside here, aren’t they?”

Francis felt a sense of relief, and was pleased to have contributed something. He pointed at his forehead. “Rules are different inside here, too,” he said.

Lucy reached out and touched him on the arm. “I’ll keep that in mind.” Then she shook her head. “Now there’s something else I need you guys to find out for me.”

“Anything,” Peter said.

“Evans suggested that there are ways to travel between buildings at night where one can avoid being seen by Security. I’m capable of asking him precisely what he means by this, but I’d like to limit his involvement as much as possible …”

“Makes sense to me,” Peter said rapidly. Perhaps a bit too much so, for he gained a sharp look from Lucy.

“Still, I wonder if you can’t pursue this from the patients’ point of view. Who knows how to get from here to there? How do you do it? What are the risks? And who would want to do it?”

“Do you think the Angel came from another building?”

“I want to find out if he could.”

Peter nodded again. “I see,” he said. He started to say something, but then stopped. “We’ll find out what we can,” he said after a moment.

“Good,” Lucy said with brisk confidence. “I’m going off to see Doctor Gulptilil, and pursue the dates and times a little more carefully. I’ll get him to escort me to the other units, so that I can come up with a rough list of names from each.”

“You can probably eliminate the men with a diagnosis of mental retardation, as well,” Peter said. “That will narrow the field. But only severe mental retardation.”

Again she nodded. “Makes sense. Why don’t you two plan on meeting me in my office prior to dinner and we’ll compare notes.”

She turned and walked rapidly down the corridor. Francis noticed that the patients who were moving through the same space all stepped aside as she sailed past, shrinking back from her. He thought, at first, that people must be scared of Lucy, which he didn’t understand, but then, he realized it was unfamiliarity that scared them. She was sane, and they were not. More, it was what she represented, which was something alien, a person with an existence that stretched beyond the walls. And last, he thought, what was ultimately the most unsettling thing about seeing someone like her within the hospital was that it drove home a sense of uncertainty about the world they all lived in.

Francis looked closely at the faces of some of the patients and realized that there were very few people in that building who really wanted the disruption to their world that Lucy represented. In the Western State Hospital, patients and staff clung to routine, because it was the only way of keeping all the forces that warred within each patient at bay. It was why so many people were stuck there for so many years, because, very swiftly one came to understand what
was dangerous. He shook his head. It was all upside down, he thought. The hospital was a place filled with risk, a constantly bubbling cauldron of conflict, anger, and madness; yet, it somehow measured out to be less frightening than the world outside. Lucy was the outside. Francis turned, and saw Peter the Fireman also watching her departure. He could see a sense of frustration in Peter’s face. It was a frustration caused by being imprisoned. They were the same, Francis thought, because they both belonged somewhere else.

He was unsure if he also fit into that category.

After a moment, Peter turned and shook his head slightly. “This is going to be tricky, C-Bird,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, Lucy thinks this is a no-big-deal question. Something to keep us occupied and focused. But it’s a bit more than that.”

Francis looked at Peter, asking him to continue with his eyes.

“As soon as we start asking Lucy’s question, someone is going to hear that we’re inquisitive. The word will get out, and sooner or later get around to someone who actually does know how to get from building to building after dark, when everyone is supposed to be locked up, drugged out, and asleep. That’s the someone we’re looking for. That’s inevitable. And it will make us vulnerable.”

Peter took a deep breath, and let it out slowly. “Think about it for a second,” he said, a little bit under his breath. “We all live in these independent housing units spread about over the hospital grounds. We eat here. We go to sessions here. We have recreation here. We sleep here. And every unit is the same. One after the other, all the same. Little contained worlds, within a bigger, contained world. With very little contact between each unit. I mean, hell, your brother could be right next door, and you wouldn’t know it. So, why would anyone want access to another place that was exactly the same as the one he just left, anyway? It’s not like we’re all a bunch of low-rent South Boston mobsters stuck in Walpole Prison doing life without parole, trying to figure out how to escape. No one here thinks about breaking out, at least, not that I can tell, as yet. So the only reason someone might have for wanting to get from this building to the next is the reason we’re investigating. And every time we start to ask a question that will make the Angel think we’re onto some element that might reduce the field of suspects, well …”

Peter hesitated. “I don’t know that he’s ever killed a man. Probably pretty strictly the women we know about.” He let his voice trail off.

Big Black and Nurse Wrong set up a painting exercise in the dayroom that afternoon for Mister Evil’s regular group session. There was no explanation as
to where Evans had disappeared to, and Lucy was out of the Amherst Building as well. The dozen members of the group were all issued large white sheets of thick cotton paper that felt rough to the touch. They were then placed in a loose circle, and given a choice between watercolors and crayons.

Peter looked askance at the whole endeavor, but Francis thought it was a welcome change from sitting in a meeting designed to underscore their madness and contrast it with Mister Evans’s sanity, which he had come to think was the sole agenda of the group gatherings. Cleo had an eager look in her face, as if she’d already anticipated what she intended to sketch and Napoleon hummed a little martial music to himself, as he contemplated the blank sheet on his lap, rubbing his fingers along the edge.

Nurse Wrong stepped into the center of the group. She treated all the patients as if they were children, which Francis hated. “Mister Evans would like all of you to use this time to do a self-portrait,” she said briskly. “Something that says something, anything, about how you see yourself.”

“I can’t do a picture of a tree?” Cleo questioned. She gestured toward the bank of dayroom windows that were filled with refracted light, glistening with the afternoon. Beyond the glass and wire mesh, Francis could see one of the quadrangle trees on the grounds swaying in a light breeze, the springtime weather just ruffling the new green leaves.

“Unless you think of yourself as a tree,” Nurse Wrong replied, stating something so obvious that it was nearly overwhelming.

“A Cleo tree?” Cleo asked. She raised her chunky arm and flexed it like a bodybuilder. “A very strong tree.”

Francis chose a small tray of watercolors. Blue. Red. Black. Green. Orange. Brown. He had a small paper cup of water that he placed on the floor next to his feet. After a final glance toward Peter, who had suddenly bent over his sheet of paper, and was busily at work, Francis turned to his own blank canvas. He dipped his small brush into the liquid to wet the tip, then into the black paint. He made a long, oval shape on the page and then turned to the task of filling in the features.

In the back of the dayroom, a man faced up against the wall, mumbling steadily, like a person at prayer, interrupting himself only every few minutes to steal a glance in the group’s direction, before returning to his conversation. Francis noticed the same retarded man who’d threatened them earlier; he lurched through the room, grunting, occasionally staring in their direction, slapping his fist into his palm repeatedly. Francis turned back to his drawing, and continued to slide the paintbrush gently over the sheet of paper, watching with some satisfaction as a figure grew in the center of the page.

Francis worked intently. He tried to give himself a smile, but it came out crookedly, so that it seemed that half his face was enjoying something, while
the other half filled with regret. The eyes stared out at him intently, and he thought he could see beyond them. Francis thought the painted Francis had shoulders perhaps a little too slumped, and a posture that was perhaps too resigned. But this was less important than trying to show that the Francis on the sheet of paper had feelings, had dreams, had desires, had all the emotions that he associated with the outside world.

He did not look up until Nurse Wrong announced there were only a few minutes left in the session.

He glanced to his side and saw that Peter was intently putting the finishing touches on his own picture. It was a pair of hands, gripping bars that stretched from the top of the sheet to the bottom. There was no face, no body, no sense of person whatsoever. Just the fingers wrapped around thick shafts of black that dominated the page.

Nurse Wrong took Francis’s painting from his hands and paused to examine it.

Big Black came over and stared over her shoulder at the painting. He broke into a smile. “Damn, C-Bird,” he said. “This is some fine work. Boy’s got some talent he didn’t tell no one about.”

The nurse and the huge attendant moved off, collecting the other patients’ work, and Francis found himself standing next to Napoleon. “Nappy,” he said, quietly, “how long have you been here?”

“In the hospital?”

“Yes. And in here, in Amherst.” He gestured at the dayroom. Napoleon seemed to think for a moment before responding.

“Two years now, C-Bird, except it could be three, I’m not sure. A long time,” he added sadly. “A real long time. You lose track. Or maybe it’s that they want you to lose track. I’m not sure.”

“You’re pretty experienced in how things work around here, aren’t you?”

Napoleon bowed slightly, almost gracefully. “An expertise, alas C-Bird, that I would prefer not to own. But true enough.”

“If I wanted to get from here to one of the other buildings, how would I do it?”

Napoleon looked slightly frightened by the question, he took a single step back, and shook his head. His mouth opened, flustered, and he stammered his reply: “You don’t like it here with us?”

Now it was Francis’s turn to shake his head negatively. “No. I mean late at night. After medication, after lights-out. Suppose I wanted to get to one of the other buildings without being seen, could I do it?”

Napoleon considered the question. “I don’t think so,” he said slowly. “We’re always locked in.”

“But suppose I wasn’t locked in …”

“We’re always locked in.”

“But suppose …,” Francis said again, slightly exasperated by the round man’s response.

“This has something to do with Short Blond, doesn’t it? And Lanky, too. But Lanky couldn’t get out of the dormitory. Except the night Short Blond died, when it was unlocked. I’ve never heard of the door being left unlocked before. No, you can’t get out. No one can. I don’t know that I’ve ever heard someone wanting to.”