The Madman's Tale (55 page)

He spoke, pausing in such a way as to demonstrate that he was actually not thanking her for anything, before continuing. “… But are you not seeking someone who uses a knife, and who somewhat ritualistically defaces the hands of his victims and who, to the best of your knowledge, confines his assaults to young women?”

“Yes,” Lucy replied. “You are correct.”

“So, this death would not seem to fit the pattern that interests you?”

“Again, Doctor, you are correct.”

“Then, please, allow us to handle this death in routine fashion.”

“You don’t call in outside authorities?”

Gulptilil sighed, but again, this only barely concealed his irritation. “When a patient dies during surgery, does the neurosurgeon call a policeman? This situation is analogous, Miss Jones. We file a report with the state. We hold a mortality conference with the staff. We contact the next of kin, if there are any listed. In some cases, where doubt factors are large, we hand the body over for autopsy. In others, however, we do not. And oftentimes, Miss Jones, because this hospital is the only home and only family that some unfortunate patients have, we are in charge of seeing our dead directly into the grave.”

He shrugged, but again, a movement that spoke of disinterest and nonchalance, hid what Lucy Jones thought was anger.

In the doorway, a crowd of patients gathered, trying to see into the dormitory. Gulptilil glanced at Mister Evil. “I think this is bordering on the morbid, Mister Evans. Let’s clear those folks out and move the fellow over to the morgue.”

“Doctor …,” Lucy started in again, but he cut her off, and turned, instead to Mister Evil.

“Tell me, Mister Evans, did anyone in this unit awaken last night and observe a struggle? Was there a battle that anyone saw? Were there screams and punches thrown and shouted curses and imprecations? Everything that ordinarily fits into the type of conflict that we are accustomed to?”

“No, Doctor,” Evans replied. “None whatsoever.”

“A fight to the death, perhaps?”

“No.”

Gulptilil turned to Lucy. “Certainly, Miss Jones, if there had been a murder, someone in the midst of this room would have awakened and seen or heard something. Absent that, however …”

Francis took a half step forward, about to say something, but then stopped.

He glanced over at Big Black, who shook his head slightly. The big attendant was giving good advice, Francis realized. If he described what he’d heard,
and the presence that had lurked by his own bedside, it most likely would merely have been considered another hallucination by physicians predisposed to reach that conclusion.
I heard something—but no one else did. I felt something—but no one else noticed. I know a murder took place—but no one else does
. Francis immediately saw the hopelessness of his position. His protest would have been noted and registered in his file as yet a further indication of how far he was from meaningful recovery and the opportunity to get out of the hospital.

Francis held his breath. In the hospital, the Angel’s presence was still neither real nor delusion. He knew the Angel understood this. No wonder, Francis thought, to a chorus of assent within him, the killer was confident.
He can get away with anything
.

The question, Francis asked himself, was:
What is it he wants to get away with?

So he clamped down on his lip, and stared instead at the Dancer. What killed him? Francis wondered. No blood. No marks around the neck. Just a death mask engraved on his features. Probably a pillow held down over the face. Quiet panic. Silent death. A momentary thrashing about and then oblivion. Is that what I heard last night? Francis asked himself. He thought painfully: Yes. I just never opened my eyes to the noise.

The knife that had killed Short Blond, this time had been reserved for him. But the message on the bunk was for all of them. Francis could feel his muscles shuddering. He was still gathering himself together, understanding how close he’d been that night to either real death or being driven into a deeper madness. It was, he thought, as if the two of them went hand in hand, a matched set of unpleasant alternatives.

“I hate these sorts of deaths,” Gulptilil said offhandedly to Mister Evans. “They upset everyone. See that medications are adjusted for anyone who seems to be unreasonably focused on this event,” the medical director said, throwing a look in Francis’s direction. “I do not want patients dwelling on this death, especially with a release hearing scheduled for later this week.”

“I know what you mean,” Evans said.

Francis, however, suddenly bent toward the doctor’s words. He was unsure whether the Dancer’s death would prove to be anything more than a curiosity for everyone in the housing unit. But he did know that the news that a release hearing was scheduled for that week would have a dramatic impact on many of the patients. Someone might get out, and hope inside Western State was the half brother of delusion.

He stole one last look at the Dancer and felt an improbable sadness within him. There’s a man who got his release unexpectedly, Francis thought.

But within the ebb and flow of fear and sadness that he felt, Francis perceived something else: a juxtaposition of events that he couldn’t quite identify, but which gave him a cold suspicion within that worried him.

A gurney was wheeled into the dormitory to remove the Dancer’s body. Gulptilil and Mister Evil oversaw the dead man being rolled out of his bunk and placed under a dingy white sheet. Lucy shook her head, watching what she thought might be a crime scene cavalierly eradicated.

Gulptilil turned, and trailing after the body, spotted Francis. He paused, and said, “Ah, Mister Petrel. I wonder if it might not be time soon for us to have another session.”

Francis knew what the doctor wanted. He nodded, because he didn’t know what else to do. But then, in a switch that left the medical director almost openmouthed in surprise, Francis lifted his arms above his head, and pirouetted about slowly, moving his feet and arms as gracefully and balletlike as he could, in conscious imitation of the dead man’s dance to music only he could hear.

Gulptilil tried to interrupt him, suddenly asking, “Mister Petrel, are you okay?” which Francis thought a most fantastically stupid question, as he simply danced out of the doctor’s path.

At their regularly scheduled group session that day, the conversation turned to the space program. Newsman had been spouting headlines for the past few days, but there was widespread disbelief amongst the patients at Western State whether any moon walks had actually taken place. Cleo in particular had been defiant, rumbling about government cover-ups and unknown otherworldly dangers, giggling one instant, then growing morose and quiet the next. The swings in her mood seemed obvious to everyone except Mister Evil, who ignored most of the external signs of madness when they reared up. This was his usual approach. He liked to listen, take a note, and then the patient would discover later, when he or she lined up for the evening medication, that their dosage had been adjusted. This had a stifling effect upon much of the conversation, because everyone at the hospital saw the daily medications as so many links of the chain that kept them there.

The Dancer’s death wasn’t mentioned, although it was on everyone’s minds. Short Blond’s murder had fascinated and scared them, but the Dancer dying reminded them all of their own mortality, which was a different fear altogether. More than once, patients sitting in the group’s loose circle burst out in a laugh, or choked a sob, none of which had anything to do with the course of the conversation, but seemed to erupt spontaneously from some internal thought or another.

Francis thought that Mister Evil was watching him particularly closely. He attributed this to his bizarre behavior earlier that morning.

“What about you, Francis?” Evans asked abruptly, poking at Francis with a question.

“I’m sorry, what about me what?” Francis replied.

“What do you think about astronauts?”

He thought for a moment, then shook his head. “It’s hard to imagine,” he answered.

“What is hard?”

“To be that far away, connected only by computers and radios. No one has ever traveled as far before. That’s interesting. It’s not the reliance on all the equipment, it’s that no adventure ever has been quite like it.”

Mister Evil nodded. “What about explorers in Africa or the North Pole?”

“They faced elements. Unknown. But astronauts face something different.”

“What’s that?”

“Myths,” Francis said. He looked around at all the others, and then asked, “Where is Peter?”

Mister Evil shifted about. “Still in isolation,” he said. “But he should be out soon. Let’s get back to the astronauts.”

“They don’t exist,” Cleo said. “But Peter does.”

Then she shook her head. “Maybe he doesn’t,” she said. “Maybe all this is a dream and we’re going to wake up any second.”

An argument broke out then, between Cleo and Napoleon and several others about what really existed and what didn’t, and if something took place where you couldn’t see it, did it really happen. All of this caused the group to snort and wave their hands excitedly in contradiction and dispute, which Evans allowed to ricochet back and forth. For a moment or two, Francis listened, because, in an odd way, he thought there were some similarities between his position in the hospital and men on their way to space. They were adrift, he thought, the same way he was.

He believed that he had recovered from his fright from the night before, but he had little confidence in his ability to greet the night to come.

He probed his memory for all the words the Angel had spoken, but it was hard for Francis to remember them with the sort of precision that he thought was necessary. Fear, he realized, skews things about. It’s like trying to see accurately when staring into a fun house mirror. The image is wavy, indistinct, distorted.

For an instant, he told himself: Stop trying to see the Angel. Start trying to see what the Angel sees.

Deep inside him, voices shouted out in sudden warning.
Stop! Don’t do that!

Francis shifted about in his seat uncomfortably. The voices wouldn’t have warned him, if they hadn’t seen something important and dangerous. He shook his head slightly, as if to restore his connection to the group that was continuing to argue, and he looked at the others, just as Napoleon was saying, “… Why do we need to go up into space anyway …” and he saw that Cleo was eyeing him from across the circle with a slightly bemused, slightly curious, almost impressed look of attention. She leaned forward in her seat, ignoring Napoleon, which infuriated the small round man, and she quietly said to Francis, “C-Bird saw something, didn’t he?”

Then she cackled, her body quivering with some joke that only she understood, just as Peter stepped into the room.

He immediately waved to the group, and then made a sweeping, formal bow to his fellow patients, like a king’s attendant in some sixteenth-century court. Then he grabbed a steel folding chair and pulled himself into the circle.

“None the worse for wear,” he said, as if anticipating the question.

“Peter seems to like isolation,” Cleo said.

“Nobody snores,” Peter replied, which got everyone to grin and chuckle.

“We have been discussing astronauts,” Mister Evil said. “In the time remaining, I’d like to conclude that discussion.”

“Sure” Peter said. “Didn’t mean to interrupt anything.”

“Well, fine. Now, does anyone have anything else to add?” Mister Evil turned away from Peter and examined the collected patients. He was met with silence.

Evans let a few seconds pass. “Anyone?”

Again, the group, so vociferous a few minutes earlier, was quiet. Francis thought that this was like them; that sometimes words flowed from all of them almost unchecked, flooding the air, and other moments, they disappeared, and with almost religious fervor, everyone looked inward. Shifts in mood were commonplace.

“Come on,” Evans said, exasperation creeping into his voice. “We were making progress a moment or two before we were interrupted. Someone, Cleo?”

She shook her head.

“Newsman?”

For once, he didn’t have a headline to spout.

“Francis?”

Francis didn’t answer.

“Say something,” Evans said stiffly.

Francis was at a loss and he saw Evans shifting about, his own anger increasing. It was, Francis thought, a matter of control. Mister Evil liked to control everything in the dormitory, and once again Peter had disrupted that
power. More than any patient, no matter how rigid with madness they were, none of them could compare with Mister Evans’s need to own every moment of the day and night inside the Amherst Building.

“Say something,” Evans repeated, even colder. This was an order.

Francis hurried about within himself, trying to imagine what it was that Mister Evil wanted to hear, but, in reply, he was only able to blurt out: “I’ll never go into space.”

Evans shrugged and snorted, “Well, of course not …” as if what Francis had said was the silliest thing he’d ever heard.