The Madman's Tale (70 page)

The overweight judge banged his gavel down. “What have we got left?” he asked briskly. “It’s getting late.”

The woman psychiatrist looked up. “Three cases, Your Honor,” she said with a slight stutter. “They shouldn’t be difficult. Two of the men are here with diagnoses of retardation and the third has emerged from a catatonic state, and shown great progress with the help of antipsychotic medication. None have any current charges pending …”

“Come on, C-Bird,” Big Black whispered, a little more insistently. “We’ve got to get back. Ain’t nothing different gonna happen in here now. These cases are going to be rubber-stamped and out-of-here quick. Time for us to leave.”

Francis stole a glance toward the young woman psychiatrist, who was continuing to speak to the retired judge.“… All these gentlemen have been committed and released on several prior occasions, your honor …”

“Let’s go, C-Bird,” Big Black said in a tone that didn’t leave room for debate. Francis didn’t know how to say that what was about to take place was what he had spent the day waiting for.

He stood up and Francis realized that he wasn’t being given a choice. Big Black gave him a little push in the direction of the door, and Francis stepped that way. He did not turn around, although he had the impression that at least one of the three remaining men had slightly turned in his chair and aimed a
glance in his direction, his eyes burning into Francis’s back. He could feel a presence that was both cold and hot all at the same time, and he understood that was what the killer felt, when he held sway with knife and terror over his victim.

For a second, he thought he heard a voice shouting after him:
We are the same, you and I!
but then he realized that there was no real noise in the hearing room, except the routine voices of the participants in the daylong exercise. What he heard was hallucination.

But it was real, and not real, all at once.

Run Francis, run!
his own voices clamored.

But he did not. He simply walked forward slowly, imagining that the man they had hunted was directly behind him, but that no one, not Lucy, Peter, or the Moses brothers, Mister Evil, or Doctor Gulp-a-pill would believe him if he blurted this out. There were three remaining patients in that room. Two were what they were. One was not. And Francis thought behind that one false mask of madness he could hear the Angel laughing at him.

He understood another thing: The Angel seemed to like risks, but Francis might have slipped past the acceptable category. He would not leave Francis alive much longer.

Big Black held the door to the administration building open and the two of them stepped out into a haphazard drizzle. Francis turned his face skyward, and felt the mist flow over him, almost as if he could get the sky to clean away all his fears and doubts. The day was rapidly closing down, the gray skies fading to a washed-out black that heralded night. In the distance, Francis could make out the sound of some heavy machinery laboring hard and fast, and he turned in that direction. Big Black, as well, had pivoted about and was staring across the hospital grounds. Over by the garden, in the makeshift cemetery in the most distant corner of Western State, a bright yellow backhoe was dumping a final load or two of moist dirt onto the ground.

“Hold on, C-Bird,” Big Black said abruptly. “We need to take a minute here.” The huge attendant lowered his head down, and then Francis heard him whisper, “Our Father, who art in heaven …” and the rest of the brief prayer.

Francis listened quietly. When Big Black lifted his head, the attendant said, “I’m thinking that’ll be just about the only words spoken over poor Cleo.” He sighed. “Maybe she’ll have more peace now. Lord knows, she had little enough while she was alive. That’s a sad thing, C-Bird. A real sad thing. Don’t make me have to speak a prayer over you. You hang in there. Things will get better, sure enough. You trust me.”

Francis nodded. He did not truly believe this although he wanted to. And, when he looked up once again into the darkening skies, hearing the distant
noise of Cleo’s grave being filled in, he thought right at that moment that he was listening to the overture of a symphony, notes and measures and rhythms that promised that there were surely still deaths to come.

It was, Lucy considered in reflection, the simplest, least adorned plan they could come up with, and probably the only one that held out any hope for success. She would simply take the late night nursing shift that had proven to be fatal for Short Blond. After taking up her position in the nursing station alone, she would wait for the Angel to show up.

Lucy was the tethered goat. The Angel was the man-eating tiger. It was the oldest of ruses. She would leave the hospital intercom open to the second-floor station, one flight above her, where the Moses brothers would wait for her signal. In the hospital, cries for
help
were pretty familiar and often ignored, so it was decided that if they heard Lucy say
Apollo
, they would race to her side. Lucy had chosen the word with a twinge of irony. They might as well have been astronauts heading for a distant moon. The Moses brothers did not think it would take more than a few seconds for them to descend the stairwell, which would have the added advantage of blocking one of the routes of escape. All Lucy had to do was keep the Angel occupied for a few moments—and not die doing it. The front entrance to Amherst was double-locked, as was the side entry. They all imagined that they could corner the killer before he was either able to slice Lucy or to fumble his way through keys and out into the hospital grounds. But even if he did flee, by then Security would be alerted, and the Angel’s options would be rapidly narrowing. And, more important, they would see his face.

Peter had been particularly insistent on this point and one other detail. It was critical, he’d argued, that the Angel’s identity be learned, regardless of what happened. It would be the only way to back build the cases against him.

He had also demanded that the door to the first-floor men’s dormitory be left unlocked, so that he, too, could monitor the situation even if it meant a sleepless night. He argued that he would be a little closer to Lucy, and that the Angel was least likely to expect an attack from a door customarily locked. The Moses brothers had said that was true—but that they could not leave the door unlocked themselves. “Against the rules,” Little Black had said. “Big doc would have our jobs if he caught wind of that …”

“Well—,” Peter started, only to be shut down by Little Black holding up his hand.

“Of course, Lucy will have her own set of keys for all the doors around here. What she does with them while she’s at the nursing station ain’t our business …,”
Little Black said. “But it ain’t gonna be my brother and I leave that door open. We find this guy, all is good. But I’m not looking for any more trouble than we’ve already got coming.”

Lucy looked down at her bed. It was quiet in the nurse-trainees’ dormitory, and she had the sensation that she was alone in the building, although she knew that couldn’t be true. Somewhere there were people talking, perhaps even laughing over a joke, or sharing some story. Not her. She had laid out a white nurse’s outfit on the surface of the cot. It was to be her costume for the night. Inwardly, she felt a little mocking laughter. First Communion dress. Prom dress. Wedding dress. Funeral dress. A woman laid out her clothes with care for special occasions.

In her hand, she hefted the small, snub-nosed pistol. She placed it into her handbag. She had not told any of the others that she had it with her.

Lucy did not truly expect the Angel to show, but she was at a loss as to what else she could do in the time remaining. Her own stay was coming to an end, her welcome long past expiration and by Monday morning Peter would be shipped out as well. That left this one night. In some ways, she had already begun to plan ahead, considering about what she would be forced to do when her mission ended in failure and she departed the hospital. Eventually, she knew, the Angel would either kill again inside the hospital or seek release and kill once he’d stepped outside the walls. If she monitored every release hearing, and kept a watch on every death at the hospital, sooner or later he would make a mistake and she would be there to accuse him. Of course, she realized, the problem with that particular approach was obvious: It meant someone else had to die.

She took a deep breath and reached for the nurse’s outfit. She tried to not imagine what that other, nameless, faceless but very real victim would look like. Or who she might be. Or what hopes and dreams and desires she might have. She existed somewhere in some parallel world, as real as anyone, but ghostlike. For a second, Lucy wondered if this woman out there waiting to die was a little like the hallucinations that so many of the patients in the hospital had. She was just out there somewhere, not knowing that she was next in line for the Angel if he did not show up at the first-floor nursing station in the Amherst Building that night.

With the full weight of that unknown woman’s future resting on her shoulders, Lucy slowly began to dress herself.

When I looked up from the words to catch my breath, Peter was there in the apartment, standing nonchalantly up against the wall, arms folded in front of his chest, a troubled look on his face. But that was all that was familiar about him; his clothing was in tatters, the skin on his arms was seared red and black. Dirt and blood streaked his cheeks and throat. There was so little left of him that I remembered, I am not sure whether I could have recognized him. The room filled with a foul odor and suddenly I could smell the awful stench of burned flesh and decay
.

I shook off a sensation of dread, and greeted my only friend
.

“
Peter,” I said, relief flooding my voice, “you’re here to help
.”

He shook his head but didn’t voice a reply. He gestured once to his neck and then his lips, like a mute signaling that words were lost to him
.

I pointed back at the wall where my story was collected. “I was beginning to understand,” I said. “I was there at the release hearings. I knew. Not everything, but I was beginning to know. When I walked across the hospital grounds that night, for the first time, I saw something different, didn’t I? But where were you? Where was Lucy? All of you were making plans, but no one wanted to listen to me, and I was the one who saw the most
.”

He smiled again, as if to underscore the truth in what I was saying
.

“
Why weren’t you there to listen to me?” I asked again
.

Peter shrugged sadly. Then he reached out a hand that seemed almost stripped of flesh, like a skeleton’s bony fingers reaching for my own. In the second that I hesitated, the hand reaching for me faded, almost as if a fogbank had slid between him and me, and after I blinked again, Peter was gone. Wordless. Disappearing like a conjurer’s trick on a stage. I shook my head, trying to clear my thinking, and when I looked up again, filmy, slowly taking shape very close to where Peter’s apparition had been, I saw the Angel
.