The Madman's Tale (74 page)

The fingers seemed long, almost exaggerated. Clawlike. But they were empty.

He stepped closer, now only a few feet distant, close enough so that she could feel a kind of heat between them. She thought this was merely her own nervousness.

“Anyway, sorry if I startled you. I should have called on the phone to let you know I was coming down. Or maybe Mister Moses should have called, but he and his brother were a little busy.”

“It’s all right,” she said.

The attendant gestured at the phone by her hand. “I need to call Mister Moses, tell him I’m heading back up to the isolation wing. Okay?”

She nodded at the phone. “Help yourself,” she said. “You know, I didn’t get your name …”

Now he was close enough to touch, but still separated from Lucy by the protective wire mesh of the nursing station. The pistol butt seemed to glow red-hot in her hand, as if it was screaming at her to pull it out of its place of concealment.

“My name?” he asked. “Sorry. Actually I didn’t give it …”

The man reached through the opening in the mesh where medications were dispensed and took the telephone receiver off the hook, lifting it to his ear. She watched him dial in three numbers, and then wait for a second.

A momentary icy confusion sliced through her. The attendant had not dialed two zero two.

“Hey,” she said, “That’s not …”

And then it seemed her world exploded.

Pain like a sheet of red exploded in her eyes. Fear stabbed her with every heartbeat. Her head spun dizzily, and then she felt herself plunging forward, as if her balance was gone, and a second blast of hurt slammed into her face, followed rapidly by a third, then a fourth. Her jaw, her mouth, nose, and cheeks all suddenly seemed aflame, waterfalls of instant agony pounding down upon her visage. She could feel herself on the verge of losing consciousness, a blackness grasping hold of her. With what little remained of her memory and her control, she tried to tug her pistol free. It seemed to her that she was in a cone of pain and head-spinning confusion; the confident, firm grip she’d had seconds earlier on the butt of the gun seemed suddenly flimsy, loose, inadequate. Her motions seemed impossibly slow, as if they were restrained by ropes and chains. She tried to lift the weapon toward the attendant while the last bit of presence she retained screamed
Shoot! Shoot!
, but then, just as abruptly, the gun and all safety was gone, clattering away from her, and she felt herself tumbling down, falling to the floor, slamming against the linoleum, where all she could taste was the salty residue of blood. It seemed the last sensation open and available to her, the others eradicated by torrents of hurt. Explosions streaked crimson before her eyes. Deafening noise destroyed her hearing. The stench of fear filled her nostrils, erasing all else. She wanted to cry out for help, but the words seemed instantly distant and unreachable, as if beyond some great canyon.

What had happened was this: The attendant had suddenly driven the heavy telephone receiver up with a short, brutal uppercut, slamming it against the underside of Lucy’s jaw with the efficiency of a boxer’s knockout punch, as he had simultaneously reached through the opening in the wire mesh, and seized hold of her jacket. Then, as she had rocked back, he’d savagely pulled
her forward, so that her face crashed into the screen that was there to protect her. He’d pushed her back, then blasted her forward viciously into the mesh three times, and then tossed her down, where she’d hit the floor face-first. The gun, which he’d rather easily knocked from her hand with the telephone receiver, skidded across the floor and came to rest in a corner of the nursing station. It was an assault of blistering speed and efficiency. A bare few seconds of unbridled strength, a limit of sound that didn’t reach beyond the narrow world they occupied. One instant, Lucy had been cautious, assessing, hand wrapped around the weapon she believed would keep her safe; the next, she was down, barely able to put one thought next to another, except for a single awful idea:
I’m going to die here tonight
.

Lucy tried to lift her head from the floor, and through the haze of shock saw the attendant calmly opening the door to the nursing station. She made a great effort to get to her knees, but was unable. Her head screamed at her to call for help, to fight back, to do all the things which she’d planned to do, and which earlier had seemed so easily accomplished. But before she could martial the strength or the will necessary, he was at her side. A savage kick to her ribs burst what little wind she had from her chest, and Lucy moaned hard, as the Angel bent down over her and whispered words that pitched her into a far deeper fear than she had ever known could exist: “Don’t you remember me?” he hissed.

The truly terrible thing in that moment, the thing that went beyond all the terrible things that had taken place in the prior few seconds, was that when she heard his voice pressed up so close to her with an intimacy that spoke only of hate, it seemed to vault across the bridge of years, and she did.

Peter pivoted back and forth, trying to see down the corridor of the Amherst Building, thrusting his face up against the small glass window that had wire embedded into it to reinforce it. He was surrounded by darkness, and all he could see was shadow and shafts of wan light, none of which held any sign of existence or activity. He pitched his ear up against the door, trying to hear something through the thick steel, but its solid bulk defied his efforts, no matter how hard he strained. He could not tell what was happening—if anything. All he knew for certain was that the door that was supposed to be left open was locked tight, and that just beyond his sight and his grasp something might be happening and that suddenly, abruptly, he was powerless to do anything about it. He grabbed at the doorknob and furiously tugged on it, making a small, impotent banging sound not even strong enough to awaken any of the other well-drugged men in the room. He cursed and pulled again.

“Is it him?” Peter heard from behind his shoulder.

He spun about and saw Francis standing stock-still, a few feet back. The younger man’s eyes were wide with fear and tension, a stray slice of light from a distant barred and closed window making his face seem even younger than he was.

“I don’t know,” Peter said. “I can’t tell.”

“The door …”

“It’s locked,” he replied. “It’s not supposed to be, but it is.”

Francis took a deep breath. He was absolutely certain of one thing.

“It’s him,” he said with determination that surprised him.

Webs of pain constricted her every thought and motion. She was battling to remain alert, understanding that her life depended upon it, but she was uncertain how. One of her eyes was already swelling shut, and she thought her jaw was broken. She tried to crawl away from the sound of the Angel’s voice, but he slammed her with his foot again, and then abruptly dropped down on top of her, straddling her, pinning her to the floor. She groaned again, and then she was aware that he had something in his hand. When he pressed it up against her cheek, she knew what it was. A knife, much as the one that he had used to slice through her beauty so many years earlier.

He whispered, but it had the force of a drill sergeant’s command: “Don’t move. Don’t die too quickly, Lucy Jones. Not after all this time.”

She stayed rigid with fear.

He lifted himself up, casually walked back to the desk, and in two swift, vicious motions, cut the telephone line and the intercom.

“Now,” he said, turning back toward her, “A little conversation before the inevitable takes place.”

She pushed herself back, and didn’t respond.

He dropped back down on top of her, once again pinning her with his knees, holding her in place. “Do you have any idea how close I’ve been to you, on so many occasions I’ve lost count. Do you know that I’ve been at your side every step you’ve taken, day after day, week after week, adding all those seconds into minutes and letting the years come and go, and always been right there, so near I could have reached out and taken hold of you any time, so close I could smell your scent, hear your breathing? I have never left your side, Lucy Jones, not since the night we first met.”

He pushed his face down next to hers.

“You have done well,” the Angel said. “You learned every lesson you could in law school. Including the one that I taught you.”

The Angel looked down at her, his own face a mask of anger. “There’s just time for one more final bit of education,” he said. He placed the knife blade up against her throat.

Francis stepped forward, staring hard at Peter. “It’s him,” he repeated. “He’s here now.”

Peter looked back at the small window in the door. “We haven’t heard a signal. The Moses brothers should be here …”

But he took one more look at the mixture of fear and insistence that Francis wore on his face, and he turned and threw his shoulder against the locked door, grunting hard with exertion. Then he pulled back and slammed himself into the unyielding metal again, only to drop back with a solid, meaningless thud. Peter could feel panic lurking around within him, suddenly aware that in a place where time seemed almost irrelevant, seconds now mattered.

He stepped back and kicked hard at the door. “Francis,” he said loudly, “we’ve got to get out there.”

But Francis was already tugging hard at the metal frame of his bunk, trying to pull one of the stanchions free. It took less than an instant for Peter to recognize what the younger man was trying to do, and he jumped to Francis’s side, to help rip free some piece of iron that might serve as a makeshift crowbar, so that they could attack the door. Peter had an unusual thought penetrate all the mingled fears and doubts about what was taking place right in front of him, but beyond his reach, that the sensation he felt right then was probably the same as a man trapped within a burning building felt as he faced the wall of flame that threatened to devour him. Peter grunted hard with exertion.

On the floor of the nursing station, Lucy fought desperately to keep her wits about her. In the hours, days, and months after she’d been assaulted so many years earlier, there had been an inevitable replaying in her mind of
what ifs
and
if I’d onlys
. Now she was trying to gather all those memories, feelings of guilt and recriminations, internal fears and horrors back to her—to sort through them and find the one that truly might help, for this moment was the same as that one was. Only this time, she knew more than youth, innocence, and beauty were about to be taken from her. She screamed at herself, thrusting her imagination past the pain and despair, to find a way to fight back.