Every mental hospital had somebody like Gus living within its walls. He'd been at Hastings House so long-some said ever since Dwight Eisenhower had been elected president-that he didn't even have a last name anymore. He was just Gus.
At this point in his life, he was round, fish belly white, balding, and just as strange as he'd been the day his mother had first brought him here after Gus had complained too many times about the small green Martian man who kept trying to poison him. Every time the staff recommended that Gus be granted a few days at home, he would invariably do something that would make them rescind the order. One time it was sneaking into old Mrs. Grummond's room and taking a dump under her pillow because she hadn't wanted to watch Superman in the TV room. Another time it was dressing up in Katie Dowd's slinkiest nightgown and strolling into the games room, lipstick like a rash on his mouth, and a red paper rose stuck behind his ear. Perhaps his most memorable moment at Hastings came one September day when the state inspectors arrived to check out rumours of abuse they'd heard about Hastings. Just as they reached the third floor, they heard horrifying screams coming from the opposite end of the hall. Along with Dr. Bellamy himself, the inspectors ran to the source of the screams, out of breath and frightened that something terrible was going on. What they found was that Gus had commandeered the nurse's station loudspeaker microphone and was filling all the speakers with his great imitation of a guy being strangled to death, a trick he'd picked up from an episode on Alfred Hitchcock Presents. By this time, Hastings was a literal zoo-a human zoo-patients so horrified by the screams that they were crying and screaming themselves, and huddling in corners, and running up and down the hall, and fighting with staff nearly everywhere.
Gus later explained that he was just trying to have a little fun and was sorry that some of the patients had got so scared and that some of the staff had suffered injuries trying to calm down some of the more violent patients. But, hey, if you couldn't have a little fun in a mental hospital, where the hell could you have fun?
Following this last incident, Gus was made PRN, short for the Latin phrase pro re nata, which means 'as needed'-Gus's personal doctor had given the nurses at Hastings permission to shoot Gus up with 100 mg of Thorazine anytime they felt he needed it. As when Gus went fruitcakes on them three or four times a week, peeing in glasses of orange juice and then drinking them down, finding rats in the closets and killing them and then putting them in other patients' drawers so the vermin would turn green and fester with maggots-which meant that the nurses were damn tootin' going to keep Gus shot up every chance they got. He was just too much hassle to deal with otherwise.
While Gus sometimes suffered tardive dyskinesia, an involuntary movement disorder suffered by many patients who had been overtreated with drugs, the nurses nonetheless kept him zoned out most of the time. He wasn't violent enough to tie down to a bed in one of the isolation rooms, but he was sure as hell violent enough to keep pacified with a needle.
When Gus was all medicated up, he walked around a lot. He didn't harm anybody, he just walked. You'd see him in the TV room and in the game room and in the visitors' room and in the hallways. Just shuffling along in his shabby pyjamas and his even shabbier robe and his flapping K-Mart house slippers. Gone was the Gus of shitting-under-people's-pillows and getting-all-dressed-up-in-drag and peeing-in-orange-juice-glasses. All that remained was this shambling, dead-eyed, slack-jawed zombie. He got so bad at these times that he had to be showered with the most helpless patients-gang showered, as they called it, hosed off like a circus animal or a car, just a row of cowering naked people like concentration camp prisoners about to be shot and thrown into a mass grave.
Yet curiously enough, it was when he was all shot up with drugs that Gus heard the voices. They came, according to Gus, from people in the tower that soared from the north-east corner of this part of the building into the black and starry sky above.
"They's not normal," Gus would tell people over and over again. "They's not normal."
And even some of the more disturbed patients-patients who heard voices of their own-would look at poor Gus and take him gently by the elbow and say, You wanna Baby Ruth, Gus (or) You want some strawberry Kool-Aid, Gus? (or) You want me to get a nurse and have her take you back to your room, Gus?
But he never wanted anything. He'd just go on, shuffle down the hall or out of the room or into the next room, and keep muttering "They's not normal" and looking up with childlike awe out a window where he could get a glimpse of the turreted tower.
This had been Gus's life for nearly four decades. He became an old man, one who'd seemed to give up on everything. He was not even the mad masturbator that he used to be. He now found no solace in his groin area. The drugs had made him sexless. Nor did he care about visitors. The only ones he'd ever wanted to see were his own people-mother, father, aunts, uncles-and they'd passed on long ago.
He just walked around on the third floor and muttered to himself about the tower and how the people in it weren't normal. And when he'd show any signs of lucidity-any signs, in other words, that the drugs were wearing off-they'd slap him down on his bed and put the quick sharp silver needle into the right cheek of his fleshy white buttock.
This was Gus.
Other patients knew that Gus sometimes took the grille from the air conditioning duct and crawled up the dark, dusty passageway until he was on the first floor of the tower. He never had any trouble with the duct-work passage because it was pretty wide and because it was made from sheet metal that was twenty-four-gauge steel that was S-cleated for extra support and that was crimped for even more support beyond that. Gus always went after dusk because during the day, with the full staff out in force, it would be too easy to get caught entering or leaving the duct.
The grille was located at about eye level to the right of the freight elevator in a seldom-used section of the third floor.
Tonight, Gus went through his usual procedures. Once he knew nobody was around, he took a small milking stool, set it on the floor directly beneath the grille, set his clawed fingers into the grid itself, and extracted the grille from its square.
After checking one more time for sight of anybody, Gus boosted himself up and crawled into the opening. He banged his knee as he did so. A shock wave of pain moved through his entire leg and he said severed curse words that he knew were wrong. He even took the Lord's name in vain and that was especially wrong.
In the pocket of his robe, he kept a flashlight. In need of fresh batteries, the beam was a dim, almost watery yellow but at least it offered a comforting glow in the gloom.
His destination was always the same. Gus liked to crawl until he'd reached a grille identical to the one he'd just taken out. This second grille opened on to the first floor of the tower.
Now, reaching the grille, he started hearing the noises he usually did coming from somewhere high up in the shadowy top of the tower-dragging noises, as if something very heavy were being hauled with great difficulty across the floor. And the whimpering sounds. All Gus could liken them to were the sounds his puppy with cancer had made that long ago sunny afternoon. The puppy had died in Gus's lap and as it expired it made these tiny, mewling pleas. All Gus could do was hold the puppy tight and rock him back and forth the way Gus's mother did with Gus's little sister-but it had done no good. The puppy had started sweating and silver spittle spewed from its mouth and then its eyes had rolled all white with just a tiny red tracery of veins showing… and then the little dog had gone rigid in Gus's lap. Gus had cried for days after, inconsolable. He'd been convinced that the same Martians who were after him had also been after his little puppy.
He jumped down and stood in the small lobby area. The tower had only a few windows, and they were more like slats than anything. Moonlight lay silver against the slats now. Gus shone his beam around. This was like being on the ground floor of a lighthouse. All you could see in the cramped, damp darkness was a huge set of metal steps spiralling up into the blackness above.
A chittering sound made him swing his head around. In the gloom behind him, a pair of tiny red eyes watched him. A rat. One time Gus had seen a rat in here that had been as big as a cat he had once had. Gus's mind was filled with stories his mother had told him about rats-how they often snuck into houses and ate tiny babies as the infants slept in their cribs; how their fangs ran red with blood and green with poison; how they sank their fangs into your hair and started ripping your scalp apart. Or was that last one bats? Sometimes Gus got rats and bats confused.
The rat hunkered, started inexorably toward Gus.
While he wasn't as big as a cat, the grey creature with the swollen belly and the swishing spiky tail was formidable nonetheless.
The rat sprang, then. Came off the floor like an animal grotesquely capable of flight. Flew directly at Gus.
But Gus was ready. He'd been through this many times here before in the mildewy darkness of the tower.
Gus expertly brought the flashlight down on the rat's head. The chittering turned into a kind of keening.
The rat slammed to the floor.
Gus brought the heel of his K-Mart slipper down on the animal's skull. He felt a pleasing pop as the rat's brains escaped the confines of its skull, spilling out through its nostrils' and mouth. The animal started jerking wildly, puking and continuing to keen, and then it lay still. Dead.
"You little sonofabitch," Gus said. And smiled to himself.
He never felt more purposeful than when he'd inflicted pain on something or somebody. He couldn't tell you why he felt this way and he didn't give a damn why he felt this way. He just did.
So even squashing a rat gave Gus considerable pleasure.
He wiped the blood, hair, and flecks of bone off the head of the flashlight-he'd knocked the light out for good this time- and then looked once more at the steps.
Up at the top of them, the dragging sound was still going on.
And so was the occasional flash of amber light.
Gus had no idea what this was. During his first trips to the tower, he'd even wondered if he might not be imagining the amber light, if it might not be some kind of illusion.
But no; now almost every time he came through the vent shaft, he saw the intermittent glow coming down the stairs like a ghost just starting to take shape.
Then, as now, it would be gone.
He went over to the stairs and set one foot on the first step. He could feel his heart begin to race, his body grow sleek and pasty with sweat.
In the now claustrophobic darkness (he often told Dr. Milner that he feared they would someday bury him alive), he raised his eyes to the gloom.
What made the dragging sound?
What caused the amber glow? And then he heard a new noise-a kind of snapping sound, the crack a whip makes when it meets flesh.
And he got scared.
This happened to him every time he came here. He'd just get curious about the tower-and what was up at the top-and then he'd get scared.
Because the one time he'd gone all the way to the top of the tower, Gus had seen what actually happened in the room up there.
It was just a small stone room, with a hole in the wall near the lone, mullioned window. That's where the snake came from. Or maybe it wasn't a snake exactly.
But anyway, it came coiling out of the hole, seeming to go on forever, and it angled across the floor to where the naked woman stood.
Gus couldn't keep his eyes off her.
The only woman he'd ever seen naked was his mother and he'd always felt terrible about that.
This woman was named Sally. She was from the third floor, too. She was the one with the slash marks on her wrists. Sometimes at the table she'd start sobbing and saying, I almost did it; I almost did it, but then the muscle boys in the white uniforms would come and take her back to her room and give her the same sharp quick silver needle they always gave Gus.
But tonight she was up here.
And in the soft moonlight through the window he could see her breasts with the big brown nipples and her tidy little thatch of pubic hair (and Gus wondered what it would be like to touch and lick her down there; exciting, he somehow knew, exciting).
And the snake, its slanted eyes throwing off an almost blinding amber light, was coiling, coiling around her leg and coiling, coiling up her body.
And she threw her head back and began touching herself between the legs and laughing and crying at the same time.
And the snake continued to coil around her body, up around her belly and then around her breasts and then angling up over her chest to where it began to feed into-
Her mouth.
She was swallowing the snake.
And as the serpent worked its way down inside her, Gus could see the amber glow begin to shine through the flesh of her belly.
The stench almost made him throw up.
The stench was horrible. All he could think of was the way dead animals left a long time in the basement always smelled.
And somehow every foot of that snake fitted into her belly, she writhed to the enormous size of it slithering down inside her. All he could think of was a scene he'd seen on TV once when a python had swallowed a small pig, the way the jaws came unhinged so the snake could swallow the animal whole.
And for a brief moment, the radiant glow came not from her belly, but her eyes-her eyes looked just the way the snake's had.
And then even that was gone.
There was just the darkness.
And then she sensed him.
She didn't even look in his direction.
But he knew she'd become aware of him.
Gus went back down the stairs through the gloom to the duct opening. He crawled inside so quickly and carelessly that he cut his hands on the edges of the sheet metal. But he kept moving, moving.
She was somewhere behind him.
He didn't want her to swallow him.
He was horrified of her swallowing him.
Two days later they found Mr. Conrad in the shower. Something had dug both his eyes out and ripped off his penis so that there was just a bloody hole there.
That night they found Sally sitting up in her bed.
She was playing with Mr. Conrad's limp, ragged penis.
There wasn't a trial, just a hearing, after which Sally was put on the third floor where rooms were more like cages and where you were fed through slots in the door and where no matter how hard you screamed or cried they never let you out.
A new director was appointed. Hastings House spent the next three years staging a variety of public relations events. On Christmas Eve, for instance, they had the most docile patients dress up like elves to serve dinner to two hundred orphans. There was a lot of TV coverage.
Gus was eager to tell everybody what he'd seen. Especially the part about how her eyes became just like the snake's and how she'd taken the entire snake inside her. But nobody paid much attention to him, of course.
If he wasn't talking about Sally and the serpent, then he was talking about this nice man he'd once met from Uranus. Somehow, most of Gus's words ran together. About the only other guy who'd believe him was a janitor named Telfair, whom Gus knew had also been to the tower at least a few times.
It wasn't really a date, of course, but it was a sort of pretend date…
From her bedroom window Marie saw Richie's car coming down the driveway and stopping at her apartment complex. Picking up her red jacket, she walked out into the living room where her mother was watching the last of the local news.
"Night, Mom," Marie said.
Her mother looked up. "Don't forget this is a school night."
"I won't."
"And-" Her mother paused, as if afraid to speak her mind. "And be careful."
"I know it's not a good neighbourhood, Mom. That's why I'm always careful.'"
Her mother's gaze did not leave Marie's face. "I don't mean just the neighbourhood. I mean that boy, too." She hesitated again. "I don't want to see you just-disappointed over anything."
I don't want to see you get your heart broken. That's what her mother was really saying. No doubt about that.
Marie leaned over and kissed her mother tenderly on the forehead. Her mother meant well. There was no meanness or mendacity in her heart.
She went to the door, waved goodbye, and went out.
In the hall she saw Mrs. Rubens. The older lady, who always wore the same sparkly rhinestone eyeglasses and the same shade of dire red lipstick, looked her over and whistled. "You must have a date tonight!"
And then it happened: a giggle. An honest-to-God giggle issuing from the otherwise mature mouth of Marie Fane. Marie couldn't believe it. She felt her cheeks bum.
Mrs. Rubens, whom Marie liked very much, winked and said, "So I was right. You do have a date tonight."
"Well, not really, I guess. Or not exactly, Mrs. Rubens."
"Not exactly?" Mrs. Rubens smiled. "Now what could that mean?"
By now they had reached the front door. Mrs. Rubens held it open for her. At such times Marie was always reminded of people's kindness. People always held doors for Marie. Given her crippled walk, they probably always would. On some paranoid occasions, she resented them. There was such a thing as being too kind; kind to the point of being patronising. But then she always realised that she was being unfair-that people only meant to show her that they liked her and were concerned for her.
The early evening was an explosion of wonderful aroma- everything in urgent bloom-and lovely, vital sounds.
"You have a good time tonight," Mrs. Rubens said, taking her lone sack of garbage out to the big Dumpster discreetly kept on the other side of the nearest garage.
Marie walked over to the car, aware that Richie was watching her. He'd changed into a white shirt and a blue jacket. With the collar up and his dark hair piled high, he resembled a teen idol from the fifties. Especially with his slightly petulant mouth and sad dark eyes. She thought again: Richie must have a secret otherwise he wouldn't always look so melancholy.
The car was five years old, an Oldsmobile, the kind of vehicle that was ideal for families but that teenage boys looked a little awkward driving. It had 'Daddy's Car' stamped all over it. As if to compensate for this, Richie had the radio up loud, playing some very punky dance music.
He surprised her suddenly by bolting from the car, running around to her door, and opening it for her.
"Why thanks, Richie."
He smiled. "My pleasure."
When he got her safely ensconced, he walked around the rear of the car and got in.
So here it is, she thought. My first actual date. Or sort-of-date, anyway. She'd been waiting the better part of five years for this, constantly shaping and reshaping this moment to make it into the maximum thrill.
As she sat there watching him put the car in gear, watching him glance out the back window as he started moving in reverse, she wondered if she weren't at least a tad disappointed. In her fantasies, her first date had always had a gauzy unreality to it. Mere glances carried searing meaning; his few muttered words had inspired rhapsodies in her heart. Whoever it was in her dreams (and the boy changed from time to time, blond now, now dark; short sometimes, tall others) didn't look quite as young as Richie nor did he sink down in the seat quite as much as Richie, nor did he smell of excessive aftershave lotion as did Richie, nor had his voice risen an octave and a half out of sheer plain nervousness.
She strapped on her seat belt as Richie pulled out into traffic.
"You get off at nine-thirty, right?"
"Right," she said, feeling kind of sorry for him that he had to struggle to make conversation. In the cafeteria, he had always seemed so self possessed and self confident. He knew very well that she got off at nine-thirty.
"Well, maybe around nine or so I'll go get us some Dairy Queens."
"Dairy Queens? Are they open already?"
And here he looked younger than ever. Not the dark teen idol despite his calculated appearance, but rather the kid brother got up to look like the teen idol.
In that moment something came to her-something that was better than all the gauzy unreal fantasy first dates could ever offer-she liked Richie and liked him lots and thought he was really cute and clean and appealing.
"Boy, that sounds great," she said, wanting her own enthusiasm to match his.
"You like Blizzards?"
"I love Blizzards," she said.
He glanced over at her and grinned. "Great," he said. "Great."
Ten blocks from the bookstore you started seeing winos and homeless people. They clung to the shadows of crumbling buildings and rambled listlessly down the cracked sidewalks amid the garbage and wind-pushed litter. There were homeless dogs and cats, too, and they roamed after their human counterparts. Dirty children belonging to some of the people who lived and worked in the neighbourhood played in the gutters, too far from their parents, too close to traffic. Nobody seemed to notice or care.
Towering over all this in the near distance were the spires of the university, great Gothic structures built at the turn of the century. While the university itself had not been touched by the poverty and hopelessness and shambling violence of the streets, everything around it had been.
The Alice B. Toklas Bookshop was situated in an aged two-storey brick building that sat on an alley. Across the alley was a pizza place that seemed to do business twenty-four hours a day.
Marie showed Richie where they could park in the rear-in a shadowy cove next to a Dumpster that always smelled of rotting meat from the pizza place-and then they went inside.
They walked in on a familiar scene-a customer at the cash register buying a book and Brewster giving his opinion of the book to the customer. Arnold Brewster looked like Maynard G. Krebs on the old Dobie Gillis show. Except this was Maynard at fifty years of age. Round, bald, stoop-shouldered, he wore a wine-coloured beret, a little tuft of grey goatee on his chin, and a FUGS T-shirt. Marie wasn't even sure who the FUGS were exactly-just some kind of musical group that had prospered briefly during the hippie era.
The customer-a proper looking man, probably a professor, in a tweedy sports jacket and a white button-down shirt and a narrow dark necktie-looked as if he wanted badly to get out of here. Every time he pulled to go away, Brewster started telling him how bad a writer Sartre (the man had bought a copy of Nausea) really was.
Actually, Marie had met many bookstore owners who were not unlike Brewster. Maybe they weren't quite as forthcoming but they were certainly as opinionated. They ran their stores like little fiefdoms over which they were absolute masters-dispensing approval or disapproval (this author was good, this author was bad), handing out second-hand gossip (did you know that this writer was getting a divorce, that that writer was an alcoholic?), and pushing their own pets (you could tell the authors they really liked because they referred to them almost as personal friends).
As Brewster wound up his harangue ("Camus was the artist; Sartre was just a journalist"), Marie glanced over at Richie who looked both fascinated and repelled by Brewster's loud earnest diatribe.
Marie spent the last few minutes of the verbal barrage looking around the store. One thing you had to say for Brewster, he was a Zen master of organisation. Every book was very strictly categorised and God forbid you-customer or employee-put the book back in the wrong place. If he saw you do this, he'd come screaming down the aisle like a maniac and make you put the book in its proper place.
The weird thing was, Marie actually liked Brewster. He was crazed, he was obnoxious, but he loved literature and books with a true passion that was moving to see in this age of television and disco. He knew 3,453 things about Shakespeare and at least 2,978 things about Keats and this made him-by Marie's definition anyway-a holy man.
On the walls above the long aisles of books-he sold everything from the plays of Henrik Ibsen to the sleazy 'adult' westerns of Jake Foster-were drawings and photographs of the men and women he admired most-Shakespeare, of course, but also Shaw and Whitman and Hemingway and Faulkner.
When the customer left, Brewster picked up his lunch sack from underneath the register and said, "Who's this?"
"This is Richie." Then she introduced them.
"You a reader, Richie?" Brewster wanted to know, pushing his black hom-rimmed glasses back up his tiny pug nose.
"Sometimes," Richie said.
"Good," Brewster said, quite seriously. "I wouldn't want Marie here to have any friends who weren't." Then he looked back to Marie. "I cleaned it and oiled it today. Okay?"
Marie felt her cheeks burn again. "Okay."
"I know hippie-dippies like myself aren't supposed to believe in such things, but I don't want you to take any chances, all right?"
"All right."
Brewster cuffed Richie on the shoulder and said, "Nice to meet you, Richie."
"Nice to meet you."
"Talk to you tomorrow, Marie."
Then Brewster went out the back way to his car.
"You were put into Hastings House as a patient and one night while you were half asleep you felt this compulsion to go to the tower that was a part of the hospital's first building. You had to go through the air conditioning ductwork but you made it. And then upstairs in the tower-"
Emily Lindstrom then described to Richard Dobyns how he stood in the centre of the dusty tower room and watched the snake come out of the crack in the wall and how the snake then entered his body.
She then described the peculiar amber light of the snake's eyes.
He just sat across from her in the small, shadowy apartment, staring.
And then she told him about the killings.
"My brother didn't understand why he killed those women," she said gently. "And it wasn't his fault. But he didn't believe that. He just thought that the snake and the way it controlled him was illusory."
They sat for a time in silence.
She said, "Are you thirsty?"
"No."
"Hungry?"
"No."
"Is there somebody you'd like me to call for you?"
"How did you know about this apartment?"
"I've spent every day since my brother's death-as you may remember, he was shot and killed by a policeman-trying to find out what happened. This apartment is part of it."
He fell into silence once more.
Traffic noise. Children being called in for dinner. A subtle drop in the temperature; the dusk chill now despite the blooming day.
She said, "I want to help you."
"You're going to the police, I suppose."
"The police won't help us. They won't believe us."
He shook his head again.
And now he did start sobbing.
He put his hand to his stomach. "I want to cut this goddamn thing out of me."
And then he just cried.
She lit a cigarette. She was down to six a day now but she couldn't quit completely. Times like these drove her to light up.
"I'm going to see a TV reporter in a little while," she said.
Slowly, he quit crying and looked up at her. "A TV reporter?"
"A woman named Chris Holland."
"How can she help?"
"I don't know if she can, but I at least want to try. She's covered a lot of murders in this city, including the ones my brother supposedly committed. She'll at least listen, I think."
"I'm afraid of tonight."
"Afraid?"
"There was a girl's name in the manila envelope."
"I saw it. Marie Fane."
He touched his stomach.
She was slowly becoming aware of the odour; the uncleanness.
"I want you to help me."
"How?" she said.
He reached in the pocket of his sport coat. "I stopped by a hock shop this afternoon. I got these."
In the shadows, he held up a pair of handcuffs.
"While you're gone visiting the reporter, I want you to handcuff me to the bedpost. And you take the key." He looked at her through his teary eyes. "I don't want to hurt this Fane girl. I don't want to hurt anybody at all."
She sighed. She couldn't go to the police but maybe Chris Holland could. She might at least listen to her.
"I'll be glad to help you," she said. Then, "Do you know there's some bourbon in the kitchen? Would you like a shot?"
"Yes. Please."
"I'll be right back"
While she was pouring them two drinks, he said, "You know there's an old man at Hastings House who knows all about the tower."
"There is?"
"His name's Gus."
She brought the drinks in. "Really?"
"Yes, but whenever he tells people about the tower and the snake, people just smile at him. Think he's crazy."
"I wonder how long he's known."
"Years probably. He's been there since the fifties."
"My God."
Richard Dobyns sipped his whiskey. "That's why I'm afraid to tell anybody about what's happened to me. They'll start looking at me the way they look at Gus."
"There's also a janitor named Telfair who knows about the tower." She sighed. "My brother tried to get back to Hastings House. After he killed those women, I mean. So did the other men."
"Other men?"
She nodded, sipped at her own whiskey. "Since 1891 there've been six escapees who committed murder and were then killed- either by police or by suicide. Every one of them tried to get back to the tower. One of the men committed suicide by climbing up on the turret next to the tower and jumping."
He stared at her, miserable again. "I know why those men committed suicide, believe me."
"The thing inside you," she said.
He smiled bitterly. "The devil made me do it?"
"Something like that, yes."
He bowed his head and ran a shaky hand through his hair. He looked up at Emily again. "I called my wife today. I couldn't explain to her, either."
"I know."
"I just wanted to see her one more time before-" He paused. "You'll help me with the handcuffs?"
"Of course." She glanced at her wristwatch. She had to turn it so she could get the light of the dying day through the edges of the curtain. Nearly 5:45. She had to get going if she was going to be on time meeting Chris Holland.
She stood up and walked over to the chair.
This close, the odour was stomach turning.
She recalled the same smell on her brother.
His eyes had looked like Dobyns's, too. So sad; so sad.
"Come on," she said softly, taking the handcuffs from him.
She led him into the bedroom.
He sat on the soft double sized mattress, the springs squeaking beneath his weight.
She'd never held handcuffs before. Not real ones; only play ones that Rob and she used to use when they were cowboys and Indians. These cuffs were heavy and rough.
She snapped one cuff on his wrist and one cuff to the brass bedpost.
"Too tight?" she said.
"No. Fine."
"I'll be back here after I see Chris Holland."
He reached out and touched her hand. "I can't tell you what this means to me. I don't want to get-overwhelmed again and-kill anybody. You know?"
She touched his forehead gently. "I know." She smiled and touched his cheek now. "I'll be back as soon as I can."
"Would you call my wife when you come back?"
"Really?"
"Yes. It'll all sound less-insane-coming from you. Then maybe afterward I could talk to my daughter. For just a few minutes. Before we go to the police, I mean."
He was a decent and honourable man, she thought. And now she wanted to cry, too.
Her brother had also been a decent and honourable man.
She left him there, handcuffed to the bed.
Chris Holland had once been picked up by a Prudential insurance salesman in a dark, chilly bar very much like this one. This was not an achievement she talked about much-especially considering the fact that afterward the insurance salesman had confessed that he didn't find the Ku Klux Klan "all bad, I mean they're just doing what they believe in." He then said that he'd kind of lied to her and that he was, in fact, ahem, married and was now feeling kind of shitty about going to bed with her, nothing personal you understand. And that he'd be shoving off (what was he, a goddamn sailor?). And getting home to that wife and kids. All of which left Chris feeling just great, of course, and wondering if she shouldn't give up her career, find a nice fat bald guy, and retreat to suburbia and raise some kids.
She sat in the bar now, waiting for the woman who'd called her about the murders, and realised that in the eight years since the Prudential guy her love life had not improved a whole hell of a lot. She just had lousy instincts where men were concerned. She could not seem to understand on any gut level the truth all her friends understood-that damaged men, of the type Chris liked to help put back together, inevitably dragged you down with them. Hell, even the Pru guy had had that air about him-vulnerable, hurt, lonely.
The waitress in the cute little handmaiden's costume (though Chris doubted that handmaidens had worn hot pants) brought the day's second beer, picked up her tip, and started away.
And that was when she saw the tall, very Nordic woman in the tailored grey suit standing just inside the entrance door staring at her.
The woman was sombre and beautiful and regal and, now that she was walking, quite graceful, too.
Chris had been secretly dreading that her informant would turn out to be some obviously crazed attention starved lunatic who was going to help 'solve' a murder that took place in 1903 or something. TV reporters were always getting calls from such folks.
But if this one was a lunatic, she was a lunatic with great breeding.
The woman came over to Chris's table and put out a long, strong dry hand. "I'm Emily Lindstrom."
"Nice to meet you, Emily. Why don't you sit down?"
So Emily Lindstrom sat down.
The first thing she did was glance around the place. The walls were all got up like the interior of a pirate's sailing vessel. On each table tiny red encased candles burned fervently. In the darkness, Frank Sinatra sang Laura, from the era when he still had a voice. In one corner two salesmen types, all grins and gimme-gimme eyes, were huddled over their table talking about Chris and the Lindstrom woman, obviously trying to figure out how to make their moves. Hell, Chris thought sourly, maybe they work for Prudential.
The waitress came. Emily Lindstrom ordered a small glass of dry white wine. The two salesmen were both grinning at them openly now.
"I'll get right to it if you don't mind," Emily said.
In the flickering shadows, the Lindstrom woman was even more impressive looking. There was the clarity of a young girl about her beauty, yet there was pain in her blue eyes, a pain that suggested dignity and perhaps even wisdom. If she was a crackpot, Chris thought, she sure wasn't your garden variety crackpot.
"Fine," Chris said.
"Several years ago my brother, Rob, was accused of murdering three women. When the police moved in to capture him, he was killed."
"I'm sorry."
"He didn't kill those women. Some-force had taken him over."
"I see." Chris couldn't keep the scepticism from her tone.
Emily smiled. "I'm sure you've heard stories like this many times. An innocent relative and all that."
Chris was just about to respond when she saw Emily Lindstrom's upward glance.
There, right next to their table, stood the two salesmen.
"Hi, gals," the taller of the two said. "I'm Arnie."
"And I'm Cliff."
"You're the TV reporter if I'm not mistaken," Arnie said.
They both wore three-piece suits. They both wore Aqua Velva. And they both wore lounge lizard smiles.
"That would be me, yes," Chris said.
"I'd consider it an honour to buy you a drink," Amie said. He nodded to the two unoccupied chairs gathered at the table. "You know?"
"I know, Arnie, I know. But believe it or not, this is a business meeting for me."
"Really?"
"True facts, Arnie," she said. She always had to remember that she had a public image to worry about. Even while spuming hit artists like these two bozos, she had to maintain a certain decorum. "I'm sorry but I really am busy."
Across the table, Emily Lindstrom kept her head down, her eyes almost closed, as if she were trying to will these two out of existence.
"You may not have noticed," Cliff said, "But they've got a dance floor in the back"
Emily Lindstrom's head shot up suddenly. She glared regally at Cliff. "Then why don't you and Arnie go show us how nice you look dancing together?"
Arnie lost it. "Hey, just because you're sitting here with some TV reporter doesn't give you the right to get shitty."
But Cliff, obviously the more sensible of the two, had his hand on Arnie's elbow and was gently tugging him away. "Come on, Arnie. Screw 'em."
Arnie, still angry, and a little drunker than Chris had realised, said, "Screw 'em? Hey, I wouldn't touch 'em. Either one of 'em. I don't think they're the type who go for guys-if you know what I mean."
Now Cliff's hand was more insistent on Arnie's elbow.
"You think you're some goddamn queen just because you're on the tube," Arnie said. "Well, you're no queen in my book"
Well, Chris thought uncharitably, in my book you’re a queen.
But then the bartender was there and when he took Arnie's elbow, it was in a manner far rougher than Cliff had done.
The half filled bar was alive now with curiosity about the scene in the corner involving the TV lady and the drunk. This was a lot more interesting than most of the conversations running, as they did, to politics and baseball and routine sexual propositions.
Watching some clown making a fool of himself over a TV lady. That was pretty good.
"Sorry," the bartender said, after getting Arnie and Cliff out the front door. "I'd like you to spend the entire evening drinking on the house."
"That's nice of you," Chris said, "but not necessary. You didn't make him a jerk."
The bartender obviously appreciated her kindness. Then he took a small white pad from his back pocket. He handed her a yellow Bic along with it. "Would you mind? For my daughter, I mean. She'd get a kick out of it."
Chris had never been sure exactly why people wanted the autograph of a local TV reporter, but she was modest enough to be flattered and so she was always most agreeable about putting pen to paper.
"What's her name?"
"Eve."
"Pretty name."
So she wrote a nice little inscription to Eve, signed it, and handed the pad back. "Here you go."
"Thanks. And I wasn't kidding about the drinks being on the house. They are."
When they were alone once again, Chris said to the Lindstrom woman, "I'm really sorry."
"Actually, it's sort of fascinating. Do you go through all this very often?"
Chris smiled. "Just enough to keep me off balance."
"I'd be off balance, too."
Chris said, "But we're here to talk about you, not me."
The Lindstrom woman leaned forward. "There's a man I want you to meet."
"Oh!"
"Yes. He's waiting for us at an apartment house."
"Will we leave right away?"
"No," Emily Lindstrom said. "He's going to be there for a while."
"Oh?"
"Yes. He's handcuffed to the bedpost."
And right then, Chris Holland thought: Maybe she isn't a garden variety lunatic.
But she sure is a lunatic of some kind.
So Chris sat there and sipped her drink and learned all about the man handcuffed to the bedpost with the giant serpent iri his belly.
He wasn't sure when it happened. It just happened, too subtie to quantify in any way, some process utterly mysterious.
Handcuffed to the bed, head dangling in an almost sleepy way, an image of his daughter filling his mind (a rowboat on a scummy but not unpretty pond; lily pads the colour of frog bellies parting as the stem of the rowboat gently parted them; and Cindy's laugh; God, Cindy's laugh).
And then his head came up abruptly and he thought no more of his daughter.
He started yanking on the handcuffs.
He thought of freedom and of what he would do with that freedom.
The girl: Marie Fane.
The snake shifted in his innards now, and he felt that crazy upside down nausea again.
Marie Fane.
He was so singular of purpose now.
He had an erection but he scarcely noticed.
He thought only of working himself free.
He searched frantically for any tool or implement that would help him escape.
The only thing that looked marginally useful was a pink plastic hairbrush on the edge of the bureau.
But what was he going to do with the hairbrush? Pry the cuffs free with it?
He was being silly.
And then he began to growl, no melodramatic transformation to hairy wolf or silken vampire, just a low vibration in his chest and larynx, like a dog at the exact moment it senses danger.
And then he began to tear more ferociously at his metal bonds, up on his feet now, and jerking at them with single-minded viciousness.
In no time at all, he was lifting the bed from the floor. It made a clattering sound as it rose, then fell; rose, then fell.
He tore himself so savagely from the bedpost that the cuff ripped deep into his wrist, hot metallic smelling blood spreading through the matted black hair on his arm.
But he hadn't snapped the cuff. That would take even more strength and he wondered if he'd ever have it.
He bit his lip so he wouldn't cry out.
The bed was already making too much noise. He couldn't afford to attract any attention. Not if he wanted to get out of here.
He knew that he had, at most, one or two chances left. Somebody was bound to call the police if he kept banging away at the bed.
He crouched down, trying to get better leverage on the bedpost.
He closed his eyes, trying to focus all his energy on the handcuffs.
Just the right amount of pressure and-
And then he felt the snake inside him shift again.
Oddly, this time there was no sense of nausea.
Indeed, if anything, he felt stronger, tougher than ever.
He bent forward a few inches, prepared himself mentally for the struggle with the bed, and then started counting backward from ten.
Ten… Nine… Eight… Seven… Six… Five…
(I've got to fucking do it this time.)
Four… Three… Two… One…
He jerked the handcuffs so hard that he not only lifted the entire bed off the floor but smashed it directly into the wall as well.
From upstairs, the floor erupted with pounding and a Mexican voice shouted something about fuckin' stop it man or I'm callin' the police.
He fell to the floor in terrible pain.
He had put so much pressure on the wrist that it now felt broken.
He got up on his haunches, holding his wrist tenderly, tears rolling down his cheeks, just rocking back and forth.
Twenty minutes went by.
He stopped crying, but his wrist didn't feel any better.
And then he was ready again.
He had to get out of here before Emily Lindstrom got back.
So he prepared himself once more.
This time, almost as if for luck, he lay the palm of his free hand flat against his belly and felt the snake coil and uncoil inside.
Once again, he felt younger, stronger, tougher.
He stood up.
This time, he put his foot against the brace that ran across the bottom of the front post.
His weight would hold the bed down while he pulled. He should have thought of this before.
And then he heard her voice: Emily.
In the hallway.
Goddamn. He hadn't expected her so soon.
He turned his attention fully to the bed now. Concentrated. Foot against the brace. Painful wrist ready to be tugged on again.
Five… Four… Three…
(Emily closer now. "It's right down here.")
Two… One…
The pain was blinding.
He could scarcely stop himself from screaming.
He heard and felt rather than saw-the pain kept him blind- the cuff snap away from the bedpost.
And then he was free.
If you could call it that.
Marie Fane.
She was all he could think of.
He ran to the window.
(Emily with her key in the door now, saying to somebody: "Something's wrong in there.")
And then opening the window and diving through it to the chill but grassy ground below. Free, goddammit, free.
He took off running.
He put his face down near the sink and spent the next two minutes splashing himself with cold water.
He needed to be revived, brought out of his stupor. He was having the thoughts he hated to have and he needed to do something about them.
Then somebody was there: "Walter?"
"Yeah."
"Phone. It's Holland."
"Okay. Thanks."
Before going out, O'Sullivan picked up the can of Lysol air freshener (pine scent this time around) and sprayed the one-stall john that was just off the news studio. He'd got very uptight about the aroma of his stools since management (ever the trendy ones) had turned the news studio johns unisex. He didn't mind if men knew he'd had Mexican food for lunch, but women were a different matter entirely.
The newsroom had virtually shut down. The early evening news over with, most reporters had scurried away to meet spouses and lovers. Ordinarily, unless there was a critical breaking news story, everybody took an hour and a half for dinner and then came back to grind out the ten o'clock edition.
A lone light flickered on the phone buttons. O'Sullivan picked up.
And spent the next fifteen minutes listening.
He knew that the Lindstrom woman who Holland described was sitting right next to her so he didn't say anything sarcastic. He just said, "I'd be real leery of this story, Holland."
"We don't know where Dobyns went."
"Why don't you call the police?"
"We have."
"Have you looked for a Marie Fane in the phone book?"
"Of course."
"And nothing?"
"Nothing. There are seven Fanes. None of the six who answered were or knew of a Marie Fane."
"I wish I could help you." O'Sullivan had visions of the small Italian joint around the corner. A little table in the rear with the cliche red-and-white-checkered tablecloth in the back and a green wine bottle with candle drippings running down the neck and a small steady candle glow lighting the really sweet face of Chris Holland across from him. That's how he wanted to spend his break. Not chasing down some stupid story that more properly belonged to the National Enquirer.
"You can help me, Walter."
"Oh, shit. Here we go."
"There's a janitor."
"A janitor." He couldn't help being sarcastic. At least this one time.
"Yes, Walter. A janitor."
"What about him?"
"Emily talked to him on several occasions. He worked at Hastings House for forty years before he retired. He knows what's going on there. Dobyns may have contacted him. He may know something about this Marie Fane. Could you go talk to him?"
"I thought we were going to have dinner."
''We'll have dinner afterward."
"Afterward. Right."
"You want his address?"
"Whose address?"
"The janitor's address. God, Walter, you're supposed to be a news director."
"Yeah. A hungry one."
"Here's his name and address." So she gave it to him.
Reluctantly, he wrote it down.
"We're going to keep trying to find Marie Fane," Chris said.
"I can't believe you're buying all this."
"I'm not. Not entirely, anyway. But it's a lot more interesting than On the Town."
He sighed. "Yeah, I suppose that's true." He paused. "Holland, I was going to put the moves on you again tonight."
"Really?"
"Really."
"I thought we'd kind of given up on that."
"Well, no harm in trying again."
"I'd like that, Walter."
"I thought I'd buy you some pasta and a nice salad-"
"Come on, Walter. We've got work to do."
"Thanks for reminding me."
"Please go see the janitor. All right?"
"All right."
He hung up.
When he turned around and faced the deserted newsroom, he realised how lonely he felt most of the time. Cynical as he was about human nature, he needed other people around him.
Especially one person in particular named Chris Holland.
He hadn't been kidding about putting the moves on her. Who said a romance couldn't grow out of a friendship? He was already reading about just such relationships in all the magazines (Redbook, Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping) that the women were leaving in the unisex john.
He was still hoping that someday somebody would leave new copies of Baseball Digest and Sports Illustrated in there as well.
Resigning himself to the fact that dinner tonight was going to be at the McDonald's drive-up window, he tugged on his unlined London Fog and went out the back door to the parking lot.
She had long been a believer in premonitions, Kathleen Fane had.
One day in second grade she'd stared over at the boy across the aisle from her-Bobby Bannock by name-and saw a strange light encircling his head. Years later, she would come to know this curious configuration of sculptured neon as an 'aura' but on that long-ago day all she knew was that the light-even though she had nothing to compare it to-bespoke something terrible that was soon to happen to Bobby Bannock.
Sister Mary Carmelita had caught her staring at Bobby and had harshly chastised Kathleen for doing so. Sister Mary Carmelita did not much approve of girls and boys interacting, even on so harmless a level as staring.
Blushing, Kathleen had sat up straight in her desk and looked at the blackboard where the nun had just finished writing the words 'Christopher Columbus.'
She did not look at Bobby the rest of the day, not even at recess when she usually sat beneath a shade tree daintily eating the crisp red autumn apple her mother always poked into the pocket of her blue buttoned sweater.
Three days later, just after school, just at the corner that so many parents complained about, Bobby was struck by a black Ford and killed. One little girl actually saw Bobby's head strike the pavement and heard his skull crack. A little boy insisted that he'd actually seen Bobby's brains ooze out through that crack.
Ever since, Kathleen had felt in some way responsible for Bobby's death. Even if he'd laughed at her-he had usually laughed at most things she'd said-she should have warned him, told him about the strange light around his head and what it portended.
She stood now at the dusk window watching the walk below. In three and a half hours, her daughter Marie would be walking up those stairs, on her way back from the bookstore and what amounted to her first date. The autumn sky-salmon pink and grey streaked with yellow now at evening-struggled to give birth to night.
Kathleen wished now that she'd handled the whole matter better.
In her defence, she thought that she might have been more receptive to the idea of a date-even admittedly an informal one-if only Marie had given her a little warning.
Kathleen shook her head.
Sometimes her life seemed to be little more than a long list of regrets.
These days she wished, for example, that she'd been more compliant with her husband where sex was concerned. He really hadn't asked for much but Kathleen had always been something of a prude and the notion of actually putting his thing in her mouth- Well, without exactly knowing why, the whole idea had always frightened her. Now she wished she'd done it, at least a few times, and at least with the pretence of enjoyment. She'd certainly enjoyed it when he'd put his mouth on her down there and-
So many regrets with Marie these days.
How badly Kathleen wanted to strike the right balance of strict but compassionate. That was the key to raising a teenager well. Strict but compassionate.
Tonight was a milestone of sorts in Marie's life. That's where the compassion should have come in. Kathleen should have shared Marie's obvious excitement for the evening.
And now there was the premonition.
It wasn't a vision. She hadn't seen any curious light around Marie's head this afternoon.
It was just a feeling.
A terrible, fluttering feeling in both her chest and her stomach.
Something awful was going to happen to Marie tonight.
That's where the strict came in.
She should have risked disappointing or even angering Marie and just said it-Even though you think I'm being hysterical honey, I've just got this notion about tonight. This feeling, honey. There's no other way to explain it. I know you think your mother's crazy and old-fashioned and just trying to spoil all your fun but, honey- (And then maybe she'd tell Marie, for the first time ever, about little Bobby Bannock in second grade, and about the terrible thing that had happened to him and about the terrible sin Kathleen had committed by not warning him-)
She continued to stare out the window.
The downtown buildings were outlined in black against a dark blue sky. Somewhere in this evening radiance was her daughter who thought she was so big and impervious but was still this little girl-
Then Kathleen smiled.
She thought of how freaky Marie considered herself. No matter how many times you told her how pretty she was or how bright or how giving or caring-
No matter what you said, Marie always considered herself a freak.
Her foot, of course. That was the culprit.
You couldn't really be pretty or bright and walk with a limp. That was what Marie thought. Believed.
So tonight would be good for her.
She hoped the boy somehow convinced Marie that she was a worthy and desirable person.
Self-esteem, Kathleen thought. Oprah and Phil and Sally Jessy and even Geraldo preached it, and so did most modern psychologists.
Self-esteem: without it you had nothing.
For a time she followed the arc of a small private plane across the very top of the sky.
Flight had always fascinated her, especially at night when the small moving lights on the wings and tail were like stars mysteriously crossing the firmament.
But then her dread premonition returned, and Kathleen forgot all about aeroplanes and stars, and thought again of Marie. Something was going to happen.
She was sure of it.