I had only allowed myself to remember the dream while alone.
It helped keep me invisible.
That would be more critical than ever now.
Because the dream had changed.
I walked into the lab as usual.
The water sprayed down from the broken pipes.
But when I looked up at his face, the swollen tongue lashed to and fro, angry as a trapped snake. The engorged lips pulled back in a swollen leer. The black orifice mouthed, "Do it!"
Death rounds had been the tipping point- my stage perfectly set.
If I acted quickly now, with everyone primed, they'd all draw the logical conclusion.
One, two, three, and I'd be free.
First the suicide.
Then Graceton. My perfect dry run had left no doubt about her fate.
And finally, if grief didn't stop Garnet, I'd do it myself.
And everybody would be fooled.
One, two, three…
The little ditty kept running through my head as I prepared the chloroform, then gathered up what else I'd need for the night's work.
Wednesday, July 16, 4:40 p.m.
Stewart woke with a start, only to hear a loud roll of thunder slowly die out.
Outside his bedroom window a gray fog thick as flannel cut the light and made it seem dusk, but a glance at the glowing figures on his digital alarm clock surprised him. An afternoon storm must have blown in, he thought, getting up to close the windows. But the air, much cooler now, held a pleasant scent that reminded him of fresh laundry, so he left everything open.
More thunder rumbled not too far off.
"Tocco," he called, surprised the dog hadn't stayed by his bed. She hated storms and stuck as close to him as possible whenever they occurred. If alone in the house, she'd head into the basement, and he'd find her there when he came home, huddled in the darkest nook she could find.
He pulled on his clothes and headed downstairs, his feet still bare. "Tocco, come here, girl."
Sleep had helped him. And having saved Jane Simmons. His stock had soared so much with the nurses for that one that maybe he'd have a chance to ride out Yablonsky's accusations. At least at St. Paul's.
His enemies on the Web were another matter.
His mood immediately darkened.
In that forum he'd be held guilty until he could prove himself innocent. Even then, he might never be good enough again for the kind of grant money he used to get. Awarded on merit, it could be denied on a whim. He'd have to convince everyone that crone Yablonsky had concocted the whole thing, tried to use him as a handy scapegoat to cover up her own incompetence. "Or worse," as Earl had put it.
"Tocco!" he called, entering the kitchen. His basement door yawned open as he usually left it, so she could have the run of the house. "Come on up, girl. Suppertime."
He expected to hear the click of her nails on the linoleum-covered steps and the jingle of her collar tags.
Nothing.
"Tocco?"
He flicked on the light switch near the cellar steps.
The darkness below remained.
Bulb must be burnt out, he thought.
"Come here, Tocco," he called out, and started down. The small basement windows, even with the gloom outside, would allow him enough light to see by. She must have really been scared by the thunder.
He reached the bottom of the stairs, certain she'd come out of hiding and greet him.
No dog.
What the hell? he thought, feeling his way through the semidarkness toward one of the spots she often curled up in.
A tiny rectangular window in his laundry room admitted a thin, almost yellow glow as the late afternoon sun penetrated layers of fog blanketing the city. In a far corner lay a shadow darker than the rest.
That's when he caught the first whiff of chloroform.
5:45 p.m.
The steady rumbling chased everyone else inside, but Earl stayed put. The luminous haze of the mist suggested the storm clouds were thinning out. Even if they didn't go for a brisk paddle as planned, it would be as good a place as any to talk with Jimmy alone. One thing was for certain: he wasn't about to let the priest cancel.
He stood on the worn wooden boardwalk of an area called the basin, a harbor where some of Buffalo's more affluent boaters moored their yachts. Less ostentatious sailors kept smaller craft on nearby racks. That's where Jimmy stored his sixteen-footer.
As he waited, Earl found himself carried back to a time in medical school when he and his roommate, Jack MacGregor, would seek relief from their studies by launching paper airplanes from the roof of their apartment building. They would craft various weird shapes and give them stabilizers and lift vents; though some nosedived to the street below, others would rise in the air, catch a breeze, and sail out of sight. The model that went the farthest and highest, no matter how wonky-looking, won.
Jack had always been the more daring of the two in this venture. "Your trouble, Garnet, is not allowing yourself to think outside the box," he'd accused more than once, and with reason. Medicine required pattern recognition, and that meant disciplining one's thoughts to symptoms and signs that were mired in evidence-based facts. The convention gave science its reliability but kept imaginations in check.
So Earl made himself remember those days with Jack whenever he faced a seemingly insolvable problem. Ideas, he'd realized, were often like those crazy paper planes. No matter how silly or bizarre they seemed at first, every now and then one would soar above all the others, usually to his complete surprise, and provide the answer that had eluded him.
The late Jack MacGregor- he'd died over five years ago saving Earl's life- must be proud of him now. Ever since his talk with Stewart's ex-wife and the bizarre confrontation with Michael, Earl's imagination had gone into overdrive with out-of-the-box ideas.
How could he help but look at Stewart's dilemma in a different light? If the man had had a hand in destroying another researcher's life, as odious as that might be, more and more his claim of being set up took on a different resonance.
Michael definitely required a new take, whatever he'd gotten himself into.
And since Jimmy had seen fit to label both of them "the good guys," maybe he could also explain what they were up to.
He glanced at his watch. The priest should have been here twenty minutes ago. He'd been dodging Earl the whole day, claiming to be busy. But Earl had finally cornered him with the suggestion they use Jimmy's daily hour of exercise as a chance to talk, something they'd often done in the past. Jimmy then proposed that they take out the canoe.
Just when Earl figured he'd been stood up, he heard footsteps approach, and a dark shape became visible in the yellow mist.
"We go out there with a storm threatenin'," said a lilting voice, "the good Lord is likely to zot us for our stupidity."
"We can just take a walk instead, Jimmy." No way you're evading me any longer, he added to himself.
"Only if we pick up the pace. After a day like mine, I need to run."
Earl groaned. He'd slipped into shorts, sneakers, and a T-shirt, anticipating a workout on the water, but jogging, especially in a city of smog, never held much appeal, let alone made sense. But what the hell. Once wouldn't kill him. "Lead the way."
They took off along a pedestrian path that curved through a grassy area surrounded by trees, but beyond that, the mist prevented Earl from seeing exactly where they were.
"So what did you want to talk about?" Jimmy asked, breathing as easily as if they were standing still.
Although Earl found the pace a bit more of an effort than Jimmy, biking, swimming, and racing around the yard with Brendan had kept him in reasonable shape. "I had an odd run-in with Michael this morning over a rather selective way he'd filled out Artie Baxter's insurance form. You remember the case?"
"I'll never forget it. What do you mean by 'selective'?"
"No mention of anything that might raise questions about the widow getting the check."
"I thought death from a heart attack would be a straightforward claim."
"Not when falling comatose from too much insulin might have been a factor."
The priest increased the pace. "What are you suggesting?"
"Artie may have deliberately taken too much."
"But you can't be sure."
"No."
"Then Michael did the right thing. Why give the insurance company an out not to pay?"
"I'd normally agree, Jimmy, except this time it seemed a bit too obvious."
"How?"
"A bunch of reasons. One, whenever you have any kind of physical stress- and from what Artie's wife said, he'd been suffering unstable angina for days- blood sugar usually rises in a diabetic. For Artie to make himself fall into a hypoglycemic coma, he would have had to do more than skip breakfast after his regular morning insulin. He would have had to have taken more than usual."
"But if his sugars were high, wouldn't an increase be called for?"
"Yeah, but experienced diabetics can tell when they're slipping into a coma. I just don't see Artie ignoring the symptoms of hypoglycemia."
"And you would have put that down on paper?"
The path tilted upward into an all-encompassing gloom, the momentary hint that the fog would disperse anytime soon vanishing like a false promise. "Probably not. But I wouldn't have gone so much out of my way to make it seem I'd never even thought of it. No physician worth his salt could look at Artie's file and claim that. Not that I would have spelled out my suspicions either, but there are ways to state them subtly. For instance, Michael could have noted that on questioning, the patient 'claimed' to have taken only the regular dose. Then it's the adjuster's problem to put two and two together, or not."
"And that game makes it all right? Sounds like covering your ass to me. And abandoning the widow to the mercies of the company."
"It's how we do it yet stay legal, Jimmy. And it still works. An agent may call and ask outright if I'm willing to say the patient committed suicide, and I'll say no one could claim that for certain, and eventually they pay up."
"Just the kind of hassle a grieving family needs."
Earl ignored the jibe. "Look, if it were just the Artie Baxter case, I would have let it go. But what really bothered me is that something's obviously been eating at Michael recently. One look at the guy says he's worried-"
"It's called SARS, Earl. Look around you. Everybody's scared shitless these days."
The image of Michael's hurt expression when he'd blurted out how the outbreak had caused problems between Donna and him made Earl wince. He hadn't realized the couple had been having such a hard time coping. "Maybe. But to be precise, he also reamed me out for, if you'll pardon my literal rendition of what he said, 'fucking up the good guys lately'- namely, you, himself, and Stewart- and practically begged me to keep my nose out of his business."
Jimmy responded by yet again picking up speed. "So the guy's stressed and he overreacted. Don't make a big deal of it."
"Do you think I'm acting like an asshole and getting in the way of the good guys?"
Jimmy started to laugh. "You want a professional opinion from a chaplain, or something more personal?"
Earl strained to keep up. Sweat had already soaked through his clothing despite the temperature having dropped with the afternoon showers. "What I want to know, Jimmy, is if you've had a talk with him like you did with me, and coaxed him into the service of some greater good, such as making certain that suitably deserving widows and orphans collect money from insurance companies without any troublesome questions or delays."
"I'd think that would be the job of any responsible doctor toward a patient."
"I know you, Jimmy. In another age you'd have been a swashbuckler, a musketeer, a wielder of the sword of justice in a fight for the downtrodden, beholden only to the laws of God."
"Sounds like my kind of guy. What's wrong with that?"
"What's wrong is that you might not be above tweaking man-made regulations, especially if they stood in the way of a righteous cause."
"I believe these days we call that civil disobedience, and a noble activity it is. But no, I've not led Michael astray. Now are you goin' to start running, or is hobblin' along like this as fast as an old man like yourself can do?" He pulled away into the gray haze until his form had no more substance than smoke.
How flippant would he be if he knew Michael might be taking favors from the damsels in distress? Earl wondered, and dug harder. He managed to accelerate up the slope and pull abreast again. "What about Stewart?"
"What about him?"
"You heard Yablonsky's accusation. Do you know if he's been up to anything in Palliative Care?"
"You're not serious."
"Something's going on up there. Increased death rates don't lie."
"They're supposed to die."
"You sound like Hurst."
"Now don't be gettin' nasty with me."
"Then what's going on, Jimmy?"
"Did you ever talk to any of the patients you brought back from a cardiac arrest?"
"Sure, sometimes."
"What did they tell you they remembered?"
"Sometimes nothing. Others gave the usual story of rising above their bodies, a bright light at the end of a tunnel…"
"And what do you make of those stories, Earl?"
"If you mean do I think they're proof of an afterlife, I'm afraid not."
"Neither do I. I made a point of reading up on it. Interesting how neurologists think it's got to do with neurotransmitters, certain parts of the brain being stimulated or losing the blood supply to the outside of the retina first, and the optic nerve last, creating the image of a dark tunnel with a bright light at the end. But there are some stories that can't be explained by chemicals, physiology, or anatomy. Did any of the patients you talked to ever tell you about the dark man?"
"What?"
"The dark man. A person dressed in black hovering around the end of their bed."
Earl chuckled. "No."
"You wouldn't laugh if they had, yet I'm not surprised they didn't. It's not in any of the published accounts either, not even Stewart's, though I suspect when researchers refer to subjects who report frightening images, had those descriptions been specific, the dark man would be as common to near-death as lights and tunnels. But people don't feel comfortable in getting too detailed about that sort of thing unless it's with chaplains, figuring we're bound by belief to be sympathetic, not scoff at it."
"What do they see exactly? A guy in a black hood with a scythe?"
"The figure usually wears loose-fitting clothes, always black, and the face is mainly in shadow. Except for the eyes. They're all too visible and have an icy vastness to them that people feel sucked into when he comes closer. At the same time they feel their skin burning hot."
"Ischemia," Earl muttered.
"What?"
"The burning feeling is from ischemia. The lack of blood in muscle and skin results in a buildup of metabolic acids. They burn like fire." Exactly the way my legs are now, he nearly added, but until the priest came up with a few more answers he didn't want Jimmy to know how easy it would be to leave him behind.
"Maybe you're right about the heat, but nothing explains the fear. Everybody who reported seeing the dark man seemed more terrified at the prospect of him waiting for them the next time than they were of dying."
"Don't tell me you believe there's something to tales like that. And what the hell do they have to do with Stewart?"
"I'm just suggesting that people who venture near death and return can find the experience very traumatic. The accounts from Palliative Care about someone badgering patients as they hovered on the brink may be a variation of the dark man encounters. The last thing I'd do is try to link Stewart to them."
Jimmy's words silenced Earl. Perhaps they were meant to. Because if the priest had done his homework, he'd know that Earl had had his own encounter with near death seven years ago. He still tried to avoid thinking about it. Certainly the memory of it remained traumatic. But no dark man had awaited him. Instead he'd felt death as a dilutent, as if he were being thinned out, like a drop of water returning to the ocean. And as Jimmy had said, he seldom wanted to talk about it. Maybe that's what didn't make sense. "But how could it be the dark man, Jimmy, with so many patients suddenly willing to tell the nurses about him?"
The priest answered by pulling ahead.
Earl thought, Aha! Got him, and tried to keep up.
But in a hundred paces the fire in his lower legs spread to his thighs and the inside of his lungs.
He slowed and came to a stop. The scuff of Jimmy's shoes on the gravel underfoot faded into the distance.
"You can't avoid me forever about Stewart, Jimmy," he shouted after him. "And if you have recruited Michael on some quest, I think he's out of his depth."
"Relax, Earl." The words floated back to him like a message out of the ether.
Earl caught his breath and started to walk back along the path toward St. Paul's. The muffled traffic noises on the freeway came at him from the front, and a guttural roll of thunder originating far out over the lake rumbled up behind him.
Either Jimmy really had no idea what Michael and Stewart were up to or he'd become a hell of a good actor. Or maybe Earl hadn't a clue as to what was going on, had gotten it all wrong in the first place, and had been the one who'd swum out of his depth.
Ten minutes later he passed the smoked-glass entrance to the Horseshoe Bar and Grill. Up ahead the bulk of St. Paul's loomed in the thick gray smog, a giant hive of tiny lights. For an instant he felt overwhelmed at the sight. Who could really know all the enigmas of the place? A big teaching hospital held more human emotions per cubic foot of air than any edifice on earth. Always at the core were the patients- they numbered eight hundred here- their thoughts closer to their own mortality than ever before, yet they came and went, changing every ten days on average, each set of newcomers bringing a whole host of different dreams and fears. Then there were the healers. In addition to laboring over their charges, they lugged around the personal baggage of ambitions and desires, everything from a need to do good works, find love, and win the wealth of success, to far less noble pursuits- right down to settling old scores, nursing slights, or exacting revenge, usually in petty little ways, but sometimes on a more serious scale. Most agendas focused on the mundane issues of life, such as putting food on the table and how to get laid Saturday night, but they were legion in number and sometimes led to their own league of trouble. Who broke which rules to satisfy what appetites? There often could be no way of telling, and through all that complexity, he'd no more chance to see the thread of a single coherent motive than to track the purpose of an individual ant in a swarming nest.
So was it Stewart's lethal cover-up or the work of a saboteur? Michael's noble service to needy women or the exploitation of them? Jimmy's undue influence on either man, or just a good priest doing his job? The answers might never come to light. And if he was on the wrong track altogether, God knew what other secrets might remain hidden forever. No wonder Hurst preferred to hide the nasty side of things. With such an impenetrable matrix to help cloak everything, odds were he could get away with it.
And now SARS underlined the whole kit and caboodle with the issue of survival.
As he drew closer to the blurred dark shape of St. Paul's, it appeared to expand through the charcoal-seeped air and spread outward, towering over where he walked.
For a second he had the illusion it reared defiant before his growing sense of helplessness, a leviathan set to devour him whole.
6:45 p.m.
Windows rattled with each thunderclap, and the count between a flash and the boom narrowed to three. Drops of rain the size of marbles pelted the roof and walls with the force of hailstones.
"I'm sure everyone's lying to me- first Stewart, then Michael, and now Jimmy."
"Sit down, Earl, and have a drink," Janet ordered, presiding over an array of pots on the stove. The aroma of teriyaki chicken, fried eggplant, and grilled peppers filled the air.
At her side, perched on a stool and wearing an apron with MOMMY'S LITTLE HELPER emblazoned across the front, Brendan wielded a wooden spoon with the authority of a royal mace. "Yes, go have a drink, Daddy."
"Ordered out of the kitchen again," he muttered, and went to the liquor cabinet.
"With good reason," Janet called after him. "Your mother never taught you how to cook."
" 'Never taught me how to cook,'" he mimicked, filling a glass with ice and pouring himself a Black Russian, the one hard liquor concoction he actually enjoyed. Except he used more Kahlua than vodka, soothing a sweet tooth more than any love for alcohol.
"Not like me, huh, Mommy?" Brendan chimed in.
"You, my love, will be a thoroughly modern man when it comes to culinary skills, and some lucky woman will thank me for educating you."
Earl chuckled, and wandered back into their domain, swirling the ice in his tumbler with his finger as a swizzle stick.
While some doctors golfed or played tennis for recreation, Janet cooked. Her ideal getaway involved uninterrupted hours over a wood stove at their log home beside an isolated mountain lake south of Buffalo.
She sent Brendan upstairs to clean up his room. "In case our guest wants to see your budding train collection," she explained.
"Oh, yeah!" he said, his train set far higher on the scale of what would interest company than food.
"Now sit over there." She directed Earl to the far corner of their breakfast nook. "And tell me what's got you so riled."
He took a sip of his drink and enjoyed the cool burn it made on the way to his stomach. "Well, it started with an interesting call I made to NYCH this morning…
Stewart's legs ached from standing on his toes.
The storm had struck with force, rumbling the house to its foundations and making it impossible for anyone to hear his screams. Even without the thunder and teeming rain, it would be unlikely that all the yelling in the world would reach the ears of a passerby. These old dwellings had foundations like fortresses.
The soft vinyl cover of the stool under his feet sank with his weight. Anytime his muscles faltered, if he even began to buckle at the knees and go down on his soles, the noose tightened.
"Pretty woman," Roy Orbison sang, the voice sounding tinny on the small tape deck, the same as it had that night when he'd found Jerome's body.
Why had the man played it?
To muffle the sounds he'd make dying, one of the cops had said casually, as if this were knowledge every person should have at hand, in case…
Stewart forced himself to think of something else, anything to keep terror at bay and his mind off the agony in his legs. He must manage to stand until someone came for him.
His thoughts whipped backward in time.
The door to the lab had been open. "Somebody must have already walked in on him but left him hanging," he told the police. "Perhaps the person heard Jerome dying despite the music."
Nobody had cared.
Stewart's muscles tightened, yanking him back to the present. As spasms shot through them, he sagged, tightening the loop another notch. With his wrists handcuffed behind his back, he'd no chance of loosening them to free himself however much he struggled. But links of the chain were long enough that the fingers of one hand could circle the wrist of the other- consistent with a pair he could have snapped on himself. That little detail must be for the cops.
"Pretty woman…"
Orbison launched into yet another chorus. The damn recording must be a fucking loop.
He teetered, let out another strangled yell, then regained his balance.
And again thought of that night, everyone in the hospital glued to the television, watching the reports out of Berlin. It had always haunted him, indelibly clear in his head- Thursday, November 9, 1989, the day the wall fell.
They'd all agreed that Jerome had seemed depressed for months.
Some wondered if he had picked that evening to make sure the date would stand out and forever haunt those who'd driven him to his death. Others figured the ever-practical scientist had seized on a chance moment of opportunity, choosing a supper hour with everyone transfixed by newscasts so nobody would interrupt him.
Whatever the intent, Stewart couldn't hear the word wall, Berlin, or even Germany without a flashback hurtling him into that lab and leaving him staring up at the limp body.
Another cramp gripped the sole of Stewart's foot, the right one this time.
He screamed, but the loop around his neck garbled the sound, reducing it to a gurgle.
He lost his balance again and swayed, fighting to recover.
Each drawn breath became a coarse rasp, and every expiration produced a rattling wheeze. His face throbbed as the venous blood engorged his skin, and the periphery of his vision darkened, encroached on by a night that had nothing to do with the slow creep of dusk through his basement window.
He listened, trying to hear some clue whether his soundless killer remained in the shadows, just beyond where he could see. At first he'd thought there were two of them, that he'd heard their voices, like whispers through the din of a rushing noise inside his head. But then he sensed only one, someone behind him. Now he couldn't be sure anyone stood there at all.
"Please! I don't deserve this," he cried. It came out a squawk.
His mute sentinel remained silent.
Or had left.
The coldness of that empty quiet sent his panic skyrocketing.
Just hold on. Somebody will come. It's not too late. Still no permanent damage done. As long as they loosen the loop soon, my throat will heal, he tried to convince himself.
But the only person with a key, his cleaning woman, wouldn't be here until morning. And he seldom had visitors, never encouraged them, preferring the people in his life to be part of his work, where he could use his authority over them to control how close they got. The only ones he invited over willingly were residents, for journal clubs, because even on social occasions there was no lack of clarity about his being their superior.
His only hope of rescue lay with his killer.
"I shouldn't have to die!" he attempted to yell, unable to accept that he'd been abandoned. A croaking noise seemed to originate inside his skull, and nothing but the rushing sound, loud as an express train, filled his ears. He nevertheless continued to spit out words, intelligible only in his mind, like someone with a stroke.
"Who are you? Why do this to me?" If he found he knew the person, understood the reasons, he'd know how to explain that there'd been a terrible mistake.
The last thing he remembered before a gloved hand had grabbed him from behind and rammed chloroformed gauze into his face had been the fumes. He'd turned only enough to glimpse a shadowy form before everything went black. He came to already bound and suspended from the overhead iron pipe, Tocco's leash looped around his neck. The powerful arms that locked him in their grip and held him up until his own legs could bear his weight were muscular, but he couldn't see the face.
"What are you doing?" he'd mumbled at first, still floating up from the no-man's-land of being anesthetized. "If Tocco's dead, goddamn you, I'm calling the police."
Then the realization he stood on a makeshift gallows had catapulted him awake.
Indifferent as an executioner, the person at his back had partially supported him until he stood entirely alone, straining up on his toes, winning some slack in the braided strap that choked off his air.
All to the tune of "Pretty Woman."
The present cramp in his right foot eased.
But the leash had again cinched tighter.
That's why the person had used it, why Jerome had used one, why so many did- handy, strong, effective.
His once magnificent brain began to plod for want of oxygen. He'd no means of measuring time or knowing how long he'd been dangling there. Questions that he might have reasoned through and disposed of in seconds grew impenetrable to his crippled flow of thought.
Who would do this to him? Jerome's wife? He couldn't remember her name, nor even recall her face. No, she'd dumped the man years before, hadn't even bothered to attend his funeral, didn't care enough.
He strained higher on his toes.
But why would anyone else who cared so much about Jerome have waited until now?
He felt his eyes bulge. He flexed his feet to push higher still. Goddamn it, he thought. This is a lynching.
Could it be the work of a more recent enemy? One who knew about what had happened at NYCH, yet wanted to get rid of him for another reason altogether? Somebody determined to make it look like he'd chosen suicide over being discovered as a fraud? Someone who'd set up a scene to make it appear he'd copied Jerome Wilcher, the man he'd discredited so many years before?
He lost strength in his legs, and the leash choked him harder.
Like a man inebriated, Stewart could still snatch seconds of clarity from a progressive swoon into darkness, enough to know that this scenario definitely widened the field as to who might have done him in.
Everyone who hated his guts.
He sucked in air as if inhaling it through a straw. Soon his windpipe would be squeezed smaller still, and his brain would shut down, seize, and die for lack of oxygen. He'd see for himself the greatest riddle that had preoccupied him these last few years. Would there be a tunnel, the bright light, and loved ones?
His thoughts began to shatter and drift apart. He fought to hold them together, but it felt like trying to make jagged shapes fit alongside each other.
What loved ones?
His daughter had stopped visiting years ago.
Two wives no longer saw fit to even talk to him.
Colleagues admired his skills, but who liked him besides Garnet? And even Earl suspected him of murder.
All he had were legions of grateful patients whose lives he'd saved.
Not the same thing at all.
"Who are you?" he shrieked again, outraged he wouldn't know his killer or the reason why he'd been targeted for murder.
This time spittle rather than noise bubbled out his lips.
He again pushed up on his toes and recovered some slack. With the arrival of more blood to the brain, his desperation to live revived. New terrors raced through his head, insane panic driving his thoughts at high speed with the frantic, illogical, futile clarity that visits a man about to die.
"Are you there? Tell me why you did this," he sobbed, not realizing he no longer made a sound. "Is it punishment for Jerome? Yes, that's it, isn't it? Ail the reminders are to make me think of the poor man's last agony. Yes. Please, let it be punishment. Because that means you must still be here in the basement. Because what good would punishment be without someone to witness it and see the torment? And there still might be time for me to explain, make you take pity and cut me down. You see," he tried to say, "I hadn't meant Jerome to kill himself…"
He became faint. His vision closed in around the edges again, but this time it was as if he were inside a black hood and someone were pulling it shut with a drawstring.
No! No hood! This needn't be. Not an execution.
The pain in his legs trebled.
And he felt himself get an erection.
He could explain that too.
Something to do with the blood supply being cut off to a certain level of the spine.
But he couldn't remember the specifics.
All from insufficient oxygen.
A new panic blasted through his delirium.
His lifetime of medical knowledge, his skill to bring people back from death, would slip away into oblivion, cell by cell, memory by memory.
That's my legacy, my entire worth.
This time both his legs curled into spasm.
The noose cinched tighter and crushed his larynx.
No more breath.
The darkness swept it all away.
No white light.
No loved one.
No peaceful floating above himself.
Only inexorable pain.
And one last thought: end it fast.
Except…
He wouldn't kick away the stool to let his full weight hurry the process.
He'd simply allow himself to sag and prolong the agony.
Something a suicide wouldn't do.
Something someone smart enough might notice and figure out.
Earl, for instance…