The Madman - Страница 111

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The attendant shrugged. "There were a couple of guys in the upstairs dormitory got into it a bit right around lights-out, and he had to escort one of them up to the fourth floor and see that he was restrained, put in observation, and knocked out with a shot of Haldol. So he left his big old brother at the desk, and asked me to come on down here. But it looks like you've got everything under control just fine. Anything I can do to help out before I head back upstairs?"

Lucy kept her hand on her weapon and her eyes fixed on the attendant. She tried to examine every inch of him as he came closer. His dark hair was longish, but well combed. He wore the white attendant's suit trimly and tennis shoes on his feet that made very little noise. She took a long look at his eyes, searching them for the light of madness, or the darkness of death. She scoured the man's appearance, looking for some indication that would tell her who he was, waiting for some signature that would make everything clear. She gripped the gun tighter, and pulled it partway from her pocketbook, readying herself. She did this as surreptitiously as she could. At the same time, she looked down at the man's hands.

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.

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