The Madman - Страница 12

Francis looked around for somewhere to run, or to hide, but he was hemmed in by the man lurching toward him and the back wall of the room. The few other men in the dormitory were still asleep, or ignoring what was happening.

The man seemed to have stretched in size, growing in ferocity with every stride. "I know! I could tell! From the moment you walked in! Stop now!"

Francis felt frozen with confusion. Inwardly, his voices were all screaming in a cascade of conflicted advice: Run! Run! He's going to hurt us! Hide! His head pivoted around, trying to see how he could escape the tall man's onslaught. He tried to will his muscles to work, at least rise up from the bed, but, instead, he shrank backward, almost cowering.

"If you will not stop, then it's up to me to stop you!" the man shouted. He seemed to be preparing himself for an assault.

Francis lifted his arms to fend off the attack.

The tall man gargled out some sort of gathered war cry, lifted himself up, puffing out his sunken chest and waving his arms above his head. Seemed ready to leap on Francis, when another voice sliced across the room.

"Lanky! Stop there!"

The tall man hesitated, then turned in the direction of the voice.

"Just stop right there!"

Francis was still huddled back against the wall, and he couldn't see who was speaking until the tall man turned around.

"What are you doing?"

"But it's him," the man said to whomever had come into the dormitory. He seemed, in that moment, to have shrunk in size.

"No, it's not!" came the reply.

And then Francis saw that the man fast approaching was the same man he'd met in his first minutes in the hospital.

"Leave him alone!"

"But it's him! I could tell as soon as I saw him!"

"That's what you said to me when I first showed up. That's what you say to every new person who comes into the hospital."

This made the tall man hesitate.

"I do?" he asked.

"Yes."

"I still think it's him," said the tall man, but oddly, most of the passion had fled from his voice, replaced by questions and some doubt. "I'm pretty sure," he added. "He absolutely could be, I'll say that." Despite the conviction contained in the words, the tenor of the voice was filled with uncertainty.

"But why?" said the man. "Why are you so sure?"

"It was just, when he came in, it seemed so obvious, I was watching, and then…" The tall man's voice tailed off, fading. "Maybe I'm wrong."

"I think you're genuinely mistaken."

"You do?"

"I do."

The other man came forward. He was grinning now. He stepped past the tall man.

"Well, C-Bird, I see you're all settled in."

Francis nodded.

The man turned to the tall man. "Lanky, this is C-Bird. I met him the other day in the administration building. He's not the person you think he is any more than I was the other day when you first spotted me. I can assure you of that."

"How can you be so certain?" the tall man asked.

"Well, I saw him come in, and I saw his chart, and I promise you, if he was the son of Satan sent here to do evil inside the hospital, there would have been a notation on it, because it had all the other particulars. Hometown. Family. Address. Age. You name it, it was there. Nothing about being the Antichrist."

"Satan is the great deceiver. His son would be equally clever. Probably be able to hide himself. Even from Gulp-a-pill."

"Ah, possibly. But there were policemen with me, and they would have been trained to spot the son of Satan. They would have had flyers and handouts, and those pictures like they have on the walls at the post office, you know what I'm saying? I doubt even the son of Satan could have hidden from a pair of state troopers."

The tall man listened intently to this explanation. Then he turned to Francis.

"I'm sorry. I was apparently mistaken. I can see now that you are not the person I have been on the lookout for. Please accept my sincerest apologies. Vigilance is really our only defense against evil. You have to be so careful, you know, day in, day out, hour after hour. It's exhausting, but utterly necessary…"

Francis finally managed to crawl off the bed and stand up. "Yes. Of course," he said. "It's perfectly okay."

The tall man reached out and shook Francis's hand, pumping it enthusiastically.

"I'm delighted to make your acquaintance, C-Bird. You are generous. And clearly well mannered. I'm sincerely sorry if I scared you."

To Francis the tall man suddenly seemed far less frightening. He simply seemed old, tattered, a little like an out-of-date magazine that has been left on a table for far too long.

The tall man shrugged. "They call me Lanky," he said. "I'm here most of the time."

Francis nodded. "I'm…"

The other man interrupted. "C-Bird. No one seems to use their real name in here."

Lanky moved his head up and down rapidly. "The Fireman's right, C-Bird. Nicknames and abbreviations and the such."

Then he pivoted, and quickly marched back across the room, and tossed himself down on his bed, staring back up at the ceiling.

"He doesn't seem to be a bad fellow, and I think in reality, which is a poor word to use in this fine place, I believe he's actually pretty harmless," the Fireman said. "He did exactly the same to me the other day, shouting and pointing and acting like he was going to take me on single-handedly, thus protecting society from the arrival of the Antichrist, or the Son of Satan or whomever. Any odd demon that might accidentally land here. He does that to everyone who enters whom he doesn't recognize. And it's not altogether crazy, too, if you think about it. There seems to be a significant amount of evil around in this world, and it has to be coming from somewhere, I'm guessing. Might as well stay vigilant, like he says, even here."

"Thank you, anyway," Francis said. He was calming down, a little like a child who thought he was lost, but somehow spots a landmark, that gives him a sense of location. "But I don't know your name…"

"I don't have a name any longer," the man said. This was spoken with just the slightest touch of sadness around the edge, replaced swiftly by a wry half smile that was tinged with some sort of regret.

"How can you not have a name?" Francis asked.

"I've had to give it up. It's what landed me here."

This made little sense to Francis. The man shook his head, amused. "I'm sorry. People have started calling me the Fireman, because that is what I was before I arrived at the hospital. Put out fires."

"But…"

"Well, once my friends called me Peter. So, Peter the Fireman, that will have to do for you Francis C-Bird."

"All right," Francis replied.

"I think you'll discover that the naming system here, makes it a little easier. Now you've met Lanky, which is as obvious a nickname for someone who looks like he does as one could possibly have. And you've been introduced to the Moses brothers, except everyone calls them Big Black and Little Black, which, again, seems like appropriate casting. And Gulp-a-pill, which is easier to say and far more accurate given his approach to treatment than the doctor's real name. And who else have you run into?"

"The nurses outside behind the bars, Miss…"

"Ah, Miss Wrong and Miss Watchful?"

"Wright and Winchell."

"Correct. And there are other nurses as well, like Nurse Mitchell, who is Nurse Bitch-All and Nurse Smith, who is Nurse Bones because she looks a little like Lanky, there, and. Short Blond, who seems quite beautiful. There's a social worker named Evans called Mister Evil whom you're going to meet soon enough, because he's more or less in charge of this dormitory. And Gulp-a-pill's nasty secretary's name is Miss Lewis, but someone dubbed her Miss Luscious, which she apparently hates, but can't do anything about, because it has stuck to her as tightly as those sweaters she likes to wear. She seems to be a real piece of work. It might all seem very confusing, but you'll get it all straight in a couple of days."