The Madman - Страница 95

Blond hair.

All four victims had worn hair that was styled noticeably short. They had all approximated much the same physical characteristics. They had all been killed in the same fashion, the same murder weapon used in each case and the throat slashed left to right the same way. The postmortem mutilations to the hands had been the same. Then their bodies were abandoned in similar settings. Even the last victim, there in the hospital, when she considered the storage room that had housed the nurse-trainee's last seconds, she could see the way that the killer had replicated the rural, forest locations of the other killings. And, she remembered, he'd compromised the physical evidence with water and cleaning fluid in the same way that nature had unwittingly abetted him with the first three homicides.

He was here, she knew this. She suspected that she'd even looked directly into his eyes, at some point during her days in the hospital, but hadn't seen him for what he was. This thought made her shudder, but also seemed to stoke the fury that was building within her.

She stared at the strands of black hair that she held like so many delicate spider webs in her fingers.

A small price to pay, she thought.

She turned abruptly and returned to the bed. The first thing she did was remove a small black suitcase from where she had stored it beneath the frame. The suitcase had a combination lock, which she dialed and opened up. There was a second, zippered pocket inside, and this she opened as well, drawing forth a deep brown leather holster which held a snub-nosed.38 caliber revolver. She hefted the pistol in her hand for a moment, feeling its heft and weight. She had fired this weapon less than a half-dozen times in the years that she had owned it, and it felt unfamiliar, but incisive in her hand. Then, with a single, determined motion, she scooped up the remaining items gathered on the bedspread: A hairbrush. A pair of barber's scissors. A box of hair dye.

Her hair would grow back in time, she told herself.

And the great sheen of black that she'd known for the entirety of her life would return before too long.

Telling herself that there was nothing permanent in what she was doing, but what could be permanent was not doing enough to find the Angel right then, right at that moment, she took all the items into the bathroom and arranged them all in front of her on a small shelf. Then she lifted the scissors and half expecting to see blood flowing, began to saw away at her hair.

One of the tricks that Francis had learned, over all the years since the first day in his childhood when he'd first heard voices, was how to find the one that made the most sense in the symphony of discord within his head. He had come to know that his own madness was denied by his ability to sort through everything that came rushing at him from inside, and make his path ahead as best he could. It wasn't exactly logical, but there was some practicality in what he had learned to do.

He told himself that the situation in the hospital was not all that different. A detective takes many disparate clues and pieces them together into a consistent whole, he thought to himself. He was persuaded that everything that he needed to know in order to paint the portrait that would become the Angel had already taken place, but somehow, in the wildly fluctuating, erratic world of the mental hospital, the context had been hidden.

Francis looked over at Peter, who was dashing cold water onto his face at a washbasin. He will never see what I can see Francis told himself. There was a chorus within him of agreement.

But before he could go any further with this thinking, Francis saw Peter pull himself off the basin, look up at himself in a mirror and shake his head, as if displeased with what he saw in the reflection. At the same time, Peter saw Francis hovering behind him and smiled. "Ah, C-Bird. Top of the morning to you. We have survived another night here, which, upon reflection and on balance, is no small feat and an accomplishment that should be celebrated with a hearty, if not all together tasty, breakfast. What do you suppose this fine day will bring?"

Francis shook his head to indicate he was unsure.

"Maybe some progress?"

"Maybe."

"Maybe something good?"

"Unlikely."

Peter laughed. "Francis, buddy, there's no pill and certainly no shot they can give you in here to reduce or remove a sense of cynicism."

Francis nodded. "None that can give you optimism, either."

"Touche," Peter said. He lost the grin he wore, and leaned toward Francis. "We'll make some headway today, I promise." Then he smiled again, and added, "Headway. That's a little bit of a joke. You'll get it soon enough."

Francis had no idea what he was talking about, but asked, "How can you promise that?"

"Because Lucy thinks a different approach might work."

"A different approach?"

Peter looked around for a moment, then whispered, "If you cannot bring yourself to the man you're hunting, perhaps you can bring the man to you."

Francis recoiled slightly, as if pummeled by the noise within him of dozens of voices screaming danger. Peter did not notice the sudden shift in Francis's appearance, like the abrupt approach of a storm cloud on a distant horizon, as the younger man chewed over what Peter had said. Instead, he clapped Francis on the back and sardonically added, "Come on. Let's eat soggy pancakes or runny eggs and see what starts to unfold. Big day, today, I'm guessing, C-Bird. Keep your eyes and ears open."

The two of them stepped from the washroom, to where the men of the dormitory were starting to stumble and shuffle out of the doorway into the corridor. The start of the daily routine. Francis was more than a little unsure what it was that he was supposed to be watching out for, but any questions he might have had were instantly erased in that moment by the high-pitched, shrill and desperate scream that furiously echoed down the hallway, reverberating in the air around them with a complete helplessness that chilled everyone who heard it.

It is easy to remember that scream.

I have thought about it many times, over many years. There are screams of fear, screams of shock, screams that speak of anxiety, tension, and some even of despair. This seemed to mingle all those qualities together into something so hopeless and terrifying that it defied reason and comfort, amplified by all the terrors of the mental hospital rolled together. A mother's scream of danger closing in on her child. A soldier's scream of pain as he sees his wound and knows it speaks of death. Something ancient and animal that emerges only in the rarest and most fearsome of moments. It was as if something fixed firmly in the center of things was suddenly, abruptly gone, and it was too much to bear.

I never learned who emitted that scream, but it became a part of all of us who heard it. And stayed with us, no matter how much time had passed.

I pushed out into the corridor directly behind Peter, who was moving quickly toward the sound. I was only peripherally aware of some of the others, who were shrinking to the sides, hugging the walls. I saw Napoleon pushing himself into a corner and Newsman, suddenly not curious in the slightest, huddling down as if he could cloak himself from the vibrant noise. Peter's footsteps resounded against the corridor floor, as he picked up his pace, and hurried down the path of the echo toward the source of the scream. I caught just the smallest look at his face, which was set with a sudden harshness and clarity that was unfamiliar in the hospital. It was as if the sound had triggered some immense worry within him, and he was trying to outdistance all the fears that accompanied it.

The scream had come from the far end of the corridor, past the entrance to the women's dormitory. But the memory of the scream was as real in my mind as it was that morning in the Amherst Building. It curled around me, like smoke from afire, and I grasped my pencil and wrote furiously on the wall of my apartment, fearing every second that the Angel's great mocking laughter would supplant it in my recollection, and I needed to get it down before that took place. In my imagination, I could see Peter, running headlong fast, as if he could outrace the echo.

Peter rushed forward, sprinting down the Amherst Building corridor, knowing that only one thing in the world could generate that sort of despair in a person, even a mad one: death. He dodged the other patients, who were shrinking from the sound, near panicked, unsettled, and filled with explosions of anxiety and fear, as they tried to escape a noise that terrified them. Even the Catos and the retarded men, who so often seemed oblivious to the entirety of the world around them, were pushing to the walls, trying to hide. One man was rocking back and forth in a squat, his hands held tight over his ears. Peter could hear the doleful drumbeat of his own shoes slapping hard against the flooring, and he understood that there was something within him that always drove him hard toward dying.