by Dan Wells
I nod. He closes the door and walks away.
The woman peeks out of the bathroom. “He’s kind of an asshat, isn’t he?”
“You said you could help,” I say, and tug on my arm restraints. “Can you get me out of these things?”
“Whoa,” she says, stepping into the room. “That would really be crossing a line.”
“You don’t understand,” I say. “This hospital, and apparently Powell, are run by…” And now we’re back to the same old problem—if I tell anyone the truth, I sound completely crazy. It’s the trickiest part of the Faceless Men’s Plan, to hide themselves so well from the world that no one will ever believe they exist. “I have to get out of here.”
“Let me ask you a few questions first,” she says, “and then I’ll see what I can do about the restraints, okay?”
“Do you promise?”
“I can’t promise I’ll get you out, but I promise to look into it. You’re asking me to break the law, Michael; you’re going to have to trust me first.”
I look at the door to the hallway, then up at the TV. “Fine,” I say, “but make it quick.”
“Great.” She smiles and opens her handbag, pulling out a small black device. I draw back as far as I can and shake my head.
“Get rid of that.”
“It’s my digital recorder,” she says. “I’m just recording the interview.”
“No,” I say more firmly, pressing myself as far back into the pillows as I can. “Put it in the hall, or back in the other room, but it can’t be in here.”
She looks at it, then at me, then shrugs and walks into the bathroom. “I’m leaving it on the sink,” she says, “is that okay?”
“Yes.” I take a deep breath, forcing myself to calm back down. It’s just a recorder—it might not send a signal at all. “If you’ve got a cell phone, leave that in there too.”
“All right,” she says, walking back in with a notebook and a pen. “Let’s get started. The doctors here suspect that you may have witnessed a crime scene related to the Red Line killings. Can you describe that scene for me, please?”
“I don’t remember anything like that.”
She frowns. “But they said you were talking about it.”
“I was talking about … something else,” I say. I don’t dare mention the Faceless Men; I need her to believe me, not think I’m crazy. “I may have seen something, but I don’t remember a crime scene. Certainly not any bodies or anything like that.”
“Okay,” she says slowly, tapping her pen on the notebook. “If you don’t remember a crime scene, maybe you remember something else? They obviously think you saw something or they wouldn’t have called the police.”
“They called the police?”
“Nothing fancy, just a tip. My source placed the call, that’s how I knew to come here. Let’s try to figure this out. I take it you lost some memory?”
“About two weeks,” I say, nodding. “I was in some kind of a fall.”
“Were you pushed?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Where were you?”
“I don’t remember.”
“You’re not being very helpful.”
“I remember some kind of a … hollow city,” I say. “Streets full of houses with nobody in them, like an empty skeleton after all the flesh has gone away.”
She jots it down. “That’s creepy, but it’s a start. Can you remember who you were with?”
“I don’t think I was with anybody. Maybe Lucy—definitely Lucy, because I can’t imagine going away without her.” I look up, intense and sincere. “We’re going to get away—get to a small town somewhere, maybe a farm. I think I’d like to live on a farm. The hospital couldn’t find her, though, so I don’t know where she is.” For the first time it occurs to me that something might have happened to her, and my stomach clenches into a knot. “You’ve got to find her: Lucy Briggs.”
“Girlfriend?”
I nod. “I don’t know her phone number, but she works in a Greek place on Grand Avenue. I think something may have happened to her.”
“I’ll find her. Anyone else?”
“No one I can think of.”
“Have you recently associated with any members of the Children of the Earth?”
My heart stops beating—the entire world seems to freeze—and then everything snaps back into place. I stare at her carefully, cautiously, suddenly wary. “What do you know?”
She looks up, eyes wide. “What’s wrong?”
“Why are you asking about the Children of the Earth?”
She makes a note on her pad. “Is that a problem?”
“How much do you know about me?” I demand. “What’s really going on here?”
“I…,” she stumbles over her words, brow furrowed in confusion. “I don’t know anything, why? Are you a member of the Children?”
“The Children of the Earth are a murder cult,” I say. “They kidnapped my mother while she was pregnant, and when I was born they killed her. I wouldn’t associate with them for anything. I’d kill them first.”
Her face goes white. “You did not just say that.”
“What do the Children of the Earth have to do with the Red Line Killer?”
She sucks in a breath. “Almost all of the victims have been members.”
I curse.
“Someone is hunting down the Children of the Earth and cutting off their faces,” she says. “Someone who hates them as much as you do.”
“So they do suspect me,” I say, watching her carefully. “You said they didn’t, but they do.”
“Well, yeah, now I know that.” She clicks her pen and drops it in her purse, folding up her notebook and shoving it in after. “I could get in so much trouble for being here.”
“You can’t leave,” I say quickly. “You can’t leave me with them.”
“Listen, Michael.” She stands, glances at the door, then steps toward me and lowers her voice. “I promised I’d look at getting you out of here, and I will—if you’re as innocent as you say I’ll do everything I can to get you out of here. But until then you’ve got to be careful, okay? And please, don’t tell anyone I was here. I’ll try to visit you at Powell, as soon as I’m allowed to, but please—just keep me a secret, okay?”
“You promise you’ll come?”
“I’ll do everything I can, but if you tell anyone I was here I could get cut off completely.”
“I won’t tell.”
“Thanks.” She steps to the door, listens carefully, then cracks it open and slips into the hall.
I sit in silence, staring at the blank TV. It stares back. I hear a voice in the hall, loud and familiar, and look anxiously at the door.
My last hope has arrived: Dr. Vanek is here.
THREE
DR. VANEK THROWS OPEN THE DOOR, nearly filling it with his bulk. I allow myself to hope that I might be released, but he seems to sense my optimism, and frowns and shakes his head.
“You made quite a splash here, they tell me.” He grunts slightly as he drops into the nearby chair. He has dark hair, ringing his face with a dark beard, and the frames of his glasses look thin and fragile. “I wish you’d have come to see me sometime in the past six months—it’s one thing to get a call from the hospital announcing your long-lost patient has finally surfaced, and it’s quite another to learn that said patient has managed to injure two members of the hospital staff—one of them, I might add, the head of the psych ward. You did not make any friends with your outburst yesterday, I assure you of that.”
“You’re in a mood,” I tell him. Dr. Vanek has always been gruff, much more so than any of the other psychiatrists I’ve dealt with. Some of them were great; I even had a crush on my old school counselor, a young, pretty woman named Beth. She’s the one who first diagnosed me with depression. She loved her job; loved helping people. On the opposite end of the spectrum, sometimes I think the only reason Vanek got into medicine was to show off how smart he is.
“Didn’t I warn you about this, Michael?” Vanek rubs his forehead with thick, sausagelike fingers. “Didn’t I tell you, when you started missing a session here and there, that a lapse in treatment or medication could result in a heightening of your symptoms?”
“Do you have a cell phone?”
He sighs. “No, Michael, I never bring my cell phone to our sessions, you know that. Though now I understand that your distaste for technology has grown some new and interesting dimensions. Tell me about these Faceless Men.”
“They think I killed them. They think I’m this … Red Line Killer.”
Vanek raises his eyebrow. “Where did you get that idea?”
I open my mouth, but say nothing. I promised the reporter I wouldn’t say anything. I shrug. “It just … seems obvious.”
“Well,” says Vanek, nodding, “that saves me the trouble of breaking it to you gently. If we’re going to do anything about it, though, I think you ought to tell me where you’ve been for the last two weeks. The Red Line Killer killed a janitor in an industrial park last week, and it would be nice to be able to prove you were somewhere else.”
“Hiding,” I say. Vanek has a poor bedside manner, perhaps, but he’s not dumb. He might be able to see the truth. “You need to get me out of here. We can talk about all of this back in your office, or wherever you want, but not here.”
“I’m not here to get you out,” he says, staring at me intently. “I’m here to oversee your transfer and readmittance to Powell Psychiatric. Dr. Sardinha is recommending high security, intensive therapy, and neuroleptics.”
“Neuro … what?”
“Antipsychotic medication,” Vanek explains. “You’re not just a violent patient anymore, Michael, you’re a violent, schizophrenic patient. That is not a good combination in the eyes of our medical or legal systems.”
“I’m not crazy.”
“Please, Michael, we prefer the term ‘mentally divergent.’”
“I don’t have multiple personalities.”
Vanek laughs, a rough sound, like a bark. “Double damnation on whoever started that misconception. Schizophrenia has nothing to do with multiple personalities; it means that your brain responds to stimuli that don’t exist. You see and hear things, like these Faceless Men of yours, and you believe things, like this paranoid plan of persecution and surveillance, that are not real.”
I sit up desperately, but the arm restraints stop me from leaning very far forward. “I’m not crazy,” I say quickly, “and I’m not paranoid.”
“Please, Michael,” he says, peering at me over the tops of his glasses. “You’ve been paranoid your entire life. That’s a reasonable enough reaction for someone who was kidnapped before he was even born, but ‘reasonable’ and ‘healthy’ are very different things.”
“This has nothing to do with my mother,” I say, angry at him for bringing it up. “Now listen, you’ve got to believe me. The Faceless Men are real—there was one in here last night. I saw him!”
“Well of course you saw him,” says Vanek, “that’s what I just explained—you see imaginary things that your brain perceives as real. It’s called a hallucination.”
“It was real,” I insist. How can I make him believe me? “He was as real as … as that wall, as the chair; he was as real as you and me.”
“Reality,” says Vanek, frowning. He leans forward and gestures with his hand. “Think of it this way: the human brain does not have a direct connection to reality—not yours, not mine, not anyone’s. We can only perceive something after it’s been filtered through our senses—our eyes, our ears, etc.—and then communicated to our brain. Our brain takes that information and reconstructs it to create the most accurate picture of reality that it can. That’s good enough for most of us, but schizophrenia breaks the system—the signal from your senses to your brain gets corrupted somewhere along the line, so when your brain puts together its picture of reality, that picture is full of extra, artificial information. Some people hear voices, others see faces or colors or other things. Put simply, the reality you perceive is separate from the reality that actually exists.”
“That’s ridiculous,” I say. “My brain doesn’t do that.”
“Everyone’s brain does it to some extent—what do you think a dream is? It’s a false reality that your brain creates out of remembered stimuli, extrapolating where necessary to fill in the gaps. The difference, of course, is that a dream is usually healthy, while a hallucination is not.”
I shake my head. On top of being trapped, now I’m being disbelieved and studied and who knows what else. My chances of escape are slipping away with every word that comes out of his mouth. “This is…” I don’t know what to say. “This is stupid and unfair and … illegal.” I tug on the arm restraints. “You can’t say I’m crazy just because I saw something you haven’t seen. What about … what about God? Can you lock someone up for believing in God? You’ve never seen him, so he’s probably just a hallucination, right?”
“It’s times like these I wish I had an assistant to explain things sensitively,” says Vanek. “I don’t have the patience for it.”
“Obviously not,” I say, “or you wouldn’t have jumped straight from ‘Michael’s saying strange things’ to ‘Michael’s a delusional psychotic.’”
“It wasn’t my diagnosis, Michael.” He sighs and rubs his forehead again, his eyes closed. “It was Dr. Sardinha’s.”
“The one I kicked? They said I broke his nose—no wonder he wants to lock me up.”
“Thank you for arriving at the point I started this conversation with ten minutes ago.”
“And his diagnosis doesn’t seem suspicious to you?”
“Listen, Michael, it’s more than just you saying strange things. Hallucinations and delusions are the most visible symptoms of schizophrenia, but they’re not the most important. The big ones, the ones at the core of the disease, are depression—which you’ve had for years—and ‘disorganized behavior,’ which is a fancy way of saying … well, of describing the way you’ve been living for the past six months: you stopped taking care of yourself, you wander around and get lost, you do bizarre things like carry faucet handles in your pockets—”
“I didn’t do any of that.”
He holds up a small metal lever—the knob from a bathroom sink. I recognize it instantly as mine, though I have no idea where it came from.
“This was in your pocket when you were admitted, though I suppose it’s not damning in itself. Shall we enumerate the other points on the list?” He ticks off his fingers one by one. “You stopped coming to our sessions, you stopped going to work, you eventually stopped doing everything—the cops found you living under an overpass. You haven’t shaved in months, you haven’t bathed in weeks, and the police report suggests that you’d been pissing in your pants for days.”
“I was being chased,” I say, gritting my teeth. “We were trying to get out of town, and sometimes … sometimes hiding from the bad guys requires sacrifices. What else was I supposed to do?”
“How can you be sure you were hiding?” he asks. “Do you even remember where you were? Or why you went there?”
I look at him silently, trying desperately to remember anything about the last two weeks, but all I get are quick snatches—meaningless bits of sight and sound and smell that I can’t piece together into anything coherent. It’s like trying to look at the world through a dirty glass, smeared and warped and blurry.
He sighs. “You had no money and no ID; the only thing you did have, in fact, was the water faucet.”
“I remember the faucet!” I say suddenly, shocked at my own outburst. Excitement wells up inside of me—the first memory to return from the two missing weeks. “I can’t remember much—I think something happened to my head—but I remember the faucet handle. I was defending myself.”
“You’re lucky you didn’t hit a cop with it, or you’d be in even more trouble than you are now.”
“Not like that,” I say. “It was
to keep the hot water turned off. The Faceless Men had tracked me down, but they couldn’t get to me through the wires like they usually did, so they filled the water heater with cyanide instead. I took the faucets off to make sure it couldn’t get out.”
Vanek is watching me, stubby fingers folded across his round chest. “You removed your father’s faucet handles? No wonder they found you living on the street.”
“I…” I stop. He’s right—my father would never have allowed it. He was not a patient man. “I wasn’t living there. Did I get kicked out?”
“When did you leave your father’s house?”
“Two weeks ago, I think. I … I remember I tried to take the TV outside, to make the house safe. I think he threw a fit.”
“That sounds like him. And you.” Vanek pulls off his glasses and rubs his eyes. “If your father cared half as much about his son as he does about his television, some of this behavior might have been reported early enough to make a difference.”
“I got away from home,” I say, not really paying attention. “They had no reason to poison me unless I’d escaped from the web of electronic surveillance—and they were trying to poison me, which means I’d done it. I’d found a place without any wires.” I laugh. “I think it scared them.” So little of the past few days made sense to me, but this did. The Faceless Men were on my trail, and I’d almost gotten away. It was just a chance encounter with the police that got me back on their radar—which means that if I can get away again, and avoid the police this time, I can escape completely.
Except I can’t leave without Lucy. Are they holding her hostage to keep me from running? Where is she?
“Listen to yourself, Michael,” says Vanek, leaning forward. “Inconsistency is one of the best ways to spot a delusion, so let’s consider: first the Faceless Men are tracking you, and then when they lose track of you they decide to kill you in the most obtuse, convoluted way possible. How did they know which water heater to spike with cyanide if they didn’t know where you were? And if they did know where you were, why not just plant more listening devices and continue observing you? And the biggest question of all: if they wanted you dead, why not just kill you outright? Why bother with such a roundabout plan?”