The Madman's Tale

by John Katzenbach

  Evans seethed. He started to speak, then stopped.

  Instead, he tossed an angry glare at Peter, and without a word, stomped from the room.

  The group quieted, watching Mister Evil’s back. Within seconds, the fog of troubles fell back upon all of them.

  Cleo, however, sighed loudly and shook her head. “I guess it’s just you, C-Bird,” she said, briskly. “You’ll have to head to the heavens for all of us.”

  Dutifully, the group rose, folded up their chairs and placed them against the wall where they belonged, making a rattling, metallic clanking sound as one after the other was lined up. Then, lost in his own thoughts, each member made his way out of the therapy room, back into the main Amherst corridor, blending into the tidal flow of patients that maneuvered up and down the hallway.

  Francis grasped Peter by the arm.

  “He was here, last night.”

  “Who?”

  “The Angel.”

  “He came back again?”

  “Yes. He killed the Dancer but no one wants to believe that and then he held a knife to my face and told me he could kill me or you or anyone he wanted, whenever he wanted.”

  “Jesus!” Peter said. Whatever leftover exhilaration Peter had felt at out-maneuvering Mister Evil disappeared, and he bent to every word Francis spoke. “What else?” he asked.

  Francis, hesitantly, trying hard to recall everything that had happened, could feel some of the remainder of fear that still lurked about within him. Telling Peter about the pressure of the blade on his face was harsh. He thought, at first, that it might make himself feel better, but it did not. Instead, it merely redoubled anxiety within him.

  “He held it how?” Peter asked.

  Francis demonstrated.

  “Jesus,” Peter repeated. “That must have scared the hell out of you, C-Bird.”

  Francis nodded, unwilling to say out loud precisely how scared he’d been. But then, in that second, something struck him, and he stopped, his brows knitting as he tried to see through a question that was murky and clouded. Peter saw Francis’s sudden consternation, and asked, “What is it?”

  “Peter …,” Francis started, “you were the investigator once. Why would the Angel hold the knife against my face that way?”

  Peter stopped, thinking.

  “Shouldn’t …” Francis continued, “shouldn’t he hold it against my throat?”

  “Yes,” Peter said.

  “That way, if I screamed …”

  “The throat, the jugular vein, the larynx, those are the vulnerable spots. That’s how you kill someone with a knife.”

  “But he didn’t. He held it to my face.”

  Peter nodded. “That’s most intriguing,” he said. “He didn’t think you would scream …”

  “People scream all the time in here. It doesn’t mean anything.”

  “True enough. But he wanted to terrify you.”

  “He succeeded,” Francis said.

  “Did you get a look …”

  “He made me keep my eyes closed.”

  “How about his voice?”

  “I might recognize it, if I heard it again. Especially close up. He hissed, like a snake.”

  “Do you think he was trying to conceal it somehow?”

  “No. Funny. I don’t think so. It was like he didn’t care.”

  “What else?”

  Francis shook his head. “He was … confident,” he said cautiously.

  Peter and Francis walked out of the therapy room. Lucy was waiting for them midway down the corridor, near the nursing station. They headed toward her, and as they maneuvered through the knots of patients, Peter spotted Little Black, standing not far from the station, a few feet away from Lucy Jones, and he saw the smaller of the two brothers bent over, jotting down something in a large black notebook attached to the metal grate with a modest silver chain, a little like a child’s bicycle lock. In that second, he thought of something, and he stepped toward Little Black rapidly, only to have Francis grasp at his arm and stop him.

  “What?” Peter said.

  Francis looked pale, suddenly, and there was a nervous hesitancy in his voice. “Peter,” he said slowly. “Something occurs to me.”

  “What’s that?”

  “If he wasn’t scared of speaking to me, that meant he wasn’t worried that I might accidentally overhear his voice in some other location. He didn’t worry about me recognizing it because he knows there’s no chance I’ll ever hear it.”

  Peter stopped, nodding, and gestured toward Lucy. “That’s interesting, Francis,” he said. “That’s very interesting.”

  Francis thought that interesting wasn’t the word that Peter really meant. Francis pivoted about and thought to himself: Find silence.

  He noticed a slight quiver in his hand when he thought this, and he realized suddenly that his throat had dried up. There was a noxious taste in his mouth, and he tried to swirl saliva around but he had none. He looked at Lucy, who wore an expression of annoyance; he thought it had little to do with them, but much to do with how the world she had entered so confidently now proved more elusive than she had first guessed.

  As the prosecutor approached them, Peter stepped toward Little Black.

  “Mister Moses,” he spoke cautiously, “what are you doing?”

  The slender attendant looked up at Peter. “Just routine,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Routine,” Little Black continued. “Just making some notes in the daily log book.”

  “What else goes into that book?”

  “Any changes ordered by the head doc, or Mister Evil. Anything out of the ordinary, like a fight or lost keys or a death like the Dancer’s. Any switches in the routine. Lots of little, stupid crap, too, Peter. Like when you take your bathroom break at night, and when you check the doors and when you check the sleeping dormitories and any phone calls that come in or anything like I say that just about anybody who works here might think was out of the ordinary. Or you notice, maybe, one patient making progress for some reason or another. That can go in here, too. When you get on station at the start of your shift, you’re supposed to check the overnights. And then, before you clock out, you’re supposed to make some entry and sign it. Even if it’s only a couple of words. This goes on every day. Log book is supposed to make things easier for the next folks that come in, so they’re up to date on anything happening.”

  “Is there a book like that—”

  Little Black interrupted him. “One on every floor, by every nursing station. Security got their own, too.”

  “So, if you had that, you would know, more or less, when things happen. I mean, the routine things?”

  “Daily log is important,” Little Black said. “It keeps track of all sorts of things. Got to have a record of everything that happens in here. It’s like a little history book.”

  “Who keeps those logs, when they get filled up?”

  Little Black shrugged. “Stored down in the basement somewhere in boxes.”

  “But if I were to get a look at one of those, I’d know all sorts of things, wouldn’t I?”

  “Patients not supposed to see daily log books. It ain’t like they’re hidden or anything. But they’re for the staff.”

  “But if I did see one … even one that had been retired and put in storage, I’d have some pretty good ideas about when things take place on what sort of schedule, wouldn’t I?”

  Little Black slowly nodded his head.

  Peter continued, but now he was speaking to Lucy Jones. “For example, I might have a pretty good idea when I could move around the hospital without being detected. And I might know the best time to find Short Blond alone at the first-floor nursing station in the middle of the night and drowsy because she routinely worked a double shift one day each week, wouldn’t I? And I’d know, too, that Security had long since been by to check on the doors and maybe gab a little bit and that no one else at all was going to be around, except a bunch of drugged
out, sleeping patients, right?”

  Little Black didn’t have to answer this question. Or any of the others.

  “That’s how he knows,” Peter said softly. “He doesn’t know absolutely for certain, with military precision, but he knows enough, so that he can guess with a great deal of certainty, and with a little bit of foresight, can wait and pick the right moments.”

  Francis thought this was possible. He felt cold inside, because abruptly he began to think that they had just taken a step closer to the Angel, and he had already been too close to the man, and he wasn’t sure that he wanted to get that close again to the knife and the voice.

  Lucy was shaking her head back and forth, and finally said to Peter and Francis, “I can’t put my finger on it exactly, but something is wrong. No, that’s not it, it’s more that something is right and wrong, both at the same time.”

  Peter grinned. “Ah, Lucy,” he said, almost mocking the way that Gulptilil liked to begin his sentences with an elongated pause, and adopting the Indian physician’s lilting accented English. “Ah, Lucy,” he repeated, “you make the sort of sense that belongs here in the madhouse. Please continue.”

  “This place is getting to me,” she said quietly. “I think I’m being followed back to the nurse-trainees’ dormitory at night. I hear noises by my door that disappear when I get up. I sense that someone has been into my belongings, although there is nothing missing. I keep thinking we’re making progress, and yet, I can’t point at what it is. I’m beginning to think that I’ll start hearing voices any second now.”

  For a moment, she turned and looked at Francis, who seemed not to be listening, but was lost in thought. She peered down the corridor and saw Cleo holding forth on some incredibly important issue or another, waving her arms energetically, her voice booming out, not that anything she said made particularly cogent sense. “Or,” Lucy said, shaking her head, “I will come to imagine that I’m the reincarnation of some Egyptian princess.”

  “That might cause a significant conflict,” Peter replied with a grin.

  “You’ll survive,” Lucy continued. “You’re not crazy like the rest of these folks. Soon as you get out, you’ll be okay. But C-Bird … what will happen to him?”

  “Bigger questions for Francis,” Peter said, instantly turning glum. “He needs to prove he isn’t crazy, but how do you do that in here? This place is designed to make people more crazy, not less. It makes all the diseases people suffer, like, contagious …,” Peter said, bitterness creeping into his voice. “It’s as if you come in here with a cold, and it turns into strep or bronchitis and then into pneumonia, and finally into some terminal respiratory failure and then they say, ‘Well, we did all we could’”

  “I need to get out of here,” Lucy said. “You need to get out of here, too.”

  “Correct,” Peter replied, “But the person who needs out more than anybody is C-Bird, because otherwise, he’ll be lost forever.” Peter smiled again, but this was a smile that was merely a blanket thrown over all his sadness. “It’s as if you and I, we elect our own troubles. We choose them in some perverse, neurotic way. Francis, all his troubles were delivered to him. No fault of his own, not like you and me. He’s innocent, which is a hell of a lot more than you can say for me.”

  Lucy reached out her hand and touched Peter’s forearm, as if to buttress the truth in what he said. For a moment, Peter stayed stock-still, like a bird dog on point, his arm almost burning with the sensation of the touch. Then he stepped a little ways back, as if he couldn’t stand the pressure. But as he did that, he smiled, and sighed deeply, although he turned his face away from Lucy as he did it, as if, in that second, he couldn’t force himself to see what he could see.

  “We need to find the Angel,” Peter said. “And we need to do it right away.”

  “I agree,” Lucy said. But then she looked at Peter curiously, because she saw that he meant something beyond the simple encouragement.

  “What is it?”

  But before he could answer that question, Francis, who had been weighing something inwardly and not paying attention to the others, looked up and approached the two of them. “I had an idea,” he said hesitantly, “I don’t know, but …”

  “C-Bird, I need to tell you something …,” Peter started, then he interrupted himself. “What’s your idea?”

  “What do you need to tell me?”

  “It can wait a little bit,” Peter said. “But your idea?”

  “I was so scared,” Francis began. “You weren’t there, and it was pitch-dark, and that knife was at my cheek. Fear is funny, Peter,” he continued, “because it rearranges all your thinking so much that you can’t see anything else because of it. And I bet Lucy already knows this, but I didn’t and it gave me an idea …”

  “Francis, try to make a little more sense,” Peter said, like he would to a student in an elementary school. Affectionate, but interested.

  “Fear like that, it makes you think of only one thing: How scared you are and what’s going to happen, and will he come back, and the terrible things he’s done and what he might still do, because I knew he could have killed me, and I wanted to descend into some sort of safe place where I could be all alone …”

  Lucy bent to Francis, because suddenly she saw a glimmer of what he was driving at. “Go on,” she said.

  “But all that fear, it covered up something that I should have seen.”

  Peter nodded. “What?”

  “The Angel knew you would not be there that night.”

  “The log. Or he saw for himself. Or he heard I was being moved to isolation …”

  “So, the situation was ripe for him to move last night, because he didn’t want to try to handle both of us at once, I don’t think. I’m kinda guessing here, but it makes some sense to me. Anyway, he had to move last night, because the situation was perfect for him to terrify me …”

  “Yes,” Lucy said. “I can see that.”

  “And he needed to kill the Dancer. Why?”

  “To show us how he could do anything. To underscore the message. We’re not safe.” Francis breathed out hard, because the notion that the Dancer was killed simply to make a point truly unsettled him. He couldn’t imagine what could drive the Angel forward so dramatically, and then, in the same second, he realized that perhaps he could. This frightened him even more, but he took refuge in the bright light of the midday corridor, and being surrounded by Peter and Lucy. They were competent, and strong, Francis thought, and the Angel was being cautious with them because they weren’t mad and weak like he was. He breathed out slowly and continued, “But these are risks. Do you suppose there was another reason he had to be in that room last night?”

  “What sort of reason?”

  Francis was almost stuttering, each thought that he had seemed to echo within him, deeper and farther away, as if he was on the edge of some great hole that only promised oblivion. He closed his eyes for a second, and there was a red streak of light behind his lids, almost blinding him. He took his time forming each word, because in that second he saw what was in that room that the Angel needed.

  “The retarded man …,” Francis began. “He had something that belonged to him …”

  “The bloody shirt.”

  “Well, I wonder …”

  Francis didn’t get a chance to finish. He looked up at Peter, who turned to Lucy Jones. They didn’t have to agree out loud. Within seconds, the three of them had crossed the corridor and pushed into the dormitory room.

  They were fortunate that the hulking retarded man was sitting on the edge of his bed, crooning softly to his Raggedy Andy doll. In the back of the dormitory, there were a few other patients, mostly lying about, staring out the window or at the ceiling, disconnected from anything. The retarded man looked up at the three of them and smiled. Lucy pushed forward, taking the lead.

  “Hello,” she said. “Do you remember me?”

  He nodded.

  “Is that your friend?” she asked.
/>   Again, he nodded.

  “And is this where the two of you sleep?”

  He patted the mattress, and she sat down at his side. As statuesque as Lucy was, she was still dwarfed by the retarded man, who shifted in his seat to make a little room for her.

  “And this is where the two of you live …”

  Again he grinned and smiled. He seemed to concentrate hard for a moment, and then he haltingly said, “I live in the big hospital.”

  The words tumbled like boulders from his mouth. Each one was misshapen and rock hard, and she imagined that the effort to form each one was a monumental task.

  “And this is where you keep your things?” she asked.

  Again, his head moved up and down.

  “Has anyone tried to hurt you?” she asked.

  “Yes,” the retarded man said slowly, as if the single word could be drawn out so that it could say more than simply agreeing. “I had a fight.”

  Lucy took a deep breath, but before she could ask another question, she saw that the retarded man’s eyes had filled with some tears.

  “…I had a fight,” he repeated, and then he added, “I don’t like to fight. My momma told me, no fighting. Never.”

  “Your momma is wise,” Lucy said. She had no doubt that the retarded man could do serious damage if he permitted himself to.

  “I’m too big,” he said. “No fighting.”

  “Does your friend have a name?” she asked, gesturing toward the doll.

  “Andy”

  “I’m Lucy. Can I be your friend, too?”

  He nodded and smiled.

  “Will you help me with something?”

  He knitted his brows together, and she thought he was having trouble understanding, so she said, “I’ve lost something.”