The Madman's Tale

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The Madman's Tale Page 49

by John Katzenbach


  Francis felt a world of despair within him. As he looked around the room, he realized that the critical element of the release hearings had to be the families sitting quietly, waiting for the name of their son or daughter or niece or nephew or even mother or father to be called out. Without them, no one got released. Even if the initial orders putting them in Western State had long since expired, absent someone willing on the outside to take responsibility, the gate to the hospital remained closed. Francis could not help but wonder how he would be able to persuade his parents to open their door to him again, when they would not even come to the hospital to visit.

  Inside his head, a voice insisted They will never love you enough to come here and ask for you to be returned to them…

  And then another, speaking quickly, saying Francis, you must find a different way to prove you’re not crazy.

  He nodded to himself, understanding that what he hid from Mister Evil and Gulp-a-pill was crucial. Francis shifted about in his seat and slowly began to survey the people seated about the room. They seemed cut from all sorts of cloths, rough-edged, rough-hewn. Some of the men wore jackets and ties that seemed out of place and he knew that they had dressed up to make a good impression, when, in truth, the opposite was far more likely. The women wore simple dresses and clutched Kleenex, sometimes to dab away tears. Francis thought there was a great deal of failure loose in the room, and an accordant amount of guilt. More than one face carried the marks of blame, and for a moment he wanted to say It’s not your fault we turned out the way we did… but then, he wasn’t at all sure that that was accurate.

  He heard the red-faced judge blurt out, “Let’s move on …” as he pounded the gavel sharply two or three times and Francis turned to watch the proceedings.

  But before the judge could clear his throat, and the psychiatrist with the files and confused look could read out a name, Francis heard several of his voices all at once. Why are we here, Francis? We shouldn’t be here at all. We should run, fast. Get away. Go back to Amherst. It’s safe there…

  Francis pivoted first to the right, then the left, assessing the gathered people. None of the patients in the room had noticed him come in, none were staring at him, none were eyeing him with malevolence, hatred, or anger.

  He suspected that might change.

  And he took a deep breath, for he knew that he was, if he was right, in as much danger right in that moment, surrounded by patients and hospital personnel, and even sitting in Big Black’s shadow, as he’d ever been. Danger because of the man he thought was in that room with him. And danger because of what he was letting loose within himself.

  He bit down on his lip and tried to clear his imagination. He told himself to simply be a blank slate, and wait for something to be written upon it. He wondered if his shallow breathing and sweaty forehead, or the clamminess he suddenly felt in the palms of his hands might be observed by Big Black, and with an immense force of will, he insisted to himself: Be calm.

  And then, he took a deep breath, and inwardly spoke to all his voices: Everyone needs a way out.

  Francis squirmed in his seat, hoping that no one, especially Big Black or Mister Evil or any of the other administrators could see how much turmoil he was in. He was pitched to the edge of his chair, nervous, frightened, but compelled to be there, and to listen, for he expected to hear something that day that was important. He wished that Peter was at his side, or Lucy, although he didn’t think he could have persuaded her that listening was crucial. Francis at this moment was alone, and guessing that he was closer to an answer than anyone else might imagine.

  Lucy came through the doors to the hospital’s morgue and felt the chill of too much air-conditioning. It was a small, basement room, located in one of the distant buildings on the fringe of the hospital grounds that was generally used to house out-of-date equipment and long-forgotten supplies. It had the questionable virtue of being near the makeshift burial ground. There was a single, shiny steel examination table in the center of the room, and a bank of a half dozen refrigerated storage containers built into one wall. A glass paneled and polished steel bureau held a modest selection of scalpels and other surgical implements. A filing cabinet and a desk with a battered IBM Selectric typewriter were stuffed into a corner, and a single window was set into the cinder block wall, high up, looking out onto the ground, and only permitting a single shaft of wan, gray light to slip in past a crust of dirt. A pair of insistently bright overhead lights hummed like a matched set of large insects.

  The room had an empty, abandoned quality, save for a slight smell of human waste that lingered in the cold air. On the examination table there was a clipboard with a set of forms attached. Lucy looked around for an attendant but no one was around, and so she stepped forward. She noticed that there were sluicing channels on the examination table, and a drain in the floor. Both wore dark stains. She picked up the clipboard and read a preliminary autopsy report that stated the obvious: Cleo had died by strangulation caused by bed-sheet. Her eyes dwelt for a second on the entry: Self-Mutilation, which described her severed thumb, and for a moment on her diagnosis, which was schizophrenia, paranoid type, undifferentiated, with delusions and suicidal tendencies. Lucy suspected that this last observation had been, like so much else, added postmortem. When someone hangs themselves, their preexisting potential for self-destruction becomes a little clearer, she thought.

  She read on: No next of kin. There was an entry for In case of death or injury please notify: which was answered with a line through the space.

  A medical examiner, a famous man in forensic circles, had once addressed her senior year class on evidence, and had, in most grandiose terms told all the law students that the dead spoke most eloquently about the means of their passing, often pointing directly to the person who had illegally helped them on their path. The lecture had been well attended and energetically received, but in this moment, Lucy thought it was ridiculously abstract and very distant. What she had was a silent body in a refrigerated cooler in the corner of a dingy, forgotten room and an autopsy protocol crammed onto a single sheet of yellow paper fastened to a clipboard, and she didn’t think it was telling her anything, especially something that might help her in her pursuit of a killer.

  Lucy put the clipboard back down on the examination table and moved over to the cooler. None of the doors were marked, so she pulled first one, then a second open, revealing a six-pack of Coca-Cola that someone had left behind to chill. The third, though, was hesitant, as if stuck slightly, and she guessed that it contained the body. She took a deep breath, and slid open the door a couple of inches.

  Cleo’s naked body was jammed inside.

  Her bulk made it a tight fit, and when Lucy tugged on the sliding pallet that Cleo rested on, it wouldn’t budge.

  Lucy gritted her teeth, and got ready to pull harder, when she heard the door open behind her. She spun about and saw Doctor Gulptilil standing in the entranceway.

  For a moment, he looked surprised. But he removed this look and shook his head.

  “Miss Jones,” he said slowly, “this is unexpected. I am not sure that you should be here.”

  She did not reply.

  “Sometimes,” the medical director said, “even as public a death as Miss Cleo’s should have some privacy.”

  “I would agree with that, at least in principle,” she said haughtily. Her initial surprise at the doctor’s arrival was immediately replaced by the belligerence that she wore as armor.

  “What is it you expect to learn here?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” Lucy replied.

  “You think this death can tell you something? Something that you don’t already know?”

  “I don’t know,” she said again. She was slightly embarrassed that she couldn’t come up with some far better response. The doctor moved into the room, his portly figure and dark skin gleaming under the overhead lights. He moved with a quickness that contradicted his pear-shaped figure, and for a second she thought he was
going to slam the door to Cleo’s temporary tomb shut. But, instead, he put his hand out and tugged; finally the dead woman slid forward, so that her torso was exposed on the slab between them.

  Lucy looked down at the purplish red ligature marks that surrounded Cleo’s neck. They seemed to have been absorbed by skin that had already turned a porcelain white. The dead woman had a faint, grotesque smile on her face, as if her death had caused some joke somewhere. Lucy breathed in and out slowly.

  “You want something to be simple, clear, obvious,” Doctor Gulptilil said slowly. “But, Miss Jones, answers are never like that. At least, not here.”

  She looked up and nodded. The doctor smiled wryly, a little bit like the small grin that Cleo wore.

  “The outward signs of strangulation are apparent,” he said, “but the real forces that drove her to this end are shrouded. And, I suspect, the actual cause of death would elude even the most distinguished examination by the greatest pathologist we have in this nation, for the reasons are obscured by her madness.”

  Doctor Gulptilil reached out and touched Cleo’s skin for a second. He looked down at the dead woman, but he directed his words toward Lucy.

  “You do not understand this place,” he said. “You have not made an effort to understand it since you arrived, because you arrived here with the same fears and prejudices that most people who are unfamiliar with the mentally ill embrace. Here, what is abnormal is normal and what is bizarre is routine. You have approached your investigation here as if it were the same as the world outside the walls. You have looked for documentary evidence and telltale clues. You have searched the records and walked the hallways, just as you might have were this not the place that it is. This is, of course, as I have tried to point out, useless. And thus, Miss Jones, I fear your efforts here are destined for failure. As I have suspected they would be from the start.”

  “I have some time remaining.”

  “Yes. And you have invited a response from the mysterious and perhaps nonexistent target of your pursuit. Perhaps this would be an appropriate activity in the world you are accustomed to, Miss Jones. But here?”

  Lucy fingered her shorn locks. “Don’t you think this is unexpected, and might work?”

  “Yes,” the doctor said. “But on whom will it work? And how?”

  Again, she kept quiet. The doctor looked down at Cleo’s face and shook his head. “Ah, poor Cleo. I enjoyed her antics so much of the time, for she had a manic energy that was, when under some control, most entertaining. Did you know that she could quote the entirety of Shakespeare’s great drama, line for line, word for word? She is, alas, destined this afternoon for our own potter’s field. The undertaker should be here shortly to prepare her body. A life lived in turmoil, pain, and a great deal of anonymity, Miss Jones. Whoever cared for her once, and might at some point have actually loved her, has disappeared from our records and what institutional memory we have. And so, her years on this planet amount to very little. A most modest sum. It doesn’t seem altogether fair, does it? Cleo was rich in personality, decisive in opinion, strong in belief. That all these were mad in nature doesn’t diminish the passion that she had. I wish that she could have delivered a little mark on this world, for she deserved an epitaph larger that the notation in the hospital record that she will receive. No headstone. No flowers. Just another bed in this hospital, only this one will be six feet under. She deserved a funeral with trumpets and fireworks, elephants, lions, tigers, and a horse-drawn cortege, something fit for her queenliness.”

  Lucy heard the doctor sigh. He looked up at her, pulling his eyes off the dead body. “And so, Miss Jones, where does it leave you?”

  “Still searching, Doctor. Searching right up to my last moments here.”

  He looked slyly toward her. “Ah, obsession. Single-minded pursuit in the face of all obstacles. A quality which you might admit comes closer to my profession than yours.”

  “Perhaps persistence is a better word.”

  He shrugged. “As you wish. But answer me a question, Miss Jones: Have you come here searching for a madman? Or a sane one?”

  He did not wait to hear her answer, which was slow in coming anyway. Instead, the doctor pushed Cleo’s body back into the refrigerated unit with a grunt and a squealing sound of the runners complaining under her weight and said, “I must go to find the undertaker, who is expected shortly and has a busy day ahead. Good day, Miss Jones.”

  Lucy watched the doctor exit, his plump body swaying a little under the harsh overhead lights and she thought to herself that she was a little in awe of the killer who had managed to find the hospital. Even with all her efforts, she recognized that he was still concealed within the walls, and probably, for all she knew, utterly immune to her powers of investigation.

  That is what you thought, right?

  I closed my eyes, knowing that it was inevitable the Angel would be at my side within moments. I tried to calm my breathing, slow my racing heart, for I thought that every word from here on was dangerous, both for him and for me.

  “Not only was it what I thought. It was true.”

  I pivoted about, first right, then left, trying to see the source of the words I heard in the apartment. Vapors, ghosts, filmy lights that wavered and blinked seemed on either side of me.

  “I was completely safe, every minute, every second, no matter what I did. Surely, C-Bird, you can see that?” His voice was rough-edged, filled with arrogance and anger and each word seemed to slap against my cheek like a dead man’s kiss.

  “You were safe from them,” I said.

  “They did not even understand the law,” he boasted. “Their own rules were completely useless.”

  “But you weren’t safe from me,” I replied. Defiant.

  “And do you think you are safe from me, now?” the Angel said harshly. “Do you think you are safe from yourself?”

  I didn’t answer. There was a momentary silence and then an explosion, like a gunshot, followed by the shattering sound of glass breaking into hundreds of shards. An ashtray, filled with cigarette butts had burst against a sidewall, thrown with lightning speed and force. I shrank back. My head spun drunkenly, exhaustion, tension, fear all vying for purchase within me. There was a smell of stale smoke and I could see some dusty ashes still fluttering in the air next to a dark smudge against the white paint. “We are closing now, Francis, on the end,” the Angel said, mocking me. “Can’t you feel it? Can’t you sense it? Don’t you understand that it is almost all over?”

  The Angel’s voice ragged me.

  “Just like it was all those years ago,” he said bitterly. “Dying time getting closer.”

  I looked down at my hand. Did I throw the ashtray at the sound of his words? Or did he throw the ashtray to demonstrate that he was taking form, gaining substance, slowly returning to shape. Becoming real once again. I could see my hand quiver in front of me.

  “You will die here, Francis. You should have died then, but now you will die here. Alone. Forgotten. Unloved. And dead. It will be days before someone finds your body, more than enough time for maggots to infest your skin, your stomach to be bloated and your stench to penetrate the walls.”

  I shook my head, fighting as best as I could.

  “Oh, yes,” he continued. “That is how it will be. Not a word in the newspaper, not a tear shed at your funeral—if there even is one. Do you think people will come together to eulogize you, Francis, filling up the rows of some fine church? To make nice speeches about all your accomplishments? All the great and meaningful things you did before you died? I don’t believe that’s in the offing, Francis. Not in the slightest. You’re just going to die and that will be it. Just a lot of relief by all the people who haven’t cared a whit for you, and will be secretly overjoyed that you are no longer a burden on their lives. All that will remain of your days will be the smell you leave behind in this apartment, which the next tenants will probably scrub away with disinfectant and lye.”

  I half gestured toward th
e wall of words.

  He laughed. “You think anyone will care about all your stupid scribblings? It will be gone in minutes. Seconds. Someone will come in, take one look at the mess the crazy man created, fetch a paintbrush and cover up every word. And all that happened a long time ago will be buried forever.”

  I closed my eyes. If the words pummeled me, how long before his fists? It seemed to me, right at that moment, that the Angel was growing stronger every second, while I was growing weaker. I took a deep breath, and started to drag myself back across the room, my pencil in hand.

  “You will not live to finish the story,” he said. “Do you understand that, Francis? You will not live. I will not allow it. You think you can write the ending here, Francis? You make me laugh. The ending belongs to me, It always has. It always will.”

  I didn’t know what to think. His threat was as real at that moment as it was so many years earlier. But I struggled forward and thought I had to try. I wished Peter was here to help, and he must have been able to read my mind. Or perhaps I moaned Peter’s name out loud, and wasn’t aware of it, because the Angel laughed again. “He can’t help you this time. He’s dead.”

 

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