The Madman's Tale

by John Katzenbach

  “I was right, wasn’t I? About Cleo?”

  He wheezed a laugh again. “Yes. She did not know I was there, but I was. And what was most unusual about that night, C-Bird, was that I had every intention of killing her before dawn arrived. I figured simply to cut her throat in her sleep and then point some evidence at one of the other women in the dormitory. This had worked just as I knew it would with Lanky. It was likely to work again. Or perhaps just the pillow over the face. Cleo was asthmatic. She smoked too much. It probably wouldn’t have taken long to choke the air from her. That worked with the Dancer.”

  “Why Cleo?”

  “It was when she pointed up at the building where I lived and shouted out that she knew me. I didn’t believe her, of course. But why take the chance? Everything else was going just as I imagined it would. But C-Bird knows that, doesn’t he? C-Bird knows, because he is like me. He wants to kill. He knows how to kill. He hates so much. He loves the idea of death so much. Killing is the only answer for me. And for C-Bird, too.”

  “No,” I moaned. “Not true.”

  “You know the only answer, Francis,” the Angel whispered.

  “I want to live,” I said.

  “So did Cleo. But she wanted to die, too. Life and death can be so close. Almost the same, Francis. And tell me: Are you any different from her?”

  I couldn’t answer that question. Instead, I asked, “You watched her die?”

  “Of course,” the Angel replied, hissing. “I saw her take the bedsheet from beneath her bed. She must have been saving it for just that reason. She was in a lot of pain and the medications weren’t helping her in the slightest, and all she could see ahead of her, day after day, year after year, was more and more pain. She wasn’t afraid of killing herself, C-Bird, not like you are. She was an empress and she understood the nobility of taking her own life. The necessity of it. I just encouraged her along the path, and used her death to my advantage. I opened the doors, then followed her out and watched her go into the stairwell …”

  “Where was the nurse on duty?”

  “Asleep, C-Bird. Dozed off, feet up, head back, snoring. You think they actually cared enough about any of you to stay awake?”

  “But why did you cut her, afterward?”

  “To show you what you guessed later, C-Bird. To show you that I could have killed her. But mostly, I knew that it would make everyone argue, and that the people who wanted to believe I was there might see it as proof, and the people who didn’t want to believe I was there would see it as persuasive of their position. Doubt and confusion are truly helpful things, C-Bird, when you are planning something precise and perfect.”

  “Except for one thing,” I whispered. “You didn’t count on me.”

  He snarled and replied, “But that’s why I’m here now, C-Bird. For you.”

  Shortly before ten PM, Lucy moved rapidly across the grounds of the hospital toward the Amherst Building, to take over the late-night solitary shift. The graveyard shift, as it was called in newspaper offices and police stations. It was an awful night, caught somewhere between storm and heat, and she lowered her head and thought that her white outfit cut a slice through the thick black air.

  In her right hand, she carried a ring of keys that jangled as she quickly marched down the path. Above her, an oak tree bent and swayed, rustling leaves with a breeze that she didn’t feel and which seemed out of place in the still, humid night. She had thrown her pocketbook, with the loaded pistol concealed inside, over her right shoulder, giving her a jaunty look which was far from how she felt. She ignored an odd cry, something desperate and lonely, that seemed to float down from one of the other dormitories.

  Lucy unlocked the two deadbolt locks at the door to Amherst, and put her shoulder to the heavy wood, pushing her way into the building with a scraping sound. For an instant, she was taken aback. Every time she’d been in the building, either in her office, or making her way through the corridor, it had been filled with people, light, and noise. Now, not even late, it had been transformed. What had seemed jammed and constantly busy, energized by all sorts of misshapen madnesses and misbegotten thoughts, was now quiet, save for the occasional eerie shout or scream that lurked through the empty spaces. The corridor was nearly black; some light that faded a little bit of the darkness to a manageable gray came weakly through the windows from distant buildings. The only real light in the corridor was a small cone of brightness, behind the barred door of the nursing station, where a single desk lamp glowed.

  She saw a form move at the nursing station, and exhaled slowly when she saw Little Black uncurl himself from behind the desk and open the wire door.

  “Right on time,” he said.

  “Wouldn’t miss this for the world,” she said with a measure of false bravado.

  He shook his head. “I’m guessing you’re just in for a long, boring night,” he said. He pointed at the intercom on the desk. It was old-fashioned, a small squawk box with a single on/off switch on the top and a dial to reduce squelch. “This will keep you connected to my brother and I upstairs,” he said. “But we really got to hear you sing out that Apollo word, because these things got to be ten, twenty years old and they don’t work too good. The telephone, too, connects upstairs. Just dial two zero two, and it rings. Tell you what, if it rings twice and then you hang up, we’ll take that as a signal, too, and come running.”

  “Two zero two. Got it.”

  “But ain’t likely to need it,” Little Black said. “In my experience, inside this place, nothing logical or expected ever happens right, no matter how much planning goes into it. I’m pretty sure that the guy you’re hunting knows you’re gonna be here. Word gets around pretty good, if you say the right thing to the right person. Gets broadcast real fast. But if this guy is as clever as you seem to think, I’ve got my doubts that he’ll walk into something he’s got to figure is a trap. Still, never know.”

  “That’s right,” Lucy said. “You never know.”

  Little Black nodded. “Well, you call. You call if something happens with any of the patients you don’t want to handle. Just ignore anybody calling out for help or something. We generally wait until morning for dealing with most any nighttime problems.”

  “Okay.”

  He shook his head. “Nervous?”

  “No,” Lucy replied. She knew she was something she just wasn’t certain that nervous described it.

  “When it gets late, I’ll send someone to check up on you. That’d be okay, right?”

  “Always appreciate the company. Except I don’t want to spook the Angel.”

  “I’m not guessing that he’s the sort that gets spooked by much,” Little Black said. He looked down the corridor. “I made sure the dormitory doors are locked,” he said. “Men’s and women’s. Especially that one right over there that Peter wanted me to unlock. Of course, you know that’s the key, right at the end of that chain that unlocks it …” He winked conspiratorially “My guess is, just about everyone in there is lights-out fast asleep by now.”

  With that, Little Black shoved back and stepped down the corridor. He turned once and waved, but it was so dark at the end of the hallway, near the stairwell on that end, that she could barely make out his features, beyond the white attendant’s suit he wore.

  Lucy heard the door creak shut, and then put her pocketbook down on the table, next to the phone. She waited for a few seconds, just long enough to let the silence creep over her with a clammy enveloping sensation, and then she took the key and went down to the men’s dormitory. As quietly as she could, she slipped the key into the door lock and turned it once, hearing a distant click. She took a deep breath, and then went back to the nursing station and began to wait for something to happen.

  Peter sat wide-awake and cross-legged on his bunk. He heard the click of the lock tumblers being turned, and knew this meant Lucy had unlocked the door. He imagined her in his mind’s eye rapidly walking back down to the nursing station. Lucy was so striking, from her height,
her scar, the way she carried herself, it was easy for Peter to picture her every move. He strained, trying to hear the sound of her footsteps, but was unable. The noise of the room filled with sleeping men, tangled up in sheets and various despairs, overwhelmed any modest sound from out in the corridor. Too much snoring, heavy breathing, talking in their sleep going on around him to pick out and isolate noise. He guessed this might be a problem, and so, when he was persuaded that all around him were locked in whatever unsettled, uneven sleep they were going to get, he, silently unfolded himself and gingerly picked his way past the forms of men and came to the door. He did not dare open it, for he thought that the noise might awaken someone, no matter how drugged they were. Instead, what Peter did was simply slide down, back against the adjacent wall, so that he was sitting on the floor, waiting for a sound that was out of the ordinary, or the word that signaled the arrival of the Angel.

  He wished he had a weapon. A gun, he thought, would be helpful. Even a baseball bat or a policeman’s baton. He reminded himself that the Angel would wield a knife, and he would need to stay clear of the man’s reach until the Moses brothers arrived, Security was called, and success had been achieved.

  Lucy, he guessed, would not have agreed to her performance without some assistance. She had not said she would be armed, but he suspected she was.

  The edge they had, though, was in surprise and numbers. It would, he imagined, be sufficient.

  Peter stole a glance at Francis and shook his head. The younger man seemed to be asleep, which he thought was a good thing. He regretted that he was leaving Francis behind, but felt that probably, all in all, it was going to be better for him. Since the arrival of the Angel at his bedside—an event Peter still wasn’t certain had actually taken place—it seemed to him that Francis had been increasingly flaky, and increasingly less in control. C-Bird had been descending along some route that Peter could only guess at, and surely wanted no part of. It made him sad to see what was happening to his friend, and be powerless to do anything about it. Francis had taken Cleo’s death very hard, Peter thought, and more than any of them seemed to have developed an unhealthy obsession with finding the Angel. It was a little as if Francis’s need to find the killer signaled something different and immense to the younger man. It was something well beyond determination, and something dangerous.

  Peter, of course, was wrong about that. Obsession truly lay with Lucy, but he did not want to see that.

  He leaned his head back against the wall, closing his eyes for a moment. He felt fatigue running through his veins, parallel to excitement. He understood that much was about to change in his life, that night, the following morning. Within him, Peter pushed away many memories, and he wondered what was next in his own story. At the same time, he continued to listen carefully, waiting for a signal from Lucy.

  He wondered if, after that night, he would ever see her again.

  A few feet away, Francis lay rigid on his own bunk, perfectly aware that Peter had silently moved past him and taken up a position near the door. He knew sleep was very distant, but death was not, and he breathed in slowly, steadily, waiting for something he could feel was utterly inevitable to occur. Something that was set in stone, planned and plotted, measured out, deciphered and designed. He felt as if he was caught up in a current, dragging him someplace far closer to who he was, or who he could be, and that he was helpless to swim against the tide.

  We were all exactly where the Angel expected us to be. I wanted to write that down, but did not. It went beyond the idea that we had simply taken up places on a stage, and were feeling that last rush of anxiety before the curtain rises, wondering whether our lines were memorized, whether our movements were choreographed, whether we would hit our marks and follow our cues. The Angel knew where we were physically, but deeper still. He knew where we were in our hearts.

  Except, perhaps, for me, because my heart was so confused.

  I rocked back and forth, moaning, like a wounded man on a battlefield who wants to call for help, but can manage only some deep sound of pain. I was kneeling on the floor, the wall space dwindling in front of me, as were the words I had available.

  Around me, the Angel roared, his voice like a torrent, drowning out my protests. He shouted, “I knew. I knew. You were all so stupid … so, normal … so sane!” His voice seemed to rebound off the walls, gain momentum in the shadows and then pummel me like blows. “I was none of those things! I was so much greater!”

  Then, as I lowered my head and squeezed shut my eyes, I yelled out, “Not me …” which made little sense, but the sound of my own voice contending with his gave me a momentary burst of adrenaline. I took a breath, waiting for some pain to be sent my way, but when it did not come, I looked up, and saw the room suddenly bursting with light. Explosions, starbursts, like phosphorous shells in the distance, tracers racing through darkness, a battle in the dark.

  “Tell me!” I demanded, my voice raised above the sounds of fighting. The world of my little apartment seemed to buckle and sway with the violence of war.

  The Angel was around me, everywhere, enveloping me. I gritted my teeth. “Tell me!” I called out again, as loudly as I could.

  Then a softly dangerous voice, whispered in my ear. “You know the answers, C-Bird. You could see them that night. You just don’t want to admit to them, do you, Francis?”

  “No,” I cried out.

  “You don’t want to say what C-Bird knew in that bunk bed that night because it would mean Francis has to kill himself now, wouldn’t it?”

  I could not answer. Tears and sobs wracked my body.

  “You will have to die. What other answer is there, C-Bird? Because you knew the answers that night, didn’t you?”

  I could feel spiraling agony throughout my body when I whispered the only reply I knew that might quiet the voice of the Angel.

  “It was not about Short Blond, was it?” I asked. “It never was.”

  He laughed. A laugh of truth. An awful, ripping noise, as if something was being broken that could never be repaired.

  “What else did C-Bird see that night?” the Angel asked.

  I remembered lying in my bed. Beyond stillness, as rigid as any catatonic frozen in some terrible vision of the world, unwilling to move, unwilling to speak, unwilling to do anything but breathe, because as I lay there, I saw the whole world of death that the Angel had woven together. Peter was at the door. Lucy was in the nursing station. The Moses brothers were upstairs. Everyone was alone, isolated, separated, and vulnerable. And who was most vulnerable? Lucy.

  “Short Blond,” I stammered. “She was just …”

  “A part of a puzzle. You saw it C-Bird. It’s the same this night as it was then.” The Angel’s voice boomed with authority.

  I could barely speak, because I knew the words I grasped right then were the same that came to me that night so many years earlier. One. Two. Three. And then Short Blond. What did all those deaths do? They inevitably brought Lucy to a place where she was alone, in the dark, in the midst of a world that was ruled not by logic, sanity, or organization, no matter what Gulptilil or Evans or Peter or the Moses brothers or anyone in authority at the Western State Hospital might think. It was an arctic world ruled by the Angel.

  The Angel snarled and kicked at me. He had been vaporous, ghostlike before. But this blow landed hard. I groaned in sudden pain, and then struggled back to my knees and crawled back to the wall. I could barely hold the pencil in my hand. It was what I saw in the darkness that night.

  Midnight crept closer. Hours that slowed to a crawl. Night that seized the world around him. Francis lay stiffly, his mind searching through everything he knew. A series of murders that brought Lucy to the hospital, and now, she was just beyond the doorway, her hair cropped short and colored blond, waiting for a killer. All sorts of deaths and questions, and what was the answer? It seemed to him to be within his grasp, and yet was a little like trying to pluck a feather out of the breeze that carried it past him.

>   He turned in the bunk and looked over to Peter, who was resting with his head down on arms stretched over his bent knees. Francis thought that exhaustion must have finally grasped the Fireman. He did not have the advantage that Francis did, of panic and fear that held sleep at bay.

  Francis wanted to explain that it was all very close to being clear to him, and he opened his mouth, but no words came out. And in the silence of despair, right at that moment, he heard the unmistakable noise of the lock that had been opened earlier, clicking shut.

  chapter 32

  Peter’s head snapped up at the sound of the door being locked. He shook himself to his feet, leaping up, wondering how it was that he could have dozed off and failed to hear muffled footsteps just on the other side of the wall. He slipped his hand over the doorknob and placed his shoulder to the door, hoping, in that second, that the noise that had stirred him was something belonging to some half-sleep dream, and wasn’t real. The handle turned, but the door would not budge, and he could feel the deadbolt lock holding it in place. He released the knob and stepped back a single pace, filling with some wild torrent of emotions, something different from fear or panic, distinct from anxiety, shock, or surprise. He had been filled with simple expectations based on reasonable suspicions about how the night would pass, and abruptly he realized that whatever he’d imagined was going to take place had evaporated, replaced with some terrible mystery. He was initially unsure what to do, so he took a deep breath, reminding himself that more than once he’d been in situations that demanded calm when all sorts of danger suddenly buzzed about his head, or tugged at his clothes. Firefights when he was a soldier. Fires when he was a fireman. He bit down hard on his lip and told himself to keep his wits about him and remain quiet and then he thrust his face up to the small window in the door, and he craned his head, trying to see down the corridor. Nothing yet had taken place, he reminded himself, that made this night any different from any other.