The Madman's Tale

by John Katzenbach

  Behind him, Francis had spun his feet out of the bed. He was driven to his feet by forces he did not completely recognize. He could hear his own chorus of voices shouting It’s happening now! but he could not tell what it was. He stood, almost statuelike, by his bunk, waiting for the next moment to arrive, hoping that whatever it was he was supposed to do would become clear within seconds. And that when he was called to do it, he would be able. He was filled with doubt. He had never managed to succeed at anything, not once, that he could remember, throughout his brief life.

  Lucy looked up from behind the nursing station desk, peering through the wire mesh into the gray black darkness of the hallway, seeing a figure near the end where a few hours earlier Little Black had waved goodbye. It was a human shape, that seemed to have materialized out of nothing. She craned forward and saw a white-jacketed attendant pause by the men’s dormitory door, then continue to saunter down the hallway to greet her. The man gave her a small wave, and she could see that he was smiling. He had a confident, unfettered manner about him—or, at the very least, he walked with none of the shuffling hesitancy that she recognized in the vast majority of the patients. They always moved with the burdens of their diseases. This man had a lightness to his step that seemed to put him into a different category. Nevertheless, she reached down and placed her hand on her pocketbook, reassuring herself that her pistol was close by.

  The attendant came closer. He was not overly large, probably no taller than she was, but carrying a bit more weight in a trim, athletic build. Moving down the hallway, it was a little as if he were stepping free from a cloud, coming into shape, growing more distinct with each stride. He stopped and checked first one of the storage room doors, making certain that it was locked, then a second, the door that led down to the basement heating system. He jiggled the door, then produced a set of keys not unlike the ones that she’d been given for that night, and he slid one into the lock. He was perhaps twenty feet away from her, and she lowered her hand down so that it gripped the butt of the pistol. She started to reach for the intercom, but hesitated when the attendant turned back away from the basement door, and said, not unpleasantly, “The idiots in Maintenance are always leaving these things open, no matter how often we tell them not to. I’m surprised we haven’t lost a dozen patients down there in those tunnels by now.”

  He grinned and shrugged. She didn’t say a word.

  “Mister Moses asked me to come down and check on you,” the attendant said. “He said it was your first night, and all. Hope I didn’t make you nervous.”

  “I’m fine,” Lucy said, keeping her hand wrapped around the pistol butt. “Tell him thanks, but I don’t need any help.”

  The attendant stepped a little closer. “That’s what I figured. Night shift is more about being a little lonely and a little bored and mainly about staying awake more than anything else. But it can get a little creepy after midnight, for sure.”

  She looked carefully at the man, trying to imprint every detail of his presence on her imagination, comparing every feature, every inflection, with the image she had created within her mind’s eye of the Angel. Was he the right height, the right build, the right age? What does a killer look like? She could feel her stomach knotting tightly, the muscles in her arms and legs quivering with tension. She had not expected a murderer to come sauntering down the hallway with a smile on his face. Who are you? she asked herself.

  “Why didn’t Mister Moses come down himself?” she wondered instead.

  The attendant shrugged. “There were a couple of guys in the upstairs dormitory got into it a bit right around lights-out, and he had to escort one of them up to the fourth floor and see that he was restrained, put in observation, and knocked out with a shot of Haldol. So he left his big old brother at the desk, and asked me to come on down here. But it looks like you’ve got everything under control just fine. Anything I can do to help out before I head back upstairs?”

  Lucy kept her hand on her weapon and her eyes fixed on the attendant. She tried to examine every inch of him as he came closer. His dark hair was longish, but well combed. He wore the white attendant’s suit trimly and tennis shoes on his feet that made very little noise. She took a long look at his eyes, searching them for the light of madness, or the darkness of death. She scoured the man’s appearance, looking for some indication that would tell her who he was, waiting for some signature that would make everything clear. She gripped the gun tighter, and pulled it partway from her pocketbook, readying herself. She did this as surreptitiously as she could. At the same time, she looked down at the man’s hands.

  The fingers seemed long, almost exaggerated. Clawlike. But they were empty.

  He stepped closer, now only a few feet distant, close enough so that she could feel a kind of heat between them. She thought this was merely her own nervousness.

  “Anyway, sorry if I startled you. I should have called on the phone to let you know I was coming down. Or maybe Mister Moses should have called, but he and his brother were a little busy.”

  “It’s all right,” she said.

  The attendant gestured at the phone by her hand. “I need to call Mister Moses, tell him I’m heading back up to the isolation wing. Okay?”

  She nodded at the phone. “Help yourself,” she said. “You know, I didn’t get your name …”

  Now he was close enough to touch, but still separated from Lucy by the protective wire mesh of the nursing station. The pistol butt seemed to glow red-hot in her hand, as if it was screaming at her to pull it out of its place of concealment.

  “My name?” he asked. “Sorry. Actually I didn’t give it …”

  The man reached through the opening in the mesh where medications were dispensed and took the telephone receiver off the hook, lifting it to his ear. She watched him dial in three numbers, and then wait for a second.

  A momentary icy confusion sliced through her. The attendant had not dialed two zero two.

  “Hey,” she said, “That’s not …”

  And then it seemed her world exploded.

  Pain like a sheet of red exploded in her eyes. Fear stabbed her with every heartbeat. Her head spun dizzily, and then she felt herself plunging forward, as if her balance was gone, and a second blast of hurt slammed into her face, followed rapidly by a third, then a fourth. Her jaw, her mouth, nose, and cheeks all suddenly seemed aflame, waterfalls of instant agony pounding down upon her visage. She could feel herself on the verge of losing consciousness, a blackness grasping hold of her. With what little remained of her memory and her control, she tried to tug her pistol free. It seemed to her that she was in a cone of pain and head-spinning confusion; the confident, firm grip she’d had seconds earlier on the butt of the gun seemed suddenly flimsy, loose, inadequate. Her motions seemed impossibly slow, as if they were restrained by ropes and chains. She tried to lift the weapon toward the attendant while the last bit of presence she retained screamed Shoot! Shoot!, but then, just as abruptly, the gun and all safety was gone, clattering away from her, and she felt herself tumbling down, falling to the floor, slamming against the linoleum, where all she could taste was the salty residue of blood. It seemed the last sensation open and available to her, the others eradicated by torrents of hurt. Explosions streaked crimson before her eyes. Deafening noise destroyed her hearing. The stench of fear filled her nostrils, erasing all else. She wanted to cry out for help, but the words seemed instantly distant and unreachable, as if beyond some great canyon.

  What had happened was this: The attendant had suddenly driven the heavy telephone receiver up with a short, brutal uppercut, slamming it against the underside of Lucy’s jaw with the efficiency of a boxer’s knockout punch, as he had simultaneously reached through the opening in the wire mesh, and seized hold of her jacket. Then, as she had rocked back, he’d savagely pulled her forward, so that her face crashed into the screen that was there to protect her. He’d pushed her back, then blasted her forward viciously into the mesh three times, and then tossed her do
wn, where she’d hit the floor face-first. The gun, which he’d rather easily knocked from her hand with the telephone receiver, skidded across the floor and came to rest in a corner of the nursing station. It was an assault of blistering speed and efficiency. A bare few seconds of unbridled strength, a limit of sound that didn’t reach beyond the narrow world they occupied. One instant, Lucy had been cautious, assessing, hand wrapped around the weapon she believed would keep her safe; the next, she was down, barely able to put one thought next to another, except for a single awful idea: I’m going to die here tonight.

  Lucy tried to lift her head from the floor, and through the haze of shock saw the attendant calmly opening the door to the nursing station. She made a great effort to get to her knees, but was unable. Her head screamed at her to call for help, to fight back, to do all the things which she’d planned to do, and which earlier had seemed so easily accomplished. But before she could martial the strength or the will necessary, he was at her side. A savage kick to her ribs burst what little wind she had from her chest, and Lucy moaned hard, as the Angel bent down over her and whispered words that pitched her into a far deeper fear than she had ever known could exist: “Don’t you remember me?” he hissed.

  The truly terrible thing in that moment, the thing that went beyond all the terrible things that had taken place in the prior few seconds, was that when she heard his voice pressed up so close to her with an intimacy that spoke only of hate, it seemed to vault across the bridge of years, and she did.

  Peter pivoted back and forth, trying to see down the corridor of the Amherst Building, thrusting his face up against the small glass window that had wire embedded into it to reinforce it. He was surrounded by darkness, and all he could see was shadow and shafts of wan light, none of which held any sign of existence or activity. He pitched his ear up against the door, trying to hear something through the thick steel, but its solid bulk defied his efforts, no matter how hard he strained. He could not tell what was happening—if anything. All he knew for certain was that the door that was supposed to be left open was locked tight, and that just beyond his sight and his grasp something might be happening and that suddenly, abruptly, he was powerless to do anything about it. He grabbed at the doorknob and furiously tugged on it, making a small, impotent banging sound not even strong enough to awaken any of the other well-drugged men in the room. He cursed and pulled again.

  “Is it him?” Peter heard from behind his shoulder.

  He spun about and saw Francis standing stock-still, a few feet back. The younger man’s eyes were wide with fear and tension, a stray slice of light from a distant barred and closed window making his face seem even younger than he was.

  “I don’t know,” Peter said. “I can’t tell.”

  “The door …”

  “It’s locked,” he replied. “It’s not supposed to be, but it is.”

  Francis took a deep breath. He was absolutely certain of one thing.

  “It’s him,” he said with determination that surprised him.

  Webs of pain constricted her every thought and motion. She was battling to remain alert, understanding that her life depended upon it, but she was uncertain how. One of her eyes was already swelling shut, and she thought her jaw was broken. She tried to crawl away from the sound of the Angel’s voice, but he slammed her with his foot again, and then abruptly dropped down on top of her, straddling her, pinning her to the floor. She groaned again, and then she was aware that he had something in his hand. When he pressed it up against her cheek, she knew what it was. A knife, much as the one that he had used to slice through her beauty so many years earlier.

  He whispered, but it had the force of a drill sergeant’s command: “Don’t move. Don’t die too quickly, Lucy Jones. Not after all this time.”

  She stayed rigid with fear.

  He lifted himself up, casually walked back to the desk, and in two swift, vicious motions, cut the telephone line and the intercom.

  “Now,” he said, turning back toward her, “A little conversation before the inevitable takes place.”

  She pushed herself back, and didn’t respond.

  He dropped back down on top of her, once again pinning her with his knees, holding her in place. “Do you have any idea how close I’ve been to you, on so many occasions I’ve lost count. Do you know that I’ve been at your side every step you’ve taken, day after day, week after week, adding all those seconds into minutes and letting the years come and go, and always been right there, so near I could have reached out and taken hold of you any time, so close I could smell your scent, hear your breathing? I have never left your side, Lucy Jones, not since the night we first met.”

  He pushed his face down next to hers.

  “You have done well,” the Angel said. “You learned every lesson you could in law school. Including the one that I taught you.”

  The Angel looked down at her, his own face a mask of anger. “There’s just time for one more final bit of education,” he said. He placed the knife blade up against her throat.

  Francis stepped forward, staring hard at Peter. “It’s him,” he repeated. “He’s here now.”

  Peter looked back at the small window in the door. “We haven’t heard a signal. The Moses brothers should be here …”

  But he took one more look at the mixture of fear and insistence that Francis wore on his face, and he turned and threw his shoulder against the locked door, grunting hard with exertion. Then he pulled back and slammed himself into the unyielding metal again, only to drop back with a solid, meaningless thud. Peter could feel panic lurking around within him, suddenly aware that in a place where time seemed almost irrelevant, seconds now mattered.

  He stepped back and kicked hard at the door. “Francis,” he said loudly, “we’ve got to get out there.”

  But Francis was already tugging hard at the metal frame of his bunk, trying to pull one of the stanchions free. It took less than an instant for Peter to recognize what the younger man was trying to do, and he jumped to Francis’s side, to help rip free some piece of iron that might serve as a makeshift crowbar, so that they could attack the door. Peter had an unusual thought penetrate all the mingled fears and doubts about what was taking place right in front of him, but beyond his reach, that the sensation he felt right then was probably the same as a man trapped within a burning building felt as he faced the wall of flame that threatened to devour him. Peter grunted hard with exertion.

  On the floor of the nursing station, Lucy fought desperately to keep her wits about her. In the hours, days, and months after she’d been assaulted so many years earlier, there had been an inevitable replaying in her mind of what ifs and if I’d onlys. Now she was trying to gather all those memories, feelings of guilt and recriminations, internal fears and horrors back to her—to sort through them and find the one that truly might help, for this moment was the same as that one was. Only this time, she knew more than youth, innocence, and beauty were about to be taken from her. She screamed at herself, thrusting her imagination past the pain and despair, to find a way to fight back.

  She was facing the Angel all alone in a world surrounded by people, as isolated and abandoned as if they were on some deserted island or deep in some dark forest. Help was a flight of stairs away. Help was down the hallway, behind a locked door. Help was everywhere. Help was nowhere.

  Death was a man with a knife pinning her to the floor. He had all the power; she understood that an electricity born of planning, obsession, anticipation of this moment must have been coursing through the Angel. Years of compulsion and desire, just to reach that single moment. She knew, in a way that went beyond anything she had learned in any law school class, that she had to use his triumph against him, and so, instead of saying Stop! or Please! or even Why? she spit out between swollen lips, and loosened teeth a statement of complete fiction and arrogance. “We knew it was you all along …”

  He hesitated. Then he pushed the flat of the knife up against her cheek. “You lie,” the Ang
el hissed. But he did not cut her. Not yet, and Lucy understood she had purchased herself a few seconds. Not a chance to live, but a moment that had made the Angel hesitate.

  The noise of Peter and Francis savagely ripping at the bed frame, trying to pry loose a strip of metal, finally began to rouse the patients in the dormitory room from their unsteady sleep. Like ghosts rising out of a graveyard on All Hallow’s Eve, one after the other, the men of the housing unit stirred themselves to wake, fighting off the deep seduction of their daily sedatives, scrambling, struggling, blinking their eyes open to the novelty of Peter’s increasing panic, as he fought against the metal with every muscle he could gather.

  “What’s happening, C-Bird?”

  Francis heard the question and lifted his head in the direction of the sound. It was Napoleon. As Francis paused, at first unsure precisely how to respond, he watched as the men of the Amherst Building slowly lurched from their bunks, joining together in a haphazard, misshapen knot behind Napoleon, staring out through the darkness at Francis and Peter, whose frantic efforts were making some modest headway. He had almost managed to free a single three-foot section of the frame and he grunted as he twisted and pried at the reluctant metal.

  “It’s the Angel,” Francis said. “He’s outside.”

  Voices started to murmur, a mixture of surprise and fear. A couple of the men cowered back, shrinking from the thought that Short Blond’s killer might be close by.

  “What is the Fireman doing?” Napoleon asked, his voice tripping over each word with a hesitancy stirred by indecision.

  “We need to get the door open,” Francis said. “He’s trying to get something that will break it down.”

  “If the Angel is outside, shouldn’t we be blocking the door?”

  Another patient murmured in agreement. “We need to keep him out. If he gets in here, what’s to save us?”