Regina's Song

by David Eddings

  “That’s a very good idea, Mark,” Sylvia told me. “You’ve got a feel for this sort of thing.”

  “Not really, babe. It’s just that I’ve been majoring in Twinkie for the past several years. Mary and I kicked it around, and we think that getting rid of those nightmares would probably solve most of Twink’s problems.”

  “It might be a little more complex than that, but it’d be a big step in the right direction.”

  “Then it’s worth a try. Keep a supply of batteries for your recorder on hand, Sylvia. These nightmares pop up without much warning, so we’ll need to be ready.”

  Twink showed up for class on Thursday, and she seemed to be pretty much OK again. I was almost positive that if we could get her past those damned nightmares, she’d be on the road to normal.

  My supply of scrap lumber was starting to run low, so on Saturday Charlie and I ran up to Everett to raid Les Greenleaf’s scrap heap again. Now that I’d gotten used to them, these Saturday workdays had become almost a form of relaxation for me.

  We got back to the boardinghouse, and I took my tape measure and notepad into Trish’s room to get down the exact numbers I’d be working with.

  “Is it going to take very long?” she asked me. “I hate having my room all torn up.”

  “I’ll probably be able to knock them out next Saturday,” I told her. “Your law books are all the same size, so I won’t have to juggle the shelves around. That’ll make things go faster. I’ve got a suggestion, though.”

  “Oh?”

  “Take a little time when you pull your books. Stack them over against that far wall, but keep them in order. They’re all the same color as well as the same size. If you jumble them all up, it’ll take you a month to get them squared away. I’m still trying to find a couple of my books.”

  “I’ll be careful, Mark.”

  Midterm examinations rolled around at the university during the week of November 3. Older heads on the teaching faculty always look forward to midterm week, since the freshman class noticeably diminishes after that one. When dear old dad finds out that junior’s been goofing off for six straight weeks, he’ll usually close the checkbook and tell his vagrant son to go find an honest job.

  I dumped my favorite test on my freshmen on Wednesday—“Correct the grammatical errors in the following paragraph.” It’s a rotten thing to drop on just about anybody, but it exposes the incompetent, and it’s easy to grade. If I’d had my wits about me when I first came up with the idea, I’d have copyrighted the damn thing and lived on easy street for the rest of my life.

  At supper that evening, Sylvia told me that she had an appointment with her faculty advisor on Friday afternoon. “I’m going to spring the ‘planted bug’ idea on him,” she explained. “I want to be sure that he doesn’t have any objections. We tape just about every conversation in the various psycho wards we visit, but I’m going to be taping Renata out in the real world, so I want to clear it with him before I take it much further.”

  “That makes sense. Always cover your buns.”

  “I’m glad you approve. But that means I’m going to be tied up on Friday afternoon. Could you take Renata to Lake Stevens for me?”

  “Sure, no problem. How many hours of tape have you recorded so far?”

  “Fifteen or so. A lot of it’s nothing but random conversation, though. I’m going to have to do a lot of editing to get down to the real meat.”

  “I don’t envy you on that, babe. Trimming out the deadwood can be moderately unfun.”

  “You’ve noticed. How clever of you.”

  “Be nice,” I told her.

  I caught Twink right before class on Thursday and told her that I’d be taking her to see Fallon Friday.

  “Sylvia’s not sick, is she?” she asked, clearly concerned.

  “No, it’s nothing like that. She has to talk with her faculty advisor, is all.”

  “That’s a relief. I’m getting attached to her. Girls need other girls to talk with sometimes. You’re nice enough, Markie, but I don’t think you’re ready for girl talk—not yet, anyway.”

  “I’ll work on it.”

  “Don’t bother, Sylvia’s already got it covered.” Then she giggled.

  “What?” I demanded.

  “Never mind,” she said with a wicked little smirk.

  On Friday morning I turned in my proposal for a paper on Milton’s prose works and their relation to his poetry. This wasn’t going to be a barn-burner paper, I realized. Milton irritated me, and I was hoping that it wouldn’t show. I didn’t want to offend our gentle professor, but Cromwell’s Puritan theocracy during the seventeenth century had a strong odor of the assorted absolute dictatorships that have so contaminated the twentieth century. Some things never change, I guess, and that “My God’s better than your God” crap keeps floating to the surface, doesn’t it?

  I was at loose ends after class, so I called Twink and suggested that we might as well bag it on up to Everett that morning. “We’ll beat the noon rush, Twink,” I told her, “and I’ll buy you lunch someplace.”

  “Just like a real date, Markie?” she demanded in that empty-headed voice she dumped on me when she was practicing her cutesy-poo routine.

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t have a thing to wear.”

  “Cool it, kid.”

  “I’ll behave,” she promised.

  “Sure you will.”

  It was one of those cloudy, blustery autumn days, but at least it wasn’t raining—yet. I parked in front of Mary’s house and went around to the back door to avoid waking Renata’s aunt. I tapped lightly, and Twink opened the door immediately.

  “Is she asleep?” I asked quietly.

  “Like a baby,” Twink replied. “I left her a note.”

  “Good. Let’s split.”

  “You seem sort of antsy today, Markie.”

  I shrugged. “Midterm fidgets, I guess. It gets to be a habit after a few years. You’d better bring a coat. It’ll probably rain before the day’s out.”

  “Rain? Here? How can you say such a thing?”

  I let that pass, and we went out front to my car. I drove down toward the campus and then eased us into the northbound lane of Interstate 5. The traffic had slacked off, and it was easy going.

  “Is it always this nervous during the midterm exams?” Twink asked me. “Everybody I run into acts like the world’s coming to an end.”

  “It’s like a dress rehearsal for finals week, Twink,” I told her. “That’s the one you’ve got to watch out for. The whole student body starts to come unraveled during finals week—probably because about half of them are wired up on pep pills.”

  “Do those things actually work all that well?”

  “Not really. They will keep you awake, but your thinking gets pretty fuzzy after the second or third day.”

  She laughed. “Boy, does that sound familiar,” she said. “Is the whole world zonked out most of the time?”

  “I don’t think the trees are.”

  “I was talking about people. There seems to be a pill for almost anything, doesn’t there? There are pills to pep you up and pills to calm you down, pills to put you to sleep and pills to wake you up. You name it, and there’s a pill for it. The world of normies isn’t much different from the world of loonies, is it? We all live on a steady diet of pills.”

  “There’s one slight difference, Twink. Loonies take their pills with water. Us normies wash ours down with booze.”

  “That could do some strange things to your head, Markie.”

  “Yeah, strange. Unfortunately, it sometimes leads to an overpowering urge to hop in the car and drive off to Idaho at about a hundred and fifty miles an hour.”

  “Loonies hardly ever do that.”

  “Probably because they’ve got better sense.”

  “Maybe that’s why loony bins are called ‘asylums.’ It’s a place where loonies can be protected from those awful normies.”

  “Take that up with Doc F
allon, Twink. It’s out of my field.”

  Dr. Fallon seemed disappointed that Sylvia hadn’t been able to make the trip that Friday. I think he really wanted those tapes she was cutting.

  I got him off to one side where Twink couldn’t hear us and filled him in on our plan to tape Twink’s next nightmare.

  “Now that’s the tape I really want,” he said enthusiastically.

  “I thought that might light your fire, Doc,” I told him.

  After her session with Fallon, Twink and I stopped by her folks’ place for supper.

  Les Greenleaf and I had a little talk while Inga and Twink were busy in the kitchen. “Are you sure Renata’s all right, Mark?” he asked me in a worried tone.

  “Most of the time she is, boss,” I told him. “She has bad days every so often, but I think we’ve come up with a way to get a handle on that.”

  “Oh?”

  I told him about our scheme to tape Twink’s ravings after the next siege of nightmares.

  “Is she still having those?” He seemed surprised.

  “She sure is. They don’t come along very often, but they usually put her out of action for a day at least. Doc Fallon seems to think that those bad dreams are about the only thing that’s stalling her complete recovery. Once we get a handle on those, I’ve got a hunch that we’re home free.”

  “I certainly hope so.”

  “You’re not alone, boss. The whole Twinkie rooting section is behind her all the way.”

  After dinner, Twink and I went back to Seattle. She fell asleep once we got out onto the interstate, and I drove on in silence.

  It was about ten o’clock when I pulled up in front of Mary’s house. “We’re home, baby sister,” I told her, gently pushing her shoulder.

  “Did I doze off?”

  “Almost immediately,” I said. “You didn’t snore very loud, though.”

  “I never snore!”

  “You want to bet?”

  I walked her to Mary’s front door, and then I went back to the boardinghouse to get some sleep.

  On Saturday morning I went to my little workshop in the basement and put the last coat of stain on the shelves for Trish’s room. By now I had the whole procedure down pat, and I was fairly sure I could have the shelves in place before the day was out.

  Trish looked in from time to time, but she generally stayed out from underfoot. By noon things were coming right along, and I guess her curiosity got the better of her, so she sat at her desk watching. “I wasn’t really all that sure about this notion when you first started, Mark,” she admitted, “but it’s a definite improvement. When Erika and I took over here, our whole idea was to upgrade the place, then sell it. I’m not so sure now, though. Even after we graduate and move on, we could put a manager in here and hold on to the house. It’d provide Aunt Grace with a steady income.”

  “Only if you can keep the party boys out, Trish,” I told her.

  “Graduate students don’t party all that much, Mark. You might not be aware of it, but the house is getting quite a reputation. Every week or so I get inquiries about vacancies. Peace and quiet are a rare commodity in student housing.”

  “The reputation of the place might be based on the current inmates, Trish,” I suggested. “We’ve turned into a fairly tight group here.”

  “There is that, I suppose,” she admitted. “We all sort of clicked together right from the start, didn’t we? We’re almost like a family, really.”

  “I do seem to be getting mommied a lot here lately.”

  “Mommied?”

  “Sorry, Trish. I picked that up from Twinkie. She threatened to mommy all over me once when I was feeling sorry for myself.”

  “She’s the strangest child sometimes.”

  “Of course she is. She got out of the nuthouse not too long ago.”

  “In a peculiar way, she’s brought us all even closer together, hasn’t she? We all want to take care of Renata.”

  “She’s addictive, probably—she hooks just about any unsuspecting person who happens by.” I squinted at the bookshelves. “Getting closer, Trish. I think I’ll be able to whup this out by suppertime. If you’re real extra nice to me, I might even help you reshelve all your books.”

  “You had to remind me, didn’t you?” she said with a gloomy sigh.

  I turned in my midterm grades on my freshman class on Monday, and the rest of the week marched briskly toward Thanksgiving break: Fall quarter gets chopped up by assorted holidays and special events. We had a break in the weather, though, so those crisp, clear autumn days lifted the perpetual gloom that hovers over the Puget Sound area after Labor Day every year.

  I concentrated most of my attention on Milton that week, plowing my way through Milton’s Christian Doctrine—the translation, not the Latin original. I’ll admit that I choked a bit on his bland acceptance of predestination. That’s been used as a justification for all kinds of misbehavior over the centuries. Once I pushed that out of the way, though, I saw most of the parallels between that work and Paradise Lost that scholars much better than I’ll ever be had noticed. It was heavy going, and I finally gave up on Wednesday evening, put it aside, and went to bed.

  I was a little punchy when Charlie woke me up on Thursday morning to tell me that I had a phone call.

  I pulled on some clothes and stumbled down to the living room where the phone was. “Yeah?” I said into the mouthpiece.

  “Mark?” It was Mary.

  “It’s me, Mary. What’s up?”

  “You’d better get over here, and bring the girl with the tape recorder. Ren’s having problems.”

  “We’ll be right there,” I said shortly. Then I hung up. “Sylvia!” I shouted.

  “What’s up, Mark?” Charlie called from the kitchen.

  “Twink’s flipped out again. Where the hell’s Sylvia?”

  “She’s getting dressed,” Trish told me.

  “Please tell her to hurry.” I went back upstairs, put on my shoes and socks, grabbed a coat, and made it back down in under a minute. Sylvia looked a bit scrambled, but she was ready to go.

  “Did Mary give you any details?” Sylvia asked me, as we hurried to my car.

  “No, we’ll have to play it by ear when we get there. I don’t think I’d push her this time, Sylvia. Let’s just get this one on tape.”

  “You’re probably right,” she agreed. “Dr. Fallon’s the one who’ll make the decisions about how to proceed.”

  The drive only took us about five minutes, and Mary had left her front door standing open. We could hear Twink as soon as we got out of the car. It was a lot worse than I’d expected. Mary’s term “bad day” glossed over some pretty awful sounds. Twink was crying, screaming, and making animal-like noises.

  I led Sylvia back to Twink’s bedroom. Mary was still in uniform, and she was holding our hysterical girl in her arms and rocking back and forth. “Thank God you’re here!” she said to Sylvia and me. “This is a bad one. They seem to be getting worse.”

  “When did you get home, Mary?” I asked.

  “About a half hour ago. She was completely out of it when I came through the door.”

  “Markie!” Twink cried out, struggling to free herself from Mary’s grasp. She held her arms out to me imploringly. “We need you!”

  That “we” gave me quite a jolt. I hadn’t heard that since before Regina had died.

  “Go to her!” Sylvia gave me a push. “Quick!”

  I went to the bed and gently took the sobbing girl from Mary. Then I wrapped my arms around her and held her, rocking back and forth.

  “Make them stop, Markie,” she pleaded. “The wolves are howling again. Please make them stop.”

  There was that business about wolves again. I didn’t have the faintest idea what it meant.

  “Blood!” she wailed in a voice filled with horror. “It’s all over me! I’m covered with blood!”

  Then she began to tremble violently. “Cold!” she said. “The water’s so terribly cold!”
Then she suddenly started whispering, her lips very close to my ear—and she wasn’t whispering in any language I could understand.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  “I think that’s about as far as we want to let her go,” Mary said bleakly, as Twink kept murmuring to me in twin. “I’d better hit her with a pill now.”

  “Couldn’t we hold off on that for a little longer?” Sylvia asked. “She might give us a little more to work with if we just . . .” She left it up in the air.

  “You’re not going to get anything you’ll be able to understand,” Mary told her. “Once she starts babbling like that, she keeps it up for the rest of the day, and by noon they’ll be able to hear her in Tacoma. I’ve been through this before, so I know what’s coming. It’s time to shut her down.”

  “She’s right, Sylvia,” I agreed. “We don’t want this to get much worse.”

  Sylvia sighed. “You’re probably right,” she said regretfully. “If she’d just keep speaking English, we might be able to get to the root of the problem.”

  “It doesn’t work that way, I’m afraid,” Mary said. “I’m going to put her to sleep. You’ve got all you’re going to get that’ll make any sense.” She went into the bathroom and came back a moment later with a small pill and a glass of water. “Open your mouth, Ren,” she said gently.

  Twink obediently opened her mouth, and Mary placed the pill on her tongue. “Drink the water now,” Mary said then. I got the feeling that Twink actually welcomed the pill.

  It took about ten minutes for it to start to work, and Twink murmured to me more and more slowly as the barbiturate closed down her mind. Finally, she sighed and stopped talking. After a moment or two, she started to snore.

  “Let’s get her undressed and under the covers,” Mary said to Sylvia.

  I handed Twink off to the ladies and went out to the living room. I was a bit shaken by what had just happened. Mary’s term “bad days” pretty much glossed over what was really going on when Twink came unraveled. There’d been an intensity to it that I hadn’t really expected.