Hearing no response, Irene softly increased the pressure of her hand on Gillian’s. Irene felt snoozily adrift, in and out of clouds that were faintly lit as if by shafts of light from a celestial source. It was almost too much effort for her to turn her head on the pillow and look up at the profiled face of the tall girl sitting next to her.
When she did look Irene saw enchantment, an expression of traumatized concentration.
“Papa, don’t, don’t do it!” Gillian squeaked in a girlish voice that Irene somehow recognized although it had been years, so many years.
“Get off her, Papa!” Gillian now demanded, growing rigid, and Irene was astonished to feel the shock-wave heat of anger coming off Gillian’s skin. Irene instinctively tried to withdraw her hand, but now Gillian wouldn’t let go. This effort was too much for Irene’s failing resources; she felt herself powerlessly drifting again, near to nodding off. She might have peacefully lost consciousness but for a bolt of alarm, the organism warning of sudden massive exsanguination, of oncoming fatal shock.
That peaceful feeling was not due to the pills she had swallowed half an hour ago. Irene knew instinctively that she lay there dying while her life flashed before Gillian’s eyes.
“I will kill the both of you!” Gillian growled. She had commenced to shudder and jerk about on the bed, but her grip on Irene was unbroken. Gillian had one slippered foot on the floor. Her foot tapped imperiously as she roundly cursed the father of Irene Cameron McCurdy. She also cursed her father’s plump groaning mistress, who had spread herself belly-down on the mossy trunk of a fallen tree, blonde hair locky and all adangle in her eyes, the fat of her cheeks quivering while he shoved and grunted from behind, still impeccably attired except for the opened fly.
Tap, tap!
“Ah, God—!” Gillian cried, crazed with the pain of the spied-on infidelity. “How could you, Papa?”
But, mercifully, the image that held her tranced was beginning to fade; Gillian’s foot now made soft wet sounds on the slickening tiles of the hospital floor. The limp hand she held had become as cold as a toad in a snowbank.
Gillian’s first conscious thought following her psychometric vision was that she had embarrassingly wet herself while she sat there woolgathering, letting an old lady talk herself to sleep.
Then despite the still-cloying odor of flowers in the hot damp room, she smelled what it was.
Roth left his car on the second level of the hospital parking garage on West One Hundred Sixty-eighth and entered the hospital via an overpass walkway that connected the garage with Herlands North. There were few cars in the garage, and he passed no one on his way in.
The clock on the wall beside the guardhouse in the hospital entryway, just inside the steel-and-glass doors, gave the time: ten twenty-seven. Roth hadn’t visited the hospital since the new Y-shaped, buff-brick building had gone up. He found it depressingly like entering prison. The ceiling was a plane of white fluorescence that created a shadowless environment. The guard sat elevated behind thick glass and his voice rattled through a speaker. Roth stated his business and was issued an after-hours pass which he wore clipped to his tuxedo.
A couple of nurses wearing hooded cloaks and boots went by on their way out. One of them smiled at him and said, “Oh, where’s the party?”
Roth grinned and turned thumbs down. He walked to the elevators. After a considerable wait one came down to him, doors parting to reveal an intern leaning fogbound against one wall. He was missing a shoe and he’d put his girl friend’s flowered underwear briefs on over his trousers.
“Fella, is this your stop?” Roth asked, holding the doors for him. The intern licked his lips and looked around without seeing anything.
“Botanical Gardens?”
“Try the Lenox Avenue line,” Roth suggested. The intern stumbled off the elevator and stood looking around with an expression of tuned-out melancholy. Roth hoped he would find a conference room to crawl into and sleep it off. He pushed the right button and the elevator took him to the eighth floor.
Overhead lights had been dimmed here, to the restful yellow of a harvest moon. Several bright narrow spots were focused on the nurses’ station, but no one was on duty.
In fact there was no one to be seen anywhere on the floor.
They came by car from different parts of the city, all of them arriving by ten thirty-five. Thirty MORG agents had been put on alert. Some of them were a little red-eyed. A siren went by on Fort Washington Avenue; the wind whistled drearily on the unprotected roof of the parking garage while they waited for the minibus with the communications gear, which arrived from midtown at ten thirty-eight.
The Principal pulled up a minute behind the bus. He was a part Crow Indian named Don Darkfeather, a very tall man with the sinister thinness and crude energy of a whip. He had eyes like two black thumbtacks in a piece of tobacco-colored corkboard. His was an attitude of ruthless command. He had been directing MORG’s P and C operation in the New York metropolitan area since the day after the shooting of Raymond Dunwoodie in Central Park. His predecessor had been reassigned to a newly formed antiterrorist unit based in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska.
Darkfeather’s agents were equipped with belt transceivers, wrist microphones and earpieces as well as more powerful walkie-talkies. The team was composed of penetration specialists, crack drivers and shotmakers. The shotmakers carried low-velocity weapons: riot guns and revolvers loaded with the pancaking wadcutter slugs, which made terrible man-stopping wounds wherever they hit. Beneath his regulation dark gray trench coat each man wore a multi-layered Kevlar vest that could stop a .45 slug fired at close range. None of them had to be reminded that the man they were going after was one of the three or four best shotmakers ever turned out by MORG.
Darkfeather’s instructions were brief.
“Don’t overlook anybody,” he said. “Sandza could’ve made himself a part of the scene by now.”
“Sir, what if he has a fuck with him?” It was the MORG word for civilian.
“If you have to hole a fuck to get to Sandza, okay. We’ll sweeten it later.”
“Doctors, nurses?”
“Nobody’s sacred,” Darkfeather said.
“What about NYPD?”
The Indian tugged at one long sideburn and reconsidered.
“Don’t hole a cop,” he said. “That does take a lot of sweetenin’.”
* * *
Roth walked down the hall to 809, Gillian’s room. The door stood half open. There was a light on by the bed. He knocked softly at the door. “Miss Bellaver?”
When she didn’t reply the doctor walked in. He could see at a glance that the room was empty.
He was standing with his back to the bathroom. When he heard a door hinge creak he turned, a smile forming.
“I didn’t mean to—”
Roth bit his tongue in astonishment. A priest was standing in the bathroom doorway, pointing a gun at his head. Obviously he was accustomed to handling firearms. There was authority in his stance.
“What have you done with her, Doctor?”
The voice was familiar, and Roth felt an onrush of shock that threatened to topple him.
“Arrghhhh,” he said, fright stifling his power of speech. His body stiffened defensively as he remembered the beating, months ago, that had crippled him for more than a week. There had been few marks anywhere, although the pain even with opiates was nearly unbearable. He knew he couldn’t survive another beating like that, but this time he saw in those hellish eyes that Peter Sandza did not intend to go to any further trouble, he would simply pull the trigger when he was ready.
Dr. Roth couldn’t speak, but he could vividly picture gunshot trauma, and there was a heavy rising mass just beneath his diaphragm.
“I don’t have time,” Peter said in a toneless low yoke. “Get yourself sorted out fast and take me to Gillian Bellaver. Or I’ll start putting your lights out.”
“I—” Roth said, and found that his tongue was manageable, his throat not entire
ly paralyzed, “don’t know, where, she is. I just, g-got here my-m-my—”
“What I’ll do, Doctor, I’ll go for the back of the neck. Kiss one off the seventh cervical vertebra. Now you know what that does, it turns you into a living head for a few years; maybe they’ll be able to fix you up with one of those wheelchairs you operate by blowing air into a tube.”
“Wait! I know you don’t have any reason to believe me, but for God’s sake, man, will you l-listen! She is a patient here, but I just learned that tonight. Maybe they moved her to another room, I don’t know, but I can, if you’ll give me a moment to check, one of the floor nurses—”
A smile flickered. “They’re tied up belly to belly in a spare room down the hall. I counted on a long session with the girl, didn’t want interruptions. All right, strange as it may seem I think I believe you. I might even believe you if you told me you came alone.”
“I did!”
They had become aware of an intense maddened moaning out in the hall; the sound turned the hairs on the back of Roth’s neck spikey as pine needles. And, at the same time, someone was using a mop. Peter’s eyes widened a fraction, he seemed momentarily unable to cope with this intimation of Bedlam, one poor soul placidly mopping the floor while another went audibly insane. Then with his free hand he motioned Roth out the door.
Roth hurried outside looking the wrong way, but he caught a glimpse of something terrifying to his right just as Peter came up behind him and shoved him hard. Roth took two off-balance steps to the opposite wall and froze there. He looked starkly over his shoulder at some kind of apparition, wearing slippers steeped in blood, that glided toward him with little Oriental shuffle-steps.
Gillian’s skin was deathly white as watered milk. Her eyes rolled like the eyes of a frightened horse, and she was chomping her tongue. There was no crazy mop-lady; it was just the sound of an incredibly bloody robe, caught up on one ankle, that slopped along behind her. Gillian had stripped herself half naked; her nightgown was in tatters, most of it pasted to her shapely legs. Roth saw that her body was smeared with blood as well, and she kept making those unbearable sounds. But he saw no slashes, no deep pumping wounds, and he guessed that she wasn’t, couldn’t be, as severely injured as she looked.
He made a fumbling move to intercept Gillian, but Peter got to her first. Peter slapped her hard across the face, causing blood to spray from her bitten tongue. Gillian came to a cringing stop, hands motionless, eyes still and looking huge and halo-shiny in her drained face. The moans continued until he popped her a second time; now there were finger-welts on both cheekbones: From the small amount of blood on her mouth and chin Peter assumed she hadn’t done severe damage to her tongue. He saw it all coming back to her, whatever horror she had so pathetically fled; he moved deftly, ripped off the rest of the sodden gown, threw it against the far wall.
What a godawful load of blood, none of it hers. Whose, then? Had she murdered someone? A fantastic notion crossed his mind. He yanked the stinking slippery girl from the trailing robe and held her tightly against him. She was rigid and unbreathing in his arms.
“Find out where she’s been!” Peter said harshly to Roth. The doctor took off at a half run down the hall, following the trail of blood swabbed on the floor.
Peter upended Gillian, carried her into the room, kicked the door shut and stood her against the wall by the bathroom door. He soaked a towel and began to clean her. She was cold to the touch and still cringing, her eyes shut. He rubbed brutally; she shit on the towel. Peter sighed and threw it away and got another and rubbed harder. It hurt and Gillian groaned, but that was a healthier sound, one of protest, and Peter was encouraged. He helped himself to a fistful of her long hair and banged her head lightly against the wall.
“Look at me,” he demanded. “Whatever it was, it’s over now. You’re safe and you can face it. Don’t let it get the best of you. I said open your eyes and look at me, girl!”
Gillian trembled, but she looked at him. One inward eye, he noted, and great bones; probably a beauty when she didn’t look like something he’d fished out of a sewer. He used a corner of the towel more gently to sponge her flecked lips.
“All the blood is gone,” Peter insisted. “I wiped it off you … no, don’t.”
The impulse to hysteria was running wild under her skin. He lashed a flank with the twisted wet towel and she yelped.
“Don’t go off again. Talk to me. What’s your name? Tell me your name goddammit!”
“G-Gillyun.”
“Louder. Gillian what?”
“BELLAVER! Don’t hit me anymore.”
It was more of a warning than a plea. She still couldn’t control her miserable trembling, but there were signs of warmth, there was a healthy flush in the triangle of her throat, and great areas the length of her body were mottled where he’d scrubbed so hard.
“I’m cold,” Gillian said, her voice blurred by her defective tongue. “You’re tearing my hair out! And I d-don’t think you’re a very n-nice—”
When the tears came, copiously, Peter stepped back, breathing a little heavily but satisfied with his rescue operation. He wondered just how close she’d come to spending the rest of her life in a very expensive sanitarium wearing a fixed placid expression like a heavy coat of wax.
He left Gillian long enough to get a terry robe from the closet. He helped her into the robe and sat her in a chair. She sobbed and coughed herself blue in the face and then tried to bundle up in a tight ball, to retreat as far back into childhood as she could get. Another familiar symptom: she wanted to sleep and sleep, like naptime on mother’s bed on a rainy afternoon.
Peter knew his time was critically short. Nevertheless he pulled Gillian, wailing and complaining, from the chair, and began to trot her around the room.
“Walk! Stop the baby stuff. At least act like you’re grown up.”
“You prick! You asshole!”
Gillian struck at him, then flinched when he brought his hand back. He kissed her instead, tenderly and with as much lust as he thought she might be familiar with at her age. Gillian found this new approach confusing, shocking and indefensible, and as she grew slack in his arms gradually the kiss became a comfort to her. With his own eyes closed Peter readily lost awareness of her youth; the snug pressure of her uncovered cunt against his body was mature enough, even insinuating.
Then her lips parted and Peter tasted bitter blood. He took Gillian by the arm, this time hearing no complaints, and led her to the wash basin to rinse her mouth.
The cold water stung her lacerated tongue and she made mewing sounds of pain. She swallowed some of the water and almost heaved, but it stayed on her stomach.
Peter put a hand calmingly on the back of her neck.
He felt grotesquely ambivalent toward this unusual girl, as if he’d just given birth to her, as if they were already lovers. He was in the worst possible danger, or he would’ve taken her with him … and Peter knew Gillian would accompany him without question. He had saved her from the fury and the terror, and in a sense he owned her now.
Gillian looked up wide-eyed at the strange priest who had beaten and then half seduced her. Then the truth occurred to her, which Peter read in her eyes.
“No, I’m not a priest, it’s just a lousy disguise. Look, I have to go now, Gillian. If I stayed any longer I could get killed. I know you can’t make much sense of what I’m saying, so just remember the words and think about it later. I have a son like you, Gillian—very much like you, I think. He was taken from me. I have to find him. I believe you’re the only one who can help me, so I’ll be back to see you. In the meantime there’s a man named Roth; watch out for him. He’ll be sympathetic and helpful and charming. You can’t believe anything he tells you. Don’t, under any circumstances, admit to him that you have the powers of a clairvoyant. And stay away from a place called Paragon Institute. Once you’re inside I may not be able to get you out.”
The hall outside Gillian’s door was getting noisy, and Peter
frowned. He picked up the black bag which he’d brought with him to the hospital.
“I want you to go to the telephone before all hell breaks loose up here. Call your father or someone else you can trust, a lawyer would be ideal, and tell him to come get you tonight. Say that you’ll be waiting in room 909, which is the room directly above this one. I’ve already checked it out, and it’s unoccupied. The stairs are just across the hall. Get dressed, walk to 909, shut the door and wait until the one you called has come for you. Do you have all that, Gillian?”
Gillian spat pink water into the bowl and nodded wearily.
“What’s … your name?” she asked him.
“Peter.”
“Peter.” Gillian nodded again and tried to smile. Peter. She liked that name. For no good reason tears began to run down her cheeks. She reached for a towel to dry her face. “Peter,” she mumbled. “Mrs. McCurdy’s dead.” She found it increasingly painful to talk because of her tongue. “Ah …” Gillian caught her breath and made another attempt. She urgently had to tell him, while she could still get the words out. “Just bled and bled. All over. Soaked … me. God. I think I did it, Peter. I made it happen.”
She lowered the towel and looked around, desperate for his understanding.
Peter was gone.
Gillian experienced a sharp cramp of fear. No, she needed him! But she wasn’t going to cry any more. And he’d made a very sensible suggestion. She knew she must leave the hospital right away, and go home. There she could be safe until Peter came back—
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