Benighted

by Kit Whitfield

  “You’ve seen things I’ll never see, Lola.” His hand slides up my back and rests at the base of my skull.

  “You’ve seen pictures of them.” My voice is quiet. “It isn’t worth it.”

  Paul turns over, strokes my head. “If you could, would you be lyco?”

  His hand is on my nape, and I laugh. “What, be one of those bastards? Not in a million years.”

  We sleep again. He lies with his arm over my waist. I’m warm and comfortable at midnight when the phone rings.

  Paul gets to it first. “Hello?” he says, picking up the phone and setting it down on the bed. “It’s for you, Lola. Some woman called Bride?”

  I moan, and take the receiver in a limp hand. “You’ve got the wrong number, Bride. You don’t know anyone who’d answer the phone at this hour.”

  “Who was that?” Bride’s question is light, friendly, but there’s tension in her tone.

  Well, she had to find out sometime. This is not how I wanted to tell her. “That,” I say, rubbing my eyes, “was Paul. He’s a nice young government employee who’s been taking me out to dinner lately.” “Government employee” could mean DORLA. I don’t feel like handling her interest that I’m going out with a lyco, not right now.

  I brace myself for a tirade, or possibly jubilant triumph that for once I wasn’t sleeping alone. Instead there’s a silence, and it’s then that I hear there’s other voices than Bride’s on the line, people are shouting and hustling in the background.

  “Bride? What’s wrong?”

  “Listen, love, you’d better prepare yourself. Are you sitting down?”

  I’m awake. “No, I’m lying in bed. Bride, tell me, what’s happened?”

  “It’s about Darryl Seligmann,” she says.

  I’m sitting up, holding on to Paul’s arm. “What? What’s happened?”

  “It happened this afternoon, pet. He’d been quiet for days. Nobody was watching him.”

  “Bride, tell me. Don’t hedge, I need to know now.”

  I hear her swallow, and then she tells me. “He bit his wrist when no one was looking. By the time someone checked on him, he’d lost so much blood that we had to take him to a hospital. They stitched him up and gave him a quick transfusion. He was due to be sent back this evening. But when we went to escort him, he was gone.”

  “Gone.” My voice echoes in the cramped room.

  “He’s escaped, love. Sometime this afternoon, someone took their eyes off him, and he just stood up and walked out of there.”

  FIFTEEN

  I’m here. It’s dark and cold outside, the gutters are wet and the air is full of mist, there are globes shining around the streetlamps, soft fat spheres with rainbow spectrums at their edges. I’m swathed in a thick coat, my hands tucked away into gloves, and as I stride into the hospital parking lot the group around the entrance is silhouetted against the bright plastic light coming through the door. Bride sees me, detaches herself from the others and trots across to take my arm.

  “He’s been gone a couple of hours,” she pants before I can greet her. “He didn’t take a car, but no one saw him. He could be anywhere by now.”

  The city has buses and wide streets. In two hours, he could have crossed it.

  “Why did you release him?” I say. “Now everyone will know where he’s been these past two weeks.” Because he didn’t get a phone call, we alerted no next-of-kin, the police were not informed. As far as the world is concerned, Darryl Seligmann just vanished.

  And now he’s back.

  “We couldn’t fix him up on our own.” I’ve joined the people at the door by now; this comes from Lydia Harlan, one of our medics. About forty with peachstone-brown skin, hair braided into long plaits that she wears in a swinging ponytail, plump and comely with soft, capable hands, Lydia knows as much doctoring as anyone can learn in two years’ training and twenty years’ practice. Almost every time I see her, she has a medical journal in her hand. “He did it cleverly. We gave him a mattress when we moved him to block C, he was curled up with his back to us. He ruined the mattress.”

  “Who found him?”

  “I did.” I turn at the sound of the hoarse, crumpled voice.

  “Nick.” Nick Jarrold. Johnny’s partner, the man who first had custody of Seligmann. “Why were you down there?”

  “Taking him food,” says Nick.

  That’s menial work. It’s the injured, the restricted-pay workers who do such jobs. If Nick was doing it, we’re either understaffed even beyond what I thought, or he’s getting sicker.

  “I was doing the rounds,” he husks. “Bastard knew what he was doing. Took me about five minutes, and all the time he just lay there. Then he turned around when I was about halfway through. He timed it.”

  “He turned around?”

  “Yeah. Pushed himself to his feet, wobbled on over to the bars, and held out his wrist.” Nick looks at me out of round eyes set in a graying, haggard face, and I see it. The swaying man, arm and hand and side caked and soaked and sticky with blood. “He still had blood on his mouth,” Nick says. “He was smiling.”

  “Didn’t you—Couldn’t you smell the blood?” I ask a question fast to close the smeared, smiling face out of my mind.

  Nick shrugs his shoulders. “No, I didn’t.” Ash rustles in his voice, and I silence myself. Nick doesn’t smell anything.

  “Who’s talked to security?” I huddle into the doorway and look around. Bride, the investigator on Seligmann’s case; Nick, the police liaison officer; Lydia, the medic. And me.

  “They’re not saying anything.” Nick coughs. “Shall we go inside?” The four of us push through the door and hang together as we stand in the corridor. St. Veronica’s, the city hospital. Leo’s birthplace, Marty’s ward, rooms and rooms full of crisis and change.

  I lower my voice. “Why not? Weren’t they supposed to be watching him?” We’re heading toward the ward now, the scene of the crime, the sterile white room Seligmann got up and left.

  “They say he walked out when they were changing shift.”

  “Christ.” We walk on in silence, our steps creaking on the shiny linoleum.

  We all know what this is. This is a dying man hustled in by DORLA out of nowhere, a pack of freaks with blood on their fists showing up with a real man and handing him over. There will have been bruises on Seligmann when we brought him in, sprains, damage. The doctors received a man who bit into the pale flesh of his wrist with loosened teeth.

  Seligmann is a fearsome man. They won’t have seen that. They wouldn’t have smuggled him out in the laundry; no one will have risked their career for him. But they didn’t watch him. Not closely. For them, there was nothing in him to fear.

  This is a busy place. As we pass through the wards, the occupied medics and the sick, quiet citizens, I see a face I recognize. There’s no help to be had, but I have to try.

  “Dr. Parkinson,” I hail him.

  He stops, turns a civil face my way.

  “Lola May Galley,” I say before he can once again not recognize this cheaply dressed, wan woman who’s claiming a moment of his expensive time. “I’m investigating the disappearance of Darryl Seligmann. He escaped from your hospital earlier this evening.”

  “Ah.” His sleek skin doesn’t flush. “Good evening, Miss Galley. How’s your sister?”

  “As you’d expect,” I say. “Dr. Parkinson, we’re looking into how he managed to escape, what time, where he’s likely to have gone.”

  “Hadn’t you better talk to security?” He gives a slow, measured glance at the people surrounding me. I put my hand back, just a little, held out at hip level; he doesn’t notice until they all step out of his line of vision.

  “We have. It’s just—hard to understand, Dr. Parkinson.” I smile, I don’t threaten, I hide my smooth palms by my sides. “I’d always thought this was a well-ordered hospital.”

  The man smiles right back at me. “Well, I would have said so. But then, I’m on the medical side.” His genial chu
ckle echoes back off the synthetic walls. “If you asked me how security was run, I’m afraid I couldn’t tell you much.”

  “You aren’t acquainted with any of the security staff, then? Not even by name, or by sight?”

  He backs down without losing grace. “I wouldn’t say that. But personal acquaintance is one thing. All I meant was that the mechanics of their business, I leave in their capable hands. My attention is on my patients.”

  I don’t take him up on “capable.” It’s too tired a shot. “Has this happened before?”

  “Not to my knowledge.” He lowers his head to me, careful as an elephant. “As I’ve said, I have little do with security. But I think I’d remember a serious breach. I think we may have had occasional trouble containing a mental patient now and again, but nothing I’d call serious. The staff have always struck me as capable men.” He smiles at me, bows down over folded hands as if to emphasize the difference in our height. “Now if you’ll excuse me, Miss Galley, I have patients to see.”

  I hold out my hand so he has to shake it, and his calluses rub smooth as polish over my bare tender skin. “Thank you for your help, Doctor,” I say, and turn away so he doesn’t have to see my face.

  The room Seligmann left has moldings around the ceiling, a plaster rose in the center. My eye jumps, once, at the sight of it. It’s just like every other hospital room. There’s nothing in here to explain why the capable men of this institution neglected all our warnings and let a wild, bloody man take a short, untroubled walk out to the streets and freedom.

  SIXTEEN

  Day after day, the rain rattles my window. Day after day, I reach the office with wet shoes, the smell of dust and fresh water soaking into my scarf. Day after day, I work, and I go home, and every door I enter, I feel a heavy saddle lift from my shoulders as I stop watching the streets for Seligmann.

  I don’t go out much. Becca thinks I don’t want to take Leo out in the rain. In her untidy, well-appointed rooms, I sit behind a locked door and hold Leo on my lap, let him squirm, too small to crawl away; I shake bright toys in front of his face and applaud him when he reaches out and grabs them; I coax him to sit up. Against Becca’s double-glazing the rain is muffled; it makes a soft noise like paper crumpling.

  Paul visits me. When the rain set in, he tried to persuade me to walk in it, but after a couple of tries I stopped. It’s too hard to see things far away. The roof of my apartment building is leaking. In my little hideaway ten floors down, there’s just a few trickles around the edges of the window frames. We wake to pools on the ledge, bubbles and buckles appearing in my careful paintwork. When the rain patters down, we bet on droplets, make them race, watch the world upended in each little lens of water.

  I work. Uneventful cases drift through my hands. Ally sweet-talks Kevin White and gets another look at Ellaway’s engine, comes back more sure than before that someone’s been tampering. The phone company takes its time and every day fails to come up with the address Ellaway called at the shelter. The police don’t find Seligmann.

  When he savaged Marty, he and the others, I shot one of them in the leg. We asked the hospital, we hacked into their records, we kept watch. The wounded man never appeared.

  Day after day, I hurry through the streets and lock doors behind me, and Seligmann is nowhere to be found.

  Am I being punished? Last year I did five dogcatches. This month I’ve got to do another one, two in a row, and it’s only February. My strawing takes place next month. I tell Bride that either they’re not planning to straw me and are showing their faith in my abilities, or they’re hoping I’ll get killed and save them the trouble. She laughs. Neither of us says that it’s a bad time, that prowlers and accidents are on the rise, that we’re calling everyone young and healthy onto patrol. I don’t say that I don’t want to patrol without Marty.

  “You know what you can do?” she says.

  “What?”

  “Take Nate.”

  “Are you punishing me, too?”

  She pulls out a pack of cigarettes and offers me one. I take it.

  “You got anything against him?” I can’t say yes. Bride lights up and sighs out a mouthful of smoke. “I wasn’t scheduled this month. He’s standing idle. I won’t be going out. Listen,” she lays her hand on my wrist, “Lolie, I’m getting old.”

  I shrug her hand away, not wanting to hear her talk about mortality.

  “I’m serious, pet, I’m not first-choice stock anymore. Not against lunes.”

  She can throw a punch still—we still box sometimes in the gym, and I don’t always win. She can interrogate a man cuffed to a chair. Not against lunes, she says, and I believe her. They’re so fast. Age hasn’t started seeping through my muscles yet, not really. I can’t bounce back from a sleepless night as I could ten years ago, that’s all. Hardly anything. But if Bride’s slowing down, she needs to get her pupils trained quickly, because she won’t be able to lead the collars much longer. DORLA’s seldom tactful about telling you you’re past it.

  “Old, hell,” I say. “I thought you said he wanted to be military. You don’t have to train to dogcatch for that, do you?”

  “You do if you want to keep it a secret you’re going in for it. Anyway, I was only guessing.”

  “Do you really want me to take him?”

  Bride taps ash into her coffee cup. “He’s a pretty good catcher. For a boy his age. He won’t get you into trouble.”

  “You inspire me with confidence.”

  “Well, what do you want, the Olympics?”

  I shrug, something stiff in my shoulders. “I—I don’t know. Guess I’m wishing Marty was back.”

  Which is true, but not the reason. I’m a sorry woman to use such an excuse.

  As I stretch and press my flesh into the tight-fitting gear, I think about the moon. I always liked it when it was crescent, the sanctuary moon, a slender curl of light around the ghostly, shaded disk. When I was a little girl, I used to stare out of the window and watch it. If my mother saw me, often she’d scold in a tired way: “Come away from the window, May, you’ll only make a smudge.” Never, “Come away from the window, stop dwelling on your future.” On clear nights, I could swear I saw craters and mountains, the textures and patterns on the surface of that gray sphere that stood poised in the sky, waiting to fill out with light.

  Paul says that in Middle English there was a word meaning moonlight bright enough to see by. Loten, or some such thing. It got used by poets: a silver fish glinting through the water was loten, a lovely melancholy girl had loten eyes. Paul himself only brought it up because we were listening to choral music and he wanted a word to describe the mood of Allegri’s Miserere; it’s possible he was trying to impress me. He says people stopped using the word when they discovered gas lighting. I don’t think it can have been that simple. He asked me what I meant—a zipper catches on my leg, I will not think about this night—and I couldn’t answer. Maybe the Victorians didn’t think loten was a proper expression to use, I said. Maybe people prefer to pretend that we can’t see in the dark.

  It’s a loten night tonight. Another woman might think it was beautiful.

  Nate already has the keys to the van when we meet. As I take them off him, look at his young, bony face, it sinks in that we’re going to be spending a night together, for hours we’ll be alone in a van with the city a wasteland around us and no one within miles. We have to talk, we have to work together, we must make something out of this desolate, lethal night.

  I lift the keys from his palm, hooking my finger through the ring, and I don’t touch him at all.

  He turns and walks ahead of me, slouching in the way that fit boys sometimes do, one shoulder dipping down, then the other. The vans wait in rows for us; couples break off from the crowd at the door and trail across the lot. Some of them say things, and their voices are thin in the open air. Nobody says much.

  As we wait in the convoy, lining up to get out into the night, I turn to Nate. “How many catches has Bride taken yo
u on?” I keep my hands on the wheel as I ask.

  He shrugs one shoulder. It’s an odd gesture, as if he were straining against something. “Six.”

  “That’s quite a few, you’re—how old?” My question sounds louder with the van doors closed upon us, more personal.

  “Nineteen.”

  I could ask how many months: it makes a difference. Marty’s nineteen, nineteen years and four months old. If I think of him and try to compare him with Nate, sitting here beside me, they seem irreconcilable. Courteous, soft-spoken Marty, tall and slight, the kind of height that’s lankiness when you’re a kid and becomes leanness when you grow up; a quick boy, an innocent, a fast learner, with whatever he feels glowing clear through his skin. Small, muscular Nate seems dense and lusterless as lead; he’s heavy metal. I can’t see past his surface.

  “How many collars have you done?” The van reaches the head of the convoy and turns left. There’s still a column of vans ahead of us. Something about the reflection of my headlights on their surfaces makes me think of bent-backed creatures, beasts of burden, a whole troop of them trudging silent into the distance.

  “Just one.” Nate says this deadpan, no apology or boast in his tone.

  “On the last catch?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How did it go?”

  “Okay.”

  “Who was the offender?”

  “A homeless woman.”

  I turn the van, keep my eyes on the road. The moon shines down, casting a faint, crystal light on the city beyond my headlights. “Was she charged?”

  “No.”

  He isn’t being hostile. There’s a density to the conversation, a dragging sense that he might talk freely if I could only get it started. He’s just answering my questions, that’s all. I don’t know what it would take to get him talking.

  “Bride tells me you want to go into the financial department.” Outside, the world gapes around me and my tiny bid for conversation.