The Sleepless

by Graham Masterton

  ‘Come on,’ Michael urged Victor.

  ‘What?’ said Victor.

  ‘Come on, that’s all! We may be too late!’

  The doctor stood staring in bewilderment as they hurried out and ran to the elevators. Michael punched 10 and then they waited and waited, while express elevators whooshed past, or downward elevators pinged and opened up, revealing crowds of chattering nurses and urbane-looking interns. At last, after nearly two minutes had gone aching past, an upward-bound elevator arrived, pinged, and opened up. It was occupied by a single elderly doctor in a three-piece suit.

  ‘Have you tried the Famous Atlantic?’ he asked, out of the blue, as the elevator rose toward the 10th.

  ‘Can’t say that I have,’ Michael replied.

  ‘I had the schrod today, it was excellent. Right off the pier, straight on to your plate. The only way you can get it fresher than that is to swim across the harbour with your mouth open.’

  The elevator doors opened, and before the doctor could open his mouth a second time, Michael and Victor were gone. They jogged along the corridor until they reached the reception desk. Under a fluorescent desklamp, a bosomy blonde nurse in a saucy little starched cap was reading the National Enquirer. The headline read ‘Baby Born With Four Legs’. She looked up and flashed them a wide, dazzling smile.

  ‘Dr Rice?’ asked Michael. ‘We’re friends of his. Intimate friends.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ the nurse replied. ‘Dr Rice can’t be seen by anybody right now, not even family. He’s just been through major surgery, and he’s still very, very sick.’

  ‘Some of the doctors have seen him,’ Michael insisted.

  ‘Well, of course. Doctors are doctors.’

  ‘But I’m one of his patients.’

  ‘I’m sorry, sir. You still can’t see him.’

  ‘I must see him. Dr Moorpath’s seen him!’

  ‘I just told you, sir, Dr Moorpath is a doctor. He’s entitled to see him. Now, don’t give me any trouble, please, or I’ll have to call security.’

  At that moment, a messenger-boy arrived at the desk with flowers – irises and summer daisies and lilies. ‘Rice?’ he wanted to know.

  ‘Room 1011,’ the nurse told him; and that was all that Michael needed. Without a word he sprinted away from the reception desk, and along the corridor, following the signs that said 1000-1020.

  Faster, for Christ’s sake, faster! He pumped around the corner, and there was the door of 1011, only thirty feet away from him. The reason he could see the number so clearly was because the door was slightly ajar.

  ‘Sir!’ the nurse was calling after him. ‘Sir! You can’t go in there!’

  Panting, Michael slowed down to a hurried walk. But as he did so, the door of room 1011 opened even wider and Raymond Moorpath came out. He was wearing a dark blazer and a dark turtle-neck, and his normally sleek hair was ruffled. He stared at Michael in surprise and displeasure.

  ‘Dr Moorpath – ‘ Michael began. But in a strange, guarded gesture, Dr Moorpath shielded his face with his hand, and started to hurry away along the corridor.

  ‘Raymond, for Christ’s sake!’ Michael shouted after him.

  Victor caught up with him. ‘What’s happened? Who was that?’

  ‘Raymond Moorpath, acting like the dog that stole the Sunday roast.’

  Victor looked into Room 1011, and then he turned back to Michael with a serious expression on his face. ‘More like the pathologist who did for Dr Rice.’

  Michael stepped into the room. It was one of Boston Central’s most sophisticated recovery rooms, with all of the monitoring and life-support equipment that anybody could have needed. Dr Rice lay on the bed in the centre of the room with a cage covering his legs. He was connected to a nasal drip and a McClary vital-signs monitor. His face was yellowy-grey. The monitor was beeping a warning that Dr Rice’s pulse, respiration and brain activity had already ceased, and that his blood pressure was taking a long, relentless nosedive.

  ‘Shit,’ said Michael. He turned around to go after Dr Moorpath, but he cannoned into two blue-clad doctors, a nurse, and a hospital security guard.

  ‘What the hell’s going on here?’ one of the doctors demanded. ‘Who the hell are you?’

  ‘Victor!’ Michael shouted. ‘Tell him who the hell we are and what the hell’s going on here!’

  The doctor stepped back, startled. Michael pushed him in the chest, flat-handed, jostled the security guard with his shoulder, and then started to run off down the corridor, in pursuit of Dr Moorpath.

  ‘Freeze!’ screamed the security guard. ‘Freeze!’ But Michael had already reached the corner of the corridor. He dodged off to the right, almost stumbling over his own feet, and then he was running full-tilt down the corridor, gasping with exertion. His feet thudded on the carpet, doors jiggled past him, lights jiggled past. Somebody opened a door right next to him and shouted, ‘Hey!’ as he passed.

  He reasoned that Dr Moorpath wouldn’t try to make it back to the main elevator bank. That would mean doubling-back on himself, with the risk that Victor and he might have split up, to catch him from either direction.

  It was then that he reached the emergency stairs – and the pneumatically-buffered door was just closing.

  He shoved the door wide open again, and found himself in a gloomy concrete stairwell, with blue-painted metal railings. He stopped still, and listened – and, sure enough, he could hear the echoing chip-chipping noise of Dr Moorpath climbing the staircase to the next storey.

  ‘Raymond!’ he shouted, his voice hoarse from running. ‘Raymond! I have to talk to you!’

  There was no reply. Only the sound of Dr Moorpath climbing higher and higher up the stairs.

  ‘Goddamn it,’ Michael breathed. But he had no choice. He started to climb the stairs two at a time, pulling on the railings to help himself up. He passed the nth floor, and then the 12th. He could still hear Dr Moorpath’s footsteps two or three storeys above him, although he was gradually slowing down. Four storeys of twenty-four steps each were enough for anybody who was young and fit, but Dr Moorpath was middle-aged and 40 lbs overweight.

  Suddenly, up above him, Michael heard a sharp rattling sound. Looking up the stairwell, he saw sunlight flooding in. Dr Moorpath must have reached the roof, and opened the access doors. Michael heaved himself faster and faster up the staircase, chilled with sweat and whining for breath, until at last he reached the final flight.

  He hesitated for a moment. The two access doors were swinging slowly backwards and forwards in the warm afternoon wind, so that a parallelogram of sunlight swung backwards and forwards across the concrete walls of the stairwell. Michael glimpsed buildings, rooftops, and smoke. There was no sign of Dr Moorpath. Maybe he had already jumped from the roof. But Dr Moorpath had never seemed like the suicidal type – too proud, too arrogant, too self-assured. It was much more likely that he was hiding behind the doors, waiting to knock Michael down.

  ‘Raymond?’ called Michael. ‘Raymond, can you hear me?’

  The doors swung backwards and forwards, but there was no reply. Michael wiped the sweat from his face with his handkerchief, and then blew his nose. He felt as if his lungs and his sinuses had been scoured out with Ajax.

  He heard distant sirens, and the deep beating of helicopters. He also heard a door opening, somewhere far below him, and the distorted sound of people shouting. It wouldn’t be very long before the security guards found out where he was – and that would spoil his chance of talking to Raymond Moorpath about the O’Brien autopsy; and ‘Mr Hillary’; and the white-faced young men. Not to mention the death of Dr Rice.

  Slowly, cautiously, straining his ears for the slightest sound of a footstep, Michael climbed the last flight of stairs to the rooftop. The doors swung and banged, and he reached out with the heel of his left hand and stopped them. He could either ease his way out, or else he could make a mighty leap. He decided, on the whole, that a mighty leap would be better. At least it would give him the advantage o
f surprise.

  He counted to three – and didn’t leap. Then he counted to three a second time, and leaped. The instant he did so, the right-hand door swung back in the wind, and the push-bar handle caught him a hard, numbing knock on the elbow. He was thrown totally off-balance, and tripped, and found himself rolling across the gritty blacktop surface of the roof, grazing both hands, and ripping the knees of his trousers – two triangular tears, like a schoolkid.

  Panting, panicking, he scrambled onto his feet. He looked all around him – but Dr Moorpath hadn’t been waiting for him behind the doors. He edged backwards a little, so that he could see behind the stair housing, but there was no sign of Dr Moorpath there, either. He glanced down over the parapet, sixteen storeys down to the rear of the hospital, where he could see steam issuing from the kitchen ventilators, and tiny people walking along the pathways. There was no sign of Dr Moorpath down there or any indication that people were hurrying to look at his fallen body, so he must still be up here, on the roof.

  Limping a little, his elbow still humming with pain, Michael slowly circled around the elevator tower and the air-conditioners and the grey-painted water tanks. In the distance he could see the sun glittering on the Inner Harbor, and traffic crossing the Northern Avenue Bridge. A warm, animated hum rose from the city, and Michael felt that he could almost hear individual voices: a woman calling her dog on Boston Common; a husband standing at an open apartment window on Branch Street, telling his wife that he loved her; a girl at a telephone booth on Boylston, arguing with her boyfriend.

  Over the south-western horizon, however, the smoke still hung, thick and brown, like the smoke of cremated dreams.

  Michael had almost completed an entire circuit of the roof when he came around the corner of the water tanks and there was Dr Moorpath. Michael was about to shout, ‘Raymond!’ but his voice died in his mouth.

  Dr Moorpath was standing on top of the carved stone coat of arms which crested the north-eastern parapet. His arms were spread wide, as if to balance himself, or to simulate crucifixion. His feet were on the very edge of the coat of arms, and below him there was nothing but a drop of 315 feet to the curved stone steps of the hospital’s main entrance. He had his back to Michael, his face to the wind. The skirts of his jacket fluttered and twirled.

  Michael shuffled as close as he dared. As soon as he sensed that Dr Moorpath was aware that he was there, he stopped. ‘Raymond,’ he said, trying to sound encouraging. ‘You’re not going to do anything rash, are you, Raymond?’

  Dr Moorpath didn’t answer at first, but bowed his head. Then he called back, ‘What’s the point of living, Michael, if we can’t indulge ourselves in an occasional act of rashness?’

  ‘I came here to talk to you,’ said Michael.

  ‘You certainly picked your moment. Two or three seconds later, and nobody would have known.’

  ‘You mean you killed him? You actually killed Dr Rice?’

  Dr Moorpath didn’t turn around. ‘Let’s just say that I saved him from something far worse.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Five hundred milligrams of potassium chloride stopped his heart almost instantaneously. Better than months of torture, don’t you agree, with those clammy young men sucking the very soul out of you?’

  ‘Then you know all about them? You know who they are?’

  Dr Moorpath said nothing.

  ‘They assassinated John O’Brien, didn’t they?’ said Michael. ‘I saw the photographs.’

  Still Dr Moorpath said nothing.

  ‘Tell me that they assassinated John O’Brien,’ Michael insisted. ‘Dr Rice hypnotized Frank Coward, and Frank Coward brought the helicopter down on Sagamore Point. That’s what happened, isn’t it? And that’s why they wanted to kill Dr Rice, so that he wouldn’t tell anybody how it was done.’

  ‘Since you know so much about it, why ask me?’ said Dr Moorpath. ‘Why not go directly to Edgar Bedford, or to Commissioner Hudson? Why not go directly to the district attorney’s office, or His Honour the mayor? Talk to the Globe, talk to the Phoenix, talk to the Herald. Talk to the TV stations.’

  Michael waited for Dr Moorpath to say something more, but he didn’t. Instead, he remained balanced on that five and a half inches of sandstone, with his arms spread out, like a heavy black rook.

  But what Dr Moorpath had already implied had been quite frightening enough. With a feeling of terrible coldness, Michael realized that there would be absolutely no future in talking to Edgar Bedford about ‘Mr Hillary’ and the white-faced men – nor to the commissioner of police, nor to the district attorney, nor to the mayor or the media.

  In fact, if he tried to pursue the John O’Brien assassination any further, he would probably be putting himself in what Plymouth Insurance usually described as ‘a calculated and premeditated position of extreme jeopardy’. In other words, his chances of survival would be so small that nobody would agree to insure him.

  What Dr Moorpath was telling him was that Joe Garboden had been right in his suspicions, and that those white-faced men had influence that could only be guessed at. They whispered into all the ears that mattered, gave rewards to those of whom they approved, and took terrifying steps to remove those who happened to displease them.

  ‘Raymond,’ Michael appealed, ‘you have to tell me who they are.’

  Dr Moorpath gave him a minimal shake of his head. ‘No, I don’t, Michael. And believe me, you’d be better off not knowing.’

  ‘Aren’t you going to come down?’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Nobody’s going to harm you, Raymond. And if it’s true what you’re saying about the district attorney’s office, they’re not even going to prosecute you, are they?’

  ‘I didn’t do what I was told,’ said Dr Moorpath. ‘I interfered.’

  ‘So? What can they do?’

  ‘What did they do to Elaine Parker? What did they do to Sissy O’Brien? What did they do your friend Joe Garboden? Believe me, Michael, they want me now, and it’s better this way, by far.’

  He edged a half-inch closer to the brink of the stone crest. He lifted his face toward the sky. ‘They showed me something I didn’t believe possible,’ he said. ‘They showed me the power of the human aura in all its glory.’

  ‘You mean hypnosis, is that what you’re talking about, hypnosis?’

  ‘Hypnosis is just the beginning. Hypnosis is just the way in, like the hole in the skirting-board through which the mice wriggle in, to discover the wonderful riches of the larder. The human aura is magical, infinite, astounding – and those who learn to use it can command the very substance of life itself.’

  Dr Moorpath was almost hysterical now. Michael cautiously reached out his hand and said, ‘Come on, Raymond – come down from there. I want to know more. I want you to tell me more. But I can’t do it while you’re teetering right on the edge there, honestly.’

  Dr Moorpath turned around and stared at Michael over his right shoulder. His face was hair-raising. His eyes were staring and his jaw muscles were clenched so tightly that he looked as he might explode from the inside.

  ‘Watch!’ he said.

  And stepped off the crest.

  And walked.

  He took long, trudging steps through thin air – up from the parapet, higher and higher, like a man trying to climb up a deep snowdrift.

  Michael couldn’t move. He couldn’t believe what he was seeing. Yet there, ten feet away, now further, and higher, Dr Moorpath was steadily walking away from him – sixteen storeys above the ground.

  Michael couldn’t call out, couldn’t even speak. He was terrified and thrilled, both at the same time.

  Dr Moorpath didn’t look back, but hunched his shoulders more. It looked as if he were finding his climb harder and harder. He began to slow down, and once or twice he stumbled. He was nearly thirty feet away from the hospital now, and ten feet higher than the level of the roof. Michael saw a pale, pinkish flicker of light criss-crossing Dr Moorpath’s bac
k. The same pinkish flicker that he had seen when Dr Rice had hypnotized him. His etheric body. His aura. And as Dr Moorpath struggled higher and higher, the flickering grew brighter, and more frequent, until his heavy black outline was surrounded by dancing, dazzling bursts of energy.

  He lifted one leg, then hesitated; then lifted the other – then hesitated longer.

  Thin wisps of smoke began to pour from the back of his jacket.

  He raised his left hand, as if he were trying to claw himself up a steep slope. Blinding yellow light burst from his sleeve, and smoke began to run from his wrists like blood. He raised his right hand, and heaved himself a little higher, but it was clear that he couldn’t sustain this air-walking for very much longer.

  There was a moment when he hung in mid-air, clinging desperately to nothing at all, with black smoke gushing out of his clothes. Then he started to scream and scream, and fire engulfed him from head to foot. There was a crackling noise like fireworks, a thick shower of sparks, and Dr Moorpath spun around and around, his mouth stretched impossibly wide, roaring with agony.

  For a moment, Michael thought that he would never fall, that he would continue to spin around in mid-air, until he was all burned up. Fragments of burning clothing fell from Dr Moorpath’s shoulders, and blazing fat spat from his thrashing feet. But suddenly he dipped sideways, and dropped. Michael took three stiff steps to the edge of the parapet and watched him fall, tumbling over and over, arms, legs, flame, feet, until he hit the ground like a sackful of burning barbecue ash.

  Michael was still standing by the parapet watching him burn when Victor appeared, followed by two security guards.

  ‘Jesus,’ said Victor, staring down at the crowds and the splattering of ashes. ‘What the hell happened?’

  ‘He set fire to himself,’ said Michael, dully. ‘He jumped. Same way those Japanese students killed themselves, you remember. It was on the news.’

  Victor laid his hand on Michael’s shoulder. ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘Sure I’m okay,’ said Michael; although he felt totally empty, totally flat, as if he were standing for the last time in a house that he was about to leave. No furniture, no rugs, no phone, and – surprisingly – no memories.