The Runes of the Earth

by Stephen R. Donaldson

  Then he was gone, irretrievable, leaving only Joan and Linden behind.

  Dr. Berenford believed that he had been too silent while Covenant lived. Afterward he raised his voice. Impelled by her own regrets, Megan Roman acted on his words. And the voters and politicians of the county felt more responsible than they cared to admit. They lobbied the state legislature: they passed mill levies: they applied for grants.

  Eventually they built Berenford Memorial Psychiatric Hospital, named for Julius when he had slipped away in his sleep one night five years ago. And they appointed Linden as Berenford Memorial’s CMO. She was the only one among them who had accompanied Covenant to his last crisis.

  Now she presided over a small facility of twenty beds, all in private rooms. Her staff included five nurses, five orderlies, one janitor, one maintenance man, and a coterie of part-time secretaries, in addition to volunteers like Maxine Dubroff. Berenford Memorial had two psychiatrists on call. And one physician—herself—with a background in emergency-room medicine and family practice: trauma, triage, and pink eye.

  From the lobby, she guided Covenant’s son upstairs to the “acute care” wing: ten beds devoted to patients who were inclined to injure themselves, assault the staff, or run away at random opportunities. Instead of proceeding to Joan’s room, however, she paused at the top of the stairs and turned to face Roger.

  “A moment, if you don’t mind, Mr. Covenant. May I ask you a question?” When he had seen his mother, he might not give her another chance. “The more I think about it, the less I understand why you’re here.”

  Again his smile seemed merely reflexive. “What is there to understand? She’s my mother. Why wouldn’t I want to see her?”

  “Of course,” Linden countered. “But what inspired your desire to take care of her? That’s not as common as you might think. Frankly, it sounds a little”—the term she wished to use was de trop, existentially dislocated—“daunting.”

  In response, Roger’s manner seemed to sharpen. “The last time I saw her,” he replied precisely, “she told me that if she failed I would need to take her place. Until yesterday I didn’t have the resources to do that.”

  Involuntarily Linden caught her breath as the bottom of her stomach seemed to fall away. “Failed at what?”

  Long ago, Joan had sought out Thomas Covenant—no, not sought out, she had been sent—in order to teach him despair. Despite her terrible plight, however, and her thirst for his blood, she had failed absolutely.

  “Isn’t that obvious?” Covenant’s son returned. “She’s here, isn’t she? Wouldn’t you call that failure?”

  No. For a moment, Linden’s heart quailed. Memories beat about her head like wings: she felt harried by furies.

  Her face must have betrayed her chagrin. Solicitously, Roger reached out to touch her arm. “Dr. Avery, are you all right?” Then he dropped his hand. “I really think you should let me take her. It would be better for everyone.”

  Even you, he seemed to say. Especially you.

  Take her place.

  Ten years ago, empowered by all of those hands thrust into the flames, all of that ceded pain, as well as by the fatal rush of Thomas Covenant’s blood, a bitter malevolence had pierced the reality of Linden’s life. It had drawn her in Covenant’s wake to another place, another dimension of existence. The psychiatrists on call at Berenford Memorial would have called it a “psychotic episode”—an extended psychotic episode. With Covenant, she had been summoned to a realm known as the Land, where she had been immersed in evil until she was altered almost beyond recognition. During the black hours of that one night, before Julius Berenford had found her with Covenant’s body, she had somehow spent several months outside—or deep within—herself, striving to win free of her own weakness and the legacy of her parents in order to preserve the beauty of a world which had never been meant for corruption.

  Now Roger’s words seemed to suggest that she would have to face it all again.

  No. Shuddering, she came back to herself. It was impossible. She was flinching at shadows, echoes. Roger’s father was dead. There would be no second summons for her. The Land was Thomas Covenant’s doom, not hers. He had given his life for it, as he had for Joan, and so its enemy, the dark being known variously as a-Jeroth, the Grey Slayer, and Lord Foul the Despiser, had been defeated.

  Trusting in that, Linden set aside her alarm and faced Covenant’s son.

  Roger’s implied threat she ignored. Instead she asked, “What do you mean, you have the ‘resources’ to take her place?”

  “It’s simple,” Roger replied. He seemed to misunderstand her without being aware of it. “I’m twenty-one now. I’m of age. Yesterday I inherited my father’s legacy.

  “Of course,” he explained as if Linden might have forgotten, “he left everything to my mother. Haven Farm. His royalties. But she was declared incompetent when she was committed here. Ms. Roman—you know her, my father’s lawyer—has been trustee of the estate. But now it’s all mine.” His smile hinted at self-satisfaction. “Once I’ve persuaded you to release her, she and I will live on Haven Farm.

  “She’ll like that. She and my father were happy there.”

  Linden swallowed a groan. Thomas and Joan Covenant had lived on Haven Farm until his leprosy had been diagnosed. Then she had left him, abandoned him; divorced him to protect their son from his illness. No doubt she had believed that she was doing the right thing. Nevertheless the knowledge of her own frailty—the awareness that she had broken her vows when her husband had needed her most—had given the Despiser a foothold in her soul. Her shame was fertile soil for the seeds of despair and madness.

  And when she had been deprived of every conscious impulse except the desire to taste her ex-husband’s blood, Covenant had cared for her on Haven Farm until the end. The idea that Joan would “like” living there again nearly brought tears to Linden’s eyes.

  And Roger had not answered her real question.

  “That isn’t what I meant,” she insisted thickly. “You said she told you to take her place if she failed. Now you have the resources do that.”

  “Did I?” His smile remained expressionless. “You must have misheard me. Now I can take your place, Dr. Avery. I have enough money to care for her. We have a home. I can afford all the help I need.

  “She isn’t the only one who failed.”

  Linden frowned to conceal a wince. She herself had failed Joan: she knew that. She failed all her patients. But she also knew that her failure was beside the point. It did nothing to diminish the value or the necessity of her chosen work.

  And she was sure that she had not “misheard” Roger.

  Abruptly she decided not to waste any more time questioning him. For all practical purposes, he was impervious to inquiry. And he had nothing to say that might sway her.

  Surely he would leave when he had seen his mother?

  Without challenging his falseness, she drew him forward again, toward Joan’s room.

  Along the way, she explained, “This is where we keep our more disturbed patients. They aren’t necessarily more damaged or in more pain than the people downstairs. But they manifest violent symptoms of one form or another. We’ve had to keep your mother under restraint for the past year. Before that—”

  Linden temporarily spared herself more detail by pushing open Joan’s door with her shoulder and leading Roger into his mother’s room.

  Out in the hall, the characteristic smell of hospitals was less prominent, but here it was unmistakable: an ineradicable admixture of Betadine and blood, harsh cleansers and urine, human sweat, fear, floor wax, and anesthetics, accented by an inexplicable tang of formalin. For some reason, medical care always produced the same scents.

  The room was spacious by the standard of private rooms in County Hospital next door. A large window let in the kind of sunlight that sometimes helped fragile psyches recover their balance. The bed occupied the center of the floor. An unused TV set jutted from one wall near the ceiling. T
he only piece of advanced equipment present was a pulse monitor, its lead attached to a clip on the index finger of Joan’s left hand. According to the monitor, her pulse was steady, untroubled.

  On a stand by the head of the bed sat a box of cotton balls, a bottle of sterile saline, a jar of petroleum jelly, and a vase of bright flowers. The flowers had been Maxine Dubroff’s idea, but Linden had adopted it immediately. For years now she had arranged for the delivery of flowers to all her patients on a regular basis, the brighter the better. In every language which she could devise or imagine, she strove to convince her patients that they were in a place of care.

  Joan sat upright in the bed, staring blankly at the door. Restraints secured her arms to the rails of the bed. Her bonds were loose enough to let her scratch her nose or adjust her posture, although she never did those things.

  In fact, one of the nurses or orderlies must have placed her in that position. Fortunately for her caregivers, Joan had become a compliant patient: she remained where she was put. Pulled to her feet, she stood. Stretched out on the bed, she lay still. She swallowed food placed in her mouth. Sometimes she chewed. When she was taken into the bathroom, she voided. But she did not react to words or voices, gave no indication that she was aware of the people who tended her.

  Her stare never wavered: she hardly seemed to blink. Standing or reclining, her unfocused gaze regarded neither care nor hope. If she ever slept, she did so with her eyes open.

  Her years of catatonia had marked her poignantly. The skin of her face had hung slack on its bones for so long now that the underlying muscles had atrophied, giving her a look of mute horror. Despite the program of exercises which Linden had prescribed for her, and which the orderlies carried out diligently, her limbs had wasted to a pitiful frailty. And nothing that Linden or the nurses could do—nothing that any of the experts whom Linden had consulted could suggest—spared her from losing her teeth over the years. No form of nourishment, oral or IV, no brushing or other imposed care, could replace her body’s need for ordinary use. In effect, she had experienced more mortality than her chronological years could contain. Helpless to do otherwise, her flesh bore the burden of too much time.

  “Hello, Joan,” Linden said as she always did when she entered the room. The detached confidence of her tone assumed that Joan could hear her in spite of all evidence to the contrary. “How are you today?”

  Nevertheless Joan’s plight tugged at her heart. A sore the size of Linden’s palm stigmatized Joan’s right temple. A long series of blows had given her a deep bruise which had eventually begun to ooze blood as the skin stretched and cracked, too stiff to heal. Now a dripping red line veined with yellow and white ran down her cheek in spite of everything that could be done to treat it.

  When the bruise had first begun to bleed, Linden had covered it with a bandage; but that had made Joan frantic, causing her to thrash against her restraints until she threatened to break her own bones. Now Linden concentrated on trying to reduce the frequency of the blows. On her orders, the wound was allowed to bleed: cleaned several times a day, slathered with antibiotics and salves to counteract an incessant infection, but left open to the air. Apparently it calmed Joan in some way.

  Roger stopped just inside the door and stared at his mother. His face betrayed no reaction. Whatever he felt remained closed within him, locked into his heart. Linden had expected surprise, shock, dismay, indignation, perhaps even compassion; but she saw none. The undefined lines of his face gave her no hints.

  Without shifting his gaze, he asked softly, “Who hit her?”

  He didn’t sound angry. Hell, Linden thought, he hardly sounded interested—

  She sighed. “She did it to herself. That’s why she’s restrained.”

  Moving to the side of the bed, she took a couple of cotton balls, moistened them with sterile saline, and gently began to mop Joan’s cheek. One soft stroke at a time, she wiped away the blood upward until she reached the seeping wound. Then she used more cotton balls to dab at the wound itself, trying to clean it without hurting Joan.

  Linden would have cared for her carefully in any case; but her devotion to Thomas Covenant inspired an extra tenderness in her.

  “It started a year ago. Until then we kept her downstairs. She’d been unreactive for so long, we never thought that she might be a danger to herself. But then she began punching at her temple. As hard as she can.”

  Hard enough to wear calluses on her knuckles.

  “At first it wasn’t very often. Once every couple of days, no more. But that didn’t last long. Soon she was doing it several times a day. Then several times an hour. We brought her up here, tied her wrists. That seemed to work for a while. But then she got out of the restraints—”

  “Got out?” Roger put in abruptly. “How?”

  For the first time since he had entered the room, he looked at Linden instead of at Joan.

  Avoiding his eyes, Linden gazed out the window. Past the institutional profile of County Hospital next door, she could see a stretch of blue sky, an almost luminous azure, free of fault. Spring offered the county days like this occasionally, days when the air reminded her of diamondraught, and the illimitable sky seemed deep enough to swallow away all the world’s hurts.

  Today it gave her little comfort.

  “We don’t know,” she admitted. “We’ve never been able to figure it out. Usually it happens late at night, when she’s alone. We come in the next morning, find her free. Blood pumping from her temple. Blood on her fist. For a while we had her watched twenty-four hours a day. Then we set up video cameras, recorded everything. As far as we can tell, the restraints just fall off her. Then she hits herself until we make her stop.”

  “And she still does?” Roger’s manner had intensified.

  Linden turned from the window to face him again. “Not as much as before. I can get you a copy of the tapes if you want. You can watch for yourself. Now it only happens three or four times a night. Occasionally during the day, not often.”

  “What changed?” he asked.

  Gazing at him, she remembered that his father had done everything in his power to protect both Joan and her. Roger’s stare conveyed the impression that he would not have done the same.

  Her shoulders sagged, and she sighed again. “Mr. Covenant, you have to understand this. She was going to kill herself. One punch at a time, she was beating herself to death. We tried everything we could think of. Even electroshock—which I loathe. During the first six or seven months, we gave her an entire pharmacy of sedatives, tranquilizers, soporifics, stimulants, neural inhibitors, beta blockers, SSRIs, antiseizure drugs—enough medication to comatize a horse. Nothing worked. Nothing even slowed her down. She was killing herself.”

  Apparently something within her required those blows. Linden considered it possible that the Land’s old enemy had left a delayed compulsion like a posthypnotic suggestion in Joan’s shattered mind, commanding her to bring about her own death.

  Not for the first time, Linden wondered what Sheriff Lytton had said or done to Joan during the brief time when she had been in his care. When Julius Berenford had driven to Haven Farm after Covenant’s murder, he had found Joan there: confused and frightened, with no memory of what had transpired; but able to speak and respond. Wishing to search for Covenant and Linden without interference, Julius had sent Joan to County Hospital with Barton Lytton; and by the time they had reached the hospital Joan’s mind was gone. Linden had asked Lytton what he had done, of course, pushed him for an answer; but he had told her nothing.

  “And she was getting worse,” Linden went on. “More frantic. Hysterical. She hit herself more often. Sometimes she refused to eat, went days without food. She fought us so hard that it took three orderlies and a nurse to fix an IV. She began to lose alarming amounts of blood.”

  “What changed?” Roger repeated intently. “What did you do?”

  Linden hesitated on the edge of risks which she had not meant to take. Without warning, the air
of Joan’s room seemed crowded with dangerous possibilities. How much of the truth could she afford to expose to this unformed and foolish young man?

  But then she tightened her resolve and met his question squarely. “Three months ago, I gave her back her wedding ring.”

  Without glancing away from him, Linden reached to the collar of Joan’s nightgown and lifted it aside to reveal the delicate silver chain hanging around her neck. From the end of the chain, still hidden by the nightgown, dangled a white gold wedding band. Joan had lost so much weight that she could not have kept a ring on any of her fingers.

  Roger’s smile hinted at sudden hungers. “I’m impressed, Dr. Avery. That was obviously the right thing to do. But I would not have expected—” He stopped short of saying that he would not have expected such insight from her. “How did you figure it out? What made you think of it?”

  Committed now, Linden shrugged. “It just came to me one night.

  “I don’t know how much you know about the end of your father’s life. For the last two weeks before he was killed, he took care of Joan.” On Haven Farm. “She had already lost her mind, but she wasn’t like this. In some ways, she was much worse. Practically rabid. The only thing that calmed her was the taste of your father’s blood. When he needed to feed her, or clean her, he would let her scratch him until she drew blood. Sucking it off his skin would bring her back to herself—for a little while.”

  Behind Linden’s professional detachment, a secret anger made her hope that she might yet shock or frighten Roger Covenant.