The Cold Smell Of Sacred Stone m-6

by George C. Chesbro

"I can't do that, Frederickson." "Why not?"

  "It would look suspicious."

  "To whom?"

  "Not over the phone, Frederickson."

  "But he is awake."

  "Yes. . he's awake."

  "All right, Slycke. I'll see you at eleven."

  "And you'll come alone?"

  "I'll come alone."

  Slycke hung up. I pressed down the receiver bar, released it, and got a dial tone. I called Veil, grimaced with frustration when his telephone answering machine came on. I was starting to leave a message that I needed to speak to him as soon as possible when there was a click and he came on the line.

  "Hi, Mongo. I was painting, and I didn't want to be bothered by some idiot trying to sell me something."

  "Sorry for the interruption, Veil."

  "You're never an interruption. What's up?"

  "I could use some help tonight. Can I pick you up?"

  "No. I can get hold of a car and save you the trip into the city. What's the problem?"

  Quickly, I filled Veil in on what had been happening with Garth, my banning from the clinic, my filing of the seventy-two-hour notice, and Slycke's phone call.

  Veil's laugh was sharp, without humor. "He's got to be kidding. He really said that he wanted to meet you at eleven, and you should come alone?"

  "Maybe he thinks I never go to the movies. But he could be on the level, and in any case it's an opportunity for me to try and see if Garth's all right. I have to go. I want you to ride shotgun."

  "You've got it. I'll be there in an hour or so."

  "We've got plenty of time, so you don't have to rush. Can you make a stop in an electronics store?"

  "What do you need?"

  "A miniature tape recorder, and a pair of paging beepers with matching frequencies and signal buttons."

  "I'm not sure I like the idea of using beepers," Veil said as he sipped coffee at my small kitchen table and nodded at the two pocket-sized instruments in front of him. "Why don't I just come up with you?"

  "He's going to be meeting me downstairs."

  "You're going to have to find a way to leave the door wedged open, anyway. I'll follow the two of you up. He said he'd be keeping the staff busy elsewhere."

  "Yeah, but we don't know where 'elsewhere' is. There's too much open space up there, Veil, too many long corridors. It would be hard for even a ninja to keep visual track of me without risk of being spotted."

  "I can do it, Mongo," Veil said evenly. "Nobody will know I'm there."

  "Let's stick with the beepers. I'm pretty sure I can distract Slycke with a little sleight of hand, and I'll use a credit card to wedge the door open. If I do need you, then you can come running. Did you bring a gun?"

  Veil patted his right ankle.

  "Well, let's hope neither of us will be needing it," I said, shoving my keys across the table to him. "You take these. The little one will open and operate the elevator; the one with the M on it will open any other door in the clinic once you get up there. You've got the floor plan I drew for you, and I've put an X over Slycke's office-which is where I assume we'll be."

  "Are you taking your gun?"

  I shook my head. "In my situation, I don't think it's a good idea to take a gun into a mental ward. If something does happen to me, it's conceivable that a patient could get hold of it and start spraying bullets around for no reason at all. I don't want to be shot with my own gun, and I don't want to take any undue risk of innocent people getting hurt or killed. You'll be my gun-if I need you."

  Veil nodded, then slipped my keys into his pocket.

  "I'll be at the entrance to Building 26 exactly at eleven," I continued. "Precisely ten minutes later you'll get a beep-if everything is okay. You'll be in your car out on the street. After that, if I'm in there for any length of time, I'll beep you once every half hour to signal that I'm all right."

  "Let's make it every fifteen minutes Mongo."

  "All right, twenty. After the first beep to signal I'm in no danger, twenty-minute intervals should be enough. If Slycke is dealing with me straight, and if I have to pay attention to something he's saying or showing me, I don't want to have to keep looking at my watch. One beep means that Slycke and I are having tea and crumpets and don't wish to be disturbed. Two slow beeps means I don't like something I'm seeing, but that there's time to involve RPC Security and bring some cops up with you; those keys you're carrying should get their respectful attention. Three quick beeps-or no beep at the proper interval-means that the bad guys are tying me across the railroad tracks, and the train's coming around the bend; I'll need you in a big hurry."

  "Got it," Veil said evenly as he came around the table to synchronize his watch with mine while I buttoned my shirt over the miniature tape recorder taped to my chest. The wall clock read 10:55. "You watch your ass, Mongo."

  "Yep," I said, rising to my feet and reaching inside my shirt to turn on the recorder. "Let's do it."

  We left the staff building thirty seconds apart, with Veil going to his car while I cut behind the chapel to Building 26. I'd been expecting Slycke to be waiting for me outside, by the empty kiosk. He wasn't there. I gave it three minutes, then tried the door. It was open. I stepped inside, stopped in the vestibule in front of the elevators, looked around. The lights were on in the corridor, but they were decidedly dimmer than usual.

  Suddenly I wished I had brought my Beretta.

  "Slycke?"

  There was no answer.

  I'd done a few stupid things in my life, but over the years I hoped I had learned not to confuse stupidity with courage. I was getting too old for heroics, stupid or otherwise, and I'd already seen enough of this dimly-lit-corridor nonsense to convince me that I was walking into a trap. I wasn't going to walk any farther. It was certainly a classic two-beep situation if ever I'd seen one, but I didn't even plan on signaling Veil and waiting until he showed up with the cops. I'd go with him to get RPC Security, and would give Mr. Lippitt an emergency call for backup troops.

  I was heading back to the main entrance, feeling quite smug with myself for displaying such obvious good sense, when something very hard hit me on the back of the head, and even the dim lights in the corridor winked out.

  13

  Someone was singing, "Heigh ho, heigh ho, it's off to work we go. ."

  I'd never much cared for that song, and I particularly disliked it now that it was being sung in a low, rasping, ominously familiar voice.

  "The voices will stop after I kill you, dwarf," Mama Baker said.

  "Blauugfh," I said-or something to that effect. My ears seemed to be working perfectly well, but not my tongue.

  The fact that I couldn't make my tongue and lips form words didn't really make any difference, since Mama Baker obviously wasn't interested in hearing anything I had to say, but only in sacrificing me to the cruel, demanding, maliciously chatty gods he carried around with him inside his head.

  "Heigh ho, heigh ho, it's off to work we go. ."

  Nothing else seemed to be working right, either. My vision consisted of blurred, wavering images that only occasionally came into focus, then exploded or dissolved into wisps of luminous vapor that were sucked down long, multicolored DayGlo tunnels. My head felt as if the skull had melted and fused with my brain into a ball of thick rubber that was rolling around on my shoulders; I was very conscious of my own breathing, slow and deep, and the air in my lungs bubbled, fizzed, and popped like sparkling champagne; I imagined I could feel my blood, like warm milk, coursing through my veins and arteries, hear my heart pumping.

  Somebody had shot me up with something seriously psychotropic, I thought, and wondered if this was how some psychotics experienced the world before they were medicated.

  I was floating in the air face down, gently bobbing up and down like a toy blimp caught in a light breeze. I could feel my legs, and even managed to move them, but my feet weren't in contact with the ground, and so my feeble kicking was futile. My arms, however, weren't hanging in their accustom
ed places, and I wondered where they could have gone.

  "I'm going to hang you up and slit your throat, dwarf," Mama Baker said. "When all the blood has drained out of you, I'll be free."

  "Mmfltelkpt!" I replied as I rolled the ball of rubber that was my head to the left and, just for an instant, clearly saw the figure of Charles Slycke slumped against the wall just outside his open office door; the thick plastic barrel of a good-sized hypodermic needle was protruding from his right eye.

  Somebody had shot Slycke up pretty good.

  "Heigh ho, heigh ho, it's off to work we go. ."

  Human shapes appeared, dissolved, reappeared in the rainbow mists swirling around me. Patients I recognized.

  "Fmmlptzxchpht!" I cried, shouting for help and feebly kicking my legs.

  But, of course, nobody was going to help me-certainly not if it meant getting in Mama Baker's way. The freed patients of the D.I. A. clinic were content to wander aimlessly through their own private, tormented worlds, leaving Mama Baker alone with his sacrificial dwarf. The men were stepping around or over the corpses of two male nurses; one nurse had had his skull bashed in by something very heavy, and the other appeared to have been strangled.

  I just kept bob-bob-bobbing along through this Hieronymus Bosch world, and I finally managed to deduce that my upper body was wrapped in a canvas camisole and Mama Baker was schlepping me around by the back straps; I deduced this just before my bearer hung me up on a prong of a wooden coatrack he'd gotten from somewhere, and placed in the hallway near the elevator. All the doors in the place seemed to be wide open.

  "I'll be right back, dwarf. I gotta find myself something real sharp to cut you with."

  "Tegelmimp!"

  "Heigh ho, heigh ho," Mama Baker sang as he walked away.

  The circus was definitely in town and playing to a full house inside my skull, with everybody using my brain as a trampoline. Still, if I hoped to survive my visit to the most peculiar madhouse that the D.I.A. clinic had become, I knew that I was going to have to find some relatively quiet and stable corner in my drug-sotted brain where I could think, plan, and will myself to act.

  I vaguely remembered making some kind of arrangements for my safety with Veil Kendry, but I couldn't remember what the arrangements had been. I kept thinking of Road Runner cartoons: Beep-beep-beep. It didn't make any difference; obviously, Veil wasn't around. I hoped he wasn't dead-but, no matter what he was, he couldn't help me at the moment; it would undoubtedly be a matter of only a few minutes before Mama Baker found something he considered appropriately sharp and ceremonial with which to slit my throat.

  Or, if he got impatient, he might simply stick a hypodermic needle through my eye into my brain.

  I couldn't understand why Veil hadn't come to rescue me. I also couldn't understand why Garth or Marl Braxton wasn't helping me. All of the patients seemed to be wandering at will through the wide open spaces of the clinic, and I had to assume that Garth and Braxton were among them. It definitely seemed an appropriate time for Garth to employ some of the soothing words and gestures that had so impressed Braxton to calm down Mama Baker. Nor would I be displeased if somebody had taken the more expedient measure of simply smashing a chair over the man's tattooed head.

  And I knew I was wasting precious time for thought by engaging in petulance and speculation as to why people I'd thought I could count on had not arrived to save me from the man with the crown of scar thorns around his head and JESUS SAVES carved into his cheeks.

  "Heigh ho, heigh ho, it's off to work we go. ."

  Ah, yes; thinking and planning time was over, and if I hung around on the coatrack any longer I was going to end up dead. Snow White was on his way back.

  The coatrack had been set up near the elevator, which I couldn't use-but the elevator was near the stairs.

  "Heigh ho, heigh ho.. "

  I bucked and wriggled in the air until I got my hips and legs swinging back and forth. At the apogee of a forward swing I bent my knees, then kicked up as high as I could; the coatrack tipped over, and I flew through the air to land hard on my back, with my head banging painfully against the floor. The wind was knocked out of me, and stars began to fill the DayGlo tunnels swirling around me. Just what I needed.

  "Heigh ho, heigh ho — hey, dwarf!"

  Mama Baker's voice seemed to be right above me-and that had a remarkably galvanizing effect on my muscles and mind.

  "Sugtelmptph!" I shouted in panic as I struggled to my feet and wobbled off down one of the tunnels, through an open door, toward the stairs.

  Footsteps were coming up fast behind me; with the drugs in my brain and my arms strapped around my body, there was no way I was going to outrun the other man on the stairs. Baker was going to nab me, unless I did something ingenious-like trust that I maintained what in normal times was a pretty keen sense of balance, jump, drape the canvas-shrouded upper part of my body over the steel guardrail on the stairs and slide down. I banged painfully into the knob at the end of the first section of railing, fell back, and landed on my side.

  "Goddamn you, dwarf!" Baker was shouting as he scrambled down the stairs toward the first landing. "Stop! Stop, dwarf!"

  Stop, dwarf? He had to be kidding me. "Mflkmpiph!" I screamed as I got to my feet, did another perilous dive and bellyflop up onto the railing, and slid down to the next landing. This time there was no knob to halt my descent-which simply meant that I sailed right off the railing and slammed hard against the opposite wall in the stairwell.

  Baker's shoes clattered on the steps, descending on me. I looked up, saw something flash in his right hand as he raised it to strike. .

  I ducked under the swinging scalpel blade, once again managed to get to my feet, and flung myself on the railing. But this time I had been off balance, and had lunged too hard; I was sliding down the railing, but I was leaning too far over, slipping. .

  An instant before I would have slipped over the railing and escaped from Baker the hard way, in death, strong hands gripped the straps on the back of the straitjacket and pulled me back over the railing, set me down on the stairs.

  "Mongo!"

  "Elmptak!"

  "You son-of-a-bitch, I'll kill you too!" Mama Baker screamed as he rushed the rest of the way down the stairs and slashed at Veil.

  There was a most satisfying sound of Veil's fist colliding with Mama Baker's jaw. I savored that sound for a few moments, then decided to reward myself for my strenuous labors with a little nap.

  I had vague recollections of very nasty things, but they all seemed to have happened a long time ago, in a prehistoric nightmare time. At the moment the most pressing thing I had to deal with was a splitting headache. Very gingerly, I opened one eye-and winced as a pinkish-white razor blade of light stabbed through to my brain. Gradually, I became accustomed to the light and saw Mr. Lippitt and Veil floating in the middle of it, at the foot of my bed.

  And then I remembered what had happened.

  I started to sit up in bed, and almost fell out of it when pain exploded inside my skull, momentarily blinding me. I cried out, and hands grabbed me and pushed me back up on the bed, eased my head back on the pillow.

  "Take it easy, Mongo," Lippitt said. "You'll be all right, but you're not ready to jog around the park yet. First you have to recover from that psychotropic cocktail of LSD, Thorazine, and scopolamine Slycke shot you up with. Also, you have a slight concussion. You've been out of it for close to two days."

  "Two days?!" That got my eyes open again. This time I found myself looking up into the smiling face of a handsome woman I judged to be in her early fifties. She winked at me.

  "You're in the clinic infirmary," Lippitt said. "This is Dr. Fall-the new director of the clinic. You'll be in good hands here."

  "You can call me Helen, Dr. Frederickson," the woman said. "I believe you'll be feeling fine after a few more days of rest. In the meantime, if you need anything, just push the button at the side of your bed."

  Helen Fall patted me reassuringly on
the arm, then walked from the room. I glanced back and forth between Lippitt and Veil, who had taken up positions on opposite sides of the bed. "What the hell happened?" I croaked.

  "What do you remember?" Lippitt asked, running a leathery hand back over the top of his completely bald head.

  "I was supposed to meet Slycke at eleven at night up in his office. I found the door to the building open, and I went in. I didn't like the feel of the situation. I was on my way out to go with Veil to get RPC Security and call you when I got cold-cocked. I remember being carted around in a straitjacket by a psychotic patient by the name of Mama Baker who was getting ready to open up my throat. I remember taking myself off the hook, so to speak, and then getting down the stairs. . to Veil."

  "I was almost too late," Veil said tightly. "Mongo, I got the first beep, at ten after. And then I got another beep twenty minutes later. It was when I didn't get a third one that I ran to the building, and found the front door open. I figured the elevator might be just a bit too public, so I started up the stairs. I was about halfway up when I heard all this shouting and commotion above me, so I decided I'd better put a move on."

  "The son-of-a-bitch had my apartment bugged," I said with disgust. "Slycke knew all about our security arrangements; he was the one sending you the signals, while he was giving me that hot shot and otherwise taking care of business upstairs. What happened serves me right for being so stupid. When I get out of here, I'm going to order myself a custom-made dunce cap."

  "Better order two," Veil said. "I should have considered the possibility of your apartment being bugged."

  "No dunce cap for you. But it's a damn good thing you got there when you did; about two seconds later, and you'd have had to mop me up off the ground floor."

  Veil smiled thinly, shook his head. "You and your buddy were putting on quite a show, Mongo. I could see you while I was running up. There you were sliding down the railing, falling off, and sliding down another one. . and all the while this maniac with a scalpel is clomping down the stairs, trying to catch you. It was a sight to see."

  "I'm really happy Mama Baker and I kept you amused, Veil. Sprinting up those stairs must have been tiresome."