by H. P. Bayne
It broke Sully’s heart.
You going to cry, boy? Let me out, and I’ll make him cry.
Sully shook the hangman off. No, he was not going to cry. He was too pissed for that. “I know what you did to her, to Lucky. I know you tortured her. I know you raped her.”
That got the response Sully had been after. Gerhardt blanched, his mouth popping open. He snapped it shut before speaking. “How do you know that name?”
Sully had shied away from revealing this last truth, but the reasons not to had dwindled to zero. He found now he wanted this man to know who he was, to reveal himself to him completely, to see what response it would elicit. One of the two of them wasn’t leaving here. The truth, if need be, would stay buried within this room.
Sully spoke in a growl. “You got her pregnant, Gerhardt. You got a child pregnant. She gave birth to a son. I’m that son.”
Gerhardt gripped the railing of the treatment bed. For a moment, it looked as if it might not be enough to keep him on his feet. Disbelief clung to his features, so Sully kept on, pummelling him with truth.
“She was a good mother, in the short time she was allowed to be. She protected me by slowing you down long enough someone could get me away from here, and she didn’t tell her crazy family about me. She gave up everything, including me, to protect me. I was left on a doorstep, and after a few shitty years in the system, I ended up with the Braddocks. It was because of her wanting to give me the best chance possible that I found the family I was meant to be with. But I shouldn’t exist. I never should have been born, because what you did never should have happened. You’re an evil piece of shit, Gerhardt, and so help me, when I get out of these restraints, you’re going to wish I was never born.”
Gerhardt had regained some colour, some composure, enough that he was able to speak. “Well then, it’s all right, because you’re never getting out of those restraints. And you’re never leaving this place.”
Gerhardt moved across the room to a counter upon which sat a few vials. Into one, he inserted a syringe. “You know what I’ve just realized, Sullivan? I was wrong about David. I’m glad I didn’t succeed in killing him. Because he’s not my second son. You are. My first boy never truly saw life. He died during a miscarriage. And Lowell. When Harry went to him and told him he believed his brother would harbour the second son, we all believed he meant Aiden Braddock. But it wasn’t him. It’s you. It’s been you all along. You’re the one, Sullivan. You’re the one I need to destroy.”
NOW!
Sully at last relented, giving in to the hangman’s demands. He closed his eyes, allowing himself to slide.
The hangman leapt. He snatched onto the spirits locked inside Sully and drew out their energy.
Sully opened his eyes.
Gerhardt stepped back so suddenly onto his bad leg, he fell.
As with Harry’s spirit during the battle with Lowell and Hackman, Sully discovered he was still very much present as the hangman came forward. Although he wasn’t truly in control of his own body, he felt it nonetheless. Strangely, he found he didn’t mind the experience. This wasn’t another being inside him, controlling him. This was a part of him. A dark, twisted part, but a part nonetheless.
He feared the hangman: his power, his darkness, what he could turn Sully into. But he couldn’t deny that, right now, the nameless executioner was saving his life.
The hangman tested the bonds a moment before pulling at them, using the strength of several energies against the restraints.
Gerhardt had managed to stand, was back at the counter, filling the syringe with shaking hands.
The hangman pulled harder. At last, a crack and a ping sounded as a metal ring shattered and shot off across the room.
One hand free.
One was enough.
Gerhardt didn’t look back, focused on his desperate task, as the hangman moved to free Sully’s other hand.
Gerhardt turned, rushed to the bed before the hangman had opened the restraint fully. He stabbed the syringe into Sully’s yet-trapped forearm but, before he could inject the liquid into his captive, the hangman grabbed the psychiatrist’s hand.
A crack sounded within Gerhardt’s encased fingers, and he howled. He released the syringe and dropped to his knees, but the hangman held on, two more cracks sounding before he finally let go.
While Gerhardt moaned and writhed on the floor, hugging his broken fingers to his chest, the hangman succeeded in freeing Sully’s other hand, then his feet. He yanked out the needle and placed it next to him on the bed. It would come in handy, this substance. It appeared to be the same one Gerhardt had repeatedly administered to Sully, and no doubt to all the other psychic patients brought down here by force. Only it was at least double the usual dose.
Enough to kill a person.
The hangman stood, testing out Sully’s limbs as if revelling in the sensation of being in charge of a body for the first time in ages. In a way, Sully imagined it was true. He circled the bed until he reached Gerhardt’s side.
“My, my, how the tables have turned.” The voice emerging from Sully’s throat was his, and yet not, the deep Cockney accent belonging to another person, another time.
He reached down and, amid the psychiatrist’s startled protests, lifted and threw the older man onto the treatment bed. Gerhardt could do nothing as the hangman secured the restraint cuffs, his attempts to defend himself ineffectual against the strength of four separate entities currently taking up residence inside Sully’s body. Gerhardt was weak, helpless.
As weak and helpless as a six-year-old boy.
The hangman picked up the syringe. “This liquid. Meant to kill, ain’t it?” He met Gerhardt’s eyes, saucer-wide in terror. “Works like a charm on people with a third eye. What’s it do to people like you? What do you say, doctor? Should we find out?”
“No! Don’t you dare. Release me immediately, or you’ll regret it!”
The hangman made a tsking sound. “Now, now. Not such a wise move, trying to intimidate the man who holds your life in his hands.” He grasped the broken hand and twisted, drawing a wild yell from Gerhardt. “Try again.”
“Please! Please, don’t do this! Stop!”
The hangman released the hand and stared into the doctor’s face, tilting his head as if it would give him a new perspective on the man lying there. “Not so nice being on the receiving end, is it? Go on, beg me. Maybe I’ll relent.”
“Please. Please! I promise I won’t reveal you were here. I won’t tell anyone.”
“No, you’re right there, doctor.” The hangman leaned in, locking eyes with the psychiatrist. “You won’t.”
He jabbed the needle into Gerhardt’s arm.
“Stop!” came a voice from the door.
The hangman turned to find Emily standing there, hunched over and in obvious pain. Sully wanted to go to her, to see if she was all right, to figure out how it was she was still alive—hell, to make sure she was actually alive—but the executioner was committed to his task. Sully felt a rush of relief as her eyes met his, eyes containing their usual strength despite the discomfort she was clearly in.
The hangman had other ideas about her place here. “You the one to stop me?”
Emily’s lips curled into a smile that shocked both Sully and the hangman. “Stop you? I want to help.”
Sully was no less stunned, this time by Emily’s stated intentions, but the hangman felt only amusement.
“You’re my kind of lady,” he said.
Gerhardt’s eyes narrowed as he took in the newcomer, making her way to the side of the bed. “Emily Crichton. I should have finished you when I had the chance.”
Emily smiled. “Today or twenty-five years ago, dear?”
The hangman laughed. Gerhardt didn’t.
“How are you alive?” the psychiatrist asked. “I shot you in the chest.”
Emily tugged her blouse open, revealing a layer of black beneath. “Kevlar,” she said. “I’m afraid one or two ribs are cracke
d but, thanks to the hit and run you once plotted against me, I know how to handle pain.”
Emily turned to the hangman, flinching slightly as she peered up fully into his eyes but holding the gaze nonetheless. “I know you want to kill him, and I don’t blame you. I feel very much the same. But you need to consider something. If he dies by your hand—by anyone’s—he’ll never leave you. There’s a very good chance he’ll haunt you until the end of your days. You don’t want that, surely.”
This gave Sully pause. Unfortunately, the hangman wasn’t as convinced. “It matters not to me, pet. I’ll consume him like every other evil man I’ve killed.”
“Death is too easy for a man like him.”
“So what do you suggest? He needs to know justice.”
“I can think of a far better justice for him than death, can’t you?” Emily returned her gaze to Gerhardt. “You’ve spent your career torturing and traumatizing patients who weren’t like others, those you felt could be of benefit to you. Perhaps the most fitting punishment would be for you to become one of them. How would you like that, Doctor? To be locked away inside your own damaged mind, a patient within your own facility?” She took the syringe from the hangman’s willing hand. “I think if we’re careful with the dosage, we can ensure just such an outcome, don’t you?”
Gerhardt’s face froze.
The hangman laughed, wild and deep, as he held the psychiatrist’s arm against the bed, squeezing to make a vein pop. Emily waited a few seconds, until a thick bluish line showed through the flesh of Gerhardt’s arm. Then she inserted the needle.
“No!” Gerhardt screamed. “Stop! You can’t do this to me! It will kill me!”
“Like you’ve killed,” the hangman said. “Seems fitting.” He turned back to Emily. “What do you say, milady? Shall we?”
Emily ignored the hangman, focusing entirely on Gerhardt. “I don’t get any pleasure from this, and I assure you I have no intention of killing you. But I do need to stop you. I’ve lived with the guilt of turning a blind eye to your evil, of what that meant for Lucky Dule. I won’t let you hurt anyone else.”
She injected the drug into Gerhardt’s arm.
A furious yell broke off midway as shock overtook his features. Sully had no way of seeing inside the man’s head, but he knew what he was feeling. Sully had been here too many times before. He could see it in Gerhardt’s face as the drug he’d injected into numerous patients seeped into his own vein, set its course through blood, its final destination his brain.
Fear played out across Gerhardt’s face. Part of Sully felt guilty, but only a small part. The psychiatrist had shown no mercy to the patients he’d forced into his current position. He hadn’t batted an eye at the pleas, the tears or the screams. He’d destroyed lives, and likely taken a few.
Emily had given him only a partial dose of what Gerhardt had intended for Sully.
It was more than enough.
Psychics had been guinea pigs for Lowell because their brains, he’d reasoned, were more open. Gerhardt had happily allowed it to meet his own ends.
The problem for Gerhardt was he was no psychic.
Sully didn’t know what he’d been expecting, but he’d been mentally preparing himself to view a seizure or even death.
Instead, after a few moments of useless struggling, everything went quiet.
Gerhardt was alive. He was breathing and his pulse, when the hangman lifted a hand to check, was a solid, healthy—if not a little too rapid—thrum against fingertips. Gerhardt blinked once, twice. But the eyes didn’t focus, fixed on a spot in the water-stained ceiling.
What caught Sully was the way the eyes looked. Wide open between blinks, they held an expression of the deepest terror. What he saw was anyone’s guess. All Sully knew for sure was the man had come to resemble the haunted and tortured spectre of Harry Schuster.
Sully could think of nothing more fitting.
Pounding footfalls sounded in the hall, had the hangman spinning in place, prepared to do battle with whatever new threat this might be. Instead, a few seconds later, the image of Dez came into view, sliding to a screeching halt in the doorway and breathing hard.
“Sully? Mom and I ran into Terrence just as we got to the car. He told us his mother sold you out. We ran all the way back and had to figure out how to get in. Mom’s standing watch outside. Are you—What’s wrong with you?”
At first, Sully thought Dez must be referring to the blood on his clothes from the gunshot wound. Then he noticed Dez was focused entirely on his eyes.
“It isn’t him right now, Desmond,” Emily said. “It’s a man speaking in an English accent.”
Sully felt the hangman’s anxiety as he regarded Dez. Why, he didn’t know.
Dez at last looked away from Sully’s face, gaze settling where it ordinarily would have to start with. “God, is all of that blood yours? Sully—”
“We need to get out of here,” Emily said. “But we can’t leave Gerhardt like this. Help me get him out of this room.”
The hangman didn’t need additional help, easily lifting and carrying the psychiatrist into his office and settling him in his chair. Emily, meanwhile, busied herself gathering up the used syringes, both of which she wiped clean of any prints before wrapping Gerhardt’s limp fingers around them. One—the remainder of the dose he’d been injected with—she placed at his side, next to his good hand.
“Don’t he look all nice and cozy?” the executioner said.
Dez appeared at his side. “Stop talking like that.”
“Like what, Red? This is how I talk.”
Dez’s eyes widened, his expression an approximation of Gerhardt’s. “Christ, Sully, what happened to you?”
Emily moved forward and took Sully’s still-gloved hand. “You can let go now, Sullivan. We’re safe now. You can come back.”
Sully knew it. But this wasn’t like a separate personality. It was him, or a part of his soul anyway. The longer the hangman stayed up front, the stronger he felt, as if he was continually devouring more of the spirits he’d taken in.
As if he was trying to find a way to stay in control.
Sully wasn’t about to let him. He couldn’t. Anyway, it wasn’t fair to the patients whose spirits he’d sucked in. They deserved peace, not the eternal torment of possession.
The hangman’s protest was audible, a snarled, “No!” But Emily was right. This part of his life, the Lockwood part, it was over. He didn’t need the hangman’s strength here anymore.
He pulled the darkness back, stepped back fully into himself.
The pain hit him the second he released the three souls, but it was not what it was, and nowhere near what it should have been.
He’d been shot. He knew he had. He had plenty of blood on the front of his shirt to prove it.
He lifted his T-shirt, exposing a belly covered in blood—enough to draw an anxious Dez even closer.
One of Dez’s hands joined Sully’s in a search for the wound. “What happened?”
Emily had temporarily disappeared into the hall, and she returned in time to answer the question. “Gerhardt shot him.”
Dez’s head snapped toward her. “Jesus Christ, what? Sull—”
“I’m okay,” Sully said, just as his fingers finally settled over a small pucker in his skin, to the right of his belly button and a couple of inches down.
Dez knelt for a closer look. “This is it?” He examined it a moment before turning startled eyes up to his brother’s face. “Sully, this wound looks like it’s a month old. It’s mostly healed.”
Sully shook his head. No, he didn’t have an explanation.
While the brothers had been distracted by the injury, Emily had been bustling around the room as quickly as her own injuries would allow. Now, she appeared at their side, Gerhardt’s lab coat over one arm and an urgent tone in her demand. “We need to leave here. Now!”
“Are you okay to walk?” Dez asked her as they followed her from the room and back down the hall. “I
can carry you.”
She managed a light chuckle. “As much as I’d enjoy being carried by a handsome young man, I’ll be fine. But I do think I’ll need a hospital. Sullivan should get looked at too.”
Sully shook his head. “I can’t, Em. But it’s okay. I can’t explain it, but it doesn’t feel that bad.”
Dez wasn’t sold. “Sully, I don’t think we have a choice. You’ve been shot, dude.”
“If it’s not bad enough I’m not supposed to exist, how the hell am I going to explain a rapidly healing bullet wound?”
Dez shrugged before stopping suddenly in the dark of the hall. “Damn. Blood. Sully’s DNA’s in the databank. If someone finds it here—”
“There’s no blood that I saw,” Emily said. “The bullet must still be inside Sullivan, so there’s no exit wound. That would have lessened the external bleeding, and I’m thinking his front must not have come into contact with much. The only blood I could see was on Gerhardt’s lab coat, and I’ve taken that with me. Sullivan was wearing his gloves most of the time he was in here, as was I, so no fingerprints. I did wipe down the syringes, just in case, and I placed them next to him so someone might think he injected himself. And I picked up my gun and replaced his in the drawer and picked up the spent casings. No doubt he’ll have gunfire residue on him. I wiped some from his face, but there’s not much I can do about the rest of it. I couldn’t think of anything else to clean up offhand.”
Dez raised his eyebrows. “Damn. You’re good.”
Sully grinned. “Yeah,” he said. “She is.”
26
They spent two days lying low, waiting to hear about Gerhardt.
Dez had filled Lachlan in on what happened as soon as he dropped Emily off at the hospital. The private investigator had hightailed it back to Lockwood so he could be on hand once the search for the missing psychiatrist began, as it inevitably would. Just as well, too, because very few staff members, it seemed, had knowledge of the continued use of the old wing or Gerhardt’s illicit use of it.