The Inquisitor

by Peter Clement

  "I'd normally agree, Jimmy, except this time it seemed a bit too obvious."

  "How?"

  "A bunch of reasons. One, whenever you have any kind of physical stress- and from what Artie's wife said, he'd been suffering unstable angina for days- blood sugar usually rises in a diabetic. For Artie to make himself fall into a hypoglycemic coma, he would have had to do more than skip breakfast after his regular morning insulin. He would have had to have taken more than usual."

  "But if his sugars were high, wouldn't an increase be called for?"

  "Yeah, but experienced diabetics can tell when they're slipping into a coma. I just don't see Artie ignoring the symptoms of hypoglycemia."

  "And you would have put that down on paper?"

  The path tilted upward into an all-encompassing gloom, the momentary hint that the fog would disperse anytime soon vanishing like a false promise. "Probably not. But I wouldn't have gone so much out of my way to make it seem I'd never even thought of it. No physician worth his salt could look at Artie's file and claim that. Not that I would have spelled out my suspicions either, but there are ways to state them subtly. For instance, Michael could have noted that on questioning, the patient 'claimed' to have taken only the regular dose. Then it's the adjuster's problem to put two and two together, or not."

  "And that game makes it all right? Sounds like covering your ass to me. And abandoning the widow to the mercies of the company."

  "It's how we do it yet stay legal, Jimmy. And it still works. An agent may call and ask outright if I'm willing to say the patient committed suicide, and I'll say no one could claim that for certain, and eventually they pay up."

  "Just the kind of hassle a grieving family needs."

  Earl ignored the jibe. "Look, if it were just the Artie Baxter case, I would have let it go. But what really bothered me is that something's obviously been eating at Michael recently. One look at the guy says he's worried-"

  "It's called SARS, Earl. Look around you. Everybody's scared shitless these days."

  The image of Michael's hurt expression when he'd blurted out how the outbreak had caused problems between Donna and him made Earl wince. He hadn't realized the couple had been having such a hard time coping. "Maybe. But to be precise, he also reamed me out for, if you'll pardon my literal rendition of what he said, 'fucking up the good guys lately'- namely, you, himself, and Stewart- and practically begged me to keep my nose out of his business."

  Jimmy responded by yet again picking up speed. "So the guy's stressed and he overreacted. Don't make a big deal of it."

  "Do you think I'm acting like an asshole and getting in the way of the good guys?"

  Jimmy started to laugh. "You want a professional opinion from a chaplain, or something more personal?"

  Earl strained to keep up. Sweat had already soaked through his clothing despite the temperature having dropped with the afternoon showers. "What I want to know, Jimmy, is if you've had a talk with him like you did with me, and coaxed him into the service of some greater good, such as making certain that suitably deserving widows and orphans collect money from insurance companies without any troublesome questions or delays."

  "I'd think that would be the job of any responsible doctor toward a patient."

  "I know you, Jimmy. In another age you'd have been a swashbuckler, a musketeer, a wielder of the sword of justice in a fight for the downtrodden, beholden only to the laws of God."

  "Sounds like my kind of guy. What's wrong with that?"

  "What's wrong is that you might not be above tweaking man-made regulations, especially if they stood in the way of a righteous cause."

  "I believe these days we call that civil disobedience, and a noble activity it is. But no, I've not led Michael astray. Now are you goin' to start running, or is hobblin' along like this as fast as an old man like yourself can do?" He pulled away into the gray haze until his form had no more substance than smoke.

  How flippant would he be if he knew Michael might be taking favors from the damsels in distress? Earl wondered, and dug harder. He managed to accelerate up the slope and pull abreast again. "What about Stewart?"

  "What about him?"

  "You heard Yablonsky's accusation. Do you know if he's been up to anything in Palliative Care?"

  "You're not serious."

  "Something's going on up there. Increased death rates don't lie."

  "They're supposed to die."

  "You sound like Hurst."

  "Now don't be gettin' nasty with me."

  "Then what's going on, Jimmy?"

  "Did you ever talk to any of the patients you brought back from a cardiac arrest?"

  "Sure, sometimes."

  "What did they tell you they remembered?"

  "Sometimes nothing. Others gave the usual story of rising above their bodies, a bright light at the end of a tunnel…"

  "And what do you make of those stories, Earl?"

  "If you mean do I think they're proof of an afterlife, I'm afraid not."

  "Neither do I. I made a point of reading up on it. Interesting how neurologists think it's got to do with neurotransmitters, certain parts of the brain being stimulated or losing the blood supply to the outside of the retina first, and the optic nerve last, creating the image of a dark tunnel with a bright light at the end. But there are some stories that can't be explained by chemicals, physiology, or anatomy. Did any of the patients you talked to ever tell you about the dark man?"

  "What?"

  "The dark man. A person dressed in black hovering around the end of their bed."

  Earl chuckled. "No."

  "You wouldn't laugh if they had, yet I'm not surprised they didn't. It's not in any of the published accounts either, not even Stewart's, though I suspect when researchers refer to subjects who report frightening images, had those descriptions been specific, the dark man would be as common to near-death as lights and tunnels. But people don't feel comfortable in getting too detailed about that sort of thing unless it's with chaplains, figuring we're bound by belief to be sympathetic, not scoff at it."

  "What do they see exactly? A guy in a black hood with a scythe?"

  "The figure usually wears loose-fitting clothes, always black, and the face is mainly in shadow. Except for the eyes. They're all too visible and have an icy vastness to them that people feel sucked into when he comes closer. At the same time they feel their skin burning hot."

  "Ischemia," Earl muttered.

  "What?"

  "The burning feeling is from ischemia. The lack of blood in muscle and skin results in a buildup of metabolic acids. They burn like fire." Exactly the way my legs are now, he nearly added, but until the priest came up with a few more answers he didn't want Jimmy to know how easy it would be to leave him behind.

  "Maybe you're right about the heat, but nothing explains the fear. Everybody who reported seeing the dark man seemed more terrified at the prospect of him waiting for them the next time than they were of dying."

  "Don't tell me you believe there's something to tales like that. And what the hell do they have to do with Stewart?"

  "I'm just suggesting that people who venture near death and return can find the experience very traumatic. The accounts from Palliative Care about someone badgering patients as they hovered on the brink may be a variation of the dark man encounters. The last thing I'd do is try to link Stewart to them."

  Jimmy's words silenced Earl. Perhaps they were meant to. Because if the priest had done his homework, he'd know that Earl had had his own encounter with near death seven years ago. He still tried to avoid thinking about it. Certainly the memory of it remained traumatic. But no dark man had awaited him. Instead he'd felt death as a dilutent, as if he were being thinned out, like a drop of water returning to the ocean. And as Jimmy had said, he seldom wanted to talk about it. Maybe that's what didn't make sense. "But how could it be the dark man, Jimmy, with so many patients suddenly willing to tell the nurses about him?"

  The priest answered by pulling ahead.
>
  Earl thought, Aha! Got him, and tried to keep up.

  But in a hundred paces the fire in his lower legs spread to his thighs and the inside of his lungs.

  He slowed and came to a stop. The scuff of Jimmy's shoes on the gravel underfoot faded into the distance.

  "You can't avoid me forever about Stewart, Jimmy," he shouted after him. "And if you have recruited Michael on some quest, I think he's out of his depth."

  "Relax, Earl." The words floated back to him like a message out of the ether.

  Earl caught his breath and started to walk back along the path toward St. Paul's. The muffled traffic noises on the freeway came at him from the front, and a guttural roll of thunder originating far out over the lake rumbled up behind him.

  Either Jimmy really had no idea what Michael and Stewart were up to or he'd become a hell of a good actor. Or maybe Earl hadn't a clue as to what was going on, had gotten it all wrong in the first place, and had been the one who'd swum out of his depth.

  Ten minutes later he passed the smoked-glass entrance to the Horseshoe Bar and Grill. Up ahead the bulk of St. Paul's loomed in the thick gray smog, a giant hive of tiny lights. For an instant he felt overwhelmed at the sight. Who could really know all the enigmas of the place? A big teaching hospital held more human emotions per cubic foot of air than any edifice on earth. Always at the core were the patients- they numbered eight hundred here- their thoughts closer to their own mortality than ever before, yet they came and went, changing every ten days on average, each set of newcomers bringing a whole host of different dreams and fears. Then there were the healers. In addition to laboring over their charges, they lugged around the personal baggage of ambitions and desires, everything from a need to do good works, find love, and win the wealth of success, to far less noble pursuits- right down to settling old scores, nursing slights, or exacting revenge, usually in petty little ways, but sometimes on a more serious scale. Most agendas focused on the mundane issues of life, such as putting food on the table and how to get laid Saturday night, but they were legion in number and sometimes led to their own league of trouble. Who broke which rules to satisfy what appetites? There often could be no way of telling, and through all that complexity, he'd no more chance to see the thread of a single coherent motive than to track the purpose of an individual ant in a swarming nest.

  So was it Stewart's lethal cover-up or the work of a saboteur? Michael's noble service to needy women or the exploitation of them? Jimmy's undue influence on either man, or just a good priest doing his job? The answers might never come to light. And if he was on the wrong track altogether, God knew what other secrets might remain hidden forever. No wonder Hurst preferred to hide the nasty side of things. With such an impenetrable matrix to help cloak everything, odds were he could get away with it.

  And now SARS underlined the whole kit and caboodle with the issue of survival.

  As he drew closer to the blurred dark shape of St. Paul's, it appeared to expand through the charcoal-seeped air and spread outward, towering over where he walked.

  For a second he had the illusion it reared defiant before his growing sense of helplessness, a leviathan set to devour him whole.

  6:45 p.m.

  Windows rattled with each thunderclap, and the count between a flash and the boom narrowed to three. Drops of rain the size of marbles pelted the roof and walls with the force of hailstones.

  "I'm sure everyone's lying to me- first Stewart, then Michael, and now Jimmy."

  "Sit down, Earl, and have a drink," Janet ordered, presiding over an array of pots on the stove. The aroma of teriyaki chicken, fried eggplant, and grilled peppers filled the air.

  At her side, perched on a stool and wearing an apron with MOMMY'S LITTLE HELPER emblazoned across the front, Brendan wielded a wooden spoon with the authority of a royal mace. "Yes, go have a drink, Daddy."

  "Ordered out of the kitchen again," he muttered, and went to the liquor cabinet.

  "With good reason," Janet called after him. "Your mother never taught you how to cook."

  " 'Never taught me how to cook,'" he mimicked, filling a glass with ice and pouring himself a Black Russian, the one hard liquor concoction he actually enjoyed. Except he used more Kahlua than vodka, soothing a sweet tooth more than any love for alcohol.

  "Not like me, huh, Mommy?" Brendan chimed in.

  "You, my love, will be a thoroughly modern man when it comes to culinary skills, and some lucky woman will thank me for educating you."

  Earl chuckled, and wandered back into their domain, swirling the ice in his tumbler with his finger as a swizzle stick.

  While some doctors golfed or played tennis for recreation, Janet cooked. Her ideal getaway involved uninterrupted hours over a wood stove at their log home beside an isolated mountain lake south of Buffalo.

  She sent Brendan upstairs to clean up his room. "In case our guest wants to see your budding train collection," she explained.

  "Oh, yeah!" he said, his train set far higher on the scale of what would interest company than food.

  "Now sit over there." She directed Earl to the far corner of their breakfast nook. "And tell me what's got you so riled."

  He took a sip of his drink and enjoyed the cool burn it made on the way to his stomach. "Well, it started with an interesting call I made to NYCH this morning…

  Stewart's legs ached from standing on his toes.

  The storm had struck with force, rumbling the house to its foundations and making it impossible for anyone to hear his screams. Even without the thunder and teeming rain, it would be unlikely that all the yelling in the world would reach the ears of a passerby. These old dwellings had foundations like fortresses.

  The soft vinyl cover of the stool under his feet sank with his weight. Anytime his muscles faltered, if he even began to buckle at the knees and go down on his soles, the noose tightened.

  "Pretty woman," Roy Orbison sang, the voice sounding tinny on the small tape deck, the same as it had that night when he'd found Jerome's body.

  Why had the man played it?

  To muffle the sounds he'd make dying, one of the cops had said casually, as if this were knowledge every person should have at hand, in case…

  Stewart forced himself to think of something else, anything to keep terror at bay and his mind off the agony in his legs. He must manage to stand until someone came for him.

  His thoughts whipped backward in time.

  The door to the lab had been open. "Somebody must have already walked in on him but left him hanging," he told the police. "Perhaps the person heard Jerome dying despite the music."

  Nobody had cared.

  Stewart's muscles tightened, yanking him back to the present. As spasms shot through them, he sagged, tightening the loop another notch. With his wrists handcuffed behind his back, he'd no chance of loosening them to free himself however much he struggled. But links of the chain were long enough that the fingers of one hand could circle the wrist of the other- consistent with a pair he could have snapped on himself. That little detail must be for the cops.

  "Pretty woman…"

  Orbison launched into yet another chorus. The damn recording must be a fucking loop.

  He teetered, let out another strangled yell, then regained his balance.

  And again thought of that night, everyone in the hospital glued to the television, watching the reports out of Berlin. It had always haunted him, indelibly clear in his head- Thursday, November 9, 1989, the day the wall fell.

  They'd all agreed that Jerome had seemed depressed for months.

  Some wondered if he had picked that evening to make sure the date would stand out and forever haunt those who'd driven him to his death. Others figured the ever-practical scientist had seized on a chance moment of opportunity, choosing a supper hour with everyone transfixed by newscasts so nobody would interrupt him.

  Whatever the intent, Stewart couldn't hear the word wall, Berlin, or even Germany without a flashback hurtling him into that lab and leavi
ng him staring up at the limp body.

  Another cramp gripped the sole of Stewart's foot, the right one this time.

  He screamed, but the loop around his neck garbled the sound, reducing it to a gurgle.

  He lost his balance again and swayed, fighting to recover.

  Each drawn breath became a coarse rasp, and every expiration produced a rattling wheeze. His face throbbed as the venous blood engorged his skin, and the periphery of his vision darkened, encroached on by a night that had nothing to do with the slow creep of dusk through his basement window.

  He listened, trying to hear some clue whether his soundless killer remained in the shadows, just beyond where he could see. At first he'd thought there were two of them, that he'd heard their voices, like whispers through the din of a rushing noise inside his head. But then he sensed only one, someone behind him. Now he couldn't be sure anyone stood there at all.

  "Please! I don't deserve this," he cried. It came out a squawk.

  His mute sentinel remained silent.

  Or had left.

  The coldness of that empty quiet sent his panic skyrocketing.

  Just hold on. Somebody will come. It's not too late. Still no permanent damage done. As long as they loosen the loop soon, my throat will heal, he tried to convince himself.

  But the only person with a key, his cleaning woman, wouldn't be here until morning. And he seldom had visitors, never encouraged them, preferring the people in his life to be part of his work, where he could use his authority over them to control how close they got. The only ones he invited over willingly were residents, for journal clubs, because even on social occasions there was no lack of clarity about his being their superior.

  His only hope of rescue lay with his killer.

  "I shouldn't have to die!" he attempted to yell, unable to accept that he'd been abandoned. A croaking noise seemed to originate inside his skull, and nothing but the rushing sound, loud as an express train, filled his ears. He nevertheless continued to spit out words, intelligible only in his mind, like someone with a stroke.

  "Who are you? Why do this to me?" If he found he knew the person, understood the reasons, he'd know how to explain that there'd been a terrible mistake.