“Pudgy hates me!” Jack would wail, full of helpless rage.
Jack’s friends would smile sadly, perhaps look away, disdainful of such a cheap dodge. Sure, blame it on a dog.
When the meeting ended, Jack was prepared to hurry back to his room where he was reading a medical thriller entitled Spleen, but Kerry clutched his arm.
“They went into Hinkle’s room,” Kerry said.
“Who?” Jack asked. But he knew who would go into Hinkle’s room.
Hinkle had been brought up to the floor that morning, lodged in room E4, and nurses, orderlies, and Hurley’s resident, Dr. Barrett, had all visited him.
Jack had peered into the darkened room, but Blanche had sent them away. “He’s not up to visitors yet,” she had said.
Now a contingent of The Clear was in room E4, preparing, no doubt, to shine their special light into the truck driver’s alcoholic darkness.
“Come on,” Kerry said. She moved quickly down the hall, an imperious young woman powered by conviction. The big cast on her arm didn’t slow her.
Jack followed, reluctantly. He never cared for the thick of other people’s problems. In this case, Hinkle had sought these folks out. Kerry didn’t know that... needed to know that, and if he could just overtake her...
Kerry turned slightly, pushing the door open with her shoulder, and Jack followed her into the room.
It was darker here than in the hall, the only light coming from a floor lamp near the nightstand. One of the young men was crouched on the floor. His two companions stood at the head of the bed. The figure in the bed lay flat, a sheet drawn up to his chin.
“Hey,” Kerry said. “What the fuck do you think you are doing?”
Jack blinked at the man squatting by the side of the bed. He was creating a straight white line on the carpet by tapping a small canister in his hand. The powder formed an inch-wide line that seemed luminous in the gloom.
One of the young men left the side of the bed and came over to Kerry and Jack. “Please leave immediately,” he said. “Your presence cannot be a benign influence. We must complete the pentagram. Your friend left us before he could experience the necessary purging, and he is consequently unprotected and in grave danger. We have come to complete the process and bring him to a place of knowledge and safety. If you will leave the room, we will execute the rituals.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” Kerry said. “I’m not leaving Hinkle with you wackos, not for one second.”
The man at the head of the bed began to chant. Jack recognized the rolling, liturgical tones of Latin, mixed with some other language, guttural and primitive.
“Hey,” the youth on the floor said. “Not yet. I’m not finished here.” The chanting stopped. “Nothing will stir until the second invocation,” the chanter said. “So work while I prepare the gate, numbering the portals. There is much to do and little time.” With that, he began again.
While chanting, the young man swayed slowly from side to side. He raised his arms. In one hand he held an empty shot glass, in the other— Jesus!—a pint of bourbon.
“Hey!” Kerry shouted. She too had seen the bottle. She ducked past the man in front of her and charged toward this inappropriate high priest.
Just then, Hinkle came alive on the bed. He lurched into a sitting position, arms flaying the air, eyes wide, galvanized by some nightmare. He yelled, “Noooooooooo!”
“What’s going on in here?” It was Blanche at the door now, behind her the bulk of Big Ernie, the nightshift orderly.
Blanche moved past everyone and leaned down to enfold Hinkle in her arms. “It’s okay,” she said, patting his back. “Nothing but bad dreams.
I’ll get you something that will send those nightmares back under the bed. Hush now. Hush.”
Hinkle rocked in the nurse’s arms. Blanche looked over his shoulder; took in the room with a slow turn. “Everyone out,” she said. “Visiting hours are over.”
Blanche, formidable in her authority, sent them all tumbling into the hall. The young men of The Clear fled, down the hall and out the door with the last of the meeting’s stragglers.
Neither Kerry nor Jack made any effort to stop them, but Kerry shouted after them (turning all heads except for those attached to the miscreants themselves): “Assholes! You sonofabitch assholes!”
Then Kerry slumped back against the wall and let gravity slowly slide her into a sitting position.
“Hinkle will be okay,” Jack said.
Kerry looked up at him, the look in her eyes one he would have paid to avoid. “You don’t know that,” she said.
“No. Actually, no.”
“What were those creeps doing here, anyway?”
“Well,” Jack said, “I believe Hinkle knew them. When he left that AA meeting...” Jack hesitated. “I saw him leave in their van. I don’t think he actually embraced the tenets of their faith; he just saw them as a convenient means of escape.”
Kerry’s mouth was open and she was staring up at him with shocked disbelief. “And you didn’t tell anyone about this? You didn’t think it was worth mentioning?”
“I believe in free will,” Jack said. “I think that a person has a right...” He stopped speaking. He almost said, “I didn’t want to rat the guy out,” but that sounded so hopelessly immature, so stupid. “I don’t know,” he said.
Kerry rolled her eyes. “Great. I thought we were supposed to be looking out for each other. Just great.” She stood up, turned away, and moved down the hall toward her room. She reached her door, clutched the handle, and then she looked back. Jack wanted to comfort her, to explain that he wasn’t worth any big emotional outlay, hadn’t been for years, had retreated into passivity and intellectual solitude and, of course, alcohol.
He might have mumbled some apology, but she spoke before he could. Her voice was calm, defeated. “My mistake,” she said, and she opened the door and went into her room.
* * *
Jack was sleeping when the new weight at the end of his bed caused him to roll. He awoke instantly.
Hinkle was sitting there. He was wearing a leather jacket, a baseball cap and white boxer shorts. He put a finger to his lips, urging silence.
Hinkle leaned forward and whispered, “They think they got us skinned and salted, but they don’t.”
He stood up then, reeled a little as he lifted the bottle to his lips and took a swig that seemed to knock him back, making him stumble. He giggled and turned, lumbering out the door.
Jack scrambled into his jeans and went after the man.
The hall was empty.
Hinkle was easy to find. He was back in his own room, sitting on the bed. Barefoot moments before, he now wore a single boot, part of a dim and poorly executed plan to achieve fully-clothed status. The rest of his attire remained the same: cap, jacket, boxer shorts.
Hinkle reached over to the nightstand and lifted the bottle. He bumped the floor lamp, which wobbled; shadows reeled drunkenly on the wall. Hinkle held the bottle out to Jack. Jack shook his head, no.
“Giving it up, huh?” Hinkle said. “I been that route. I can’t recall all the details, but it was unpleasant. You ever been to Hell?” Hinkle held up a hand. “You don’t have to answer that. You might think you’ve been down some hard roads, but you haven’t, not really Cause if you’ve really been to Hell, you know it right off, no question, you’ve been where worse is just more of the same. I been there.”
Hinkle tilted the bottle to his lips again. He grinned. “Those Sunday boys sent me right to Hell. Don’t know how they done it, the details aren’t clear, but they done it. Then they hauled me back and asked, ‘How you feeling, Hinkle?’ and I said I was feeling like varnished shit, and they said, that’s cause you ain’t had enough; we got to send you to Hell again.” Hinkle grinned. His eyes were shiny, the left one drifting toward the ceiling. “They underestimated me. I busted loose. Cleared out on The Clear. Hah ha.”
“Hinkle,” Jack said, “I’m glad you’re okay. But it wouldn’t
be good if anyone caught you drinking in here. It—”
Hinkle stood up, suddenly truculent; the hand that wasn’t holding the bottle formed a fist. “You wouldn’t rat me out, would you, Professor?”
“No,” Jack said, taking a step backwards. “Of course not.”
Hinkle smiled, leered. “I come to and I’m in old Hurley detox again and old Blanche is hugging me and cooing in my ear. What do you think of that? She got her a good pair, under all that starch, and she ain’t so bad to look at in the right light. Better yet, when she leaves I lean back on my pillow, feel something uncommonly hard, slide my hand under and find a pint of Old Midnight Arkansas Bourbon. I think, ‘I been in Hell and now I’m in Heaven.’ You sure you don’t want any of this?”
‘This is Hurley detox,” Jack said. “People come here to stop drinking. That’s the plan.”
“And a fine plan it is,” Hinkle said. He hiccuped, giggled. “Next year you might plan on growing wings or porking Madonna or being less of an asshole or—” Hinkle hiccuped again. His face went rigid, his mouth opened wide, he gagged. The bottle fell from his hand, bounced off the toe of his boot and spun on the carpet. The reek of strong booze filled the air.
Hinkle stumbled into the bathroom and began to vomit violently.
Jack stood by the door to the bathroom. “You okay?” he asked. It was, he thought, his day for ineffectual gestures, lame offers of aid.
The retching stopped. Silence.
The bathroom, identical to the one in Jack’s room, was an exercise in minimalism: a sink, a shower, a toilet, a towel rack. Hinkle was on his knees in front of the toilet.
The room was dark, and Jack reached in, found the light switch, and flipped it. An overhead fluorescent light came alive with an angry buzz, casting a fitful glare over brown tiles. Hinkle’s broad, leather-jacketed back gleamed like the sleek carapace of some prehistoric beast.
Hinkle’s face, slick with sweat, was in profile. A single drop of blue water hung on the end of his nose, then fell.
He clutched the edge of the toilet bowl with shaking hands, leaned forward, stared in horror into the porcelain depths. “Go away!” he screamed. He reached up, fumbled for the silver handle.
“WHO ARE YOU TO COMMAND?”
The voice was too big for the small room, and it filled Jack’s head. It was a voice inflected with evil, implacable, inhuman, and Jack believed, instantly, without a tremor of incredulity, without so much as a discreet pause to shake off the skepticism of a rational life, that a demon had spoken.
“Aaaaaa,” Hinkle screamed, and his pale, clumsy hand slapped at the handle.
The toilet flushed, an explosive crack that roared into echoing torrents, the noise rising to a scream, tormented by the smallness of the room. Hinkle howled too, fell backwards. His baseball cap flipped off and dove, bat-like, into the bowl.
A gray towel unfurled from its rack, undulated in the air like a live thing and dove into the blue turbulence of the toilet bowl. It disappeared with a shriek. A red toothbrush leapt from its holder. Toiletries swarmed in the air: a bar of soap, a tube of toothpaste, a safety razor, a glass bottle of shampoo which, suddenly shattering, became a writhing green blob with an honor guard of glittering shards. All plunged into the toilet bowl, swallowed (pock pock pock) by something that raged as it came.
Came. Was coming. Of that, Jack was certain. Something was approaching, furious, frenzied.
A roll of toilet paper unraveled, leaving a spinning cardboard tube. The shower curtain flapped, twisted, stretched to find the toilet bowl. Two of the plastic rings popped; the others held.
The toilet bowl was straining to swallow the curtain, which was stretched on a diagonal, shaken as though harried by an invisible terrier.
The shower rod buckled and fell. The intact rings swarmed free; the curtain snapped brightly and disappeared into the groaning bowl, a clatter of rings, a last straining, gagging, keening sound and then the steady, satisfied boom of water stirred by hurricane winds.
Something was happening to the light in the room. The corners of the room were in shadow. Hinkle, shoved back against the wall, was also in shadow. The light was dimming, no, narrowing. It was being drawn into the toilet bowl, marshaled by a hideous power that fashioned it into a single cold beam traveling from light fixture to porcelain bowl.
The door to the bathroom slammed in Jack’s face, bringing stark, impossible silence. Jack hurled himself against the door. “Hinkle!” he screamed.
Jack’s voice was loud, crazy with terror in the stillness. He slammed his shoulder against the door, and it gave some, releasing the hurricane roar and Hinkle’s screams. The noise was a physical assault, battering Jack’s skull.
Jack peered through the grudging inches where door and frame were parted by the pressure of his shoulder. In the gloom, he could see that something black and wounded was crawling across the tiled floor. A dog, perhaps, beaten, abject.
Where’s Hinkle?
Jack’s eyes found the trucker, crouched in a dark corner of the shower stall. Hinkle’s white belly caught the ambient light, glowed like the moon underwater.
Of course. It was the leather jacket that crawled toward the omnivorous porcelain mouth.
The jacket ascended the white, bulging belly of the toilet, seemed to pause at the gleaming rim, hesitated, and was swallowed, three gulps, the sound: whup, whup, whup. Then Hinkle’s single boot jauntily bounced the distance and disappeared.
Jack strained at the door, but his efforts failed to widen the three-inch gap.
Hinkle suddenly screamed and lurched forward. He was leaning over the toilet, his right arm plunged into thrashing blue water, his face squashed up against the upraised toilet lid. Grimacing under the column of light, the trucker looked like one of those late-night wrestlers, illegally pinned against the ropes, writhing in anger and agony while the crowd roared and the referee looked the other way “Hinkle!” Jack shouted.
The door was jammed; perhaps if he backed up and ran against it. Jack turned to look at the room behind him. As he watched, the tall floor lamp in the corner shed its lamp shade; the light bulb blazed. The lamp leaned forward as though trying to peer past Jack, fascinated by what it sensed.
The floor lamp lifted in the air and tumbled toward Jack. It spun end over end, an illuminated baton.
The door to the bathroom slammed shut. Jack reeled in the jarring silence.
Pop. Instant darkness. The sound, Jack later realized, was that of an electrical plug wrenching free of its outlet as the lamp flew beyond the reach of its cord.
In the blackness, Jack heard the flailing lamp cord snap against the wall behind him. And that was it. A burst of light, the false illumination of pain, bathed the inside of his skull.
“We way in the boondocks,” Gates said, frowning at pine trees as the van bumped over a dirt road. “That trucker maybe had the right idea. He shouldn’t have hit you with that lamp, that was uncalled for, but gettin out of Hurley before this sorry country bullshit... that might have been a good idea. How you suppose he escaped?”
Jack rubbed his forehead, winced when his hand came into contact with the bandage—seven stitches—and shrugged.
He just slid right down the toilet, Jack could have said. I know he was kind of a big man, and so it might be hard to credit, but there was something in that toilet—I guess you’d call it a monster—that squeezed Hinkle good, squeezed that big truck driver as easy as you or I would squeeze a tube of toothpaste. No, I didn’t actually see it happen. I was knocked unconscious by a flying lamp. And, to tell you the truth, I would be happy if I were mistaken on this one. I’d be pleased to be wrong.
Gates leaned forward in his seat and shouted at the driver of the van. “How much longer before we get to this place? We been driving for hours!” Wesley Parks (rehab counselor and temporary van driver) turned in his seat and beamed. “Patience, Mr. Gates. We are almost there.”
A rickety wooden gate, latched but not locked, blocked the dirt road. A ha
nd-painted sign read NEW WAY Alcoholism Treatment Facility. The sign’s lettering was crude but elaborate, executed, Jack assumed, by one of New Way’s patients, someone who didn’t do much but did it to excess. There might, Jack thought, be some sort of graduate thesis paper in the relationship between ornate lettering and mental illness.
This is not going to be fun, Jack thought.
Wesley got A1 to get out of the van and open the gate. The teenager was wearing ballooning red pants, sneakers, and a leather flight jacket. Jack wondered if this outfit was ironic in intent. Al’s expression (gloomy, put-upon) didn’t suggest that he was consciously engaged in sending up fashion.
After A1 got the gate open, they drove past a low, rambling building of brown brick, past a small, muddy pond full of autumnal yellows and reds, past a swaybacked barn. They drove on to the top of a low hill where the sight of a wooden, three-story farmhouse in need of a paint job caused Gates to sigh audibly.
“Ta ta,” Wesley said, stopping the van. “Welcome to New Way.” He turned the engine off and climbed out of the van. “Come on.”
Eunice, wearing a pink robe over a blouse and black slacks, followed, descending to the muddy earth with a weary sigh. Al was next, then Kerry, then Ed Tilman.
Two dogs banged open the farmhouse’s screen door and came barking and bobbing across the porch and down the steps.
Irrational Fears Page 4