Requiem for Ashes

by David Crossman

  Albert was shocked. Things like that didn't happen in his world. "Didn't anyone try to stop it?"

  "Of course we did!" Moodie exclaimed. "Goodness, you don't think that all of us were parties to such a . . . the poor child . . . but, there you have it. If we’d spoken up, we’d just have become anathema to those who were egging her on with their laughing, clapping. Would’ve just made it worse. Though I don't know how much can be held to their charge. They were all knee-deep in their cups by that time."

  "That's no excuse!" Lane protested passionately.

  "Oh, of course not, but . . . " Aside. "I should mention that Professor Lane wasn't here while all this was going on. He arrived toward the end . . . broke it up, actually, if I recollect aright."

  "I offered to take her home," said Lane. "In the end she went with someone else. Next morning, I heard she was gone. Her resignation letter arrived at the school a few days later.

  "Can you imagine what that did to her?" Lane sat down slowly. "That kid was straight outta, I don't know . . . Mr. Rogers's neighborhood. Innocent as they come, and an idealist to boot. She was in Special Ed because she really wanted to help people." The look in Frank's eyes when he raised them was the nearest thing to cold blood Albert had ever seen. "He died too easily."

  Three suspects?

  The thread of conversation was run through the needle's eye and tied off at the loose end as Dr. Strickland entered the room. "Haven't seen him here since . . . " Moodie commented under her breath. "He looks three days dead."

  The six eyes at their disposal followed Dr. Strickland as he crossed the room and joined a knot of people near the fireplace.

  The first thing Albert noticed, perhaps due to his own awakened sartorial acuity, was that Strickland, though appearing tired, was impeccably dressed. Albert adjusted his tie and ventured a slight smile, but any similarity he had begun to entertain in that regard was nipped in the bud when he saw how easily Strickland fell into conversation with his colleagues.

  "Hasn't slept much lately, it would seem," Moodie diagnosed. Lane concurred. "Things aren't very peaceful at his place, I warrant. Lice in the lovenest, eh? I don't see why Administration allows it," Miss Moodie huffed on the exhale as she inflated her dignity. "She is a student, after all."

  Albert was observing. Strickland was probably in his mid-thirties. His hair was dark and, though it overhung the collar of his black wool greatcoat, seemed in general retreat elsewhere. His smile was frequent and insincere, mirroring those around him. His eyes were keen and clear and rarely fixed on anything, but were full of expression. Now and then a word straddled a peal of laughter and rode across the room.

  "Tenure," said Miss Moodie.

  Albert stopped observing. "Pardon?"

  "They're talking about tenure," Lane elucidated. "Always brings back memories.

  "I remember when I was up, there were two or three others . . . Glenly was one of them. That's all we talked about." He smiled as if the thought awoke a melancholy.

  "A pox on modern education," Miss Moodie sighed from atop her heap of years. "Tenure is a sin." The conversation laid down tracks in a scholastic direction, so Albert went away. He had a lot to ponder. He ducked into a rest room, shut himself in one of the stalls, and lit a cigarette. He paced back and forth around the bowl, two and a half steps in each direction.

  He was agonizingly uncomfortable with the picture he had gotten of Glenly.

  It had been Albert's experience that when someone dies, all their shortcomings were buried with them; they became candidates for sainthood. Everyone suddenly had nothing but wonderful things to say about them; it was amazing the world had gotten along before them and it seemed unlikely to survive their passing. It was always like that, for politicians, teachers, plumbers, churchmen, even artists who lives had been a wasteland of sin and self-satisfaction.

  Yet, no one mourned Justin Glenly, despite his brutal and untimely demise. That's what really bothered Albert. Were the things he'd been hearing true? Was it possible that such a person existed? Even more bewildering, what accounted for his hold on people? Why hadn't they just ignored him?

  He'd smoked half a pack of cigarettes by the time his train of thought derailed. All his effort had netted him was a headache. He must be hungry. He groped his way to the door and into the hall. It was dark. The building was closed and locked.

  It was a different place at night, with the lights off, and Albert - unfamiliar with all but his territorial swatch of it in the light was day - was a complete stranger to it in the dark.

  A row of tall, small-paned windows sliced squares off the moonlight and laid them in neat regiments on the floor. The darkness was deeper by contrast, and Albert's footsteps saluted them in passing. Something moved in the shadows at the end of the hall. He stopped. Somebody must be locking up.

  He overcame his instinctive surprise and continued down the hall with his face at full mast. "Hello!"

  There was no response. Albert slowed in his tracks. "Who’s there?" He stopped and announced his name. Still no reply. Maybe he hadn't seen anything after all. His glasses were dirty. He squinted. There was no distinction between the shadows. This was silly. His heart sent white-capped waves of blood to his temples. He'd never heard his heartbeat before; it was out of time. He proceeded slowly.

  The shadows stood between him and the door. Some words tested the waters, but found his throat suddenly too dry to float them. He coughed and said "hello" again.

  Albert had never been frightened before. He'd been embarrassed, Lord knows. He'd been painfully nervous. He'd felt inadequate in social situations. But he'd never had that "tiptoe up to the windows of the spooky old house at the end of the street" kind of fear. It was new, and it wasn't pleasant. It made him feel doubly silly.

  He stood a little straighter and quickened his pace.

  The shadows in question were twenty feet ahead on the right, and the closer he got the more it seemed there was someone standing there, cloaked in black, pressed into the corner. The clearer the image became, the harder he worked to imagine it into a coat on a hook or a window curtain.

  At the instant he was able to deceive his eyes no longer, the shadow burst from hiding and threw its full weight into him, slamming him into the opposite cinder-block wall with a skull-splitting crack. Albert's hands immediately went to his head as he dropped heavily to the floor. The pain was instant and aggressive. In the final blur of reason before the lights went out, he saw the shadow flying down the hall, a cape billowing in its slipstream like a demon on its back.

  Chapter Five

  It was still dark when Albert awoke. His hand went immediately to his throbbing head. He half expected to find a gaping I hole in his skull and all his brains spilled on the floor, except the segment that registers pain; that bit was intact and functioning perfectly.

  Blood from his nose had crusted on his face and formed a warm, sticky puddle between his cheek and the floor.

  He peeled himself off the flagstones, sat up, and lit a cigarette. The burst of match light adhered itself to the inner walls of his eyelids. The neatly ordered platoons of moonlight were marching up the wall opposite. Must have been an hour. Maybe an hour and a half.

  He'd never considered the speed of moonlight.

  There was a curious smell in the air. Perfume? Chemicals?

  When he was young, Albert had gone to Mt. Washington with his mother. There was a car park near the top, and a telescope you could look through for five cents. While his mother was getting her nickel's worth, he persuaded his head between two rails of the wooden fence and looked over the edge. It was a tight fit, but a glorious view seven hundred feet straight down. One of the men from the weather station finally had to break the rail to get Albert's head out. It all came back to him now.

  At least his memory worked.

  "One and one is two," he said. His voice echoed eerily through the halls. "A dotted half gets three beats in four-four time."

  Basic logic intact.

 
He ground out the cigarette, collected himself from the floor, and stood up. Instantly his brain seemed adrift in some volatile fluid. There was a brief but brilliant display of flashbulbs and Molotov cocktails in the confines of his cranium. The floor rushed up at him. It should be an easy thing to stop the fall. But his limbs ignored his brain's commands and crumpled beneath him like beanstalks.

  For the next several days Albert's chief activity was waking up, experiencing delirious pain, and falling asleep again. The hem of his consciousness was laced with voices. Men and women. Some familiar, some not. He couldn't tell what they were saying. There were dog barks, too. Train whistles. Gunshots. A whole library of grotesque sounds and voices that, orchestrated by the pain, coerced fantastic things from his subconscious. He couldn't tell if he was awake or dreaming.

  Something seeped through, though. It was the general impression of whiteness; the smell of bleach embedded in the stiff linens against his face, rubbery white hands that lifted, and rolled, and wrapped, and soothed, and performed a host of duties that only his hands had done before. He'd be embarrassed when he felt better.

  Somebody lifted his eyelid. He could feel his eyeball contract.

  "Ah, somebody's home."

  Albert tried to respond but only succeeded in producing a raspy grunt.

  "Don't try to talk," the doctor said. "If not for your sake, then for mine. I hate trying to figure out what people are saying. Doubly hard since most folks recovering from your condition don't make sense anyway."

  After a while Albert managed to arch his eyebrows high enough to pry his eyes open. The doctor had seated himself on a bedside chair and, leaning forward with hands on his knees, regarded Albert over the tops of his reading glasses with the expectancy of a baker waiting for the pastry to rise.

  "You're in hospital," said the doctor. He had an accent. Not quite English. Not Irish. "I'm Dr. Williams." Not Scots. "I'd've laid money you'd never see the light of day again." Not Jamaican or Bahamian. "But there you are." He was Welsh. Albert had always had the ability to identify accents, sometimes in minute detail. It was a faculty that embraced his only other interest in life besides music: geography.

  Dr. Williams would be called "stout" in polite company. His reddish hair was streaked with white and stood out like wings on either side of his linen cap. "I know two young ladies'll be glad to see you."

  Albert didn't know two young ladies. He knew his sister, who was in Florida, and he knew Miss Bjork . . . but she was more lawyer than lady.

  He lubricated his throat with a drink of water and made some sounds similar to an old Volkswagen bus starting on a cold day.

  "Two?" Albert said creakily. All his life he'd hardly noticed the sex, now they were popping up everywhere.

  "One's a lovely little thing. Nose like a pixie," said the doctor. "Bit frostbit, though."

  "Frostbit?" Once again Albert found himself conversing in questions. He became aware of the bandages, traced them gently with his fingertips.

  The doctor finished scratching some notes on Albert's record and hung it back on the bedside. "Eighteen stitches there, my friend. Don't go poking at my handiwork.

  “She's more GQ than Cosmo, if you take my meaning." The doctor laughed.

  Albert summoned the same dull smile he always did when he didn't understand the joke. What was a GQ? It often seemed there was an entire vocabulary that he wasn't privy to hidden somewhere in the English language. There were so many things he didn't comprehend. He'd never much cared before. He'd been a sickly child. Missed a lot of school. Those must have been the days they taught all the important things.

  "What I call a 'no-frills woman.' All business."

  It was Ms. Bjork. Albert suddenly felt unkempt. He wanted a tie.

  "And the other one?"

  The doctor deposited a buttock on the end of the bed. "A real treat, there." He tapped his temple with a forefinger and lobbed another knowing glance over the rim of his glasses. "It's not till after you've been talking to her for two or three minutes that you realize the record has a skip in it."

  An analogy Albert could understand!

  "You'll be going along, right as rain, when all of a sudden skip, skip you're in another groove." He paused. "Sometimesphwip!" his hand skidded through the air, "clear off the turntable altogether."

  "Crazy?" Albert ventured.

  "Well," said the doctor, slapping his knees as he stood up, "one of us was. Who is she, sister? Cousin?" His conscience pricked itself in retrospect. "I say, I hope I didn’t . . . "

  "No," said Albert, knitting his eyebrows in confusion. He paged through the half-dozen women of his acquaintance; all had their peculiarities, being women, but none was crazy. Not what he'd call crazy, anyway. "What did she look like?"

  "Oh, early twenties, thereabouts. Flaming red hair. Not what you'd call 'slim as the mayor's reputation,' but not fat. Painfully shy. Quiet, for the most part. Not unattractive, either. Like I said, took me a while to realize." The doctor tapped his temple again. "Those kind are more worrisome than your Napoleons and Teddy Roosevelts. A little scary. She sits there in the corner, watching. Hums, sometimes."

  A shiver thrilled its way across Albert's back. He looked at the empty chair in the corner.

  "Well, if there are no complaints, I'll pop in again this afternoon. Need anything? Pillows? Painkiller?"

  Albert hesitated. His head was throbbing. He'd been so glad to be conscious he hadn't noticed. "Maybe something for this headache?"

  Dr. Williams extracted a tiny knot of round white pills, wrapped in cellophane, from his pocket. "Happen to have just the thing." He handed three of the pills to Albert, together with the water glass from the bedside table. "Not very professional," he said as he retied the bundle and slipped it back into his pocket. "But I make up for it in bedside manner, don't you agree?"

  Albert nodded as he took the pills and water, dribbling on his gown in the process.

  "Right, then," said the doctor with a smile as he headed for the door. "Anything else?"

  Albert wiped his chin with the back of his hand. He shook his head. The doctor opened the door.

  "Doctor?"

  Williams turned in the doorway and grunted.

  "That woman . . . the second one . . . does she come often?"

  "Oh, every night . . . about eight. They turn her out at nine; end of visiting hours."

  The doctor left in his wake a profound and troubling silence, one that was shattered suddenly by an ear-splitting whistle, an explosion, and the same hideous laughter that had plagued Albert's dreams.

  Whoever was in the bed on the other side of the curtain had turned on the TV, full blast, in the middle of a Bugs Bunny cartoon. No wonder he'd had such strange dreams.

  "Could you turn that down, please?"

  The mayhem continued unabated.

  "Please turn that down!"

  Albert's feeble objection was swallowed whole by the sound of a piano falling on a duck. Nevertheless, his meager effort had exacted a painful price. He closed his eyes and massaged his temples.

  A nurse swept into the room on hospital feet, shut off the TV, and began scolding the person in the next bed.

  "I told you to keep that TV down, Jeremy. The Professor’s a very sick man. Needs his rest. Do you understand?" Albert's lately acquired appreciation of nurses was elevated at once to veneration. "Now if I have to tell you again, I'll take the remote control away."

  The nurse reappeared from behind the curtain. "So good to see you back among the living, Professor! Sorry about the noise," she said, mechanically tidying Albert's bed as if he wasn't in it.

  "He's a teenager," she explained in a whisper.

  "Oh," said Albert.

  “Normally, we’d have someone like you in a private room, but we’re packed to the rafters. Never seen the like.

  The nurse left the room.

  Albert wondered what that meant, ‘someone like him.’ Were there others? Did they keep them in special rooms?

  "Yo
u the friend of the guy down the hall?"

  It was the Teenager. Albert waited for someone to answer. The room could go on forever for all he knew; there could be row after row of invalids beyond the screen. Perhaps they all had remote controls.

  "Hey!" said the Teenager. "You asleep?"

  "Are you speaking to me?" said Albert.

  "Yeah," the Teenager replied. "You're a friend've that guy down the hall, aren't you? You know the guy who tried to you know, like, the guy who killed the guy?"

  "Tewksbury?"

  "Yeah. Tewksbury."

  "He's here?" said Albert, remembering at the same time.

  "Yeah, he tried to . . . "

  "I know," said Albert preemptorily.

  " . . . kill himself . . . "

  "I know," said Albert with finality.

  "Slit his wrists."

  Albert became aware of the boy's shadow on the curtain; he was enthusiastically sawing at his wrists.

  "I know," said Albert pleadingly.

  " . . . with a razor blade," the boy continued.

  Albert's repeated broadsides had struck a denser substance and fallen harmlessly into the brine.

  "What's he like?" the boy asked. He didn't wait for a reply. "There's this guy in the movies who hacks people up with a weed whacker. He's really dead, but, like, he keeps comin' back to life on Arbor Day, you know?"