by S. T. Joshi
“Because he was never in any of them. Dad blew his brains out. A soul would need a while to pull itself together after that. But Ephraim had no shortage of temporary shelters, back before your modern sanitation. The punier the brain, the better. Ephraim was the type to go bite a person on the scalp if he couldn’t get in his head otherwise, and that was why Dad hated bugs and such, had a flyswatter on him always and mousetraps on the floor, as if vermin could hop a bus from the asylum clean over to our place.”
He chuckled at Dad’s silliness, though nothing shy of vermin riding the bus had heretofore struck him as too fantastical. And now he was gawking at her. Dammit, she must have dropped her professional guard. Luckily, he mistook her bemusement for stodgy wits. “Don’t get it, do you? The little girls understood. ‘Ephraim didn’t want to die, He went into a fly, The fly got eaten by a spider, So he went inside her, She got eaten by a rat, So he went inside of that . . .’ That’s what they used to sing, eh?”
Meg essayed a brittle smile. She appreciated his clever ploy of recruiting Depression-era kids to validate his gibberish, but it only helped persuade her he belonged in her wing of the institute—not that poaching Pickman “clients” was on her to-do list. If anything, she was more uncomfortable with an Upton intense instead of comatose, and how would this manic phase play out? She’d already elicited details galore to jot down while they were fresh, to collate with the story so far, to fuel the director’s budding irrationality.
Speaking of whom, it behooved her to ascertain, while Upton was in so expansive a mood: “Edward, has anyone else stopped by to ask about your dad and Cell 44?”
A cogent, searching expression gave way to alarming blowup. “I’m not here!” Vocal exertion picked him up off his seat and plunked him down again. “He comes back, mark me AWOL! He’s a wall, Kilroy’s behind him, never went away, shit-eating nose flopping over the top! Kilroy was here, man the pumps! Quick anyone, the Flit!” Upton shuddered crown-to-toe, eyes darting fitfully, fists beating a paradiddle on his chair’s wooden arms. “He comes buzzing around, here’s some food for thought!”
Meg gagged and sprinted to the nurses’ station, barely pausing to announce, “Edward Upton’s had an accident. He needs an immediate change of clothing. He may be unruly.” A classic Ratched of a brickhouse nurse raised wire-thin eyebrows that projected, Who the hell are you? “I’m your deputy managing officer,” Meg grated. “I’m Dr. Kilduff.” Her parting glower intimated the plebs had better snap to it or else, while the dining-hall crooner warbled, “You must remember this . . .” Jesus Christ, what was wrong with that Kmart Sinatra? Or did she have him to thank, however ill-advised his repertoire, for defrosting Upton?
She typed up Edward’s remarks from behind a locked office door, as if merely recording them implied belief in them, impugning her own mens sana. Worse, she couldn’t just transcribe mechanically, no; compulsive riffing on Upton’s drivel ensued, inducing her to repeat, I’m going through the motions of buying into nonsense, that’s all, strictly for the sake of argument. She wouldn’t, for example, commit to typescript her surmise that a human personality could scarcely hope to interface with arthropod brains for fifty years, for thousands of evanescent generations, with nothing rubbing off on it.
And Upton’s wild aversion to “Kilroy”—did that derive entirely from turbid flashbacks to wartime experiences, or could she read into it a chat with the director gone awry? If so, Upton might also have treated him, before their tête-à-tête imploded, to his folderol about Ephraim cheating death by taking refuge in vermin. In which case, would the director be dippy enough to apply that folderol to the problem of 44? It was something for Meg to look forward to. Or if he was unacquainted with “Kilroy,” fine, she’d have the pleasure of catching him up.
She traipsed into his office as smug and self-possessed as proverbial Greeks bearing gifts, though not without trepidation. It was almost mid-January, and she hadn’t been alone with him since his Yuletide hijinks under the mistletoe. At the threshold she noticed he’d cranked the thermostat; she couldn’t be this hot under the collar in the span of seconds from her own emotional state. It was steamy greenhouse heat, conducive only to orchids and the insects nibbling them.
The director had his back to her, and when she cleared her throat and clacked her hard heels across the parquet, he about-faced from the nor’easter out the window, wide-eyed as if he hadn’t a clue what snow was. “Well, they were forecasting upwards of a foot overnight,” she greeted him.
He muttered, “They . . .” He seemed perplexed at who “they” were, disoriented, untethered from the present. Fits and starts of recognition blinked into his vision, and finding her already seated in the chair toward which he waved, he spouted, “Please make yourself at home. What have you got?”
She adhered to the custom of winging an oral summation while he, at his desk, skimmed from page to page. In brief, yes, he’d been right, a patient other than Edward Derby was the prime candidate for haunting 44. Ephraim Waite, a crackpot infamous for meting out the hairy eyeball and worse witchery, had also died there, and in yet another incredible coincidence, would have become Edward Derby’s father-in-law a few years later. The director’s brow wrinkled, probably at the paragraph about straitjacketed Ephraim raving he was his own daughter.
Meg had, she reminded him, tried imparting all this at the staff party, but just as well she hadn’t, because today a fascinating, albeit ridiculous, new rationale for the tribulations in 44 had emerged. A syllable wedged in her throat when the director’s eyes met hers with a flinty, piercing appraisal. In a flash it was over and he reverted to clinical dispassion; her sangfroid recovered and she forged on, though she’d never resolve whether her oblique allusion to his tipsy behavior, or her unprofessionalism in labeling Ephraim a “crackpot,” had annoyed him.
At any rate, Ephraim wasn’t exactly haunting the cell, as she’d prematurely espoused, so much as transplanting himself in the myriad critters infesting it, sustaining his consciousness for decades till reopening the cell last month brought human brains to infiltrate. These violations, unsuccessful to date, translated among the victims as harassment by Rasputin or the Ayatollah. How formidable Ephraim must have been to inspire that range of comparisons! And none other than Daniel Upton’s only son, right under our noses in the Pickman, had concocted this most abstruse, outlandish explanation for a cell’s poor health-and-safety profile.
The director’s swivel chair squealed and twisted some degrees, he slid an inch to one side on its cushion as if nudged, and his studied reserve sharpened into hawkish interest. Optimistic Meg strove for an air of neutrality while yearning for hairline cracks in his composure, for a tic of credulity toward Edward Upton’s hogwash. That hogwash was perturbing him all right, but in a scarily uncharted direction.
He smacked her papers down on his desk and snatched his fingertips away as if expecting they would stick. With a steely, domineering attitude quite unlike him, and diction the more chilling for its quiescence, he demanded, “Why was I not informed?” More disconcerting yet, his sightline had lowered toward the emptiness between them, fostering a notion he wasn’t addressing her. And in more daunting proof the cracks were spreading, his eyes goggled unblinking and he succumbed to herky-jerky spasms, switching his head left-right-left with a vigor liable to sprain his neck. She had a firm but arbitrary inkling the two conditions were linked, the spasms somehow contriving to restore, or recalibrate, his vision.
The spasms persisted till a string of spittle spewed past the dam of his clenched teeth, to zigzag across the desk and her topmost sheet. She winced as his head wrenched to a jarring halt, and went cold at the same leer he’d fixed on her at the party. It partook of nothing amorous but was no less carnal, and unnerving, for that. She felt unsafe as she never had among the garden-variety maniacs. In the fewest words, she felt like food. Her feet were fidgety with the stirrings of fight-or-flight response. Damn her smartass resolution to knock him off his high horse!
&nbs
p; If he began heaving from his chair, would it be to gesture her out, or pounce? Meg was on hair-trigger alert, tensing to take to her heels, and fuck it if that made her seem the crazy one. “Will you excuse me?” he murmured at torturous length, a sheath of whisper around an iron imperative. “I have much to pore over, Doctor. Thank you.” She nodded warily and hustled out, not quite bolting, declining to dwell on his borderline sardonic enunciation of “Doctor.”
She retreated to her office, not far enough down the hall, and resisted a batty impulse to barricade herself in. For one thing, she’d be signing out within the hour, and in view of the snow pelting diagonally through the cones of light from the Victorian lampposts along the drive, absconding sooner sounded wise. The two-lane blacktop into town might already amount to a slip-’n’-slide enlivened by dead-man’s curves, and the rusty old truss bridge over the Miskatonic had been slick with pre-snowfall rime this morning.
She just couldn’t disengage, though, from bureaucratic futzing with weekly treatment reports, staff performance reviews, the tedium she’d ordinarily dash into a blizzard to avoid. Nebulous forebodings about the boss held her deskbound, needled her into reviewing their fraught discussion, deconstructing his strangeness. His alienation from the world outside, his mood swings into a starker personality, his fleeting but trenchant interrogation of an impalpable third party, the psychic upheaval underlying his frothing convulsions— these were helter-skelter signposts to an overlapping pair of propositions: Ephraim had invaded the director’s head, or more realistically, the director thought he had.
She could readily credit the power of autosuggestion to possess him. He’d been receptive to a supernatural basis for the cell’s toxicity from the get-go, and once the option of naming that basis “Ephraim” became available, the director seemed unable to breeze into 44 without absorbing more and more of him. And the independence of that persona had evolved to the extent “Ephraim” wasn’t automatically privy to whatever the director knew. Edward Upton, for example, apparently hadn’t been on “Ephraim’s” radar until Meg had inserted him there.
Her forebodings redoubled at grasping how she may have blundered terribly, how she may have painted a bull’s-eye on Edward Upton’s chest. Meg couldn’t rule out an Old Testament attitude toward “sins of the fathers” between the director’s ears, whoever was in there. That must have been why her better nature hadn’t let her clock out. She’d be indirectly, a.k.a. morally, responsible for the deadly vengeance “Ephraim” might wreak on the son of the man who’d slain him.
Out of habit she’d kicked off her pumps under the desk, no use on her own turf for that further inch of stature, that extra stab at prettifying herself for the banal menfolk. Her arches always smoldered and ached by four o’clock. Urgency launched her up and out in her nylon-stocking feet to the Pickman; who the hell could run in those heels?
Shortcuts through derelict service tunnels and up equally grungy stairwells brought her, winded and sweaty, to the nurses’ station, where she vowed heads would roll. The day shift had jumped the gun at prospects of whiteout conditions, while the night shift, battling those conditions, had yet to materialize. Nobody was in sight beyond a scatter of patients drooping inert in wheelchairs or soaking up blue glow in the TV lounge. What a conducive interlude for a murder!
The blips and pings of monitors and palliative equipment made her feel like a pinball as she careened down the hall into the room where Upton wasn’t, where the absence of anything personal had become his absence, period, nothing to show he’d ever been there, unless those were his gobs of blood on which she skidded. No blood, no indicators of violence had caught her eye outside the room, not that she ever doubted the director was cunning and careful.
Those qualities were on further display in his office, where no souvenirs of mayhem met her frantic survey. Not till she turned to go did she discover the smeary footprints she’d tracked from Upton’s room; they flustered her as if guilt at exposing him were taking graphic form.
She could conceive of only one more destination in the whole sanitarium. And the air in 44, at first haggard gasp, was easier to breathe, less burdensome, as if an oppressive element had departed. Moreover, she didn’t have to throw the light-switch on her way in. Via the skylight an ashen glow suffused the cell, a protrusion of the white overcast, not so much converting night to day as exchanging mundane reality for its darkroom negative. No gore bespattered walls and floor, and maybe anxiety induced her to imagine the air growing thick and stifling again as footfalls clomped brashly down the corridor.
She pressed her spine against the wall beside the door, her best impromptu measure to “play it safe,” and a heartbeat later, the director snuffled in, bent so low he verged on toppling over, knuckles almost sweeping the floor, smudging the bloody trail he ogled with bulging eyes, his nostrils flaring. Blood encircled his lips like clown makeup. Was he on her scent or Upton’s?
She had no inclination to find out. The instant his momentum carried him past her into the cell, a pace or two from where her red footprints U-turned toward the threshold, she sidled out and slammed the door, and hurray, the key was in the lock. Her respiration had yet to quiet down when caterwauling from the cell fazed her all over again. “Don’t put me in here with him! Open that door! I’m your superior!” she deciphered amid more garbled uproar. Ah, but even had she been more sympathetically disposed, 44 was the sole single-occupant vacancy tonight.
Breathing exercises gradually recouped her the wherewithal to look around. A gaggle of nurses and orderlies had assembled in response to the director’s ruckus, or to her footprints maybe, and was giving her wide berth, waiting on her to open her mouth, as if to ensure she wasn’t the one who needed confinement. At least she had a rank-and-file who wouldn’t desert the snowed-in ship, unlike those shirkers in the Pickman.
She kept it simple, loud and clear to cut through the hysterics. The director has suffered a breakdown. He’s likely murdered someone. You, you, and you, call the police, call an ambulance, don’t let anyone into 44 who isn’t armed, he’s extremely dangerous. The rest of you, search for the body of an Edward Upton, include the Pickman Wing, inform anyone who answers the phone over there that he’s missing. And all the while the ear-splitting protests raved on, very disruptive to linear cognition, “He’ll cast me out! He’ll force me into one of them! He’ll make me what he is!”
Messengers soon reported back with body language entreating her not to shoot them please. The roads were bad, the bridge impassable due to a ten-car pileup, long story short, no cops, no medics, we’re on our own till morning. Meg wryly considered the drivers might have been Pickman commuters fecklessly outbound or valiantly inbound, perchance colliding head-on. Her verbal reaction was a model of philosophic reserve: don’t beat yourselves up, we can muddle through for a lousy twelve hours, can’t we?
Internally she was basking in the Schadenfreude. She’d proved the director unfit for duty, what a glaring understatement, never mind her active role in rendering him unfit. Here was simply the outcome of subscribing to half-baked New Age thinking, daily horoscope, ghosts, the twaddle that softened him up, made him a sitting duck for cruel-world stressors. On perceiving she’d been tuning out his hysterics, becoming desensitized, she told the flinchy doormen she’d be in her office. She could sack out on the futon and trust that anyone who sniffed out Upton’s corpse was competent to locate her too.
The dazzling sunshine of a post-nor’easter freeze poured between the slats of her venetian blinds and jarred her awake. She was irrationally nonplussed not to hear the director’s screams and, even at a stone’s throw from 44, strained her ears to no avail. Nothing disrupted the snores of the night watch, who’d been conscientious enough to plunk his ass squarely in front of the door.
She shook his shoulder, he shuddered and listened and asked, somewhat obtusely on first impression, “Is he still in there?”
“Let’s see, shall we?” she urged, already admitting to herself, Yeah, it is uncanni
ly peaceful in there. She had him open up, then waved him aside, preferring to be first to take stock, despite lurking danger, of her campaign’s success. True, she couldn’t have done it without the snow as collaborator, which thank God was still delaying the arrival of any managerial peers, with whom she was unaccountably reluctant to share this triumph. Meanwhile, she’d become, by default, the acting director!
She tromped in, but before her brain could process visual input, the smell slammed her in the solar plexus, nearly backhanded her out the door. Shit, puke, and death, in descending order, made her tear ducts overflow, dizzied her with nausea, impelled her with brute desperation to focus.
The director had come up with an all-consuming alternative to screaming. He was on hands and knees, naked, clothes in soggy shreds littering the floor, his face in a hillock of his own shit, slurping it up, its contours obscured by the vomit topping it. And in the mucoid vomit were mouthfuls of raw mushy meat, some with milky skin and limb hair still attached, along with several slimy, partly defleshed fingers. If last night’s search party had stumbled across other morsels, would it have realized they were Upton’s piecemeal remains?
A strangulated squawk impinged on her from behind. The big, manly slab of an orderly had peeked over her shoulder and wasn’t bracing up especially well. “Keep it together!” she barked, without taking her eyes off the director, who hadn’t yet acknowledged them. “It’s your job to deal with what’s in front of you, is it not?” If he managed to answer, she was deaf to it, intent on a little experiment. “Ephraim?” she accosted the director, though aware she might only establish the director thought he was Ephraim.
But she’d won his attention. His head swiveled toward her, in the fashion of a mantis or wasp; otherwise he didn’t budge a muscle. Okay, now what to say? Before anything occurred to her, an impatient buzzing sprang from his throat and he resumed breakfast. Barring a defunct warlock in genuine control, the director really had bought into the implications of Ephraim abiding in a thousandfold generations of vermin, and she had to curb a self-satisfied smirk on mulling the silver lining to this miasma.
