Wildwood Road

by Christopher Golden

  “Jillian, hey. Are you okay? Can I get you anything?”

  “Can you get me anything? It's my house, Ted.”

  The way she looked at him he felt like a fool, as though he were the one standing there in his underpants.

  “Wait, didn't Michael tell you I was here?”

  “Yeah. Baby-sitting. You're a pal.” She said this without expression, voice desert dry, then turned and moved deeper into the house.

  Teddy's face flushed and he stood awkwardly between sofa and television, listening to her open and close cabinet doors in the kitchen, probably rooting for a snack of some kind. The remote control was on the floor where it had fallen when she had startled him to his feet. He hesitated to sit down again. Teddy Polito had never felt more out of place in his life. But he sure as hell wasn't going to follow her into the kitchen to make conversation. For one thing, she was practically naked. And for another, she was behaving like an absolute bitch. If he had never met Jillian before he would have despised her. But Teddy knew her, and so instead he was worried.

  Worried, and a little afraid.

  It was possible that something had gone wrong between Michael and Jillian. An affair, maybe. Nothing else he could conceive of would have engendered so much spite. But if that was the case, why would Michael have asked him to come here? It confused the hell out of Teddy. Regardless of what was going on, whether it was something between them or some kind of personality disorder, he wanted them to work it out. Seeing Jillian like this gave him chills.

  Whatever you're up to, Michael, I hope it helps.

  When Jillian passed by again on her way back upstairs, Teddy was back on the sofa. His head was turned toward the television but he could not focus on it, all too aware of her. Only after he was sure she was back on the second floor did the tension begin to leave him, and even then, the awkwardness remained. He didn't belong here. He wanted to leave. But he had told Michael he would keep an eye on Jillian all night if he had to. Now Teddy regretted those words as he mentally hurried Michael along, hoping he would get home quickly.

  It was going to be a long night.

  THERE WERE PERHAPS TWO DOZEN cars in the main parking area behind Pentucket Hospital, all but one clustered near the front entrance. The other, a lone Cadillac, was three quarters of the way across the lot. Michael figured the people who’d parked up close were nighttime visitors, recently arrived, and whoever the poor bastard was who owned the Caddy, he had come much earlier in the day and had reason to stay until the hospital threw him out. It might have been for good reason, something happy like the arrival of a new baby . . . but odds were he had been there for a long time because something very unpleasant was going on in his life.

  Out of an impulsive burst of solidarity, Michael parked beside the silver Cadillac and walked across the barren lot to the wide front entrance. As a boy he had loved revolving doors, but they were mostly electronic now and moved too slowly, so he hadn't stepped inside one in years.

  The lobby was unlike most hospitals he had been inside. It reminded him far more of a hotel, with a sprawling oasis of greenery, comfortable chairs and carpets in the center, and all of the important counters, services, and stations ranged around the edges. Information. Gift shop. Au Bon Pain bakery. Florist. Patient services. There was a large clock on the wall that revealed the time as 8:36, and he worried that though visiting hours didn't end for more than twenty minutes, he might not be allowed in to see Susan Barnes. The prospect of this made his face flush and his pulse quicken as he approached the information counter.

  “Can I help you?” The girl behind the counter had exotic features and caramel skin, with just the faintest accent. He thought she was Middle Eastern but wasn't certain. There was a tiny diamond piercing in her left nostril and it glinted in the light.

  “I'm here to see a patient in the psychiatric ward. Where do I go from here?”

  She was pleasant enough, giving him a small square map of the hospital and showing him which corridor to follow, even marking it with a pencil. But as she slid it across the counter she glanced at the clock.

  “You should know that visiting hours are—”

  “Almost over. I know. Thank you.”

  He hurried to the elevator and was lucky enough to catch one headed up almost instantly. On the third floor he stepped out and then strode quickly along the corridor, turned left, and walked through a long covered footbridge that separated the main hospital building from the psychiatric services center. Michael resolutely refused to look at his watch.

  The double doors at the entrance to psych services swung open at his approach and he saw an abandoned waiting room beyond, with another door past that. There was a long desk by that door, and a formidable-looking black woman sat sentinel behind it. She glanced up at him as he entered, and her gaze flicked toward a clock before turning back to him.

  “Can I help you, sir?” she asked, her tone and expression indicating that she thought he had lost his way.

  “Yes. I've come to see a patient. What room is Susan Barnes in?”

  She sighed and gave him a look to let him know he was a moron. “I'm sorry, sir, but you can't simply go to her room. That isn't the way it works in this part of the hospital. Also, are you aware that—”

  “Visiting hours are almost over,” he finished for her. “Yes, but I need to speak with Susan Barnes, please.”

  He hoped that his own urgency was enough to let her know that she was wasting his time asking questions. Whatever had to be done for him to talk to Susan Barnes, he had less than twenty minutes in which to get it done.

  “Ms. Barnes is in a restricted wing. She cannot have visitors in her room. If you want to speak with her, I can have an orderly escort you to a public meeting room and have her brought to see you there.”

  “Please,” he replied, now glancing at the clock himself.

  If the nurse or receptionist or gatekeeper found his hurry odd, she did not remark upon it. Instead she picked up her phone and barked a couple of orders to have Susan brought from her room and for an orderly to fetch Michael from the entrance.

  “It will just be a moment,” she said, hanging up the phone. “Just fill this out.”

  “You knew just who she was,” Michael noted with admiration as he put his name and address into the visitation form. “That she was in a restricted wing. You didn't even have to look up her file. That's pretty good. Do you remember all the patients?”

  Her smile was thin and false. “Only the dangerous ones.”

  He blinked, taken slightly aback.

  “Just don't turn your back on her,” the woman said. Then a spark of amusement lit her eyes. “Anyway, her son called a little while ago, said someone would be coming to see his mother and that you had his permission. You think just anyone gets into this wing to see a patient when they want to?”

  Michael stared at her a moment, amazed that Tom Barnes had made the call. “No, I . . . I guess I never thought about it.”

  Then the door beside the desk opened with a clank of a lock turning and an orderly emerged. He grabbed a clipboard upon which was the form Michael had just filled out. It included not only his own information, but the details on whom he was visiting. The man had not been young for twenty years, but his size and his bearing, the cut of his hair and the line of his jaw, all suggested military service in his past.

  “All right, Mr. Dansky,” he said. “Come on with me.”

  “Have a nice night,” Michael told the receptionist out of reflex.

  “Yeah,” she said, apparently tickled by the concept. “You, too.”

  As they walked down hallways redolent with the smells of human sweat, ammonia, and disinfectant, Michael felt a shivery sort of dread creep up the back of his neck, as though dozens of sets of eyes were upon him. Most of the doors were closed, but he saw into some of the patients' rooms as he passed. A man sat in a rocking chair watching a television anchored to the wall and moved the chair in the tiniest jerks, this weird rhythm that could
barely be called rocking. In another, an androgynous figure sat calmly knitting, softly singing an old Coca-Cola advertising jingle in a voice of ethereal beauty.

  It struck him then that he actually missed the presence of the lost girl in his peripheral vision, or the passing sight of a figure in a shapeless coat on the side of the road. They were leaving him alone for the moment—perhaps because of whatever strange short circuit had happened when they had tried to control him earlier—and he should have been pleased. Instead he was unnerved. He did not want to be here, in this awful place. Some of these people had spiders crawling in their brains, at least metaphorically, and it made his skin go cold. It would have been better if his own madness was still with him. He might have felt more like he belonged here, but if not, at the very least it would have propelled him along. Terror and dread and helplessness were powerful motivators.

  The orderly led him deeper into the ward. Michael knew that once upon a time the place would not have been so much like a hospital. Pentucket's psych services wing was all about patient treatment, observation, and in some cases, long-term care. But the latter was far less common in modern times than it had once been. In an earlier era, the place would have been filled with chronic patients, permanent residents. The laws had changed, and so had drug therapy. Depression, bipolar disorder, and so many other things that altered human behavior now had clinical cures. Miracle pills that could fix the problem, as long as the patient kept taking them.

  But there were always some people who were simply crazy.

  The orderly took him into a side corridor that opened up almost immediately into a large public room with an air hockey table, a large television set, and a number of sitting areas arranged with plush chairs, throw rugs, and card tables. On the far side of the room was a set of double doors with a red light above. Set into the wall beside it was a window into an office, where a tall, thin man sat behind a desk. Michael's escort waved to the man as they approached, and the tall man nodded and reached for something beneath the desk. The light above the heavy double doors turned green.

  “Jesus, it's like a prison,” Michael muttered, mostly to himself.

  “Some of the patients can get violent,” the orderly replied. “It usually isn't a problem, but that doesn't mean you don't take precautions. Particularly with the limitations of the facility. If it was built from scratch today, the layout of the place would be completely different. A lot more PC, at least on the outside. But we have to make do with what we have. With the way things are going, it's not like the state's going to pay for a shiny new upgrade.”

  “Yeah. Yeah, of course. No way to justify it in this economy,” Michael agreed. But it still seemed like the place was a throwback to an earlier era. On the other hand, he had never been inside such a facility before.

  They passed a glass wall on the right, beyond which was a long conference table with half a dozen chairs around it. There was a second identical room, but when they came adjacent to it, Michael saw that it was not empty.

  A stocky female orderly stood in one corner. But she wasn't alone.

  Susan Barnes sat at the table with her arms crossed like a sullen child. He had seen the resemblance in her Realtor photograph to the little lost girl who had been haunting him, but if it had ever been there, any similarity was gone now. She was too thin, her face gaunt, and her dirty-blond hair was fading to white. He'd never been able to establish her precise age, but he gauged it at just past fifty. Behind that glass wall, she looked sixty at least.

  Then the woman noticed him and stared at him. Her face was so thin that her eyes seemed huge and luminous, and in that moment, any hesitation about her identity left him. Physically she looked nothing like the lost girl . . . like Scooter. But those eyes were unmistakable.

  “You've got about ten minutes, Mr. Dansky,” the orderly noted, glancing at his clipboard again for Michael's name. Then a smirk twisted up the edges of his mouth. “If she gives you that long.”

  He stood aside. Michael pushed open the glass door. The female orderly appraised him silently but said nothing, not interfering with the visit. When Michael realized he did not have to deal with her, he focused on Susan Barnes. Her arms were still crossed, and one of her eyebrows was arched. Her upper lip was curled back in the threat of a sneer about to be born.

  Come find me.

  A shiver ran through him and he felt his breathing quicken. Emotions welled up inside him and nearly spilled over. Here she was, this ordinary madwoman, tangible proof of all that he had been living through since that terrible night after the masquerade.

  “Well?”

  He blinked. So strange to hear her speak. He recalled that tiny lost-girl voice, remembered the golden-haloed angel who had been silhouetted in his headlights in her peasant blouse and blue jeans. Her foot had crushed his D'Artagnan hat. Michael smiled as he thought of it. He had no idea how that detail could have been lost to him, in spite of all the chaos. Of course she had been real, if something like that . . . but, no. There were variations on the word “real,” here, apparently. For this woman and that lost girl . . . they were the same and not the same at all.

  “Hello? Who the fuck are you? Reporter? Lawyer? They said my son sent you. So talk to me, asshole. You dragged me away from my shows, so don't waste my time. The clock is fucking ticking.”

  Michael opened his mouth, his lips moved, but he could not seem to form words. How could it all be? Seeing her there like that and knowing, remembering that night on the side of the road . . . it was worse, in a way, than the sweet lost creature haunting his eyes, worse than those hollow, twisted women with their frigid touch and the memories they had infected him with. The filthy violation of his mind.

  This is what that lost girl became, he thought. And he could not help but wonder if it was because he left her there at the house on Wildwood Road that night. If it was because he brought her home.

  The female orderly was staring at him now. She had even taken a step away from the corner; he could see in her face that she was trying to figure out if he was going to be a problem.

  “Scooter,” Michael whispered.

  Susan Barnes sneered. “What the fuck did you say?”

  “Scooter,” he rasped again. He shook himself, then slid into the chair across the table from her. “They used to call you Scooter. When you were growing up. Your . . . your sister couldn't say Susan and—”

  A trace of fear breezed across her features before disappearing, buried once more beneath the sullenness and anger. “I don't remember much about growing up.”

  “No,” Michael said, agreeing. “No, of course you don't.”

  He was still partially mesmerized by her presence. At any moment he expected those women to appear, or for the specter of the younger Susan Barnes to loom once more in his peripheral vision. But neither occurred. It was just the two of them and the orderly and the ticking clock.

  His time was wasting.

  “How long have you been here?” he asked.

  “Two years? Three? What does it matter?” Some small doubt showed in her eyes, then. “Do I know you? I mean, did I?”

  Michael understood what she meant. Did she know him from once upon a time, from her childhood, that black oil spill in her memory that blotted out everything good and innocent about growing up, that smeared and tainted her heart, ripping away all the kindness that she would otherwise have had? He did not bother to point out that he was young enough to be her son, that she could not have known him then.

  “No. No, you don't know me. Not really. But I did speak to your son Tom earlier. He thought you might be able to help me.”

  She scowled. “That little fucker? Why would I want to help you? My son is an ungrateful shit, leaving me to rot in here. I'd like to rip his . . .” She smiled sweetly. “Did he tell you that I stabbed him?”

  Michael shook his head.

  Susan crossed her arms more tightly, smugly pleased. “You know those serrated spoons people used to use for grapefruit? One of t
hose. I stabbed him in the leg with one of those. Little bastard. Wish I'd hit the femoral artery. Living in my fucking house with my fucking things, sleeping in my fucking bed. His wife left him. Bet he didn't mention that, either. She was a goddamn bitch, but I still can't blame her. Kid's a dildo.”

  The stream of filth barely fazed him. Instead he felt his face flush warmly because of the freshness of his memories of Jillian. Once upon a time, Susan Barnes had been an ordinary, happy woman. Now she was this. Michael had been nurturing faith in the idea that he could help Jillian, that he could return her to who and what she had been. But seeing Susan Barnes like this . . .

  He caught the orderly watching the clock.

  Six minutes to nine.

  Shit.

  Panic raced through him. This was too important. Everything depended on it. His marriage. Jillian's life. And he was screwing it up.

  “Look, Ms. Barnes, we only have a few minutes and I don't have time to dance around the questions I really want to ask.”

  Something troubled her. When he spoke, she narrowed her eyes as though trying to see him through the filter of her eyelashes.

  “So what are you waiting for, then?”

  No fuck. That seemed odd. Like she had been distracted from her stream of profanity by something else.

  Michael took a deep breath and nodded. “Not long before you . . . before you ended up here, you took an interest in a house on Wildwood Road. I've been to that house once, very late at night. I wasn't entirely sober. Well, now I think it's really important that I get back there. I think maybe . . . a lot is riding on me going back.”

  Her gaze dropped and she seemed to want to look anywhere but at Michael. Her lips twisted bitterly and her nostrils flared. She wanted him gone. Her body language said as much.