Spellbinders Collection

by Molly Cochran

The tall man made a dismissive gesture with his face. "Perhaps not. But I have not seen my mother since I was five years old."

  "Where was that?"

  Saladin thought. From his expression, it looked to be a pleasant experience, mentally reaching back to realms long forgotten. "Somewhere warm," he said finally. "The women's breasts were exposed. Tall reeds grew by the river."

  "Which river?"

  Saladin concentrated for a moment, then gave up with an apologetic smile. "It has been many years, Dr. Coles."

  "Quite all right. Do you remember the country where you were born?"

  "No. Just a few mental pictures. As I said, it was so long—"

  "Yes, yes. Exactly how old are you, Saladin?"

  "I've no idea."

  Extraordinary, Coles thought. He's negated his entire personality. Whoever "Saladin" is, this man has invented him from the whole cloth.

  "Are there large segments of your past which you don't remember?"

  The patient's eyes blinked lazily. "I know what I know," he said. "Which I suppose is what I need to know at present."

  "I see," said Coles.

  "Dr. Coles?"

  "Yes?"

  "The straitjacket," he said softly.

  "I've told you. I can't . . ."

  "Please." Saladin looked down at the horrid device, then his eyes met the doctor's. "A little dignity."

  Coles' mouth twitched. He had always hated straitjackets. In other institutions, he had seen the look on the faces of men forced to wear them for days on end, degraded beyond hope by their helplessness.

  Almost angrily he picked up the telephone. "Send in an orderly," he said.

  Within minutes, a man in white hospital scrubs entered the office and stood unobtrusively by the door. With a nod to the doctor, he folded his arms over his chest.

  Coles walked behind Saladin and unfastened the restraints, then quickly returned to his desk.

  "Ah, much better," Saladin said as he shrugged out of the garment. He stretched his long fingers and looked at them. "Thank you, Dr. Coles."

  Then, in one convulsive motion, he lunged over the desk and snaked his fingers around Coles' necktie. Before the doctor could utter a sound in protest, Saladin brought his head slamming down against the edge of the desk.

  Coles gurgled, his eyes bulging. Blood poured out of the horizontal wound across his forehead, where flecks of frothy gray brain tissue oozed. His fingers twitched.

  He looked up at his attacker. Saladin was watching him with intense interest, and a touch of impatience. Behind Saladin stood the orderly, his hands still crossed over his chest.

  Dr. Mark Coles' last, half-formed thought was that the two men had the same eyes.

  Saladin's nostrils flared. He held onto the necktie for a moment, savoring the sight of the warm, dying object at the end of it.

  "Get the secretary," he said at last.

  The orderly peered out the door. "Doctor wants you," he said.

  Coles' secretary, a young woman with a long mane of carefully styled blonde hair, rose quickly and strode past the orderly into the office.

  "Yes, Dr. Coles?"

  She barely had time to notice the blood spilling in torrents from the doctor's body lying across the desk before Saladin grasped her by a handful of her hair.

  She screamed. It was almost pretty, the high, sweet sound of it, but of such short duration that, heard from outside the office, it might have been a laugh. Because just as the scream left her throat, Saladin took her small golden head in his elongated hands and twisted it, his eyes half closing at the satisfying crunch of the small cervical vertebrae as they snapped.

  A stream of the girl's saliva pooled on the side of his hand. He released her with a cry of disgust.

  The orderly watched the scene dispassionately and dialed the telephone. At the same time he retrieved a shirt and a pair of long trousers from a package hidden behind a bookcase in the doctor's office.

  Beside the package was a cube of plastique with two small wires running from it into an electrical socket into which a timer had been fitted. Throughout Maplebrook, on every floor and on every wing, were identical devices, hooked up ultimately to the new auxiliary generator.

  The man who had supervised the installation of the generator had also had Saladin's eyes.

  "Clean this off me," Saladin said. He held out his hand as if expecting it to be kissed.

  Dutifully, the orderly set down the telephone and wiped the dead secretary's spittle off Saladin's hand with a tissue. Then he picked up the receiver again and spoke into it. "Five minutes."

  The lights blinked off for a moment before the auxiliary generator kicked on. A voice on the other end of the telephone answered, "Done."

  Saladin held his arms out and raised his chin, a signal that he was ready to be dressed. As the orderly unbuttoned the blue prison shirt, a car pulled up on the pavement in front of the asylum. Another followed it.

  The last item the orderly gave Saladin was a golden ring with a huge opal set in the center. Carved into the stone was an image of Saladin's own face.

  Three men got out of the cars and walked into the building, herding between them a tall, cadaverously thin man, dressed in the rags of a tramp. The man looked around him, uncomprehendingly, as if he were drugged.

  In the lobby, one man walked up to the security desk, stationed at a T where the east and west corridors met. Behind the desk were two elevator doors.

  "Name, please?" the guard asked.

  The new arrival drew an automatic Beeman P-08 with a long webbed silencer from under his jacket and slammed it across the guard's forehead. The crack of the blow echoed through the empty marble-floored hallway. The guard slumped forward, unconscious, his head split and bleeding. He looked as if he were napping.

  The other men checked both corridors as the indicators above both elevator doors spun downward. One bell rang as the elevator reached the lobby level. The two men froze in their tracks, their guns poised to shoot.

  The door opened and a couple, obviously visitors, got out. The woman was dressed in a blue puffed-sleeve Sunday school dress. Her eyes were swollen and red. She sniffed once, bravely, before seeing the guard bleeding at his desk.

  "Darryl," she whispered, clutching the arm of the man with her.

  It was all she had time to say before she too was clubbed across the skull. Reflexively, her mouth opened and closed like a fish's as her legs buckled beneath her.

  Her companion wasted no time on sympathy. He plucked her convulsive fingers off his sleeve and bolted for the front door and nearly made it to the rubber mat at the entrance before one of the men caught up with him and pounded him to the floor with powerful blows to the head.

  The two men herded the tall tramp into the waiting elevator car. The door closed and the car headed down to the basement level of the building.

  The remaining gunman checked his watch. The second elevator stopped in the lobby and when the door opened, Saladin and the orderly got out.

  The gunman bowed to Saladin. Just then the other elevator returned from the basement. This time, the two gunmen stepped off alone. The reedishly tall man was no longer with them. They too bowed to Saladin.

  Then all five men headed outside. Only Saladin, with his long legs, was not running.

  The cars had just passed through Maplebrook's front gates when the building ignited like a fireball.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Five months before Maplebrook Hospital burned to the ground, just after Hal Woczniak took early retirement from the FBI and began to drink himself to death, two crack addicts robbed the safety deposit boxes of the Riverside National Bank in a suburb of Chicago.

  The thieves left the bank with nearly ten million dollars' worth of cash and jewelry but were apprehended a few blocks from the scene of the crime. The loot, which was stuffed into green plastic garbage bags, spilled out of the getaway car onto the street when the police made the arrest. All but one piece, a hollowed lump of grayish-green metal whi
ch resembled a bronze art deco ashtray, was recovered.

  No one noticed the vaguely spheroid piece roll beneath the car and into the gutter, where it gained momentum on its downhill run, floated for half a block in a rivulet of melting snow, then came to rest in a heap of cigarette butts in front of a draining grate.

  It was here that a ten-year-old boy named Arthur Blessing found it. He wiped off the mud with his mittens and discovered that the ball was actually more like a cup, with a scooped-out cavity and an open end. It greatly resembled the tiny handleless cups in his Aunt Emily's Japanese tea set.

  The cup was warm. Even though he could see his breath in the cold January air, Arthur felt its warmth through his soggy mittens. He held it to his cheek and experienced something he could not have explained, something like the feeling he got when he hit the home run that won the game at summer camp. It felt like belonging.

  "Emily! Emily!" he shouted as he bounded up the stairs in the apartment building where he lived.

  "You never heard of an elevator, Mr. Elephant Feet?"

  An old man stood inside an open doorway on the first landing. He was wearing a plaid shirt and the yellow cardigan sweater he had worn every day that Arthur had known him. His white hair stuck out in peaks around the shiny bald center of his head. His hands were spotted. They hung down at his sides, quivering in a rhythm of their own. Through the coke-bottle lenses of his glasses, his eyes looked enormous.

  "Sorry, Mr. Goldberg. I hope you weren't sleeping or anything."

  "Sleep, who could sleep in this apartment? Always people talking on the stairs. Two feet away is the garbage dumper. All day and night they bring their garbage, then they stop and talk. The middle of the night, it doesn't matter. You want a cookie?"

  "No thanks, Mr. Goldberg."

  The old man pulled an oatmeal and peanut butter cookie wrapped in cellophane from his pocket. "Here. You take it. I got two from the deli. They make you buy two, even if you only want one." He bobbed his offering again. "Go ahead."

  "Thanks," Arthur said.

  The old man smiled.

  "Want to see what I found?" He took the metal ball from the pocket of his wool baseball jacket.

  Mr. Goldberg examined it, lowering his glasses to peer over them while he touched the ball to his nose. "What is it, an ashtray?"

  "I don't know. I found it on the street."

  "It's an ashtray," Mr. Goldberg pronounced. "You don't need it." He handed it back. "How's your aunt?"

  "She's okay, I guess."

  "She don't go out at night."

  "Not much."

  Mr. Goldberg shrugged expressively. "Who can blame her, with the crime?" He craned over Arthur's head. "Sooner or later, they're going to come in here and shoot us in our beds," he shouted for the benefit of the doorman, who ignored him. "We got no protection here. What we need is police security!"

  The doorman shook his head and smiled.

  "Me, I could protect this building better than some they've got."

  According to Aunt Emily, Mr. Goldberg and the doorman had been feuding for the past nine years, ever since the doorman let Mr. Goldberg's daughter-in-law into the old man's apartment to clean it while he was in the hospital.

  "I guess I'd better be going, Mr. Goldberg," Arthur said.

  "Okay. You say hello to your aunt. She's a good girl. Very pretty. She should find a nice gentleman."

  "Sure," Arthur said and rolled his eyes. "Pretty" was not a word he would use to describe his Aunt Emily. He started edging up the stairs.

  "I'm not talking about me, of course."

  "No, sir."

  "She should find a young man. With a good job."

  "Yes, sir."

  "Tell her I got a nephew thirty-six years old, a lawyer. Just divorced. It was for the best, believe me." He was leaning on the railing now, shouting up at the boy's retreating form. "Tell her to see me."

  "I will, Mr. Goldberg," Arthur lied. There was no way he was going to sic Aunt Emily on some unsuspecting jerk looking for a date with a normal woman. "See you in the morning," he called behind him.

  The old man waved to him abstractedly as he began a new tirade against the doorman.

  "I'm home, Emily," Arthur said.

  His aunt was seated at the computer, with her back to him. She nodded to acknowledge his presence.

  "I found something . . ."

  Emily raised her right hand, her index finger pointing upward, a signal for silence.

  Arthur took off his hat and mittens and placed them on the radiator. They steamed, emitting a faint, oily wool smell. He went to the refrigerator, where the evening meal was set out on two paper plates, ready for the microwave. Tonight it would be green beans and braised fennel, along with some speckled brown noodles.

  Arthur groaned. Emily Blessing had become a vegetarian years ago, but since she didn't cook, she hadn't imposed her eating habits on her nephew until a meatless take-out restaurant opened two doors down from their apartment building. Now, instead of the familiar TV dinner and Dinty Moore stew that had sustained Arthur through his childhood while Emily grazed on lettuce and raw carrots behind a newspaper, he was forced to eat piles of Cilantro Rice, Rutabaga with Nutmeg, and other delicacies which tasted even worse than they looked.

  He poured himself a glass of milk and slammed the refrigerator door. Emily raised her finger again.

  "Sorry," he muttered.

  He carried the milk to the dining table at the other end of the room from Emily's desktop. There was a small paper bag on the table, next to the stack of math worksheets and a freshly sharpened pencil. Arthur already knew what the bag would contain. Every morning at 7:00 a.m., Emily bought a biscuit from the tea cart at work, and kept it in her purse all day to give to Arthur in the afternoon.

  It was part of a pattern, Arthur thought. Everything was part of a pattern with Aunt Emily.

  The boy was up every weekday at 5:30, cornflakes for breakfast, downstairs to Mr. Goldberg's apartment at 6:30, when Emily left for work. After an hour spent watching the news on television (to Arthur's delight, the old man had decreed at the outset that television had some redeeming qualities, despite Aunt Emily's ban on it), Mr. Goldberg would accompany him to the bus stop at 7:30, when Arthur left for school. Emily paid Mr. Goldberg a small sum of money each month for these services.

  Every day, when Arthur returned in the afternoon, his aunt was waiting for him. Or, rather, she was in the apartment. She usually worked on her own at the computer until five or six o'clock. She rarely acknowledged Arthur before then.

  He eschewed the sour-tasting biscuit in favor of Mr. Goldberg's cookie and drank the milk while examining his new find. He hadn't been mistaken about the hollowed-out sphere. It was warm. Even in the apartment, it felt warm.

  "Em—"

  She shook her head vigorously, her fingers flying over the keys.

  Arthur set down his treasure with a defiant clunk. What did Emily care, he thought sullenly. She'd never wanted to raise a kid. When she was angry, she often reminded him that his bedroom used to be her office, as if she'd made the ultimate sacrifice for him.

  And in her mind, Arthur knew, she had. Emily Blessing was a brilliant woman whose work had helped to win two Nobel Prizes for scientists she assisted at the Katzenbaum Institute, a "think tank" devoted to the exploration of pure science. If Emily had not had to curtail her education in order to raise an orphaned child from infancy, those prizes might have been hers.

  He ran his fingers over the sphere. The warmth was peculiar, comforting. He tried to balance it on his head but it fell and crashed to the floor.

  Emily jumped. "Arthur, do you mind!" she shrieked.

  "Okay, okay."

  "I've left some work for you."

  "Yeah. I see it."

  "I beg your pardon?"

  "I mean 'yes, thank you.'"

  "That's better." Her fingers resumed their clacking on the keyboard.

  With a sigh, he picked up the first sheet of math problems. They
involved cube roots. Arthur solved them in his head, then went on to logarithms and binary functions. He used the pencil only for some equations on the last page.

  "Done," he said in a monotone, knowing that Emily would ignore him. He flipped the final worksheet face down on the table. Beneath it was an airmail envelope with a British stamp. It was addressed to him.

  Arthur tore it open eagerly. With no relatives except for Emily, he almost never received mail, certainly not anything from another country.

  "Dear Mr. Blessing," it began.

  It is our sad duty to inform you of the death of Sir Bradford Welles Abbott . . .

  Arthur frowned. Sir who?

  According to our client's Last Will and Testament, a parcel of real estate measuring approximately 300 meters square has been left to Ms. Dilys Blessing or her surviving descendants. As you are, to the best of our knowledge, the sole living offspring of the deceased Ms. Blessing, this property rightfully shall pass to you.

  The above-mentioned real estate, referred to traditionally as Lakeshire Tor, lies approximately three (3) kilometers southwest of Wickesbury, on the southern border of Somerset County. It is workable farmland, although quite rocky, due to the presence of ruins from a post-Roman hill fortification. . . .

  "Emily!"

  Her hands flew up from the keyboard. "Arthur, I have told you . . ."

  "Read this! I've inherited a castle!"

  "Stop shouting."

  "Okay. Look," he said quietly, waving the letter as he ran to her. "Somebody died and left me a castle. Well, a hill fort, but that's practically the same thing. His name's Sir Bradford Welles Abbott. Isn't that a cool name?"

  Emily's face froze in an expression of grim surprise.

  "Did you know him?" Arthur asked.

  His aunt took the letter without answering and read it silently. She had to clear her throat before she spoke.

  "It says these lawyers can sell the property and forward the proceeds to you here." She tried a strained smile. "We can put it toward your college fund."

  "But Emily . . ." His voice was a whisper. "It's my castle . . ."

  "Oh, it's hardly that, I'm sure. 'Post-Roman ruins,' it says. It's probably no more than a few boulders."