Halloween III - Season of the Witch

by Jack Martin

  “Hey!” said Challis. “I want to talk to you!”

  But the attendant broke for the doors and was gone. He was running away.

  From what?

  Agnes finished giving the injection and placed the ragged man’s bony arm back on top of the sheet.

  “That ought to hold him till morning.”

  “Great,” said Challis unenthusiastically. “Who’s next?”

  “Nobody. Except for him, it’s been a quiet night.”

  Challis nodded curtly. The ragged man’s sunken chest moved under the sheet and the rattle of labored breathing filled the room. He was emaciated, starved and dehydrated, sunburnt like a wino, though his teeth were good and his hair had been recently cut. This one was no derelict. But there would be time to sort all that out when the man was rested and coherent. So say we all, thought Challis.

  “I could use a nap,” he admitted.

  “Twenty-two’s empty.”

  The hallway was deserted, the polished floor scuffed where the man had been brought in. A duty nurse sat stiffly behind the desk, nestled between rows of metal-clad charts hanging from the wall. Certain of the ceiling lights remained dark from the power shortage, so that the corridor gleamed in places but then fell away into unexpected shadows, lending a tunneled, grotto-like character to the unevenly lighted passageway ahead.

  Challis moved at a fast clip, pressing ahead to Room 22 before his energy gave out. The head nurse kept up with him.

  “Pillows are in the cabinet.”

  “I know,” he said.

  “There’s some milk and cookies in the fridge.”

  He turned to her kindly. “That I didn’t know.”

  She lingered at the door.

  “I think I should have married you, Agnes.” He reached out and patted her bottom.

  “Watch it, buster! I play for keeps.”

  “That’s what they all say.”

  He left the light off and plumped up a pillow. As he sat on the bed, Agnes was still outlined in the doorway. He could not read her face.

  “Do you want to talk, Agnes?”

  She laced her fingers together and took a deep breath. “He was the most—most frightened man I’ve ever seen. And I’ve seen them all.”

  “What does the police report say?”

  She stood with the doorknob at her back, the subaquatic quality of the lighting from the hallway outlining one side of her dark features.

  “His name’s Grimbridge. No visible signs of injury, except for that cut on his cheek. He could have gotten it when he fell.”

  “What about the guy in the raincoat?”

  “Mr. Jones. He brought him in. Works at the Jiffy station over on Charter Way. Says our man Grimbridge came from nowhere and stood there in the rain, pounding on the glass to be let in, then collapsed. The way he told it, Jones was almost as scared as this Grimbridge. All the way here in the truck he says the man kept going on about Halloween, Halloween.”

  “I believe it. Did you take a gander at Jones’s face when our favorite commercial came on?”

  “Missed that.”

  “You’re lucky. He looked like he thought that pumpkin was going to climb right through the TV and eat him alive. This Grimbridge must have put the fear of God into him with his ranting. What happened to that mask, by the way?”

  “Police took it.”

  “I wonder what got Grimbridge so scared?”

  Agnes edged away from the door as the rhythm of even footsteps sounded from down the hall, back by the elevators. “Kids,” she said without conviction. “An old man like that—must have been some kids in masks, early trick-or-treaters, beat him and robbed him and terrorized him half to death.”

  Challis was unconvinced. He took off his shoes. “Early? This early? The night before, maybe two days. But eight days? It’s eight more days to—”

  “I don’t need to be reminded.” She shivered. “Eight days too many. In heathen times they used to call it Allhallows Eve. It was when they believed the dead came out of their graves.”

  “I’ll talk to him when he wakes up,” said Challis, lying down. “Comes the dawn, I’m sure the police will be here to finish their report. We’ll try to find out. After we run some tests and get him pumped back up with nutrients, maybe County General Psychiatric would like to have a look.”

  “I don’t believe in that,” said Agnes. “Witch doctors. What a man needs is a lot of TLC. You can’t keep a right mind without a healthy body. That, and love in your heart, and the will to do the Lord’s bidding.”

  “Why, Agnes, I do believe you’re trying to save me.”

  “Isn’t anything can save your soul if you don’t want to save yourself, Daniel. As for him, those psychiatrists will fill his head full of doubt and shame and his body full of Thorazine, so he’ll never want to hear the Word. If we sent him over there—”

  “Two sides of the same coin, Agnes. There are two noble professions in the world. We heal the body—at least we try to—and they heal the mind. They’re not batting a thousand, either. But they’re trying.”

  “Well.” Agnes straightened righteously. “I’ll see if I can’t track down a relative, some family somewhere. Every man’s got to have people someplace.”

  “You are so right, Agnes. It’s finding them that’s a real bitch sometimes. See you in a couple of hours.”

  “You stay down as long as you want to. You need it. I’ll look in on our friend Mr. Grimbridge again before I make my rounds. But you stay right where you are. I don’t expect anything else to happen tonight.”

  “One never does, Agnes, one never does.” The door was almost closed. “Hey, Agnes? Don’t you ever sleep?”

  “An old woman like me can count on plenty of that soon enough. No need to hurry things along.”

  “Take care of yourself.”

  “Don’t you worry about me.”

  The door closed and he was in darkness.

  The outdoor lights played tricks with the walls. Each time a car passed the curtains seemed to move. He let his eyes close in the hope of blotting it all out. A day in a life like any other, he thought. The oldest story in the world. The one where nothing fits together the way they told you it was supposed to way back when, if you eat your carrots and go to school and work hard and marry on the right side of the tracks. The only story since the beginning of time. But there’s no use complaining about it. That’s all there is, there ain’t no more. Live it or live with it. Or check out and never wake up again.

  And miss Agnes’s sweet talk? Not on your life . . .

  His eyelids met.

  The dream began.

  In it he was still here at the hospital, sleeping soundly in Room 22. The curtains were rippling lightly in the draft from an air duct. He groped for a blanket but there was none. He buried his hands under the pillow which smelled faintly of disinfectant. A high-pitched sound like a siren was determined to wake him. He was determined not to let it. He would not give up, but neither would the siren. It won. He sat bolt upright, groggy and enraged. He padded across the room, flung open the door. The siren was louder. It was inside the hospital. Nurse! he shouted. No one came. It must be the fire alarm, he thought. He proceeded down the hall to find it and shut it off. In the next corridor, a man in a gray suit was walking in the opposite direction. The siren was closer now. Yes, it was clear—it was coming from Room 13. The door was open. He dragged his feet toward it. Agnes! Agnes was slumped down against the wall, sitting on the floor. Her mouth was open and the warning siren, the scream, was coming from her throat. One of her hands was trembling against her chin, trying to close her mouth, and the other hand was pointing. To the bed. Grimbridge’s bed. Challis touched her. The screaming stopped but her mouth remained open, gaping in terror. He’s dead! she choked. Challis went to the bed. Grimbridge was there. His face was not right. Challis looked closer. The man’s eyes were shut. No, they were open—but he no longer had eyes. Dark, bloody sockets where his eyeballs had been before they were push
ed back into his skull. And his nose, his mouth—it was as if someone had taken hold of his face with three fingers, two in the eyes and one under the nose, and attempted to pull it off like a mask. The features were distorted, the subcutaneous musculature separated from the bones of the head. Blood was all over, gouts of it, including smears where the killer had wiped his hands tidily before leaving, even as the nurse had arrived to witness the horror.

  A man, she managed, her voice breaking, a man just—

  “A man—a man just—!”

  The man in the suit. Neat, immaculate. Not at all like his image of a killer. A professional, perhaps. An assassin. An executioner . . .

  Challis ran after.

  No one in sight. Around the corner, an orderly came wheeling supplies out of a storeroom. Ahead, around the next corner, the sound of the exit opening and closing.

  Challis got there as the door sealed shut.

  He forced his way out into the parking lot.

  There. The man in the gray suit. He was going for his car. Neat, flawlessly dressed, walking in even, measured, unhurried steps toward—

  “Hey! Hey, you! Stop that man!”

  He ignored Challis, unlocked a late-model car, climbed in carefully so as not to wrinkle his clothing. The windshield was steamed up. Through a halo of fog Challis saw him lift a large object from the floorboard. A container. The man opened the container and began pouring liquid into the back seat, then the front seat, then over the dashboard, finally dousing himself.

  A one-gallon can. DANGER, read the reflective lettering, GASOLINE.

  The man put down the can and held up a small object from his coat pocket.

  “Wait!” shouted Challis.

  A yellow Bic lighter.

  Without hesitation the man struck it.

  For a split second the tiny flame lit the underside of the man’s smooth, perfect face. His close-cropped head turned so that he was looking directly at Challis from the center of a corona of light. With no expression whatsoever.

  There was a sound of thunder, and the interior of the car burst into flames.

  Challis rocked back and shielded his face as the entire car exploded and an enormous mushroom cloud erupted into the night sky. A fireball rolled heavenward, orange at the center and then deep red and veined with black smoke, searing trees and lighting up the night with the terrible beauty of an unearthly glow.

  Then there was only the sizzle of the car’s interior as it bubbled and melted, the pinging of metal and other fragments falling back to the blacktop.

  The darkness returned and mist became steam over the charred wreckage.

  Challis felt sunburned, his hands and face raw from the conflagration.

  It might have been a dream. But in his heart of hearts he knew it was not.

  C H A P T E R

  4

  It was as if his eyelids had been burned off.

  He stood before the white-hot remains of the car and what had been in the car and could not look away.

  Only later did he help Agnes from Room 13, force a sedative into her and send her home. But he could not order himself from the hospital. The fire department came, and the police again, but he could not leave it to them to clean away, though it was now officially their job. When dawn broke at last on that gray morning he was at the window of Grimbridge’s room, seeing the circle singed into the lot outside as though his eyeballs were protected by only an X-rayed membrane which let in too much light for him to ignore.

  He could not go home to his apartment, could not lie down, could not even sit and close his eyes for a few seconds, for the images were too intense. He knew that with time a kind of scar tissue would form to occlude the memory, but for now the pictures were etched into his brain; he was afraid that the patterns might imprint so deeply that he would never be rid of them.

  He considered himself a rational man, trained as a detective of death in the face of the seemingly irrational, and this was his climate. What happened in the rest of the world might be chaotic, but here cause and effect were supposed to rule. The problem was that this time too much of the chaos had broken through. It would no longer be safe here till he could find out exactly what had happened and why. It was important for him, too, for other reasons which he could as yet only begin to comprehend. But it mattered. Somehow it mattered more than anything else.

  When the attendants came to carry away Grimbridge’s body, Challis was there.

  The coroner finished his preliminary examination and closed his bag. He was a man with an uncannily smooth, unlined complexion, unmarked by his job. What was his secret? He was chatting amiably with the sheriff, who stood shifting his weight from foot to heavy foot, defiantly ill-at-ease and jangling with weaponry.

  With the blood still on the curtains only inches in front of him, and with the uniforms and guns all around, Challis felt that his sanctuary had been invaded, that some larger, uncontrollable and previously unknown force had established a beachhead in his life. It was like that day in college when he had first learned about quantum physics and the Heisenberg principle; for a long time after that the world and his place in it had not been the same.

  There was the ratcheting of metal and the legs of a portable stretcher scissored open at his back. Grimbridge’s violated corpse was wheeled away.

  “Is this—?”

  A woman’s voice? It broke like a small child’s but immediately strove to contain itself.

  “Ma’am, I wouldn’t just yet.” That was the sheriff, clearing his throat and shifting again with the squeak of leather.

  “No. Let’s—let’s get it over with.”

  Her voice was incredibly frightened—close to terror, in fact—and incredibly brave at the same time. Challis had to turn around.

  She was slight and dark, protected by stylish clothes and hastily-applied makeup and even, Challis noted wonderingly, nail polish. Her hair was pinned back behind her ears, the dark curls tightening in the early-morning dampness and threatening to tumble loose at any moment. She held herself perfectly still.

  The sheriff set his jaw and lifted the sheet. Challis saw his knuckles go white as he gripped the shroud.

  Her eyes were enormous and black, opened wide enough to take it all in, the horror of it, at one glance.

  “Yes,” she said simply. “It’s my father.”

  Something wild moved across her face, disrupting her features in a series of tics. She averted her face briefly, and then her face was calm again. Only the muscles of her mouth moved.

  “Who did this?”

  The sheriff did not answer.

  The coroner sighed and returned to packing his tools.

  Like him, Challis had been through it more times than he could count. But this time was different. This time he was unable to offer his personal reassurance that the deceased had not suffered needlessly, had received the best care that medical science could provide. He could not find the courage to say anything to her. He had failed. The system, his system, had failed. He was afraid for the hospital, for those in it, for himself. He could not live with the feeling. Anger welled up within him.

  “Some crazy man,” the sheriff explained, though that was no explanation at all. “Killed himself in the parking lot right after. Drugs, probably. Miss Grimbridge—”

  “Is that it? My father’s dead because some drug freak was amusing himself?”

  An embarrassed deputy handed her a cup of water.

  “The whole thing,” said the sheriff, lowering his eyes, “is under investigation.”

  “I’ll bet! I’ll just bet it is!” Water splashed over her fingers. Her nails dug into the paper cup, about to crush it.

  The sheriff drew himself up defensively.

  “Miss Grimbridge, you’ve had a hard night and you’ve come a long way. Nobody’s sorrier than I am about what you’ve had to come here for. Why don’t you get some rest? When you feel better, I’ll have some questions for you. And maybe some more answers.”

  Even Challis wa
s unconvinced.

  The sheriff patted her shoulder gently, as though he thought her small bones might shatter under the impact.

  That’s great, thought Challis. With that and a dollar she can get a cup of coffee.

  He could not bring himself to speak.

  She shrugged off the sheriff’s hand. Her shoulders continued to slump under a great weight when the hand was gone. At last her eyes settled on the doctor. They did not question and they did not accuse. They were cold as black marbles and without expectation.

  Say something, thought Challis. Scream, throw things, point your finger in my face. Anything would be easier than indifference. Let me defend myself. Grant me that grace.

  I’m a professional. My job is to save lives. We protect people here. We do not expose them to unnecessary risks. And we do our job well.

  We did.

  Until last night.

  “All right, boys,” said the sheriff, hitching up his belt. “Let’s clear out.”

  Ellie Grimbridge’s eyes swept once more around the room but did not tarry. There was nothing here of interest, nothing of any use to her now. It was the parting glance of someone who is about to move out of an empty apartment. Forever.

  She left, and they all breathed again.

  The stretcher was wheeled out, and one by one they followed.

  All except Challis.

  When the police were gone, he did the same things they had done.

  He retraced their footsteps, noting the positions of the bed and table and every other object in the room, stopping always at the bloodstained curtains. There was no other evidence that the man in gray had entered this room. Fingerprints? Negative. Only those of the staff. And his own.

  There were not even signs of a struggle.

  The killer—the professional, the Kamikaze assassin, whoever he was—had been as neat as his suit, machinelike in efficiency.

  Unlike some of us, thought Challis, who are only human.

  He heard an electric floor polisher whirring in the corridor. Come in, he thought. Why not? Make everything clean again. Make it so that no one will ever guess what went on here.