Then, she fell silent, and Trey was glad she did. He didn't want to hear about her inner life. He preferred to think of her as a ward psychiatrist, not as a woman. Not as Susan, but as Hannifin, who kept her distance most of the time. Professional. Above reproach. Perhaps nobody was that professional; or that untouchable in life.
She had acquired a soul here with Trey. Beneath the hospital. She had opened up under the stress of the moment. She had shown him a little of the private woman he would never have otherwise known. He almost grinned, thinking of what Jim Anderson would've said. "Hannifin's a friggin' lunatic. Can't always tell the doctors from the patients in here." That's what he would've said. Trey held back a breath, trying not to let the grief of Jim's murder overwhelm him. Christ, this is a sorry place to be. Under a building. Beyond us, a fire that might be sweeping over us soon. Within here, two very psychopathic killers with delusions of medical expertise and an entire world for their madness.
Trey felt as if the two of them were alone in an underworld, a city of the dead – of psychiatry's past folly and vanity and monstrosity. He remembered Fallon with his talk of ghosts down here, and it would not have surprised him if they did, indeed, wander these halls. The tubercular who had died here, the mentally-retarded who had once been hidden away and forgotten, the mentally-ill who had the unfortunate circumstance to be alive before the prescription drug revolution, and others who matched society's definition of outcast that needed hospitalization deep in the ground just to hide them from the rest of the community.
Finally, he said, softly, "Everyone has secret places. I understand. Let's go back. All right? We'll get help."
She wiped her eyes again, and took his hand as he rose up.
From somewhere off in an unknown place ahead of them, the bloodcurdling scream of a man echoed along the walls.
Chapter Forty-Six
1
"You do anything — run, hide, anything," Mary said, her arm raised up, her fist around what looked like a long slender ice pick pointed to Lance Victor's head. "I will be on you. I will slice you open, and trepan your brain and draw it out for you to look at while you're dying. Do you understand?"
Lance Victor nodded vigorously.
Mary lowered the pick, and with her free hand reached up and adjusted Lance's gag, which had slipped down from the lips she had only recently sliced with her scalpel. From one of the supply closets, Doc had brought out an array of old moth-worn straitjackets and ankle hobbles that were heavier than the modern ones he had been used to wearing in his home cage.
He secured the jacket on Lance, and then hobbled his ankles together. Then, he went to restrain the police woman who had begun showing signs of reviving from the second Taser shot he'd done to her.
"Your father took me to the Night Cages," Mary said. "When I was young. They're downstairs. It may be dark. Do you understand?"
Doc, who had begun tying restraints at Jane's wrists, nodded.
"We'll heal him. All of them," she said.
"I know. I can feel a healing coming to me," he said.
"I will never leave you in the dark," his mother said.
Then, stepping over one of the dead guards, she went back to the room full of wheelchairs to get the man she had loved her whole life, the father of her child, in the room where she'd secured him.
2
Once Doc had Jane Laymon all wrapped up tight, with restraints and a gag, she opened her eyes, watching him. He still had the Taser, and pressed it point blank into the same hip where he'd shot her before. He squeezed the trigger, and the prongs went into her.
Her eyes fluttered for a moment or two, and her body convulsed.
He glanced back at the room. There were little metal cabinet-like doors on the wall.
As he dragged her toward them, he was nearly positive that her eyes – which remained open – watched him.
"It's okay," Doc said to her. "It's okay. We'll come back for you. We will. I'll heal you, too. Don't worry. We just have too much to take with us here."
Then, he opened one of the cabinets, and it drew out a long tray. Inside, it looked almost like a metal oven. He stretched his arm all the way in.
It was the perfect size.
3
Once he'd put Laymon on the flat surface, he pushed it in, and the drawer shut.
"It's a morgue," he said aloud. "It's perfect." Then, he went and grabbed an open lock from the pile on the floor and although it was rusted, it still closed, and he put it through the loop of metal at the morgue cabinet door. "Don't be afraid," he said to the door. "You're safe there."
Chapter Forty-Seven
1
Trey ran with Susan Hannifin down the hallway, toward the scream they'd heard. As they reached the end of one corridor, they turned onto another.
Susan shrieked when she saw the bodies on the ground.
Trey came up behind her.
2
Three of the guards were accounted for, but there was no sign of Jane. Trey held out a hope.
He grabbed a gun from beside each of the bodies. "You ever use these?"
"Never," she said.
"First time for everything," he said. "Let's go. Let's go. We may not have any time all now."
He ran ahead, quickly ducking in and out of rooms, hoping to see a sign, something that might indicate that Jane was alive. That she had survived. He saw rooms full of chairs, and one that had strips of newspaper clippings all over the floor; still another seemed to be the morgue of the underground – a wall that was made out of cheap metal, showing signs of rust along its drawers; another room had all kinds of bottles, large and small, set in rows throughout it as if they'd been collected from all over the hospital and stored here.
Finally, following the trail of blood they reached what seemed to be the dead end of the ward.
"There's a door, off there," Susan pointed toward one of the utility rooms. "To the next level down."
"They're taking them to the Night Cages," Trey said.
3
Through the doorway into the lower section, Trey saw that it was completely dark. He switched on his flashlight, and kept the gun in his right hand as he stepped down onto the metal stairs.
Susan followed after him. They went carefully down into the dark hole of a room below.
About three steps from the bottom, Trey missed a step, stumbling. His flashlight flew out of his hand.
Then, he fell down to the bottom step, hitting his head hard against the floor below; as he did so, his gun rolled across the floor.
4
"You okay?" Susan asked. She felt her way down the last few steps, and got down on all fours, reaching for the flashlight. When she had it, she pointed it along the floor until she found Trey. "Trey?"
"It's okay," he said. "Get the gun. It's…it's over there." He pointed somewhere off to the right.
After she'd helped him up, and he had the gun again and the flashlight, she said, "There are six tunnels down here. Not all of them are functioning."
"What's that mean?" he asked.
"Some go out under the grounds, beyond the buildings. Some have caved in over the years, so they're nothing but rubble at one end."
"We can't get lost down here, can we?" he asked.
5
There were rows of metal beds along the corridor in the second level down. Trey shined his flashlight along the wall.
"The night cages," she said. "There are nine of them. Three here. Six at the end of the hallway that goes to the tunnels."
"It's like a catacombs," he said, directing the flashlight's beam all along the various avenues that shot off from the main hallway. The other pathways were narrow and must have made the patients who had been virtually imprisoned down there feel as if they were buried alive at times.
Three closed doors in a row along one side of the wall. Along the other, the therapy rooms that had been used for hydrotherapy and minor operations.
"Lobectomies. Thoracic surgery. Lobotomies," Trey pointed the
flashlight further down to the long corridor. What looked almost like dried human feces was smeared along the crack-filled walls. At the end of the hallway the entrance to where the pipes and the tunnels intersected. "The major one – shock treatment – was upstairs. It's hard to think of all this as minor surgery."
"What was that?" she asked.
"What?"
"Over there. By the door."
"Which door?" he whispered, feeling a chill within him. Think of Jane. Think of Brainard. Hell, think of Lance Victor. Don't be afraid. Don't let the darkness win.
She took the flashlight from him and shined it to the second night cage door. It was open slightly, and it might've even been moving. It was as if a light wind pushed at the door from the inside, a draft that kept it opening and closing, almost imperceptibly.
Trey stepped forward, but kept the gun held up, ready to point it toward anybody. He crossed the large room, keeping the light on the door.
When he got to the night cage, he reached for the door-handle. It was slick and wet. He drew it outward, shining the light inside.
The night cage was small, with a low ceiling that had a grate in it. Above the grate, a metal fan for ventilation. In one corner a hole that had once been the toilet. In another a shelf that must've served for a bed, although there was no mattress or blanket on it.
Written on the wall in a dark smear: TUMORS MALIGNANT.
Trey took one step into the room.
And that's when he felt something on his foot. Something grasp at his ankles.
He looked down. A shadow there. He shone the light on it.
He didn't identify the man right away. And then, he knew. It was Lance Victor, the television reporter. But it took the longest time for Trey to realize this, because there was so much blood along the man's back, which had been split open to expose his spinal cord.
They had ripped his skin from his back, and dug into him while he had been alive.
Chapter Forty-Eight
Because Lance's fingers still moved, Trey knelt down beside him, setting the flashlight on the floor to cast light across the dying man's body.
"It's Lance, come on," he called to Susan, but in the few seconds it took for her to get there, the man had died.
Susan stood in the open doorway. She crouched down beside Trey and put her hand on his back. "Let's go." and said, "Trey. We have to go find them."
"I know." he said. But he could not leave the dead man yet. He felt an ache within him. And an anger that had grown since finding Jim dead upstairs.
A fury. Please be alive Jane. Please. I will find you. I promise. I will stop this. Somehow.
"I wonder about the fire," Susan said, suddenly. "I wonder if it's reached the grounds above us."
"Maybe we're safer down here," Trey said. Then, he felt the slight madness in having said that. He began to feel a little light-headed. Something within him was changing down in this place. Some sense of human decency had begun to vanish. He wanted to tell her about it, but he was sure she wouldn't understand. He wanted to tell her what he felt rising up in his craw – in that primitive place inside him.
He had faced psychopaths before.
He even sometimes even pretended to understand their delusions.
But not this time. These are worse than predatory animals.
Bloody Mary was like an alien species. If she could do this. If she could twist her son's soul into doing this. Doing it quickly. Doing it without remorse. Without a sense of empathy for the suffering of the ones beneath her knives and saws…she wasn't even human anymore.
Not in his eyes.
Years of training just exploded for him.
"Let's check every Night Cage," he said.
Susan began making a strange sound.
He stood up, grasping her elbow. "Susan?"
"I want them dead," she said.
"I know. Me, too."
"I want to kill them," Susan said, her voice nearly a growl. "I'm not supposed to think that. But it's what I want to do."
"Yeah, I know," he said. "Let's go."
Chapter Forty-Nine
1
Doc had warned his mother that others would follow, but she told him that it all would be taken care of. "We're healers," she said. "What we bring to them is good. They understand."
Doc had spent the better part of the past half hour gathering up more of the surgical tools they'd need. The place was full of all kind of little hammers and picks and long saws that cut just like scissors that he was fairly sure had been used as bone saws. He'd spent most of his childhood and all of his adolescence studying medical practices, and had a good feel for the tools of the trade, large and small. But as he went down one particular tunnel, he thought he saw someone standing nearby. He didn't exactly see the person at first. He felt it the way he always felt the shadows. In the area where they had decided to perform the major surgery, the red lights were on, and these comforted him. But he could not see the shadow even in the glow of the light.
"Who's there?" he asked.
He tried to ignore the feeling that he was being watched. He didn't think it was one of the night fears. His mother had told him they couldn’t find him this far down. But when he opened the door of what had once been an office, he was sure it was a little girl. Hadn't the patient above talked about seeing her? A little girl who was dead. A little girl who had not passed over into the light.
He opened the cabinets, looking for just the right tools for the surgery, and at one point caught a glimpse of her in a broken mirror that hung on the back of one of the cabinet doors.
She had a yellow-blue aura about her. Just saw her face. A little bit of her face. He turned around quickly.
She didn't try to hide.
In the light that she gave off, he saw the shadows of others who had lived here and had died here without moving on toward the light of heaven.
"Hello," Doc Chilmark said to her.
2
"There's a little girl down the tunnel a little ways," he told his mother when he'd brought the rolled up towel full of instruments back to the Night Cage where they had his father tied down to the table. "She's dead. But she's like a bright shadow."
Chapter Fifty
Dr. Brainard looked up at Mary Chilmark's face, bathed in red light. The gag was still tight over his mouth, and he pains all over his arms and legs – and he was sure a rib had been broken – as they'd pushed him and thrown him around on his journey down to this room.
He tried to rein in the fear he had. He resolved to remain calm. He felt a sense of peace. If he could just get the gag off. If he could speak to her.
She operated off of delusion and pleasure. She did not desire pain for herself. He knew that.
If he could just speak to her. Reassure her. Talk to her about what had happened.
He knew that, given her personality-type, she would respond.
But the gag stayed on, and so nothing was said.
When Doc returned, Mary began to open Brainard's already torn shirt. "I'll prep the patient, Doc."
Chapter Fifty-One
"Here's how it goes," Bloody Mary said as she tore the shirt back, and then undid his pants, slipping them down as far as she could before the restraints that held him to the operating table got in the way. "Robert, your son has grown into an excellent healer. A real doctor. Not one made by some school. But a natural-born one."
She leaned over Brainard's body, and rested her hand on Doc's face. Doc felt warmth flood him. She hadn't touched him like that since the last time he'd laid in her arms. She was purity. Purity and love in the flesh.
On the table, Brainard tried to mumble through the gag.
"The way I see it," Doc said, grinning to his nurse. "There's a lot of work to be done here."
"Yes. Let's get started," she said. "Do you remember how this goes, Doc?"
Doc nodded. "Like the Flock woman. With the malignancy."
"That's right," his mother said. Then, she went to get what she'd brou
ght all this way in her grocery bag.
Doc heard a voice behind him, and turned, afraid that someone would stop his healing.
But it was the dead girl he had seen before. She smiled at him, and he nodded back. With her, others as well, although he couldn't see them as clearly. He said to his mother, "They're with us."
"Who?" Mary asked.
"The ones who never left here. When he gets healed," he said, nodding toward his father. "Will he stay here?"
"I don't know," his mother said. She brought something from the bag – it was wrapped in newspaper. "He might go to the light."
"I'm not scared down here," Doc said.
"You shouldn't be," Bloody Mary said. "It's where I brought you into me."
Chapter Fifty-Two
1
Criminally Insane: The Series (Bad Karma, Red Angel, Night Cage Omnibus) (The Criminally Insane Series) Page 56
