Mr Wicker

by Maria Alexander

  Celexa.

  The fear of needing the medication retraced an old path in his mind, leaving a residue of resistance. He recalled the reluctance when his own therapist recommended it. Despite his extensive education and training, despite everything he knew about the medication and how it had saved lives, the stigma stuck. Who cared about the research? He feared needing the medication for life, his biochemistry being unable to operate normally on its own. It might also kill his sex drive, although lord knew he wasn’t using it.

  Alicia seemed to have more of an intellectual bias against antidepressants than a fear, but he’d have to explore that with her to see where her reaction was really coming from.

  Egg white guilt slid over him. He should not have been so cold to her. The combination of his overwhelming attraction to her, his absolute shock over what happened with the comatose Georgeta Martin, and then Alicia’s story and response to the drawing was just too much for him to process at once. Still, he should not have shut her out. She’s a suicide survivor, for Chrissakes. His personal crap had most likely set her back. Imagine what she’s had to process in only a day.

  He had to apologize to her. He would keep the focus off of Mr. Wicker for the moment. Maybe if he slept on it, things would be clearer by morning.

  But he had to apologize. Immediately.

  Yes, it was nine-fifteen p.m., but he needed to apologize.

  He straightened his Powerpuff tie. And as he stood in the doorway, he grimaced at Mr. Wicker on the wall and slammed the office door behind him.

  Chapter 13

  “Morning or evening?” Brian asked.

  “Evening,” Rachelle replied wearily.

  “Mick or Keith?”

  “Don’t you have work to do?” she asked.

  “C’mon, Rachelle.”

  She sighed. “Keith.”

  “Really?”

  “It’s the skull rings,” she replied.

  “You like that dark stuff, dontcha?”

  “Hell yeah. I like being scared. Why else you think I’d be in this job?”

  Dr. Farron heard the exchange as soon as the elevator doors opened. As he approached the nurses’ station, he saw a very tired Rachelle doing paperwork as Brian, a young male nurse, read from a GQ magazine that drooped over the desk as he squeezed a grip strengthener in one hand and sorted medications on a cart with the other. Threatened by every man in existence, Brian delivered a slicing glance at Dr. Farron, snickered, and pumped the strengthener harder. “Evening, Dr. Farron,” he said more loudly than he should.

  Relief and surprise tugged up a smile on Rachelle’s tired face. “Now, what are you doin’ up here so late?”

  He ignored Brian’s posturing. “I was going to ask you the same question! Why aren’t you home?”

  “Short-handed, as usual,” she said. She looked exasperated at Brian. “What can we do for you?”

  “I need to talk to my patient.” He indicated up the hallway toward Alicia’s room. As he stepped more toward the hallway, he noted that Alicia’s light was on.

  “She’s asleep,” Brian said, pedantic.

  “With the light on?”

  Brian leaned on the station with a bemused smirk. “She’s terrified of the dark. Won’t even sleep with a nightlight like the others. Has to have the full beam. You didn’t know that?”

  “Well...sure, it came up in session, but...” Pants on fire, James. “I’ll just go take a peek at her, if that’s okay.”

  Rachelle raised an eyebrow at him, but looked back down at her work and nodded.

  “Knock yerself out, Dr. Eff,” Brian said.

  Dr. Farron rolled his eyes at Brian, who had no authority to say either way. He wandered down the hallway, his nerves crackling.

  Alicia slept as she did when he first saw her, like she was slumbering under a giant toadstool in the grassy whiskers of a forest rather than the sickly fluorescent lights of the hospital room.

  Sidelong would she bend, and sing a faery’s song...

  That Keats poem came back to him. He leaned back against the door for a moment, just watching her sleep. There was no way he could be detached or professional about her. Yet her evaluation was tomorrow morning and he was her psychiatrist. He would make sure that she left and assign her to another doctor for outpatient treatment. The mystery would remain unsolved, at least until she was willing to discuss it with him—if ever.

  Turning away from her, he stepped through the doorway and flipped the light switch, dousing the room in pitch.

  “Aaaaaaaaaaaaa!”

  Dr. Farron scrambled for the light switch, flicking it back on to find Alicia sitting bolt upright in bed, hyperventilating as she seized the bedding with both hands. “Oh, my God! I’m so sorry!” he said.

  Brian and an orderly jogged to the doorway. Dr. Farron shooed them away. Grabbing the visitor chair, he pulled it up beside the bed. “I’m sorry I woke you up.”

  “What are doing here?”

  “I came to apologize.”

  “For waking me up?”

  “No,” he replied. “But I apologize for that, too. I wanted to say I’m sorry for being so uncompassionate today, not to mention unprofessional. I hope you will forgive me.”

  Alicia’s face registered some shock. She never took her eyes off him as she adjusted her pillows so that she could sit up comfortably. “I’m kind of out of practice in the forgiveness department, but I’ll give it a go.”

  “Thanks,” he said. This was good. She hadn’t blocked him out.

  “So,” he continued. “We’ve had some progress. I know you’re a horror writer. You believe in Mr. Wicker. You don’t believe in antidepressants. And you’re afraid of the dark.” He wondered why she just sat there watching him.

  She closed her eyes and inhaled as if smelling the air, then exhaled.

  “They flash a flashlight in your eyes every fifteen minutes, don’t they?”

  She shook her head and opened her eyes. “Don’t have to. I keep the light on.”

  “What are you afraid of?”

  “When you turn out the lights, what do you see?”

  He shrugged. “Nothing.”

  “Me, too. I see the void. It reminds me of everything that’s been taken away from me. Have you ever had everything that ever mattered to you taken away?”

  Dr. Farron paused. He wanted to say yes, more than you know, but this was about Alicia, not him. “I need you to tell me about what caused this. How can I help you if you don’t tell me?”

  Alicia grinned and broke into her best Dr. Evil imitation. “Come on, people. Throw me a bone here.”

  “Be serious, please.”

  She picked at her wrist bandage.

  “Let me see that,” he said and cursed himself for letting her slip out of the question. He held her forearm in one hand and her fingers in his other to examine the bandaging. Dried blood bloomed darkly into the gauze. “Have you been scratching at your stitches?”

  Alicia shook her head. “They gave me a shot today. They grabbed my wrists and worked the stitches loose.”

  “Why did they do that?”

  “I exploded in the cafeteria.”

  “Exploded? Like in group therapy?”

  “Kind of. I threw a tray at that jackass from group therapy when he molested some poor girl. And then he punched me.” She showed off a bruise on the underside of her chin.

  “Ooof! Are you okay?

  “Eh. You should have seen what I did to his ego.”

  “Who was the girl?”

  “I don’t know her name. She’s just a young thing and he fucking just reached for her and molested her in front of everyone. I couldn’t stand it. So when I goaded him to attack me instead, I threw a tray at him. Which, you know, was fucking brilliant, if I don’t mind saying so, seeing as how I can’t hold a fork much less a full tray of hot food. But I’m not here because I’m brilliant, am I?”

  “That’s the problem. You are brilliant,” he replied.

  Alicia blushe
d. She then looked at him squarely, her gaze permeating every layer of defense. The heat of her seeped into his hands and flashed through his body. Rather than pull away, though, he continued to examine her smallish palms and fingers with “wizard’s knots” in the joints. His Irish grandmother had said they represented a thinker. With one of his own fingers, he traced a path from the base of her palm to the middle of her forearm.

  “This,” he explained as he drew, “is your median nerve. If you had slit that, your hands would be useless.”

  “My whole body should have been useless.”

  “True. It must have been very painful.”

  “I have a high pain threshold,” she replied. He detected a flush of emotion behind that statement. “Besides, I looked it up in Gray’s Anatomy before I cut. See the lines?” She frowned. “I didn’t tell anybody what I was going to do.”

  He eyed the open door and worried for a moment about the lack of privacy in this impromptu session. Ah, screw it. She was talking. “Do you still want to die?”

  Alicia’s face brightened a shade. “Do you want to live?”

  He frowned. “What makes you think I don’t want to live?”

  “Oh, nothing.” She looked away, up at the ceiling, around the room, pursing her lips as if to whistle.

  He needed a carrot. Something to draw her out. “Look, I can try to find out who called 9-1-1, but I can’t guarantee we can discuss it. Suicide is a criminal offense after all.”

  “So was abortion, once upon a time.”

  “Point well taken.”

  “How will you find out? Do you have connections?”

  “I haff my vays.” He smiled. Like a brass chorus in his ears, something blared that he was holding her hand. And that she was holding his. Mortified, he let go and slid off the bed. “I have to go. Your evaluation is nine a.m. tomorrow morning, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  Something fluttered in the window. Dr. Farron turned toward it, puzzled.

  “What’s wrong?”

  He stepped toward the window with a sense of foreboding. As he approached, he peered through the blinds to find a glassy black eye angled at him. The great black bird stretched its wings and opened its thick beak threateningly. It would have been comical if the bird hadn’t been so weirdly large.

  It looked like a raven. But it couldn’t be. This was Berkeley, not Britain. Or did that matter?

  “What’s out there? Rachelle was looking earlier. Is something wrong?”

  “Nothing,” Dr. Farron replied although his gut screamed that it was anything but. “Just a bird.”

  “What kind of bird?” A beat. “Is it a raven?”

  He gulped.

  “It’s a raven, isn’t it?” she asked, sitting up, eyes wide. “Fuck!”

  “I—I don’t know.”

  “You do know.”

  “I don’t! It’s just a crow.” It had to be.

  Then a plaintive voice called from the other side of the ward. “A LIGHT TO GUIDE THE GENTILES!”

  Dr. Farron started. “What the heck?”

  “Jesus is getting the flashlight in his face,” she said, still distracted by the window.

  “Jesus, huh?”

  “JFC to you, pal.”

  He laughed. Her sense of humor felt stronger. She was coming back to the world.

  “Goodnight,” he said with a wave. She waved back. He turned to the doorway and reached for the light switch, but caught himself. Glancing back at her, he smiled sheepishly and curled his hand into a fist. Her weary face softened with an amused look as she lowered back down onto the pillow, never taking her eyes off him.

  Out in the hallway, his mind started beating the inner tom-toms of obsession and anxiety. He was less anxious about the conversation with Alicia than he was about the odd bird outside her window—especially given what had happened that day. Being very conscious of the sound his footsteps made in the hallway, he forced himself to walk toward the nurses’ station, even though he wanted to turn to the wall and beat his fists into it.

  Bolting past the desk, he held up a hand in brief gesture to Rachelle.

  “Hey!” she said as he passed. “I have something for you.”

  He slowed. “Where’s Brian?”

  “He’s doing checks with Dean.”

  “Ah.”

  She reached under the desk, digging. “Did you see those dead birds today?”

  “Dead birds?”

  “Dozens of dead crows just dropped out of the sky in the park.”

  “That’s bizarre.”

  “I tell you, James, I’m no psychic or anything, but I got a bad feeling about this.”

  “Did you see that bird outside of Alicia Baum’s window?”

  “The big black one?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Just what the hell was that?”

  He lowered his voice. “A raven, I think. Much too big to be a crow.”

  “You some expert? Damn, where’d I put that thing?” She found whatever she was digging for and pulled out a DVD, handing it to him like a traffic ticket.

  Arched over by white Japanese lettering, the bright blue cover art depicted a Samurai in steel armor with a slick black face shield that obscured his features. Beside a silvery clad anime girl with wistful eyes and cinnamon brown pigtails that swept into the Milky Way, the cyber Samurai held a large blaster gun at an aggressive angle as he stood on the swollen black head of a horned dragon with blood running from frothy nostrils. Its tongue split into tendrils and fanned from a toothy jaw into the winds of space, grasping and crushing distant starships.

  Dr. Farron gripped the case tighter as the dragon tickled his memory. “Where did you get this?”

  “I didn’t. She did.” Rachelle gestured toward Alicia’s room. “At some funky video store on Telegraph. Don’t ask, I don’t know.”

  Down the hall, a patient cursed Brian and the orderly, Dean.

  Jesus was quick to respond to his fellow patient’s outburst. “THE SON OF GOD IS THE TRUTH AND THE LIGHT.”

  “If ya don’t shut up, Jesus, I’ll bring the Romans,” Brian yelled.

  “She said that you should watch it again,” Rachelle intimated.

  “Again?”

  “Like I said, I don’t know.”

  With a sigh, he thanked Rachelle. “Good night, Rachelle.”

  And he went home. At first, he did not sleep. More than anything, he wanted to know who had dialed 9-1-1. So, he booted his laptop and emailed his friend Connie who worked in Emergency Services for Alameda County. If anyone could get a digital recording of the call and the readout from the PSAP, it would be her. When he clicked “Send,” he hoped that it was Alicia who had called just before slitting her wrists. That kind of behavior wasn’t unheard of.

  He had a feeling, though, that the explanation would be anything but ordinary.

  Chapter 14

  Through the eyes of Huginn as she perched in that window, Mr. Wicker watched the exchange between Alicia and The Celt with increasing alarm. How The Celt examined her hands. How they spoke. Perhaps she would be the Librarian’s undoing, but he wanted her close enough that she could undo him.

  Worse, he had a moment of recognition. It happened rarely, as few of the people he’d known in life ever passed through the Library. But this soul he could not mistake. Mr. Wicker recognized a soul by the eyes. As these particular eyes drew close to Huginn, he could see that they were quite unmistakably the eyes of someone he hated more than his captivity.

  Litu.

  Most likely this man had no idea who he had been and what he had done. Yet the sum of his current and past lives determined what The Celt would do in this life. Or at least, what he was trying to do, anyway.

  A volcanic rage roiled in the Librarian as the bitter memories of his long forgotten life flooded his mental landscape. Old, agonizing memories that he’d tried to leave behind with his death but could not. Ever.

  The man who was responsible for his curse. For his imprisonment.
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  Mr. Wicker had to stop him, whatever his purpose this life. He had to out of sheer spite. The sweetness of revenge after centuries of suffering.

  But how? He didn’t even know what the man was about this time around. He didn’t have a book. No one in his family did.

  He had to bring Alicia back to the Library. If he could convince her to stay, then at least he had won half the war—the half that held his heart. Then if he could discover what Litu was about this life, he could prepare for the onslaught—if indeed one could prepare to counter destiny. And anything involving Litu returning to his life meant fate was afoot.

  Mr. Wicker’s eyes trailed up the towering stacks. Only the very worst memories made it to the Library. They had hardened him over the years. And now was the time to raise the curtain on his cruelty to let it strut proudly. While he had to lure Alicia back to the Library, the only way to bring her back for good would be to hurt her in some way, to widen the void so that she could fall into it once again and not be able to climb out.

  There wasn’t much left to take, but he had an idea.

  This idea had already formed into a silent command. Muninn sailed to Mr. Wicker’s side and dropped a slender tome before him. The shaggy hackles of the bird’s black throat rippled as he cried and landed upon his master’s shoulder.

  Mr. Wicker laid a charred hand on the spine of the book he sought. The book need not be that thick. It could be as slim as a letter with one devastating memory. Or it could be as thick as an encyclopedia of pain. But this one could be carried by the raven alone. A feathered frenzy built between the book stacks. The air stirred with cruelty, raising a cry from the birds as if a fresh corpse had dropped before them.

  The Librarian prided himself in drawing off the poison of people’s lives, even if they often tried to kill themselves to be reunited with said poison. They would spend a lifetime pursuing those memories to feel whole again, but the contents of their book would elude them until death. Until they returned to the Library.

  But if he annihilated that memory, they would never be whole. They would wander from lifetime to lifetime, a sick wraith in flesh. Always hungry. Never quite sane. It was a destructive power that They had somehow not yet taken from him. Perhaps it was to placate his rage at being imprisoned. Or perhaps it had simply been overlooked.