“We were expecting you earlier,” O‘Kane said, by way of making conversation until he could insert the three separate keys into the three separate locks and let the swollen savior in so they could shake hands and get off to a proper start.
“Yes,” Dr. Brush rasped, chewing around his cigar, “and I expect Gilbert’ll be up in arms over it, but I’m late, you see, for the main and simple reason that this damnable fog made it damned near impossible to find the door of the hotel, let alone give the damned driver a chance of finding the damned road out here — and where in hell are we, anyway? Good God, talk about the hinterlands—”
Actually, he’d been scheduled to take over more than two years earlier, and Hamilton had prepared O‘Kane and the Thompsons and everybody else for the passing of the baton, but word had it that Katherine had opened her checkbook and said, “How can I persuade you to stay on, Dr. Hamilton?” And Hamilton, who’d already written up his monkey experiments for some high-flown scientific journal and was anxious to get back and circulating in the world of sexual psychopathology, where new advances were being made almost daily, had, so Nick said, demanded on the spot that she double his salary and provide him with the use of a new car. “Done,” Katherine said, and wrote out a check. And so, Dr. Brush was late. Not just by a couple of hours, but by two years and more.
There was an awkward moment after the door had been shut and treble-locked behind him, when Brush began advancing hugely on Mr. McCormick and throwing out a grab bag of hearty greetings and mindless pleasantries, wholly unconscious of the telltale signs that Mr. McCormick was feeling threatened and on the verge of erupting into some sort of violent episode, but O‘Kane caught the big man by the elbow and steered him toward an armchair on the far side of the room. “Wouldn’t you be more comfortable over here, doctor?” he said so that everyone could hear him. And then, sotto voce, “You’ve got to give Mr. McCormick his space, at least until the two of you are better acquainted — he’s very particular about that. You see, he’s not sitting there alone — his judges are there with him, wigs, robes, gavels and all, though you and I can’t see them.”
The big man looked perplexed. He must have been forty or so, though it was hard to tell considering the amount of flesh he carried, especially in the face — every line and wrinkle was erased in the general swell of fatty tissue, giving him the look of a very well fed and pampered baby. “Well, I just—” he began, looking down at O‘Kane’s hand clamped round his arm and then allowing himself to be led, like some great floating zeppelin, to the chair. “I just felt ”—and now he looked again to Mr. McCormick, who was doing his shrinking man routine, hunching his shoulders and declining into the chair so that soon only his head would be visible above the tablecloth—“that we should meet, and as soon as possible, Mr. McCormick, sir, for the main and simple reason that we’ll be spending so much valuable time together in the coming weeks and months, and while I, er, should really have waited for a proper introduction from that good friend of yours, Dr. Hamilton, I just thought, er, for the main and simple reason—”
Mr. McCormick spoke then, and with no impediment. “Dr. Hamilton is no friend of mine.”
Brush was on it like a hound. “Oh? And why do you say that, sir? I’m told he’s been your very good friend over the course of many years now and that he’s very much concerned for your welfare, as indeed Mr. O‘Kane and Mr. Tompkins are, and I myself.”
No reply from Mr. McCormick, whose chin now rested at the level of the table. O‘Kane could read the look in Mr. McCormick’s eyes, and it wasn’t auspicious, not at all. “Well, then, Dr. Brush,” he interjected, clapping his hands and rubbing them together vigorously, “why don’t you let me show you around a bit, at least until Dr. Hamilton arrives?”
While Mart entertained Mr. McCormick with some hoary card tricks Mr. McCormick had already seen half a million times, O‘Kane led the psychiatrist into the bedroom. “There isn’t much to see here, really,” he apologized, indicating the brass bed bolted to the floor in the center of the room. Everything else, right down to the pictures on the walls and the nails that held them, had been removed. There were no curtains, no lights. Here and there along the walls you could make out a faded patch where a piece of furniture had once stood.
“Rather spartan, isn’t it?” the doctor observed, swinging his tempestuous frame to the left and poking his head into the bathroom, which contained only toilet, sink and shower bath, and the infamous window, of course, now louverless and with the neat grid of iron bars neatly restored.
“We did have a rug,” O‘Kane said, “a Persian carpet, really quite the thing. But we found that Mr. McCormick was eating it.”
“Eating it?”
“At night, when no one was watching. Somehow he managed to get a section of it unraveled with just his fingers alone, and then he’d pull out strands of it and swallow them. We found the evidence in his stools. Of course, the rest of the stuff, the furniture and pictures and all that, well, he destroyed most of it himself the last time he escaped.”
And then they were back in the upper parlor, standing around awkwardly, awaiting Dr. Hamilton, who’d spent two hours that morning awaiting the fog-delayed Dr. Brush. By this time, Mr. McCormick had retreated to the sofa, where he was reading aloud to himself in a cacophonic clash of words and syllables: “ ‘TARzan is NOT an APE. He is NOT LIKE his peoPLE. HIS WAYS are NOT their ways, and SO TARzan is going BACK to the LAIR of his OWN KIND….’ ”
O‘Kane was just about to suggest that they take a tour of the lower floor and then perhaps look round for Dr. Hamilton, who was most likely out in the oak forest overseeing the dismantling of his hominoid colony, when Dr. Brush abruptly swerved away from him and loomed up on Mr. McCormick, cigar smoke trailing behind him as if it were the exhaust of his internal engine. “How marvelous, Mr. McCormick,” he boomed, “you read so beautifully, and I can’t tell you how therapeutic I find it myself to read good literature aloud, for the main and simple—”
But Dr. Brush never had a chance to round off his homily, because at that moment Mr. McCormick slammed the book shut and hurled it at him end over end, prefatory to leaping out of the sofa and tackling the doctor round the knees. The flying book glanced off the side of Brush’s head and he was able to take a single hasty step back before Mr. McCormick hit him and he found himself swimming through the air with an improvised backstroke before crashing down on one of the end tables, which he unfortunately obliterated. O‘Kane was there in an instant, and the usual madness ensued, he tugging at one end of Mr. McCormick’s wire-taut body and Mart at the other, but Brush, for all his size, proved remarkably agile. Without ever losing his masticular grip on the big tan perfecto, he was able to fling Mr. McCormick off, squirm round and pin him massively to the floor beneath all three hundred twenty-seven pounds.
Mr. McCormick writhed. He cursed, scratched, bit, but Dr. Brush simply shifted his weight as the crisis demanded, not even breathing hard, until finally Mr. McCormick was subdued. “Ha!” Brush laughed after a bit, O‘Kane and Mart standing there stupefied, their hands hanging uselessly at their sides. “Trick I learned at the Eastern Lunatic Hospital. Always works. The patient, you see, after a while he feels like he’s a little bird nestled inside the egg, not even a hatchling yet, and calm, so calm, for the main and simple reason that I represent the mother bird, a nurturing force that cannot be denied, for the main and simple—”
“Just a minute, Dr. Brush — I don’t mean to interrupt, but I think, well, I’m afraid you’re hurting Mr. McCormick,” O‘Kane put in, alarmed by the coloration of his employer’s face, which had gone from a deep Guinea-wine red to the palest blood-drained shade of white.