"Well," Peter started, only to be shut down by Little Black holding up his hand.
"Of course, Lucy will have her own set of keys for all the doors around here. What she does with them while she's at the nursing station ain't our business…" Little Black said. "But it ain't gonna be my brother and I leave that door open. We find this guy, all is good. But I'm not looking for any more trouble than we've already got coming."
Lucy looked down at her bed. It was quiet in the nurse-trainees' dormitory, and she had the sensation that she was alone in the building, although she knew that couldn't be true. Somewhere there were people talking, perhaps even laughing over a joke, or sharing some story. Not her. She had laid out a white nurse's outfit on the surface of the cot. It was to be her costume for the night. Inwardly, she felt a little mocking laughter. First Communion dress. Prom dress. Wedding dress. Funeral dress. A woman laid out her clothes with care for special occasions.
In her hand, she hefted the small, snub-nosed pistol. She placed it into her handbag. She had not told any of the others that she had it with her.
Lucy did not truly expect the Angel to show, but she was at a loss as to what else she could do in the time remaining. Her own stay was coming to an end, her welcome long past expiration and by Monday morning Peter would be shipped out as well. That left this one night. In some ways, she had already begun to plan ahead, considering about what she would be forced to do when her mission ended in failure and she departed the hospital. Eventually, she knew, the Angel would either kill again inside the hospital or seek release and kill once he'd stepped outside the walls. If she monitored every release hearing, and kept a watch on every death at the hospital, sooner or later he would make a mistake and she would be there to accuse him. Of course, she realized, the problem with that particular approach was obvious: It meant someone else had to die.
She took a deep breath and reached for the nurse's outfit. She tried to not imagine what that other, nameless, faceless but very real victim would look like. Or who she might be. Or what hopes and dreams and desires she might have. She existed somewhere in some parallel world, as real as anyone, but ghostlike. For a second, Lucy wondered if this woman out there waiting to die was a little like the hallucinations that so many of the patients in the hospital had. She was just out there somewhere, not knowing that she was next in line for the Angel if he did not show up at the first-floor nursing station in the Amherst Building that night.
With the full weight of that unknown woman's future resting on her shoulders, Lucy slowly began to dress herself.
When I looked up from the words to catch my breath, Peter was there in the apartment, standing nonchalantly up against the wall, arms folded in front of his chest, a troubled look on his face. But that was all that was familiar about him; his clothing was in tatters, the skin on his arms was seared red and black. Dirt and blood streaked his cheeks and throat. There was so little left of him that I remembered, I am not sure whether I could have recognized him. The room filled with a foul odor and suddenly I could smell the awful stench of burned flesh and decay.
I shook off a sensation of dread, and greeted my only friend.
"Peter," I said, relief flooding my voice, "you're here to help."
He shook his head but didn't voice a reply. He gestured once to his neck and then his lips, like a mute signaling that words were lost to him.
I pointed back at the wall where my story was collected. "I was beginning to understand," I said. "I was there at the release hearings. I knew. Not everything, but I was beginning to know. When I walked across the hospital grounds that night, for the first time, I saw something different, didn't I? But where were you? Where was Lucy? All of you were making plans, but no one wanted to listen to me, and I was the one who saw the most."
He smiled again, as if to underscore the truth in what I was saying.
"Why weren't you there to listen to me?" I asked again.
Peter shrugged sadly. Then he reached out a hand that seemed almost stripped of flesh, like a skeleton's bony fingers reaching for my own. In the second that I hesitated, the hand reaching for me faded, almost as if a fog bank had slid between him and me, and after I blinked again, Peter was gone. Wordless. Disappearing like a conjurer's trick on a stage. I shook my head, trying to clear my thinking, and when I looked up again, filmy, slowly taking shape very close to where Peter's apparition had been, I saw the Angel.
He glowed white, as if there was some harsh, unblinking light within him. It blinded me, and I shaded my eyes, and when I looked back, he was still there. Only ghostlike, vaporous, as if he was opaque, constructed part of water, part of air, partially by imagination. His features were indistinct, as if they were slurred about the edges. The only thing sharp and distinct about him were his words.
"Hello, C-Bird," he said. "There's no one here to help you. No one left to help you anywhere. Now it is just you and I and what happened that night"
I looked at him and realized that he was right.
"You don't want to remember that night, do you Francis?"
I shook my head, not trusting my own voice.
He pointed across the room at the story growing on the wall.
"Close to dying time, Francis," he said coldly.
Then he added, "That night, and this one, too."
Chapter 31
Francis found Peter outside the first-floor nursing station. It was pill time, and patients were lining up for their evening medications. There was a little jostling back and forth, a few whiny complaints about this or that, a shove or two, but mostly things were orderly; if there was anything to suggest that this was just the arrival of another night in another week of another month of yet another year for the majority of them, it was impossible to see.
"Peter," Francis said quietly, but unable to hide the tension in his voice, "Peter, I need to speak with you. And Lucy, too. I think I saw him. I think I know how we can find him." In Francis's fevered imagination, all that was necessary was to pull the files of the three men who remained behind in the release hearing room. One of them would be the Angel. He was certain of this, and his excitement spilled into every word.
Peter the Fireman, however, seemed distracted, barely listening. His eyes were fixed across the hallway, and Francis followed his gaze. He looked over at the line and saw Newsman and Napoleon, the hulking retarded man and the angry retarded man, three of the women with dolls and all the other faces that filled the Amherst Building with familiarity. He half expected to hear Cleo's voice booming forth, with some imaginary complaint that the goddamn bastards had failed once again to address, followed by her unmistakable cackling laugh bouncing off the wire bars that separated the station from the corridor. Mister Evil was behind the counter, overseeing the evening dispensing of medications by Nurse Wrong, making notations on a clipboard. Every so often Evans would look up and glare in Peter's general direction. After a second, Evans reached down and grasped a small paper cup from an array in front of him, then exited the station and made his way through the lineup of patients, who parted like river waters to let him pass. He came over to Peter and Francis before Francis had had time to say anything else to Peter about all that was troubling him.
"Here you are, Mister Petrel," Evans said stiffly, almost formally. " Thorazine Fifty mikes. This should help quiet those voices that you continue to deny hearing."