Lena, little Lena, lay face down in the middle of the skinny rug that ran down the hall to protect the hardwood. Her head was in two pieces, like in the cartoons when somebody unzipped somebody else and they fell into halves.
“Happy?” Mack yelled and shook him. “Lots more to see.”
He was lifted by the neck again. His feet tried to keep up so the cop wouldn’t pull his head off. Mack, the cop giant, was taking him to his parents’ room. Dylan didn’t want to see what they’d done to his mom and dad. With a strength born of sheer terror, he began to kick, and bite, and scream. He did wet himself then and didn’t even care. The world had gone insane.
But it hadn’t. Dylan had.
“No!” he screamed.
“Look,” Kowalski insisted. “Look. I found it for you.”
Dylan looked hard through the falling colors, through the blood in his eyes, through the dark from the walls leaning too close. Kowalski had something across his knees. He was holding it in his lap like a child.
“Look what I brought for you,” the doctor said. “I brought this to help you remember. This is the axe. The one you used to hack your family to pieces. Look at it. Look at the axe. Remember the axe? Here it is. See the axe. I brought it for you.”
Dylan looked. The axe. Blood poured from his eyes; he could feel it hot on his face. Panic clanged in his ears so loud he couldn’t hear anything else. The axe lay there, alive, waiting. Dylan looked at Kowalski’s face. It changed again. No judge. A cop. Mack, the giant cop, the fake cop, the bastard cop who had dragged him from his bed. This time he wouldn’t be afraid. This time he wouldn’t stop. This time he would get them all.
With the power of the snake in his brain he rose from the couch on a clear, cold wave of revenge, rose like a god, shooting up. His hands caught the axe from Mack the Giant’s grasp. It weighed nothing. He was a man now, not a little boy. He was strong. The axe swung high over his head, the blade glittered. The butterflies were coming back. He could save them.
With an exultant cry he brought the blade down onto Mack the Giant’s skull.
15
Again and again Dylan chopped. The axe blade sang; the butterflies flashed brighter and faster. Dylan could feel the muscles working beneath his skin. If he looked, he could see them, see through them to the bones, hard and long, wielding the axe.
Mack, the giant cop, the fake, bastard, fuck cop, fell from the chair but wouldn’t die. Dylan swung harder, driving the blade through the crawling back, hacking where arm met shoulder, down again through spine and base of skull.
Still, the man crawled, scuttling crablike, making for imagined safety beneath the desk. Dylan followed, his legs strong now, not the skinny pins of a little boy. The floor shuddered with each mighty step, and Dylan laughed. This time Mack wouldn’t do it; he wouldn’t drag Dylan down the hall and show off his grisly work. With Mack dead, the butterflies would be safe. Everybody would be safe.
The last of the cop disappeared beneath the old battered metal desk, his feet tucking up inside like a kid hiding from his brother, like the Wicked Witch’s toes curling under Dorothy’s house. Axe held loosely in his right hand, Dylan grabbed the edge of the desk with his left and heaved. His strength was a hundredfold. The heavy metal desk rose up and smashed against the wall. The murky painting broke loose and fell.
Again, Dylan raised the blade.
“There is no axe! There is no axe! The axe was a joke. There is nothing in your hands! Guard! Guard! Help! There is no axe. Your hands are empty. Jesus! Help me-somebody help me. Guard!”
The curled thing on the floor, the cowering coil of flesh, screamed these words, had been screaming these words. Noise became language; language became English and began to make sense.
“Your hands are empty, you fucking psycho. There is no axe!”
Dylan brought his hands down from over his head. He held nothing. Nothing. His fingers curled around empty air. He stared down through where the axe handle had been to the man at his feet. The cop was gone. Mack the Giant was Kowalski. Nobody was dead. Nobody but his family. And the butterflies.
Dylan shut down so hard and fast he never even felt himself falling.
He came to slowly, nausea rising out of the depths to meet a shrieking headache. His mouth was sour with bile and the faint taste of decay heavy sedatives leave behind. He twitched, wanting to raise his hand to scrub the cobwebs from his face. His arms were strapped down. Dylan knew the feel of them; leather cuffs lined with sheepskin and chained to the bed. Kowalski favored them for shock therapy.
For a hellish heartbeat, Dylan thought he was there for that purpose, that any minute the volts would rage through his brain, ripping thoughts and memories out by the roots.
If it hadn’t already happened.
Then he remembered the acid: the acid, and the axe, and the butterflies. He couldn’t remember if he’d killed Kowalski or not.
But then he wouldn’t remember, would he?
“Fuck,” he groaned. Whether Kowalski still breathed or not didn’t change the fact that he was still alive. His throat was so dry he could scarcely swallow, and his bladder felt full to bursting.
“Hey,” he croaked. He started to turn his head but it hurt too much to move. “Hey!” he shouted again after a moment. “I gotta take a piss.”
That brought an orderly running. They hated like hell to clean up piss.
They hated like hell to do anything for the inmates.
Dylan listened to the shuffle of rubber-soled shoes on the linoleum. He was in the psych ward. It was the only place other than the infirmary where they used the leather and sheepskin cuffs. After Kowalski had fried his brain, he’d woken up here. Even without the cuffs Dylan would have known where he was without bothering to open his eyes. The psych ward had a distinctive odor. The usual smells of bodily effluvia and pungent cleansers were there, as was the stink of stale food and medicines, but added to that familiar brew was a scent Dylan had identified in his mind as hopelessness. The odor, slightly like that of rank earth, came into the brain as a low note into the ears-dust dropping into a place where there was no wind to blow it away. Breathing the mixture made it hard to believe the sun shone anywhere on Earth, that all cats did not eat their kittens, and that there passed a single parade unrained on.
“Hey!” Dylan called again.
“Keep your pants on,” came a bored voice. “I’m coming.” It was Clyde.
That was good. Clyde was okay. He was old, slow and stupid, but he wasn’t full of hate. In Dylan’s world that qualified a person for near sainthood.
“You going to go chopping me up with an invisible axe if I take you to the toilet?” Clyde asked, as he undid the cuffs. Dylan guessed the orderly was under orders to have him use the bedpan. But that would mean Clyde would have to wash it. Grateful for the old man’s laziness and the shred of salvaged dignity, Dylan assured him he would not chop him to pieces but, indeed, would give him an invisible twenty-dollar bill if he could close the bathroom door.
“No dice.”
Dylan had only asked to be asking for something. Since he’d been put away he’d done nothing in private, including dream. Sometimes he wondered if, when he got out, he’d need an audience to get himself to take a dump.
Clyde held open the door to the little toilet off the recovery room and Dylan brushed by him to step inside. Contact with the old man was alarming. The sensation of life that close was too much stimulus. Inside, Dylan had the burnt-out-hole feeling a bad trip left.
Clyde had to steady him so he could hit the john. As they’d done when he was tripping, the walls wavered and leaned-the acid was still in his system-but now, added to it, was whatever they’d given him to bring him down, so the wavering and leaning was in slow motion. He kept jerking as if he were toppling over, only to find that he was still on the level; it was the walls that were sneaking out.