Other arms were helping with the fight now, and they were winning. It took three nurses to remove his hand, but they succeeded. Charlie began to breathe again, a glutton for air.
"Are you all right, Mr. George?"
He opened his mouth to reassure the angel, but his voice had momentarily deserted him. He was dimly aware that his hand was still putting up a fight at the end of his arm.
"Where's Jeudwine?" he gasped. "Get him, please."
"The doctor is unavailable at the moment, but he'll be coming to see you later on in the day."
"I want to see him now.
"Don't worry, Mr. George," the nurse replied, her bedside manner reestablished, "we'll just give you a mild sedative, and then you can sleep awhile."
"No!"
"Yes, Mr. George!" she replied, firmly. "Don't worry You're in good hands."
"I don't want to sleep any more. They have control over you when you're asleep, don't you see?"
"You're safe here."
He knew better. He knew he wasn't safe anywhere, not now. Not while he still had a hand. It was not under his control any longer, if indeed it had ever been. Perhaps it was just an illusion of servitude it bad created these forty-odd years, a performance to lull him into a false sense of autocracy. All this he wanted to say, but none of it would fit into his mouth. Instead he just said: "No more sleep."
But the nurse had procedures. The ward was already too full of patients, and with more coming in every hour (terrible scenes at the YMCA she'd just heard; dozens of casualties, mass suicide attempted), all she could do was sedate the distressed and get on with the business of the day. "Just a mild sedative," she said again, and the next moment she had a needle in her hand, spitting slumber.
"Just listen a moment," he said, trying to initiate a reasoning process with her; but she wasn't available for debate.
"Now don't be such a baby," she chided, as tears started.
"You don't understand," he explained, as she prodded up the vein at the crook of his arm.
"You can tell Dr. Jeudwine everything when he comes to see you." The needle was in his arm, the plunger was plunging.
"No!" he said, and pulled away. The nurse hadn't expected such violence. The patient was up and out of bed before she could complete the plunge, the hypo still dangling from his arm.
"Mr. George," she said sternly. "Will you please get back into bed!"
Charlie pointed at her with his stump.
"Don't come near me," he said.
She tried to shame him. "All the other patients are behaving well," she said, "why can't you?" Charlie shook his head. The hypo, having worked its way out of his vein, fell to the floor, still three-quarters full. "I will not tell you again."
"Damn right you won't," said Charlie.
He bolted away down the ward, his escape egged on by patients to the right and left of him. "Go, boy, go," somebody yelled. The nurse gave belated chase but at the door an instant accomplice intervened, literally throwing himself in her way. Charlie was out of sight and lost in the corridors before she was up and after him again.
It was an easy place to lose yourself in, he soon realized. The hospital had been built in the late nineteenth century, then added to as funds and donations allowed: a wing in 1911, another after the First World War, more wards in the fifties, and the Chaney Memorial Wing in 1973. The place was a labyrinth. They'd take an age to find him.
The problem was, he didn't feel so good. The stump of his left arm had begun to ache as his painkillers wore off, and he had the distinct impression that it was bleeding under the bandages. In addition, the quarter hypo of sedative had slowed his system down. He felt slightly stupid, and he was certain that his condition must show on his face. But he was not going to allow himself to be coaxed back into that bed, back into sleep, until he'd sat down in a quiet place somewhere and thought the whole thing through.
He found refuge in a tiny room off one of the corridors. Lined with filing cabinets and piles of reports, it smelled slightly damp. He'd found his way into the Memorial Wing, though he didn't know it. The seven-story monolith had been built with a bequest from millionaire Frank Chaney, and the tycoon's own building firm had done the construction job, as the old man's will required. They had used substandard materials and a defunct drainage system, which was why Chaney had died a millionaire, and the wing was crumbling from the basement up. Sliding himself into a clammy niche between two of the cabinets, well out of sight should somebody chance to come in, Charlie crouched on the floor and interrogated his right hand.
"Well?" he demanded in a reasonable tone. "Explain yourself."
It played dumb.
"No use," he said. "I'm on to you.
Still, it just sat there at the end of his arm, innocent as a babe.
"You tried to kill me . ." he accused it.
Now the hand opened a little, without his instruction, and gave him the once over.
"You could try if again, couldn't you?"
Ominously, it began to flex its fingers, like a pianist preparing for a particularly difficult solo. Yes, it said, I could; any old time.
"In fact, there's very little I can do to stop you, is there?" Charlie said. "Sooner or later you'll catch me unawares. Can't have somebody watching over me for the rest of my life. So where does that leave me, I ask myself? As good as dead, wouldn't you say?"
The hand closed down a little, the puffy flesh of its palm crinkling into grooves of pleasure. Yes, it was saying, you're done for, poor fool, and there's not a thing you can do.
"You killed Ellen."
I did, the hand smiled.
"You severed my other hand, so it could escape. Am I right?"
You are, said the hand.
"I saw it, you know," Charlie said. "I saw it running off. And now you want to do the same thing, am I correct? You want to be up and away."
Correct.
"You're not going to give me any peace, are you, till you've got your freedom?"
Right again.
"So," said Charlie, "I think we understand each other, and I'm willing to do a deal with you."
The hand came closer to his face, crawling up his pajama shirt, conspiratorial.
"I'll release you," he said.
It was on his neck now, its grip not tight, but cozy enough to make him nervous.
"I'll find a way, I promise. A guillotine, a scalpel, I don't know what."
It was rubbing itself on him like a cat now, stroking him. "But you have to do it my way, in my time. Because if you kill me you'll have no chance of survival, will you? They'll just bury you with me, the way they buried Dad's hands."
The hand stopped stroking and climbed up the side of the filing cabinet.
"Do we have a deal?" said Charlie.
But the hand was ignoring him. It had suddenly lost all interest in bargain making. If it had possessed a nose, it would have been sniffing the air. In the space of the last few moments things had changed-the deal was off.
Charlie got up clumsily, and went to the window. The glass was dirty on the inside and caked with several years of bird droppings on the outside, but he could just see the garden through it. It had been laid out in accordance with the terms of the millionaire's bequest: a formal garden that would stand as as glorious a monument to his good taste as the building was to his pragmatism. But since the building had started to deteriorate, the garden had been left to its own devices. Its few trees were either dead or bowed under the weight of unpruned branches; the borders were rife with weeds; the benches on their backs with their square legs in the air. Only the lawn was kept mowed, a small concession to care. Somebody, a doctor taking a moment out for a quiet smoke, was wandering among the strangled walks. Otherwise the garden was empty.