"Larry?" his mother whispered, not certain at all that she was seeing correctly-believing, in fact, that she wasn't, that she was seeing only her son in the throes of his illness, her son about to puke again. So she smiled tremblingly and said, "Can I get you something, Larry? Can I get you a bucket?"
"No," he answered, his voice lower, sharper, with a weird kind of warbling intensity to it. "I don't need a bucket, Mom."
And she watched as a boy she had never known, a strange, round-headed boy who looked for all the world as if he'd just been pulled dead from a river pushed himself to a standing position over her on the stairway, watched as a huge, empty smile full of a hollow, desperate, and murderous expectation spread over a face she'd seen only on movie posters.
She shook her head slowly, in terror. She whispered, "No. Please."
And the boy above her held his water-smoothed hand out. "Give me those." He nodded at the knitting needles she clutched in her hand. "Give me those, now."
And obediently, as if under hypnosis, she gave him the knitting needles.
"Or Bonnie and Clyde, or The Phantom of the Opera," Ryerson rattled on, trying hard to reach into his own subconscious and find out just what in the hell he was talking about. Creosote was on the floor lapping contentedly at a saucer full of water that McCabe had gotten for him. Ryerson glanced down at the dog, continued, "Or a Boston bull terrier, Tom."
McCabe was shaking his head in confusion and disagreement. "No, Rye. No. We can't just change, I mean there really is no such thing as 'shape shifting'; it's all just a bunch of… fun-"
Ryerson catapulted forward in the chair, face shaking with enthusiasm. "And yet… and yet, Tom… you can say that, and yet, you still believe in those… demons of yours-"
"I didn't say I believed in them, Rye."
"You did." Ryerson felt himself growing suddenly petulant. "You did!" he repeated, with emphasis.
McCabe let a self-accusing grin play on his lips, then fade. "Yes, I do believe in them. Of course I believe in them. I believe in my dreams, too. My dreams are real; my thoughts are real. But all by themselves they're not going to get up and go out and have a root beer. They're real, Rye-these little naked men are real, sure. In my world they're real. But not anywhere else."
Now Ryerson grinned. "Are you sure, Tom?"
And that's when Creosote latched onto the argyle sock Ryerson was wearing, taking him by surprise, which caused him to kick out and knock over the saucerful of water. Ryerson cursed, McCabe hooted. And Creosote trotted triumphantly off toward the kitchen with a piece of Ryerson's sock dangling from his mouth.
The round-headed boy shoved the knitting needle in very hard; it slid against a rib, then sank with a phump into the heart.
Joanna Wilde wanted to die then. But she didn't. It was shock, mostly, that was keeping her alive, lowering her blood pressure, bringing her oxygen requirements down. She stared stiffly into the sunken oval dark eyes of the thing on the landing. She cooed, "Oooh, nooo!" and watched expectantly, hopefully-knowing that blessed death was very near now-as the other knitting needle plummeted into her.
Chapter Sixteen
"I'm sorry, Mr. Miller," said the admitting nurse at Strong Memorial Hospital, "but Ms. Lynch has slipped into a coma, her listed condition has been returned to critical, and I'm afraid under those circumstances, no visitors are allowed." She saw the hurt in Miller's eyes. "I really am sorry, Mr. Miller."
"Yes," Miller said, "of course you are," then turned to go, head lowered.
"Mr. Ashland?" he heard.
He looked up. "Sorry?" he said, because the face before him didn't register immediately.
"How are you, Mr. Ashland?" Ryerson Biergarten said.
Miller shook his head confusedly; something about this man was familiar, if only he could place him. "Forgive me, I believe you have the wrong-"
Ryerson, sans Creosote, who had been left in the reluctant hands of Loren Samuelson, cut in, seeing that Miller really was confused. "My name's Biergarten. You came to see me a couple of weeks ago."
Miller looked momentarily stunned. He whispered something that sounded for all the world like "Ida is a member!" and then ran for the automatic exit doors. Ryerson turned, saw a beefy security guard step in front of Miller and stop him with both hands at Miller's chest. "No running, please; this is a hospital, not a gymnasium."
"Get out of my way!" Miller screeched, and pushed the security guard aside. The guard's hand went to his gun.
"Don't be a fool!" Ryerson screamed. The security guard turned toward him. Ryerson ran for the exit door; as he passed the security guard he hissed, with ill-disguised contempt, "What the hell were you going to do? Shoot him?"
The security guard looked confused. He took his hand off his gun and fell in behind Ryerson in pursuit of Douglas Miller. "What are you running for?" Ryerson called to Miller. "Don't run, there's no need to run!"
He watched Miller clamber over the hood of a car that had screeched to a halt to avoid him, watched him move-with incredible swiftness, Ryerson thought, for a man so clearly muscle-bound-into the main hospital parking lot where still another car had to screech to a halt to avoid him, and another and another, until at last one rolled slowly into him and sent him spinning into a parked Chevy van. For several seconds he staggered around as if drunk. Then he collapsed.
When Ryerson got to him, Miller was muttering Greta's name with a deep and almost embarrassing affection. Not too long after that there were several doctors standing around him, barking orders to the crowd that had gathered; the doctors were followed by nurses from admitting and emergency, one with a clipboard in hand and an admittance form to fill out; she was told by one of the other nurses that "it can probably wait, Emma," so she turned around and went back inside. Not too long after that, Miller was carried on a stretcher back into the hospital through the same doors he'd run out of minutes earlier and was taken up to radiology for X-rays. Ryerson Biergarten-who'd been asking repeatedly when he could talk to Miller, whom he knew only as "Mr. Ashland"-was told, "It doesn't look serious, but let us do our jobs first, please."
While all this was happening, Greta Lynch, lying in a coma in Room 1077, was reliving over and over again the blood guilt from her childhood-the guilt that had followed her into adulthood and sat on her shoulders night and day and babbled at her that she really was no good after all. How could anyone who was good have done something like that?
That was crushing her seven-week-old kitten, Leopard, underfoot in the middle of the night, in the dark, on her way back from pestering her parents for another glass of water (the fifth glass of water that evening). She'd tried to hide the fact of the kitten's death, of course, because she felt sure she'd murdered it in a fit of temper after her father had yelled "Go back to bed, for Christ's sake!" So, trying hard to keep her whimpering at whisper level, she had taken the kitten's limp body down to the garage, found a small cardboard box, put the kitten in it, taken the box to the side of the garage, where the ground was soft from rain splattering over the gutterless edge of the roof, and had buried it, using her hands as a shovel.
With the passage of time, the kitten's death had indeed, in her mind, become a murder.
The dirt that had caked her hands and fingernails had become the kitten's blood.
Its burial-which was discovered several years later, by a later owner of the house-became her "awful secret." And if someone had asked her-Greta Lynch, twenty-six-years-old, vivacious, intelligent-what that awful secret really was, she would have been stumped for the details. She would only have mumbled the catchwords of her guilt: murder, blood, deception.