But, of course, nobody was going to help me-certainly not if it meant getting in Mama Baker's way. The freed patients of the D.I. A. clinic were content to wander aimlessly through their own private, tormented worlds, leaving Mama Baker alone with his sacrificial dwarf. The men were stepping around or over the corpses of two male nurses; one nurse had had his skull bashed in by something very heavy, and the other appeared to have been strangled.
I just kept bob-bob-bobbing along through this Hieronymus Bosch world, and I finally managed to deduce that my upper body was wrapped in a canvas camisole and Mama Baker was schlepping me around by the back straps; I deduced this just before my bearer hung me up on a prong of a wooden coatrack he'd gotten from somewhere, and placed in the hallway near the elevator. All the doors in the place seemed to be wide open.
"I'll be right back, dwarf. I gotta find myself something real sharp to cut you with."
"Tegelmimp!"
"Heigh ho, heigh ho," Mama Baker sang as he walked away.
The circus was definitely in town and playing to a full house inside my skull, with everybody using my brain as a trampoline. Still, if I hoped to survive my visit to the most peculiar madhouse that the D.I.A. clinic had become, I knew that I was going to have to find some relatively quiet and stable corner in my drug-sotted brain where I could think, plan, and will myself to act.
I vaguely remembered making some kind of arrangements for my safety with Veil Kendry, but I couldn't remember what the arrangements had been. I kept thinking of Road Runner cartoons: Beep-beep-beep. It didn't make any difference; obviously, Veil wasn't around. I hoped he wasn't dead-but, no matter what he was, he couldn't help me at the moment; it would undoubtedly be a matter of only a few minutes before Mama Baker found something he considered appropriately sharp and ceremonial with which to slit my throat.
Or, if he got impatient, he might simply stick a hypodermic needle through my eye into my brain.
I couldn't understand why Veil hadn't come to rescue me. I also couldn't understand why Garth or Marl Braxton wasn't helping me. All of the patients seemed to be wandering at will through the wide open spaces of the clinic, and I had to assume that Garth and Braxton were among them. It definitely seemed an appropriate time for Garth to employ some of the soothing words and gestures that had so impressed Braxton to calm down Mama Baker. Nor would I be displeased if somebody had taken the more expedient measure of simply smashing a chair over the man's tattooed head.
And I knew I was wasting precious time for thought by engaging in petulance and speculation as to why people I'd thought I could count on had not arrived to save me from the man with the crown of scar thorns around his head and JESUS SAVES carved into his cheeks.
"Heigh ho, heigh ho, it's off to work we go. ."
Ah, yes; thinking and planning time was over, and if I hung around on the coatrack any longer I was going to end up dead. Snow White was on his way back.
The coatrack had been set up near the elevator, which I couldn't use-but the elevator was near the stairs.
"Heigh ho, heigh ho.. "
I bucked and wriggled in the air until I got my hips and legs swinging back and forth. At the apogee of a forward swing I bent my knees, then kicked up as high as I could; the coatrack tipped over, and I flew through the air to land hard on my back, with my head banging painfully against the floor. The wind was knocked out of me, and stars began to fill the DayGlo tunnels swirling around me. Just what I needed.
"Heigh ho, heigh ho — hey, dwarf!"
Mama Baker's voice seemed to be right above me-and that had a remarkably galvanizing effect on my muscles and mind.
"Sugtelmptph!" I shouted in panic as I struggled to my feet and wobbled off down one of the tunnels, through an open door, toward the stairs.
Footsteps were coming up fast behind me; with the drugs in my brain and my arms strapped around my body, there was no way I was going to outrun the other man on the stairs. Baker was going to nab me, unless I did something ingenious-like trust that I maintained what in normal times was a pretty keen sense of balance, jump, drape the canvas-shrouded upper part of my body over the steel guardrail on the stairs and slide down. I banged painfully into the knob at the end of the first section of railing, fell back, and landed on my side.
"Goddamn you, dwarf!" Baker was shouting as he scrambled down the stairs toward the first landing. "Stop! Stop, dwarf!"
Stop, dwarf? He had to be kidding me. "Mflkmpiph!" I screamed as I got to my feet, did another perilous dive and bellyflop up onto the railing, and slid down to the next landing. This time there was no knob to halt my descent-which simply meant that I sailed right off the railing and slammed hard against the opposite wall in the stairwell.
Baker's shoes clattered on the steps, descending on me. I looked up, saw something flash in his right hand as he raised it to strike. .
I ducked under the swinging scalpel blade, once again managed to get to my feet, and flung myself on the railing. But this time I had been off balance, and had lunged too hard; I was sliding down the railing, but I was leaning too far over, slipping. .
An instant before I would have slipped over the railing and escaped from Baker the hard way, in death, strong hands gripped the straps on the back of the straitjacket and pulled me back over the railing, set me down on the stairs.
"Mongo!"
"Elmptak!"
"You son-of-a-bitch, I'll kill you too!" Mama Baker screamed as he rushed the rest of the way down the stairs and slashed at Veil.
There was a most satisfying sound of Veil's fist colliding with Mama Baker's jaw. I savored that sound for a few moments, then decided to reward myself for my strenuous labors with a little nap.
I had vague recollections of very nasty things, but they all seemed to have happened a long time ago, in a prehistoric nightmare time. At the moment the most pressing thing I had to deal with was a splitting headache. Very gingerly, I opened one eye-and winced as a pinkish-white razor blade of light stabbed through to my brain. Gradually, I became accustomed to the light and saw Mr. Lippitt and Veil floating in the middle of it, at the foot of my bed.
And then I remembered what had happened.
I started to sit up in bed, and almost fell out of it when pain exploded inside my skull, momentarily blinding me. I cried out, and hands grabbed me and pushed me back up on the bed, eased my head back on the pillow.
"Take it easy, Mongo," Lippitt said. "You'll be all right, but you're not ready to jog around the park yet. First you have to recover from that psychotropic cocktail of LSD, Thorazine, and scopolamine Slycke shot you up with. Also, you have a slight concussion. You've been out of it for close to two days."
"Two days?!" That got my eyes open again. This time I found myself looking up into the smiling face of a handsome woman I judged to be in her early fifties. She winked at me.
"You're in the clinic infirmary," Lippitt said. "This is Dr. Fall-the new director of the clinic. You'll be in good hands here."
"You can call me Helen, Dr. Frederickson," the woman said. "I believe you'll be feeling fine after a few more days of rest. In the meantime, if you need anything, just push the button at the side of your bed."
Helen Fall patted me reassuringly on the arm, then walked from the room. I glanced back and forth between Lippitt and Veil, who had taken up positions on opposite sides of the bed. "What the hell happened?" I croaked.
"What do you remember?" Lippitt asked, running a leathery hand back over the top of his completely bald head.
"I was supposed to meet Slycke at eleven at night up in his office. I found the door to the building open, and I went in. I didn't like the feel of the situation. I was on my way out to go with Veil to get RPC Security and call you when I got cold-cocked. I remember being carted around in a straitjacket by a psychotic patient by the name of Mama Baker who was getting ready to open up my throat. I remember taking myself off the hook, so to speak, and then getting down the stairs. . to Veil."