Angel of Darkness (2 page)

They made an oddly ancient tableau: a knight kneeling before his lady.

I saw Morty often at Holloway after that day. He visited the woman several times a week, always with yellow roses, always content to say not a word. I tried to search out the cause of this devotion, but I could learn nothing from his memories. He kept his mind blank, having decided it was too painful to look back, or maybe believing that he owed his lady the honor of being in the moment with her, no matter how bleak that moment might be.

Secrets. We all have them. Even an aging beat cop who has remained unmarried for his sixty-some years, his heart imprisoned behind the walls of Holloway.

Other patients, unfamiliar to me at first, came to be a part of an imaginary family I created in my mind. Their lonely wanderings across the sculpted lawns of Holloway reminded me of my own peripatetic afterlife. Like a child with a fairy-tale family patched together in his head, I had chosen a mother, a father and a daughter for my pretend family – though in life they were not related at all and, indeed, rarely noticed one another.

A funny little man named Harold Babbitt was my patriarch. He had peaked eyebrows that matched his owl-like physique, sharp eyes that glittered and a shiny point of bald head peeping above sparse hair. Harold spent his days murmuring a strange word salad, his brain exploding with electric impulses that churned out verbal waterfalls. He spoke of himself in the third person, his mind leaping from topic to topic like quicksilver: ‘Harold Babbitt is a prince among men and a man among dogs. He is a dog named Prince who knows when doves cry. He is here to fight the people who live as lions in the caves of your heart because they want to eat your soul. He is the man. He is the Harold. He is the Godfather of Soul.'

Harold was like that: ninety-nine percent nonsense, one percent brilliance. And me, with nothing better to do but follow him around each day, fell on that one percent like a bird might fall upon a breadcrumb tumbling to barren ground.

Being Harold had its dangers. At times, his benign chattering gave way to a terrifying self-violence, as if his words were lava building toward an eruption. When the explosion came, he would slam the shiny point of his head into walls, claw at the seeping blood with his hands, and then wipe it along his body as he howled for demons to take the Sun God away. The staff was ready when this happened. They would wrestle Harold to the ground and bind him in a jacket that pinned his arms to his sides. He would whimper apologies from his cocoon as they bundled him on to a stretcher and wheeled him into a room as hushed as a tomb in a lost pyramid. Its walls were padded to protect him from his madness. There, they would unstrap him from the stretcher and lead him to a corner. He'd sit, as docile as a lamb, his mutterings stuttering to a halt in the calm that settled on him in the aftermath.

I came to crave those quiet sessions with Harold in our special room. It seemed the one place in the world where my mind and my soul were still. Harold and I would take our seats, him in one corner and me in another. We would lay our heads back against the canvassed walls, listening to nothing, feeling nothing, our minds calmed by the room's artificial twilight and gently cooled air. Harold would find peace and I would find peace, too. But the respite never lasted more than a day. Soon enough, Harold was let out to roam, a soft leather helmet affixed to his head until he found a way to take it off and hide it again. After a while, the staff usually gave up trying to find it and surrendered Harold to his walking commentary. For Holloway, Harold passed as normal.

In the fairy-tale family I had constructed in my mind, Harold's wife was a patient named Olivia, whose face was wet with tears that never quite seemed to dry. I couldn't tell what the source of her sorrow was, for she would not raise the curtain on that memory in her mind. She clung resolutely to her pain, refused to acknowledge the future and did not look at the past. Whatever that memory is, she remained its prisoner, her life stalled until she can find the strength to confront it.

Sorrow had made her incandescent. She was tall and slender, with translucent skin and pale-blue eyes shaped like almonds. Her long red hair was the color of blood; it was impossible to take your eyes off it. She moved like an angel, with a slow grace made almost ritualistic by the medications she was on.

I was not the only one who noticed Olivia's beauty. Otis Redman Parker had noticed her, too. Sometimes, when I was sitting with her in Holloway's central courtyard, pretending we were friends and enjoying the fountain that she seemed to love so much, I would look up and see Parker staring at her through the fences that enclose his unit, his eyes bright and his mouth wet with desire. I hated him in those moments. He had no right to look upon her.

The final person in my imagined family was a little girl named Lily, who could not have been more than ten or eleven years old, though she, too, had been at Holloway for as long as I had visited. She was kept there by a horrifying world that cavorted in her head, a living landscape created by an unfortunate stew of chemicals and genetics at her birth. I had visited that world, seeking a way out for Lily, but she remained captive to its power. Creatures with fangs and claws and glowing eyes lurked in its darkness. Shadow figures leapt out from behind forests of twisting trees whose branches grabbed at you like hands. Strange hybrid animals with distorted limbs wandered through a post-apocalyptic countryside, sometimes stopping to turn their cartoonish faces to Lily. It was one of those creatures, a winged cat with saucer eyes and a toothy smile, who had ordered her to light a cigarette and burn her little brother up and down his arms, an act that landed her in Holloway. I know this because the cat repeated this command to her so often that the memory haunted her daily.

Lily knows what she is.

Lily was visited every week by bewildered parents unable to comprehend how it was that life handed them a child mired in such an early madness. They, like the staff, knew that Lily did not belong among adults, but the other young patients at Holloway were not safe when Lily was around, not with that wide-eyed cat in her head whispering its dark commands. So it was that the patients closest to her age stayed in a special juvenile ward in the short-term unit, but Lily was doomed to live among the lost.

I did not judge Lily or the others. I loved each of these lost beings in their own way and saw a terrible beauty in their incoherence. The world had forgotten them, but I would not do the same. I walked beside them, wishing them a peace unlikely to come.

And so it was that, on a bleak day in March whipped by high winds and cold drizzle, my two lives collided, my living and my dead, and my son Michael, age fourteen, appeared among the outcasts of Holloway, his mind as troubled as theirs.

THREE

A
t first, I thought time had inverted. That I had been transported back to my own miserable teenage years and was staring at my own miserable self. That's how much Michael had come to look like me. Gone was the chubby boy with rounded features who sat silently at my funeral, his arm draped around his mother's shoulders as a sign of his determination to be a man. He now stood nearly as tall as I had been, though he was far stockier.

He had my dark hair and eyes, and certainly he had my nose, but his mouth was one hundred percent Connie. And, like his mother's, it did not look as if it had smiled in a long time. I discovered him in the short-term unit, pacing Holloway's juvenile ward, measuring the distance between the common room and his sleeping quarters.

He had his hands thrust deep in the pockets of his jeans and his hair hung in greasy strands. His skin had become mired in a no-man's land between uneven stubble and acne. Misery surrounded him in a cloud. It was a gloom that felt all too familiar to me: Michael was deep in the trough, he had descended as I had often descended, and was now chin high in crippling depression.
Had my death done this to him?

I'd have given anything to take on my son's sorrow. But all I could do was walk by his side, unseen and unfelt. What had happened to change Michael so? Nine months ago, faced with the truth that I was no longer part of his life, I had stopped torturing myself by standing outside our old home, staring in at a world where I had been forgotten. I had forced myself to find other families to watch. I had made myself move on.

Which meant I had not been there for him during whatever crisis had landed Michael here, among the lost souls of Holloway.

Was he becoming another version of me?

Michael ignored the nurses who watched him, assessing his behavior, trying to put a label on his troubles. He paused in the common-room doorway but gave no notice of the other young patients inside. They were gathered around a television set to watch a movie about teenage vampires. He did not notice, as I did, that the pale complexions and vacant eyes of his fellow patients were far more frightening than the stylish vampires of the movie. Michael was preoccupied and waiting for someone. His eyes kept focusing on the door at the far end of the hall before he looked quickly away, as if he were ashamed of his need for company.

He was not waiting for his mother. When Connie came through the door a few moments later, Michael slumped in disappointment. He had been hoping for someone else.

Connie exuded motherly optimism as she hugged him, but I could feel the cracks of fear spreading through her body like fissures. She was determined that Michael not sense the terror that vibrated in her like piano wire. I understood her fear. She had seen this all before. She had seen it in me. And she had learned that love alone was not enough. She knew that the darkness sometimes won.

‘I brought you tee shirts,' she said. ‘And some books, in case you feel like reading?'

‘Why do I have to be here?' Michael asked sullenly, taking the bag she offered but refusing to meet her eyes.

‘It's just for a few days. Just to give you a break.'

‘I didn't wreck the car on purpose,' he protested too loudly. His voice attracted the attention of the other patients. They watched Michael and his mother warily. When it came to the war between parent and child, they knew where their loyalties lay.

‘Sometimes we do things without realizing why,' Connie explained in a whisper. ‘It's just getting worse, Michael, it's just getting worse.' Her voice cracked and it shocked me. This was not the steel-nerved Connie I had known. Had I taken all of her strength? Left her mired in fear of the worst?

‘This place is a hellhole,' he said. ‘It's not safe. Crazy people attack you all the time. The other kids told me. They have serial killers and shit locked up right next door.'

Connie's patience was being tested. ‘Michael, that's just stupid teenage rumors and don't you swear. You're perfectly safe here. Cal told me and he ought to know.'

‘But end-of-grade tests are coming up,' Michael protested, trying another tack. ‘You're guaranteeing that I'm going to fail.'

‘It'll be OK,' she assured him, but he did not believe her. She was his mother. She had to love him. How could she possibly understand that she was the only one who did – or ever would?

This was my fault. How many times could I have stepped in when I was alive to be a real father, providing the guidance that might have kept it from coming to this?

‘He's not coming back,' Connie told him gently. ‘He's dead, Michael. I can't bring him back. He's never coming back to us and you have to accept it. Your life is just beginning. Don't sacrifice it to this.'

‘You don't understand,' Michael insisted. He fled to his room, leaving Connie standing in the hall. I wanted to follow him, but Connie's boyfriend, the man who had taken my place in my family, entered the ward, bringing an air of efficiency with him. He was tall and graying, dressed in a nice suit, full of confidence and comfortable in this setting. The staff knew him, I saw, and they liked him, judging by their smiles.

Did he work here at Holloway? Had he been the one to convince Connie to send Michael here? Why had I not seen him here at Holloway before?

Cal. That was his name. I remembered it now. Cal: sturdy and competent and kind. He was everything I had never been.

Connie buried her head in his comforting arms. ‘I can't do anything right.'

‘You don't have to do anything at all,' he told her quietly. ‘You've done everything that you can do. Let the people here do their jobs. They'll give you Michael back.'

‘He hates me,' Connie whispered.

‘He hates himself,' the man explained and I had to admit it – his voice was thick with genuine concern. He cared for them both. Who was I to begrudge him his ability to be the man I had never been?

‘Where's Sean?' Connie asked him. Sean was my youngest. He was sunny and full of himself, as different from his brother as, well, as life from death.

‘I dropped him off at Matt's house. His mother said he could stay as long as he needs to.'

This small kindness seemed to break her. Connie began to cry. ‘I don't know what I'd do without you,' she said. ‘Without you and everyone else who wants to help. I don't know what to do. I can't do this alone.'

‘Just take a deep breath. You don't have to do this alone. It's going to be OK.'

‘Cal?' A small woman emerged from a room near the nurse's station. She was in her mid-forties, with light-brown hair and a straightforward manner. I knew her. She was a therapist who sometimes advised the department on the psychological make-up of suspects.

‘Miranda.' Cal shook her hand and then gestured toward my wife. ‘This is my fiancée, Connie Fahey.'

I heard the words like a kick in the gut. Game, set, match.
Replaced.

‘How do you do?' Miranda asked. ‘Wait, don't answer that. We'll get into that later.'

Connie tried to smile at the joke, but her mouth trembled with the effort.

‘I know you're anxious to hear an opinion soon,' Miranda said. ‘I'd like to talk to Michael alone first and then we can chat. Would that be OK?'