Benighted (17 page)

FOURTEEN

I
mutter in my sleep, slap the blankets, and in the end I sit up in the dark. Paul lies beside me. After a while he reaches out and drapes his arm over my leg. Finding me upright wakes him. It isn’t until he takes hold of my hand that I realize he’s been fingering the scar on my foot.

He looks for a moment, then says, “How did you get that?”

“I was twenty-five. A caged juvenile with a small head stuck his face through the bars.” I shake my hair out of my face. “I was lucky compared to Marty. It doesn’t show when I’m dressed.”

He lies quiet. Then his hand moves to the slash on my arm. “What about that?” He speaks softly.

I don’t move. “When I was eighteen, my second catch. It was a hot night and I didn’t fasten my sleeve properly. I’d collared a woman, and she ran at me and drove the pole back in my hands. She got up close. And she did that to me before my trainer could stop her.”

His fingers settle into the hollow in my hip, and I freeze. “How did you get that?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.” I roll over and put my arms up around my face.

Paul sits up, leans against the wall. “Lola?” His tone is cautious. My hands clench against whatever he’s about to ask me. “What does a lune look like?”

“Oh no.” I sit up and pull a blanket around myself. “No, you don’t get to ask me the questions.”

“What do you mean?” He sits very still.

“You don’t get to hear what I did in the creches. You don’t get to hear if tenderfoot skin has more erogenous zones. You don’t get to hear if I like rough sex because shiftless flesh needs a good workout. If we’re trained to get off on pain. You don’t ask me those things!”

“Hey! Calm down.” Paul’s voice cuts across me. There’s an edge to it I haven’t heard before. “Don’t get paranoid on me. Look, people are stupid. I’m not. It’s not fair, Lola. I asked you something else. It’s not fair to go off on me just because other people are stupider than me.” The edge has gone; he sounds almost helpless.

I slide off the bed and sit on the floor, wrapped in a blanket, and bury my head in the covers. There’s a long silence.

Paul lies back down. He can stare at the wall forever, absorbed as a child, without even wondering if he should be bored.

“They’re big,” I say. The voice I hear is hoarse and tentative, I hardly recognize it as my own. “They come up to your chest, just standing there. They have huge heads, big as watermelons.” I look up. “Why are you asking? You must know.”

There are three feet between us. My room is on the seventh floor, many feet above the ground. We’re sitting over a canyon. “I’ve seen pictures,” Paul says. “And I remember. But it’s different.”

“You remember?”

“Some. I don’t know. It’s different.”

He’ll see if I close my eyes. The sheets are forest green, and I stare down at them. “How?”

Paul sighs, rumples his hair. “It’s hard to describe. I’d say atavistic, I guess, but it’s a long word and long academic words are no good for describing it. But I don’t think you ever really understand it. Not this way, anyway.” He gestures, two hands, two feet, upright spine. “It’d be like interpreting dreams. You can say this means that, you can do logic, but you aren’t—analytical in the state of mind you’re trying to analyze. It doesn’t work very well.”

“Their eyes are green,” I say. I can’t answer what he’s said. “Not normally; they’re gray with a round black pupil. But you know how if you take a picture of someone you get red-eye, the retina reflects back pink. Different receptors come forward in a lune’s eye. If you catch one in the headlights, their eyes flash green.”

“When you change states—you stop understanding what’s happening to you. The pain gets harder to deal with the further you go. But once it’s over, the pain and the analysis—they don’t matter. You don’t need to understand it.”

“It’s the size of them. The weight. And they’re so fast.”

“The pictures I’ve seen—” Paul turns his head and looks at me. “They looked beautiful.”

“Anyone who had their hands free to work a camera was catching the lune in a tranquil moment. You can’t see beauty when it’s poised above your throat.”

“Isn’t that just—I don’t know—your feelings rather than what you see?”

My feelings. “Eye of the beholder.” He says nothing. “I can’t help it, Paul. Yes, they’re graceful. That means they aim well when they leap at you. Yes, they’re—they’re beautifully proportioned. So they run fast, and they run toward you. A long smooth muzzle crackles up when it snarls, and as far as gray and white fur goes—well, I just know that if we tried to bite each other, I’d come off worst.”

“So you’re afraid?”

“Yes.” I look at him, and he’s watching me. “I’m afraid. I see them day to day and I know I can match them. But at night—there’s nothing I can do. Imagine it. Imagine facing someone who can tear you apart if they want to, who can’t understand why they shouldn’t. Who doesn’t have it in them, who’s flat-out
lost
how to understand why they shouldn’t. And often, they aren’t sorry the next day.”

“That’s not so.” Paul shakes his head, more to himself than to me. “That can’t be so.”

“I’ve seen what I’ve seen, Paul.”

He sighs. I feel rather than see him take a quick glance at me, and then he speaks again. “I’m lyco, too. It’s what I am. And I can’t—wish I wasn’t. You’re right in a way. I can’t wish I never luned. I don’t.”

A field stretches between us in the few inches across the bed, a winter field. Spiders weave their traps across the ground like hammocks, frost grains the grass blades, the air is cold and empty. A footfall, and the ice will crush and snap.

“I’m scared of lunes, Paul.” I close my eyes. This is weakness. I’m laying myself open and handing him a knife.

“I don’t want anything to hurt you,” he says.

I feel my eyes sting. The rest of my body is numb, chilled, lost in a winter field.

“I don’t wish I didn’t lune. If I could give it up, I wouldn’t. But I don’t want anything to hurt you.”

“Animals run away from them,” I say. “Every animal. They’re all afraid.”

“Wild animals run from people,” he says. “And it’s natural to avoid a predator.”

“A predator?” My voice is very small.

“It’s worth it, angel. It breaks your mind open. You can’t be so sure of things anymore.”

“The lycos I meet are sure. They know God is for them and the world is theirs and the cripples are—are—” My words twist in my throat.

“You’ve seen things I’ll never see, Lola.” His hand slides up my back and rests at the base of my skull.

“You’ve seen pictures of them.” My voice is quiet. “It isn’t worth it.”

Paul turns over, strokes my head. “If you could, would you be lyco?”

His hand is on my nape, and I laugh. “What, be one of those bastards? Not in a million years.”

We sleep again. He lies with his arm over my waist. I’m warm and comfortable at midnight when the phone rings.

Paul gets to it first. “Hello?” he says, picking up the phone and setting it down on the bed. “It’s for you, Lola. Some woman called Bride?”

I moan, and take the receiver in a limp hand. “You’ve got the wrong number, Bride. You don’t know anyone who’d answer the phone at this hour.”

“Who was that?” Bride’s question is light, friendly, but there’s tension in her tone.

Well, she had to find out sometime. This is not how I wanted to tell her. “That,” I say, rubbing my eyes, “was Paul. He’s a nice young government employee who’s been taking me out to dinner lately.” “Government employee” could mean DORLA. I don’t feel like handling her interest that I’m going out with a lyco, not right now.

I brace myself for a tirade, or possibly jubilant triumph that for once I wasn’t sleeping alone. Instead there’s a silence, and it’s then that I hear there’s other voices than Bride’s on the line, people are shouting and hustling in the background.

“Bride? What’s wrong?”

“Listen, love, you’d better prepare yourself. Are you sitting down?”

I’m awake. “No, I’m lying in bed. Bride, tell me, what’s happened?”

“It’s about Darryl Seligmann,” she says.

I’m sitting up, holding on to Paul’s arm. “What? What’s happened?”

“It happened this afternoon, pet. He’d been quiet for days. Nobody was watching him.”

“Bride, tell me. Don’t hedge, I need to know now.”

I hear her swallow, and then she tells me. “He bit his wrist when no one was looking. By the time someone checked on him, he’d lost so much blood that we had to take him to a hospital. They stitched him up and gave him a quick transfusion. He was due to be sent back this evening. But when we went to escort him, he was gone.”

“Gone.” My voice echoes in the cramped room.

“He’s escaped, love. Sometime this afternoon, someone took their eyes off him, and he just stood up and walked out of there.”

FIFTEEN

I
’m here. It’s dark and cold outside, the gutters are wet and the air is full of mist, there are globes shining around the streetlamps, soft fat spheres with rainbow spectrums at their edges. I’m swathed in a thick coat, my hands tucked away into gloves, and as I stride into the hospital parking lot the group around the entrance is silhouetted against the bright plastic light coming through the door. Bride sees me, detaches herself from the others and trots across to take my arm.

“He’s been gone a couple of hours,” she pants before I can greet her. “He didn’t take a car, but no one saw him. He could be anywhere by now.”

The city has buses and wide streets. In two hours, he could have crossed it.

“Why did you release him?” I say. “Now everyone will know where he’s been these past two weeks.” Because he didn’t get a phone call, we alerted no next-of-kin, the police were not informed. As far as the world is concerned, Darryl Seligmann just vanished.

And now he’s back.

“We couldn’t fix him up on our own.” I’ve joined the people at the door by now; this comes from Lydia Harlan, one of our medics. About forty with peachstone-brown skin, hair braided into long plaits that she wears in a swinging ponytail, plump and comely with soft, capable hands, Lydia knows as much doctoring as anyone can learn in two years’ training and twenty years’ practice. Almost every time I see her, she has a medical journal in her hand. “He did it cleverly. We gave him a mattress when we moved him to block C, he was curled up with his back to us. He ruined the mattress.”

“Who found him?”

“I did.” I turn at the sound of the hoarse, crumpled voice.

“Nick.” Nick Jarrold. Johnny’s partner, the man who first had custody of Seligmann. “Why were you down there?”

“Taking him food,” says Nick.

That’s menial work. It’s the injured, the restricted-pay workers who do such jobs. If Nick was doing it, we’re either understaffed even beyond what I thought, or he’s getting sicker.

“I was doing the rounds,” he husks. “Bastard knew what he was doing. Took me about five minutes, and all the time he just lay there. Then he turned around when I was about halfway through. He timed it.”

“He turned around?”

“Yeah. Pushed himself to his feet, wobbled on over to the bars, and held out his wrist.” Nick looks at me out of round eyes set in a graying, haggard face, and I see it. The swaying man, arm and hand and side caked and soaked and sticky with blood. “He still had blood on his mouth,” Nick says. “He was smiling.”

“Didn’t you—Couldn’t you smell the blood?” I ask a question fast to close the smeared, smiling face out of my mind.

Nick shrugs his shoulders. “No, I didn’t.” Ash rustles in his voice, and I silence myself. Nick doesn’t smell anything.

“Who’s talked to security?” I huddle into the doorway and look around. Bride, the investigator on Seligmann’s case; Nick, the police liaison officer; Lydia, the medic. And me.

“They’re not saying anything.” Nick coughs. “Shall we go inside?” The four of us push through the door and hang together as we stand in the corridor. St. Veronica’s, the city hospital. Leo’s birthplace, Marty’s ward, rooms and rooms full of crisis and change.

I lower my voice. “Why not? Weren’t they supposed to be watching him?” We’re heading toward the ward now, the scene of the crime, the sterile white room Seligmann got up and left.

“They say he walked out when they were changing shift.”

“Christ.” We walk on in silence, our steps creaking on the shiny linoleum.

We all know what this is. This is a dying man hustled in by DORLA out of nowhere, a pack of freaks with blood on their fists showing up with a real man and handing him over. There will have been bruises on Seligmann when we brought him in, sprains, damage. The doctors received a man who bit into the pale flesh of his wrist with loosened teeth.

Seligmann is a fearsome man. They won’t have seen that. They wouldn’t have smuggled him out in the laundry; no one will have risked their career for him. But they didn’t watch him. Not closely. For them, there was nothing in him to fear.

This is a busy place. As we pass through the wards, the occupied medics and the sick, quiet citizens, I see a face I recognize. There’s no help to be had, but I have to try.

“Dr. Parkinson,” I hail him.

He stops, turns a civil face my way.

“Lola May Galley,” I say before he can once again not recognize this cheaply dressed, wan woman who’s claiming a moment of his expensive time. “I’m investigating the disappearance of Darryl Seligmann. He escaped from your hospital earlier this evening.”

“Ah.” His sleek skin doesn’t flush. “Good evening, Miss Galley. How’s your sister?”

“As you’d expect,” I say. “Dr. Parkinson, we’re looking into how he managed to escape, what time, where he’s likely to have gone.”

“Hadn’t you better talk to security?” He gives a slow, measured glance at the people surrounding me. I put my hand back, just a little, held out at hip level; he doesn’t notice until they all step out of his line of vision.

“We have. It’s just—hard to understand, Dr. Parkinson.” I smile, I don’t threaten, I hide my smooth palms by my sides. “I’d always thought this was a well-ordered hospital.”

The man smiles right back at me. “Well, I would have said so. But then, I’m on the medical side.” His genial chuckle echoes back off the synthetic walls. “If you asked me how security was run, I’m afraid I couldn’t tell you much.”

“You aren’t acquainted with any of the security staff, then? Not even by name, or by sight?”

He backs down without losing grace. “I wouldn’t say that. But personal acquaintance is one thing. All I meant was that the mechanics of their business, I leave in their capable hands. My attention is on my patients.”

I don’t take him up on “capable.” It’s too tired a shot. “Has this happened before?”

“Not to my knowledge.” He lowers his head to me, careful as an elephant. “As I’ve said, I have little do with security. But I think I’d remember a serious breach. I think we may have had occasional trouble containing a mental patient now and again, but nothing I’d call serious. The staff have always struck me as capable men.” He smiles at me, bows down over folded hands as if to emphasize the difference in our height. “Now if you’ll excuse me, Miss Galley, I have patients to see.”

I hold out my hand so he has to shake it, and his calluses rub smooth as polish over my bare tender skin. “Thank you for your help, Doctor,” I say, and turn away so he doesn’t have to see my face.

The room Seligmann left has moldings around the ceiling, a plaster rose in the center. My eye jumps, once, at the sight of it. It’s just like every other hospital room. There’s nothing in here to explain why the capable men of this institution neglected all our warnings and let a wild, bloody man take a short, untroubled walk out to the streets and freedom.