Halloween III - Season of the Witch (6 page)

A woman’s voice? It broke like a small child’s but immediately strove to contain itself.

“Ma’am, I wouldn’t just yet.” That was the sheriff, clearing his throat and shifting again with the squeak of leather.

“No. Let’s—let’s get it over with.”

Her voice was incredibly frightened—close to terror, in fact—and incredibly brave at the same time. Challis had to turn around.

She was slight and dark, protected by stylish clothes and hastily-applied makeup and even, Challis noted wonderingly, nail polish. Her hair was pinned back behind her ears, the dark curls tightening in the early-morning dampness and threatening to tumble loose at any moment. She held herself perfectly still.

The sheriff set his jaw and lifted the sheet. Challis saw his knuckles go white as he gripped the shroud.

Her eyes were enormous and black, opened wide enough to take it all in, the horror of it, at one glance.

“Yes,” she said simply. “It’s my father.”

Something wild moved across her face, disrupting her features in a series of tics. She averted her face briefly, and then her face was calm again. Only the muscles of her mouth moved.

“Who did this?”

The sheriff did not answer.

The coroner sighed and returned to packing his tools.

Like him, Challis had been through it more times than he could count. But this time was different. This time he was unable to offer his personal reassurance that the deceased had not suffered needlessly, had received the best care that medical science could provide. He could not find the courage to say anything to her. He had failed. The system, his system, had failed. He was afraid for the hospital, for those in it, for himself. He could not live with the feeling. Anger welled up within him.

“Some crazy man,” the sheriff explained, though that was no explanation at all. “Killed himself in the parking lot right after. Drugs, probably. Miss Grimbridge—”

“Is that it? My father’s dead because some drug freak was amusing himself?”

An embarrassed deputy handed her a cup of water.

“The whole thing,” said the sheriff, lowering his eyes, “is under investigation.”

“I’ll bet! I’ll just bet it is!” Water splashed over her fingers. Her nails dug into the paper cup, about to crush it.

The sheriff drew himself up defensively.

“Miss Grimbridge, you’ve had a hard night and you’ve come a long way. Nobody’s sorrier than I am about what you’ve had to come here for. Why don’t you get some rest? When you feel better, I’ll have some questions for you. And maybe some more answers.”

Even Challis was unconvinced.

The sheriff patted her shoulder gently, as though he thought her small bones might shatter under the impact.

That’s great, thought Challis. With that and a dollar she can get a cup of coffee.

He could not bring himself to speak.

She shrugged off the sheriff’s hand. Her shoulders continued to slump under a great weight when the hand was gone. At last her eyes settled on the doctor. They did not question and they did not accuse. They were cold as black marbles and without expectation.

Say something, thought Challis. Scream, throw things, point your finger in my face. Anything would be easier than indifference. Let me defend myself. Grant me that grace.

I’m a professional. My job is to save lives. We protect people here. We do not expose them to unnecessary risks. And we do our job well.

We did.

Until last night.

“All right, boys,” said the sheriff, hitching up his belt. “Let’s clear out.”

Ellie Grimbridge’s eyes swept once more around the room but did not tarry. There was nothing here of interest, nothing of any use to her now. It was the parting glance of someone who is about to move out of an empty apartment. Forever.

She left, and they all breathed again.

The stretcher was wheeled out, and one by one they followed.

All except Challis.

When the police were gone, he did the same things they had done.

He retraced their footsteps, noting the positions of the bed and table and every other object in the room, stopping always at the bloodstained curtains. There was no other evidence that the man in gray had entered this room. Fingerprints? Negative. Only those of the staff. And his own.

There were not even signs of a struggle.

The killer—the professional, the Kamikaze assassin, whoever he was—had been as neat as his suit, machinelike in efficiency.

Unlike some of us, thought Challis, who are only human.

He heard an electric floor polisher whirring in the corridor. Come in, he thought. Why not? Make everything clean again. Make it so that no one will ever guess what went on here.

But I will know. I will always know. The responsibility was mine—he was my patient—but I gave up and tried to sleep it off. I tried to let go of everything last night.

But it wouldn’t go away.

He waited as sounds of the hospital’s normal routine began again beyond the walls of the room. Bells chimed, breakfast carts rolled past the door, rubber soles screaked on clean tiles, a maintenance crew clanked and tapped to restore full power to the facility. Cars and an ambulance came and went, a force of trucks roared past on the road with air brakes wheezing through the intersection. Morning returned, inside and outside. And still he waited.

When he had memorized every detail of the room, when he had recorded every surface and angle, every object from corner to corner to satisfy himself that nothing,
nothing
was out of the ordinary—nothing except the blood—only then did he leave the room.

He did not know where to go next.

Think,
he told himself,
think!

There must be an answer. Somewhere. There must be . . .

He opened the door.

He passed offices, the staff lounge. The warm aroma of coffee was only slightly reassuring. Crisp uniforms and scrubbed faces hurried past with charts and trays and equipment; stethoscopes dangled from necks like awakening serpents. Wordlessly he acknowledged a nurse with lipstick on her teeth and moved on.

At the main desk the bloodshot eyes of phone lines blinked restlessly. A manila folder with a message clipped to it was waiting in his box.

Not yet, he told himself, and headed for his office.

But before he could get there, at the junction to the service elevator and the fire door, he spotted a young woman. She was not wearing a uniform. She was alone with herself in the corridor.

She was braced against the wall, her body all angles and her face buried in her hands. Her hair had come undone and black curls spilled through her fingers as she held her shaking head. She was partially concealed behind the water cooler, as if she had gone that far and could go no farther and so had taken refuge there.

It was Grimbridge’s daughter.

As he approached he heard her sobbing. Her teeth were clenched but she could not hold the sound in.

He knew that she would not want anyone to see her like that.

He wanted to help her. But he did not know where to begin.

The third time he saw Ellie Grimbridge was at her father’s funeral.

He was supposed to meet Linda at the bank to cosign their income tax refund check from last year. He phoned the house and told her he was on call but that he would meet her on his lunch break the following day. She breathed into the phone and accused him of forgetting the children’s food allowance for the week. Then she informed him that her car was not running satisfactorily. He did not argue. When she had calmed down she announced that without four new tires she would not be able to drive the kids to school. He told her to put the tires on his credit card and promised to put the missing check in the mail that afternoon. He wrote out the check while they were talking. He told her that. Before he could say anything else, she hung up.

The service was at Dry Lawn Acres. It occurred to him to send flowers. There were plenty already there. It was a simple ceremony with no eulogy and only a few families but lots of young children in attendance. Ellie Grimbridge came alone. He saw her get out of her car and walk up the hill unassisted. She was not wearing black, but somehow that seemed all right.

From the other side of the plot, a distance of no more than twenty feet, her features were so faint they almost disappeared like carbon-paper tracings under the veil. Her tiny, perfect mouth did not move, not even to thank those few who pressed her hand with condolences. She could only nod to them.

No one wept, not even Ellie. He had the impression that there were no other close relatives in attendance. Once he caught her looking at him with those oversized eyes, but she made no attempt to speak.

I know what you’re thinking, he thought. I don’t know what I’m doing here, either.

They walked back to their own cars and drove away without a word.

The day after the funeral he had bourbon for breakfast.

The bar was dank, the air stale, the glasses not yet washed and reracked from the night before. Challis had been there when the bar closed, and now he was opening it. Charlie the bartender never failed. He kept regular hours, too.

A Saturday morning cartoon show was in progress on the TV set above the mirror. Two-dimensional animals with powers no animal on earth has ever needed were battling it out in a nonviolent war, accompanied by the same kind of synthesized sound effects Challis had heard from the electronic arcade game in the corner the night before. Man against machine, he thought. That’s the new battleground.

Onscreen, cutout characters indistinguishable one from another jerked across artificial landscapes as devoid of life as the inside of an autoclave. Chartreuse invaders attacking a dog wearing a space helmet, for instance; that sort of thing.

“That’s great,” said Challis into his drink.

“What is?” asked Charlie the bartender. He sauntered over, drying a glass.

“My kids are probably watching this right now.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. What kind of a warped idea of life are they going to get from shit like that?”

“Beats the news,” said Charlie. “Wars, murders . . .”

“Does it, Charlie?”

Charlie propped his beer belly on the stainless steel sink and rewashed the glass. There was lipstick on the rim.

“Pour me another one.”

“Help yourself.”

“That’s not real life.”

“Right,” said Charlie. “My niece’s kid, he sees the Four O’clock News, the Six O’Clock News, the Ten O’Clock News, every kind of news there is. I’m waitin’ for him to blow some kid away on the playground one of these days.”

“Unh-uh,” said Challis, shaking his head.

“I tell her not to let him watch all that crap, but you can’t protect ’em. It’s in the movies now, all over the TV—”

“No. I don’t think so. Telling the truth isn’t the same thing as advocacy.”

“What?”

“Kids understand the difference.”

“I’m not so sure about that.”

“Well, I am. Did real life, wars, all that stuff we went through turn you and me into maniacs, Charlie?”

“Well . . .”

“I say
this
is what’s dangerous. Animals in space, Big Bird, Scrubbing Bubbles fighting the Dirt Monster—nobody gets hurt no matter what.”

“So?”

“We’re afraid to let them grow up. At least that’s the way it seems to me. What do you think’s going to happen the first time somebody takes a swing, tries to mug ’em in the bathroom at Chuck E. Cheese’s? Their Super Friends with Super Powers won’t be enough. And they’ll get their little asses kicked around the block. Or worse.”

Challis ran out of breath. He saw his own face reflected in the bourbon. It was bent out of shape, almost unrecognizable.

“I think I see what you mean,” said Charlie. He didn’t, but that was all right, too.

Challis filtered another shot of bourbon through his teeth.

“Let ’em see what’s really there. Otherwise they won’t know until it’s too late. They think the world is a game. It isn’t. Or if it is, somebody’s been keeping the rules a secret for a hell of a long time.”

“Can’t argue with you there, pardner,” said Charlie.

I’d tell my Willie about it, the danger, thought Challis. If I ever got to see him. Who knows what his mother is filling his head with? Money that arrives in the mailbox every week no matter what, food that no one has to earn, presents that come king-sized whether you deserve them or not.

Linda’s living in a dream world, he thought, the same as they are. How can I blame them for being spoiled? I can’t. Not me.

He squinted up at the TV without hope. An animated leprechaun was skipping through clover, singing the virtues of sugar for breakfast that was sold in the shape of good-luck charms. Challis winced.

“Hey, Charlie. How about another channel?”

Nobody was watching it. There was nobody else in the place. Charlie shrugged and flipped the selector.

Channel 4. A network preview faded in.

A long-legged girl with good bones and a lingering tomboy disposition was crossing a tree-lined street. It looked very much like Sierra Mesa; in fact it might have been filmed here, thought Challis. Except for the quick flash of a palm tree on the horizon, it could be the Midwest. Illinois, say. Bradbury country, if he remembered his high-school English. A repetitious but properly nerve-wracking piano melody tinkled on the soundtrack.

“HALLOWEEN!”
intoned a hyperstimulated announcer. “THE SPECIAL FEATURE ON OUR VERY SPECIAL HALLOWEEN NIGHT HORRORTHON!”

The preview cut to another shot of the long-legged girl, now flanked by two of her friends, walking home from school in a typical middle-class neighborhood.

“. . . Totally insane!”
prattled the foxy-looking girl on the left.
“We have three new cheers to learn in the morning, the game in the afternoon, I get my hair done at five, and the dance is at eight. I’ll be totally wiped out!”

Damn totally straight, thought Challis, sipping slowly.

The girl on the right made a derisive comment. Dark, New York, sarcastic passing for witty. A real ballbreaker. Hmm, he thought. I know the type well. Reminds me a little bit of old Linda. I’ll bet that’s what she was like at that age. Always on hand with the right remark to shoot down anybody in sight.