Projection (15 page)

"We're in the ventricle of the heart," Lucas beamed.  "The boiler room of the ship.  Everything we need to beat Satan back is right here.  I even found a little tool that should help with any messy blood vessels we encounter on our way through the cerebral cortex."  He pointed at a transistor-radio-sized plastic and chrome device in the center cabinet.  It was an electric cautery used to singe small arteries and capillaries.

As I gazed up at the cabinet I realized we were truly alone.  No one could reach us from the unit.  And I knew that even in my weakened state I could overpower Lucas.  I could kill him.  I glanced at the corner of the steel counter.  Then I looked at him and squinted as I pictured slamming his face into it, battering his eyes to mush, caving in his skull.  The images were crystal clear to every one of my senses.  I could feel his hair in my fist, his head bouncing back off the metal.  I could hear the sounds of flesh and bone giving way.  I could smell the last of his bodily fluids spilling out of his corpse.  Everything I was experiencing was intensely pleasurable to me.  I felt exhilarated.  I leaned ever so slightly toward Lucas, as if drawn toward my own murderousness, into my own shadow.

He cocked his head as he looked back at me.  "If you're thinking of doing me harm, keep in mind the men out there would tear you and the other hostages limb from limb without me."

I struggled to keep myself in check.  I believed what Lucas said was true, even if I didn't fully understand why.  There were men much larger than he, after all, on the unit.  They could try to torture him into telling them the combination to the medication room.  They could steal doses of methadone that he instructed them to hand out to the other patients.  They could try to escape.  Was it truly the mystique of the physician that gave Lucas his authority?  Did these extraordinarily dangerous men, like men everywhere, fear autonomy and yearn to be led?

"Take me out of the equation, and they'll explode," Lucas went on.  "I'm the one who gave them their freedom.  I'm the one who diagnosed their possession.  I'm the only one who can win their souls from Satan.  I'm..."

Perhaps the biggest reason the patients followed him came to me as he ranted.  Beyond doling out the drugs that quieted the turmoil in their minds, that numbed their consciences, Lucas dispensed a kind of absolution.  By asserting that their common enemy was the devil, he allowed them to believe they had no control over their minds and behavior and, therefore, no responsibility for what they thought or what they did.  They had abandoned their free will to him and were free not to look at themselves, not to feel their own pain, not to think about how their lives had turned to darkness.  By conjuring the specter of Satan, Lucas had created a collective delusion more powerful — and more liberating from reality — than any individual's psychosis.

"Do you understand now the weight on my shoulders?" Lucas demanded.  "Do you see how this war depends on me?"  He reached out and pulled me flush to him.  He was drenched with sweat.  "Do you?"

"I understand."

He looked fiercely into my eyes.

I kept myself from pulling away.  "I understand," I repeated quietly.

He seemed satisfied he had gotten through to me.  He backed off, took a moment to compose himself, then reached into one of the cabinets.  He took down an oversized brown glass prescription bottle.  A white label identified the substance as methadone.  He twisted off the cap, poured what looked like a five-milligram dose of the orange liquid into a paper cup and downed it.  He winked at me.  "I'll trust you not to report me to the Drug Enforcement Administration.  I wouldn't want to lose my medical license."  He poured another, bigger dose into the cup and handed it to me.  "
Salud
."

I swallowed it in one gulp.  "Where's the cocaine?" I asked.

"Not to worry."  He reached into the cabinet again and picked up a much smaller clear glass vial with a rubber top — the way cocaine in solution is dispensed.  The liquid is used to shrink inflamed nasal passages in case of sinusitis or to anesthetize wounds before minor surgical procedures.  He held it out to me.

Even in my methadone-induced haze I could imagine the cocaine high.  I hadn't touched the stuff for six months, but I had never stopped craving it.

"Go ahead," Lucas said.

I knew taking the vial from him could rocket me down the slippery slope of drug dependency.  But the combination of seeing too much terror and swallowing too much methadone had left me in a state that was too dangerous to let alone — too dangerous for me and for everyone else on the unit.  I had killed one man, there was no denying that.  I could easily kill again.  I took the vial from Lucas.  I peeled off the rubber cap and poured a teaspoon or so onto my tongue.  It went numb.  My anxiety started to melt away.  I closed my eyes, took a deep breath.

"The wonders of chemistry," Lucas chuckled.  "Look at you.  You're becoming a new man before my eyes."

I forced myself to laugh with him, despite my thoughts.  If I was becoming a new man, I wondered, what sort of man?  I kept smiling even as I thought of what I had done to Bishop, what a large part of me wanted to do to Lucas.  I poured another teaspoon of the cocaine between my lower lip and gums, then rubbed a bit into the laceration on my cheek.  My jaw, mouth and throat lost all sensation.  My level of alertness began to rise.

Lucas took another swig of methadone directly from the bottle.

For the moment, Lucas was treating me like a drug buddy.  I hoped he might give up some information about the takeover of the unit.  "How can Kaminsky, Zweig and the rest of the patients out there be dependent on methadone already?" I asked.  "How were they getting it before yesterday?"

An impish delight showed on his face.  "I shouldn't say."  He nibbled his lip and scratched the sutures in his stump, apparently deciding whether to let me in on the secret.

I waited.

"Nurse Vawn.  Carla Vawn."

"Which nurse is that?  What do you mean?"

"The poor thing at the nursing station.  The one infested in the womb.  I had her convinced I was detoxing off prescribed methadone, that I had been part of the Impaired Physician's Program on the outside — an addict in recovery.  Just like you.  My inspiration."  He winked.  "I made her see how I was being mistreated by the others on the staff.  I told her I could sense she was brighter, kinder, more caring.  Special.  That's all she needed to hear.  She's from a big family, lost in the crowd, as it were.  Father and mother both bottom-dwelling drunks.  She started dosing me up cautiously, just to take away the cramps I cried to her about, but she was good enough to smuggle more and more into my room.  To calm my nerves.  To make me stop shaking."  He paused.  "I distributed it to the others in need."

I had to speak through my revulsion at the reminder of Lucas’ uncanny ability to charm, manipulate and ultimately help destroy fragile and sick women — including Kathy.  To have fallen for a psychotic patient like Lucas, Vawn had to suffer sever psychological problems herself.  "Why did she do as you asked?"

"The best reason of all."  She's in love with me.  On her night shifts, she gave me some of the best head of my life.  She even smuggled the knives in here, helped me stash them under my bed.  I believe she could see, at some level, that her coworkers weren't up to the challenge of engaging Satan in the final battle.  It took a surgeon to show them the way."  He took a deep breath.  "I dare say I've fallen for her just as hard as she has for me.  I'm a human being like anyone else, Frank.  I haven't found many places to lay my head."

"Then why would you want to kill her?"  An awful thought crossed my mind.  "Is her child yours?"

"Kill her?"  His face lost every hint of amiability.  "Can't you see the truth?  She's infested."  He was nearly shouting.  "I'm trying to cure her!  I love her!"  He screwed the cap back on the bottle of methadone and threw it into the cabinet, knocking over a half-dozen other bottles.  He wheeled around and pulled open the doors of the refrigerator along the opposite wall.  "Satan dwells in every one of these tissues."

I nearly stumbled back.  Lucas’ severed arm, the skin and muscles crudely dissected, lay on a stainless steel table.  Above it, four shelves held an assortment of glass containers, some with specimens floating in murky fluid.  I saw an ovary in a giant jar.  The label on the jar read, Elmonte, L, M.D.  I shuddered with the realization that Lucas had harvested the organ from her, that he wasn't beyond doing the same to Nurse Vawn.  Next to it was a row of glass beakers filled with urine and blood.  A rack of test tubes held what looked like samples of semen.  I looked up a shelf, and my heart began racing faster.  A wide-bottomed flask labeled Winston, Ph.D. held a tongue.  I remembered Jack Rice leaning over Lawrence Winston outside the hospital.  And I remembered his words:  ‘His tongue's gone.’

"Look at the black bile seeping out," Lucas said.  "Lucifer's vital fluid."  He pointed from specimen to specimen.

I didn't see anything but poorly preserved organs and bodily fluids.

He lifted his remaining hand chest level and stared at it.  "The beast can hide anywhere."  He turned his hand palm-up, then palm-down as he inspected it.  He let it fall back to his side.  "I need you to help me conquer him."

I knew Lucas’ unconscious was projecting the demons that dwelled in his own tortured mind.  And I knew the fact that he had kept me alive was evidence part of him wanted to confront those demons.  "To conquer Satan," I said, "you'll have to figure out how he sneaked into your soul.  You'll have to figure out what happened to make you fertile ground for his evil."

"Psychobabble.  No wonder your patient killed himself."

"You asked
me
to come onto the unit.  A psychiatrist.  You didn't ask for another surgeon."

"You're the one who took my life.  You're the one who should help me win it back.  It’s only fair."  He paused.  "I'm giving you the chance to redeem yourself, Frank.  That's more than you gave me."  He closed the refrigerator doors, grabbed the electric cautery out of the cabinet and opened the door to the hallway.  "We're wasting time.  We have surgery to perform."

Chapter 8

We walked to the last room on the right.  Gabriel joined us at the bedside and stood with me, across from Lucas.  The man earmarked for neurosurgery still lay face-down, in four-point restraints, the black V on his scalp outlining the planned incision.  His whole body seemed to be trembling.  "Is everything ready, Gabriel?" Lucas asked.

"Yes, doctor."  He pulled a green paper drape off a bedside tray, revealing two scalpels, a set of retractors and a gray metal drill.

Lucas put the cautery down on the tray and picked up the drill.  "Where did we come by this magnificent piece of machinery?"

"Maintenance.  Second floor," Vernon said.

"Excellent.  As I remember, the amygdala lies fairly deep."  Lucas pressed the trigger.  The drill whirred, then screamed.

The patient cried out in terror.

I wasn't sure how to stop what was about to happen.  Despite the fact that he had killed his eight-year-old son, I instinctively placed a hand on the man's arm to comfort him.  He struggled to pull it away.  I moved my hand to the mattress, realizing he couldn’t consider my touch anything but threatening.  I didn't even know his name.  I read it off his hospital identification bracelet:  Tisdale, Richard.

"This should get us where we need to go," Lucas shouted over the noise of the drill.  He held the bit in front of his eyes and watched it spin for several seconds.  When he let go of the trigger and tried to lay the drill back on the tray, his fingers stayed curled around the handle.

"Leave me alone," the man cried into the sheets.

"We'll leave you alone, sweet boy," Lucas answered him, still trying to let go of the drill.  "We're going to chase Satan all the way back to hell."

Sweet boy
.  I remembered those words had been carved into Grace Cummings.  I pictured her naked body sprawled on the concrete outside the hospital, the letters on her torso dripping blood.  Given what I knew of Lucas’ hatred for women, my gut told me the phrase belonged to his mother, the first woman in his life.  I thought of the word Lucas had screamed before killing Lawrence Winston —
Harpy
, the mythological half-woman, half-beast.  I had nothing to lose.  The only way to reach him was to offer him the truth, which is always a reflection of God.  I went out on a limb with my hunch.  "Was she insane?" I asked.

Lucas was still occupied with the drill.  He didn't respond.

"What did she do to you?"

He managed to release his fingers from the drill handle, but they were bent into a claw, as if crippled by arthritis.  It wasn't clear he had heard my question.  "You don't know that you're talking about," he said, without looking at me.  He shook his hand to relax it.

"Was Satan in her, too?"

Lucas opened his mouth, but his words were obliterated by the PA system outside.  "This is Lieutenant Patterson of the Massachusetts State Police," the speakers blared.  "I am issuing a final warning.  All hostages must be freed within ninety seconds."

The release of Lindsey Simons minus her tongue must have hardened, rather than appeased, Jack Rice.  He had approved Patterson's plan.

Lucas turned and walked to the grated window at the head of the bed.  "Dusk.  How appropriate.  The devil comes by night."

Kaminsky and Zweig walked into the room.

"Tell everyone to get down on the floor and stay down," I told Lucas.

Kaminsky's eyes flashed in my direction.  Gabriel Vernon caught him by the neck and threw him back toward the door.

"Wait for the doctor's orders," Vernon said.

"And my orders are, assemble everyone in the Day Room," Lucas said.  "This is the moment we have been waiting for.  This is our Armageddon."

"You can't stop them," I protested.  "They have too many men.  They have guns."

He gazed at me as if lost in a dream.  "We have the heavens.  We have no need of the earth."