Fever Dream Page 38

  The gun began to shake more visibly in Pendergast’s hands.

  “Crunch, crunch!” Slade whispered, his eyes wide with glee. “Ah, Pendergast, you have no idea what sort of Pandora’s box you’ve opened up with this investigation of yours. You’ve roused the sleeping dog with a kick in the ass.”

  Pendergast took aim.

  “You promised,” Hayward said in a low, insistent voice.

  “He must die,” whispered Pendergast, almost to himself. “This man must die.”

  “The man must die,” Slade said mockingly, his voice rising briefly above a whisper before falling again. “Kill me, please. Put me out of my misery!”

  “You promised,” Hayward repeated.

  Abruptly, almost as if overcoming an invisible opponent in a physical struggle, Pendergast lowered the pistol with a jerk of his hand. Then he took a step toward Slade, twirled the gun around, and offered him the grip.

  Slade seized it, yanked it from Pendergast’s grasp.

  “Oh, my God,” Brodie cried. “What are you doing? He’ll kill you for sure!”

  Slade, with an expert motion, retracted the slide, snapped it back, then slowly raised the gun at Pendergast. A crooked smile disfigured his gaunt face. “I’m going to send you to the same place I sent your bitch of a wife.” His finger curled around the trigger and began to tighten.

  77

  JUST A MOMENT,” PENDERGAST SAID. “BEFORE YOU shoot, I’d like to speak to you a minute. In private.”

  Slade looked at him. The big handgun looked almost like a toy in his gnarled fist. He steadied himself against the IV rack. “Why?”

  “There’s something you need to know.”

  Slade looked at him a moment. “What a poor host I’ve been. Come into my office.”

  June Brodie made a move to protest, but Slade, with a flick of the gun, gestured Pendergast through the doorway. “Guests first,” he said.

  Pendergast shot a warning glance at Hayward, then disappeared through the dark rectangle.

  The hallway was paneled with cedar, painted over in gray. Recessed lights in the ceiling cast low, regular pools of light onto neutral carpeting, its weave tight and plush. Slade walked slowly behind Pendergast, the wheels of his IV making no noise as they turned. “Last door on the left,” he said.

  The room that served as Slade’s office had once been the game room of the lodge. A dartboard hung on the wall, and there were a couple of chairs and two tables shoved up against the walls, tops inlaid for backgammon and chess. A snooker table near the back apparently served as Slade’s desk: its felt surface was empty save for carefully folded tissues, a crossword magazine, a book on advanced calculus, and several additional flails, their tips tattered from constant use. A few ancient snooker balls, crazed with craquelure, still lay forlornly in one pocket. There was little other furniture: the big room was remarkably bare. Gauzy curtains were drawn tightly over the windows. The space had the stillness of a tomb.

  Slade closed the door with exquisite care. “Sit down.”

  Pendergast dragged a cane chair out and set it on the thick carpet before the table. Slade wheeled his IV rack behind the table and sat down very slowly and carefully in the lone easy chair. He pressed the bulb on the IV line, eyes fluttering as the morphine hit his bloodstream, sighed, then trained the gun again on Pendergast. “Okey-dokey,” he said, his voice remaining whispery and slow. “Say what you have to say so that I can get on with shooting you.” He smiled faintly. “It’ll make a mess, of course. But June will clean it up. She’s good at cleaning up my messes.”

  “Actually,” Pendergast said, “you’re not going to shoot me.”

  Slade emitted a careful little cough. “No?”

  “That’s what I wanted to speak to you about. You’re going to shoot yourself.”

  “Now, why would I want to do that?”

  Instead of replying, Pendergast stood up and walked over to a cuckoo clock that stood on a side wall. He pulled up the counterweights, set the time to ten minutes before twelve, then gave the pendulum a flick with his fingernail to start it.

  “Eleven fifty?” Slade said. “That’s not the correct time.”

  Pendergast sat down again. Slade waited. The tick of the now-active cuckoo clock began to fill the silence. Slade seemed to stiffen slightly. His lips began to move.

  “You are going to kill yourself because justice demands it,” Pendergast said.

  “To satisfy you, I suppose.”

  “No. To thwart me.”

  “I won’t kill myself,” Slade said out loud, the first words he had spoken above a papery whisper.

  “I hope you won’t,” Pendergast said, plucking two snooker balls from the corner pocket. “You see, I want you to live.”

  Slade said, “You’re making no sense. Even to a madman.”

  Pendergast began rolling the pool balls back and forth in one hand, Queeg-like, clacking them together.

  “Stop that,” Slade hissed, wincing. “I don’t like it.”

  Pendergast clacked the balls together a little more loudly. “I had planned to kill you. But now that I’ve seen the condition you’re in, I realize the cruelest thing I could do would be to let you live. There’s no cure. Your suffering will go on, only increasing with old age and infirmity, your mind sinking ever deeper into misery and ruin. Death would be a release.”

  Slade shook his head slowly, his lips twitching, the muttered sounds of broken words tumbling from his lips. He groaned with something very much like physical pain, and then gave the morphine drip another pump.

  Pendergast reached into his pocket, took out a small test tube half full of black granules. He tipped out a small line of the granules along the edge of the pool table.

  The action seemed to bring Slade back around. “What are you doing?”

  “I always carry a little activated charcoal. It’s useful in so many field tests—as a scientist, you must know that. But it has its own aesthetic properties, as well.” From another pocket Pendergast pulled out a lighter, swiftly lit one end of the granules. “For example, the smoke it emits tends to curl upward in such beautiful gossamer patterns. And the smell is far from unpleasant.”

  Slade leaned backward sharply. He trained the gun, which had sagged to the floor, toward Pendergast again. “You put that out.”

  Pendergast ignored him. Smoke curled up in the still air, looping and coiling. He leaned back in his chair, forcing it to rock slightly, the old canework creaking. He rolled the pool balls together as he went on. “You see, I knew—or at least guessed at—the nature of your affliction. But I never stopped to think just how awful it would be to endure. Every creak, click, tap, and squeak intruding itself into your brain. The chirping of the birds, the brightness of the sun, the smell of smoke… To be tormented by every little thing carried into your brain by the five senses, to live at the edge of being overwhelmed every minute of every hour of every day. To know that nothing can be done, nothing at all. Even your, ah, unique relationship with June Brodie can provide nothing but temporary diversion.”

  “Her husband lost his apparatus in Desert Storm,” Slade said. “Blown off by an IED. I’ve stepped in to fill the breach, so to speak.”

  “How nice for you,” said Pendergast.

  “Go stuff your conventional morality. I don’t need it. Anyway, you heard June.” The mad sheen to his eyes seemed to fade somewhat, and he looked almost serious. “We’re working on a cure.”

  “You saw what happened to the Doanes. You’re a biologist. You know as well as I do there’s no hope for a cure. Brain cells cannot be replaced or regrown. The damage is permanent. You know this.”

  Slade seemed to go off again, his lips moving faster and faster, the hiss of air from his lungs like a punctured tire, repeating the same word, “No! No, no, no, no, no!”

  Pendergast watched him, rocking, the snooker balls moving more quickly in his hand, their clacking filling the air. The clock ticked, the smoke curled.

  “I couldn’t
help but notice,” Pendergast said, “how everything here was arranged to remove any extraneous sensory trigger. Carpeted floor, insulated walls, neutral colors, plain furnishings, the air cool, dry, and scentless, probably HEPA-filtered.”

  Slade whimpered, his lips fairly blurring with maniacal, and virtually silent, speech. He lifted the flail, smacked himself.

  “And yet even with all that, even with the counterirritant of that flail and the medicines and the constant dosings of morphine, it isn’t enough. You are still in constant agony. You feel your feet upon the floor, you feel your back against the chair, you see everything in this room. You hear my voice. You are assaulted by a thousand other things I can’t begin to enumerate—because my mind unconsciously filters them out. You, on the other hand, cannot tune it out. Any of it. Listen to the snooker balls! Examine the curling smoke! Hear the relentless passage of time.”

  Slade began to shake in his chair. “Nononononononoooo!” spilled off his lips, a single never-ending word. A loop of drool descended from one corner of his mouth, and he shook it away with a savage jerk of his head.

  “I wonder—what must it be like to eat?” Pendergast went on. “I imagine it’s horrible, the strong taste of the food, the sticky texture, the smell and shape of it in your mouth, the slide of it down your gullet… Isn’t that why you’re so thin? No doubt you haven’t enjoyed a meal or a drink—really enjoyed—for a decade. Taste is just another unwanted sense you can’t rid yourself of. I’ll wager that IV drip isn’t only for the morphine—it’s for intravenous feeding as well, isn’t it?”

  Nonononononononono… Slade reached spastically for the flail, dropped it back on the desk. The gun trembled in his hand.

  “The taste of food—mellow ripe Camembert, beluga caviar, smoked sturgeon, even the humblest eggs and toast and jam—would be unbearable. Perhaps baby food of the most banal sort, without sugar or spice or texture of any kind, served precisely at body temperature, would only just be bearable. On special occasions, naturally.” Pendergast shook his head sympathetically. “And you can’t sleep—can you? Not with all those raging sensations crowding in on you. I can imagine it: lying on the bed, hearing the least of noises: the woodworms gnawing between the lathe and plaster, the beat of your heart in your eardrums, the ticking of the house, the scurry of mice. Even with your eyes closed your sight betrays you, because darkness is its own color. The blacker the room, the more things you see crawling within the fluid of your vision. And everything—everything—pressing in on you at once, always and forever.”

  Slade shrieked, covering his ears with claw-like hands and shaking his entire body violently, the IV drip line flailing back and forth. The sound ripped through the stillness, shockingly loud, and Slade’s entire body seemed to convulse.

  “That is why you will kill yourself, Mr. Slade,” Pendergast said. “Because you can. I’ve provided you with the means to do it. In your hand.”

  “Yaaahhhhhhhhh!” Slade screamed, writhing, the tortured movements of his body a kind of feedback from his own screams.

  Pendergast rocked more quickly, the chair creaking, rolling the balls ceaselessly in his hand, faster and faster.

  “I could have done it anytime!” Slade cried. “Why should I do it now? Now, now, now, now, now?”

  “You couldn’t have done it before,” Pendergast said.

  “June has a gun,” Slade said. “A lovely gun, gun, gun.”

  “No doubt she is careful to keep it locked up.”

  “I could overdose on morphine! Just go to sleep, sleep!” His voice subsided into a rapid gibbering, almost like the humming of a machine.

  Pendergast shook his head. “I’m sure June is equally careful to regulate the amount of morphine you have access to. I would guess the nights are hardest—like about now, as you’re quickly using up your allotted dose without recourse for the endless, endless night ahead.”

  “Eeeyaaahhhhhhhhhh!” Slade screamed again—a wild, ululating scream.

  “In fact, I’m sure she and her husband are careful to limit your life in countless ways. You’re not her patient—you’re her prisoner.”

  Slade shook his head, his mouth working frantically, soundlessly.

  “And with all her ministrations,” Pendergast went on, “all her medication, her perhaps more exotic means of holding your attention—she can’t stop all those sensations from creeping in. Can she?”

  Slade didn’t respond. He pressed the morphine button once, twice, three times, but apparently nothing more was coming through. Then he slumped forward, head hitting the felt of the desk with a loud crack, jerked it back up, his lips contracting spastically.

  “Usually I consider suicide a cowardly way out,” Pendergast said. “But in your case it’s the only sensible solution. Because for you, life really is so much infinitely worse than death.”

  Still, Slade didn’t respond. He banged his head again and again onto the felt.

  “Even the least amount of sensory input is exquisitely painful,” Pendergast went on. “That’s why this environment of yours is so controlled, so minimalist. Yet I have introduced new elements. My voice, the smell of the charcoal, the curls and colors of its smoke, the squeaking of the chair, the sound of the billiard balls, the ticking of the clock. I would estimate you are now a vessel that is, so to speak, full to bursting.”

  He continued, his voice low and mesmerizing. “In less than half a minute now, the cuckoo of that clock is going to sound—twelve times. The vessel will burst. I don’t know exactly how many of the cuckoo calls you’ll be able to withstand before you use that gun on yourself. Perhaps four, perhaps five, perhaps even six. But I know that you will use it—because the sound of that gun firing, that final sound, is the only answer. The only release. Consider it my gift to you.”

  Slade looked up. His forehead was red from where it had impacted the table, and his eyes wheeled in his head as if set free of each other. He raised his gun hand toward Pendergast, let it fall back, raised it again.

  “Good-bye, Dr. Slade,” Pendergast said. “Just a few seconds now. Let me help count them down for you. Five, four, three, two, one…”

  78

  HAYWARD WAITED, PERCHED ON A GURNEY, in the gleaming room full of medical equipment. The other occupants of the large space—June Brodie and her silent husband—stood like statues by the far wall, listening, waiting. Occasionally a voice would sound—a cry of rage or despair, a strange gibbering laugh—but they drifted only faintly through the thick, apparently soundproofed walls.

  From her vantage point, she could see both exits—the one that led to Slade’s office, and the one that led down the stairs and out into the night. She was all too aware that a second shooter was still out there somewhere—and that at any moment he might come bursting in from the stairwell. She lifted her weapon, checked it.

  Once again, her eye drifted to the doorway through which Pendergast and Slade had disappeared. What was going on? She had rarely felt worse in her life—utterly exhausted, covered with caked mud, her leg throbbing viciously as the painkiller began to wear off. It had been at least ten minutes, maybe a quarter of an hour since they had left, but some sixth sense told her to heed Pendergast’s urgent instruction to remain where she was. He had promised not to kill Slade—and she had to believe that, whatever else he was, Pendergast was a gentleman who kept his word.

  At that moment, a handgun fired, a single shot, the muffled boom shuddering the room. Hayward raised her weapon, and with a cry June Brodie ran to the doorway.

  “Wait!” Hayward said. “Stay where you are.”

  There was no further sound. A minute passed, then two. And then—quiet, but distinct—came the sound of a closing door. A moment later the faintest of treads sounded in the carpeted hallway. Hayward sat up straight on the gurney, heart racing.

  Agent Pendergast stepped through the doorway.

  Hayward stared at him. Under the thick encrustation of mud he was paler than usual, but otherwise he appeared unhurt. He glanced
at the three of them in turn.

  “Slade—?” Hayward asked.

  “Dead,” came the reply.

  “You killed him!” June Brodie shrieked, running past Pendergast and into the corridor. He did nothing to stop her.

  Hayward slid off the gurney, ignoring the pain shooting through her leg. “You son of a bitch, you promised—”

  “He died by his own hand,” Pendergast said.

  Hayward stopped.

  “Suicide?” Mr. Brodie said, speaking for the first time. “That’s not possible.”

  Hayward stared at Pendergast. “I don’t believe it. You told Vinnie you would kill him—and you did.”

  “Correct,” Pendergast replied. “I did vow to do that. Nevertheless, all I did was talk to him. He committed the deed.”

  Hayward opened her mouth to continue, then shut it again. Suddenly she didn’t want to know any more. What did that mean—talk to him? She shuddered.

  Pendergast was watching her closely. “Recall, Captain, that Slade ordered the killing. He did not carry it out. There is still work to be done.”

  A moment later June Brodie reappeared. She was sobbing quietly. Her husband walked over and tried to put a comforting arm over her shoulder. She shrugged it away.

  “There’s nothing to keep us here any longer,” Pendergast told Hayward. He turned to June. “I’m afraid we’ll have to borrow your utility boat. We’ll see it’s returned to you tomorrow.”

  “By a dozen cops armed to the teeth, I suppose?” the woman replied bitterly.

  Pendergast shook his head. “There’s no reason anyone else need know about this. In fact, I think it’s in all of our best interests that no one ever does. I suggest you burn this place to the ground and then leave it, never to return. You tended a madman in his final sufferings—and as far as I’m concerned, that’s where the story begins and ends. No need to report the suicide of a man who is already officially dead. You and your husband will want to work out an appropriate cover story to minimize any official interest in yourselves—or in Spanish Island—”