With his wife in Minneapolis for the birth of a grandchild, Dr. Irving Roth, director of Paragon Institute, found himself with nothing better to do on New Year's Eve than attend a party of the Hudson Valley Medical Association for some globe-trotting Russians. It was a big, formal, and dull affair in Riverdale, the kind of thing where you had to wear a name tag on your tuxedo. The buffet wasn't bad. Roth over-ate, as he'd done throughout the holiday season. Pounds and pounds he didn't need. He was already wide, like a wrestler, but he had short arms and no air of aggression—his smile was too smooth and appealing; All in all, a bit of a charmer. His hair was fading from the top of his head like grass on a drought-stricken lawn.
Roth spoke to men he hadn't seen much of since med school, and he spoke to a disconcerting number of colleagues who thought he'd retired and moved to a more leisurely part of the world.
"I'm doing basic research," he said, when the question inevitably came up. No one pressed for details, but several with research projects of their own were interested in the numbers.
"Well funded, I hope," said a physiologist with a goatee who was looking for a sponsor. Roth smiled the comfortable smile of a man up to his elbows in the public trough. He told the physiologist he needed to make a phone call, helped himself to a third martini, vowing to drink only half of it, and went wandering. It was a depressing house: drafty, with slate floors and dark wainscoting high as a man's head.
"Irv? Irving Roth?"
Roth turned, smiling automatically.
"Oh, hello, doctor, uh—"
"Tofany," the man said. He had a kind of cheerful, old-fashioned, turn-of-the-century look: Teddy Roosevelt glasses and strawberry-pink coloring, topped by a confection of pure-white, billowy hair. "Hubert Tofany."
"Let's see, tropical medicine, isn't it? And you're at Columbia."
Tofany nodded. "I saw you come in. I was hoping I'd have the chance to talk to you tonight—I've meant to look you up. Do you have a minute, Irv?"
"I was looking for a telephone, but it's nothing urgent. Grandchild due out in Minnesota."
"I have six grandchildren myself. The oldest will be ready for medical school in a couple of years."
Roth chuckled and shook his head as if to say Time sure gets away from you, and then he decided to finish the third martini after all. Every damn drop.
"What piqued my interest, Irv, I recalled hearing you were heavily into psychic phenomena these days."
"As an adjunct to noetics and transpersonal psychology, yes. I suppose you might say I'm interested in psi."
"I mention it because of a patient, unusual case. I was brought in as a consultant when it seemed there was a good possibility she was infected with one of the really hot viruses that slip into the country from time to time. We had her in isolation at Columbia until we were certain it was nothing more than a particularly vicious flu mutation, similar to the one that was so devastating in Recife last summer."
"Uh-huh."
"The patient is a young lady of fourteen. She was stricken suddenly, and ran a high temperature. It peaked at one hundred six and two tenths."
"Wow."
"Apparently without doing any real damage; they can stand a lot at that age. She convulsed at least once before we saw her, but an EEG two days ago showed normal wave patterns. Now she's almost completely recovered, in fact we may let her go home tomorrow. It can't be too soon for Gillian. She's had some interesting paranormal experiences these past few days."
"Paranormal?"
"I'm not sure what you'd call them. Visions, perhaps."
"She saw herself standing before the gates of Heaven, that sort of thing?"
"Nothing so comfortably rooted in mysticism. She was able to describe to me, in great detail, a malpractice suit I was familiar with, because it involved my son-in-law. The case was settled two years ago."
"She remembered reading about it in the papers."
"The case was tried in Texas, and even then it rated only a couple of paragraphs."
"Hospital gossip, then."
"Gossip about a two-year-old case at Houston Medical Center? I don't think so. And Gillian knew too much to have casually pieced it together from idle chatter. For instance, she could describe accurately General Robert E. Lee's aide-de-camp for whom my son-in-law Josiah was named. There's a portrait of Captain Brakestone hanging in the den down there in Houston, but Gillian couldn't possibly have seen it. I think the whole thing is rather remarkable."
"What else has she done?"
"Before it began to trouble her and she stopped talking altogether, she kept the floor nurses entertained . . . and, I think, a little apprehensive. She was like a, a mental magnet, picking up items of personal information. By that I mean the sort of thing you might not even discuss with your closest friend. Everyone was talking about Gillian on the floor, and I suppose all the attention, plus a certain amount of notoriety, made her cautious."
"But it could have been a short-lived phenomenon. That isn't unusual. We're a long way from understanding how the human mind works. The high fever, well, that could have resulted, in view of the essentially passive condition of the recuperating patient, in some sort of biocommunication, perhaps a veridical hallucination or two . . ."
"Oh, yes, I see."
"It would be more significant if the girl had been aware of definite Psi experiences before she came ill."
"Well, one of the reasons she fainted at the skating rink—"
Roth said alertly, "Skating rink? Are you talking about Wollman Rink in Central Park?"
"Yes."
"She fainted there, and was taken to the hospital?"
"Roosevelt. Then that evening I had her moved uptown to Washington Heights."
"Do you remember what day it was?"
"Before Christmas. Tuesday, I think, the twenty-first, because we were due at the Amerdeens at eight, and I—"
"Doctor, I'm sorry, you were saying, weren't you, that the girl had some sort of paranormal experience at the rink—"
"That's what Gillian told me, two days after her fever broke and she was able to piece together what had happened to her just before she collapsed. Gillian and her girl friend had been aware of a, some sort of bum, derelict, the park is full of them as you know, he may have been making a nuisance of himself. Asking for handouts. For some reason Gillian felt as if she knew him. At least she knew his name, and his background; he was from some little place in New Jersey. It all, she said, just popped into her mind."
"His name was—?"
"Raymond. Dun something. Dunkirk, perhaps."
"Please go on."
"Gillian remembers feeling a little woozy, out on the rink. She already had a touch of fever, and she was looking forward to a long nap when she got home. It was when she made a turn on the ice that she was severely jolted by the sight of the bum, Raymond, lying on his back, a gunshot wound in his head."
"Gunshot-wound!"
"It was dreadful and gory, and that's what precipitated her faint."
"But he wasn't there, it was just a, call it a hallucination."
"Of course."
"Gunshot wound, she's definite about that."
"Oh, yes," Dr. Tofany said.
Roth had finished his third martini without tasting it, and he was feeling rather nastily on edge, a little worm of a blood vessel prowling in his left temple, usually an unfailing commandment: thou shalt lay off the hard stuff, take deep breaths in a well-ventilated room, and think benign thoughts about the human condition.
"He said, "With your permission, doctor, I think I'd like to talk to the girl. Gillian?"
"Bellaver."
"Oh. Those Bellavers?"
"Her father is Avery Bellaver."
"The family oddball?"
"I found him cultivated and sensitive, although not very . . . accessible, which may account for his reputation. His wife is a raving beauty." Roth consulted his watch.
"Let's see, nine forty-six, the hospital's just a few minutes from here—"
"You wanted to see her tonight?"
"Clairvoyance, or precognition, is neither rare nor a sign of abnormality, but Gillian has no way of knowing that. She could be one very badly confused girl. Frightened. I think she'll confide in me, however. And it would be far easier tonight than after she's discharged, at home with the family."
"Yes, I understand that."
"New Year's Eve, my wife's in Minneapolis—" Roth spread his hands and grinned wryly. "And I'm here, surrounded by two hundred doctors talking shop, I might as well be working. At least I won't wake up tomorrow with a hangover."
Dr. Tofany also smiled.
"She's in 809 Herlands North, and I do appreciate your taking an interest. Why don't you give me a ring in a day or two?"
The only phone line in the house not tied up by other doctors was a pay phone that had been installed for the convenience of the household staff. It was located in an alcove between the busy kitchen and the butler's pantry. Roth made a credit-card call to Minneapolis, and was so brusque with his wife she had to ask him if he was feeling well. The baby hadn't come yet. Roth told Grace-Ann that he would be at home in Pelham in about an hour and a half, she could reach him there after the blessed event. He managed to sound cheerful saying goodbye to her, but she was out of his mind even before he hung up.
Roth was thinking about the dazzling day before Christmas when Raymond Dunwoodie called him from Central Park, and he had a serious attack of the guilts again; he would feel everlastingly guilty about Raymond. They should never have let him try to send from inside the high-frequency electrical field, an experiment that for unknown reasons always has a terrible effect on the organism. A promising young psychic had been reduced to fumbling in trashcans because of a directive Roth should have been sufficiently cautious to ignore. That's why he always tried to be patient when Raymond was desperate, and shamming, and inventing stories in hopes of cadging a few bucks. (They could have taken care of him, for God's sake, put him on some kind of pension. The ethical poverty of his employer, the essential lack of respect for human life, shamed Roth.) The story about the girl at the ice rink was too good to be true, of course, but Raymond's voice sounded different that afternoon. He wasn't whining. He was excited but not overwrought. There was a suggestion of forcefulness that surprised Roth, so he took time off on a busy day to taxi to the park, expecting almost anything but the sight of Raymond so pathetically dead on a high rock overlooking the rink.
He'd reported it the same day, and later the startling explanation came back to him. Raymond had been seen with Peter Sandza. The decision was made by the MORG team to take out Sandza, because opportunities had been scarce and Childermass was having fits. Unfortunately the attempted assassination went wrong, a grotesque climax to the downhill life of Raymond Dunwoodie.
Roth had his opportunity then to explain about the psychic girl of Raymond's, but the more he thought about it the more it seemed a terminal fantasy. If she did exist, with Raymond dead how could she be located? So Roth kept the story to himself.
Now, purely by chance, he knew that Raymond had been telling the truth, and Roth quickly had to do something about the girl. It was time to make another phone call—suspiciously past time, depending on how they cared to look at it. He could be in trouble.
The vein in his temple was acting up again. He was standing, and his right leg was going numb from the pressure of the garters he wore only with his formal threads. He ignored the black maid who was prowling around hoping to get possession of the telephone, wiped oily palms on a paper napkin, turned his back, hunched over the receiver and placed a second call.
As usual, once he reached the primary number, there was waiting involved. He was uneasy, thinking of the girl in the hospital, wondering if somehow she might get away from them again; but this time he had her name. Gillian. Just fourteen. Robin Sandza's age. . . .
The phone rang and Roth picked up the receiver.
"Hello, Doctor," Childermass said pleasantly. "How's tricks?"
Her last night in Washington Heights Hospital, Gillian, for sheer lack of anything else to do, considered throwing a tantrum.
She was in a ludicrous state of frustration; hollow, but not hungry; despairing, but not quite enough to support a good soul-cleansing cry. She had taken her sleeping pill, but she remained starey-eyed awake. Television was contemptible, all music bored or annoyed her, and there was nothing to see through her windows except another part of the sprawling hospital. She had a mysterious rash on her bottom that made it difficult to sit still for any length of time. She had bitten her nails to the bleeding quick. She didn't feel attractive enough to go to bed and try to get some pleasure from her body; she couldn't be horny even when she concentrated on an image of Robert Redford at the tennis club, the heart-stopping way his eyes gleamed in his sweaty overheated face when he smashed back a powerful serve. It was hard to have erotic fantasies when your hair needed washing. She knew if Bob could see her now he wouldn't smile that great cheeky morale-building smile that was especially hers; he would probably throw up instead.
The old year dragged minute by minute into oblivion. The hospital floor was dismally quiet at five minutes past ten. Most of the rooms around Gillian's were unoccupied; no one liked to be in the hospital at this time of the year if they could possibly put it off.
Even a visit from Irene Cameron McCurdy would have been preferable to going nuts by herself, but Mrs. McCurdy had entertained right up until eight o'clock, a parade of gimpy garden-club ladies, and she was undoubtedly fast asleep by now. Gillian considered another slow stroll up and down the hall, but there was nobody much to talk to, only a couple of unfamiliar nurses at the brightly lit eighth-floor station. Nor could she while away an hour on the telephone; her friends were out for the evening or having fun in a warmer climate, her mother was God knows where, and her father had left for Boston, where he was to read a scholarly paper to a group of his peers.
There were some books piled on the window ledge, and Gillian went through them unhopefully, stopping when she came to the paperback biography of Peter Hurkos which Mrs. McCurdy had written. Gillian frowned; she thought she had returned it, along with the scrapbook which had sat untouched in her room all afternoon. Maybe she had taken another book back by mistake. She decided to go down the hall and leave the Hurkos book. It was something to do. There might not be time in the morning, and tomorrow she would have nothing else on her mind but going home.
Gillian changed slippers and chose one of the newer wraps from the closet. The single nurse visible at the station opposite the elevators had her back turned when Gillian left her room. Gillian went the other way, past a room half lit by the screen of a silent TV set: the man in the bed had fallen asleep. There was no activity on the floor. It was so quiet she felt a little spooked.
She was never going to be stuck in another hospital, Gillian thought grimly. If she had babies, she would have them at home.
Irene Cameron McCurdy's door stood part way open and Gillian looked in. There was a night light near the floor in the corner opposite her bed. Irene was sound asleep on her back, both legs elevated slightly to ease continuing circulation problems. She made snoring sounds that were a little louder than the rasp in the throat of a contented cat. A vaporizer breathed foggily. Irene before retiring had sprayed some flower scent in the air. Gillian found the moist sharply sweet air all but unbreathable as she put the book on top of the dresser.
"Who's that?" Irene said calmly from the bed. Gillian turned. "Oh, it's you, dear."
"I thought you were asleep, Mrs. McCurdy. I was just returning a book you loaned me."
"That's very thoughtful," Irene murmured. Gillian walked toward the door. "But you don't have to go yet."
"Well—"
"I'll be asleep soon. I had a little something extra for the pain tonight, it's very . . . relaxing. Would you mind sitting with me for a few moments? Since I was a little girl I've dreaded going to sleep alone. That's silly, isn't it?"
Gillian approached her. "I feel the same way sometimes," she said.
Irene smiled and patted the bed.
"Sit right here. Such an exhausting day. So you'll . . . be going home tomorrow. We won't lose touch, though. Oh, no. There's so much we need to talk about."
Irene held Gillian's free hand. Irene's hand was on the plump side and felt papery but it wasn't unpleasant to touch, and Gillian was sure that the woman would soon fall asleep.
"We must think of . . . how to care for all the New People," Irene murmured. "I know that there are many in High Places who are already using their considerable psychic powers to check the Forces of Darkness; but their power, compared to the power of the New People, is a drop of rain compared to an ocean. And so we cross the threshold of a new age of consciousness. But not everyone is to be trusted. Remember that. History teaches that evil at its most exalted is merely a wretched excess of good. Good becomes righteous; righteousness becomes evil. Are we in the dawn of a Great Awakening, or in the last moment of twilight, just before the plunge into an abyss of ignorance and terror? I don't know the answer to that question. There are those who will prefer another Dark Ages to the Triumph of the New People, the blinding purity of the psi Enlightenment. I do ramble on, don't I? Are you there, dear?"
Hearing no response, Irene softly increased the pressure of her hand on Gillian's. Irene felt snoozily adrift, in and out of clouds that were faintly lit as if by shafts of light from a celestial source. It was almost too much effort for her to turn her head on the pillow and look up at the profiled face of the tall girl sitting next to her.
When she did look Irene saw enchantment, an expression of traumatized concentration.
"Papa, don't, don't do it!" Gillian squeaked in a girlish voice that Irene somehow recognized although it had been years, so many years.
"Get off her, Papa!" Gillian now demanded, growing rigid, and Irene was astonished to feel the shock-wave heat of anger coming off Gillian's skin. Irene instinctively tried to withdraw her hand, but now Gillian wouldn't let go. This effort was too much for Irene's failing resources; she felt herself powerlessly drifting again, near to nodding off. She might have peacefully lost consciousness but for a bolt of alarm, the organism warning of sudden massive exsanguination, of oncoming fatal shock.
That peaceful feeling was not due to the pills she had swallowed half an hour ago. Irene knew instinctively that she lay there dying while her life flashed before Gillian's eyes.
"I will kill the both of you!" Gillian growled. She had commenced to shudder and jerk about on the bed, but her grip on Irene was unbroken. Gillian had one slippered foot on the floor. Her foot tapped imperiously as she roundly cursed the father of Irene Cameron McCurdy. She also cursed her father's plump groaning mistress, who had spread herself belly-down on the mossy trunk of a fallen tree, blonde hair locky and all adangle in her eyes, the fat of her cheeks quivering while he shoved and grunted from behind, still impeccably attired except for the opened fly.
Tap, tap!
"Ah, God—!" Gillian cried, crazed with the pain of the spied-on infidelity. "How could you, Papa?"
But, mercifully, the image that held her tranced was beginning to fade; Gillian's foot now made soft wet sounds on the slickening tiles of the hospital floor. The limp hand she held had become as cold as a toad in a snowbank.
Gillian's first conscious thought following her psychometric vision was that she had embarrassingly wet herself while she sat there woolgathering, letting an old lady talk herself to sleep.
Then despite the still-cloying odor of flowers in the hot damp room, she smelled what it was.
Roth left his car on the second level of the hospital parking garage on West One Hundred Sixty-eighth and entered the hospital via an overpass walkway that connected the garage with Herlands North. There were few cars in the garage, and he passed no one on his way in.
The clock on the wall beside the guardhouse in the hospital entryway, just inside the steel-and-glass doors, gave the time: ten twenty-seven. Roth hadn't visited the hospital since the new Y-shaped, buff-brick building had gone up. He found it depressingly like entering prison. The ceiling was a plane of white fluorescence that created a shadowless environment. The guard sat elevated behind thick glass and his voice rattled through a speaker. Roth stated his business and was issued an after-hours pass which he wore clipped to his tuxedo.
A couple of nurses wearing hooded cloaks and boots went by on their way out. One of them smiled at him and said, "Oh, where's the party?"
Roth grinned and turned thumbs down. He walked to the elevators. After a considerable wait one came down to him, doors parting to reveal an intern leaning fogbound against one wall. He was missing a shoe and he'd put his girl friend's flowered underwear briefs on over his trousers.
"Fella, is this your stop?" Roth asked, holding the doors for him. The intern licked his lips and looked around without seeing anything.
"Botanical Gardens?"
"Try the Lenox Avenue line," Roth suggested. The intern stumbled off the elevator and stood looking around with an expression of tuned-out melancholy. Roth hoped he would find a conference room to crawl into and sleep it off. He pushed the right button and the elevator took him to the eighth floor.
Overhead lights had been dimmed here, to the restful yellow of a harvest moon. Several bright narrow spots were focused on the nurses' station, but no one was on duty.
In fact there was no one to be seen anywhere on the floor.
They came by car from different parts of the city, all of them arriving by ten thirty-five. Thirty MORG agents had been put on alert. Some of them were a little red-eyed. A siren went by on Fort Washington Avenue; the wind whistled drearily on the unprotected roof of the parking garage while they waited for the minibus with the communications gear, which arrived from midtown at ten thirty-eight.
The Principal pulled up a minute behind the bus. He was a part Crow Indian named Don Darkfeather, a very tall man with the sinister thinness and crude energy of a whip. He had eyes like two black thumbtacks in a piece of tobacco-colored corkboard. His was an attitude of ruthless command. He had been directing MORG's P and C operation in the New York metropolitan area since the day after the shooting of Raymond Dunwoodie in Central Park. His predecessor had been reassigned to a newly formed antiterrorist unit based in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska.
Darkfeather's agents were equipped with belt transceivers, wrist microphones and earpieces as well as more powerful walkie-talkies. The team was composed of penetration specialists, crack drivers and shotmakers. The shotmakers carried low-velocity weapons: riot guns and revolvers loaded with the pancaking wadcutter slugs, which made terrible man-stopping wounds wherever they hit. Beneath his regulation dark gray trench coat each man wore a multi-layered Kevlar vest that could stop a .45 slug fired at close range. None of them had to be reminded that the man they were going after was one of the three or four best shotmakers ever turned out by MORG.
Darkfeather's instructions were brief.
"Don't overlook anybody," he said. "Sandza could've made himself a part of the scene by now."
"Sir, what if he has a fuck with him?" It was the MORG word for civilian.
"If you have to hole a fuck to get to Sandza, okay. We'll sweeten it later."
"Doctors, nurses?"
"Nobody's sacred," Darkfeather said.
"What about NYPD?"
The Indian tugged at one long sideburn and reconsidered.
"Don't hole a cop," he said. "That does take a lot of sweetenin'."
* * *
Roth walked down the hall to 809, Gillian's room. The door stood half open. There was a light on by the bed. He knocked softly at the door. "Miss Bellaver?"
When she didn't reply the doctor walked in. He could see at a glance that the room was empty.
He was standing with his back to the bathroom. When he heard a door hinge creak he turned, a smile forming.
"I didn't mean to—"
Roth bit his tongue in astonishment. A priest was standing in the bathroom doorway, pointing a gun at his head. Obviously he was accustomed to handling firearms. There was authority in his stance.
"What have you done with her, Doctor?"
The voice was familiar, and Roth felt an onrush of shock that threatened to topple him.
"Arrghhhh," he said, fright stifling his power of speech. His body stiffened defensively as he remembered the beating, months ago, that had crippled him for more than a week. There had been few marks anywhere, although the pain even with opiates was nearly unbearable. He knew he couldn't survive another beating like that, but this time he saw in those hellish eyes that Peter Sandza did not intend to go to any further trouble, he would simply pull the trigger when he was ready.
Dr. Roth couldn't speak, but he could vividly picture gunshot trauma, and there was a heavy rising mass just beneath his diaphragm.
"I don't have time," Peter said in a toneless low yoke. "Get yourself sorted out fast and take me to Gillian Bellaver. Or I'll start putting your lights out."
"I—" Roth said, and found that his tongue was manageable, his throat not entirely paralyzed, "don't know, where, she is. I just, g-got here my-m-my—"
"What I'll do, Doctor, I'll go for the back of the neck. Kiss one off the seventh cervical vertebra. Now you know what that does, it turns you into a living head for a few years; maybe they'll be able to fix you up with one of those wheelchairs you operate by blowing air into a tube."
"Wait! I know you don't have any reason to believe me, but for God's sake, man, will you l-listen! She is a patient here, but I just learned that tonight. Maybe they moved her to another room, I don't know, but I can, if you'll give me a moment to check, one of the floor nurses—"
A smile flickered. "They're tied up belly to belly in a spare room down the hall. I counted on a long session with the girl, didn't want interruptions. All right, strange as it may seem I think I believe you. I might even believe you if you told me you came alone."
"I did!"
They had become aware of an intense maddened moaning out in the hall; the sound turned the hairs on the back of Roth's neck spikey as pine needles. And, at the same time, someone was using a mop. Peter's eyes widened a fraction, he seemed momentarily unable to cope with this intimation of Bedlam, one poor soul placidly mopping the floor while another went audibly insane. Then with his free hand he motioned Roth out the door.
Roth hurried outside looking the wrong way, but he caught a glimpse of something terrifying to his right just as Peter came up behind him and shoved him hard. Roth took two off-balance steps to the opposite wall and froze there. He looked starkly over his shoulder at some kind of apparition, wearing slippers steeped in blood, that glided toward him with little Oriental shuffle-steps.
Gillian's skin was deathly white as watered milk. Her eyes rolled like the eyes of a frightened horse, and she was chomping her tongue. There was no crazy mop-lady; it was just the sound of an incredibly bloody robe, caught up on one ankle, that slopped along behind her. Gillian had stripped herself half naked; her nightgown was in tatters, most of it pasted to her shapely legs. Roth saw that her body was smeared with blood as well, and she kept making those unbearable sounds. But he saw no slashes, no deep pumping wounds, and he guessed that she wasn't, couldn't be, as severely injured as she looked.
He made a fumbling move to intercept Gillian, but Peter got to her first. Peter slapped her hard across the face, causing blood to spray from her bitten tongue. Gillian came to a cringing stop, hands motionless, eyes still and looking huge and halo-shiny in her drained face. The moans continued until he popped her a second time; now there were finger-welts on both cheekbones: From the small amount of blood on her mouth and chin Peter assumed she hadn't done severe damage to her tongue. He saw it all coming back to her, whatever horror she had so pathetically fled; he moved deftly, ripped off the rest of the sodden gown, threw it against the far wall.
What a godawful load of blood, none of it hers. Whose, then? Had she murdered someone? A fantastic notion crossed his mind. He yanked the stinking slippery girl from the trailing robe and held her tightly against him. She was rigid and unbreathing in his arms.
"Find out where she's been!" Peter said harshly to Roth. The doctor took off at a half run down the hall, following the trail of blood swabbed on the floor.
Peter upended Gillian, carried her into the room, kicked the door shut and stood her against the wall by the bathroom door. He soaked a towel and began to clean her. She was cold to the touch and still cringing, her eyes shut. He rubbed brutally; she shit on the towel. Peter sighed and threw it away and got another and rubbed harder. It hurt and Gillian groaned, but that was a healthier sound, one of protest, and Peter was encouraged. He helped himself to a fistful of her long hair and banged her head lightly against the wall.
"Look at me," he demanded. "Whatever it was, it's over now. You're safe and you can face it. Don't let it get the best of you. I said open your eyes and look at me, girl!"
Gillian trembled, but she looked at him. One inward eye, he noted, and great bones; probably a beauty when she didn't look like something he'd fished out of a sewer. He used a corner of the towel more gently to sponge her flecked lips.
"All the blood is gone," Peter insisted. "I wiped it off you . . . no, don't."
The impulse to hysteria was running wild under her skin. He lashed a flank with the twisted wet towel and she yelped.
"Don't go off again. Talk to me. What's your name? Tell me your name goddammit!"
"G-Gillyun."
"Louder. Gillian what?"
"BELLAVER! Don't hit me anymore."
It was more of a warning than a plea. She still couldn't control her miserable trembling, but there were signs of warmth, there was a healthy flush in the triangle of her throat, and great areas the length of her body were mottled where he'd scrubbed so hard.
"I'm cold," Gillian said, her voice blurred by her defective tongue. "You're tearing my hair out! And I d-don't think you're a very n-nice—"
When the tears came, copiously, Peter stepped back, breathing a little heavily but satisfied with his rescue operation. He wondered just how close she'd come to spending the rest of her life in a very expensive sanitarium wearing a fixed placid expression like a heavy coat of wax.
He left Gillian long enough to get a terry robe from the closet. He helped her into the robe and sat her in a chair. She sobbed and coughed herself blue in the face and then tried to bundle up in a tight ball, to retreat as far back into childhood as she could get. Another familiar symptom: she wanted to sleep and sleep, like naptime on mother's bed on a rainy afternoon.
Peter knew his time was critically short. Nevertheless he pulled Gillian, wailing and complaining, from the chair, and began to trot her around the room.
"Walk! Stop the baby stuff. At least act like you're grown up."
"You prick! You asshole!"
Gillian struck at him, then flinched when he brought his hand back. He kissed her instead, tenderly and with as much lust as he thought she might be familiar with at her age. Gillian found this new approach confusing, shocking and indefensible, and as she grew slack in his arms gradually the kiss became a comfort to her. With his own eyes closed Peter readily lost awareness of her youth; the snug pressure of her uncovered cunt against his body was mature enough, even insinuating.
Then her lips parted and Peter tasted bitter blood. He took Gillian by the arm, this time hearing no complaints, and led her to the wash basin to rinse her mouth.
The cold water stung her lacerated tongue and she made mewing sounds of pain. She swallowed some of the water and almost heaved, but it stayed on her stomach.
Peter put a hand calmingly on the back of her neck.
He felt grotesquely ambivalent toward this unusual girl, as if he'd just given birth to her, as if they were already lovers. He was in the worst possible danger, or he would've taken her with him . . . and Peter knew Gillian would accompany him without question. He had saved her from the fury and the terror, and in a sense he owned her now.
Gillian looked up wide-eyed at the strange priest who had beaten and then half seduced her. Then the truth occurred to her, which Peter read in her eyes.
"No, I'm not a priest, it's just a lousy disguise. Look, I have to go now, Gillian. If I stayed any longer I could get killed. I know you can't make much sense of what I'm saying, so just remember the words and think about it later. I have a son like you, Gillian—very much like you, I think. He was taken from me. I have to find him. I believe you're the only one who can help me, so I'll be back to see you. In the meantime there's a man named Roth; watch out for him. He'll be sympathetic and helpful and charming. You can't believe anything he tells you. Don't, under any circumstances, admit to him that you have the powers of a clairvoyant. And stay away from a place called Paragon Institute. Once you're inside I may not be able to get you out."
The hall outside Gillian's door was getting noisy, and Peter frowned. He picked up the black bag which he'd brought with him to the hospital.
"I want you to go to the telephone before all hell breaks loose up here. Call your father or someone else you can trust, a lawyer would be ideal, and tell him to come get you tonight. Say that you'll be waiting in room 909, which is the room directly above this one. I've already checked it out, and it's unoccupied. The stairs are just across the hall. Get dressed, walk to 909, shut the door and wait until the one you called has come for you. Do you have all that, Gillian?"
Gillian spat pink water into the bowl and nodded wearily.
"What's . . . your name?" she asked him.
"Peter."
"Peter." Gillian nodded again and tried to smile. Peter. She liked that name. For no good reason tears began to run down her cheeks. She reached for a towel to dry her face. "Peter," she mumbled. "Mrs. McCurdy's dead." She found it increasingly painful to talk because of her tongue. "Ah . . ." Gillian caught her breath and made another attempt. She urgently had to tell him, while she could still get the words out. "Just bled and bled. All over. Soaked . . . me. God. I think I did it, Peter. I made it happen."
She lowered the towel and looked around, desperate for his understanding.
Peter was gone.
Gillian experienced a sharp cramp of fear. No, she needed him! But she wasn't going to cry any more. And he'd made a very sensible suggestion. She knew she must leave the hospital right away, and go home. There she could be safe until Peter came back—
Soon. It had to be soon.
Gulping air, hiccupping, Gillian went straight to the telephone and sat hunched over it, her mind momentarily a blank. Voices outside brought her around; she was afraid someone would come in. There was no man to call, as Peter had hoped; but all her life when she'd most needed help she'd been able to depend on Mrs. Busk, the Bellavers' housekeeper. It was New Year's Eve, but Mrs. Busk would be at home with her hair in rollers, waiting for Guy Lombardo on TV. Once alerted and aroused she had the moxie to drive straight to the hospital, strong-arm her way inside, and take her Gilly home.
Over everyone's dead body, if it came to that.