Aldiss had led them to the end of the world.
Shining City had been an insane asylum in another era: Gothic-fronted, black-shadowed eaves, a turret that jutted anonymously from the side of the building like a portent. It was out of place amid the starkness of the land—and yet weren’t the students as well? Nothing fits here. Alex thought as they passed the security gate and approached the building. Especially not us.
A drab, blackened sign announced the place: SHINING CITY, HOME FOR TROUBLED BOYS, EST. 1957. The two stood outside the entrance, perhaps willing themselves to go inside, maybe waiting for a signal that would explain why they were there.
Because we have to find Fallows. Because Aldiss is innocent. Because the two mysteries are one and the same.
The place held no promises. A few orderlies swept in and out of the great room, but otherwise it was silent. No manic patients, no wandering insane—the home had been left behind in the seventies. Even the wallpaper was stripped, outdated, its rainbow pattern suggesting a sort of happiness that was alien here.
Alex was flying blind. And yet Keller followed her down a long antiseptic corridor and into another just like it. She heard him say, “I don’t know about this, Alex,” the tentativeness in his voice urging her on to prove him wrong. She didn’t know, either—and the thought enraged her. If they had made a mistake, if this was not where Aldiss wanted them to be, then there was nowhere else. Tomorrow they would be on a plane back to Jasper College and the night class would be over.
“Can I help you?”
She turned. The woman who had spoken was standing a few feet from them, clutching a stack of folders. She wore flat shoes and a white coat. A doctor.
“We’re looking for someone,” Alex said. “A therapist who worked here at one time. Maybe he still does.”
“There aren’t many docs left now,” said the woman. “They’re razing this place, and we’re in the process of transferring patients to an institution in Des Moines right now. What was his name?”
“Morrow,” Alex said. “His name is Dr. Morrow.”
“Can’t say it’s familiar,” she said. “But I’ve only been at Shining City for two months. Let me ask someone who might know. Wait here?” She gestured toward a dim lobby.
Alex sat in the kind of unwieldy chairs you only find in hospitals. She offered Keller the chair beside her but he waved it off as if he was fine with standing. Then she saw: the plastic chair was too small for him. Alex smiled despite herself.
Two minutes later a thin, silver-haired man stood at the door. He looked weary, as if this was his last stop of the day. He eyed the students suspiciously and said, “Terese said you wanted to ask me a few questions.”
“Dr. Morrow?” Alex asked.
“No,” the man said, a hesitant smile breaking across his lips. “My name is Allen Bern. I interned under Morrow. He died in ’91.”
Her heart stuttered. They were too late.
“But maybe I can help you?”
“We’re here because of a patient Dr. Morrow was in charge of,” Keller broke in. “He would’ve been very young, only a boy. He was at Shining City for a short time. But we believe Morrow had a profound effect on him. His name was Charles Rutherford Jr.”
The man’s eyes jumped. He knew something.
“I’m . . . I’m sorry,” he said. “I think I should be going. I don’t want to—”
“Please, Dr. Bern,” Alex said. She heard her own desperation and didn’t try to check it. “We’ve come such a long way and we just need a few answers. If you know anything about this patient, anything at all, then—”
“He lied about not being able to speak.”
Alex blinked. “Excuse me?”
“I saw Morrow with so many patients over the years,” Bern went on. “So many troubled youths came through Shining City, and Morrow was brilliant with them all. Every one he treated as his own son, as if that boy was special. Unique. But Charlie . . .”
“Go on.”
“I had just started,” Bern explained. “I was young, not long out of med school. I was still learning my way into therapy, and to me Morrow was a sort of deity. I had read his articles at university, had begun to appropriate some of his methods in my own sessions. Everything he did with these patients I wanted to replicate.”
“And did you watch him treat Charlie Rutherford?” Keller asked.
Bern nodded. “I want to say I still think of it, but the truth is I don’t. I haven’t thought of it for a very long time. Almost twenty years now. Maybe I wanted to put it out of my mind. To forget it ever happened.”
“What happened?”
“He was performing the Rorschach test,” Bern said. “He was showing Charlie the ink blots. I remember Dr. Morrow shuffling through the cards, the sound of them against his fingers. That was the only sound in the room, because Charlie—of course he wasn’t speaking. He never spoke. He wrote his responses on a little pad Morrow had given him.”
“What did he write?” Alex asked, and glanced at Keller. The Rorschach test—they were both thinking of it. What could it mean?
Bern turned to her slowly, resolutely. His gaze held the past now, the memory heavy and fierce. “Atrocities,” the man said. “Every blot, every image was another violent detail. One was fire; the next was pain; another was blood. All of these words scratched onto the pad. Sometimes he would copy what Morrow showed him. Draw his own blot and then hold up the card to the therapist as if he were some sort of mirror. Then he would smile as if he had done something grand. When the session was over I looked at Morrow and saw . . . I don’t know. I saw this distance. He was afraid of the boy.”
“But Morrow must have seen violent patients before,” Keller said, keeping his voice calm and steady. “It would have been common at Shining City for children to come through who had that kind of temperament.”
“No,” Bern said quickly. “Not like Charlie. The other boys, even the ones with violent pasts—they were acting. Playing a role. But with Charlie you felt it was real. He had been damaged innately. He had been turned, somehow.”
“You say he lied about being mute,” Alex goaded the doctor. She wanted to get to the bottom now, get out of this place. She was beginning to understand why Aldiss had sent them to this private little hell, but some piece of the puzzle was still out of reach.
“Yes,” he said, his gaze drifting away and his voice softening. “This was three months after he came to Shining City. They were having another Rorschach session. They were just to the end, and Charlie looked at Morrow and said something. It was one word—we both heard it. When the boy left the room Morrow came to me, pale and shaking, and said, ‘Did you . . . ? ’ Of course I did.”
“But that must have been a breakthrough,” Alex said, remembering Lydia’s praise of the doctor the night before. “Morrow’s work, it would have been changing Charlie. Healing him.”
“No,” Bern said quickly. “That wasn’t it at all. There was something about that word—something almost teasing. It was then that Morrow asked to be removed from the boy’s case. Charlie had come a long way but there was no question—for the first time, Morrow had failed one of his patients. But I also saw relief. He had gone inside Charlie Rutherford’s mind and had seen something truly ugly. Obscene. He wanted out.”
“Did you ever see Charlie again?” asked Keller.
“No. The boy’s mother came a few weeks later and removed him from Shining City. I heard she lived alone in Hamlet. A beautiful woman, so different from her son. The husband had died by then. But by then none of it mattered. We just wanted to be free of that child.”
Bern walked them out. As she moved down the hall beside the doctor, she turned what he had said over in her mind. She thought of the Rorschach, of the photographs she had seen of the Dumant victims, of the word Bern had used: violence. Aldiss had wanted them to know these things about Charlie. He had wanted them to draw a line between the damaged man and the murders at Dumant.
“The word,” Bern said now. They were at the exit, and outside the sky was darkening. Close to the end now.
“What’s that, Doctor?” asked Keller.
Bern looked at them with such intensity that Alex shivered. He was trying to warn her.
“ ‘Daddy,’ ” Bern said. “Just that one word, the only one Charlie Rutherford ever said. “He was saying ‘daddy.’ ”