Nightjack (5 page)

“What do these damn things do?” he asked.

“They help control your dissociative identity disorder.”

It certainly sounded like serious fun. Something inside of him was being willfully obtuse, making him ignorant. It didn’t want him to remember. “What the hell is that?”

“A condition in which two or more distinctive identities or personality states alternate in controlling your consciousness and behavior.”

“Oh. Multiple personality. Yeah.”

“That’s an outdated term. MPD has been re-designated DID. Dissociative Identity Disorder. Many doctors think it may be a variation of PTSD. Post traumatic Stress Disorder. There are other causes and conditions as well. These include head injuries and brain disease. AIDS dementia complex. Epilepsy or other seizure disorders. Identity disturbances in DID result from the patients having split off entire personality traits or characteristics, as well as memories. When a stressful or traumatic experience triggers the reemergence of these dissociated parts, the patient switches—usually within seconds—into an alternate personality.”

Pace liked listening to her. “Oh?”

“Some patients have histories of erratic performance in school or in their jobs caused by the emergence of alternate personalities during examinations or other stressful situations. Patients vary with regard to their alternates’ awareness of one another.”

It was good to know what you had, and what had you. He wondered if he could keep all the anagrams straight, if they had some kind of trick to help you memorize it Doe-Ray-Me style. “I wondered about all the people inside me.”

“You still feel them?”

“Yes.”

“All of us suffer from it,” Faust said.

Dr. Brandt nodded and looked around, like she was fielding questions from an audience. “Many DID patients sometimes have setbacks in mixed therapy groups because other patients are bothered or frightened by their personality switches. But you four—”

Again, she stopped. Never just giving him the answers he wanted, always forcing him to beg for more. And the thing inside him not wanting to hear.

“Us four what?” Pace asked.

“You four accommodate one another.”

“You say that like it’s a bad thing.”

“It is. You make each other sicker.”

The name on the prescription bottles was WILLIAM PACELLA. Pace felt heat rising on the back of his neck and he saw Big Joe Ganucci’s elderly face, the Ganooch just sitting in his wheelchair in the middle of the room with the sacred heart of Jesus picture on the wall, overlooking the gutted bodies of his bodyguards.

The guy who was giggling inside Pace started toying with a knife.

four

Tell me again, please, what do these pills do?” he asked.

“They keep you from killing people,” Dr. Brandt said.

There it was, finally. The truth laid out, raw and bleeding. “Who would I kill? Who did I kill?”

“I’d prefer not to go into that right now.”

Just like a shrink to fuck with you when you were down. He shook his head. “I’d be in jail, not a psych ward. And if I was found not guilty by reason of insanity, which almost nobody ever is, then I couldn’t have gone in voluntarily, and I wouldn’t have ever gotten out of the Falls.”

“The police didn’t have enough evidence to indict you.”

“Then maybe I didn’t do it.”

Hayden, letting out a wild burst of laughter that sounded more animal than human, said, “Oh, believe us, you did it.”

He remembered Ernie calling him “killer.” Pace was recollecting pieces here and there, retaining more without the meds. “Tell me who Cassandra and Kaltzas and Pythos are.”

“You’re beginning to remember them?” Pia asked. “It’s a long story.”

He stared into the void where her eyes should be and said, “Give me an abbreviated version in thirty seconds, okay?”

She let out a deep breath and the scent of her lips, which he knew well, wafted against the back of his throat. “We were on the ward with Cassandra Kaltzas, daughter of a Greek shipping magnate.” The anxiety ratcheted her voice up an octave. “Are there any other kinds of magnates? Aren’t they all goddamn ‘shipping magnates’? What the hell is a magnate anyway?”

“Faster,” Pace said.

“Cassandra was beaten and raped on the ward four months ago. Kaltzas thinks one of you did it, and that I helped.”

“Helped?”

“I didn’t like her very much. I was jealous. Sick, you know? I have mother issues. Sister issues, really. Well, mother and sister issues. I wasn’t on the ward for my goddamn health. Anyway, the bastard sent men to visit us. They asked questions like they were our friends, but they had us marked from the beginning. They knew all about us, everything in our files, all about our lives. We think they were planning to kidnap or kill us. That’s why we skipped from the Falls.”

“You’re sure about this? It wasn’t just paranoia?”

“It’s always paranoia, but yes, we’re sure.”

“How did you escape?”

“I fucked the guards. We got out.”

Pace thought about how many attendants there were between the ward and the front gate. He counted four. “All of them? One after the other?”

“Where’s the challenge in that? No. Collectively.”

Jesus Christ. “Ernie? You screwed Ernie?”

“I don’t know their names.”

“I hate Ernie. And Brutus.”

“I hated all of them. I have father and brother issues too. And men in general. Well, men and women.”

Pace thought about it some more. “What about forensic evidence?”

“From the guards?”

“From the rape.”

“There was no ejaculation,” Dr. Brandt said. “No sample of semen to test against your DNA.”

“Then how do you know it even happened?”

“Severe vaginal bruising. Rectal bleeding. Scratches, welts characteristic to sexual molestation.”

“Who did she say raped her?”

“She couldn’t say anything. The trauma sent her into a fugue state. Her father immediately had her taken back to Greece.”

“How many patients were on the ward?”

“Thirty-five,” she said.

“So why were we singled out?”

“We don’t know, except that it’s likely he considers you four the most likely suspects due to your histories.”

“Hey,” Hayden said, “I never did any evil shit like that.”

“Me neither,” Faust said.

“I only fuck men,” Pia said.

Rape? Pace wondered. Was he capable of even that?

Hayden said, “You might’ve been getting it on with Cassandra, we don’t know, but if you were it wasn’t rape. You had a special relationship with her.”

“I did?”

“You’ll remember soon enough. But because of that bond you shared with her, Kaltzas thinks you might be responsible for what happened.”

Dr. Brandt’s lovely face screwed up with anguish. Her shoulder muscles tightened. It had to be tough on her, being surrounded by her greatest failures. “No one on the ward is known for violent tendencies. Since you’re the only true cases of DID at Garden Falls, it cast greater doubt on you since one of your alternates may have been responsible for such brutality even if your primary personalities weren’t.”

“It could’ve been one of the attendants.”

“There were three on duty and two night nurses.” A hint of embarrassment crept into her voice. “They were busy playing strip poker together.”

“They could be covering for each other.”

“They’re too selfish to cover for anyone. They’ve all been summarily fired and have charges still pending.”

The laughter was trying to work its way up Pace’s throat again. He turned to the faceless Faust and asked, “Why didn’t I go with you when you ran?”

“You were supposedly in a straitjacket, shackled to your bed in a secured room. Solitary confinement. It’s where they put the
tempestuous
cases.”

“He was there,” Dr. Brandt said. “He was having a bad reaction to his last medication. It was making him very manic. He struggled with the guards, broke one of their arms.”

You had layers to your life, and within those layers were other strata. Levels and planes and tiers. You got a hold of one memory and it slipped away in a torrent. There was the person you were before the madness and then the one you became. The many you became.

The man he was now meant nothing except in relation to the one he was an hour ago, and the one he’d be an hour from now. He felt ephemeral, tenuous as tissue paper.

Pace looked at Dr. Brandt. “Four months ago I was shackled and today I walked out?”

“You’re perfectly stable when you take your new medication.”

Okay, he wasn’t stable, but he was right enough to play their game.

“So one of us might be a rapist.”

“Or one of our multiples,” Faust said.

Hayden laughed bitterly. “That makes about a hundred and thirty-seven suspects. You want to include yetis, aliens, dinosaurs, robots, demons, dogs, or fallen angels, you gotta add another twenty-five or so.”

Pace felt the need for contact again and touched Dr. Brandt’s wrist. It electrified him, put him back in his body. “Why have you thrown in with them?”

“Alexander Kaltzas holds me accountable as well. For failing to keep his daughter safe in the hospital. For allowing you and Cassandra to have an association.”

“So it’s not all paranoia? This man is really after us?”

“Yes. I’ve met him before. And his...his agents visited me at home. He frightens me.”

“Worse than we do?”

“Yes.”

“Didn’t you go to the police? The FBI?”

“They can’t do anything without proof.”

“Couldn’t you go ask help from your friends? Stay with someone?”

“I don’t have many close friends.”

Pace thought, She’s as nutty as any of us.

“And did you allow Cassandra and me to...associate?”

“You were close friends. You were both notably calmer in each other’s presence. You were better off together than apart.”

He looked out the window at the prostitutes below. In his depths, somebody opened up a doctor’s bag and pulled out scalpels and instruments and a heavy leather apron. Pace wondered if he should run. Steal the Chevy and drive through the tunnel and find himself a fish cannery. Stay the course, start slapping back the meds. Forget this little detour ever happened.

“I need sleep.”

“It’s only three in the afternoon.”

He could sense a burgeoning realm of misery building within him, a growing understanding. Within it, he thought, would be design and purpose. Further blood, maybe redemption, perhaps even the reclamation of Jane.

There were two bedrooms in the apartment, a small one with a door and large one without. He knew the three of them would be sharing the mattresses on the floor of doorless room, afraid to be closed in or spend the night too far away from one another.

He walked to the other bedroom. They’d left it for him. There was an old box spring and mattress, but the sheets looked clean. Maybe they planned on giving him Maureen Brandt too, as a sacrifice. They were scared and wanted to appease him.

five

When he awoke, the orange lace of dusk slipped in through a barred window. They were still shouting in Spanish on the street.

Atop the sheet kneeled the blue woman.

Her gills eased open as she breathed, arching above him on the bed, watching him. As she shifted her chain mail dress jangled, crusted with jewels, seashells, and coral. She drew fiery sigils and spells in the air. Arcane symbols and covenants in a sea language that had been chiseled into rock at the bottom of the deepest trenches and abysses of the ocean.

Her black and lidless eyes, like a shark’s, somehow retained a great humanity. He sensed her sorrow.

Princess Eirrin, ten thousand-year-old sorceress and heir to the Atlantean throne, one of Pia’s alternates.

“You awaken to this world once more,” she said in a voice strong enough to be heard even under the frothing waves of the Aegean. She used to show him treasures taken from centuries-old galleon shipwrecks: gems, Roman coins, doubloons, riches from the fallen empires which she used to decorate her throne floor.

Pace said, “Hello Princess, it’s been a while.”

Beside her sat a panting pug which she stroked with one webbed hand. The dog cocked his head at Pace, climbed up the blankets, and laid his chin on Pace’s forearm. This was Crumble, one of Hayden’s personalities.

Eirrin undid Pace’s shirt and pressed her palm against his chest: it was cool, a bit clammy, soft and meaty like dolphin skin. She moved her nails against the burn scars, tracing their ridges and contours.

“You remind me of another human male I knew millennia ago. Odysseus. He too suffered because he would not bow to a greater fate. The orders of his commanders were not enough to persuade him. He refused to accompany the Greeks to Troy, feigning madness by sowing his fields with salt.”