Francis was right behind him, fighting the urge to flee in the opposite direction, swept up and carried along by Peter's headlong rush. He could hear Big Black's deep voice, shouting commands, "Get back, please! Get back! Let us through!" as the attendant and his brother raced down the hallway. A nurse in white uniform came out from behind the wire mesh station. Her name was Nurse Richards, but of course she was called Nurse Riches instead, but the elegance of her nickname was ruined by the look of unaccustomed distress and outright terror in her eyes.
By the entrance to the women's dormitory, a disheveled woman with wiry gray hair was rocking back and forth and keening to herself. Another was pirouetting about in circles. A third had put her forehead against the wall and was mumbling something in what Francis thought might be a foreign language, but might also have been gibberish; it was impossible to tell. Two others were wailing, sobbing, and had thrown themselves to the floor where they twitched and moaned as if possessed by devils. He could not tell if any one of the women he saw had issued the scream. It might have been any one of them, or someone else whom he had not' seen But it seemed to him that the noise of despair was still in the air around them, an unrelenting siren's call dragging them inexorably forward. Inside his own head, his voices were shouting warnings, trying to get Francis to stop, to retreat, to run away from danger. It took a strong physical effort to ignore them, and he tried hard to keep pace with Peter, as if the Fireman's sense of reason and understanding might actually carry him along as well.
Peter hesitated only for a moment by the doorway, turning rapidly toward the disheveled woman, and demanding forcefully, "Where?" in a voice that bellowed authority.
The woman pointed toward the end of the corridor, to the stairwell behind what were supposed to be locked doors, and then burst out in a cackle and laugh, that disintegrated almost as swiftly into a series of wracking sobs.
Peter stepped forward, Francis directly behind him, and reached out for the handle on the large steel door. He pushed it open in a single, unafraid motion, then stopped.
"Holy Mary, Mother of God!" he burst out.
Peter gasped in a deep breath, then whispered the second part of the prayer,"… Pray for us sinners in this the hour of our death…" He started to raise his hand to make the sign of the cross, all that Catholic School training coming back to him in an instant, but he stopped in mid motion
Francis craned past him, felt all the air drain from his chest and recoiled sharply. He stepped aside, as if to steady himself, suddenly dizzy. He thought there was no blood in his heart, and he worried that he might pass out.
"Stay back, C-Bird," Peter whispered. He probably didn't mean this, but the words fell like some feathers caught in a gust of wind.
Big Black and Little Black stopped their own rush forward right behind the two patients, staring up, suddenly quieted. After a second, Little Black quietly said, "Goddamn, goddamn…" but nothing else. Big Black turned his face to the wall.
Francis made himself look ahead.
Hanging from a makeshift noose fashioned from a twisted dingy gray bedsheet, tied to the iron railing leading to the second floor, was Cleo.
Her chubby face was misshapen, blown up and inflated, twisted gargoyle-like in death. The noose fashioned around her neck had creased the folds of skin, cutting in like a knot at the bottom of a child's balloon. Her hair cascaded wildly around her shoulders in a tangled mess, and her blank eyes were open, but fixed ahead. Her mouth was cracked slightly askew, giving her an appearance of shock. She wore a simple, gray shift that hung from her sloped shoulders like a bag, and one gaudy pink sandal had slipped from her foot to the floor. Francis saw that her toenails were painted red.
He thought he was having trouble breathing, and he wanted to turn his face away and avert his eyes, but the portrait of death in front of him had a sickly, compelling urgency to it, and he stayed rooted in position, fixed on the figure hanging from the stairwell. He found himself trying to reconcile Cleo with her constant torrent of obscenities, her bouncing, energetic devastation of all challengers at the Ping-Pong table, with the lumpy, grotesque figure before him. The stairwell had a shadowy half light, as if the single uncovered bulbs that lit each floor were inadequate to hold back the tendrils of darkness that were eager to creep into the area. The air seemed musty and hot, as if rarely circulated, like inside an attic never visited.
He let his eyes sweep over her figure again, and then he saw something.
"Peter," Francis whispered slowly, "look at her hand."
Peter's eyes dropped from Cleo's face to her hand and for a moment he was silent. Then he said, "I'll be damned."
Cleo's right thumb had been severed. A streak of crimson ran down the outside of her shift, and along the side of her naked leg, finally pooling in a black splotch on the floor beneath her body. Francis stared at the circle of blood, then gagged.
"Damn," Peter said again.
The severed thumb was on the floor about a foot, perhaps two, away from the center of the small maroon circle of sticky blood, left there almost as if it had been discarded like some petty afterthought.
A thought occurred to Francis, and he surveyed the scene rapidly, looking for one single item. His eyes raced right and left, searching as quickly as he could, but he did not see what he was looking for. He wanted to say something, but instead kept his mouth closed. Peter, as well, had grown silent.
It was Little Black who finally spoke. "There's going to be hell to pay over this," he said glumly.
Francis waited over by the wall, sitting on the floor, while a number of things took place in front of him. He had the odd sensation that he wished that it was all a simple hallucination, or perhaps a dream, and that any moment he would wake up, and the usual day in the Western State Hospital would simply begin all over again.
Big Black had left Peter, Francis, and his brother in the stairwell, looking up at Cleo's body, and had dutifully returned to the nursing station and called Security, and then Doctor Gulptilil's office, and finally, Mister Evil's apartment number. There had been a short lull, following the phone calls, during which time Peter had moved slowly around Cleo's dead form, assessing, memorizing, trying to fix it all firmly in his head. Francis admired the Fireman's diligence and sense of professionalism but he secretly doubted whether he would ever be able to forget any of the details of the death in front of him. Still, both Francis and Peter did as they had done before, when Short Blond's body was discovered, letting their eyes walk the entire scene, measuring, photographing, the way crime scene specialists might do, except that neither had any tape or camera, so they were left to form their own internal specifications.
In the corridor, Big Black and Little Black were trying to restore some calm to a setting that defied calm. Patients were distraught, crying, laughing, some giggled, some sobbed, some tried to behave as if nothing had taken place, others cowered in corners. A radio someplace was playing Top 40 hits from the 1960s, and Francis could hear the unmistakable strains of "In the Midnight Hour" followed by "Don't Walk Away, Renee." The music seemed to make the whole situation even more demented than it already was, as guitar and vocal harmonies mingled with chaos. Then he heard a patient demanding in a loud voice that breakfast be served immediately, while another asked if they could go outside and pick flowers for a grave.
It did not take long for Security to arrive, followed in rapid succession by Gulp-a-pill and Mister Evil. Both men hurried with that half run, half walk pace that made them seem slightly out of control. Mister Evil pushed a few patients out of his path, while Gulptilil simply sailed down the corridor oblivious to entreaties and pleas from the nervous crowd of residents.