I half gestured toward the wall of words.

He laughed. "You think anyone will care about all your stupid scribblings? It will be gone in minutes. Seconds. Someone will come in, take one look at the mess the crazy man created, fetch a paintbrush and cover up every word. And all that happened a long time ago will be buried forever."

I closed my eyes. If the words pummeled me, how long before his fists? It seemed to me, right at that moment, that the Angel was growing stronger every second, while I was growing weaker. I took a deep breath, and started to drag myself back across the room, my pencil in hand.

"You will not live to finish the story," he said. "Do you understand that, Francis? You will not live. I will not allow it. You think you can write the ending here, Francis? You make me laugh. The ending belongs to me, It always has. It always will"

I didn't know what to think. His threat was as real at that moment as it was so many years earlier. But I struggled forward and thought I had to try. I wished Peter was here to help, and he must have been able to read my mind. Or perhaps I moaned Peter's name out loud, and wasn't aware of it, because the Angel laughed again. "He can't help you this time. He's dead."

Chapter 30

Peter hustled through the Amherst Building corridor, sticking his head into the dayroom, pausing outside the examination rooms, taking a quick glance into the dining area, dodging clusters of patients, searching either for Francis or Lucy Jones, neither of whom seemed to be anywhere close by. He had the overwhelming sensation that something was happening that was critical, but that he was being prevented from witnessing. He had a sudden recollection of walking through the jungle in Vietnam. At war, the sky above, the moist earth beneath his feet, the superheated air and clammy foliage that caressed his clothes, all seemed the same as they were every day, but that there was no way of knowing, other than some otherworldly sixth sense, that around a corner there might be a sniper in a tree, or a waiting ambush, or perhaps just a nearly invisible wire stretched across the trail, patiently awaiting an errant step to trigger a buried mine. Everything was routine, everything was in place and ordinary, just as it was supposed to be, except for the hidden thing that promised tragedy. That was what he saw in the hospital world surrounding him.

For a moment, he paused by one of the barred windows, where an old man in a dull steel wheelchair had been left unattended. The man had a little white line of spittle meandering down his chin, where it mixed with gray stubble. His eyes were fixed on the outside land beyond the window, and Peter asked him, "What can you see, old man?" but he got no response. Rivulets of rain distorted the view, and past those haphazard streaks, it seemed there was little but a gray, damp, muffled day. Peter reached down and took a piece of brown paper towel from the man's lap and wiped his chin. The man didn't look toward Peter, but nodded, as if grateful. But the old man remained a blank slate. Whatever he might have been thinking about his present, remembering from his past or even planning for his future, was all lost in whatever fog had descended right behind his eyes. Peter thought there was little more of permanence to the man's remaining days than those raindrops dripping down the windowpane.

Behind him, a woman with long, unkempt, and wild gray-streaked hair flowing electrically from her head lurching from right to left down the corridor a little drunkenly, suddenly stopped, looked up at the ceiling, and said, "Cleo's gone. She's gone forever…" before putting her engine back into its never-ceasing gear and moving off.

Peter headed into the dormitory area. Not much of a home, he told himself. One day, he thought to himself. Two days. That was all it would take. A flurry of paperwork, a handshake or a nod of the head. A "good luck," and that would be it. Peter the Fireman would be shipped out and something different would take over his life.

He was a little unsure what to think. The world of the hospital did that to one rapidly, he thought. It engendered indecisiveness. In the real world, decisions were clear-cut and at least had the potential to be honest. Factors could be measured, assessed, and balanced. Decisions reached. But inside the walls and locked doors, none of that seemed the same.

Lucy had cut her hair and rendered it blond. If that didn't bring out the predatory urge in the man they hunted, he didn't know what would. Peter gritted his teeth for a second, grinding them together. He looked up at the ceiling, a little like a motorist waiting for the light to change from red to green. He thought Lucy was taking a chance. Francis, too, he thought, was walking a narrow line. Of the three of them, he understood, he had risked the least. In fact, he was hard-pressed to see how he had risked anything yet. Certainly, he hadn't put himself into any jeopardy that he could readily see.

Peter turned and left the room. When he exited into the hallway, he spotted Lucy Jones, hovering outside their small office, and he hurried in her direction.

One after another, the release hearings had progressed all morning and into the afternoon. They were a theater of the expected; Francis swiftly understood that if you had arranged all the factors necessary to qualify for a hearing, the likelihood was that you were going to be released. The charade that he was watching was a bureaucratic opera, designed to make certain that unforeseeable risks weren't taken and careers unnecessarily threatened. No one wanted to release someone who promptly descended into a psychotic rage.

The bored young man from the prosecutor's office reviewed any legal cases outstanding against the patients in a perfunctory fashion; everything he said was uniformly objected to by the equally young man from the public defender's office, serving as patient advocate, and who wore the ardent behavior of a do-gooder. More critical to the hearing panel was the assessment from the hospital staff and the recommendation from the young woman from the state Department of Mental Health, still hunting through her folders and notes, and who spoke in a hesitant, half-stuttering fashion, Francis thought, which made a weird sense to him, because she was really being asked whether it was safe to release someone, and she actually had no idea. "Is he a danger to himself, or to others?" It was like a church litany. Sure it was safe, he thought, if they kept up their medications and they didn't walk directly back into the same circumstances which had driven them mad in the first place. Of course, these were the only circumstances available, so that it was hard to be very optimistic about anyone's actual chances beyond the hospital walls.

Patients were released. Patients came back. A boomerang of madness.

Francis shifted about in his chair, still bent forward, listening intently to every word spoken, watching the faces of every patient, every physician, every parent, brother, sister, or cousin who rose to speak. Within his heart he felt nothing but turmoil and chaos. His voices threatened to send him spiraling into some dark, deeply pained place. They shouted desperately for him to leave. Insistent, screeching, pleading, begging, demanding all equally fervent, almost hysterical in their desire. It was, he thought, like being trapped within the pit of some hellish orchestra, where every instrument played louder and more harshly, more utterly out of tune with every passing second.

He understood why. Occasionally, he would close his eyes, trying to get some rest. But it didn't help much. He continued sweating, feeling every muscle in his entire body tensed. That no one had as yet seen the struggle he was trapped within surprised him for he thought anyone who truly looked at him would see in an instant that he was teetering on some razor edge.