Chapter 33

Apollo!" I said out loud.

In mythology, he was the sun god whose swift. chariot signaled the coming of day. It was what we needed that night, two things that were generally in short supply in the world of the mental hospital: Speed and clarity.

"Apollo," I said a second time. I must have been shouting.

The word reverberated off the walls of my apartment, racing into the corners, leaping up to the ceiling. It was a uniquely wondrous word, one that rolled off my tongue with a strength of memory that fueled my own resolve. It had been twenty years since the night I'd last spoken it out loud, and I wondered if it wouldn't do the same for me this night, as it did then.

The Angel bellowed in rage. Glass shattered around me, steel groaned and twisted as if being consumed by fire. The floor shook, the walls buckled, the ceiling swayed. My entire world was ripping apart, shredding into pieces around me, as his fury consumed him. I clutched my head, pushing my hands over my ears, trying to drown out the cacophony of destruction around me. Things were breaking, crumbling and exploding, disintegrating beneath my feet. I was in the midst of some terrifying battlefield, and my own voices were like the cries of doomed men surrounding me. I buried my head for a moment in my hands, trying to duck the shrapnel of remembrance.

On that night twenty years earlier, the Angel had been right about so much. He had foreseen everything Lucy would do; he understood precisely how Peter would behave; he knew exactly what the Moses brothers would agree to and help arrange. He was intimate with the hospital and how if affected everyone's thinking. What the Angel comprehended better than anyone else was how routine and organized and drearily predictable everything was that sane people would do. He knew the plan they would come up with would leave him with isolation, quiet, and opportunity. What they had thought was a trap for him was actually the most ideal of circumstances. He was, far more than they, a student of psychology and a student of death and he was immune to their earthbound plans. To take her by surprise required him only to not try to surprise her. She had willingly set herself up; it must have thrilled him to know she would do that. And on that night, he knew murder would be in his hands, directly in front of him, ready like some weed that had sprouted up, to be plucked. He had spent years patiently preparing for the time that he would have Lucy beneath his knife once again, and he had considered almost every factor, every dimension, every consideration except, oddly the most obvious but the most forgettable.

What he hadn't counted on were the crazy folks.

I squeezed my eyes shut with recollection. I was a little unsure whether it was all happening in the past or in the present, in the hospital or in the apartment. It was all coming back to me, this night and that night, one and the same.

Peter was shouting deep, guttural noises, as he bent the door from its lock, the hulking retarded man wordlessly straining and sweating at his side. Beside me, Napoleon, Newsman, all the others, were arranged, like a chorus, waiting for my next direction. I could see them quiver and shake with fear and excitement, for they, more than anyone, understood that it was a night unlikely to ever be repeated, a night where fantasies and imagination, hallucination, and delusion all came true.

And Lucy, so few feet away, but alone with the man who'd thought of nothing except her death for so long, feeling the knife at her throat, knew that she needed to keep stealing seconds.

Lucy tried to think past the cold of the knife and the sharpness of the blade as it dug at her skin, a terrible sensation that reached deeply into the heat of the moment, and crippled her ability to reason. Down the hallway she could hear the noise of metal being bent, as the locked door was savaged, groaning with complaint as Peter and the retarded man assaulted it with the bed frame. It yielded slowly, hesitant to open up and let loose rescue. But above that noise, rising into the air beyond, she could hear the word Apollo being sung by the men in the dormitory, which gave her a wisp of hope.

"What does it mean?" the Angel demanded fiercely. That he had patience amid the sudden arrival of noise in what had been such a sleeping world, frightened her as much as anything.

"What?"

"What does it mean!" he asked, his voice growing lower, harsher. He did not need to attach a threat to his words, Lucy thought. The tone was clear enough. She kept repeating to herself buy time! And so she hesitated.

"It's a cry for help," she said.

"What?"

"They need help," she repeated.

"Why do they…" and then he stopped. He looked down at her, his face contorting. Even in the blackness of the floor of the nurse's station, she could see creases in his face, lines and shadows, each that spoke of terror. Once he'd worn a mask as he terrorized her, but now, she understood he wants to be seen because he expects that he will be the last thing I ever see. She gasped for breath, and she moaned beyond the pain of her swollen lips and ravaged jaw.

"They know you're here." She spit the words between blood. "They're coming for you."

"Who?"

"All the crazy men down the hall," she said.

The Angel bent down to her. "Do you know how quickly you can die here, Lucy?" he asked.

She nodded. She didn't think she should answer that question because her words might invite the reality. The blade of the knife bit into her skin, and she could feel her flesh parting ever so slightly beneath its pressure. It was a terrifying sensation, and one that she remembered with an awful intimacy from the first terrible night that she'd had with the Angel so many years earlier.

"Do you know that I can do anything I want, Lucy, and you are powerless to do anything about it?"

Again, she kept her mouth closed.

"Do you know that I could have walked up to you at any point during your stay here in this hospital and killed you right in front of everyone, and all they would have said was "He's crazy…" and no one would have blamed me? That's what your own law says, Lucy, surely you know that?"

"Then go ahead and kill me," she said stiffly. "Just like you did Short Blond and those other women."

He put his head down closer, so that she could feel his breath against her face. The same motion that a lover would make, leaving his partner asleep as he went off in some early hour on some distant task. "I would never kill you like them, Lucy," he hissed. "They died to bring you to me. They were simply part of a design. Their deaths were just business. Necessary, but not remarkable. If I'd wanted you to die like them, I could have killed you a hundred times. A thousand. Think of all the moments you've been alone in the dark. Maybe you weren't alone all those times. Maybe I was at your side, you just didn't know it. But I wanted this night to happen in my own way. I wanted you to come to me."

She did not reply. She felt caught up in the vortex of the Angel's sickness and hatred, and she spun around, feeling her grip on life loosening with each revolution.

"It was so terribly easy," he hissed. "Create a series of murders that the hotshot young prosecutor couldn't help but be attracted to. You just never knew that they meant nothing and you' meant everything, did you Lucy?"

She groaned in reply.

From down the hallway, the door being torn at emitted a great rending sound. The Angel looked up, searching with his eyes in the direction of the noise through the darkness that hung in the corridor. In this moment's hesitation, Lucy knew her life hung in balance. He had wanted minutes in the deep of night to luxuriate in her death. He had seen it all, right from the way he'd approached her, to the attack, and then beyond that. He'd fantasized and envisioned every word he would speak, every touch, every slice, every awful cut along her path to dying. It had all been a hallucination, in his mind every second of every waking moment, that he was compelled to make real. It was what made him powerful, fearless, and every inch the assassin that he was. Everything in his being had been directed to that space in time. But it wasn't happening quite the way he'd perfected it in his mind, day after day, through every turn, planning, anticipating, sensing the deliciousness of death when he delivered it. She could feel his muscles tensing as he was caught in a contradiction between what was real and what was fantasy. All she had left to hope for was that the real would take over. She didn't know if there was enough time.