Jimmy responded by yet again picking up speed. "So the guy's stressed and he overreacted. Don't make a big deal of it."

"Do you think I'm acting like an asshole and getting in the way of the good guys?"

Jimmy started to laugh. "You want a professional opinion from a chaplain, or something more personal?"

Earl strained to keep up. Sweat had already soaked through his clothing despite the temperature having dropped with the afternoon showers. "What I want to know, Jimmy, is if you've had a talk with him like you did with me, and coaxed him into the service of some greater good, such as making certain that suitably deserving widows and orphans collect money from insurance companies without any troublesome questions or delays."

"I'd think that would be the job of any responsible doctor toward a patient."

"I know you, Jimmy. In another age you'd have been a swashbuckler, a musketeer, a wielder of the sword of justice in a fight for the downtrodden, beholden only to the laws of God."

"Sounds like my kind of guy. What's wrong with that?"

"What's wrong is that you might not be above tweaking man-made regulations, especially if they stood in the way of a righteous cause."

"I believe these days we call that civil disobedience, and a noble activity it is. But no, I've not led Michael astray. Now are you goin' to start running, or is hobblin' along like this as fast as an old man like yourself can do?" He pulled away into the gray haze until his form had no more substance than smoke.

How flippant would he be if he knew Michael might be taking favors from the damsels in distress? Earl wondered, and dug harder. He managed to accelerate up the slope and pull abreast again. "What about Stewart?"

"What about him?"

"You heard Yablonsky's accusation. Do you know if he's been up to anything in Palliative Care?"

"You're not serious."

"Something's going on up there. Increased death rates don't lie."

"They're supposed to die."

"You sound like Hurst."

"Now don't be gettin' nasty with me."

"Then what's going on, Jimmy?"

"Did you ever talk to any of the patients you brought back from a cardiac arrest?"

"Sure, sometimes."

"What did they tell you they remembered?"

"Sometimes nothing. Others gave the usual story of rising above their bodies, a bright light at the end of a tunnel…"

"And what do you make of those stories, Earl?"

"If you mean do I think they're proof of an afterlife, I'm afraid not."

"Neither do I. I made a point of reading up on it. Interesting how neurologists think it's got to do with neurotransmitters, certain parts of the brain being stimulated or losing the blood supply to the outside of the retina first, and the optic nerve last, creating the image of a dark tunnel with a bright light at the end. But there are some stories that can't be explained by chemicals, physiology, or anatomy. Did any of the patients you talked to ever tell you about the dark man?"

"What?"

"The dark man. A person dressed in black hovering around the end of their bed."

Earl chuckled. "No."

"You wouldn't laugh if they had, yet I'm not surprised they didn't. It's not in any of the published accounts either, not even Stewart's, though I suspect when researchers refer to subjects who report frightening images, had those descriptions been specific, the dark man would be as common to near-death as lights and tunnels. But people don't feel comfortable in getting too detailed about that sort of thing unless it's with chaplains, figuring we're bound by belief to be sympathetic, not scoff at it."

"What do they see exactly? A guy in a black hood with a scythe?"

"The figure usually wears loose-fitting clothes, always black, and the face is mainly in shadow. Except for the eyes. They're all too visible and have an icy vastness to them that people feel sucked into when he comes closer. At the same time they feel their skin burning hot."

"Ischemia," Earl muttered.

"What?"

"The burning feeling is from ischemia. The lack of blood in muscle and skin results in a buildup of metabolic acids. They burn like fire." Exactly the way my legs are now, he nearly added, but until the priest came up with a few more answers he didn't want Jimmy to know how easy it would be to leave him behind.

"Maybe you're right about the heat, but nothing explains the fear. Everybody who reported seeing the dark man seemed more terrified at the prospect of him waiting for them the next time than they were of dying."

"Don't tell me you believe there's something to tales like that. And what the hell do they have to do with Stewart?"

"I'm just suggesting that people who venture near death and return can find the experience very traumatic. The accounts from Palliative Care about someone badgering patients as they hovered on the brink may be a variation of the dark man encounters. The last thing I'd do is try to link Stewart to them."

Jimmy's words silenced Earl. Perhaps they were meant to. Because if the priest had done his homework, he'd know that Earl had had his own encounter with near death seven years ago. He still tried to avoid thinking about it. Certainly the memory of it remained traumatic. But no dark man had awaited him. Instead he'd felt death as a dilutent, as if he were being thinned out, like a drop of water returning to the ocean. And as Jimmy had said, he seldom wanted to talk about it. Maybe that's what didn't make sense. "But how could it be the dark man, Jimmy, with so many patients suddenly willing to tell the nurses about him?"

The priest answered by pulling ahead.

Earl thought, Aha! Got him, and tried to keep up.

But in a hundred paces the fire in his lower legs spread to his thighs and the inside of his lungs.

He slowed and came to a stop. The scuff of Jimmy's shoes on the gravel underfoot faded into the distance.

"You can't avoid me forever about Stewart, Jimmy," he shouted after him. "And if you have recruited Michael on some quest, I think he's out of his depth."

"Relax, Earl." The words floated back to him like a message out of the ether.

Earl caught his breath and started to walk back along the path toward St. Paul's. The muffled traffic noises on the freeway came at him from the front, and a guttural roll of thunder originating far out over the lake rumbled up behind him.

Either Jimmy really had no idea what Michael and Stewart were up to or he'd become a hell of a good actor. Or maybe Earl hadn't a clue as to what was going on, had gotten it all wrong in the first place, and had been the one who'd swum out of his depth.

Ten minutes later he passed the smoked-glass entrance to the Horseshoe Bar and Grill. Up ahead the bulk of St. Paul's loomed in the thick gray smog, a giant hive of tiny lights. For an instant he felt overwhelmed at the sight. Who could really know all the enigmas of the place? A big teaching hospital held more human emotions per cubic foot of air than any edifice on earth. Always at the core were the patients- they numbered eight hundred here- their thoughts closer to their own mortality than ever before, yet they came and went, changing every ten days on average, each set of newcomers bringing a whole host of different dreams and fears. Then there were the healers. In addition to laboring over their charges, they lugged around the personal baggage of ambitions and desires, everything from a need to do good works, find love, and win the wealth of success, to far less noble pursuits- right down to settling old scores, nursing slights, or exacting revenge, usually in petty little ways, but sometimes on a more serious scale. Most agendas focused on the mundane issues of life, such as putting food on the table and how to get laid Saturday night, but they were legion in number and sometimes led to their own league of trouble. Who broke which rules to satisfy what appetites? There often could be no way of telling, and through all that complexity, he'd no more chance to see the thread of a single coherent motive than to track the purpose of an individual ant in a swarming nest.