was why Jessica Coran was interested in such men as Matisak. The good doctor's reasons were far from pure. She, like Stainlype, wanted to take power from men… and maybe Stainlype was right.
“ How else could she have overpowered Matisak?” Stainlype had asked, hammering home the point. “It was she who put Matisak away.”
“ She says that we-me and her-could do some good,” he had tried to explain to Stainlype. “That together, we could help stop killings in the future. That's power, Dr. Coran says, to alter what's going to happen.”
Stainlype caused a milky white froth to bubble up from his stomach and over his lips, and she was shouting at the same time, “That mind-whore is looking for a mental fuck, Gerald. She is fucking your head, you stupid bastard.”
Down the hall from Gerald's cell, a guard was on the phone with Dr. Gabriel Arnold, excitedly saying, “It's Sims, sir!.. Yes, yes, he's getting agitated again.”
At the other end, Dr. Arnold leaned back into the folds of his high-backed, cushioned chair, sighed heavily and looked around the book-tiered room with its polished, modern milieu beating out a rhythm that spoke of comfort and longevity. He'd survived as head of psychiatric disciplines at the federal facility since it opened its doors in 1979, and now with a staff numbering seven and two part-time internists, not to mention his teaching duties at nearby Philadelphia University, he was dug in and in control.
“ Talking to himself again, or rather to Stainlype, is he?” asked Dr. Arnold.
“ More like cursing and shouting, sir.”
“ Well, we've all seen that before.”
“ Spitting up, too, sir.”
“ Spitting up?”
“ White stuff, sir, all over the glass.”
“ Christ,” moaned Arnold. “Look, take two men and get in there. Restrain the bastard before he hurts himself.”
“ Full restraints, sir?”
“ Yes. Now go! I'll be right down.”
“ Yes, sir, Dr. Arnold.”
Arnold took a moment to clean his glasses with a handkerchief and then wiped excess grease from his forehead. He buzzed his secretary, telling her where he would be, and after a moment's hesitation over a file he'd been looking through before Lewis had called, he got up and went for the elevator that would carry him to lockup. When he got to level H, the doors opened and he stepped out, calling to a guard with keys to follow him. He had to pass through three security checks and locked doors. Disregarding any paperwork, as it was in the nature of an emergency, he was passed through without the usual sign-ins, which even he had to adhere to, under normal circumstances.
Over the comlink, he could hear the commotion up ahead. Lewis was calling for backup and, thinking himself off the comlink, he added, “Shit, we got to jump through hoops every time one of these freaks goes off his bean.”
Arnold had just reached one of the TV monitors when his attention was riveted by a strange sound like that of a huge kettledrum. Arnold stared in horror, seeing Sims repeatedly throw himself viciously against the glass, totally out of control, sending up a chorus of gong sounds.
“ Lewis! Lewis!” Arnold began screaming through the comlink, and the entire cell block went into bedlam. Over the chorus of catcalls, Arnold clearly heard Matt Matisak's voice, shouting, “Do it, Gerald! Do it right! Do it, babe!”
Sim's face was already a mask of red, his nose broken and blood covering his scalp, when Dr. Arnold stormed to the guards who stood transfixed and staring in at the sight of a man killing himself against the blood-streaked, smeared glass.
The pooooooong, pooooooong, pooooooong beat was punctuated by a bone-crushing counterpoint-Sims' skull cracking. Any normal man would by now be sprawled out and unconscious, but some demonic force within kept hurtling the man's body-as if independent of him-into the killing wall of glass. With each crashing gong sound, the other inmates cheered. Matisak roared out, “Stainlype one, Gerald zip.” Hideous laughter filled the cell block.
Then the pongs stopped abruptly and Gerald Ray Sims' bloodied form slid Jell-O-like down the face of the filthy glass and into a formless heap on the floor.
“ Get the hell in there!” cried Arnold.
Lewis had been fighting with the key in an uncontrollable hand, but now the cell door came open.
“ Careful, Lewis!” shouted Matisak from two cells away. “Sims may be dead but Stainlype isn't!”
“ Shut up, Matisak!” Arnold replied.
“ You touch Sims and Stainlype's going to get you!” Matisak shouted, and laughed, causing a chain reaction of barking and laughter from the row of inmates.
Arnold ordered the other two guards inside with Lewis. They must get Sims to the infirmary immediately. Lewis, without touching the body, replied, “He's dead, sir.”
“ Check for a pulse!” shouted Arnold, pushing his way past the guards and doing it himself, getting Sims' blood all over his hands and white lab coat.
“ Watch you don't get his blood on you, boys!” shouted Matisak, whose voice was ominously muffled here in Sims' cell. “One drop of it and you could be Stainlype. It's like AIDS, you know, what he has… contracted through the blood. If you want. Dr. Arnold, I'll drink it all up for you, so you don't have to worry.”
Arnold was trying desperately to ignore Matisak. “He's dead, all right… Bloody fool killed himself.”
“ Stainlype killed him!” Matisak shouted.
“ Well, don't just stand about, you men!” said Arnold. “Get this… cleaned up.”
The guards hesitated, not wanting to touch Sims. Hardened, seasoned men, they shied from any thought of touching him. They had all come to feel superstitious about this thing that had hold of Sims. Could it possibly be catching? Sims had said it, and now Matisak said it, and what they had seen also said it could be.
“ Lewis?”
Lewis, the senior man, crouched over the body and told Dr. Arnold it would be taken care of.
“ There'll be papers to fill out, reports, no doubt an investigation into the man's death.”
Lewis said to another of the guards, “Haines, get a stretcher from the infirmary. Malone, get what you need and clean this place up.”
Both junior men looked relieved and neither man hesitated leaving. Dr. Arnold quietly and slowly left behind them, leaving Lewis alone with the devil at his feet. A creeping, eerie feeling began to invade Lewis' insides, moving outward from his abdomen, climbing up his spine one vertebra at a time as his skin began to prickle, sweat and cool. He felt an odd sensation verging on fear, an emotion he had never allowed a moment's sway with him in his life. He recalled Sims' left eye, just before he died, looking out at him as if he were the only man in the room. Lewis thought he had seen something there, a ghostly sliver of curling smoke wisping up and away from the raw, red cranium, like a lingering ring of smoke… something escaping.
When they carried Sims' body out on the stretcher, his disfigured face was covered with a white sheet. A brownish purple stain rose and grew where the sheet clung to the sticky face. Carrying Sims out past the other madmen brought on a new wave of cheers, hoots, laughter and remarks.
“ Did he shit his pants?”
“ What're you going to do with him?”
“ Dissect him, dummy. We're all going to have our heads cut open and studied at close range someday.”
“ Is that true, Lewis? Lewis?”
Matisak had the last word as they passed from the cell block. “You know Stainlype's got you now, don't you, Lewis?”?
Two
The heavyset man in the seat beside her kept staring, and his eyes played over Dr. Jessica Coran's inconvenient, pearl-handled cane. It was a gift from those who knew that her long recovery had been filled with
