the phone. She waited for a few seconds, just long enough to let the silence creep over her with a clammy enveloping sensation, and then she took the key and went down to the men's dormitory. As quietly as she could, she slipped the key into the door lock and turned it once, hearing a distant click. She took a deep breath, and then went back to the nursing station and began to wait for something to happen.
Peter sat wide-awake and cross-legged on his bunk. He heard the click of the lock tumblers being turned, and knew this meant Lucy had unlocked the door. He imagined her in his mind's eye rapidly walking back down to the nursing station. Lucy was so striking, from her height, her scar, the way she carried herself, it was easy for Peter to picture her every move. He strained, trying to hear the sound of her footsteps, but was unable. The noise of the room filled with sleeping men, tangled up in sheets and various despairs, overwhelmed any modest sound from out in the corridor. Too much snoring, heavy breathing, talking in their sleep going on around him to pick out and isolate noise. He guessed this might be a problem, and so, when he was persuaded that all around him were locked in whatever unsettled, uneven sleep they were going to get, he, silently unfolded himself and gingerly picked his way past the forms of men and came to the door. He did not dare open it, for he thought that the noise might awaken someone, no matter how drugged they were. Instead, what Peter did was simply slide down, back against the adjacent wall, so that he was sitting on the floor, waiting for a sound that was out of the ordinary, or the word that signaled the arrival of the Angel.
He wished he had a weapon. A gun, he thought, would be helpful. Even a baseball bat or a policeman's baton. He reminded himself that the Angel would wield a knife, and he would need to stay clear of the man's reach until the Moses brothers arrived, Security was called, and success had been achieved.
Lucy, he guessed, would not have agreed to her performance without some assistance. She had not said she would be armed, but he suspected she was.
The edge they had, though, was in surprise and numbers. It would, he imagined, be sufficient.
Peter stole a glance at Francis and shook his head. The younger man seemed to be asleep, which he thought was a good thing. He regretted that he was leaving Francis behind, but felt that probably, all in all, it was going to be better for him. Since the arrival of the Angel at his bedside an event Peter still wasn't certain had actually taken place it seemed to him that Francis had been increasingly flaky, and increasingly less in control. C-Bird had been descending along some route that Peter could only guess at, and surely wanted no part of. It made him sad to see what was happening to his friend, and be powerless to do anything about it. Francis had taken Cleo's death very hard, Peter thought, and more than any of them seemed to have developed an unhealthy obsession with finding the Angel. It was a little as if Francis's need to find the killer signaled something different and immense to the younger man. It was something well beyond determination, and something dangerous.
Peter, of course, was wrong about that. Obsession truly lay with Lucy, but he did not want to see that.
He leaned his head back against the wall, closing his eyes for a moment. He felt fatigue running through his veins, parallel to excitement. He understood that much was about to change in his life, that night, the following morning. Within him, Peter pushed away many memories, and he wondered what was next in his own story. At the same time, he continued to listen carefully, waiting for a signal from Lucy.
He wondered if, after that night, he would ever see her again.
A few feet away, Francis lay rigid on his own bunk, perfectly aware that Peter had silently moved past him and taken up a position near the door. He knew sleep was very distant, but death was not, and he breathed in slowly, steadily, waiting for something he could feel was utterly inevitable to occur. Something that was set in stone, planned and plotted, measured out, deciphered and designed. He felt as if he was caught up in a current, dragging him someplace far closer to who he was, or who he could be, and that he was helpless to swim against the tide.
We were all exactly where the Angel expected us to be. I wanted to write that down, but did not. It went beyond the idea that we had simply taken up places on a stage, and were feeling that last rush of anxiety before the curtain rises, wondering whether our lines were memorized, whether our movements were choreographed, whether we would hit our marks and follow our cues. The Angel knew where we were physically, but deeper still. He knew where we were in our hearts.
Except, perhaps, for me, because my heart was so confused.
I rocked back and forth, moaning, like a wounded man on a battlefield who wants to call for help, but can manage only some deep sound of pain. I was kneeling on the floor, the wall space dwindling in front of me, as were the words I had available.
Around me, the Angel roared, his voice like a torrent, drowning out my protests. He shouted, 'I knew. I knew. You were all so stupid… so, normal… so sane!' His voice seemed to rebound off the walls, gain momentum in the shadows and then pummel me like blows. 'I was none of those things! I was so much greater!'
Then, as I lowered my head and squeezed shut my eyes, I yelled out, 'Not me…' which made little sense, but the sound of my own voice contending with his gave me a momentary burst of adrenaline. I took a breath, waiting for some pain to be sent my way, but when it did not come, I looked up, and saw the room suddenly bursting with light. Explosions, star bursts like phosphorous shells in the distance, tracers racing through darkness, a battle in the dark.
'Tell me!' I demanded, my voice raised above the sounds of fighting. The world of my little apartment seemed to buckle and sway with the violence of war.
The Angel was around me, everywhere, enveloping me. I gritted my teeth. 'Tell me!' I called out again, as loudly as I could.
Then a softly dangerous voice, whispered in my ear. 'You know the answers, C-Bird. You could see them that night. You just don't want to admit to them, do you, Francis?'
'No,' I cried out.
'You don't want to say what C-Bird knew in that bunk bed that night because it would mean Francis has to kill himself now, wouldn't it?'
I could not answer. Tears and sobs wracked my body.
'You will have to die. What other answer is there, C-Bird? Because you knew the answers that night, didn't you?'
I could feel spiraling agony throughout my body when I whispered the only reply I knew that might quiet the voice of the Angel.
'It was not about Short Blond, was it?' I asked. 'It never was.'
He laughed. A laugh of truth. An awful, ripping noise, as if something was being broken that could never be repaired.
'What else did C-Bird see that night?' the Angel asked.
I remembered lying in my bed. Beyond stillness, as rigid as any catatonic frozen in some terrible vision of the world, unwilling to move, unwilling to speak, unwilling to do anything but breathe, because as I lay there, I saw the whole world of death that the Angel had woven together. Peter was at the door. Lucy was in the nursing station. The Moses brothers were upstairs. Everyone was alone, isolated, separated, and vulnerable. And who was most vulnerable? Lucy.
'Short Blond,' I stammered. 'She was just…'
'A part of a puzzle. You saw it C-Bird. It's the same this night as it was then.' The Angel's voice boomed with authority.
I could barely speak, because I knew the words I grasped right then were the same that came to me that night so many years earlier. One. Two. Three. And then Short Blond. What did all those deaths do? They inevitably brought Lucy to a place where she was alone, in the dark, in the midst of a world that was ruled not by logic, sanity, or organization, no matter what Gulptilil or Evans or Peter or the Moses brothers or anyone in authority at the Western State Hospital might think. It was an arctic world ruled by the Angel.
The Angel snarled and kicked at me. He had been vaporous, ghostlike before. But this blow landed hard. I groaned in sudden pain, and then struggled back to my knees and crawled back to the wall. I could barely hold the pencil in my hand. It was what I saw in the darkness that night.
Midnight crept closer. Hours that slowed to a crawl. Night that seized the world around
