He licked his lips, and Starlene saw why the children compared him to a reptile. 'We do the best we can,' she said.
'Goddamned right we do.' On the fourth try, the key slid in the lock and the hasp popped free. 'We're in service of the Lord but all these layers of deception get in the way of the real work. You know what that work is?'
'Healing. Loving. Caring.'
He banged his foot against the door and it swung open. 'Hell, no. The real job is about looking good on paper. That's what brings in the money. That's why Kracowski is the best thing that ever happened to Wendover.'
Bondurant shouted up the stairwell. 'You hear that, Kracowski? You're the best goddamned thing that ever happened.'
Starlene stood clear of Bondurant, who swayed and leaned against the doorjamb. She couldn't resist looking past him into the dark basement.
Bondurant held out his hand and gave a wiggly grin. ''Fraidofthedark?'
More afraid of YOU, she wanted to say, but this might be her only chance to see inside the basement. Vicky and Freeman had been trying to tell her something, but she'd been unable to cut through her own educated biases to listen. Maybe her faith was a bias, too. Now the door was open. It was up to her to walk through.
'She smiled at me,' Bondurant said spraying her with his liquor spittle.
'Who?'
'The woman. The woman in the wall.'
Starlene barely heard him, because she saw a glow emanating from inside the basement. It was an eerie, diseased half-light. She felt herself being drawn forward almost against her will. Behind her, Bondurant pressed close against her, his stench as repellent as his body heat.
'She's here,' he whispered and closed the door behind them. Starlene knew this was dangerous, that the drunken fool might do something embarrassing, but her fears were overwhelmed by what she saw before her.
The metal tanks themselves would have been cause for wonder, set in rows with coils and wires around each. The wiring that Vicky had tried to describe circumvented the ceiling, and several sizes of conduit ran overhead. An array of expensive-looking machinery lined the walls behind the tanks. The technology was a vivid contrast to the musty gray of the stone foundation, but that wasn't what caused Starlene's blood to freeze in her veins.
An old woman, Bondurant's 'woman in the wall,' stood in the glow of the generator components.
The woman had an ugly scar across her forehead her facial wrinkles so deep that it looked to be the work of several hundred years of gravity. The woman's eyes were set back in her skull like the openings of small caves, holes that allowed no light to enter. From the tattered condition of the woman's robe, she looked severely neglected.
Starlene's first instinct was to help the woman. 'What are you doing here?'
The woman's mouth opened, as slow as dust. Bondurant had pulled a flask from somewhere and was busy assaulting his central nervous system. 'She lives here,' he said, after removing the flask from his lips.
'Here?' Beyond the tanks set in the middle of the room, a series of dark corridors broke off from the main floor area. Starlene saw a few doors that promised even deeper shadows.
'When she's not in the walls, I mean,' Bondurant said.
The woman's lips moved again, slowly, and Starlene thought the woman had spoken. Maybe sound wasn't what the woman emitted, because the top of Starlene's spinal column tingled and the words 'A white, white room in which to write' flitted across her head and were gone. Except the voice had been a man's, not an old woman's.
Bondurant put his arm around Starlene, the gesture more boozy and paternalistic than sexual. 'We got plenty down here. They're the best kind of patients you could think of. Don't have to feed them, they never complain, and no Social Services bastards breathing down your neck.'
'You mean they stay down here?' The cobwebs, the stained concrete floor, and the wet smell of corruption made the basement seem more suited for a colony of rats.
'They don't stay here all the time. They used to, then they got in the walls. And now, sometimes, they get out.' Bondurant waved his hand toward the ceiling, indicating the rooms above them.
They took it by hook and by crook.
The words were there, inside Starlene's head, like voice-over edited into a movie soundtrack. The woman's lips hadn't moved, but Starlene was sure the words had been the woman's.
I got half a mind to tell somebody about it, what they did. But I only got half a mind.
Maybe Freeman had been telling the truth. He'd exhibited some remarkable guess work during his session with her. But mind reading was a little too loopy, a little too unnatural, a little too much like something God would never allow. Yet so were old men who walked on water and disappeared. And shadowy secret agent types making deals with doctors. And expensive equipment bidden in an underfunded children's home.
'Who are you?' Starlene asked the woman.
The woman said nothing, just turned her stooped body and shuffled back towards the shadows. It was only after she'd reached the throat of the widest corridor that Starlene's legs obeyed her brain enough to follow.
'You don't want to go back there,' Bondurant said.
'She needs help,' Starlene said, angry. 'How could you stand it, knowing she was living down here in this filth?'
Bondurant's drunken laughter bounced off the stone walls. 'I don't think 'living' is the right word.'
Starlene paused in mid-stride, and stood breathless in the center of the metal cylinders. Ahead of her, the woman had faded to nothing.
The woman's final words reverberated inside the bone cave of Starlene's skull: Got half a mind. Off to find the other half.
TWENTY-TWO
'Starlene went down there,' Freeman said. The sound on the rec room TV was turned down, and a cat food commercial was playing. He looked out the window at the sun sinking behind the impossibly distant mountains. Eastwood in Escape from Alcatraz.
Vicky had 'finished' her meal, and the counselors hadn't noticed that she'd only eaten one teaspoonful of food. Freeman had no appetite, so they left the cafeteria early. They were allowed to wait in the rec room near the offices while the rest of the kids ate. Randy had cast a suspicious eye at them, but then had to go break up a shouting match between Raymond and a second-string goon who was probably making a play for Deke's vacated throne.
'I guess Starlene can find out for herself,' Vicky said.
'You can't talk any sense into a grown-up's head. They already think they know everything.'
'She's not so bad. Not like The Liz or Doctor Krackpot.'
'Who do you think those people down there are?'
Freeman looked at the ugly swirl rug beneath his feet. He narrowed his focus, deliberately keeping his attention above floor level. He was pretty sure he wasn't keen enough to triptrap into the heads of the people underneath, but he didn't want to take the chance right now. 'I'm not sure, but they're somehow wrong?'
'Do you believe in ghosts?'
'No, but that doesn't mean that ghosts don't believe in me. I didn't believe in ESP, either, until it jumped up and bit me.'
'Do you believe in anything else?'
'Sometimes.'
Vicky sat back in the worn armchair and crossed her thin legs. 'When it's dark and all the other girls are asleep, I talk to God.'
'Now that's what I call ESP.'
