the hall. Along with Dr. Bellamy himself, the inspectors ran to the source of the screams, out of breath and frightened that something terrible was going on. What they found was that Gus had commandeered the nurse's station loudspeaker microphone and was filling all the speakers with his great imitation of a guy being strangled to death, a trick he'd picked up from an episode on
Gus later explained that he was just trying to have a little fun and was sorry that some of the patients had got so scared and that some of the staff had suffered injuries trying to calm down some of the more violent patients. But, hey, if you couldn't have a little fun in a mental hospital, where the hell could you have fun?
Following this last incident, Gus was made PRN, short for the Latin phrase pro re nata, which means 'as needed'-Gus's personal doctor had given the nurses at Hastings permission to shoot Gus up with 100 mg of Thorazine anytime they felt he needed it. As when Gus went fruitcakes on them three or four times a week, peeing in glasses of orange juice and then drinking them down, finding rats in the closets and killing them and then putting them in other patients' drawers so the vermin would turn green and fester with maggots-which meant that the nurses were damn tootin' going to keep Gus shot up every chance they got. He was just too much hassle to deal with otherwise.
While Gus sometimes suffered tardive dyskinesia, an involuntary movement disorder suffered by many patients who had been overtreated with drugs, the nurses nonetheless kept him zoned out most of the time. He wasn't violent enough to tie down to a bed in one of the isolation rooms, but he was sure as hell violent enough to keep pacified with a needle.
When Gus was all medicated up, he walked around a lot. He didn't harm anybody, he just walked. You'd see him in the TV room and in the game room and in the visitors' room and in the hallways. Just shuffling along in his shabby pyjamas and his even shabbier robe and his flapping K-Mart house slippers. Gone was the Gus of shitting- under-people's-pillows and getting-all-dressed-up-in-drag and peeing-in-orange-juice-glasses. All that remained was this shambling, dead-eyed, slack-jawed zombie. He got so bad at these times that he had to be showered with the most helpless patients-gang showered, as they called it, hosed off like a circus animal or a car, just a row of cowering naked people like concentration camp prisoners about to be shot and thrown into a mass grave.
Yet curiously enough, it was when he was all shot up with drugs that Gus heard the voices. They came, according to Gus, from people in the tower that soared from the north-east corner of this part of the building into the black and starry sky above.
'They's not normal,' Gus would tell people over and over again. 'They's not normal.'
And even some of the more disturbed patients-patients who heard voices of their own-would look at poor Gus and take him gently by the elbow and say,
But he never wanted anything. He'd just go on, shuffle down the hall or out of the room or into the next room, and keep muttering 'They's not normal' and looking up with childlike awe out a window where he could get a glimpse of the turreted tower.
This had been Gus's life for nearly four decades. He became an old man, one who'd seemed to give up on everything. He was not even the mad masturbator that he used to be. He now found no solace in his groin area. The drugs had made him sexless. Nor did he care about visitors. The only ones he'd ever wanted to see were his own people-mother, father, aunts, uncles-and they'd passed on long ago.
He just walked around on the third floor and muttered to himself about the tower and how the people in it weren't normal. And when he'd show any signs of lucidity-any signs, in other words, that the drugs were wearing off-they'd slap him down on his bed and put the quick sharp silver needle into the right cheek of his fleshy white buttock.
This was Gus.
Other patients knew that Gus sometimes took the grille from the air conditioning duct and crawled up the dark, dusty passageway until he was on the first floor of the tower. He never had any trouble with the duct-work passage because it was pretty wide and because it was made from sheet metal that was twenty-four-gauge steel that was S-cleated for extra support and that was crimped for even more support beyond that. Gus always went after dusk because during the day, with the full staff out in force, it would be too easy to get caught entering or leaving the duct.
The grille was located at about eye level to the right of the freight elevator in a seldom-used section of the third floor.
Tonight, Gus went through his usual procedures. Once he knew nobody was around, he took a small milking stool, set it on the floor directly beneath the grille, set his clawed fingers into the grid itself, and extracted the grille from its square.
After checking one more time for sight of anybody, Gus boosted himself up and crawled into the opening. He banged his knee as he did so. A shock wave of pain moved through his entire leg and he said severed curse words that he knew were wrong. He even took the Lord's name in vain and that was especially wrong.
In the pocket of his robe, he kept a flashlight. In need of fresh batteries, the beam was a dim, almost watery yellow but at least it offered a comforting glow in the gloom.
His destination was always the same. Gus liked to crawl until he'd reached a grille identical to the one he'd just taken out. This second grille opened on to the first floor of the tower.
Now, reaching the grille, he started hearing the noises he usually did coming from somewhere high up in the shadowy top of the tower-dragging noises, as if something very heavy were being hauled with great difficulty across the floor. And the whimpering sounds. All Gus could liken them to were the sounds his puppy with cancer had made that long ago sunny afternoon. The puppy had died in Gus's lap and as it expired it made these tiny, mewling pleas. All Gus could do was hold the puppy tight and rock him back and forth the way Gus's mother did with Gus's little sister-but it had done no good. The puppy had started sweating and silver spittle spewed from its mouth and then its eyes had rolled all white with just a tiny red tracery of veins showing… and then the little dog had gone rigid in Gus's lap. Gus had cried for days after, inconsolable. He'd been convinced that the same Martians who were after him had also been after his little puppy.
He jumped down and stood in the small lobby area. The tower had only a few windows, and they were more like slats than anything. Moonlight lay silver against the slats now. Gus shone his beam around. This was like being on the ground floor of a lighthouse. All you could see in the cramped, damp darkness was a huge set of metal steps spiralling up into the blackness above.
A chittering sound made him swing his head around. In the gloom behind him, a pair of tiny red eyes watched him. A rat. One time Gus had seen a rat in here that had been as big as a cat he had once had. Gus's mind was filled with stories his mother had told him about rats-how they often snuck into houses and ate tiny babies as the infants slept in their cribs; how their fangs ran red with blood and green with poison; how they sank their fangs into your hair and started ripping your scalp apart. Or was that last one bats? Sometimes Gus got rats and bats confused.
The rat hunkered, started inexorably toward Gus.
While he wasn't as big as a cat, the grey creature with the swollen belly and the swishing spiky tail was formidable nonetheless.
The rat sprang, then. Came off the floor like an animal grotesquely capable of flight. Flew directly at Gus.
But Gus was ready. He'd been through this many times here before in the mildewy darkness of the tower.
Gus expertly brought the flashlight down on the rat's head. The chittering turned into a kind of keening.
The rat slammed to the floor.
Gus brought the heel of his K-Mart slipper down on the animal's skull. He felt a pleasing pop as the rat's brains escaped the confines of its skull, spilling out through its nostrils' and mouth. The animal started jerking wildly, puking and continuing to keen, and then it lay still. Dead.
'You little sonofabitch,' Gus said. And smiled to himself.
He never felt more purposeful than when he'd inflicted pain on something or somebody. He couldn't tell you
