present.
I stepped in out of a night laden with a fresh freight of rain that had yet to fall onto thick carpet and the expertly canned smell of wild honeysuckle. But the Stanger has a hard time putting on a pretty face: as I pushed open the second set of doors and went on through into the lobby, I could already hear a huge commotion from somewhere further inside. Shouting voices, a woman?or maybe a man?crying, crashes of doors opening and closing. It all sat a little oddly with the soothing Vivaldi being played pianissimo over the speaker system. The nurse at the desk, Helen, was staring off down the corridor and looking like she wanted to bolt. She jerked her head around when she saw me, and I gave her a nod.
?Mr. Castor!? she said, checking her start of alarm. ?Felix?It?s him. Asmodeus. He?s?? She pointed, but seemed unable to get any more words out.
?I heard,? I said, tersely. ?I?ll go on through.?
I broke into a trot as I went up the main corridor. This was my usual weekly visit: I still called it that, even though these days the interval between them had stretched out to a month or more. I was tied to this place by the loose elastic of ancient guilt, and every so often the pull became too insistent to ignore. But clearly tonight was going to be a departure from routine. There was something going on up ahead of me, and it was a violent, screaming kind of something. I didn?t want to be anywhere near it, but Rafi was my responsibility and this was absolutely my job to sort out.
Rafi?s room is in the new annex. I sometimes think, with a certain bitterness, that Rafi?s room financed the new annex, because it had cost a medium-size fortune to have the walls, floor, and ceiling lined with silver. I went up past the low-security wards, hearing sobs and shouts and swearing from inside each one as I passed: every loud noise at the Stanger stirs up a host of echoes. As I rounded the corner at a jog, I saw a whole crowd of people clustered about ten feet away from Rafi?s door, which seemed to be open. I was looking for Pen, and so I saw her first: she was tussling with two nurses, a man and a woman, and cursing like a longshoreman. Looking at Pen head-on, you always get the impression that she?s taller than she is; the vividness of her green eyes and red-auburn hair somehow translates into a sense of imposing height, but in fact she stands a little over five feet tall. The two nurses weren?t actually holding on to her, they were just blocking her way to the door and moving with her whenever she tried to slide around them?a very effective human wall.
The rest of the scene was like a bar fight taking place under local rules I wasn?t familiar with. Webb, the director of the Stanger Home, sweating and red-faced, was trying to lay hands on Pen to pull her away from the door, but at the same time he was fighting shy of doing anything that might be construed as assault?and any time he got close she just smacked him away. The resulting ballet of twittery hand gestures and involuntary cringeing was strange in the extreme. Half a dozen nurses of both sexes jostled around them, none of them relishing a possibly actionable rumble with someone who wasn?t an inmate and might have the money to sue. Two other Stanger staffers were down on the floor, apparently wrestling with each other.
I could hear the voices now?some of them, anyway, raised above the background babble.
?You?ll kill him! You?re going to kill him.? This was Pen, shrill and urgent.
??have a responsibility to the public, and to the other residents of the home, and I?m not going to be intimidated into?? Webb, partway through a sentence that had clearly been going on for a while and wasn?t going to end any time soon.
But just as I pushed through the edges of the group, it was ended for him as a body came sailing through the open doorway and hit the corridor?s farther wall with a solid, meaty sound before crashing to the carpeted floor. He was faceup, so I was able to recognize him as Paul, another male nurse, and probably the guy I liked best on the Stanger?s staff. He was unconscious, his face flushed purple, and the hypodermic syringe that rolled from his hand was sheared off short as if by a samurai sword, clear liquid weeping from the cleanly sliced edge of the plastic ampoule.
Everyone stared at him with varying degrees of awe and alarm, but nobody made a move to help him or assess the damage. I took the opportunity to thread my way through the onlookers, heading for the empty stretch of corridor around the open door?no-man?s-land. One of the two nurses who was blocking Pen?the male one?immediately turned his attention to me, clamping a heavy hand on my shoulder.
?Nobody?s allowed through here,? he told me, brusquely.
?Leave him!? Webb snapped. ?That?s Castor.?
?Oh thank God!? said Pen, seeing me for the first time. She threw herself into my arms, and I gave her a reassuring hug. At the same time I looked down and realized that the two men on the ground weren?t wrestling after all: the conscious one was hauling the unconscious one away from the door, leaving a feathery- edged smear of blood on the carpeted floor from some wound I couldn?t see.
Pen?s eyes were glistening with tears as she turned them pleadingly on me. ?Fix, don?t let them hurt him! It?s not Rafi, it?s Asmodeus. He can?t help himself!?
?I know that. It?s okay, Pen.? I put as much conviction into those words as I could muster. ?I?m here now. I?ll sort this.?
?One of my staff is still in there,? Webb told me, cutting across Pen as she started to speak again. ?We think she may be dead, but we can?t get in to find out. Ditko is . . . frenzied, in a hypermanic state. And as you can see he?s violent. I think I?m going to have to gas him.?
Pen wailed at the word, and I wasn?t surprised. The gas Webb was talking about is a mild nerve toxin?a tabun derivative called OPG, developed at Porton Down for military use but now illegal on any battlefield in the world. Ironically it had turned out to have therapeutic effects if you used it in tiny doses on Alzheimer?s sufferers: it blocks the breakdown of acetylcholine in the brain, slowing memory loss. Then someone found out that zombies could use it in much larger doses to do more or less the same thing?slow down the inevitable breakdown of their minds as the processes of butyric decay turned complex electrochemical gradients into rancid sludge. So now the gas was legal in psychotherapeutic contexts, and actively recommended for the dead and undead?a loophole that still had half the civil rights lawyers in the world yelling in each other?s face. The fact that it had sedative side effects just added to the confusion.
Using it on Rafi was a spiky proposition in any case, though. He was no zombie: just an ordinary living man with a tenacious passenger. And if Asmodeus was in the ascendant, it would take a big hit even to slow him down, which would mean that the side effects would be that much more painful and extreme. Some of them might even be permanent.
?Let me go in first,? I suggested. ?Maybe I can calm him down with some music.?
Webb huffed and puffed, but unlike the big bad wolf he was actually very keen to avoid having the house blown down. He was looking for a way out of this that caused the minimum damage to life and property?especially property?and he had enough sense to see that I was probably it. After all, this wasn?t the first time Rafi had played up: I?d proved my usefulness many times before this. ?I?m not legally responsible for you,? he reminded me. ?You signed a waiver, and I?ve still got it on file. You go in there on your own recognizance, and if you?re hurt??
?You?ll deny all knowledge of my activities,? I finished, nodding. ?And you won?t put a penny in the collection box. Let?s just take that shit as read, shall we??
I turned my back on him and took a step toward Rafi?s cell.
?I?m coming with you,? Pen yelled, and she pushed her way between the two nurses, who weren?t sure anymore what their brief was. I put up my hand to block her. ?Better not, Pen,? I muttered. ?Asmodeus needs me alive, and that?s the only thing I?ve got going for me here. Like you said, it?s not Rafi. He won?t hold back when he sees you: he may even take a smack at you out of pure spite.?
She hesitated, still not convinced. I left her there and went forward, hoping she?d see sense: there was really no time to argue about it while I could see Webb plutzing and quivering his way toward ordering a gas attack. I gave the door a shave-and-a-haircut knock as I went through. It would probably have been safer to take a peek round the edge of the doorway first, but I was going to have to go in anyway: this way I went in with a certain amount of panache, even if I came out again on my arse with my head flying separately.
Stepping over the threshold meant going from carpeted floor to naked metal: an amalgam of steel and silver in the ratio of ten parts to one. It?s there behind the plasterboard of the walls, too, shining out in a few places where Rafi has punched his fist through in a temper. My feet boomed hollowly on the metal plate, announcing my arrival even more emphatically than the knock. But Rafi didn?t seem to notice me in any case: he was on the far side of the bare cell, kicking savagely at a sprawled form on the floor. Not the nurse, thank God: she was lying motionless just inside the door, a spidery trickle of blood on her forehead and her eyes closed. What Rafi was destroying was the meds trolley. Pills in a hundred party colors were strewn all over the floor and they crunched underfoot as I shifted my ground.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw that Pen was kneeling down to check the nurse?s pulse. I took my tin whistle out of my pocket and put it to my lips, but before I could play a note Rafi threw back his head and howled in what sounded like agony. He threw up his hands and pressed both clenched fists to his forehead, jerking spasmodically from side to side. Then with a deep-throated groan he drew his hands down his face from hairline to chin, digging his nails in deep so that he drew blood from eight parallel gashes.
I was going to have to put a
