The Cold Smell Of Sacred Stone

'Got it,' Veil said evenly as he came around the table to synchronize his watch with mine while I buttoned my shirt over the miniature tape recorder taped to my chest. The wall clock read 10:55. 'You watch your ass, Mongo.'

'Yep,' I said, rising to my feet and reaching inside my shirt to turn on the recorder. 'Let's do it.'

We left the staff building thirty seconds apart, with Veil going to his car while I cut behind the chapel to Building 26. I'd been expecting Slycke to be waiting for me outside, by the empty kiosk. He wasn't there. I gave it three minutes, then tried the door. It was open. I stepped inside, stopped in the vestibule in front of the elevators, looked around. The lights were on in the corridor, but they were decidedly dimmer than usual.

Suddenly I wished I had brought my Beretta.

'Slycke?'

There was no answer.

I'd done a few stupid things in my life, but over the years I hoped I had learned not to confuse stupidity with courage. I was getting too old for heroics, stupid or otherwise, and I'd already seen enough of this dimly-lit-corridor nonsense to convince me that I was walking into a trap. I wasn't going to walk any farther. It was certainly a classic two-beep situation if ever I'd seen one, but I didn't even plan on signaling Veil and waiting until he showed up with the cops. I'd go with him to get RPC Security, and would give Mr. Lippitt an emergency call for backup troops.

I was heading back to the main entrance, feeling quite smug with myself for displaying such obvious good sense, when something very hard hit me on the back of the head, and even the dim lights in the corridor winked out.

13

Someone was singing, 'Heigh ho, heigh ho, it's off to work we go. .'

I'd never much cared for that song, and I particularly disliked it now that it was being sung in a low, rasping, ominously familiar voice.

'The voices will stop after I kill you, dwarf,' Mama Baker said.

'Blauugfh,' I said-or something to that effect. My ears seemed to be working perfectly well, but not my tongue.

The fact that I couldn't make my tongue and lips form words didn't really make any difference, since Mama Baker obviously wasn't interested in hearing anything I had to say, but only in sacrificing me to the cruel, demanding, maliciously chatty gods he carried around with him inside his head.

'Heigh ho, heigh ho, it's off to work we go. .'

Nothing else seemed to be working right, either. My vision consisted of blurred, wavering images that only occasionally came into focus, then exploded or dissolved into wisps of luminous vapor that were sucked down long, multicolored DayGlo tunnels. My head felt as if the skull had melted and fused with my brain into a ball of thick rubber that was rolling around on my shoulders; I was very conscious of my own breathing, slow and deep, and the air in my lungs bubbled, fizzed, and popped like sparkling champagne; I imagined I could feel my blood, like warm milk, coursing through my veins and arteries, hear my heart pumping.

Somebody had shot me up with something seriously psychotropic, I thought, and wondered if this was how some psychotics experienced the world before they were medicated.

I was floating in the air face down, gently bobbing up and down like a toy blimp caught in a light breeze. I could feel my legs, and even managed to move them, but my feet weren't in contact with the ground, and so my feeble kicking was futile. My arms, however, weren't hanging in their accustomed places, and I wondered where they could have gone.

'I'm going to hang you up and slit your throat, dwarf,' Mama Baker said. 'When all the blood has drained out of you, I'll be free.'

'Mmfltelkpt!' I replied as I rolled the ball of rubber that was my head to the left and, just for an instant, clearly saw the figure of Charles Slycke slumped against the wall just outside his open office door; the thick plastic barrel of a good-sized hypodermic needle was protruding from his right eye.

Somebody had shot Slycke up pretty good.

'Heigh ho, heigh ho, it's off to work we go. .'

Human shapes appeared, dissolved, reappeared in the rainbow mists swirling around me. Patients I recognized.

'Fmmlptzxchpht!' I cried, shouting for help and feebly kicking my legs.

But, of course, nobody was going to help me-certainly not if it meant getting in Mama Baker's way. The freed patients of the D.I. A. clinic were content to wander aimlessly through their own private, tormented worlds, leaving Mama Baker alone with his sacrificial dwarf. The men were stepping around or over the corpses of two male nurses; one nurse had had his skull bashed in by something very heavy, and the other appeared to have been strangled.

I just kept bob-bob-bobbing along through this Hieronymus Bosch world, and I finally managed to deduce that my upper body was wrapped in a canvas camisole and Mama Baker was schlepping me around by the back straps; I deduced this just before my bearer hung me up on a prong of a wooden coatrack he'd gotten from somewhere, and placed in the hallway near the elevator. All the doors in the place seemed to be wide open.

'I'll be right back, dwarf. I gotta find myself something real sharp to cut you with.'

'Tegelmimp!'

'Heigh ho, heigh ho,' Mama Baker sang as he walked away.

The circus was definitely in town and playing to a full house inside my skull, with everybody using my brain as a trampoline. Still, if I hoped to survive my visit to the most peculiar madhouse that the D.I.A. clinic had become, I knew that I was going to have to find some relatively quiet and stable corner in my drug- sotted brain where I could think, plan, and will myself to act.

I vaguely remembered making some kind of arrangements for my safety with Veil Kendry, but I couldn't remember what the arrangements had been. I kept thinking of Road Runner cartoons: Beep-beep- beep. It didn't make any difference; obviously, Veil wasn't around. I hoped he wasn't dead-but, no matter what he was, he couldn't help me at the moment; it would undoubtedly be a matter of only a few minutes before Mama Baker found something he considered appropriately sharp and ceremonial with which to slit my throat.

Or, if he got impatient, he might simply stick a hypodermic needle through my eye into my brain.

I couldn't understand why Veil hadn't come to rescue me. I also couldn't understand why Garth or Marl Braxton wasn't helping me. All of the patients seemed to be wandering at will through the wide open spaces of the clinic, and I had to assume that Garth and Braxton were among them. It definitely seemed an appropriate time for Garth to employ some of the soothing words and gestures that had so impressed Braxton to calm down Mama Baker. Nor would I be displeased if somebody had taken the more expedient measure of simply smashing a chair over the man's tattooed head.

And I knew I was wasting precious time for thought by engaging in petulance and speculation as to why people I'd thought I could count on had not arrived to save me from the man with the crown of scar thorns around his head and JESUS SAVES carved into his cheeks.

'Heigh ho, heigh ho, it's off to work we go. .'

Ah, yes; thinking and planning time was over, and if I hung around on the coatrack any longer I was going to end up dead. Snow White was on his way back.

The coatrack had been set up near the elevator, which I couldn't use-but the elevator was near the stairs.

'Heigh ho, heigh ho.. '

I bucked and wriggled in the air until I got my hips and legs swinging back and forth. At the apogee of a forward swing I bent my knees, then kicked up as high as I could; the coatrack tipped over, and I flew through the air to land hard on my back, with my head banging painfully against the floor. The wind was knocked out of me, and stars began to fill the DayGlo tunnels swirling around me. Just what I needed.