Mr Wicker Read online

  The Librarian held the book before the candelabra, opening the pages that stuck together from disuse.

  The ink rose in a medieval chorus of voices that lilted above chords heavy with melancholy. A bell tolled. He tore one of the pages from the binding and a contralto wailed as she separated from her comrades, a solo voice that trilled with the strings of a mandolin.

  Mr. Wicker held the page above the candle flame, the contralto shrieking as the fire devoured the paper. Under the shrill raven calls, the ink boiled on the page as it curled black and thin with smoke. When it shriveled into a mere whisper of charred parchment, Mr. Wicker flung it into the air...

  Whoooosshhh!

  The withered, blackened blossom sailed through the rafters, writhing as sinister petals of ash turned oily and bloody—a memory, a stroke of ink. A fledgling beak tore from the gory heap, wings convulsing as they ripped from the blistering, roiling mass. The newly born thing flapped and gyred through the air, its brothers and sisters dipping and swerving around it. Every moment another detail was teased from the blackness while the tarry throat stretched and rippled—kraaa-kraaa-kraaa!

  Kraaa-kraaa-kraaa!

  Chapter 15

  Kraaa-kraaa-kraaa!

  “Mrs. Rains?”

  Jimmy the bellboy strolled into the lobby from the employee lounge, tugging at the leather hat strap that was cutting his chin, when he noticed Mrs. Rains in the lobby. Her skin was waxy, eyes fixed eerily on some point across the room. She wore glossy burgundy pajamas and slung her purse over her outstretched forearm as if she were about to parade into a high-end boutique. She also wore one white leather flat. Not a slipper but something comfy to scuttle around in when traveling. The other foot was bare, revealing her callused, bunion-twisted toes. The bellboy’s stride slowed, a high-pitched ringing in his ears. The conspicuous juxtaposition of the old woman in her pajamas with her Italian purse standing against the lavish Art Deco décor of the posh hotel reminded him of a scene in a Fellini movie.

  It was only six a.m., and the few people on staff at that hour milled behind the registration counter.

  “Mrs. Rains?” he asked. “Are you all right?”

  Her eyelids flickered as the orbs languidly rolled toward him. Her lower lip twitched.

  Jimmy reached for her elbow. “Let me take you back to your room.”

  Her withered lips parted to release a deafening squall that rebounded from the domed ceiling and marbled lobby. A sick wave of fear washed up from the bellboy’s shiny black shoes and into his chest. Then, the old woman looked straight up, pointing as she cried, and the skin of her face tightened into a death mask. The bellboy glanced upward, following her finger’s accusations. His body went cold as he thought he saw a black bird streak across the mezzanine from one brass railing to another on the opposite side. A dreadful crash wrenched away his attention from the hallucination. At his feet, the elderly woman had collapsed, her twisted body forming a rosette of burgundy silk and mottled skin. The contents of her purse sprawled about his feet. He knelt beside her, blinking in shock as a colleague vaulted over the registration desk and rushed toward the scene. Everyone around him dialed cell phones, shouted, chattered.

  A business card had settled among the detritus of her purse. The bellboy picked it up: James Farron, M.D. M.F.C.C.

  Chapter 16

  DAY 2—BAYFORD PSYCHIATRIC UNIT

  The scene eerily flickered like a damaged film reel as Alicia approached a circle of roses.

  Some stood as high as six feet tall, tightly surrounding a concrete arena about eight feet in diameter. Two blanching roses hung their blighted heads, Gog and Magog arching across the arena’s entry. Their bowed stems crossed like pikes, thorns murderously cuspate. Like a fairy woods, the roses entwined above and below, a wild mass of commingling vegetation. In the background was the hiss of an unattended needle riding the dead grooves of an antique phonograph, dipping with a crackle into a deep scratch.

  A cleaning machine rumbled over the linoleum of the hospital hallway, clacking as it crossed rubber runners in doorways. Awaking from the dream, Alicia rolled onto her back and let anxiety ransack her mind. He said the missing memory would explain everything. And someone—presumably her—had died because of it. Or them.

  Someone? What did that mean? It sounded vaguely biblical. “Someone” died for your sins. If he was referring to her suicide, why didn’t he say so?

  Would she kill herself again? Perhaps. To see Mr. Wicker?

  The answer fell into her stomach and burned it dry. What purpose had His Fucking Majesty of showing her the Library? Of plunging her into this great mystery with threats of death? God had turned her ultimate act of anger against her. He defied her. By some miracle, she lay awake and alive with desire when that was the last thing in the world she’d wanted just a few days ago.

  But then, what future did she have if she did leave the hospital? How long before the void embraced her again, bit her cheek, and licked her veins dry?

  Given the dream fragment, however, perhaps she and Dr. Farron could reach the missing memory through hypnosis. Was Mr. Wicker lying after all? Did she not have proof now that the memory was merely submerged and not catalogued separately in the Dewey Decimal System of the Damned?

  The moment she’d stood in the Library, she’d stood in the center of the sun. The reality of it burned glyphs into her bones; she would never be the same.

  She wanted to see that little girl again. If nothing else, she could hold her small warm hand and sit with her. She had no reassuring words about the sins of the world, no encouragement that life would be anything but disappointing. Hans Christian Anderson’s Little Match Girl dies alone in the cold; his Little Mermaid dies in excruciating pain and never knows her lover; the Tin Soldier melts to a lump, alone and unloved. How could she say those tales were not true? But she could be there for the child in the silence of her coma when no one else in her family would. When God had gone, she might have a friend. And, meantime, Alicia might nurse her precious conduit to the Library and gain whatever the Librarian might pass to her through the child.

  Her motives were mixed and she felt badly about it.

  By six a.m., a mouse of a nurse was waking patients and rounding them up to the showers. Her tiny black eyes and compact figure supported a generous Shiseido-red mouth with swollen lips. Her hair was divided in two black buns, one on each side of her head. Check out Minnie Mouse. “Where’s Arnie?” she asked.

  “Oh, he’ll be back,” the nurse squeaked. Alicia had read somewhere that a grown woman with a little girl’s voice was a classic sign that she’d been sexually abused as a child, as if the child inside had been bansai tied by the damage and could not grow.

  “Would you know if Dr. Sark is here today?” Alicia asked.

  “He doesn’t come in until eight.” A suspicious familiarity whetted the nurse’s expression as she spoke of him.

  Fuck a duck.

  “My attorney. Malcom Shefter. He’s coming, right?” She’d given his name to the admissions nurse when they filled out her paperwork.

  “Oh yes,” she said, brightening. “I spoke to him.”

  “What’s your name?”

  The nurse plucked at her badge. It sagged on her lab coat, out of sight behind her lapel and the elevator security card attached to her lanyard. She refastened it to make it visible. “I’m Mindy.”

  “Nice to meet you, Mindy.” She wondered if Mindy made herself look like a cartoon character on purpose.

  Nurse Mindy promised she’d be around for the day until Arnie arrived. She then left the room, Alicia’s eyes trailing her far out of frame. She would need to make Mindy her ally as she seemed to have some kind of rapport with Dr. Sark.

  Shortly thereafter, Mindy led Alicia to the showers, explaining that they’d have to tape plastic bags over her hands and wrists to protect her stitches. Alicia declined. There was no way she was going to shower with mumbling, drooling crazy people. Mindy made her dress and sit in a metal chair
by the secondary nurses’ station near the cafeteria until everyone was ready to eat.

  After Alicia finished a breakfast of peeled hardboiled eggs, pre-cut fruit, pre-buttered toast, orange juice, and tepid black coffee—the entire meal uniquely concocted to be eaten without utensils—she decided to slouch about the activities room until her evaluation that morning. All except the sickest of the other patients avoided her these days, so she didn’t worry that she’d be troubled. She growled at the most delusional ones and they recoiled. As she created twisted collages about her life from glossy magazines at the activities table, boredom beckoned her to get up and peer into the corridor.

  Wearing a lab coat, a tall man with dishwater blond hair and wintry blue eyes swaggered down the hallway, a simper straddling his lips. He passed the secondary nurses’ station where Mindy talked on the phone, motioning her to his side. When she saw him, she hastily ended her conversation, shoveled a few charts into her arms, and scampered after him.

  Scanning the corridor for techs and other nursing staff, Alicia followed. Her footsteps barely whispered in red velvet slippers as she pursued the two. Thank you, Grandma. They moved down the corridor and turned down another hallway, headed toward the suite of offices at the southeastern corner of the ward through a door. She paced herself so as not to look suspicious, as if she were taking a self-absorbed stroll, crossing her arms and tilting her head forward.

  The nurse and the man she suspected was Dr. Sark turned one more corner, exchanging banal words as he asked her how things were going on her second day and if there was anything she needed. Keeping just over a hall’s length between her and them, Alicia knew this had to be the end of the line. She stopped just before the hallway ended, leaning her body flat against the wall, and listened to their tete-a-tete.

  “So...how long until your next appointment?” Mindy asked hesitantly as he unlocked the door.

  “Long enough,” he replied and threw it open. They bustled inside and he closed it behind them.

  Fuck a duck—for a buck!

  Alicia waited several moments before she edged closer to the door. A plaque read “Dr. Mason Sark, Director of Adult Behavioral Health Services.”

  As her heart threw sidekicks at her ribcage, Alicia put her ear to the wall beside the door, standing closest to the hallway corner in case she had to escape. Ever vigilant to the scant sounds down the corridor, her ears were rewarded with the man’s groans and directions to lick, lower, suck, harder. And more groans. Alicia leaned her feverish body against the cool wall, enrapt by the sounds of illicit intercourse, remembering the erotic thrall of Mr. Wicker when he ordered her to take off her robe and painted her skin with the wet brush of his gaze.

  You don’t seem to want life, but I do...

  The groans gave way to more articulate phrases, Mindy’s high-pitched chatter overrunning Sark’s low voice.

  Definitely Upper East Coast. New England, maybe. From “Assholechusetts,” as her MIT pal, Doug, used to call it. But Dr. Sark didn’t have the open, lingering vowels. Rather, he affected a faint English accent.

  The voices jostled closer to the door. Startled, Alicia shoved herself from the wall and forced her legs to move, move, move. The door closed and the jangle of keys announced Dr. Sark was locking his office. The two then headed down the corridor after her. She had lingered too long, dammit. Scrambling in the velvet slippers, she skip-skidded down the slick linoleum of the corridor and disappeared around a bend into an adjacent hallway. Thing One and Thing Two (as she decided to call them) passed the adjacent corridor a beat later, nonchalantly discussing ward procedures. Mindy’s buns hung a bit loosely and Dr. Sark’s cheeks were flushed.

  Alicia slipped from her hiding place, past the group therapy room, where the session had just started. As she passed the nurses’ station, she smiled at Mindy who smiled back sweetly and answered a ringing phone. As Alicia ducked into the room, she slyly observed Minnie as she chattered. Something was wrong about her uniform. Her clothes looked less “busy.” Mindy patted absently at her chest as she talked, uneasiness creasing her eyes.

  Alicia retired to the back couch of the activities room, arms crossed defiantly. Whatever was wrong with Mindy’s uniform nagged at Alicia.

  She watched the young blue-haired woman from the cafeteria. The longer Alicia watched her emaciated form interact with the ethers, the more deeply she felt the edge of life’s brutalities scrape and cut her own skin. But after several minutes she began to wonder if the woman truly saw something that Alicia couldn’t. Who was the crazy one?

  The young woman seemed to suddenly notice Alicia. The air thickened with the woman’s sweat as she approached.

  “Thank you for what you did.” The woman wiped stray hairs from her mouth. A faint southern accent dusted her words.

  “Any decent person would have done it.”

  “Not with hurt wrists.”

  “They’d try.”

  “I have a message for you.”

  “A message? From whom?” Alicia leaned back in the couch, amused at the suggestion. Gimme more of the crazy. I can take it.

  “Lillian.”

  “And what does Lillian have to say?”

  The woman paused, gaze brushing the ceiling before her eyes rolled up into her sockets. When the irises emerged, she stared at Alicia with unfathomable compassion, her eyes misted by some revelation. “She wants to know why you left her in the rose garden. It made her sad.”

  The caveman in Alicia’s head began to holler, slamming a club against her hollow memory. Lillian. Lillian. Who was she? That name was incredibly familiar but no matter how far or widely it roamed, Alicia’s memory could not place it in time and space. Like the word that falls out of a person’s head as they age, Lillian the person fell into some chasm of memory that made Alicia quake. She’d have to ask her grandmother if she remembered Lillian. “Who told you this?”

  “Lillian,” the woman said.

  “Where is she?”

  “Over there.” The woman pointed to the corner of the room.

  Alicia saw nothing except sodium light spilling against the dayroom walls. How did this woman know about the rose garden? It wasn’t possible she’d overheard something from her discussion with her grandmother because she’d arrived sometime after that conversation. Alicia also wondered what had become of her grandmother in the last twenty-four hours. It’s so unlike her not to be involved at every opportunity.

  “How do you know Lillian?”

  The girl shrugged. “I don’t. She just showed up over there. You can’t see her?”

  Alicia shook her head. Oh, great. Sylvia Brown’s in the house. Alicia didn’t believe in ghosts but now she had to wonder. In fact, she needed to recalibrate her entire supernatural belief system.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Geri,” she said. “Are you Alicia?”

  “Yeah. How did you know?”

  “Lillian told me.”

  “I see. What’re you in for?”

  “I get very sad,” she said. “The voices told me to break up razors in my yogurt a few days ago. My family says I need to come here sometimes.”

  Alicia gulped, wondering what razors felt like on the inside. She decided she didn’t want to know. In truth, she wanted as far away from this woman as possible, but she had to press on. “That’s awful. Are you hurt?”

  “They caught me before I could eat it. I just wanted to die. No one understands that. They think you’re crazy when you want to die. When you just want to be free of the horrible depression. And the voices. I hate the voices.” She hugged herself, eyes brimming with pain.

  “I’m with you.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. Not about the voices. But I totally get everything else.”

  Geri smiled shyly. “You’re very nice.”

  Alicia felt guilty for her desire to bolt. “Thanks. So...how do you know Lillian?”

  Before Geri could answer, Jesus dashed inside. He peeled off his white T-shirt
and jumped up on the coffee table where two patients played cards. They cursed him loudly as he threw open wide his naked arms to proudly proclaim:

  “I AM JESUS FUCKIN’ CHRIST!”

  Alicia rolled her eyes, annoyed at the Son of God for disrupting her interrogation.

  “Hey, Ms. Baum!”

  Arnie leaned into the room, working on a fresh piece of gum from the smell of it. The curly head of her attorney, Malcom, poked into the room alongside him. Malcom waved, his arm swathed in his usual granite suit.

  “Hey, Mal.”

  “Hey, soldier.” He shouldered a massive bag of briefs. “Let’s get you out of here.”

  Alicia practically leapt from the couch. Malcom hugged her—gently at first, but then harder, and she reciprocated. It had been a couple of years since she’d seen him, but he still smelled vaguely like matzo ball soup and cheap cologne. They chatted for a few minutes in the hallway as Arnie kept vigil.

  “So what’s going to happen?”

  “Just be cool. Don’t exercise that wicked wit of yours.”

  “What wit? It’s been bled from me.”

  “That’s not funny. Look, the first certificate has been filed with the State Attorney’s Office. They’ve only been legally able to hold you up to twenty-four hours. At this evaluation they can decide to file the second certificate, which will mean they can keep you here until the court hearing for involuntary admission.”

  “So basically we need this to go well or I’m fucked,” Alicia said.

  “Not permanently. Just for a few days until the hearing. Then we’ll see.”

  Alicia felt panicked. “Shit.”

  “Don’t worry. You’re safe here, aren’t you? Anything I need to know about?”