Exit Light (3 page)

“Did you do extensive work inside, too? Properties with accommodations for the disabled are quite valuable.” Richards nodded firmly. “If you’re ever looking to sell—”

“I’ll keep you in mind.” Tovah’s smile wasn’t as bright as Richards’s. “But I don’t plan on moving any time soon. Really.”

“Right. Of course.” The Realtor backed up, looking at the new doorframe, which, with its glass side panels, was much nicer than the original had been. “Well, thanks for keeping me in mind. If you come across anyone looking, please pass my card along.”

“I’ll do that. Max!” Tovah gestured. “Come inside!”

Max lumbered to his feet and up the ramp. Both women moved aside to let him pass. The Realtor scraped another palmful of hair off her skirt but seemed unsure what to do with it. Tovah held out her hand for the fur. Maybe someday she’d be able to stuff a mattress with it.

“Take care,” said Richards with a little wave. “See you.”

Inside, Tovah tacked the Realtor’s card on the bulletin board with everything else. “Wonder how long it will take me to lose that?”

Max woofed. She laughed. “Yeah, yeah. I know. Queen of Disorganization. That’s me.”

She stuck another pin into the card to make sure it didn’t fall, but it would be covered in a day by something else, she was sure of it. The bulletin board was her repository for anything that didn’t fit in her junk drawer.

“Don’t give me that look,” she told the dog, and waited for an answer.

But of course, since this was the waking world, there was none.

The boy had been listening to the sound of screams for a long time. When they stopped this time, he cocked his head to listen for more. And, in a moment, fresh cries echoed around him from the walls.

He didn’t know how he’d arrived here, or how long ago, or why. He knew days passed like a string of beads, each the same and without end. He knew he was safe only from moment to moment, but he’d stopped worrying about being the next to scream.

After a while, even terror must fade.

Still, he was only a boy, and when he heard the sound of footsteps on the stone floor outside his door, he stood. Waited. When the shadow fell across the threshold, he shrank away from it. Away from the stink and the sound of panting, that short, sharp snorting of the dogman.

“Go away!”

Growling laughter greeted that command, but the dogman didn’t enter the room. The boy watched the shadow grow, stretching across the floor toward him. He took another step back, his hands flung out as though to thrust away the shadow. But he couldn’t, could he? Shove away something like that? Hadn’t he learned that already?

“You know what you have to do,” said the witchwoman in the doorway. She wore dark denim jeans and a blue T-shirt. Her gray-streaked hair fell over her shoulders in messy waves. Her long nails clicked against each other.

His mother had long hair, but she was not his mother. This was…someone else, someone he knew but wished he didn’t. She detached herself from her own patch of darkness and looked out into the hall.

“Go ahead,” she urged. “Try it. See what happens.”

The boy shook his head. Bad things happened when he tried to keep the witchwoman and the dogman away. Bad things happened to other people. “No.”

The dogman growled again. The shadow stretched. Once, a long time ago, the boy had seen a movie about a vampire whose shadow moved when it did not. Gnarled, clutching fingers had sought to throttle a victim and pulled back before they could reach. But one day, he thought, stepping back, pushing the shadow away with his will, the dogman wouldn’t pull back.

“He’s never going to stop or go away.” The witchwoman said this matter-of-factly.

His teacher had spoken that way about homework and tests. But this woman wasn’t his teacher, Mrs. Bellestead, who’d kept him after class to work on multiplication, reciting the numbers over and over until at last they’d clicked. This woman moved toward him and he put out a hand to keep her at bay, too, though this effort made his arms tremble with the effort.

“You stop,” he told her. “
You
stop.”

She shook her head. Light crossed her face. Dark eyes. Red smear of a mouth. She’d been eating berries or jam. Something sticky and red. It coated her lips and teeth when she grinned.

“I can’t stop. Neither can he. And we don’t want to.”

“No!” cried the boy. “That’s not fair!”

“It might not be fair,” the witchwoman said. “But it’s the truth, and you know it. So do it. Do it now! He’s coming. And he will bite you this time. I will
let
him bite you!”

Her voice got high and excited. Her eyes went wide and she danced back from the doorway, hands clutched to the center of her blue T-shirt and denting the fabric. The shadow in the doorway grew. Stretched. The growling got louder.

And the boy closed his eyes, flung out his hands and pushed.

He pushed hard.

He pushed for a long time, until his stomach got sick and he had to bend over to gag and choke. He fell to hands and knees on soft black sand. No more walls around him. No screams, not even his own. He wept fat, hot tears that sizzled when they hit the ground.

“Very nice,” the woman purred. “Do it again.”

And though it hurt him deep inside, the boy did.

Henry Tuckens wasn’t doing any better, at least not according to the chart at the foot of his bed. Tovah wasn’t supposed to be reading the thick sheaf of papers clipped to the splintered clipboard, but after two years of visiting Henry in the same room at Sisters of Mercy Hospital, she no longer bothered with protocol.

Catatonic schizophrenia. Whatever that meant. The doctors couldn’t seem to figure out what was going on with Henry, who swung between the extremes of mania and depression with regularity—and ever-lengthening bouts of catatonia in between.

Tovah set the book she’d brought him on the nightstand. “Hey, Spider. I brought you something special. Maybe you’ll wake up and check it out.”

Henry stared straight ahead, eyes wide but unseeing. Tovah knew he could hear her, maybe even see her, but he was locked inside his head. She tucked the blankets around him more firmly, noting the places where his limbs felt thinner. His face looked more wasted, too, the cheeks hollow and lips pale. His hair had receded, leaving his forehead high and bare and vulnerable.

“C’mon, buddy. You can’t sleep your life away. You need to get up, get out of bed.” She took his hand, feeling the warmth there that told her he was alive, despite all appearances to the contrary. “Stop living in your dreams.”

She turned at the sound of the scrape of soft-soled shoes in the doorway. Ava, Henry’s favorite nurse, stood with a needle in her hand.

“Does he really need that?” Tovah asked, knowing the answer was inevitably yes. “I mean, look at him.”

Ava grunted and moved toward the bed. She was smaller than Tovah’s five feet six inches but wiry with muscle. She could take down a patient twice her size without blinking. Tovah had seen her do it.

“You weren’t here the last time he woke up.” Ava’s no-nonsense tone brooked no argument. “He took out three interns and broke the TV before we could wrestle him down. The interns I couldn’t give a shit about, but the TV was bitching hard to replace.”

Tovah looked down at the man in the bed. “He doesn’t mean to. He just gets confused.”

Ava swabbed the patch of skin on the back of Henry’s hand and slipped the drug into his veins. He barely twitched. Ava pulled the sheets tighter around him and turned to Tovah. “You staying for a while?”

“I thought I would.”

“We’ve got bingo going on in the rec room in about twenty minutes, if you want to join us.”

“Thanks.” Tovah smiled. “I think I’ll pass.”

Ava tossed up her hands. “Suit yourself. You used to love bingo, as I recall.”

“Yeah, well, that was then.” Tovah focused on Henry’s wan face. There was no point in pretending she didn’t remember those days, when bingo was the highlight of the week and she had to be forced to wash her hair and brush her teeth.

“You know something, Connelly? You’re the only patient I ever had who came back. Lots of ’em say they will, but you’re the only one who ever did.”

Tovah looked at the nurse who at one time had known her more intimately than any lover. “He doesn’t have anyone else.”

“Lots of them don’t,” said Ava as she left the room.

“That doesn’t make it right,” Tovah whispered to Henry, so Ava couldn’t hear.

She wasn’t, in fact, certain Henry could hear her. Sometimes he could. Sometimes he didn’t, it just depended on how far he was from his waking self. Tovah watched him sleep for a moment or two, then busied herself with making sure his room was clean and nothing was missing. The pajamas she’d bought for him were folded neatly in his drawer, which was good. Someone had nicked the last pair. The stack of books on the nightstand didn’t look as though they’d been touched. The bottles of shampoo and bars of soap lined up on his dresser were barely used.

“Spider,” she said. “You’ve got to get up. C’mon.”

His only response was the snort-whistle of his breath. This wasn’t surprising, but it was frustrating. Henry had been a patient in this hospital, on and off, for more than ten years.

Tovah settled into the chair next to his bed, picked up the copy of
The Pickwick Papers
and began to read. Doctors had told her it didn’t matter so much what was read to him, just that somehow, someway, some stimulus reached Henry’s mind while he shut himself away from the world. The doctors—most of them overworked and frazzled, this floor one last stop before they moved on to something bigger and brighter—didn’t know that Henry wasn’t lacking in stimulation. Yet Tovah was sure the reading didn’t hurt. He never admitted to listening to her, but she was convinced the time she spent reading aloud to him somehow anchored him to the waking world in a way none of their drugs or psychotherapies could.

The book served another purpose. It was so boring it usually put her to sleep within twenty minutes. It worked this time, too, her eyes drooping, and she slid a finger between the pages to mark her place. It helped, too, that last night she’d dreamed hard and strangely, that it had been almost too difficult to shape the club and the music. Last night’s dreams had worn her out.

Tovah wasn’t quite asleep yet. She was aware of the chair beneath her, the hiss of the hot air pouring out of the vents, and the muffled sound of shouting coming from the hall. Aware, too, of the way her hair feathered over her face as it tipped forward and the feeling of dry paper on her fingers. A gray mist swirled around her, softening the edges of these sensations. Colors muted.

And then, with a subtle shift, she lost sight of the hospital room and stepped forward, moving as though through water. She was there. The Ephemeros, land of dreams. Everything was bright and clear and fresh, and she tipped her face to a yellow sky with dancing pink clouds.

“I wondered when you were finally going to show up.” Spider crouched on a large boulder.

Today he represented in shades of gold and red, a spider in formal dress. His legs were longer today, his body less the squat, rounded shape of a tarantula and more like a garden spider. He held a small silk-wrapped package between his two front legs.

“You’re not going to eat that now, are you?” Tovah grimaced, stretching, feeling her limbs work the way they were all meant to. She loved this part, the first few moments when she arrived. It was like magic, the small changes her body went through as she shaped herself. She controlled how she represented, but in those first few moments after she crossed over, sometimes she surprised herself.

“It’s pastrami on rye!” Spider sounded offended. “What, you think I eat flies?”

“You
are
a spider,” she pointed out.

“And you’re a brunette,” Spider shot back. “Usually.”

This was true. Tovah ran fingers through her hair, longer here where it didn’t matter if it got tangled. “Huh. Look at that.”

She’d arrived with a definite auburn tinge to her tresses. She liked it. Where it had come from, she wasn’t sure, but she didn’t bother changing it. Everything else seemed the same. She did a few deep knee-bends, enjoying the way her muscles worked.

“You’re with me, ain’t ya? Over there?”

Despite his claim he wasn’t consuming insects, Tovah turned her attention away when Spider brought the package to his mouth and began to eat. “Yes. Ava sends her regards.”

Spider snorted. “She forgive me for the television yet?”

“No.”

Soft grass, each individual blade a different shade of green, brushed Tovah’s fingertips as she did a slow, even cartwheel. Then a split, something she couldn’t do in the waking world, no matter how hard she tried. She laughed, feeling lighter.

It was good to have people who loved her, even if they were a St. Bernard and a man who represented as an arachnid. Spider scuttled forward, the earth shaping with his every step to leave a trail of flowers behind him. It was a nice effect, though what purpose he meant for it to serve she had no idea.

“Just to be pretty.” He couldn’t read her mind, but he had no problem reading her face. “Flowers are pretty. You should try it.”

“Leaving a trail of flowers behind me? What’s next, jewels falling from my lips with every word?”

“You could do that, too, but flowers smell good.”

As he said it, the scent of roses and lavender filled the air. Tovah took a deep, hungry sniff. “They do. Thanks, Spider.”

“Anything for my girl. You know that.”

“Anything?” Tovah bent to scoop up a handful of flowers. The details were amazing, if not entirely correct. Spider was skilled, but even he needed to know what something really looked like in order to shape it accurately. He’d taken liberties with the petals, shaping them like hearts. Or maybe he’d done that on purpose. “Will you wake up for a while?”

His only answer was the turning of his back.

“Spider…”

No answer. Tovah looked around the meadow. To please him, she shaped a bird or two. Some butterflies. When she looked back at him, he’d shrunk from the size of a midsized dog to a large rat. The vibrant reds and golds had gone to muted browns and greens.

“So you’re going to abandon me? Is that it? Just walk away because you don’t like something I had to say? I don’t like a lot of the stuff you say to me, but I don’t ever run away.” She took a few running steps toward him, but he’d shaped the air to a thickness that made moving difficult. She concentrated and managed to thin it, but the birds and the butterflies disappeared, winking out in her field of vision like candles being snuffed. “Spider, dammit! You can’t sleep all the damn time! If you don’t wake up you’re going to—”

All at once he was huge, the size of a compact car, then bigger. He loomed over her. Fangs the size of her arm dripped venom that hissed and burned the ground where it struck.

“Don’t you say it!” The words shot from Spider’s mouth with the force of bullets.

Tovah flinched but stood her ground, even though her pulse thudded in her ears and wrists and her body tensed to flee. Spider wouldn’t hurt her.

“Don’t you say it,” he repeated.

Tovah held out her hands to him. “I don’t want to lose you, that’s all.”

His laughter echoed around them. The grass leaped up beneath her feet, thick and strong. The scent of flowers filled the air. Spider returned to his normal size.

“You won’t ever lose me, kiddo. I’ll be around for-fucking-ever.”

“Nobody can be around forever,” she told him. “Not even you.”

For one rare instant, the spider flickered and vanished, replaced by Henry representing as the man he must have been before his stint in the hospital. Tall, strong, with powerful arms and legs. All his hair. A man who looked like he could rule the world.