Part 5 (2/2)

The worst feeling in the world came over me.

”The lock's been cut,” I shouted.

”What?” I heard.

Cutler did not come down. I should have turned back. This was all the evidence I needed to get the Keeper down here. But I felt laden with obligation and amped by the need to know, a desire to see what I had discovered. The door was thick and sodden. I could smell a thin odor of p.i.s.s in the cold air behind it. The sounds changed and became less m.u.f.fled as the world opened up into an expansive darkness. I heard something move, probably a rat, and stamped my foot and shouted to scare it off. The silence returned, but I could no longer believe it was an empty silence. ”Crowley?” I called. My voice was deadened by the thickness of the stone. Before me was a pitch-black hallway. s.h.i.+ning my flashlight along the floor, I saw angled shapes like craggy rocks and realized that the entire hallway was cluttered with garbage. I made out broken computer terminals, upturned boxes of files, a weight-lifting bench, a metal bookshelf on its side. It was as though I'd stumbled on an abandoned warehouse or a flood-decimated building. The jutting rock created more shadows along the walls. The right wall was rough-hewn, while on the left I saw a row of doors with little s.p.a.ce between them. My breath came rapidly, and I tried not to imagine larger shapes in the darkness flitting off whenever I moved my flashlight beam away. Some of the doors were shut; others were angled out of their rooms in disordered fas.h.i.+on like a series of unmade beds. I moved an inch forward and stopped. Anything could be down there. It would be better if I checked each cell in turn.

Opening the first door and looking in, I saw that the cell inside was barely long enough for a cot. Again, the room was filled with scattered garbage-a broken riot s.h.i.+eld, an old cafeteria table. In the corner of the floor I saw a small, irregular hole with two raised stone rectangles straddling it. Rats came up through those sewer lines, I figured, probably had crept up even in the days when men slept inside. What a place to put someone. I shone my light on the walls within and saw graffiti scratched into the stone. I told myself it had been there for decades.

”Crowley?” I called again, irrationally, and part of me believed he might emerge from the darkness, blinded by the flashlight, babbling incoherently.

The second and third rooms were cluttered with garbage, too, their walls covered in more graffiti scrawls. By the time I got to the fifth room, I couldn't take my eyes off the shape ahead of me.

I wanted to run back to Cutler, to emerge from the darkness with a heavy gasp, as though I'd been underwater. But I also felt the need to see. There was nothing simple about that urge, however. It feathered into multiple threads-a desire to show myself strong and overcome the worst possible fright; an indecent, voyeuristic need that seemed almost p.o.r.nographic in its insistence; and finally, a tender horror, a grief for human plight. Down here, in the clutter, the sour illness of cruelty. Nothing could be more awful.

His heaviness weighed the door down. I talked myself calm as I reached forward and pulled the door back gently, though my self-control was thin. Then my mouth was filled with saliva, my breath came in short, rapid intakes, and I struggled to see clearly.

The body was naked, suspended from the top of the door, jutted forward as if poised in mid-flight. There was a crusted paste all over his face and neck. The cast on his broken arm was gone, the unraveled chalky cloth strewn around him. He'd used some of that cloth to make the noose. It ate into his neck like an amputee's blood-soaked bandage. His knees were bent, and he had only to straighten his legs in order to rescue himself. His toes dangled. He was much smaller than he'd seemed in real life.

”Oh, Christ,” I moaned, and realized that I'd been saying it over and over. I wanted to live my whole life without ever seeing such a thing. But it was too late, and I knew the smell and sight of Crowley would smother me forever.

I backed away, stumbling over a broken chair, the panic lifting me up. I struggled to grasp onto a single clear thought, and I shone my light around, paranoid again that there might be someone else inside one of the rooms I'd skipped. It occurred to me then, with all the horror I'd ever felt, that Cutler could slip the bar through the door as easily as an executioner slips a needle into an intravenous line, and I would be lost in here, too, disappeared forever, a joke among COs for years to come. I tried to calm myself, turn my back on poor Jon Crowley, and stride down the hallway, but then I was running, stumbling, teeth rattling in my mouth.

My light poured over the walls, the drawings different to me now. He must have used his cast, the chalk from the plaster, part of me realized-or did I figure that out later? Each cell room contained its own madness, a bewildering collage of images. At the top of the stairs I saw a last word, more hastily scrawled than the others and much larger, as if Crowley had stood there before the door and sc.r.a.ped the chalk up and down, losing hope: ”DIG.” Was it a command or a kind of pleading? I couldn't process what it meant, but I envisioned corpses, maggot-eaten bodies, flies swarming over an open grave. I slipped as I scrambled up the wet steps, fell so hard on my s.h.i.+ns and elbow that my teeth clacked together, and crawled out of the hole and into the armaments room. Only then, when I was safely out, did I yell for Cutler.

Hours later, after the warden and the a.s.sistant wardens and all four of the keepers and half the senior COs and two Pen Squad lieutenants had been through, Wallace asked me whether I was all right. I didn't feel all right. My hands trembled slightly, and though I had moments where I considered myself extraordinarily sharp and lucid, there were dead spots, too, when my focus was utterly inert. The smell was in my nostrils, and I couldn't get the grip of the memory out of my brain. I saw the graffiti like some viral insanity infecting the stones, spreading outward, threatening to cover every brick and archway in the world above. Wallace mentioned the stain on my s.h.i.+n. I reached down and felt the pain, lifted my stuck pants, and saw the gouge out of my skin. He told me to go to the hospital ward and see to it, then go home, write my reports tomorrow.

I checked my watch. It was three in the morning. I did not want to walk through the tunnel to get to the hospital. I never wanted to walk through a tunnel again.

Outside, the sky was black. The air was sticky with cold. When I reached the hospital wing, I huddled to stop the s.h.i.+vering. It finally calmed down, and I proceeded around the corner and met eyes with the CO at the desk. He wanted to know what was going on, whether it was true they'd found Crowley. I muttered yes and pushed through the door. He asked me if I was all right, and I didn't answer.

The hallway was dim. I still had my flashlight on my belt. I pulled it out and shone it along the walls, intolerant of any pools of darkness. I could hear the breathing of those men in the utter silence. My steps echoed. I stopped before the infirmary cell where Jon Crowley had lived in endless purgatory while his busted arm healed. The steel sink and toilet. The empty cot with the single sheet. I remembered the smirk that had greeted me the last time I looked in, and the emptiness of expression in the dead face I'd seen an hour before.

I could sense Josh in the next cell, and I moved in front of his door. In that moment, all my anger toward him surged, my rage like a knife that ripped in a ragged line through the air, swinging out to hit something soft and vulnerable. His drawings of me p.i.s.sed me off. What he'd done to his girlfriend ate at my stomach. And yet, in the lottery of life and death, he was protected from harm. I didn't know how to justify such random outcomes, that some men could be dragged down into the earth and torn apart while others got watched over by guardian keepers. I shone the light into his room and caught his face where he lay on the bunk, his eyes open, as if knowing with a preternatural instinct that someone outside the door was thinking about him, the expression pathetic, anxious, wary. He had said that he and Crowley were close. Well, let him hear the truth now.

”Your friend's a wind chime,” I hissed through the grate, and stumbled on, seeking out a doc.

Josh lay on the bed and wondered if he'd heard right. He knew it was news about Crowley. He heard it as a tender kind of caring, a bit of human compa.s.sion, even an overture of mutual need. He missed his friend terribly. He'd been worried and anxious since the fight in the yard, frightened that he hadn't done enough to help. Now he had some news. Crowley was a wind chime, he thought, and let the words tap lightly through his brain, contemplating their poetic mystery, wondering what they meant. The answer, when it came, was simple. All rumors of escape or relocation had to be true. Crowley was gone, free somewhere. The wind blowing him about. He was a poem. A note hanging in the air. There was nothing more peaceful than sitting outside on a porch in the warm summer evening listening to the quiet tones of a wind chime.

When he woke up an hour or so later, heart knocking, he understood the real meaning of the dream. Not free. Not released. But dangling in a breeze. A hanging man.

STAGE II.

10.

When he woke, Josh was so flattened by the endless depths of unconsciousness that he was bewildered to find himself in Ditmarsh.

Then he remembered the news about Crowley and felt sick to his stomach, wondering what it had been like for him when it happened. Had he been very afraid? Had he known what was coming? Josh had hours to think about it.

During that long morning, despite the fact that it was Christmas, no one was allowed out of his cage. Nothing got delivered. At one point the hallway pounded with panic, army boots stomping by at a hard run, a door slamming against the wall, and a voice shouting for a doctor. In between there were long, empty oceans of indifferent silence. He wished the entire Christmas season to be over. He thought about his mom and ached with emptiness. He considered the peace that might have been possible if he'd never been born.

That afternoon, he was told to distribute meal trays in the ward. It was the first time the COs had asked him to do anything. The doors got unlocked. Able-bodied and compliant, Josh moved awkwardly and hesitantly down the hallway, unaccustomed to staring into so many homes. Most of the regular long-termers were docile on bug juice. They sat on the edge of their bunks, rocking back and forth, or paced their drums waving away unseen flies. A few were eager for chatter or news, though he had nothing to offer. The one with no face needed to be fed, so Josh set up a tray on the edge of the bunk and filled a spoon. When the spoon nudged the man's mouth, he ate mechanically. Josh fed him until the mouth stopped opening, and then he wiped the warped rivulets of healed flesh clean, afraid the nubbed hands might reach up and touch him.

By the time he got to the intensive care wing, he was tired of being free of his own cage and wanted to leave the trays on the chrome table outside, but a male nurse, overworked and weary, told him to finish the job. The room was a cavern with a dingy, antiseptic chill. The walls had been plastered until the edges were smooth and then painted a dull battles.h.i.+p gray. The ceiling shot twenty feet above to where the hanging fluorescent lights gave off a weak glow. The beds were in alcoves, the entrances arched. In the first alcove he saw a patient with some kind of vacuum machine parked beside the bed, rolling with a bad motor. Next over was an old bag of bones attached to an IV. Neither of them needed food, as far as he could tell, so he moved on, rattling the cart along the stone floor. He placed a tray on one man's stomach and put a spoon in his hand. He laid trays on med tables at the next two beds, where the men were sleeping. Then he came to a bed enclosed by a cage. Inside, he saw Elgin.

Even unconscious and strapped to the hospital bed railings, Elgin scared the s.h.i.+t out of him. In Brother Mike's studio he'd worn only an unders.h.i.+rt when working, showing off his tattoo colors, birds of prey on his broad shoulders, tangled spiderwebs spiraling from each elbow, naked angels with big t.i.ts peeking out from his own pectorals. According to Crowley, Elgin's artistic work was done in service of keeping his inking skills up, in the unlikely event he was ever released and could open his own parlor. Now half of Elgin's face was covered in a kind of cheesecloth, mottled with Chiclet squares of blood. There were uncovered st.i.tches on his neck, a slashed line like a row of black flies drawn to the puckered gore. The sheet was tucked snugly below his armpits and then raised up in a tent around his waist, as if gently lifted from whatever horrifying injuries settled underneath. He was utterly helpless yet still fearsome. The cage door was closed, but there was no lock on the clasp. He could pull out of the straps, rise up, and swing the door out, and Josh would be too frightened to move.

Standing there, Josh heard a loud, reprimanding voice and looked to see who was so angry.

”What's your G.o.dd.a.m.n hurry? Some of us in here could actually eat that food.”

He saw that it was Roy, sitting on a bed in the last alcove at the end of the room. The cot sagged below him. His peg leg stood against the wall, the halter at the top of the stick yellowed and stained. As Josh wheeled the cart over obediently, Roy grabbed a crutch from the floor and hauled himself off the cot.

”Just jos.h.i.+ng you, Josh,” he said. ”I'm glad to see a pal at a time like this.”

A pal. He'd never talked at any length with Roy before, only suffered his jokes and his relentless teasing, like the new kid in school. Roy limped toward him on the crutch. He seemed diminished now without his peg leg, breathing hard.

”You thinking about Crowley?” Roy asked.

Josh said he still couldn't believe it.

”I know, I know,” Roy said, and then limped forward some more. ”Help me get over to the big window. I need to warm my bones in some daylight, or I'm going to die in the dark like an old house cat.”

He slid underneath Roy's wing and helped him maneuver his girth across the room. Pa.s.sing Elgin's cage, Roy sneered. ”You staring at that sack of beat-up s.h.i.+t made me miss Crowley more than I could stand. If G.o.d's got any spare time on his hands, he could send a nice chunky aneurysm up this f.u.c.ker's leg.”

Josh agreed. Together they moved on toward the caged window and stared out. The gla.s.s was greasy with decades of exhaled breath.

”Merry f.u.c.king Christmas,” Roy said.

11.

They gave me three days off after finding Crowley, and I was grateful for the break, even as I wished I had something other than the rattle and shock of the previous week to occupy my every waking thought. MacKay was still in intensive care and not seeing visitors yet, but at least his prognosis was good. I got the information by lying, telling the nurse I was his daughter calling from out of state. No one checked on me, no one called to congratulate me or tease me or hear the Crowley story firsthand, no one even called to wish me Merry Christmas, and my brain went to work on that silence, parsing it for meaning. I began to wonder if they blamed me, if they saw my industriousness as a betrayal, a finger pointing toward some other CO's guilt. When the phone finally rang on my third and final free evening, I reached for it with a high school nervousness. It took me a moment to recognize that the quiet voice on the other end belonged to Brother Mike.

”I'm sorry to bother you at home,” he said.

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