After Midnight, page 2
“Oh. All right. I’ll leave you alone then.” Nancy sounded hesitant. It was clear she was uncomfortable with this disruption in the usual routine and wasn’t sure how to proceed. “You’ll let me know if you need anything.” She phrased it as a statement.
“Of course. And don’t worry, this won’t take long.”
Mack waited a moment and when there was no further interruption, he returned his attention to the commemorative letter opener glittering in gold on the surface of his desk.
He considered whether it would serve his purposes.
Couldn’t decide.
Undoubtedly there was a pair of scissors around somewhere, probably under lock and key inside a drawer in Nancy’s desk. Given the nature of Bridgewater State Hospital’s mission, it would be career suicide to leave scissors where there was even a chance they could be accessed by the wrong people. In fact, strictly speaking, the letter opener shouldn’t have been out in the open, either. But he had always used the damned thing, and there had never been a problem. Besides, he was the boss; who the hell would anyone complain to?
He considered calling Nancy on the intercom and asking her about scissors, even picked up the phone and prepared to buzz her.
Then he changed his mind. Hung up the phone. Given his secretary’s already-expressed concern, he felt that asking her to dig up a pair of scissors would only lead inevitably to more questions, more expressions of concern, and more hassles he didn’t need.
He picked up the letter opener again and ran his left index finger along the cutting edge as he had done a moment ago, only this time Mack pressed firmly. A narrow gash opened up in his finger as the tool sliced deep into the tender flesh.
Mack gasped quietly. He was determined not to upset Nancy, whom he pictured listening just on the other side of the door. A river of bright red blood welled up inside the furrow he had opened, overflowing its banks a moment later and running down the length of his finger. The blood began dripping onto the surface of his desk, spattering in a delicate pattern on his blotter/desk calendar.
He had cut himself badly.
He smiled. The letter opener would work just fine.
Mack leaned over his desk, concentrating hard, staring at the office tool as he tried to determine the most efficient way to accomplish his task. He was anxious to get started, but a lifetime of career experience had taught him the importance of thorough planning. A task worth doing was worth doing right.
He gripped the opener in his right hand and then his left, lifting it and picturing in his mind what he needed to accomplish. The blood continued to drip onto his desk, now flowing more steadily. Mack thought there should be some serious pain from the deep gash, but he barely felt any. He prided himself on his ability to focus, to devote his full attention on what was important.
Finally he decided on the most efficient course of action. It would involve holding the opener in his left hand, the one that was now bleeding profusely. He wished he had used a finger of his right hand to test the blade, but hadn’t thought things through before doing so, and now would have to adjust.
Hopefully the blood leaking out of his finger wouldn’t cause his grip to slip when he needed it most.
Mack moved everything out of the way, doing his best to avoid splashing too much blood around. The daily inmate status reports and stack of correspondence he placed in two neat piles on the carpeting next to his desk. The equipment requisition went into his inbox. He left his computer running.
Preparations complete, Mack pulled his chair up close to the desktop, sliding it forward until his ample belly pressed tightly against the surface. He lifted his head as if staring at something on the ceiling and stretched his neck taut.
He gripped the letter opener as firmly as he could in his left hand, making a fist and wrapping his fingers around the haft, with the blade protruding out the small gap between his thumb and bleeding forefinger, using the thick pad of skin in the webbing for support.
He placed his elbow on the top of his desk and extended his arm across his body until his fist was suspended several inches to the right of his neck.
He took a deep breath and smiled. This was going to be easy.
Mack wrapped his right hand around his left for a little extra support and punched the letter opener through the skin of his neck, burying it as deeply into his throat as possible.
Blood spurted from the puncture wound and mixed with what was already flowing from the gash in his finger, dripping down the side of his neck and under the collar of his shirt. As with the cut on his finger, Mack knew he should be experiencing extreme pain, but all he could feel was a bit of minor discomfort.
He took a breath and was amused to hear a gurgling sound coming from the small hole in the right side of his neck. Mack chuckled and began sawing steadily, forcing the letter opener through muscle and gristle, working it right to left across his throat.
The flow of blood increased significantly as the wound became larger.
Black spots began to blossom in Mack’s vision.
He worked harder, determined to complete the morning’s most important task.
He groaned and then went silent as the letter opener severed the muscles of his Adam’s apple.
Mack Pender’s last thought before losing consciousness and toppling onto his blood-soaked desk was that he had done a damned fine job. He had almost—not quite, mind you, but almost—managed to slit his own throat from ear to ear.
3
Caitlyn Connelly sipped a glass of wine and smiled at her boyfriend. Kevin Dalton’s injuries were healing nicely and he seemed to be suffering few lingering effects from nearly being killed last year in a tiny Revere, Massachusetts house at the hands of a madman.
Cait wished she could say the same about herself. Physically, she was doing okay, she supposed. The surgeons said the skin grafted onto her arm where Milo Cain had begun peeling it like an apple was healing well. There had been no significant issues with infection and the pain was manageable.
Yes, physically she was recovering, if slowly.
Mentally was a different story.
Getting a full night’s rest had become a thing of the past, a fantasy, an elusive and unreachable goal. Falling asleep was difficult, staying asleep impossible. It didn’t matter how exhausted she was or how late she stayed up. She tried working out late in the day, jogging long distances, taking sleeping pills, all in an effort to knock herself out so badly she could just sleep.
Nothing worked. Every evening was the same: a monumental struggle to drop off, sleep coming only with the utmost reluctance, hours of tossing and turning, kicking off the blankets, pulling up the blankets, lying on her side, on her belly, on her back. Finally falling asleep, only to be tortured by the nightmares.
And they were always the same. Always.
In her nightmares, Cait found herself strapped to a couch, naked and afraid, as a shadowy man, faceless but for a leering mouth, came at her with a razor-sharp carving knife. The man would hold the knife in front of her eyes, turning it this way and that, explaining with utter lack of emotion what he was going to do to her. How he was going to slice her, stab her, impale her on the blade’s end.
Then he would begin. He would peel the skin away from her arm, reveling in her screams, the pain fiery and unrelenting. He would move to her face, and start slicing the skin, row after row, hairline to jaw, until there was nothing left but a grinning skull where her face once was, the pain enormous, Cait wishing she could die just to escape it, and then—
And then she would awaken, moaning and crying, sometimes screaming softly, sometimes reduced by the magnitude of the imagined pain to gasping silence, drenched in sweat, the bedcovers twisted around her writhing body, Kevin, blessed Kevin, deep sleeper that he was, snoring softly away beside her.
Cait forced herself away from her thoughts and back to the present. The waiter had taken their dinner order and was walking away. Cait noticed Kevin gazing at her appraisingly. He had been doing that a lot lately.
“What?” she said defensively.
“Where were you?”
She shrugged. “The usual.”
“You look like hell,” he said softly.
She chuckled. “Thanks. You really know how to sweet-talk a girl.”
“You know what I mean. The dreams aren’t getting any better, are they?”
She shrugged again. She had never confessed to anyone—not even to Kevin—just how horrifying her nightmares were, or how reliably consistent. But he would have had to be utterly oblivious not to notice her distress, no matter how deep a sleeper he was. And Kevin Dalton was not oblivious.
She glanced into his piercing blue eyes and then looked away. Sometimes holding his intense gaze was too difficult, especially when it seemed he could see right into the core of her being. “I think I just need some time.”
“Time? It’s been months, Cait, and I know for a fact you’re not sleeping any better now than you were right after…it…happened.”
She had no answer for that. What could she say? He was right.
He lifted the wineglass to his lips and then placed it back on the table without drinking. “I think you should see someone. You know, just to talk.”
This again.
They had had this conversation many times, and while Cait could not argue the point—there was no question he was right; she was at least self-aware enough to recognize that fact—she just couldn’t bring herself to discuss with anyone the main issue: that her own brother had tried to murder her, and in the most gruesome manner possible.
“I’m not ready,” she said quickly, reflexively.
Kevin shook his head slightly, not able to hide his disappointment. “Maybe you’re going to have to do it before you’re ready. Maybe you’ll never be ready until you kick yourself in that cute little ass of yours and just do it.”
Cait smiled. “It always comes down to my ass with you, doesn’t it?”
“Of course. Your ass is the eighth wonder of the world. And don’t change the subject.”
Cait wanted nothing more than to change the subject, but the problem with dating a cop was that he was like a bulldog once he clamped onto something. He was relentless. It was a personality trait that had damned near gotten him killed last summer.
“I’ll think about it,” she mumbled, knowing she would do no such thing and suspecting strongly he knew it as well.
“What about you?” she asked. “How in the world are you able to sleep like a baby after what happened?”
“What makes you think I sleep like a baby?”
“I’m right next to you when you do it, remember? And I’m up most of the night, while you snore away, lost in a peaceful slumber.”
Kevin laughed. “Okay, you got me. I do sleep pretty well, now that you mention it.”
Cait spread her arms. “How? I thought you were dead that day inside my mother’s house. How do you not relive it over and over in your head?”
“I guess it comes down to my job. When you’re a cop, you only rarely see the best in people. Most of the time you’re confronted with the ugliest behavior human beings are capable of inflicting on each other. Now, Milo Cain was a whole different brand of evil, I’ll grant you that, but I think I’ve been inoculated against some of the worst effects of that kind of evil after seeing it day after day. Kind of like a flu shot, maybe.”
Now it was his turn to shrug. “If I couldn’t compartmentalize, I think I would have been forced to find a new line of work years ago.” He looked at her sadly. “Believe me, baby, if I could take away your pain, I would do it in a heartbeat.”
“I know,” Cait said. But she wouldn’t wish the endless sleepless nights on her worst enemy. Up until a few months ago, Caitlyn Connelly would have scoffed at the notion of even having a worst enemy. She had been a more-or-less anonymous thirty-year-old real estate lawyer, successful in her career and without a single enemy in the world. Or so she had thought.
Now she recognized the foolishness of that belief.
She knew who her worst enemy was, all right.
But how could she wish ill will on her own brother?
4
Milo Cain lay in his hospital bed listening to the conversation of people who had not the slightest inkling he could hear them. Today it was two nurses, here for their semi-regular attempt at providing him care. Changing his bedsheets. Giving him a sponge bath and then dressing him in fresh pajamas. Cleaning his small hospital room/prison cell. Replacing his nearly full colostomy bag with an empty one.
Milo didn’t give a damn about any of that.
What he did give a damn about, however, was their conversation. The nurses were yakking with the unrestrained enthusiasm of gossipers who had latched onto one of the juiciest stories ever and were determined to rehash it for days on end and from all possible angles. They weren’t just going to beat the dead horse; they intended to pound it over and over until the corpse was nothing more than an unrecognizable bloody pulp.
If he had been capable of feeling emotion, Milo might actually have liked these girls.
He listened closely. It was easy enough to do, and not just because he was comatose and paralyzed from the neck down. The nurses didn’t seem the least bit concerned about discretion or lowering their voices. Milo pictured other employees walking past in the prison hospital hallway, hearing the conversation coming from the coma patient’s room and shaking their heads in disgust. He smiled inside.
“Did you hear how they found him?” Milo pictured this nurse as blonde and petite, slim but not skinny. Big tits.
“He was locked in his office, wasn’t he?” This one he guessed to be a little older, maybe slightly overweight. Pleasingly plump but not grossly corpulent. The thicker the cushion, the better the pushin’, and all that. She would have dark hair and would wear it in a ponytail.
“Yes! He locked himself in his office and tried to saw his own freaking head off with a letter opener, do you believe that?”
The second nurse made appropriate noises of disgust but then said, “I heard there was a lot of blood.” Milo thought he could sense a trace of excitement in her voice. A good girl discussing naughty things.
“A lot of blood? Of course there was a lot of blood, he slit his throat practically from ear to ear! I heard it was all over his desk, like a little mini ocean or something. I heard there was so much blood it soaked into the carpet and the whole thing will have to be replaced.”
“His secretary saw it all, didn’t she?”
“Well, she was there, but he locked his office door, remember? So I don’t think she actually saw anything. I heard she banged on the door for like fifteen minutes after he offed himself before she finally called for help. When they forced his door open, I heard she screamed so loud you could hear her throughout the whole damned complex!”
Not true, Milo thought. I was listening closely and I heard nothing. He had to give the young nurse points for imagination and enthusiasm, though.
Now the second nurse lowered her voice, as if suddenly realizing the subject was taboo, that maybe it wasn’t the smartest career move to discuss the suicide of your boss with such obvious glee. “I wonder how long it took him to die.”
“Couldn’t have been long,” the slim blonde nurse said confidently. “There was so much blood he wouldn’t have been able to last more than a couple of minutes before dropping onto his desk like a rag doll.”
“Why do you suppose he did it? And in such a…horrible…way?”
Milo could almost see the first nurse shrug. “Who knows? He obviously had mental problems, but the funny thing is that his wife and secretary both claim he was acting completely normal that morning, right up to the time he locked his door and started slicing his throat like he was carving up a Thanksgiving turkey.”
“Well, he obviously wasn’t normal.”
“Obviously. But how could anyone even act like everything was fine when their intention was to cut their own head off in the next few minutes?”
The conversation continued, the nurses beating the dead horse—and warden—to their hearts’ content, but Milo tuned them out. He had learned all he needed to know. His experiment had been successful beyond his wildest dreams.
He had thought his life was over after failing in his quest to rid the world of that self-righteous little bitch Caitlyn Connelly, the young woman who had turned out to be his twin sister and who had benefitted from every advantage the world had to offer, while he had been forced to suffer through life, tortured by visions and compulsions no one would ever understand and the knowledge he would never be normal.
Getting shot in the face by the little bitch wasn’t bad enough; losing an eye to a hunk of lead fired from point-blank range wasn’t bad enough. He had had the extreme misfortune to break two vertebrae in his back when he fell. Now he was not just a comatose freak but a paralyzed one as well.
But Milo’s attitude reversed itself by one hundred eighty degrees not long after his arrival here at Bridgewater, his permanent home. He had discovered, purely by accident, that his ability to “see” things in his head, the random snatches of people’s lives known as “Flickers” by his bitch-sister, had not disappeared when he was attacked.
In fact, just the opposite was true. He discovered that now, in addition to seeing those random snatches of people’s lives, he had somehow developed the unexpected and heretofore unimagined ability to influence those people, to push thoughts and ideas—suggestions—into their heads.
Why that would be the case, Milo Cain had not the slightest notion. Presumably, the two slugs he had taken to the head from point-blank range had scrambled the circuitry of his brain enough to slightly alter the ability he had always possessed. The ability he had considered the worst kind of curse for most of his life.
Thanks to his paralysis and his comatose state, Milo had had plenty of time to dwell on the bizarre occurrence, and the theory about his brain circuitry becoming inadvertently rewired was the best he could come up with. Ultimately, though, it didn’t matter why he could do the things he was now capable of.
