Free Live Free

Three Conspirators

The witch’s glare would have bored holes in steel. She strained at her straitjacket like an athlete and bared her gleaming teeth like a beast.

“You want me to give her another injection?” the nurse asked. “That first one don’t seem to have touched her.”

Dr. Roberts shook his head. “No need to risk it.”

“Think you can get her to talk when she’s like that?”

“I will speak,” the witch told them. “I will tell you both what will happen to you. Your children will be taliped, their eyes dropping from their heads. They will hate you, and in the end they will kill you, cruelly and filthily, in an unclean place.” She began to speak words neither physician nor nurse understood. “Marear enkranken tober malade ammalarsi …”

“We’ll be all right,” Dr. Roberts said. “You can go now, Nurse.”

“Uh huh.” The nurse was still watching the witch. “Doctor, you think she’s white?”

Dr. Roberts shrugged. “Race is largely a matter of selfclassification.”

The nurse grinned. “Yeah, you think so, don’t you.”

“If she told you she was white and spoke like a white, you’d probably accept her as white. If she told you she was black and spoke like a black, you’d accept her as black.”

“Look here.” The nurse put her forearm beside the witch’s face. “She’s nearly dark as I am.”

“I would die before I would jump into the melting pot with either one of you!” the witch snarled.

“No foolin’, Dr. Bob. Have a look here.”

For an instant, some minute fraction of a second, Dr. Roberts saw—or believed he saw—a metamorphosis wild as any psychotic delusion. The witch struck like a snake, and for that instant seemed a snake. There was a gleam of scales, a blow sinuous and powerful as a cut from a bullwhip.

The nurse screamed and fell to her knees, the witch’s teeth still buried in the flesh of her arm. Blood ran from the witch’s lips, staining her canvas straitjacket and the nurse’s white uniform.

Dr. Roberts shouted, “Orderly! Orderly!” and got both hands around the witch’s neck. Unthinkably, a bronze shoulder was writhing from the opening in the straitjacket, followed by a bronze arm.

A fat blond nurse and a lanky red-headed orderly arrived at virtually the same moment, so that they stuck in the doorway, the nurse with her belly jammed against the jamb, the orderly caught between her billowing hips and the other side of the frame.

“I’ll take care of this,” the fat nurse said. By then the witch had Dr. Roberts by the throat, a development the fat nurse seemed to view with satisfaction.

“Well, shouldn’t we do something?” the orderly asked. He crouched to look at the witch, whose jaws were still locked on the black nurse’s arm. “Here now,” he said. “You let go of her.”

The witch ignored him. Her rapt face gave the impression that her whole attention was devoted to throttling Dr. Roberts, that she continued to bite the black nurse from a sort of absence of mind.

“Get her off,” the fat nurse said.

“Maybe if you stuck your fingers in her eyes,” the lanky orderly suggested. He glanced around at the fat nurse as if to see what she thought of the idea. “Hey, why are you unbuckling that?”

The fat nurse was bent red-faced over the witch. “She’s half out of it already. We can’t get her back in without getting her all the way out, can we?” The final buckle loosed, she slipped the witch’s other arm from the straitjacket and looked at the canvas. “Have to be washed,” she said.

Another orderly opened the door and looked in. “Everything all right here?” The fat nurse was between him and Dr. Roberts.

“We’re taking care of it,” the lanky orderly said. “Hey, shut the hatch, will you, Mate?”

“Okay.” The door closed softly. Dr. Roberts crumpled unconscious to the floor; the witch released him and transferred her grip to the black nurse.

“Don’t kill her,” the fat nurse said. Other than spitting out the black nurse’s bloody arm, the witch seemed to pay no attention.

“Jesus!” the lanky orderly muttered. “I always thought they wore stuff—you know, underwear or something—under those things.” He was staring at the witch.

The fat nurse eyed him. “You sure you work here?”

“I’ll level with you. This is my first day on the job.”

“Really. Where’d you get your training?”

“In the Navy. I just got out. I was a Navy corpsman, see, but we only had guys in our hospital. Well, a few girls—women, I mean—but the nurses always took care of them.”

“I see,” the fat nurse said. “Where was this hospital, anyway?”

“Norfolk. The base hospital there.”

“You’re a phony.” She fixed him with a plump index finger. “You stay right where you are, or I’m gonna holler my head off. I want to talk to you.”

The witch dropped the black girl. “What is the difficulty now? Nurse, I regret losing my temper with these two. It will not happen again.”

“You can forget it, Madame Serpentina. He’s not for real. He told me he’d been a Navy medic, but they didn’t have many girls in the Norfolk Base Hospital. I spent three days with somebody from there once, and he said there were more women than men; they take dependents, so they get a ton of obstetric cases.”

The lanky man looked sheepish. “I switched clothes with a pal and put this coat over them. They didn’t fit too good.”

The witch laughed. “But you thought our Candy a true nurse! I am sorry, but it is so funny!”

“She’s a fake too? Hell, she’s bustin’ out of that uniform.”

“Yes!” The witch pointed. “Hold in your stomach or you will lose a button.”

“Okay, I’m hilarious. But we have to do something fast, or they’ll be on to us. Are those two dead?”

The witch shook her head.

“Then look in these cabinets. There ought to be tape around here someplace. You can wear the nurse’s clothes.”

“Fah! They are bloodstained.”

“We’ll have to risk it.” Candy slammed a cabinet shut and opened another. “My God, look at the dope!”

“Here,” the lanky man said. He nudged her and handed her a roll of adhesive tape.

“Great, but you can do it as well as I can—probably better, because you’re stronger. Take care of the doc. Tape up his mouth first, then do his hands behind his back and tape his ankles together. I’ll help Madame Serpentina strip the girl, then we’ll take care of her.”

The lanky man glanced at the unconscious nurse. “We better bandage that arm while we do it. She looks like she might bleed to death.”

Madame Serpentina clicked her tongue. “So both of you are ministering angels now.” She was pulling off the nurse’s white shoes.

“What’s your name anyway?” Candy asked the lanky man.

“Phil Reeder. I really am a sailor—seaman first—but on a destroyer. No women there. You haven’t seen anything around here to cut this with, have you? I lost my jackknife when they picked me up.”

Madame Serpentina said, “In that drawer,” and pointed. Candy asked, “How do you know?”

“I know. Look.”

Candy did, and handed Reeder a pair of surgical scissors. “That’s Madame Serpentina. You probably already heard me call her that.”

“Right.” He rolled Dr. Roberts over and lovingly spread a piece of wide tape across his mouth.

“She’s a witch. She’s magic—she really is. It’s scary and pretty hard to swallow, but it’s true.”

“And this,” Madame Serpentina said, rising with the nurse’s white pantyhose in her hand, “is my good friend Candy Garth, who has saved me. What I wish to know is why the two of you, who are attempting to fly this place, came here when you heard that foolish woman scream.”

“I didn’t save you,” Candy said. “You saved yourself. You had an arm out, and you could have gotten the rest of yourself out of that thing.”

The witch waved the objection away. “But why did you come?”

Reeder told her, “I think we scared each other into it. She was goin’ down the hall out there and I was comin’ up it, and we heard this yell and sort of looked at each other. I thought she was tellin’ me to go on and see about it, and she must have thought the same thing about me. I know I was scared that if I ran away from the trouble instead of to it, they’d know I didn’t really work here.”

Candy nodded confirmation.

“I have more questions. But first you, Mr. Reeder, must turn your back so that I may put on these things. Good. Candy, will you tape that woman, please. I have already from her all that I require.”

The witch hesitated, and they heard the rustle of fabric.

“Now if I have understood you, one walked in one direction and one in the other. In which direction is the exit from this mad place?”

Reeder pointed. “The way I was goin’. That’s the elevators, anyway.”

Candy said. “There’s stairs there too—I already checked them out.”

“But it was not in that direction that you walked. You were coming toward this room, and your back was to them. You were not trying to leave this hospital then.”

“Okay,” Candy said. “I guess I got to tell.” She propped her plump hips against the side of the examination table. “There’s this kid. Ozzie’s kid, and—”

Reeder leaned forward. “Who?”

“Ozzie Barnes. You don’t know him. I found his kid in the bus station. He was looking for Ozzie, but I don’t think Ozzie ever got the word he was supposed to pick up the kid there. So I figured I’d sit with him—you know, take him around till I ran into Ozzie or we met back at the hotel.” She looked at the witch. “You remember when Stubb was talking at breakfast, he told me to come here and see Proudy, if I could, and find out what he had against us? Come to think of it, what are you doing here anyway? You were supposed to get some friends of yours on our side.”

The witch said. “Possibly it is unwise to speak too much of these things now. Let me say only that I did what I agreed to do, and some of the friends you spoke of came seeking a certain one we both know of. They were detained. I came to free them, and as you have seen, I was detained myself. It is unimportant. Tell me quickly about the child.”

Candy nodded. “I brought him here, and then I got mad at the two-bit piece down at the desk and tried to take a hunk out of her, and they got me. I guess about like they got you. They doped me up and strapped me down, and after a while this doc here—Hey, he’s awake! Hi ya, Doc! He came and talked to me. After that, he talked to Little Ozzie, only Little Ozzie split when they had some kind of ruckus and went looking for me, and when he found me, he undid my straps. This was only about three rooms down from here. Then I went wandering around in those pajamas they put on me. Really, I was looking for my own stuff, my dress and handbag. But one time when the nurse at the desk was gone, I looked under it and found this big package wrapped up in brown paper. I figured it might be something useful, so I took it back to the room where Little Ozzie was, and it turned out to be her laundry, you know? The really lucky part was that she was a pretty big gal, so I was able to get into her stuff. Then I thought, hey, if I could just find a basket or a big box or something like that, I could put Little Ozzie in it and carry him out. I figured he couldn’t just walk out with me, because I knew they were looking for him. So I looked and the big nurse at the desk was gone again, or maybe still gone, and I decided to risk it. Only there wasn’t anything, and I was on my way back when I heard the girl you bit yell.”

“You shall never know,” the witch said, “how truly thankful I am that I asked you to speak quickly. Otherwise we should still have been here on the Last Day. This child, then, is still in the room where you were strapped?”

Candy nodded.

“Then you, Mr. Reeder, must bring him to us now. If anyone should see my friend Candy with him, that person might easily remember that it was she who brought him here. But if you are seen with him, it will only be thought that he has been recaptured. I have a plan for our escape. It involves coercion and perhaps torture, but those are often characteristic of the best plans.”