The Cat, The Devil, The Last Escape

38

A SINGLE LIGHT BURNED behind the hospital bed, illuminating the white bandage that circled Morgan’s scalp. Light caught across his stubble of beard and picked out the IV tube that ran down his arm, draining through a needle into the vein of his wrist. Lee couldn’t see Morgan breathing, couldn’t see the blanket move, but each time he laid his fingers along Morgan’s free wrist he found a faint pulse. Morgan had been unconscious all night and it was now nearly noon, the high sun slanting down through the half-closed Venetian blinds of the small hospital room. Lee sat in a wooden chair beside the bed, his knees pressed against the metal rail, talking; he’d been talking most of the night. Except for a short break to eat the breakfast an orderly had brought him, and for a brief nap on the other bed. A few minutes’ sleep, then he’d risen to groggily feel Morgan’s pulse and to start talking again.

He had no idea if Morgan could hear him. The constant effort wearied him, but Dr. McClure had said to keep talking; he said the sound of Lee’s voice could be a lifeline for Morgan. Said the contact between Lee’s voice and whatever within Morgan was alert enough to listen might keep him from sinking deeper into an oblivion from which he could not return.

Lee had no idea if that was so. He had no idea how much the medical profession really knew, and how much they could only guess. Dr. McClure was a strange man. You’d think a prison doc would be hardened, that after the twenty years he said he’d spent at T.I., he wouldn’t give a damn who lived and who died. But McClure’s sad, dark eyes under those bushy brows had shown Lee a whole world of caring inside that middle-aged, pudgy man. “Talk to him, Fontana. If you’re his friend and you want to help him live, talk to him and keep talking.”

“But he can’t—”

“You don’t know what he can hear. There’s a lot in this world we don’t know, maybe a lot we’ll never know. I say he can hear you and that talking to him might keep him alive. Sit here and talk, as long as you can, no matter how foolish that seems.”

So Lee talked. McClure had gotten permission for him to stay with Morgan. The orderlies and male nurses moved around Lee doing their work, silently accepting his presence. Lee told Morgan over and over that Falon had spilled, had confessed where the money was hidden. He just hoped Falon wasn’t lying. He told Morgan that FBI and GBI agents were already on their way up Turkey Mountain Ridge to look for the evidence, for the proof that could clear Morgan—that could put Falon on trial for the robbery and murder. In between telling him about Falon, Lee talked about anything he could think of just to keep going; he dredged up memories that, after several hours, turned his voice rough and straining.

He told Morgan about life in South Dakota when he was a kid, how he broke his first colt when he was eight. How he’d hobbled the youngster, dragged an old jacket over his neck and back and legs until the colt no longer snorted and bolted, how the colt finally settled down to lead. He told Morgan about spring roundup, how the steers and cows would hide among the mesquite or down in a draw and you had to rout them out. How the ranchers all helped each other rounding up the cattle, separating out their own stock during branding. The scenes of roundup came back so clearly, he recalled scanning the far hills where you could barely pick out a few head of steers, watching them slip away among the brush as a rider or two eased after them. He could still hear the calves bawling during the sorting and branding, could still smell the burning hair and skin under the smoking iron, though it didn’t hurt them but for a minute or two.

Sometimes, as Lee talked, he was aware of another presence, a warmth between the comatose man and himself, the touch of rough fur against his hand, and he could hear soft purring as the ghost cat pressed against Morgan. It seemed to Lee then that he could see the faintest of color in Morgan’s white, cold cheeks. Lee knew as well when the ghost cat had gone and wondered if he was with Sammie. He remembered Morgan’s description of Sammie’s sickness when Morgan, after the bank robbery, had been left drugged and unconscious in the backseat of his car, and Sammie herself was unable to stay awake. Now, with Morgan in a coma, was the child again lost in darkness? As Lee kept talking, hoping to reach Morgan, was he reaching out to Sammie, too?

He told Morgan about his first train jobs, when he was barely seventeen, described how his chestnut mare would race alongside the engine keeping close to it as he dove off her back onto a moving car, how he’d taught her to follow the train, waiting for him. He tried to explain the fascination of the old steam trains, to describe his excitement when he, just a kid, was able to stop a whole train and haul away its riches. He told Morgan that was the life he’d always wanted, that he’d had no choice—but he knew that wasn’t true. No matter what you longed for, you always had a choice.

Late on the second afternoon as dusk crept into the hospital room, Morgan stirred. His free hand moved on the covers, but then went still again. His eyes slit open for an instant unfocused, but then closed. At the same moment the shadows grew heavy around them. Suddenly Lee’s rambling voice sounded hollow, sucked into emptiness. The walls had vanished into shadows, the floor had dissolved except for the one ragged section that held Morgan’s bed and Lee’s chair. They drifted in dark and shifting space.

And Morgan woke, staring at something behind Lee.

Lee turned to face the dark presence looming over them, its cold seeping into Lee’s bones. Morgan’s hand, then his whole body, grew so cold that Lee scrambled to reach for the call button.

“They won’t hear it,” said the dark spirit.

“What do you want? Get out of here. What do you want with Morgan, what does he have to do with your vendetta against me? He’s not of Dobbs’s blood.” Lee wanted to lunge at the figure but knew he would grapple empty air.

“Morgan’s little girl is of Dobbs’s blood. She is descended from Dobbs just as you are. There is no finer prize,” Satan said, “than a child. Now, through her father, I will destroy the girl. Through her father and soon through you as well.

“Oh, she dreams of you, Fontana. You are her kin. She saw you kill Luke Zigler, she saw his smashed face. She saw you and Morgan scale the wall; she was with you on your journey, suffering every misery you endured; she felt cold fear at the sight of the tramp’s switchblade, fear not as an adult would experience but as a child knows terror. Her pain, as she watched, is most satisfying.

“She saw you pull the cable around Falon’s throat, she felt your urge to kill him, she watched you smile and pull the cable tighter.”

Lee’s helplessness, his inability to drive back the dark spirit, enraged him. Nothing could be so evil as to fill a child with such visions, to torment a little girl with an adult’s lust.

But at Lee’s thought, the invader shifted. “I do not give the child her nightmares,” Satan snapped. “I have no control over her dreams.”

“How could she see such things if the dreams don’t come from you?”

The shadow faded, then darkened again. “I do not shape her dreams,” he repeated testily. “I do not control her fantasies.”

But then he laughed. “Soon I will control them, soon I will break the force that gives her such visions, and then,” he said, “then I will shape the images she sees, I will shape her fears until, at long last, I use that terror to break her. To own her,” Lucifer said with satisfaction.

“In the end,” he said, “the child will belong to me. My retribution will be complete. You might resist my challenges, Fontana. You might have won a bargain, as you put it. But Sammie Blake won’t win anything. She will soon be my property. As I destroy her father, so I will destroy her. She is my retribution, the final answer to my betrayal by Russell Dobbs.”