The Devil's bed

chapter
eleven

When Nightmare was very young, his mother sometimes slept with him. He remembered the feel of her, warm through the flannel of her nightgown, her arms around him protectively. Her smell would stay on his thin pillow and unwashed sheets for a long time. When he was alone, he would bury himself there and breathe in the ghost of her presence.

Often he wouldn’t see her for days. He would find plates of food on the basement stairs, left when he was sleeping, and after he put the empty plates back, they would eventually be gone. When she next appeared, her face would be pale, occasionally bruised, and her eyes would be distant. Her hair was long and dirty. Her clothes were drab. He would sit with her on the bed and they would be quiet together. Sometimes her lips moved as if she were talking to someone in the basement shadows, but if she spoke loud enough for him to hear, her words made little sense. Even these visits he cherished, for she was all he had.

When he was older, she would unlock the basement door after the old man had gone to sleep. She held a finger to her lips to keep him silent, and she led him outside, where they would walk together in the night. She couldn’t see well, not like him for whom the dark was an old friend. He would take her hand and lead her. Away from the rotting old house. Away from the barn that was little more than a loose skeleton of weathered boards. Away from the monster sleeping in the second-floor bedroom. In the winter, nights were silent except for the crunch of their feet on the snow. In summer, the night air was alive with music, the song of tree frogs from the woods and bullfrogs in the marshy meadow and crickets everywhere. Mostly, she was sad, and he never tried to make her happy. He was sad, too, alone all day in the dark beneath the house. That’s just the way people were. Sad. Or they were angry, like his grandfather. They were monsters, or they were the servants of monsters. Their souls were corrupt-born corrupt, beyond redemption-and they deserved to live in the dark, or they lived in the light, as his grandfather did. Above in the light. His mother lived there, too, but she would often visit Nocturne at night, in the basement where the old man seldom came.

Nocturne. That was how he thought of himself then, for that was what she called him. He’d never been given a real name. His existence had never been officially recorded. His grandfather sometimes called him “boy” or “spawn,” but his mother called him Nocturne. It was the music of the night, she explained to him in one of her more lucid moments. Among the junk on the shelves in the basement, he’d found an old phonograph. It hadn’t worked when he discovered it, but he tinkered, something he had a lot of time to do, and he coaxed the turntable into motion and began to listen to the old 78s he found boxed on the shelves. His mother told him they’d belonged to his grandmother and that when she died, the old man had put them in the basement, put away all reminders of her, and that he’d buried her in the fields somewhere. Some nights when Nocturne walked with his mother, she stopped and listened for a long time. She’s crying, she would say. Do you hear her?

Yes, he would answer, although he heard only the frogs and the crickets.

They would walk in silence back to the house, to the basement, and Nocturne would put something gentle and sad on the phonograph, and they would sit on his old bed together in the dark while she wept.

At 10:30P.M., in the laundry of the St. Croix Regional Medical Center, the man known to his coworkers as Max Ableman turned off his boom box. It had been a good evening. Except for the interruption by the Secret Service agent, everything had been quiet. Although Thorsen had surprised him, Nightmare wasn’t greatly alarmed. In fact, there was one aspect of Thorsen’s presence and questions that pleased him. If Thorsen was nosing around the hospital, it meant he was concerned about Jorgenson as well as Jorgenson’s daughter. He was looking in two directions. His attention was divided. Nightmare knew the first rule of any successful operation was focus.

From his clothes locker, Nightmare took a roll of silver duct tape and a sealed glass cylinder fifteen inches long and five inches in diameter. He also lifted a small armload of dirty linen from a pile in front of one of the washers. He descended the stairs to the tunnel, selected a laundry cart, put the cylinder in the cart, and covered it with the soiled linen. Then he headed to the main hospital building. He rode the freight elevator to the fourth floor. The nurses in trauma ICU paid no attention to him as he went about his normal duty of collecting the laundry. He spent a few extra minutes in the room of a man who’d flatlined the night before, then he crossed to the room where Tom Jorgenson lay comatose. He had to wait less than thirty seconds before the alarm went off, signaling another cardiac arrest on the far side of the ICU. He heard the nurses call a Code Blue, and they directed their attention to the situation. He had a window of a few minutes.

He reached into the cart and drew out the glass cylinder and the duct tape. Inside the cylinder, cradled among Styrofoam pellets, was a length of one-and-a-quarter-inch PVC pipe. The pipe, capped and sealed to be airtight, contained C-4, a volatile plastic explosive. The C-4 was fitted with a detonator that could be triggered remotely. A vacuum surrounded the pipe, a precaution that would prevent the scent of the C-4 from being detected by bomb dogs. The inner surface of the glass was coated with common airplane glue. There was enough air in the sealed PVC pipe itself to allow detonation of the C-4. In addition to the destruction caused by the explosion, the glue-coated fragments of glass would be like burning shrapnel, setting the room ablaze. Nightmare intended to attach the device to the underside of the bed with the duct tape and to detonate it the next time the First Lady visited.

He knelt beside the bed and leaned close to the man who lay there.

“Do you remember yourIliad?‘The day shall come, that great avenging day, which Troy’s proud glories in the dust shall lay, when Priam’s powers and Priam’s self shall fall, and one prodigious ruin swallow all.’ Old man, that great avenging day has come. You will die and the Troy you built on your lies will crumble.” He glanced back through the door. The nurses were still occupied with the Code Blue. “But I wanted to give you something to take into the darkness with you. I wanted you to know she’sgoing to die with you. That’s why I didn’t kill you in the orchard. I knew they would bring you here, and I knew she would come.”

“Ableman, what are you doing?” The security guard filled the doorway.

Nightmare stood up and quickly tucked loose bedding into the mattress. “Straightening his bed.”

“That’s the nurses’ job,” Randy O’Meara said.

“They’re busy trying to save a life.” Nightmare dropped the bomb and tape back into the laundry cart.

“You were saying something to him,” O’Meara pressed him.

“Praying for him.”

“Didn’t sound like a prayer to me.”

Nightmare slipped past the guard and shoved his cart down the hallway. He made for the stairway.

The guard followed him. “Ableman, what did you put in that cart?”

Nightmare reached the stairway door and abandoned his cart. He hurried through the doorway into the concrete shaft of the stairwell, pressed himself against the wall, and waited.

Damn. He’d given in to weakness, to a desire to taunt his enemy, the mistake of a green recruit. And this was the result. This was always the result when you let yourself go, even for a moment. Now he would have to risk much.

When Randy O’Meara swept through in pursuit, Nightmare leaped at his back. He used the bigger man’s momentum, pushed him forward, and hooked the guard’s ankle with his foot. O’Meara didn’t even have time to call out before he tumbled down the hard, concrete steps. He lay on the next landing, groaning. Nightmare sailed down the stairs, knelt, grasped the guard’s head in the crook of his arm, and gave his neck a powerful twist. He could feel the satisfying snap of bone against his own muscle. Afterward, he quickly mounted the stairs and checked the hallway. The nurses were still working on the Code Blue patient. No one seemed to have noticed him or O’Meara. He glanced back down at the dead man. Something more had to be done to cover the deed, and Nightmare, who was no stranger to tense situations, knew exactly what that was.