Frank De Felitta: For Love of Audrey Rose

Bill wore a long black overcoat, stolen from a closet on the first floor. It stretched from his shoulders clear down to his knees; an expensive, severely styled black coat with thin strips of fur along the collar and down the lapel. His feet were still in slippers, and they slipped painfully over the ice.

Bill thought he saw a smaller figure emerge from the sanitarium, limping under the small globes of light. He ducked his head and ran south, cutting across the parking lot. A man’s voice called out to him.

“Dr. Henderson!”

Panicked, Bill whirled, lost his balance, and nearly fell. Two enormous headlights swirled slowly toward him out of the darkness, blinding him. He held his hand in front of his face. The door of a taxi opened.

“Here, Dr. Henderson, climb in.”

In the distance, a limping figure made its way under the windows of the dormitory wing of the building. His feeble arms were waving.

Bill scrambled quickly into the cab.

“Sorry,” laughed the cab driver, “but I had my lights off. You couldn’t see me but I spotted you.”

Bill craned his neck backward through the rear window. He saw an orderly running toward them, losing ground.

“Hell, I’d recognize that black coat anywhere, Dr. Henderson,” the driver chuckled.

Under the gentle noise of the radio, Bill heard the sound of the wheels spinning out of control, digging down to the asphalt beneath the ice. The taxi went slowly sideways in a great arc, then straightened and skidded slowly ahead.

“It’s a lot better on the main road. Pisser of a night, isn’t it?”

Bill coughed. He felt the severe chill penetrating the overcoat, through to his legs covered only with thin pajamas. He felt nothing at all in his feet. Dimly he saw them and thought they had turned blue. Ice melted very slowly from his ankles, sliding off in crinkling little cakes of light.

The taxi swerved, jolted, and finally found traction. The sanitarium very gradually glided past them. Bill ducked as far back into the seat as he could, and he kept his face averted from the driver. For several minutes they drove in silence, and the storm buffeted the car, while the driver wrestled it back to control.

Bill stared wide-eyed at the vision of the night. Headlights swarmed in his mind. It had been a lifetime since he had seen the manic jaws of civilization so close about him. From time to time he saw his own reflection in the dark panes, pale as dirty snow, the eyes deep in sockets of shadow, like two tiny animals hiding in caves.

“You’re going the wrong way!” Bill shouted.

“You’re not going home to Glen Cove?” the driver asked, surprised.

“Manhattan!”

The driver noted a different inflection in the voice than the one he was used to. He peered in the rearview mirror. Bill huddled in his coat and did not look up, but shrank against the door, in the shadow where the driver could barely see. The driver shrugged.

“To the city, then,” the driver mumbled, changing lanes.

The taxi fought its way back around a jug-handle, then up a ramp, and bumper to bumper with traffic on a single lane. Flashing red lights everywhere revealed the touch of a thousand brakes on the slippery road. Then they were moving west again.

The taxi picked up speed, occasionally slipping on ice patches. The city was a hallucination of glimmering yellow and red lights, streaks of blinking neon in the black, and clouds livid with painfully bright reflections.

The driver set his lips hard and fought his way down into the Queens Midtown Tunnel, dipping and rising toward the main heart of Manhattan. He leaned back. Heading north on the East Side Drive, the driver glanced in the rearview mirror.

“Where exactly did you want to go?”

“Des Artistes.”

The driver screwed up his face.

“Where?”

“Home!”

“Home?”

The driver turned. His eyes widened.

“Hey, you ain’t Dr. Henderson!”

A violent screech of brakes, horns, and shouts snapped his head back to the slapping windshield wipers. The cab skidded to the center divider, bounced lightly off it, and regained its momentum as Forty-second Street momentarily came into view.

“I ain’t go no money,” breathed the driver quickly, his eyes darting back and forth. “See that sign? Driver carries no more than five bucks change—”

“Des Artistes!” Bill roared, leaning suddenly forward.

“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about, mister!”

“Home!”

“You’re a goddamn loony! That’s what you are! I’m taking you right back to the asylum!”

The cab skidded onto the Forty-second Street off-ramp, the driver pressed on the accelerator, the tires whined, spat snow in a long arc behind them, and then Bill reached through the small opening in the glass wall that divided driver from passenger, and grabbed the driver’s hair. With a murderous yank, he jerked the driver’s head backward.

In incoherent rage and frustration, Bill beat the driver’s head back against the glass divider, then bit the man’s finger until red spurted into his mouth.

“Help! Help!” the driver yelled, arms flailing, his legs kicking wildly, smashing into the dashboard.

The taxi began to decelerate, finally crashing into the car ahead at a traffic light. Immediately there was an angry snarl of car horns. Bill looked around wildly. It seemed all of New York poured its alien, annihilating light directly at his heart. In a single, terrible lunge, he was out in the cold, white as a rabbit, stock-still in the middle of the street.

The driver came out, holding his ear, wobbling, pointing at Bill.

“Grab him! He’s a maniac!”

Bill leaped across the snow that divided the road, slipped, and somersaulted in the black overcoat over the ice. His hands emerged bleeding. He picked himself up, and ran in his iced and torn slippers into the heart of the crowds and flashing, swirling lights.

He ran down Forty-second Street, away from the tangle of red flashes, shouts, and glistening roads.

The swirling storm turned to blankets descending in soft folds. Traffic was stalled. Disgusted, police stood by patrol cars.

Pedestrians walked around Bill as he ran from the reflection of his own form in dark windows. Slipping, his ragged slippers torn in half, he went sprawling into a filthy snowdrift.

“Here you go, friend. Up and easy.”

Two strong hands grabbed him under the elbow.

Bill looked into the eyes of two priests. They backed away from the intensity of his stare.

“Dr. Geddes?”

“What’s that? You want a doctor?”

Bill stumbled backward, frightened, tore himself away, retreating down Forty-second Street. He ran into the lights that poked holes in the darkness, glittered through the falling snow. Evil followed him everywhere, and he looked back over his shoulder.

Bill reached an enormous structure that exhaled warmth. It smelled like New York. Gritty, sweaty, oily. Something seemed to click into place. Cautiously, he walked down the stairs, went through large glass doors, and looked around at the rolling, incessant crowds under brilliant lights.

It was Grand Central Station. Bill smiled. He had been here before. In another incarnation. Bewildered, he ducked away from the vents that roared at him with hot air. A group of sailors jostled him. Businessmen pushed him out of their way. A teenager shot past him with a radio blaring rock.

Instinct led him to a kind of bright tunnel. There was a series of urinals. Trembling, he relieved himself. Then he examined his feet. They were soaked, dirty, bleeding, and the toes tingled ominously, as though the flesh was barely alive. He tucked the black overcoat carefully over the pajamas and went to the shoeshine stand in a lobby.