P. Parrish - An Unquiet Grave

His eyes jerked to the smear of blood across the floor and he rose quickly, following it. Ives was dragging her, and she was still bleeding, leaving the floor streaked red and wet. It went on and on, across an intersection.

Why wasn’t he hearing anything? Where were they?

The smears were fading but he moved forward, straining to see some drop or smudge that told him he was still going in the right direction. But suddenly, the blood trail was gone.

He looked up. In front of him was another cinder-block wall.

It had been quiet for a while now. Last time he had checked his watch it was 8:10. He guessed that was an hour ago. But he didn’t check now. He needed to save the light.

He was sitting on the cold floor again. He felt something on his hands and he wiped them on his jeans, staring again down the tunnel.

His mind had started to drift the last few minutes. Back to things he hadn’t thought about in years. He knew what it was, knew what isolation did to people. He had seen it in jails and prisons and in this hospital.

“Get up, get up,” he whispered.

But he didn’t. He worked his head back to Ives and the handprint he slapped on walls and the word BITCH he had painted just for Dr. Seraphin.

Why did he hate her so much? Because she was a woman? Because she had been his doctor? Because she hadn’t been able to help him?

Her words came back to him.

Your man is impotent. In the sixties he was young and healthy. . He’s changed since then. . grown angrier and if he’s become impotent recently his anger is magnified by his inability to perform. . a man who lost the last few years, no job, no contact with his family. . who came to Hidden Lake at a young, impressionable age.

“Nice profile, Doctor,” Louis said. “You nailed him.”

Louis let his own words echo, trying to find the rest of it, knowing something else was there that he wasn’t getting. Then it came to him.

“You nailed him because you knew all along who he was, didn’t you?” he said.

Louis lowered his head, fingers on the bridge of his nose, something else in his head now.

“You knew he was a rapist then,” he said. “You knew what he did in here and you kept it a secret and then, years later, you released him into the world.”

Louis didn’t move, his mind filled with Millie Reuben’s strange story and the vacant look in Claudia DeFoe’s eyes, and he tried to imagine them tied to a bed, Buddy Ives standing at the foot of it, a cigarette in his fingers, smoke curling from his lips. The image started to crystalize into something else, as more of Seraphin’s words came back to him.

Something new I was trying with the patients. . isolating them to gain their dependency. . we treated them with various stimuli.

Louis shut his eyes, trying to make sense of his thoughts, knowing that what he was thinking was so crazy it had to be impossible, but he didn’t think it was.

Something new I was trying. .

Was it possible it had been some kind of therapy? A physical kind that involved sexual pain and pleasure? Acted out in rapes that Dr. Seraphin not only knew about, but arranged and condoned?

God. He was right. He knew he was.

Louis pushed himself to his feet, taking a second to steady himself, surprised his legs were so cramped and weak. But the idea about Seraphin gave him a surge of energy and he wanted to use it to move, afraid that if he stayed on the ground much longer, he wouldn’t get up. He moved forward in the darkness.

There was something that came in total darkness, he thought. An unsettling kind of awareness that allowed people to hear even the faintest sound. Like a rat breathing. Or the grass growing. Or a heart beating in a tunnel a hundred feet away. Like the heart in that Edgar Allan Poe story. . the heart under the floor that beat and beat and beat.

His body was trembling with a cold he couldn’t feel anymore. Sometimes he thought the numbness was death setting in and he’d put a hand over his heart to make sure it was still beating.

No more walking now. He was too cold. He was on the floor, his legs drawn in, his hands shoved into his armpits.

In the last few hours, the screams had come and gone. He had been trying to keep track of them, but he had lost count a long time ago, sometimes wondering in the quiet whether he had heard them at all.

He had lost an hour or more somewhere. Part of him thought he had slept it away, but he didn’t think he could sleep, although he knew he should. Sleep was essential to alertness. That’s what they taught in the police academy. Cops needed to stay alert or they died.

He rested his head back against the wall, watching the darkness shift from gray to black to sometimes even flashes of white, when he blinked.

His partner Ollie had died. But it wasn’t because he wasn’t alert. It was because the bullet had been an inch high, hitting him above the vest in the neck. He hadn’t been able to save Ollie, couldn’t stop the blood pouring from his neck.

Louis glanced at his feet, watching a rat. It stopped and he could make out its eyes, like they could somehow find a reflection of light where there was none. Louis moved his feet and the rat ran off.

Get up. Get up and walk. You’re drifting. You’re back to things you haven’t thought about for years. You’ll freeze to death if you sit here. And she’ll die. The woman will die.

She was already dead. Like Ollie was. Like Zeke was. And Rebecca Gruber. He had done nothing for them, just like he had done nothing for Phillip, except be ungrateful and give him grief. And just like he had done nothing for Kyla.

Get rid of it. I don’t want to screw up my life.

Are you sure she had an abortion, Louis?

What if she didn’t? What if you have a kid out there and its mother is too ashamed of you to tell the kid about you?

No, don’t go there. Not now. Not with this. Think about anything but this.

Louis struggled to his feet, and started to walk. He turned on the flashlight, using the little sliver of light to provide some sense of reality. But the light was growing weak, and he clicked it off.

You’re no better than him.

That man you keep in the drawer in your bedroom. That picture you keep of that white man who wasn’t there for you. That man ran out on his son, ran out on you. But you are no better. No better than the man who slept with your mother and then walked away, ashamed of his black woman and his black child.

Something hard grabbed at his gut and he felt his whole body tighten. He stopped walking.

Don’t you cry, boy. Don’t you cry or I’ll whip you twice as hard and twice as long.

He was seeing things now, seeing that old picture of himself as a boy, the one Phillip had given him at the kitchen table.

Then you stay in that closet, you sorry little bastard. Stay there until you starve for all I care.

Louis pressed the heel of his palm to his forehead.

It was after 1:00 A.M. He had no idea where he was now, if he was anywhere near the lift entrance. He had walked everywhere, met with cinder-block walls or more tunnels. He could no longer remember the layout of the hospital or what the map looked like that Spera had given him.

One thing was clear right now. He might die in here. Slip into a coma and freeze to death. And it struck him how sad that was. No one wanted to die, but wasn’t there something about some professions, some lives, that dictated a person should die in a dignified fashion? Soldiers. . cops.

Not that he even was a cop now.

He reached back and pulled his wallet out his pocket, flipping it open to the Ardmore P.D. badge. He wanted to look at it, but he didn’t want to waste the light. So he ran his fingers over the embossing.