Ed Gorman - Serpent's kiss

Holland was like that. A serious reporter.

Maybe that was why he liked her so much (and a hell of a lot more than he'd ever let on to her, being of the generation of men who believed that women could guess your true feelings through intuition or some goddamned thing like that).

So where the hell was Holland anyway?

For the first time he had the thought that maybe if the murder call was the real thing, Holland might be in a little trouble.

And that didn't make O'Sullivan feel good at all.

Even if he didn't tell her how much he cared about her (after a few brewskis, he sometimes even admitted to himself that he might even l-o-v-e her), he worried about her sometimes.

Sometimes he worried about her a lot.

Every mental hospital had somebody like Gus living within its walls. He'd been at Hastings House so long-some said ever since Dwight Eisenhower had been elected president-that he didn't even have a last name anymore. He was just Gus.

At this point in his life, he was round, fish belly white, balding, and just as strange as he'd been the day his mother had first brought him here after Gus had complained too many times about the small green Martian man who kept trying to poison him. Every time the staff recommended that Gus be granted a few days at home, he would invariably do something that would make them rescind the order. One time it was sneaking into old Mrs. Grummond's room and taking a dump under her pillow because she hadn't wanted to watch Superman in the TV room. Another time it was dressing up in Katie Dowd's slinkiest nightgown and strolling into the games room, lipstick like a rash on his mouth, and a red paper rose stuck behind his ear. Perhaps his most memorable moment at Hastings came one September day when the state inspectors arrived to check out rumours of abuse they'd heard about Hastings. Just as they reached the third floor, they heard horrifying screams coming from the opposite end of the hall. Along with Dr. Bellamy himself, the inspectors ran to the source of the screams, out of breath and frightened that something terrible was going on. What they found was that Gus had commandeered the nurse's station loudspeaker microphone and was filling all the speakers with his great imitation of a guy being strangled to death, a trick he'd picked up from an episode on Alfred Hitchcock Presents . By this time, Hastings was a literal zoo-a human zoo-patients so horrified by the screams that they were crying and screaming themselves, and huddling in corners, and running up and down the hall, and fighting with staff nearly everywhere.

Gus later explained that he was just trying to have a little fun and was sorry that some of the patients had got so scared and that some of the staff had suffered injuries trying to calm down some of the more violent patients. But, hey, if you couldn't have a little fun in a mental hospital, where the hell could you have fun?

Following this last incident, Gus was made PRN, short for the Latin phrase pro re nata, which means 'as needed'-Gus's personal doctor had given the nurses at Hastings permission to shoot Gus up with 100 mg of Thorazine anytime they felt he needed it. As when Gus went fruitcakes on them three or four times a week, peeing in glasses of orange juice and then drinking them down, finding rats in the closets and killing them and then putting them in other patients' drawers so the vermin would turn green and fester with maggots-which meant that the nurses were damn tootin' going to keep Gus shot up every chance they got. He was just too much hassle to deal with otherwise.

While Gus sometimes suffered tardive dyskinesia, an involuntary movement disorder suffered by many patients who had been overtreated with drugs, the nurses nonetheless kept him zoned out most of the time. He wasn't violent enough to tie down to a bed in one of the isolation rooms, but he was sure as hell violent enough to keep pacified with a needle.

When Gus was all medicated up, he walked around a lot. He didn't harm anybody, he just walked. You'd see him in the TV room and in the game room and in the visitors' room and in the hallways. Just shuffling along in his shabby pyjamas and his even shabbier robe and his flapping K-Mart house slippers. Gone was the Gus of shitting-under-people's-pillows and getting-all-dressed-up-in-drag and peeing-in-orange-juice-glasses. All that remained was this shambling, dead-eyed, slack-jawed zombie. He got so bad at these times that he had to be showered with the most helpless patients-gang showered, as they called it, hosed off like a circus animal or a car, just a row of cowering naked people like concentration camp prisoners about to be shot and thrown into a mass grave.

Yet curiously enough, it was when he was all shot up with drugs that Gus heard the voices. They came, according to Gus, from people in the tower that soared from the north-east corner of this part of the building into the black and starry sky above.

"They's not normal," Gus would tell people over and over again. "They's not normal."

And even some of the more disturbed patients-patients who heard voices of their own-would look at poor Gus and take him gently by the elbow and say, You wanna Baby Ruth, Gus (or) You want some strawberry Kool-Aid, Gus? (or) You want me to get a nurse and have her take you back to your room, Gus?

But he never wanted anything. He'd just go on, shuffle down the hall or out of the room or into the next room, and keep muttering "They's not normal" and looking up with childlike awe out a window where he could get a glimpse of the turreted tower.

This had been Gus's life for nearly four decades. He became an old man, one who'd seemed to give up on everything. He was not even the mad masturbator that he used to be. He now found no solace in his groin area. The drugs had made him sexless. Nor did he care about visitors. The only ones he'd ever wanted to see were his own people-mother, father, aunts, uncles-and they'd passed on long ago.

He just walked around on the third floor and muttered to himself about the tower and how the people in it weren't normal. And when he'd show any signs of lucidity-any signs, in other words, that the drugs were wearing off-they'd slap him down on his bed and put the quick sharp silver needle into the right cheek of his fleshy white buttock.

This was Gus.

Other patients knew that Gus sometimes took the grille from the air conditioning duct and crawled up the dark, dusty passageway until he was on the first floor of the tower. He never had any trouble with the duct-work passage because it was pretty wide and because it was made from sheet metal that was twenty-four-gauge steel that was S-cleated for extra support and that was crimped for even more support beyond that. Gus always went after dusk because during the day, with the full staff out in force, it would be too easy to get caught entering or leaving the duct.

The grille was located at about eye level to the right of the freight elevator in a seldom-used section of the third floor.

Tonight, Gus went through his usual procedures. Once he knew nobody was around, he took a small milking stool, set it on the floor directly beneath the grille, set his clawed fingers into the grid itself, and extracted the grille from its square.

After checking one more time for sight of anybody, Gus boosted himself up and crawled into the opening. He banged his knee as he did so. A shock wave of pain moved through his entire leg and he said severed curse words that he knew were wrong. He even took the Lord's name in vain and that was especially wrong.

In the pocket of his robe, he kept a flashlight. In need of fresh batteries, the beam was a dim, almost watery yellow but at least it offered a comforting glow in the gloom.