Jeffry Lindsay - Darkly dreaming Dexter

I looked back at Last Nurse. “He wants the pain,” I told her, and somewhere in her small frown, the petulant shake of her head, I heard the roar of a savage beast watching its prey scuttle down a hole.

“I'll have to tell the doctor,” she said.

“All right,” I told her. “We'll wait here.”

I watched her sail out into the hallway like some large and deadly bird. I felt a pressure on my hand. Harry watched me watching Last Nurse.

“You… can tell…,” Harry said.

“About the nurse?” I asked him. He closed his eyes and nodded lightly, just once. “Yes,” I said. “I can tell.”

“Like… you…,” Harry said.

“What?” Deborah demanded. “What are you talking about? Daddy, are you all right? What does that mean, like you?”

“She likes me,” I said. “He thinks the nurse may have a crush on me, Deb,” I told her, and turned back to Harry.

“Oh, right,” Deborah muttered, but I was already concentrating on Harry.

“What has she done?” I asked him.

He tried to shake his head and managed only a slight wobble. He winced. It was clear to me that the pain was coming back, just liked he'd wanted. “Too much,” he said. “She… gives too much-” he gasped now, and closed his eyes.

I must have been rather stupid that day, because I didn't get what he meant right away. “Too much what?” I said.

Harry opened one pain-blearied eye. “Morphine,” he whispered.

I felt like a great shaft of light had hit me. “Overdose,” I said. “She kills by overdose. And in a place like this, where it's actually almost her job, nobody would question it-why, that's-”

Harry squeezed my hand again and I stopped babbling. “Don't let her,” he said in a hoarse voice with surprising strength. “Don't let her-dope me again.”

“Please,” Deborah said in a voice that hung on the ragged edge, “what are you guys talking about?” I looked at Harry, but Harry closed his eyes as a sudden stab of pain tore at him.

“He thinks, um…,” I started and then trailed off. Deborah had no idea what I was, of course, and Harry had told me quite firmly to keep her in the dark. So how I could tell her about this without revealing anything was something of a problem. “He thinks the nurse is giving him too much morphine,” I finally said. “On purpose.”

“That's crazy,” Deb said. “She's a nurse.”

Harry looked at her but didn't say anything. And to be truthful, I couldn't think of anything to say to Deb's incredible naïveté either.

“What should I do?” I asked Harry.

Harry looked at me for a very long time. At first I thought his mind might have wandered away with the pain, but as I looked back at him I saw that Harry was very much present. His jaw was set so hard that I thought the bones might snap through his tender pale skin and his eyes were as clear and sharp as I had ever seen them, as much as when he had first given me his Harry solution to getting me squared away. “Stop her,” he said at last.

A very large thrill ran through me. Stop her? Was it possible? Could he mean- stop her? Until now Harry had helped me control my Dark Passenger, feeding him stray pets, hunting deer; one glorious time I had gone with him to catch a feral monkey that had been terrorizing a South Miami neighborhood. It had been so close, so almost human-but still not right, of course. And we had gone through all the theoretical steps of stalking, disposing of evidence, and so on. Harry knew that someday It would happen and he wanted me to be ready to do It right. He had always held me back from actually Doing It. But now-stop her? Could he mean it?

“I'll go talk to the doctor,” Deborah said. “He'll tell her to adjust your medicine.”

I opened my mouth to speak, but Harry squeezed my hand and nodded once, painfully. “Go,” he said, and Deborah looked at him for a moment before she turned away and went to find the doctor. When she was gone the room filled with a wild silence. I could think of nothing but what Harry had said: “Stop her.” And I couldn't think of any other way to interpret it, except that he was finally turning me loose, giving me permission to do the Real Thing at last. But I didn't dare ask him if that's what he had said for fear he would tell me he meant something else. And so I just stood there for the longest time, staring out the small window into a garden outside, where a splatter of red flowers surrounded a fountain. Time passed. My mouth got dry. “Dexter-” Harry said at last.

I didn't answer. Nothing I could think of seemed adequate. “It's like this,” Harry said, slowly and painfully, and my eyes jerked down to his. He gave me a strained half smile when he saw that I was with him at last. “I'll be gone soon,” Harry said. “I can't stop you from… being who you are.”

“Being what I am, Dad,” I said.

He waved it away with a feeble, brittle hand. “Sooner or later… you will- need -to do it to a person,” he said, and I felt my blood sing at the thought. “Somebody who… needs it…”

“Like the nurse,” I said with a thick tongue.

“Yes,” he says, closing his eyes for a long moment, and when he went on his voice had grown hazy with the pain. “She needs it, Dexter. That's-” He took a ragged breath. I could hear his tongue clacking as if his mouth was overdry. “She's deliberately-overdosing patients… killing them… killing them… on purpose… She's a killer, Dexter… A killer…”

I cleared my throat. I felt a little clumsy and light-headed, but after all this was a very important moment in a young man's life. “Do you want-” I said and stopped as my voice broke. “Is it all right if I… stop her, Dad?”

“Yes,” said Harry. “Stop her.”

For some reason I felt like I had to be absolutely certain. “You mean, you know. Like I've been doing? With, you know, the monkey?”

Harry's eyes were closed and he was clearly floating away on a rising tide of pain. He took a soft and uneven breath. “Stop… the nurse,” he said. “Like… the monkey…” His head arched back slightly, and he began to breathe faster but still very roughly.

Well.

There it was.

“Stop the nurse like the monkey.” It had a certain wild ring to it. But in my madly buzzing brain, everything was music. Harry was turning me loose. I had permission. We had talked about one day doing this, but he had held me back. Until now.

Now.

“We talked… about this,” Harry said, eyes still closed. “You know what to do…”

“I talked to the doctor,” Deborah said, hurrying into the room. “He'll come down and adjust the meds on the chart.”

“Good,” I said, feeling something rise up in me, from the base of my spine and out over the top of my head, an electric surge that jolted through me and covered me like a dark hood. “I'll go talk to the nurse.”

Deborah looked startled, perhaps at my tone. “Dexter-” she said.

I paused, fighting to control the savage glee I felt towering up inside me. “I don't want any misunderstanding,” I said. My voice sounded strange even to me. I pushed past Deborah before she could register my expression.

And in the hallway of that hospice, threading my way between stacks of clean, crisp, white linen, I felt the Dark Passenger become the new driver for the first time. Dexter became understated, almost invisible, the light-colored stripes on a sharp and transparent tiger. I blended in, almost impossible to see, but I was there and I was stalking, circling in the wind to find my prey. In that tremendous flash of freedom, on my way to do the Thing for the first time, sanctioned by almighty Harry, I receded, faded back into the scenery of my own dark self, while the other me crouched and growled. I would do It at last, do what I had been created to do.