Gene Wolfe - Free Live Free

Sandy asked, “Are the Gypsies gone?”

“Some are still here, I think.” Dr. Benson glanced at his watch. “I can’t imagine what’s holding them up with Proudy.”

“You were just fooling with us, weren’t you?” Sandy glanced at Stubb, then back to the doctor. “All that stuff about our catching paranoia from him. You were just passing the time.”

He smiled. “Partly, I suppose. Let me put it this way. Virtually all normal people exhibit some pathological tendencies. If you can learn—”

There was a knock at the door.

“That should be Proudy now,” Dr. Bensen said.

The witch’s glare would have bored holes in steel. She strained at her straitjacket like an athlete and bared her gleaming teeth like a beast.

“You want me to give her another injection?” the nurse asked. “That first one don’t seem to have touched her.”

Dr. Roberts shook his head. “No need to risk it.”

“Think you can get her to talk when she’s like that?”

“I will speak,” the witch told them. “I will tell you both what will happen to you. Your children will be taliped, their eyes dropping from their heads. They will hate you, and in the end they will kill you, cruelly and filthily, in an unclean place.” She began to speak words neither physician nor nurse understood. “Marear enkranken tober malade ammalarsi …”

“We’ll be all right,” Dr. Roberts said. “You can go now, Nurse.”

“Uh huh.” The nurse was still watching the witch. “Doctor, you think she’s white?”

Dr. Roberts shrugged. “Race is largely a matter of selfclassification.”

The nurse grinned. “Yeah, you think so, don’t you.”

“If she told you she was white and spoke like a white, you’d probably accept her as white. If she told you she was black and spoke like a black, you’d accept her as black.”

“Look here.” The nurse put her forearm beside the witch’s face. “She’s nearly dark as I am.”

“I would die before I would jump into the melting pot with either one of you!” the witch snarled.

“No foolin’, Dr. Bob. Have a look here.”

For an instant, some minute fraction of a second, Dr. Roberts saw—or believed he saw—a metamorphosis wild as any psychotic delusion. The witch struck like a snake, and for that instant seemed a snake. There was a gleam of scales, a blow sinuous and powerful as a cut from a bullwhip.

The nurse screamed and fell to her knees, the witch’s teeth still buried in the flesh of her arm. Blood ran from the witch’s lips, staining her canvas straitjacket and the nurse’s white uniform.

Dr. Roberts shouted, “Orderly! Orderly!” and got both hands around the witch’s neck. Unthinkably, a bronze shoulder was writhing from the opening in the straitjacket, followed by a bronze arm.

A fat blond nurse and a lanky red-headed orderly arrived at virtually the same moment, so that they stuck in the doorway, the nurse with her belly jammed against the jamb, the orderly caught between her billowing hips and the other side of the frame.

“I’ll take care of this,” the fat nurse said. By then the witch had Dr. Roberts by the throat, a development the fat nurse seemed to view with satisfaction.

“Well, shouldn’t we do something?” the orderly asked. He crouched to look at the witch, whose jaws were still locked on the black nurse’s arm. “Here now,” he said. “You let go of her.”

The witch ignored him. Her rapt face gave the impression that her whole attention was devoted to throttling Dr. Roberts, that she continued to bite the black nurse from a sort of absence of mind.

“Get her off,” the fat nurse said.

“Maybe if you stuck your fingers in her eyes,” the lanky orderly suggested. He glanced around at the fat nurse as if to see what she thought of the idea. “Hey, why are you unbuckling that?”

The fat nurse was bent red-faced over the witch. “She’s half out of it already. We can’t get her back in without getting her all the way out, can we?” The final buckle loosed, she slipped the witch’s other arm from the straitjacket and looked at the canvas. “Have to be washed,” she said.

Another orderly opened the door and looked in. “Everything all right here?” The fat nurse was between him and Dr. Roberts.

“We’re taking care of it,” the lanky orderly said. “Hey, shut the hatch, will you, Mate?”

“Okay.” The door closed softly. Dr. Roberts crumpled unconscious to the floor; the witch released him and transferred her grip to the black nurse.

“Don’t kill her,” the fat nurse said. Other than spitting out the black nurse’s bloody arm, the witch seemed to pay no attention.

“Jesus!” the lanky orderly muttered. “I always thought they wore stuff—you know, underwear or something—under those things.” He was staring at the witch.

The fat nurse eyed him. “You sure you work here?”

“I’ll level with you. This is my first day on the job.”

“Really. Where’d you get your training?”

“In the Navy. I just got out. I was a Navy corpsman, see, but we only had guys in our hospital. Well, a few girls—women, I mean—but the nurses always took care of them.”

“I see,” the fat nurse said. “Where was this hospital, anyway?”

“Norfolk. The base hospital there.”

“You’re a phony.” She fixed him with a plump index finger. “You stay right where you are, or I’m gonna holler my head off. I want to talk to you.”

The witch dropped the black girl. “What is the difficulty now? Nurse, I regret losing my temper with these two. It will not happen again.”

“You can forget it, Madame Serpentina. He’s not for real. He told me he’d been a Navy medic, but they didn’t have many girls in the Norfolk Base Hospital. I spent three days with somebody from there once, and he said there were more women than men; they take dependents, so they get a ton of obstetric cases.”

The lanky man looked sheepish. “I switched clothes with a pal and put this coat over them. They didn’t fit too good.”

The witch laughed. “But you thought our Candy a true nurse! I am sorry, but it is so funny!”

“She’s a fake too? Hell, she’s bustin’ out of that uniform.”

“Yes!” The witch pointed. “Hold in your stomach or you will lose a button.”

“Okay, I’m hilarious. But we have to do something fast, or they’ll be on to us. Are those two dead?”

The witch shook her head.

“Then look in these cabinets. There ought to be tape around here someplace. You can wear the nurse’s clothes.”

“Fah! They are bloodstained.”

“We’ll have to risk it.” Candy slammed a cabinet shut and opened another. “My God, look at the dope!”

“Here,” the lanky man said. He nudged her and handed her a roll of adhesive tape.

“Great, but you can do it as well as I can—probably better, because you’re stronger. Take care of the doc. Tape up his mouth first, then do his hands behind his back and tape his ankles together. I’ll help Madame Serpentina strip the girl, then we’ll take care of her.”

The lanky man glanced at the unconscious nurse. “We better bandage that arm while we do it. She looks like she might bleed to death.”

Madame Serpentina clicked her tongue. “So both of you are ministering angels now.” She was pulling off the nurse’s white shoes.

“What’s your name anyway?” Candy asked the lanky man.

“Phil Reeder. I really am a sailor—seaman first—but on a destroyer. No women there. You haven’t seen anything around here to cut this with, have you? I lost my jackknife when they picked me up.”

Madame Serpentina said, “In that drawer,” and pointed. Candy asked, “How do you know?”