George Chesbro - Bleeding in the Eye of a Brainstorm

I found nobody who matched any of the descriptions.

By 10 P.M. I had worked my way south toward my own neighborhood, and I decided to visit the one city shelter and three Salvation Army and church relief centers in the area before calling it a night. I was getting more than a wee bit discouraged. If the patients had seriously gone to ground and were avoiding all relief centers, or were scattered in the other boroughs, I had little real hope of finding them even if I devoted all my time to the search. And that would be counterproductive, since come December 26 or thereabouts they would all be mad or dead or both anyway. The only solace I could take was in the knowledge that if I was having so much difficulty finding the lost flock, then so must the assassins on their trail.

I was coming out of the shelter when I looked across the street and saw something that made me stop so abruptly I almost tripped over my own feet. There, standing at the curb under a streetlight, was a young couple-at least they certainly appeared young from a distance-with their arms around each other's waist, apparently engaged in earnest conversation. From the way they dressed and by their physical mannerisms, their gestures, the man and woman looked to be in their late teens or early twenties. From what I could see of their faces, they certainly appeared youthful-but there was no bus stop where they were standing, and it seemed to me that there were any number of other, more pleasant places where a young couple could go to chat rather than this forlorn, potentially dangerous block, across the street from a shelter for homeless men. I waited for a stream of cars to pass, then headed in their direction.

They saw me coming, turned their heads slightly to regard me for a few moments, then resumed their conversation; as I drew closer, it sounded to me as if they were speaking Dutch, or perhaps some Scandinavian language. I stepped up on the curb next to the couple and waited for them to take notice of me, something which they at least pretended not to do. They were both about the same height, about five eight or nine, and what I saw when I looked into their faces amazed me and made the hairs on the back of my neck rise. While the man and woman had indeed looked like college students from where I had stood across the street, up close I could see that they were no spring chickens. Like an optical illusion gone sour, they had aged twenty years or more in the time it had taken me to cross the street.

The longish, dyed blond hair of both the man and the woman hid the multiple scars I knew they both bore behind their ears from multiple visits to plastic surgeons; their flesh, which had the starched look and translucency of parchment, was stretched like drumheads across their skulls, lending both of them the expression, even when speaking, of a perpetual, faint grimace. The man had brown eyes, and the woman one blue eye and one green; the eyes of both protruded slightly from their sockets, and looked like glass marbles in the mercury glow from the streetlight. I had no idea what the man and woman would have looked like if they had allowed themselves to age normally, but they couldn't look any worse than they did now.

I'd seen enough, and was about to retreat into the shadows when the woman with the mismatched eyes suddenly glanced down at me and asked me a question in what I now thought sounded like a German dialect.

"Uh, excuse me," I said, smiling up into the stretched faces. "Could you tell me how to get to Carnegie Hall?"

They conferred for a few moments in the language that was incomprehensible to me. Finally the woman looked at me and winked her blue eye. "You are perhaps trying to have some fun with tourists?" she asked in heavily accented English. "We have heard that joke. The answer is: Practice, practice, practice."

"Uh, right you are. Well, thanks anyway. Have a nice evening."

I didn't go far, south half a block and around a corner. Then I stopped and peered back around the edge of a building. The man and woman were still standing at the curb, talking. I was certain they were Punch and Judy, trolling the same shelters and relief centers I was, but avoiding the risk of identification by remaining at a distance to watch who went inside and who came out. They would have whole dossiers on the escaped patients, including photographs and behavior profiles. Taking out this decidedly unattractive duo could produce all sorts of dividends. They were unlikely to know anything about Rivercliff, the drug or the company that manufactured it, but they could tell me the names of their employers, people who presumably would know. Their forced retirement would also certainly make the streets a lot safer for the lost flock, and might even bring a faint smile to the thick lips of Captain Felix MacWhorter, perhaps even raise his level of tolerance for having me live in his precinct.

But I was going to need more than my own conviction and evidence of plastic surgery to remove them from circulation. It was going to cost me valuable time to gather enough evidence for MacWhorter to take them in, but the effort certainly seemed worth it.

Fifteen minutes went by, and upwards of twenty men entered the shelter without the couple giving any one of them so much as a glance. That surprised me, and took a bit of a nick out of my confidence that they were Punch and Judy. In fact, they seemed far more interested in each other than in who was entering the shelter across the street. Then they surprised me a second time by abruptly heading off down the block in the opposite direction. They were definitely not acting like the stalkers and professional killers I wanted them to be, but I followed them anyway.

Since I was the only dwarf in the general vicinity, I had to keep a respectable distance between us or I would immediately be made if one of them happened to glance back. However, they didn't seem to be in a hurry to get anywhere, and they were easy to follow. They went north awhile, then turned east on 76th Street. Three quarters of the way down the block they paused outside an apartment building. They demurely kissed each other on the cheek, the woman disappeared into the building, and the man resumed walking. It seemed unlikely that Punch and Judy would be living in separate quarters, and the behavior of this couple was growing ever more depressingly unsuspicious. Still, I continued to follow the man, who disappeared down the steps into the subway station at Columbus Circle.

I sprinted the rest of the way down the block, across the street, and scurried down the stairs, toward the almost palpable rumble of incoming and outgoing trains, hoping to at least catch a glimpse of him to determine whether he was going towards the uptown or downtown stairs. There was no sign of him. I dug a subway token out of the change in my pocket, dropped it into the turnstile, then hurried down another flight of stairs leading to the platforms for the downtown trains. I knew I was running a considerable risk of being spotted if he was on the platform, but I didn't see him anywhere.

I hurried back upstairs then down another flight to the platform for the uptown trains, but I didn't see any sign of the man there either. I headed home, my thoughts once more turning to the image of a man with an ice pick, taking care to avoid dark areas, and paying close attention to anybody who passed close to me on the sidewalk.

By the time I reached my block I had convinced myself that the couple had not been Punch and Judy, that it had simply been coincidence that both the man and the woman had undergone extensive plastic surgery, and that they had been standing in that particular spot across from the men's shelter. I had been very careful in tailing them, which meant that the woman most likely really did live in that particular apartment house, and the man had simply stepped onto a train that had been in the station and had almost immediately pulled out. In any case, whether or not the couple had been Punch and Judy was a moot question; they were gone now. At least I had gotten some exercise.