T. Boyle - Riven Rock

And a good thing too. Because what happened during O‘Kane’s shift on the fourth day after Mr. McCormick awakened from the dead came as a shock, to put it mildly. O’Kane had never seen anything like it, and he thought he’d seen everything. No one was to blame, at least, and that came as a relief to all concerned, but if he were to scratch deep enough in the sediment of culpability, O‘Kane could have named a candidate — Katherine, Katherine yet again. She meant well, he would never deny that, but because she meant well — and because she was a snooping imperious castrating bitch of a woman the likes of which he could never have imagined even in his worst nightmare — she couldn’t help sticking her nose in where it didn’t belong.

The problem this time was with the window in Mr. McCormick’s bathroom. Katherine couldn’t leave it alone. After she’d finished with the first floor of the house, consigning the McCormick furniture, pictures and pottery to the garage and remaking the place in her own image — when it was all done, from paint to draperies to rugs — she began to fixate on the second floor, the floor she’d never seen, the floor from which she was interdicted on Dr. Hamilton’s strictest orders. She studied it constantly — or at least the outer walls and windows and the tiled expanse of the sunporch — watching for a glimpse of her husband through a pair of opera glasses. Inevitably she found something to displease her, and in this case it was the bathroom window.

The bars disturbed her. They made the place look too much like a fortress — or an asylum. She consulted with Hamilton and then brought in a young architect and a crew of Italians who removed the perfectly serviceable standard one-inch-thick iron bars while Mr. McCormick lay tranced in his bedroom and replaced them with steel louvers. The louvers had been designed to ensure that a fully grown man of Mr. McCormick’s height and weight couldn’t work his arm through any of the apertures and make contact with the glass beyond it — and of course, they’d been constructed to a standard of strength and durability that would prevent their being bent or mutilated in any way that might afford Mr. McCormick an avenue of escape. What the architect hadn’t taken into account was the ingenuity of Mr. McCormick — or his strength. Especially when the fit was on him.

It was late on that fourth day, toward the end of O‘Kane and Martin’s shift, and the evening was settling in round the house, birds calling, the sun hanging on a string, the islands in bold relief against the twin mirrors of sea and sky. Mart was in the parlor, working on a crossword puzzle by way of improving his vocabulary, and Mr. McCormick had retired for a nap before dinner. O’Kane was seated in a chair across the room from Mart, his feet propped up on the windowsill, gazing into space. He was thinking about his room and the bland indigestible cud of grease and overcooked vegetable matter his landlady was likely to serve up for dinner — and his first drink, and Giovannella — when he heard the unmistakable sound of glass shattering and falling like heavy rain to the pavement below.

He didn’t stop to wonder or think, vaulting out of the chair like a high-jumper and hurtling across the floor to Mr. McCormick’s bedroom, which he found empty, and then to the bathroom, which he found locked. Or not locked, exactly — there was no lock — but obstructed. Mr. McCormick seemed to have jammed something — something substantial — up under the doorknob. O‘Kane twisted the knob and applied his shoulder to the unyielding slab of the door, all the while tasting panic in the back of his throat, a harsh taste, precipitate and unforgiving. Mart was right behind him, thank God, and in the next instant there were two of them battering at the door, Mart standing back five paces and then flinging himself at the insensate oak with the singlemindedness of a steer in a chute. Once, twice, three times, and finally the door gave, splintering off its hinges and lurching forward into a barricade of furniture with a dull echoing thump. And where had the furniture come from? From the stripped and ransacked bedroom behind them. While they were lulled to distraction in the soothing plenitude of the late afternoon, decoding their crossword puzzles and gazing idly out the window, Mr. McCormick had silently dismantled his room and built a bulwark against the door to cover his escape.

Oh, yes: his escape. That was what this was all about — the barricaded door, the shattered glass, the imploded peace of the lazy languorous late afternoon in Paradise — as O‘Kane was to discover in the next moment. He scrambled up over the plane of the door, which was canted now at a forty-five-degree angle, just in time to see Mr. McCormick vanish through a ragged gap in the louvers that looked as if an artillery shell had passed through it but was in fact created by Mr. McCormick himself, using main strength, ingenuity, and a four-inch-thick length of cherrywood that had formerly served as a table leg. O’Kane cried out, his mind a seething stew of featureless thoughts, the three p’s tumbled together with Dr. Hamilton’s lectures on the train, Katherine’s denunciatory fury and the stark crazed pulse-pounding phrase “suicidal tendencies,” and he rushed to the window and thrust his head through the gap in horror, expecting anything, expecting the worst. What he saw was Mr. McCormick, eyes sunk deep in the mask of his face, fierce with concentration, clambering down the drainpipe with all the agility of a, well, of a hominoid.

By the time O‘Kane reached the ground floor, burst through the front door and tore round the corner of the house, Mr. McCormick had vanished. Why, he was thinking, why does this always have to happen on my shift? and then he was in motion, frantic, irrepressible, charging round the courtyard and shouting out for Roscoe, the gardeners, the household help and any stray Italians who might have been dicing garlic or nodding over a glass of wine in their tumbledown cottages, dogs barking, chickens flying, the whole place a hurricane of fear and alarm. “Mr. McCormick’s loose!” he bellowed, and here came Mart and Roscoe and a host of sweating dark men gripping hoes and hedge clippers. “Lock your women indoors,” he cried, “and all of you men fan out over the property — and if you find him, don’t try to approach him, just stand clear and send for me or Dr. Hamilton.”

They were systematically beating the bushes, describing an ever-widening circle around the house under O‘Kane’s command, when Dr. Hamilton appeared on the run, flashing through the trees from the direction of the apery in a white lab coat stippled with the various leavings of his monkeys and baboons, not to mention Julius the orangutan. He slashed through the kitchen garden, across the courtyard and right on up to O’Kane, who was searching the bushes around the daphne bed to the west of the house. “My God,” the doctor gasped, out of breath, his eyes whirling, and he repeated it over and over again, wheezing for breath, “my God, my God, my God.”

“He can’t have gone far,” O‘Kane said, “his legs won’t carry him. He’s not in condition.”

The doctor just stood there, a sharp wedge of the declining sun isolating the right side of his face, the tic replicating itself in his cheek now and at the corner of his mouth. “How?” he sputtered. “Who was—? When did-?”

“No more than ten minutes. We almost had him — he pried open the new louvers with a stick of wood.”

“Shit.” The doctor let out a string of curses, every trace of the therapeutic whisper gone out of his voice. “What’s the nearest estate — Mira Vista, isn’t it? Who’s there now — are there any women?” His face was a small thing, flushed and bloated beneath the tan he’d acquired in the company of his hominoids, his hair wet through with sweat, and sweat descending in a probing and tentative way from his temples to trace the clenched lines of his jaw. “We’ve got to warn them. Notify the police. Call out the bloodhounds.”