T. Boyle - Riven Rock

Mr. McCormick spoke then, and with no impediment. “Dr. Hamilton is no friend of mine.”

Brush was on it like a hound. “Oh? And why do you say that, sir? I’m told he’s been your very good friend over the course of many years now and that he’s very much concerned for your welfare, as indeed Mr. O‘Kane and Mr. Tompkins are, and I myself.”

No reply from Mr. McCormick, whose chin now rested at the level of the table. O‘Kane could read the look in Mr. McCormick’s eyes, and it wasn’t auspicious, not at all. “Well, then, Dr. Brush,” he interjected, clapping his hands and rubbing them together vigorously, “why don’t you let me show you around a bit, at least until Dr. Hamilton arrives?”

While Mart entertained Mr. McCormick with some hoary card tricks Mr. McCormick had already seen half a million times, O‘Kane led the psychiatrist into the bedroom. “There isn’t much to see here, really,” he apologized, indicating the brass bed bolted to the floor in the center of the room. Everything else, right down to the pictures on the walls and the nails that held them, had been removed. There were no curtains, no lights. Here and there along the walls you could make out a faded patch where a piece of furniture had once stood.

“Rather spartan, isn’t it?” the doctor observed, swinging his tempestuous frame to the left and poking his head into the bathroom, which contained only toilet, sink and shower bath, and the infamous window, of course, now louverless and with the neat grid of iron bars neatly restored.

“We did have a rug,” O‘Kane said, “a Persian carpet, really quite the thing. But we found that Mr. McCormick was eating it.”

“Eating it?”

“At night, when no one was watching. Somehow he managed to get a section of it unraveled with just his fingers alone, and then he’d pull out strands of it and swallow them. We found the evidence in his stools. Of course, the rest of the stuff, the furniture and pictures and all that, well, he destroyed most of it himself the last time he escaped.”

And then they were back in the upper parlor, standing around awkwardly, awaiting Dr. Hamilton, who’d spent two hours that morning awaiting the fog-delayed Dr. Brush. By this time, Mr. McCormick had retreated to the sofa, where he was reading aloud to himself in a cacophonic clash of words and syllables: “ ‘TARzan is NOT an APE. He is NOT LIKE his peoPLE. HIS WAYS are NOT their ways, and SO TARzan is going BACK to the LAIR of his OWN KIND….’ ”

O‘Kane was just about to suggest that they take a tour of the lower floor and then perhaps look round for Dr. Hamilton, who was most likely out in the oak forest overseeing the dismantling of his hominoid colony, when Dr. Brush abruptly swerved away from him and loomed up on Mr. McCormick, cigar smoke trailing behind him as if it were the exhaust of his internal engine. “How marvelous, Mr. McCormick,” he boomed, “you read so beautifully, and I can’t tell you how therapeutic I find it myself to read good literature aloud, for the main and simple—”

But Dr. Brush never had a chance to round off his homily, because at that moment Mr. McCormick slammed the book shut and hurled it at him end over end, prefatory to leaping out of the sofa and tackling the doctor round the knees. The flying book glanced off the side of Brush’s head and he was able to take a single hasty step back before Mr. McCormick hit him and he found himself swimming through the air with an improvised backstroke before crashing down on one of the end tables, which he unfortunately obliterated. O‘Kane was there in an instant, and the usual madness ensued, he tugging at one end of Mr. McCormick’s wire-taut body and Mart at the other, but Brush, for all his size, proved remarkably agile. Without ever losing his masticular grip on the big tan perfecto, he was able to fling Mr. McCormick off, squirm round and pin him massively to the floor beneath all three hundred twenty-seven pounds.

Mr. McCormick writhed. He cursed, scratched, bit, but Dr. Brush simply shifted his weight as the crisis demanded, not even breathing hard, until finally Mr. McCormick was subdued. “Ha!” Brush laughed after a bit, O‘Kane and Mart standing there stupefied, their hands hanging uselessly at their sides. “Trick I learned at the Eastern Lunatic Hospital. Always works. The patient, you see, after a while he feels like he’s a little bird nestled inside the egg, not even a hatchling yet, and calm, so calm, for the main and simple reason that I represent the mother bird, a nurturing force that cannot be denied, for the main and simple—”

“Just a minute, Dr. Brush — I don’t mean to interrupt, but I think, well, I’m afraid you’re hurting Mr. McCormick,” O‘Kane put in, alarmed by the coloration of his employer’s face, which had gone from a deep Guinea-wine red to the palest blood-drained shade of white.

The big doctor was unconcerned. He squared the cigar in his mouth, shifted his haunches. “Oh, no, no, that’s just the thing, don’t you see — a little compression. It’s what they all need.”

Afterward, when apologies had been made all around and Mr. McCormick, very contrite, was put to bed for his afternoon nap, O‘Kane felt it politic to escort Dr. Brush out onto the fog-shrouded grounds in search of Dr. Hamilton. “Can’t see a damned thing,” Brush complained, moving cautiously forward as O’Kane, familiar with the terrain, led the way. “Afraid of barking a damned shin. Or worse. You sure he’s out here?” And then, in a stentorian voice: “Gilbert? Gilbert Hamilton! Are you there?”

The trees stood ghostly, ribbed in white like so many masts hung with tattered sails. The leaves were damp underfoot. Nothing moved, and there was no sound, not even of birds. O‘Kane felt his way, and he didn’t even have the stench of the hominoids to guide him. All but two of the baboons and monkeys had been sold off to private collectors or donated to zoos, and Hamilton was packing up his notes and equipment and shipping it back east to his mentor, a small monkey-obsessed scholar by the name of Yerkes who’d spent some time at Riven Rock a year ago. As for Julius, he’d been removed from the premises after the Potter Hotel incident and sold for a song to a traveling circus — on Katherine’s orders.

There was a smell of burning in the air, and of something else too, something rank, and before long they could hear the crackling of a fire, and then they saw the flames, a moiling interwoven ball of them, up ahead at the edge of the oak grove. Two figures, in silhouette, slipped back and forth in front of the fire, feeding the flames with scraps of timber. As they drew closer, the big doctor tramping heavily behind him and cursing steadily under his breath, O‘Kane recognized Hamilton’s gnomelike assistants, and he called out to the shorter of them, the Mexican. “Hey, Isidro, you seen Dr. Hamilton?” And then, showing off one of the handy phrases he’d picked up amongst the denizens of Spanishtown: “ El Doctor Hamilton, dondy estis?”

They were at the edge of the fire now and O‘Kane saw that the two men were burning up the dismantled cages, wire and all. Paint sizzled and peeled. Wood split. Fingers of flame poked up through the mesh, weaving an intricate pattern, leaping high to drive back the fog even as the smoke settled in to replace it. The heat was intense, a hundred stoves stoked to capacity, and they had to step back away from it; O’Kane looked at the two scurrying men and hoped they knew what they were doing — a blaze like this could get out of hand and bring the whole place down, orchards, cottages, Pierce Arrows and Mr. McCormick too. Isidro, the Mexican, paused with an armload of rubbish to consider the question of Hamilton’s whereabouts, then nodded his head toward the place beneath the trees where the cages had stood even this morning.