Darkness, Take My Hand (16 page)

Alec Hardiman was
forty-one years old, but looked fifteen years younger. His pale blond hair was plastered wetly across his forehead like a grade-schooler’s. His eyeglasses were small and rectangular—granny glasses—and when he spoke his voice seemed as light as air.

“Hi, Patrick,” he said as I came into the room. “Glad you could make the trip.”

He sat at a small metal table bolted to the floor. His frail hands were cuffed and looped through two holes in the table and his feet were manacled. When he looked up at me, the fluorescent seared the lenses of his glasses white.

I took a seat across from him. “I heard you could help me, Inmate Hardiman.”

“You did?” He slouched loosely in his chair and gave off the impression of a man completely at ease with his surroundings. The lesions that covered his face and neck seemed raw and alive, their surfaces carrying a sheen. His pupils seemed to emanate brightly from recessive caverns in their hollow sockets.

“Yes. I heard you wanted to talk.”

“Absolutely,” he said as Dolquist took the seat beside my own and Lief took up position against the wall, eyes impassive, hand on his nightstick. “I’ve wanted to talk to you for a long time, Patrick.”

“To me? Why?”

“You interest me.” He shrugged.

“You’ve been in prison for most of my life, Inmate Hardiman—”

“Please call me Alec.”

“Alec. I don’t understand your interest.”

He tilted his head so that the glasses, which had been sliding down his nose, righted themselves.

“Water?”

“Excuse me?” I said.

He tilted his head to indicate a plastic pitcher and four plastic glasses on the table to his left.

“Would you like some water?” he said.

“No, thank you.”

“Candy?” He smiled softly.

“What?”

“Do you enjoy your work?”

I glanced at Dolquist. Career seemed to be an obsession behind these walls.

“It pays the bills,” I said.

“But it’s more than that,” Hardiman said. “Isn’t it?”

I shrugged.

“Do you see yourself doing it at fifty-five?” he asked.

“I’m not sure I see myself doing it at thirty-five, Inmate Hardiman.”

“Alec.”

“Alec,” I said.

He nodded the way a priest will in a confessional. “What other options do you have?”

I sighed. “Alec, we didn’t come here to discuss my future.”

“That doesn’t mean we can’t, Patrick. Does it?” He raised both eyebrows and his skeletal face softened with innocence. “I’m interested in you. Humor me, please.”

I looked at Lief and he shrugged his wide shoulders.

“Maybe I’ll teach,” I said.

“Really?” He leaned forward.

“Why not?”

“What about working for a large agency?” he said. “I’ve heard they pay well.”

“Some do.”

“Offer a benefits package, health insurance, the like.”

“Yes.”

“Have you considered it, Patrick?”

I hated the way he said my name, but I wasn’t sure why.

“I’ve considered it.”

“But you prefer your independence.”

“Something like that.” I poured myself a glass of water and Hardiman’s bright eyes fixed on my lips as I drank. “Alec,” I said, “what can you tell us about—”

“You’re familiar with the parable of the three talents.”

I nodded.

“Those who horde or are afraid to answer to their gifts, ‘are neither hot nor cold’ and shall be spewed from the mouth of God.”

“I’m familiar with the tale, Alec.”

“Well?” He sat back and raised his palms against the cuffs. “A man who turns his back on his vocation is neither hot nor cold.”

“What if the man isn’t sure he’s found his vocation?”

He shrugged.

“Alec, if we could just discuss—”

“I think you’ve been blessed with the gift of fury, Patrick. I do. I’ve seen it in you.”

“When?”

“Have you ever been in love?” He leaned forward.

“What’s that got to—”

“Have you?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Are you now?” He peered into my face.

“Why do you care, Alec?”

He leaned back, looked up at the ceiling. “I’ve never been in love. I’ve never been in love and I’ve never held a woman’s hand and walked on a beach with her and talked about, oh, domestic things—who will cook, who will clean that night, if we should call a repairman for the washing machine. I’ve never experienced such things and sometimes when I’m alone, late at night, it makes me weep.” He chewed his lower lip for a moment. “But we all dream of other lives, I suppose. We all want to live a thousand different existences during our time here. But we can’t, can we?”

“No,” I said. “We can’t.”

“I asked about your career goals, Patrick, because I be
lieve you’re a man of impact. Do you understand?”

“No.”

He smiled sadly. “Most men and women pass their time on this earth without distinction. Lives of quiet desperation and all that. They are born, they exist for a time with all their particular passions and loves and dreams and pains, and then they die. And barely anyone notices. Patrick, there are billions of these people—tens of billions—throughout history who have lived without impact, who may as well not have been born at all.”

“The people you’re talking about might disagree.”

“I’m sure they would.” He smiled broadly and leaned in as if he were about to tell me a secret. “But who would listen?”

“Alec, all I need to know here is why—”

“You are potentially a man of impact, Patrick. You could be remembered long after you die. Think what an achievement that would be, particularly in this disposable culture of ours. Think of it.”

“What if I have no desire to be a ‘man of impact’?”

His eyes disappeared in the wash of fluorescence. “Maybe the choice isn’t yours. Maybe you’ll be turned into one whether you like it or not.” He shrugged.

“By who?” I said.

He smiled. “Whom.”

“By
whom
, then?” I said.

“The Father,” he said, “the Son, and the Holy Ghost.”

“Of course,” I said.

“Are you a man of impact, Alec?” Dolquist said.

We both turned our heads, looked at him.

“Are you?” Dolquist said.

Alec Hardiman’s head turned back slowly to face me, and his glasses slipped halfway down his nose. The eyes behind the lenses were the milky green of Carribbean shallows. “Forgive Doctor Dolquist’s interruption, Patrick. He’s a little on edge lately about his wife.”

“My wife,” Dolquist said.

“Doctor Dolquist’s wife, Judith,” Hardiman said, “left him once for another man. Did you know that, Patrick?”

Dolquist picked at some lint on his knee, concentrated on his shoes.

“And then she came back, and he took her back. I’m sure there were tears, pleas for forgiveness, some minor snide remarks on the doctor’s part. One can only assume. But that was three years ago, wasn’t it, Doctor?”

Dolquist looked at Hardiman and his eyes were clear but his breathing was slightly shallow and his right hand still picked absently at his pant leg.

“I have it on good authority,” Hardiman said, “that on the second and fourth Wednesday of every month, Doctor Dolquist’s Queen Judith allows penetration of her every orifice by two former inmates of this institution at the Red Roof Inn on Route One in Saugus. I wonder how Doctor Dolquist feels about that.”

“Enough, Inmate,” Lief said.

Dolquist looked at a point somewhere over Hardiman’s head and his voice was smooth, but the back of his neck bore a swath of hard bright red. “Alec, your delusions are for another time. Today—”

“They’re not delusions.”

“—Mr. Kenzie is here at your behest and—”

“Second and fourth Wednesdays,” Hardiman said, “between two and four at the Red Roof Inn. Room two seventeen.”

Dolquist’s voice faltered for just a moment, a pause or an intake of breath which wasn’t quite natural and I heard it and so did Hardiman, and Hardiman smiled slightly at me.

Dolquist said, “The point of this meeting—”

Hardiman waved his thin fingers dismissively and turned his full attention to me. I could see myself mirrored in the icy fluorescent light that ran along the upper half of both lenses, his green pupils floating just below my melting features. He leaned forward again and I resisted the urge to lean back because I could suddenly feel the heat of him, smell the torpid, fleshy stench of a decayed conscience.

“Alec,” I said, “what can you tell me about the deaths
of Kara Rider, Peter Stimovich, Jason Warren, and Pamela Stokes?”

He sighed. “When I was a boy, I was attacked by a nest of yellow jackets. I was walking along a lake, and I have no idea where they came from, but then, like a mirage, they surrounded me and swarmed my body in this great big cloud of black and yellow. Through the cloud I could just make out my parents and some neighbors rushing down the sand toward me, and I wanted to tell them it was all right. It was fine. But then the bees stung. A thousand needles pierced my flesh and drank from my blood, and the pain was so excruciating it was orgasmic.” He looked at me as a drop of sweat fell from his nose and landed on his chin. “I was eleven years old and I had my first orgasm, right there in my swimsuit, as a thousand yellow jackets drank my blood.”

Lief frowned and leaned back against the wall.

“The last time it was wasps,” Dolquist said.

“It was yellow jackets.”

“You said wasps, Alec.”

“I said yellow jackets,” Alec said mildly and looked back at me. “Have you ever been stung?”

I shrugged. “Probably once or twice when I was a little kid. I can’t remember.”

There was a silence then which lasted several minutes. Alec Hardiman sat across from me and looked at me as if he were considering how I’d look laid out in sections on a piece of bone-white china, forks and knives and a full service tray at his disposal.

I looked back, aware that he’d refuse to answer any questions I had at the moment.

When he spoke, I didn’t see his lips move until afterward, in memory.

“Could you adjust my glasses, Patrick?”

I looked at Lief and he shrugged. I leaned forward and pushed them back up to Alec’s eyes and he tilted his nostrils toward the space of bare skin between my gloved palm and shirt cuff, sniffed audibly.

I removed my hand.

“Did you have sex this morning, Patrick?”

I didn’t say anything.

“I can smell her sex on your hand,” he said.

Lief came off the wall just enough so that I could see the warning in his face.

“I want you to understand something,” Hardiman said. “I want you to understand that there are choices. You can make the right one or the wrong one, but the choice will be presented. Not everyone you love can live.”

I tried to get some saliva working through the sand stiffening in my throat and against my tongue. “Diandra Warren’s son is dead because she put you away. That one I get. What about the other victims?”

He hummed, softly at first, and I couldn’t recognize the tune until he lowered his head and the volume rose slightly. “Send in the Clowns.”

“The other victims,” I repeated. “Why did they have to die, Alec?”

“Isn’t it bliss?” he sang.

“You brought me here for a reason,” I said.

“Don’t you approve…”

“Why did they die, Alec?” I said.

“One who keeps tearing around…” His voice was thin and high. “One who can’t move…”

“Inmate Hardiman—”

“So send in the clowns…”

I looked at Dolquist, then at Lief.

Hardiman wagged a finger at me. “Don’t bother,” he sang, “they’re here.”

And he laughed. He laughed hard, his vocal cords booming, his mouth wide and spittle forming at the corners, and his eyes even wider as they remained on me. The air in the cell seemed to go into that mouth with him, as if he were sucking it down into his lungs until it filled his whole body and we’d be left airless and gasping.

Then his mouth clamped shut and his eyes glazed and he looked as reasonable and gentle as a small-town librarian.

“Why did you bring me here, Alec?”

“You’ve tamed the cowlick, Patrick.”

“What?”

He turned his head, spoke to Lief. “Patrick used to have an awful cowlick near the back of his head. It stuck out like a broken finger.”

I resisted the urge to raise my hand to my head, pat down a cowlick I haven’t had in years. My stomach felt weak suddenly and very cold.

“Why’d you bring me here? You could have spoken to a thousand police officers, a thousand Feds, but—”

“If I claimed my blood was being poisoned by the government or that alpha waves from other galaxies were infiltrating my faculties or that I’d been forcibly sodomized by my mother—what would you say to that?”

“I wouldn’t know what to say.”

“No, you wouldn’t. Because you know nothing, and none of those things are true, and even if they were, it would be largely irrelevent. What if I told you I was God?”

“Which one?”

“The only one.”

“I’d wonder how God got Himself locked up in the joint and why he couldn’t just miracle His ass out.”

He smiled. “Very good. Very glib, of course, but that’s your nature.”

“What’s yours?”

“My nature?”

I nodded.

He looked at Lief. “Are we having the baked chicken again this week?”

“Friday,” Lief said.

Hardiman nodded. “That’s good. I like the baked chicken. Patrick, it was a pleasure meeting you. Drop by again.”

Lief looked at me and shrugged. “Interview’s over.”

I said, “Wait.”

Hardiman laughed. “Interview’s over, Patrick.”

Dolquist stood up. After a minute, I did too.

“Doctor Dolquist,” Hardiman said, “say hello to Queen Judith for me.”

Dolquist turned toward the cell gate.

I turned with him, stared at the bars, and felt them hold
ing me, closing me in, blocking me from ever seeing the outside world again, locking me in here with Hardiman.

Lief walked up to the gate and produced a key, all three of us with our backs to Hardiman now.

And he whispered, “Your father was a yellow jacket.”

I turned around and he was staring at me impassively.