Delirious (34 page)

“Two nights to start,” Charlie said. He pulled out the sizable wad of cash so that the man could see that he was good for the money. If the guy was as desperate as he looked, he’d figure Charlie might be worth even more than a two-night stay. Charlie noted there were far more pigeon holes with keys than without.

“So you’re paying cash? Up front?” The man’s eyes narrowed.

“Yeah, cash,” Charlie said.

“Okay. Fill this out.”

He pushed a clipboard toward Charlie. Clipped to the board was a card to fill in personal information, such as address and phone number.

“Is there really a need for this if I pay you up front?” Charlie asked.

The man eyed him again.

Charlie set a few hundred dollars down on the counter. “Plus deposit,” Charlie added.

“Well, I guess not,” the man said. Reaching behind him, he fished out a key from the nearest pigeon hole. “Room two-sixteen,” he said. “It’s in the back.”

“Actually,” Charlie said, “I was wondering if I could get room two-twenty-four. I saw it on my way in, and I liked the view.”

The man grunted and turned. He looked at the pigeon holes and stopped. “Two-twenty-four?” he asked, with his back still turned to Charlie.

“Yes, if it’s available.”

The man pulled out an envelope from inside the cubby marked 224. He opened it and took out what Charlie thought to be a driver’s license or a laminated ID of sorts.

“What’s your name?” the man asked, his eyes narrowing on Charlie.

“Craig Devlin,” Charlie said. Without thinking, he had selected the name of one of his favorite professors from MIT.

“Yeah? Craig Devlin, eh? Then tell me, who is this?”

The man slapped down the ID on the counter. Charlie’s breathing
grew shallower, and he shook his head, as though the motion would change what he couldn’t believe he was seeing. On the counter the man had placed Charlie’s driver’s license. The picture was facing up.

“Room two-twenty-four is paid in full. It has been rented through next month and was paid for in cash, too. I got this in the mail just a few days ago. The instructions were to rent it to the guy in the ID. I’m not a specialist or anything, but you look a lot like him, amigo,” the man said. His twisted grin suggested that he enjoyed the mystery of the situation almost as much as the money he was making off the room.

“Could I see that note?” Charlie stammered.

The man fished it out of the envelope. The handwriting was unmistakably his own. Charlie’s blood turned ice cold as he read the undated, handwritten note.

To whom it may concern:

I will be arriving at this motel, requesting room 224. I will not have ID. Do not ask me any questions. In exchange, I will rent the room for two months at your standard rate, although I expect that my stay will be much shorter. Please return to me my ID and give me the keys to room 224 upon my arrival.

“It’s impossible,” Charlie muttered. “I don’t understand.”

“I don’t, either,” the man said. “But I do understand one thing, and that’s money. I’ve kept in business this long by keeping quiet. You’re the guy in the ID. You’ve paid for the room. It’s yours.”

He slid the ID across the counter. Charlie picked it up and appraised it, quickly convinced of its authenticity. He couldn’t figure out how they had his ID. If anything, it should still be in his wallet at Walderman. The man next pushed the key to room 224 across the counter. Charlie picked it up and held it loosely in his hand, as though it were diseased.

“I’ll take it,” Charlie said and pocketed the key.

Charlie stepped outside the office and inhaled the cool ocean air. Then he walked toward room 224.

T
he room was standard-issue motel. In the center stood a queen bed covered with an orange polyester bedspread. Directly across from it, resting on a nondescript bureau, was a nineteen-inch color T V. The TV had a built-in VCR but no DVD player. Charlie figured the Seacoast Motel didn’t provide much in the way of on-demand entertainment.

It was fitting, then, that as a substitute the motel offered a “bring your own video” service. He noticed that the bathroom lights, at the other end of the room, were on. He found that a bit odd since he was the only one who should be in the room, unless a cleaning person had left them on accidentally. The motel owner didn’t seem the sort to waste electricity.

He had no idea how long the room had been vacant. Although he had meant to ask, it didn’t surprise him to have forgotten. He was still in shock from discovering he had a connection to this motel that seemed to predate his being committed. Charlie made a mental note to check back in with the owner and try to figure out exactly when the letter with his ID had arrived. It might help him construct a time line of events.

Charlie hovered in the center of the room, pondering what seemed to be an endless supply of questions.
When did I send him that note and money? I’ve never even heard of this place before. Why here?

Nearly as startling as his having rented a room without any recollection of doing so was the realization that this was the first room he’d been in in nearly a week that locked from the inside. Moreover,
it smelled more like other people than it did disinfectant, and had a color scheme that actually deviated from shades of white.

“Good-bye, Walderman,” Charlie said aloud.

Taking off his Windbreaker, Charlie realized his shirt felt damp with sweat. Given all that he’d been through, that wasn’t entirely surprising. He wondered if there was a clothing store nearby or at the very least a Laundromat. A clean change of clothes and a shower would do him a world of good.

He looked at the time on the digital clock next to the bed and realized that he could catch the evening news. As long as his escape wasn’t broadcast, he felt a certain safety. At the least the motel would make a good hideout for a short while.

Praying that local and national events would steal the spotlight from his escapades, Charlie turned on the television. He sat on the edge of the bed, gritting through a tightness forming in his chest. Fifteen minutes later he breathed a loud sigh of relief. There had been a shooting in Dorchester. Three-alarm fire at a home in Beverly. All occupants were rescued, including the cat. Police were still trying to make an arrest in a string of car break-ins in Newton. But there was nothing, not even a tease for the eleven o’clock news, about a former software executive turned escaped mental patient, considered dangerous and out prowling the streets. He was certain the police had been alerted to his escape, but suspected Walderman Hospital had earned enough political capital over the years to keep the security breach quiet.
Quiet at least for the moment,
Charlie reminded himself. Time was a luxury he didn’t have.

Spent with exhaustion, Charlie buried his head in his hands. He took some pleasure from evading capture, but for what purpose? The note waiting for him at the motel was a dagger thrust into his heart. The idea of Eddie Prescott guiding him from beyond the grave felt foolish and, even worse, sad. What other answer could there be, save for his complete and total madness?

The only thing that kept him from walking outside and surrendering to the authorities was a sudden and overpowering feeling of exhaustion. His eyelids grew heavy as his muscles gave way to relaxation. The sensation he felt was not unlike his earlier experience during the hypnosis session with Rachel. Images flashed through his mind with a hazy recollection. The faces of his former Magellan
teammates from SoluCent were interspersed with images of his mother and Joe. He felt sick to his stomach, but rather than attempt the fifteen-foot trek to the bathroom, Charlie managed to fight back the urge to vomit. Even if he couldn’t resist the urge, Charlie doubted he’d have the strength to even make it there. His legs felt too heavy to move.

He thought again of his mother. He hadn’t even checked in on her condition. For all he knew, she could be out of her coma, although that was doubtful. Every update they had ever gotten was the same—no change. But he still hadn’t ruled out that improvement was a possibility. Unlike how he felt about his own future, Charlie still held out hope for hers.

Although he was free, he was essentially locked up again. It was just a different prison: one of his own making, which kept getting smaller and smaller. First he was a prisoner of this motel room, and now he felt a prisoner of the bed. He was too weak and exhausted even to stand.

His head began to buzz, then tingle. It wasn’t an alarming sensation; it felt calming. Exhaustion had won out. Charlie’s thoughts drifted between his desire for sleep and a desperate need for answers.

Perhaps I could sleep a minute. I’ll figure things out later. I don’t remember sending money to this motel. I’m so lost. Just close my eyes …

The tingling in his head retreated a moment, only to swell up again. With closed eyes, Charlie watched as the faces of Rachel, Randal, Sandy Goodkin, and Joe spun around in his imagination in a wild, frenzied dance. George’s laugh echoed from somewhere deep in the recesses of his mind. There was a moment when Charlie felt himself falling, but the sensation was blessedly brief. He had only a vague awareness that he was lying on the bed. His legs felt as if they had melted into the mattress, and his feet were glued to the floor. The tingling in his head stopped at last.

“I’ll close my eyes for just a minute,” Charlie muttered. “Then I’ll figure it out. I’ll figure everything out….”

His voice trailed off. Faces of people in his life ceased haunting his thoughts. They were replaced by the blackest infinity he had ever faced. The only feeling now was the familiar disconnect of body from
brain, signaling the onset of sleep. As that feeling took him deeper into a blessed slumber, it brought along the one thing that had been most elusive in Charlie’s life of late. It brought him a moment of peace.

Charlie awoke with a start. His back ached, and his legs were still draped over the foot of the bed. He went to stand, but his feet were numb and prickling; his muscles had fallen asleep from having stayed in the same awkward position for too long. Eventually he forced himself to his feet and shook his head vigorously from side to side to clear the fog. A film of mucus covered his eyes and blurred his vision. He rubbed it away so that he could see. His shirt, damp before, was now soaked through with sweat. He walked over to the bathroom on wobbly legs and ran cold water from the sink over his face. The person who greeted him in the bathroom mirror had become even more of a stranger than the last time he looked at his reflection. His skin was a ghastly gray. The grit of his beard extended well down his neck. His hair had grown, too, and was long past its normal cropped length. Worry lines, similar to his mother’s crow’s-feet, were visible on the sides of his eyes. Nothing about the man in the mirror reminded Charlie of the person he once had been.

As he took off his drenched shirt, he noticed that his hands were caked with dried blood. Pulling the shirt over his head and draping it on the shower curtain rod to dry, Charlie rinsed the blood off his hands. He searched them for a wound.

He had no memory of having cut himself. He supposed it was possible that he had scratched his hand in fitful dreams.
Hard enough to draw blood, but not wake me?
It seemed unlikely
.

With the blood removed from his hands, Charlie searched again for the source. He didn’t find even a trace of a scratch, let alone an open cut.

As his shirt began to dry, Charlie noticed first a spot, then several spots that were darker than the rest of the fabric. Pulling the shirt down, Charlie examined the dark areas more closely. He held the shirt up to his face and pressed the fabric to his nose. The smell, like rusted iron mixed with sweet marigolds, was unmistakably blood.

How did I cut myself? Charlie wondered. And how did I heal so quickly?

Charlie left the bathroom and went to retrieve his other shirt, still crumpled inside the plastic Olympia Sports bag. It should have been on the chair nearest the room entrance, where he had left it. He looked on the chair and under it, but the plastic bag wasn’t where it should be. Perhaps, in his exhaustion he had placed it in the room closet and forgot. Not an unlikely scenario, given how forgetful he’d become.

For a moment the blood on his hands and shirt faded into the back of his thoughts. He opened the closet door and flicked on the closet light on the inside left wall. He was certain he’d find the empty plastic bag crumpled on the floor inside and the clothing within neatly folded and tucked on a shelf.

The moment the light came on, Charlie screamed. He sank to his knees and buried his face in his hands.

The plastic bag was, as he expected, crumpled on the floor. But the closet was filled with clothes. There were shirts, pants, sweaters, all draped on hangers in a tight row on the chrome rod. On the shelf above were more shirts and pants. All the clothes were neatly folded, just the way he would have done it. And all the clothes were his.

C
harlie stayed on his knees until five minutes had passed. Shakily, he rose to his feet, bracing himself against the doorjamb before backing out of the closet. The first thing that caught his attention was the smell of blood. It was more pronounced now than when he’d first noticed blood on his hands and shirt in the bathroom. There was another foul odor that penetrated his senses as well. This one was a rank and disturbingly unfamiliar scent. He could equate it only with rot and decay. His right hand caressed his left; he was still hopeful that he’d feel a gash or scratch that could explain the blood he’d found earlier. It was a pointless gesture. The smell of blood in the air was far too intense to have come from anything less than a serious cut.

He sank down onto the bed. The morning light that managed to seep into the room through the drawn shades did little to brighten the drab interior. A quick glance at the digital clock on the nightstand told him it was almost 6:20 a.m. The last time he had noticed the time was more than twelve hours earlier.