Zod Wallop (18 page)

“Exactly,” Mitford said, slapping his thighs. “That’s what’s so fascinating. You and your friends have established a sort of gestalt—I’m sure you know the word—which seems independent of physical contact. Emily and Rene and Allan all visited Harwood while you were there, though. And Raymond knew you all.”

The psychologist seemed profoundly pleased with himself.

“So what?” Harry said.

“Marlin Tate administered Ecknazine to all of you, that’s what.”

“I’m afraid I’m still not following you. What does that have to do with anything? It seems to me that the only thing we have in common is legitimate grounds for a whopping big lawsuit.”

Mitford waved his hand. “I’m sure Dr. Blaine would be willing to compensate you all beyond the dreams of the most litigious lawyer. It’s not a lawsuit you have in common; it’s
Zod Wallop
.”

“
Zod Wallop
?”

The psychologist nodded.

Harry sighed. “
Zod Wallop
is a children’s book that Raymond has some odd notions about,” he said, speaking slowly now, cautiously. “He seems to have convinced both Rene and Allan of the reality of his delusions, but I don’t see what their gullibility—they are mental patients, after all—has to do with your so-called gestalt.”

Mitford stood up and walked to the wall where he studied a painting of a barn that appeared to be under siege by swallows or bats. He turned, walked back to the bed and, leaning close enough for Harry to smell the alcohol on his breath, studied Harry’s immobilized head with a sort of clinical madness burning in his eyes, a greedy look, a fat-child-eyeing-a-cookie jar look.

“There are two
Zod Wallop
s, aren’t there?”

A strange, irrational fear stilled Harry’s heart. He found he was holding his breath; he exhaled slowly.

“Two
Zod Wallop
s,” the psychologist continued. “And in the first of them, created while you were a resident of Harwood Psychiatric, the drawings are of hospital staff and patients. These caricatures are quite recognizable and include Rene and Emily and Allan, people you had not met at the time of the book’s creation. We do not have the book itself, but we have obtained excellent photos of its contents, and there is no denying the likenesses. My own employer is a prominent character in the book.”

The Gorelord, Harry thought.

“It could all be an elaborate hoax,” Mitford continued. “But the question then is: to what purpose?”

Harry was silent. What purpose, indeed.

“It’s an ugly book,” Mitford said, causing Harry to slowly rotate his upper body to regard the shrink with new interest. Mitford was frowning, musing to himself. “Not something you’d want a child to see, at all. Not an uplifting message. I mean…” He turned and regarded Harry with bafflement. “What is it saying, after all? That it is better not to live? Really.” He shrugged, turned, and walked toward the door. A hand on the doorknob, he muttered to himself. “I don’t have children,” he said. “But if I did, I can tell you I wouldn’t read them
Zod Wallop
. Not that ugly first book with its relentless gore and despair, and not the second either. In some ways, the second is creepier, sicker…once one has read the first one. I mean, once you know… you can’t help thinking the second’s all sunny lies, now can you? You don’t believe for a second that things will really work out. Lydia stopping the river of stone with a kiss…I don’t buy it. You can’t help thinking there’s a missing page, something ugly like one of those pop-up corpses at the end of a horror movie. It’s an uneasy feeling…” Mitford’s voice died away and he looked up, smiled wanly (but at nothing in particular; he certainly wasn’t seeing Harry), and left, closing the door softly as he went.

An uneasy feeling. Harry knew just what he meant.

Mitford smiled at the secretary, a succulent charmer named Rachel, who didn’t return his smile, seemed to have to squint just to register his existence, and who said, “Go on in. He’s waiting.”

Mitford pushed the door open and entered the big, carpeted office. CEO Blaine sat behind the black desk in a brown sweater that looked like something dogs might have fought over. He smiled, showing his toothless gums. Blaine liked to go toothless in the office, and Mitford was used to the sight but he could never entirely shake a sense of unreality. It was as though some old wino had slipped into the plush intelligence center of GroMel. Surely the corpse of GroMel’s true founder, some dapper, well-tailored Harvard prodigy, was stuffed under the desk or leaking its life’s blood into the executive bedroom’s jacuzzi.

But no, in fact this wizened derelict with the oddly sheeplike countenance, the deceptive blankness of eye and gaping red-lipped mouth, this feeble old codger in need of a shave and a haircut, this was the mastermind behind GroMel.

Blaine stood up. “Well Mitford, any progress?”

There was no chair to sit in, just miles of gray carpet and in the far corner some sort of green rubber plant. There were no windows. “Newark’s not going anywhere,” Blaine had told the architect. “I don’t need to keep an eye on it.”

Mitford turned as the door to the executive bedroom opened. Dr. Gloria Gill walked over to the desk and leaned against it. She was a stocky woman with a round face, short-cropped hair like a skullcap, and a wardrobe consisting entirely of black sweaters, black dresses, and black stockings. Mitford guessed that something sexual existed between Blaine and this woman, although Mitford didn’t like to think about it. Given a choice between sex with Gloria Gill or the Pillsbury Doughboy, Mitford figured he would spend the morning after showering off flour.

“Well,” Mitford said, “I think the videotape of Emily Engel floating in the air could be called progress. We have actual, physical evidence of psychokinetic phenomena.”

“I was thinking,” Blaine said, his voice deceptively sleepy, “more in terms of progress toward recovering the Ecknazine formula.” He coughed then, inhaled with a thin whistling noise, and said, “Gloria, the oxygen.” The woman came to his side, fiddled with something behind the desk, and then walked behind him. She fitted the transparent mask over his nose and mouth, patted his shoulder, and returned to the side of the desk.

Blaine closed his eyes, breathed deeply for a moment—his Adam’s apple bobbing as though he were gulping air—and then removed the mask and smiled. “I smoked two packs of unfiltered cigarettes every day for forty-seven years,” he said. “I don’t recommend it if you plan on growing old.”

Mitford nodded. “Are you all right?”

Blaine slapped his hands on the desk. “As right as acid rain!” he shouted. Dr. Gill, standing by the desk like an honor guard, laughed soundlessly, the only indications of her mirth being a rocking motion and closed eyes.

Blaine said, “The Ecknazine. If we can regain the formula, we can have subjects aplenty. It’s the formula we want.”

“Yes, of course,” Mitford said. “Unfortunately, I haven’t discovered anything about the chemical nature of the drug. What I am able to study is the group dynamic, the result. It’s fascinating. Gainesborough’s children’s book, this
Zod Wallop
, seems to serve as a sort of fulcrum for the psychokinetic effects, and if—”

Gloria Gill snorted loudly. “Waste of time.”

Mitford worked at a smile. He hated this Gill woman, one of those brain-dicing bitches who thought everything was synapses and serotonin levels.

Blaine looked at the woman and smiled. He said, “Dr. Gill believes the time for this therapy fishing is over. She’s already run a battery of tests. More radical and intrusive procedures are now in order. Her early workup suggests that at least one of the subjects, the Engel girl, may, as a result perhaps of her impaired condition, still contain traces of the original drug. If that’s the case, then extracting such trace elements would seem to be our best plan of attack. Dr. Gill suggests we start immediately. I’m inclined to agree with her.”

Mitford had known it would come to this. “If we lose these subjects, we lose everything,” Mitford said. “We lose any knowledge they might have that could lead us directly to a cache of the drug. I believe there may be several other subjects, and we will never find them if we submit this group to procedures that render them useless.”

“We don’t have all the time in the world,” the woman said. “All traces of the drug may be lost if we don’t act now.”

“A month,” Mitford said. “Give me another month.”

“A week,” Blaine said. “We’ll give you a week.”

“I can’t—”

Blaine stood up. “You will excuse me now. I have to move my bowels.” He strode quickly across the floor into the executive bedroom. It was clear that the conversation was at an end.

Gloria Gill smiled at Mitford. “Just tell them to talk fast,” she said. “Tell them to feel the feelings while the feeling’s good.”

T
HIRTY-SEVEN
D
AYS
H
AD
passed since Harry’s disappearance. Helen Kurtis sat at her desk and pored over a legal pad, seeking Harry’s trail in her notes. Arbus was asleep behind her on the bed. He was wearing pajamas with clowns (Helen had discovered an unlooked-for maternal side that manifested itself in purchasing these tiny outfits).

The monkey reassured her, somehow. He was alive and there was nothing in his manner or character—he was something of a pleasure-seeker, cheerful, unreflective—that indicated he had suffered any trauma. Surely, if the others were dead, he would show it somehow, the horror would look out of his eyes.

The logic of this was, she knew, threadbare. But it was strengthened by her own conviction that she would have felt the loss of Harry if he were dead.

As it was, she only felt confused, old, ineffectual.

She had hired a private investigator who had, she assumed, bribed someone at Harwood Psychiatric Institute and so produced the brief biographies of Harry’s companions.

Paul Allan, son of the stunning Gabriel Allan-Tate, was a young man whose anger had set him at odds with authorities. Had his mother been poor, he probably would have been consigned to juvenile homes and jails, but his anger was identified as pathology thanks to his mother’s wealth. Harwood Psychiatric was his frequent refuge after outbreaks of rage and physical violence.

Rene Gold was addicted to alcohol and drugs and, according to her father, sex. In the write-up that Helen perused, her father was quoted as saying, “She’s the Devil’s work. She’ll put anything inside her, either end.”

Translating between the case history social-speak lines, it was clear to Helen that Clyde Gold and his wife, Nadine, were trailer park trash.

What was curious about Rene’s situation was that she should be in a ritzy place like Harwood. Someone had been paying her way for several years, the funds administered by a Newark law firm, and her actual benefactor was a mystery. Rene herself did not know—or at least said she didn’t—where the money for her treatment came from.

Emily Engel had always been as she was now. She had come into the world without much interest in it and had received a variety of diagnoses from sage physicians of the body and mind and none of it had meant a damn to Emily Engel. Her parents had died in an automobile accident when she was twelve, and she had been adopted by her uncle, a man named Robert Furman—Helen found the name vaguely familiar—who had cared for her privately before discovering that the task was no small one and so had sent her on to Harwood.

Helen pushed the legal pad away and got up and went into the bathroom. She brushed her teeth slowly, methodically, a habit developed in childhood when a dental hygiene film frightened her into elaborate ablutions.

She thought about them. It was a strange and tragic crew that Harry had disappeared with. That, in itself, might not be wildly coincidental; after all, their meeting ground was a psychiatric hospital. But what they had in common was deeper than that. It was, Helen thought, a condition of isolation, of retreat. Emily had fled at birth, had never greeted the world. Rene had retreated into the dark closet of addiction. Paul Allan had hidden in a fog of red rage. Raymond Story was convinced that he had never properly returned from a watery death, that he was exiled to an alternate world. And Harry…Harry’s retreat had been so abrupt, so cruel.

It had occurred the day of the funeral. Morganson’s Funeral Home had been packed, for Harry and Jeanne were a gregarious couple and had many friends. Helen had been talking to Jeanne’s mother, a woman ill-equipped for tragedy, who dealt with the horror by talking tirelessly about a host of inconsequential subjects.

When Helen had first arrived at the funeral home, she had found Harry alone, outside, smoking a cigarette. She had embraced him, offered condolences, and asked where Jeanne was. He said she was inside, with her parents. He added—and it was later that this seemed ominous—that he thought funerals were barbaric. He did not believe in religious ceremonies, he said, and while some people felt that rituals were a way of dealing with grief, he felt they simply showed the true futility of any attempt to “pretty-up” death.

It was a strangely intellectual speech, and Helen had studied Harry’s pale, twisted countenance and thought that he would need to find professional help if he were to survive.

“A child’s coffin is an awful thing,” he had said. “Cremation is really the only civilized alternative, but Jeanne—”