I was a bit unsure about how to go about writing this chapter, so I opted for the increasingly popular "innocent bystander pov" method. Let me know if it works. It's just the Joker (and I think our poor Mr J is more Joker than Jack by now) is a really hard character to write! Anyway, hope you enjoy. There will (probably) be just one more chapter after this, to tie things up.
The stainless steel pushcart had a squeaky wheel, the nurse noticed as she pushed it down the hallway, and it wobbled slightly, causing the two trays of food to rattle against its flat top. She ignored the noise, stepping briskly along the hall with the air that all practiced nurses seem to give off: that they are very busy, and that they will be kind and polite to their patients, but not to you, should you get in their way. In truth, this particular woman was feeling rather anxious, even frightened (though she was bravely trying to hide it by hurtling with increasing speed down the hallway.)
She had never met the long-term patient in Room 186, but she'd heard stories from some of the nurses who had. He never tried anything, like a few of the more troublesome men did, but she'd heard that he looked at you. Not with the stupid, suggestive wiggle of an eyebrow that she'd grown used to, but with the closely focused intensity of a predator, coupled with the malevolent glee of a child with a new toy. A toy just waiting to be broken—pulled apart and banged on the floor until all the little plastic pieces fell out like entrails. The nurse shuddered, and she stopped at the door to Room 186, her hand resting firmly on the handle. Let's just get this over with.
She opened the door and wheeled the cart bearing the two trays of food and her clipboard, into the room. The first patient, the one she'd been warned about, was seated on the edge of his bed, idly twiddling his thumbs in his lap. The other man lay tucked snugly into bed, and from this angle she couldn't see his face.
"Mr Wyatt? Mr Napier? I have your dinners here."
The seated man looked up, and she gulped at his expression: his scarred mouth stretched in a mocking grin, the light in his eyes seeming to flicker like an unsteady candle flame. "Dinner? What're we having? Something good, I hope." He stood up and shambled towards the cart, and she resisted the urge to back away. "Soup! How dee-light-ful." He picked up his bowl and sat back down on the bed, lifting the spoon and taking a dainty sip. "Hmm."
"It's chicken noodle," she said, silently wondering why on earth she was trying to make conversation with this man.
"I see." He tossed aside the spoon, and poured the entire bowlful down his throat. "You know I heard that's supposed to be the best medicine… Or was that something else…?"
She ignored him, moving further into the room, and approaching the bed where the other man still lay motionless. "Mr Wyatt? I have your dinner."
Jack glanced over at her, his smirk underlined with malice. "Uh, he's not feeling too good, doc."
She frowned. "Why, what's wrong with"—her sentence was cut off by a sharp gasp that sounded almost like a scream. Mr Wyatt lay stiff and unmoving in his narrow cot, the blankets impeccably folded and tucked securely around him like a cocoon. His hands were folded on his chest and his eyes, as blank as marbles, stared unseeingly at the ceiling. He was dead.
She jumped back as if the air around him had scalded her, her voice shrill and breathless. "Oh my… what happened?"
Jack was now perched on the edge of his bed, leaning forward as though watching a particularly fascinating show. "Ah, an accident… Hey, can I have his soup?"
She shot him a horrified glance, but then turned back to the dead man in the bed, steeling herself. This wasn't the first corpse she'd seen, and she couldn't afford to be squeamish now. She moved forward and gingerly examined the body, searching for some clue of what might have caused his sudden death. It wasn't heard to find. Mr Wyatt's throat was bruised, the skin red and chafed. The woman's blood ran cold. She had worked in a shelter for battered women for a while, and seen the ones who'd come in after being beaten by their husbands. One girl in particular stood out in her memory; she had narrowly avoided being choked to death by a couple of thugs. The skin on her neck had been flushed and bruised. Just like this.
"You…"
There was a smashing noise behind her and she spun around. Shards of glass sparkled like ice on the tiles around Jack's feet—all that was left of the glass of water that had been standing on his bedside table. "Oops," he muttered, almost to himself, and bent to pick up a razor sharp fragment. It cut his hand, but he didn't let go. If anything, he gripped it harder, blood coloring the glass like red candy apple dye. She shivered when he smiled at her.
--
Molly was doodling a picture of an intricate maze on the corner of the sign-in sheet on her desk, when an almost comically synchronized chorus of gasps and shrieks from the rest of the lobby startled her out of her daydream. She looked up, and gasped too, a half-step behind everyone else.
The man in the center of the room glanced briefly at her, unconcerned, but then his eyes took in her desk, her shiny, laminated nametag, and the clipboard and pen she still held in her limp hand. His grin creased the half-healed scars on his cheeks, and the nurse in his grip opened her mouth to say something, but he stifled her with one hand, the other lightly tracing a bloody shard of broken glass over her jaw line. He shushed her like someone would a flighty horse, and turned back to Molly, who was sitting frozen with fear behind her desk.
"You're, ah, the receptionist, right?"
She nodded.
"Great!" He held his captive a little tighter as she made another half-hearted bid for freedom, and Molly could see the skin on her neck dimple where he pressed the glass a little harder. Soon it would break. "I, uh, need to check out of this hospital. I'm healthy enough to go home now!" She gulped. "So, if you could just… fill out the paperwork, or whatever it is you do here, both I and my friend would be much obliged." He squeezed the woman against his chest in a weird kind of backwards hug, and the glass nicked her chin. Fresh blood ran onto the makeshift weapon, melting the already dried stains of it.
Molly's hand was shaking so much that the writing on the form was barely legible, but she figured it really didn't matter. She turned the clipboard around to face him, holding out her pen. "Just… just sign here."
The formality sounded absurd, but he took the pen in his left hand, keeping his hold on the terrified nurse with the other, and scribbled something at the bottom of the paper. He backed away slowly, dragging his hostage with him, and she thought she could hear fractured humming escaping his lips.
He stopped at the door and spun the poor woman around to face him, the splinter of glass still hovering by her face like a glittering wasp. "Hey, do you wanna know how I got these scars?" But before she could reply, he looked her up and down, frowning critically. "No," he said, "I don't suppose you do."
And then the shard of glass flashed across her throat, there was a wet spray of scarlet, the door slammed, and he was gone.
--
People were on their feet, whimpering, crying, screaming. They all crowded around the dead nurse, who lay in a pool of blood that was so red it looked fake, like a cheap Halloween decoration. But Molly couldn't move. She sat in her swivel-backed chair, her hands folded in her lap, her eyes staring straight ahead like the headlamps of a stalling car. Suddenly, a thought occurred to her, a thought that seemed suddenly like the most pressing thing in the world, and she spun the clipboard around to scan the form she had just filled out. Next to "Patient Signature", hastily scrawled in her blue ballpoint pen was a single letter: J.
