Chapter Thirty-Two: The Shape
A bell tolls dismally in his head, marking its restoring passage through his body, until the racket thins to an empty silence.
Then, the silence cracks.
The mark of sixteen years.
His memories are blown out and sucked into a vortex. Each colorless image scrolls past. Arousing nothing. Even as he watches and rewatches, rewinds and ruminates, his sister's murder through younger eyes in an older time. The memory has grown stale.
The voices whisper in the wake of the passing scene.
.oldoldold
They whisper what he knows.
He's become bored.
New blood…
"You boys stay out, ya here?"
The lock clanks in its shaft. The person who enters carries the trace of a snubbed out cigarette. It reminds him of all the other nurses, who had skulked around the corners of the main hall, as he had eaten alone, trapped in the juvenile ward…
The nurse shuts the door, but it locks from the outside.
A flick of the lightswitch.
"Look at you," she murmurs. "All this, to bring you back home. I guess that nurse at Ridgemont wasn't lying. You really are some freak."
He feels her breath glide over his cheek and he uses that to gauge the distance of how close she leans over him.
Too close...
"What a damn shame...A face like yours and you turn out to be some maniac…"
Cool fingers caress his wrist. He denies his muscles the urge to tense.
Her intentions are clear.
"Could've gone places, hun."
The needle grazes like a taunt over his forearm.
No.
He was already moving...
Her wrist is thin in the trap of his clutch and he's afforded the time to humor the idea of breaking it. But, he doesn't risk the noise she could make. She's on the verge of screaming when he wrenches the syringe from her hand.
The tip flies through the air and penetrates the pinprick of her pupil so fast she barely sees the motion. His thumb jams down the plunger and empties the sedative.
He doesn't know the exact effect it might have on her brain, but at the very least the nurse collapses to the floor with a face drawing a blank.
Time is spent and the minutes tick by. It's not that he isn't wrought with a sense of urgency, but he forces himself to bide his time because to waste an opportunity of repose when it presents itself would be unwise.
Eventually, his bare feet lower to the ground and he rises from the bed, stiffly. There is blood on the sheets from wounds, now closed.
His blood.
The mask and his bloodied clothes—
His blood.
Old blood.
— and work boots are found in a discarded pile underneath the foot of his bed.
The next thing the Shape notices is the gunshot trailing its scream from the floor below him...