Author's Note: I'm sorry this hastaken so long to finally squeeze out. In truth I wrote it in like an hour, so if it seems rushed or full of grammatical errors, I apologize. I got really involved in my other stories for a while and forgot how much I enjoyed writing this one. Sam's character in this story is infused witha lot of my personality so forgive meif she strays from her usual demeanor.However, I do try to keep in mind the fact thatsix or seven months in a psychological facility would change anybody's attitudes and body language,Sam not excluded. So, here's chapter five and I hope to get asixth upin a shorter period of time than before.

Chapter5

I asked my resident nurse for a notebook and the key to the library and quickly locked myself inside. Eight. The number resounded in my head over and over like a mantra and quickly fell in with my breathing. I drew a diagram on the first blank page, a large bubble with eight legs spanning out in all directions from it. In the large bubble I wrote 13 Months and in each leg I wrote a brief title for each murder I'd seen. I burned a callus onto my emotions and wrote each description dispassionately.

"They started thirteen…no, nineteen months ago," I murmured out loud, scribbling madly. "Eight murders, and they were all in the city. I recognized Central Park somewhere…The first, the man in the cabin. What was his name? It was a cabin, an empty cabin." My hand raked the pen along paper, forming a small rough sketch of a cabin. "What was his name? Shit, think Sam."

I concentrated and brought the image back into my mind, but with it I heard the faint singing of birds in the background. I saw red splashes of color around the man's chest. Blood? No, it wasn't blood. They were all centrally at his …

"Hart! Robin Hart!" I shouted, and a few other patients jumped in their corners of the library. My hand shook a little as I wrote the name 'Robin Hart' on the diagram. Flashes of cryptic memory played with the image in my head and I translated them as fast as I could. "It was cold, winter, Christmas Eve…discovered by his girlfriend, married."

Hesitating slightly I summoned the second image into my head and the woman on a white bed in what looked like a nice hotel room swirled into vision. Her right hand was surrounded by a halo of light and I shook my head disbelievingly. "Julie Wright." I searched for signs of the weather like before but instead I only heard or rather saw the tolling of bells in the distance. "Found by her husband—" (there was a gold band on her finger) "—stabbed to death…on her wedding night."

"Jesus Christ," I muttered, squeezing my eyes shut to grasp the next victim. The black woman, shot in the back and submerged in water eagerly leapt forward. My forehead wrinkled in disgust as the area around her pelvis shone white against her dark skin. It was bruised, tainted…the smell of familiar, sharp liquor teased my senses. Familiar, Jack, Jack and I, where are you, Jack? Jack… "Jack Daniels! Shirley! Shirley Daniels! Prostitute who got it in the back and ... and…traffic? Car alarms, brakes are screeching… Of course! She was thrown off the Brooklyn Bridge postmortem."

By now, the patients around me were begging, pleading with juvenile whimpers to their nurses to escape my madness. I saw the boy, his head hidden from view as it was jammed into a gas oven, hands and feet bound. "Who are you?" I said to myself. "Tell me…"

There was fog, lots of fog, and at first I assumed it represented the gas, but no, this was different. It was fog, perfect thickness and swirling like in the movies. Beautiful relationship. Sam, we've got a beautiful relationship…Sam, you're my beginning…so beautiful. "What the hell?" I wrote down the words on the page and stared at them in confusion until suddenly it became so clear and so clichéd I wanted to laugh. "'Sam, this could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.' Casablanca. It's from Casablanca…but what…why?" I stared at the boy's shape and it glowed as the fog cleared slightly. Something caught in the corner of the image, in his hands. "A crucifix? No, no, there's no body on it. It's a cross. His father…was a reverend. Episcopalian Reverend. Reverend…" Sam, beautiful beinnings… "Reverend Bogart! Harold Bogart. Harold, Harold, Harold…" I scribbled his name down along with the description of his death.

Bolder now, I dragged the next murder into my mind, the girl in the bed with a pillow smashed on her face. There was someone else, behind the little bed. Not a complete person, just a hand, just a hand with an extended finger that curled toward the palm, commanding, ordering, beckoning, beckoning me to come closer. "Beckoning…beckoning…beck—Becca! Becca Smart! Okay, okay…got it, now who is she? What did she do?"

The image faded. "No! No, wait! Who are you? Who are you, baby?" I saw a glowing gold band where her body used to be. Two bands, like cells in meiosis the gold band divided into two, linked together, inside one another as only a magician could make them become. Suddenly, the bands snapped and broke into two, shattering and only the first original band hovered over Becca's body. "I don't understand..."

It was if my memory was agitated, impatient with my brain for its slowness for the sequence of actions with the bands repeated itself again and again until suddenly I understood. "Her parents were married…then divorced, and she lives with only one…her father?" There was a blinding flash of light that made me recoil, and I realized I was wrong. "The mother, she lived with the mother." I paused for a second. "Did—did my brain just punish me?"

The sixth murder came into my mind without my urging. The well-dressed man face down in a plate of food, his expression green and the familiar poison bones tattooed against his skin. Poisoned. The squealing and screaming of sea birds greeted my senses. Sea birds battling each other for bits of his food, angry, fighting sea birds. Seagulls. Gray and huddled into an animated mass of feathers… "SEGAL! Ben Segal, poisoned with rat poisoning, found by his wife…who he loved…Susan." The wedding bands were whole in my vision, held together by what seemed to be an unbreakable, glowing bond. "They were happy, weren't they? Yes, they were very happy…"

As the seventh murder burst into my head, I heard the screams of small children, the smells of frying beans, refried beans, seasoning, screaming, so much to do, so much work, overwhelmingly loud children crying and pulling at her broken body. A husband who knelt by her, tears in his eyes, but he unbuckled his pants and pulled at her waist expectantly. I didn't need prodding for her name, her husband called it as he whined for her attentions. "Maria Nuñez. Mother of…well, one, two, three, four, five…five, mother of five. Someone broke her neck, she must have fallen." I felt the beginnings of the reproachful blinding light and changed my answer. "Okay, okay, someone … fell on her?" No light. "

While I was writing the information on this woman, my pen froze. Maria Nuñez. Her name was familiar, and not as in the weird, ethereal way that my mind recognized familiarities in these murders, but an actual memory, separate from the images. My case files, my cases. She was a missing person a few years back. Case went cold when the only lead we had, her mother, died in her sleep before we could talk to her. She abandoned her children and her husband, I said in the report. Looking at the screaming chaos in my mind, I now understood why, but before I could spend more time pondering, the eighth and final murder sprang into view.

The old man hung in a slumped position in his ill-kept pool, algae beginning to cling to his body. Dollar bills floated down like green paper birds from the sky and I tried to count how many, maybe he had a lot of money. They came down like snow so fast and in such great numbers that I quickly lost count and gave up. Wait, they were all one dollar bills. Why was that significant? United States, Treasury, E Pluribus Unum, George Washington… Something struck a chord in my mind. "George. George Darwin, aged 69. Drowned in his pool." I found myself looking at his hand, and realized it was bare except for a faceless watch that was blurred to indicate its unimportance. "Unmarried."

I threw down my pen and slid back from the table on my rolling chair. Eight unsolved murders glared back at me with eyes of glittering black cursive. I was out of breath, I realized, and took a few minutes to regain composure before scooting back to the desk. At the bottom of the messy web, I connected all the lines to a single vertex and from it I drew one last line. I hesitated, then wrote the man's name, the man who Dr. Aldersyde believed triggered my final "episode." Paul Mathers.

Damn, I need to be back in New York. I need to see Jack. I need background information, case files, interrogation reports, and especially Paul Mathers. I looked around the empty library and sighed. I need to get out of here before I go stir-crazy. My arms locked mid-stretch and the irony of what I had thought brought a sarcastic grin to my lips. I stood up and took the wrinkled notebook with me. It gave me a strange comfort, hope that maybe I wasn't as crazy as they'd took me for. A sudden hatred for my coworkers in New York poisoned my relief. They hadn't even done as much as visited me. Just tucked me a way in a little clinic in Winchester, never to be thought of again. I knew I was being over-dramatic but I didn't care. As a lunatic, I guess that was my prerogative.

I unlocked the library door and shuffled down the hallway, looking for Dr. Aldersyde's office. As I lifted my hand to knock on the door I yawned again and itched my nose. The bright fluorescent lights that had once instilled a deathly panic in my bones now seemed dull and powerless. It's amazing what knowledge of one's mind and self can do for your confidence. And it's quite a unique feeling to be at your brain's employ. The reproachful glares and undeniable impatience of my memories made me wonder whether I was either extremely brilliant or extremely disturbed. Maybe, after all this was over, maybe I would go in for a few appointments with my shrink every now and then. I'm sure Martin would appreciate that; he thinks I'm a crack head enough as it is…where the hell is Aldersyde?

I banged louder on his office door until a nurse touched my shoulder and I stopped. "Do you need something, dear?" I wanted to punch her in the face, I really did. This place, this "institute" really did a number on my nerves, and I realized if I ever got back on the job, I would be a much different agent.

"I'm looking for Dr. Aldersyde," I said as politely as my clamped jaw would allow. She checked a clipboard hanging from her neck. Running her finger down what seemed to be a list, she tapped a spot on the paper with her pen.

"He's at lunch until 1:30, dear," she answered in a syrupy voice. Lunch? At a time like this? Lunch? Well, I…I…well, what kind of lunch?

"Okay, thank you," I told her and walked off towards the cafeteria, my stomach gleefully entertaining the thought of a giant rotisserie chicken, but the nurse caught up with me. "No, it's okay, I know where I'm going."

"Do you have permission to be out of your room, dear?" I stared at her blankly. "Can you hear me, young lady?"

"Yeah, yeah, I hear you. No, I don't. I was in the library doing some research for Dr. Alder—hey!" She yanked the notebook from my hands and looked at the manic sketches I drew. Her face grew pale and her lips parted in horror as I realized what sort of crazed lunatic I probably seemed like with the eight murders articulately drawn out in a diagram. "No, it's not what you think. Can I have that back—I can explain everything if you just…"

She held it away from me and brought a walkie-talkie to her lips. "Security, I need security. We've got a rogue patient here with homicidal tendencies, bring the suit. I'll try to secure her for the time being but she could be hostile."

I groaned. "Jesus Christ, lady, just give me back the notebook, and I'll explain. Where's Dr. Aldersyde? He'd have a stroke if he saw what you're doing here." She pinned me against the wall and my blonde hair caught painfully under her left arm while the right was held under my chin so that I could barely breathe.

"And who's Paul Mathers, hmm? Your next victim?" Her white face was hot with excitement and fear as I squirmed under her grasp. "Security! Over here! Security! " Out of the corner of my eye, I saw three giant men sweep me into arms ripped with bulging muscle as my own arms were forced into a sickeningly familiar white jacket. I didn't squirm and instead stood there stock still while they apprehended their so-called dangerous fugitive. "Oh, for the love of God! This is ridiculous!"

"Stay calm, ma'am," a huge black guy said, sticking a syringe into my arm. "Just stay calm."

I glared at him sarcastically and leaned against him. "Well, hold me, goddammit, I'm going to conk out in like three seconds and my head has sustained enough injury with Hulk Hogan over here…" The nurse pursed her lips and sniffed. Three seconds passed, and sure enough, with very little grace, so did I.