Chapter Two

Karen was quite happy to let Elena work Friday evening for her, so she could see if there was any improvement after that week's therapy.

Luisa was waiting for her when she arrived mid-afternoon on Friday. The short, stocky Latina, usually bright and bubbly, was looking as sober as Elena had ever seen her. "Not a good day," she murmured.

"What happened?"

"Don't know. Guess it wasn't a good session with the doctor." Luisa shrugged and handed over her set of keys, including the one to String's room. "Buena suerte."

Elena hurried down the hall. "Dr. Fairling left you a message," Luisa called after her.

"Thanks. I'll get it later." Elena reached the room and unlocked the door.

Oh hell.

String was lying on the bed, useless lower limbs lying slack, upper body curled up on himself as tightly as he could possibly manage. Every so often, he gave a kind of soft, keening moan.

"Not a good day" was a gross understatement. She hadn't seen him this bad for weeks. He was curled so tightly she couldn't see his face. "String?" she asked softly. "String, it's Elena. What's wrong?"

Of course he didn't answer. She sat down next to him on the narrow bed and put her hands on his shoulders. His whole body was quivering, either with fear or tension. Gently she rubbed his back. That seemed to calm him slightly, but when she took her hands away he began to shake again. She bent down and wrapped her arms around him, holding him tightly and rocking him. "String, Stringling, hush. It's okay. It's all right. Quiet now. Elena's here." She rested her chin on top of his brown hair and wondered what in the world had happened to him. She'd seen him in every condition from totally apathetic to practically raving, but this ‒ this was something new.

Finally he began to relax. She let him go and helped him to sit up. There were tear marks on his face, and she pulled out a tissue and wiped them off. "Better?"

He tried to sit straighter and scrubbed at his face with one hand in an endearingly childlike fashion, even managing to give her a hint of a self-conscious smile.

Then ‒ it all changed.

There it was again. That sound. Coming for him. The black machine, coming out of the sky. Coming to crush him. The black machine . . .

He began screaming.

Elena couldn't quiet him. She couldn't even hold onto him. She hit the panic button by the bed, and a moment later there were two nurses and three orderlies in the room.

"Can't you give him something?" she demanded from one of the nurses.

The other woman shook her head. "He's got no orders for sedatives, and there's no doctor around. We'll have to get him downstairs." With practised ease they wrapped the thrashing man up in the bed coverings, tightly enough that he was immobilized, with a wad of sheet stuffed hastily into his mouth to stop him from screaming loudly enough to disturb everyone in the building. Then they bundled him into a wheelchair and hurried him down to the basement.

They put him in a deep tub and filled it with cold water and kept him there until he calmed down. The treatment had always seemed barbaric to Elena, like something out of a Victorian madhouse, but at least it was effective. She hung onto him to make sure he didn't slide under the surface and drown, getting nearly as wet as String in the process. She was peeling off his soaked clothing and drying him off after they'd lifted him out of the tub when the nurse in charge reappeared to say that Dr. McCutcheon still hadn't returned his page, so there was still no authorization to give any sedative. "He'd better stay down here tonight. There's not enough staff to cope if he goes berserk like that again. And when you've gotten him settled, I need you upstairs."

There were several bedrooms in the basement. They were more like jail cells than the conventional rooms upstairs, with no windows, no furniture other than a bed with heavy-duty restraints. They were also almost soundproof, meant as temporary quarters for the most violent and disruptive patients.

Elena looked at String, down on the bare floor with his head on her lap. He was shivering hard, but she thought that was with cold now, not fear. He had that blank stare again. "But ‒ "

"Forget it, Elena. Just get him into that bed and make sure he doesn't get out of it again. And put a diaper on him, because he's there for the night unless I hear from McCutcheon, and those night orderlies aren't going to clean him up if he pees himself."

One of the orderlies helped her to get him in a bed. She covered him with a sheet and blanket and then carefully fastened all the straps. His unclothed body felt like ice wherever she touched it and he was completely unresponsive to his surroundings. Dunking him in the cold bath had jolted him out of his frenzy, but what had replaced it was almost as unsettling. It was like putting a corpse to bed, except that there would have been no need to use restraints on a corpse. Not that there was probably any need to use them now either, but if she didn't put them on and String went wild again, she would be in a huge amount of trouble, not to mention that String could well hurt himself.

She asked the orderly to get her a second blanket and tucked it carefully over him, in the hope that the extra warmth would be comforting, and that was all she could do for him.

Wearily Elena went back upstairs and spent the next three hours trying to spoonfeed supper into two elderly Alzheimer's patients. It wasn't until almost the end of her shift that she had a chance to look at the message Dr. Fairling had left her.

"Mr. Vine became extremely agitated at mention of a helicopter. Please do not mention the subject of a helicopter or any kind of aircraft to him again. It is not in his own best interest at this time."

Elena rarely swore. "No shit," she muttered.

--------------------

He was trapped, alone in the cold darkness.

Where was the black machine? Was it coming back? Could it find him in the dark?

He knew it could see in the dark. But if he kept as still as death and shut his eyes, maybe he could stay hidden. Maybe it wouldn't notice him.

He wanted to whimper in fear, but clenched his jaw tightly shut on the sound.

Keep still!