The Best Horror of the Year. Volume 4

Rideout nodded: up, down, up, down, back to center. Eye-contact never lost. Kat was sure he would have nodded with exactly the same look of grave confirmation if Newsome had said his pain was blue, or as purple as the fabled Purple People-Eater. She thought, with a combination of dismay and real amusement: I could lose my temper here. I really could. It would be the most expensive tantrum of my life, but still — I could.

“And where is it?”

“Everywhere.” It was almost a moan. Melissa took a step forward, giving Jensen a look of concern. Kat saw him shake his head a little and motion her back to the doorway.

“Yes, it likes to give that impression,” Rideout said, “but it’s not so. Close your eyes, sir, and concentrate. Look for the pain. Look past the false shouts it gives — ignore the cheap ventriloquism — and locate it. You can do this. You must do it, if we’re to have any success.”

Newsome closed his eyes. For a space of ninety seconds there was no sound but the wind and the rain spattering against the windows like handfuls of fine gravel. Kat’s watch was the old-fashioned wind-up kind, a nursing school graduation present from her father many years ago, and when the wind lulled, the room was quiet enough for her to hear its self-important ticking. And something else: at the far end of the big house, elderly Tonya Andrews singing softly as she neatened up the kitchen at the end of another day: Froggy went a-courtin’ and he did ride, mmm-hm.

At last Newsome said, “It’s in my chest. High in my chest. Or at the bottom of my throat, just below the windpipe.”

“Can you see it? Concentrate!”

Vertical lines appeared on Newsome’s forehead. Scars from the skin that had been flayed open during the accident wavered through these grooves of concentration. “I see it. It’s pulsing in time to my heartbeat.” His lips pulled down in an expression of distaste. “It’s nasty.”

Rideout leaned closer. “Is it a ball? It is, isn’t it? A green ball.”

“Yes. Yes! A little green ball that breathes!”

Like the rigged-up tennis ball you undoubtedly have either up your sleeve or in that big black lunchbox of yours, Rev, she thought.

And, as if she were controlling him with her mind (instead of just deducing where this sloppy little playlet would go next), Rideout said: “Mr. Jensen, sir. There’s a lunchbox under the chair I was sitting in. Get it and open it and stand next to me. You need to do no more than that for the moment. Just—”

Kat MacDonald snapped. It was a snap she actually heard in her head. It sounded like Roger Miller snapping his fingers during the intro to ‘King of the Road’.

She stepped up beside Rideout and shouldered him aside. It was easy. He was taller, but she had been turning and lifting patients for nearly half her life, and she was stronger. “Open your eyes, Andy. Open them right now. Look at me.”

Startled, Newsome did as she said. Melissa and Jensen (now with the lunchbox in his hands) looked alarmed. One of the facts of their working lives — and Kat’s own, at least until now — was that you didn’t command the boss. The boss commanded you. You most certainly did not startle him.

But she’d had quite enough, thank you. In another twenty minutes she might be crawling after her headlights along stormy roads to the only motel in the vicinity, a place that looked like the avatar of all roach-traps, but it didn’t matter. She simply couldn’t do this any longer.

“This is bullshit, Andy,” she said. “Are you hearing me? Bullshit.”

“I think you better stop right there,” Newsome said, beginning to smile — he had several smiles, and this wasn’t one of the good ones. “If you want to keep your job, that is. There are plenty of other nurses in Vermont who specialise in pain therapy.”

She might have stopped there, but Rideout said, “Let her speak, sir.” It was the gentleness in his tone that drove her over the edge.

She leaned forward, into his space, and the words spilled out in a torrent.