Vicious Circle

Closer in, you see the bars over the windows, riveted directly into the original brickwork, and the looming bulk of the new annex protruding backward at an acute angle, dwarfing the cottages themselves. If you’re tuned in to stuff like that, maybe you also notice the magical prophylactics that they’ve put up beside the main door to discourage the dead: a sprig of myrtle for May, a necromantic circle bearing the words HOC FUGERE—flee this place—a crucifix, and an ornate blue enamel mezuzah. One way or another, you’re dumped out of the Victorian reverie into an uncomfortable present.

I stepped in out of a night laden with a fresh freight of rain that had yet to fall onto thick carpet and the expertly canned smell of wild honeysuckle. But the Stanger has a hard time putting on a pretty face: as I pushed open the second set of doors and went on through into the lobby, I could already hear a huge commotion from somewhere further inside. Shouting voices, a woman—or maybe a man—crying, crashes of doors opening and closing. It all sat a little oddly with the soothing Vivaldi being played pianissimo over the speaker system. The nurse at the desk, Helen, was staring off down the corridor and looking like she wanted to bolt. She jerked her head around when she saw me, and I gave her a nod.

“Mr. Castor!” she said, checking her start of alarm. “Felix—It’s him. Asmodeus. He’s—” She pointed, but seemed unable to get any more words out.

“I heard,” I said, tersely. “I’ll go on through.”

I broke into a trot as I went up the main corridor. This was my usual weekly visit: I still called it that, even though these days the interval between them had stretched out to a month or more. I was tied to this place by the loose elastic of ancient guilt, and every so often the pull became too insistent to ignore. But clearly tonight was going to be a departure from routine. There was something going on up ahead of me, and it was a violent, screaming kind of something. I didn’t want to be anywhere near it, but Rafi was my responsibility and this was absolutely my job to sort out.

Rafi’s room is in the new annex. I sometimes think, with a certain bitterness, that Rafi’s room financed the new annex, because it had cost a medium-size fortune to have the walls, floor, and ceiling lined with silver. I went up past the low-security wards, hearing sobs and shouts and swearing from inside each one as I passed: every loud noise at the Stanger stirs up a host of echoes. As I rounded the corner at a jog, I saw a whole crowd of people clustered about ten feet away from Rafi’s door, which seemed to be open. I was looking for Pen, and so I saw her first: she was tussling with two nurses, a man and a woman, and cursing like a longshoreman. Looking at Pen head-on, you always get the impression that she’s taller than she is; the vividness of her green eyes and red-auburn hair somehow translates into a sense of imposing height, but in fact she stands a little over five feet tall. The two nurses weren’t actually holding on to her, they were just blocking her way to the door and moving with her whenever she tried to slide around them—a very effective human wall.

The rest of the scene was like a bar fight taking place under local rules I wasn’t familiar with. Webb, the director of the Stanger Home, sweating and red-faced, was trying to lay hands on Pen to pull her away from the door, but at the same time he was fighting shy of doing anything that might be construed as assault—and any time he got close she just smacked him away. The resulting ballet of twittery hand gestures and involuntary cringeing was strange in the extreme. Half a dozen nurses of both sexes jostled around them, none of them relishing a possibly actionable rumble with someone who wasn’t an inmate and might have the money to sue. Two other Stanger staffers were down on the floor, apparently wrestling with each other.

I could hear the voices now—some of them, anyway, raised above the background babble.

“You’ll kill him! You’re going to kill him.” This was Pen, shrill and urgent.

“—have a responsibility to the public, and to the other residents of the home, and I’m not going to be intimidated into—” Webb, partway through a sentence that had clearly been going on for a while and wasn’t going to end any time soon.

But just as I pushed through the edges of the group, it was ended for him as a body came sailing through the open doorway and hit the corridor’s farther wall with a solid, meaty sound before crashing to the carpeted floor. He was faceup, so I was able to recognize him as Paul, another male nurse, and probably the guy I liked best on the Stanger’s staff. He was unconscious, his face flushed purple, and the hypodermic syringe that rolled from his hand was sheared off short as if by a samurai sword, clear liquid weeping from the cleanly sliced edge of the plastic ampoule.