Asylum (29 page)

I slid around another pillar just as the alarm I’d set went off. Even though I knew it was coming, I jumped.

Robert, however, did nothing. No more calling out. No rushing to see where my phone was. No exclamations of discovery or irritation. It was as if I were alone in the vast dark cathedral. That’s probably what he wanted me to think.

For one long moment I considered just staying there. All night. They’d be in, later, to lock up; if not, someone would open the church for morning mass. I could just stay there; in the morning I’d be safe.

In the morning, I thought, I’d be dead. I had to get out of there.

Back behind the reredos was a stairway, down to the restrooms and the exhibit hall. And an exit.

The church seemed brighter now, lit by the thousands of candles burning all over, in front of statues and icons, in all of the side altars, carrying prayers eternally on their flames. I could have used a few of those prayers right now. I felt my way back down toward the front of the church, keeping my back to the wall, in and out of the depressions that held statues, paintings, grottoes. I could do this. I could get out of here.

Still no movement anywhere. I forced myself to breathe. Sure, Martine, everything’s safe now. Odd how I’d thought of the murderer as some shadowy figure, larger than life, scary as a nightmare; and then had met him and saw how ordinary he was. Maybe evil looks like that. Maybe evil is so insidious because it’s so ordinary.

Maybe someday I’d have the leisure to consider such philosophical questions.

Past the choir stalls, finally, and the staircase, dark and gaping, opened to my left. There was no candlelight back here. It didn’t matter: the door at the foot of those stairs was freedom, light, safety. I plunged down them headlong.

And had my wrist grabbed even as I reached for the doorknob. “I don’t think,” Robert Carrigan said, “that it’s time for you to leave quite yet, my dear.”

They caught me doing it, of course.

There were four or five doctors at the asylum all the time now, and they all were very busy. There were medications for us to take, injections—some painful, some merely scary—to be endured. Operations to be done. Electroshock, which I hadn’t had to undergo but had seen, quite by accident, and never wanted to even think about again. Restraints, chains, straitjackets. Oh, and the prettiest girls—and prettiest boys, too—who spent time with the orderlies behind closed doors, and cried about it later in the night.

And all of it supervised by the doctors. Who always were looking for someone who hadn’t been “treated” yet.

Which brought everything back to me and my lists.

I’d been handing them to Sister Béatrice with scribbled notations, and one day she came into the file room and sat across from me. “I’d like to see some of the folders,” she said. Her eyes were colder than anything I’d ever seen.

“Yes, Sister,” I said. What else was there for me to say?

“
Bien
,” she said. “Let me see … Bernard Leveque. Catherine Dulac. François.… Hmm, little François has no surname.”

“No?” I asked.

“No. No surname. Odd how you were able to locate a sister for him,” she said. “You are very talented, Gabrielle.”

I hated that she knew my name. “Perhaps I made an error,” I said.

“Perhaps you did. Perhaps you’ve made a great many errors, Gabrielle, and especially the error you made in thinking yourself smarter than we are.”

“No, Sister,” I protested. “I never said that.”

“Or better?” she countered. “Perhaps you think that you’re better than we are? Perhaps you think your judgment superior to ours?”

“No, Sister,” I said miserably.

“Let’s see those folders,” she said.

I took them all out. Empty, all of them, as I knew they were, as she’d somehow figured out that they would be: these were the orphans who had nobody to care if they lived or died—or to care if they were tortured in between the two.

Orphans like me.

Sister Béatrice went through them slowly, one by one. When she was finished, she raised her eyes to mine. “You were given our trust,” she said. “We took you in when no one else cared about you. We gave you shelter and food and an education. We’ve given you employment. And this is how you respond. You’ve lied to us, you’ve tricked us, you’ve humiliated us.”

What was scariest of all was that she wasn’t shouting. She wasn’t taking a stick to me, beating the words into me, as they so often did. Her voice was colorless, without inflection, and I found that the most frightening part of all. “Sister—”

“Enough!” The hand blocked any more conversation.

She stood up then, slowly. “You have shown yourself to be willful and disobedient,” she said, and I thought no, please, God, no, not back to the restraints again, the cold metal collar around my neck, the immobility; but it seemed she had something else in mind. “Other orphans who are grateful for what they have will take your place here,” she said. “Tomorrow I will introduce you to Dr. Cameron.”

And then she was gone.

I took a long, deep breath. I knew what that meant.

I pulled some paper from the file cabinet, and began to write:

I suppose that there had been a life sometime before the orphanage, but I could never really remember it—not really, not as a whole. There were only scraps left, a tune that wouldn’t leave my brain, a sense of something almost familiar lurking just out of sight that disappeared as soon as I turned my head to look at it …

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

I floated back to consciousness.

I really mean it: I was floating. It felt like I was in water, but it wasn’t water. I wasn’t drowning.

Not altogether unpleasant, to tell you the truth.

It became more unpleasant, of course, as my brain cells awoke and synapses fired, albeit irregularly. I knew who I was … gradually. I wasn’t sure what I was doing floating in the dark, but I remembered my name, which had to be a good thing.

Martine LeDuc. That’s who I was. I lived in Montréal. I had a ginger cat … no, not anymore; Théo d’Or had died when I was still in college. I started giggling; the cat’s name really was clever. A pun in a name. If you spoke French.

Okay. Starting over. Martine LeDuc. That was right,
n’est-ce pas?
And Montréal: I lived in Montréal. That was easy; I’ve always lived in Montréal. But no more cat … there was someone else, though. Someone else close to me? My mother? No: she was sleeping, peacefully or otherwise, up on the mountain for which the city had been named.

Focus, focus: it’ll come to you. It has to come to you. Someone else, a man,… a tall man, a Russian?

But the sensation of floating was too pleasant to follow the thread of my thoughts, and so for a while I gave in and just floated some more. Couldn’t hurt, could it?

Some annoying voice was insisting that it
could
hurt, actually, and that it was time for me to come back. I didn’t understand. Irritating little voice. Go away. Leave me alone. I moved my hand to push the thought away, batting at it like a persistent gnat, and found that I couldn’t move my arm.

That brought me back in a hurry.

Bon, d’accord.
I was Martine LeDuc. I lived with a man, not a cat. A husband, that was it. Ivan the Terrible. No, not terrible: I loved him. It would be good if he were here so he could tell me I’d had too much to drink and take me home to sleep it off. I nodded owlishly, or at least tried to nod, but found then that I couldn’t move my head, either.

The floating sensation was receding. Maybe I should open my eyes, I thought, and see exactly what’s going on here.

Mistake. Can’t see anything. Panic grabbing at my throat and my stomach. I couldn’t move, I was blind, I was …

And I remembered, then, the basilica in the night and the man, the lawyer, the one who’d killed those women. Robert Carrigan.

Maybe he’d killed me, too. That would make sense. Maybe this was purgatory, and I was going to float here until it was time to see God. But hadn’t the Church admitted, finally, that purgatory was a medieval construct with no theological basis? If I wasn’t in purgatory I must be dead.

More panic. Breathe, Martine, just breathe. I’d tried to live a good life, I really had. I’d tried to do what I read in the Gospels, I fed the hungry, gave to the poor, turned the other cheek. I hadn’t done anything wrong.

More floating. Amazing how you can float and panic at the same time. A rotten feeling, really.

I’d tried to live a good life. I seized on that thought, clutching at it, perhaps even trying to convince myself. I contributed to my church. I volunteered at a women’s shelter. And then there were the children … I used to think that Lukas and Claudia were a necessary evil that accompanied Ivan whether I liked it or not. To love him meant putting up with them. And that … well, that hadn’t been fair to any of us. Not to Ivan, who struggled with the long absences when he couldn’t see his kids. Not to Lukas or Claudia, who had the right to be people, not just symbols insofar as they related to me as their stepmother.

And not to me, because I hadn’t allowed them to inhabit anything but the margins of my life. I hadn’t opened myself up to them, not really. Yet despite it all, they had—as the expression goes—grown on me. Now I was wondering: did they know that I loved them? Had I ever told them?

Too late now, anyway.

I tried to move again, which only brought on more panic. Can’t breathe, can’t move, can’t breathe, can’t think.

Something touched me and I screamed and flinched, and there was a sense of lightness around my head. And a voice.

“Ah, there you go. We’ll take these off, now that you’re awake. I’d hate for you to miss anything.”

Familiar voice. Male. Self-assured.

Robert Carrigan.

The name clicked, and it was suddenly blindingly clear that I wasn’t dead. Not yet, anyway. Who was it that said hell is other people? Sartre?

I still couldn’t see anything.

“You’re probably wondering where you are,” he said, his voice casual, a tour guide, slightly bored. Been there, done that. I didn’t respond.

“If you’re a very good girl,” he continued, “I’ll let you see a little something. Hard to tell what’s going on around you when you’re
deprived of your senses
.” He chuckled.

Yeah, I thought, I get it, you don’t have to rub it in too hard. My research over the past week flooded back through my synapses. Sensory deprivation: no sound, no light, nothing to touch or feel. And here he was, playing his own little private MK-Ultra games with me. You don’t really have to underline the obvious; I do still have the odd brain cell or two.

But maybe he was right to think I was stupid. I’d pretty much done everything he’d wanted, hadn’t I?

Hands on my head, again, and suddenly, dazzling light. I blinked, closed my eyes, opened them again. Light sparkling all around me. Blessed, blessed light. Can you drink light, savor it, taste it? Why not?

“Why not?” he asked. Had I spoken those words aloud? I must have done, or he wouldn’t have repeated them. “Well, welcome to the sleep room, Martine.” I still couldn’t really see anything, certainly not him, certainly not the room I was in. It had a familiar ring to it, though, that name: where had I heard it before?

It was too much work to think it through. Too many shadows there. Keep floating in the light.

He was talking again, his voice fuzzy. What was he saying? “… effects of soft torture,” the calm monotone was going on. “Always interesting to observe how it works on different individuals.”

I squinted in the direction of the voice. “Thought you were a lawyer,” I said, my words slurring.

“What was that? Speak up, Martine.”

“You don’t sound like a lawyer,” I managed to say. “You sound like one of the doctors. Those doctors experimented on their patients.” I licked my lips: I was determined not to sound afraid. Who could be afraid, anyway, floating in the light like this? “But you remind me of someone specific,” I added. “That guy … One of the CIA’s imports from Germany. You sound a lot like Dr. Mengele.”

He seemed to find that uproariously funny, and I winced: too much sound is as bad as too little, the volume of his laughter was jangling nerves in my head I didn’t know I possessed. I was starting to get a sense of where I was, but there wasn’t much to see: there were sheets pinned up all around the bed on which I was lying. A hospital? Above, way high above, a vaulted ceiling. No, not vaulted exactly, not like in the church … but curved. A curved concrete ceiling. Where on earth was there a curved concrete ceiling?

Church … I’d been in church, I remembered. In the basilica, the biggest church in the city. And that was where he’d hunted me down.

“Funny you should say that, Martine,” Robert Carrigan was saying. “Funny that you should mention him. Because once upon a time, I nearly was. A doctor, that is. Perhaps even a pupil of Dr. Mengele. You say his name like it’s such a
bad
thing.”

“Nazi,” I managed to say. “Human experimentation.”

He laughed. “You don’t think anything
that
important could be done with rats and monkeys, do you?”

“You’re no doctor,” I said.

“But I might have been. I came close. So close. They were willing to send me to medical school. And apparently I had the aptitude for it, but I decided on the law instead. And, for a long time, I liked it. People respect attorneys. You get to spend all your time playing a chess game, and outsmarting your opponents. I did love the law,” he said on a sigh. “But now, lately, I wonder if I chose the right path after all. I wonder if it was a mistake.”

I had absolutely no idea what he was talking about. “A mistake?” I repeated, just to keep him talking.

“Well, I’d gotten quite used to the medical side of things, hadn’t I?” he said, and his face swam into view in front of me. “Oh. I see. Really. Now, you surprise me. You didn’t work that one out?”