Henry was no shrink, but he’d seen enough violence to know that it did a number on people. “He’d just seen his sister murdered,” he said.
“His affect was off,” Anne said. She hesitated. “And this is not my professional opinion. My opinion as a psychologist was in the reports: dissociative fugue. My opinion as a mother? Jeremy Reynolds is dangerous.”
“Susan said his memory’s come back,” Henry said. He told Anne what Susan had said about the chest carvings apparently matching the marks on Isabel’s torso.
“In a kid like Jeremy,” Anne said, “without the proper support, that could send him reeling. He’d look for alternative support structures. Like the Internet, the fan club. And he’d look for people he could talk to.”
Henry finished the thought. “Like Archie. The one person who understands.” Archie had left the hospital and gone into that basement looking for Jeremy. Someone had to know the connection he and Jeremy had shared. Someone had to figure that Archie, knowing what Jeremy had gone through, would do almost anything to save him.
“Susan thinks Jeremy was the man in the mask,” Henry said.
“Well, duh,” Anne said.
C H A P T E R 51
After a while, Archie found that the pain from the hooks became a sort of physical white noise. He relaxed his body, letting his arms dangle, fingertips almost brushing the floor, and he took slow, deep breaths. The weightlessness was disorienting and he was getting dizzier and increasingly light-headed. His mind skittered. When he tried to focus on the floor, his vision blurred.
His blood pressure was dropping.
At this rate, he wouldn’t be conscious much longer.
“I can let you down now,” Jeremy said.
Archie lifted his head. The room spun. “I think that would be an excellent idea,” he said.
Jeremy pulled at a mechanism Archie couldn’t see and after a painful jerk, he was lowered blissfully to the concrete. Archie lay on his belly, his arms under his torso, his cheek on the floor. The concrete was cool. Jeremy lifted his head and held a sports bottle to his lips. “It’s sugar water,” he said. “To get your glucose up.”
Archie parted his lips and Jeremy pressed the nozzle into his mouth and squeezed the bottle. The sugar water was room temperature
and sweet, like flat cola, but Archie suckled at it feverishly, his mind clearing as the fluid found its way down his throat. When Jeremy pulled the bottle away, Archie managed to sit up, his bare knees pulled to his chest. “Take the hooks out,” he said.
Jeremy knelt behind him. “I have to do it fast,” Jeremy said. “The faster you take them out, the less it hurts.” Archie could feel him working, feel the pressure as Jeremy held a cloth to his skin to stop the bleeding, but he didn’t feel any pain. He knew each hook was out only because of the sound it made as Jeremy dropped it into an empty Nancy’s Yogurt container.
“I’m going to massage the air out of your skin,” Jeremy said. “To help prevent infection. It’s going to hurt a little.” Jeremy pushed around the puncture wounds, with a circular motion. It was more unsettling than painful, like Rice Krispies popping under his skin. The air made a burping sound as it exited his flesh, and warm blood spurted from the wounds, splattering and running down Archie’s back. Archie rested his forehead against his knees and hugged his shins.
Then he felt Jeremy rub something cool on his back.
“Antibacterial solution,” Jeremy said. He cleaned up the blood and then continued to massage Archie’s back, working up his spine and rubbing his neck and shoulders, rubbing his fingers up the back of Archie’s skull through his hair.
“Did Gretchen touch you like this? . . .” Jeremy asked softly.
“Yes,” Archie said. “The carvings you made on the guy with the teeth, you remember Gretchen doing that to Isabel?”
“I watched her do it.”
“Do you want to tell me what happened, Jeremy?”
“Yes,” Jeremy said. “But I want to get the scalpel first.”
C H A P T E R 52
Henry would’ve been happy to go years before seeing the inside of the Providence psych ward again. He didn’t like the way it smelled. He didn’t like the security cameras and locked doors. He didn’t like the nurses. And he didn’t like the fact that his best friend had spent two months there.
“This better be good,” Henry said to Claire. He was standing with Claire next to Archie’s psychologist, Sarah Rosenberg, in the hall. They were looking into the activities room, where a department shrink sat across the table from Archie’s old roommate, Frank. The shrink was interviewing all the mental patients about Courtenay Taggart’s death. The hospital would only approve professional crazy wranglers to wrangle its crazies.
Henry thought it was all bullshit.
“Frank doesn’t have a sister,” Rosenberg said.
Henry let that soak in. “Fuck,” he said.
“Your psychiatrist saw it in his file,” Rosenberg said, looking through the glass at Frank. “No one ever thought to check.”