“We exposed everything; county police saw it and they didn’t care,” said Nate, pushing back the chance for self-pity. “They said it was a prop in a staged haunting.”
Acker nodded, understandingly. “I would have been inclined to agree once. But not today. Not in Sleepy Lake. Whoever owned that book had an agenda. And I am staggered they left it behind.”
He paused, lost in his grave thoughts. When he spoke again, he seemed to be quoting someone else.
“No book is dangerous in and of itself, you know. But historically, reading a book in the wrong way has led to terrible consequences. I can only think of one person more dangerous than a man who reads the Necronomicon and knows what he’s doing. And that is someone who reads the damned book with no idea of what he’s doing at all.”
Nate’s reaction shot was ruined by the voices of Craig and Kimrean, who were having a Pythonesque discussion over the window.
“You nutjob, penguins can’t fly!”
“But this one just flew in!” Kimrean wailed, putting the bird in question under Craig’s nose. “Look! And it brings a message! It’s a carrier penguin!”
“Hey, Kim,” called Nate. “Can I see that penguin, please?”
Kimrean capered back to him, carrying the plastic toy. Two words had been penciled on the penguin’s white breast. “Keep squeaking.”
“Put the penguin between my knees, please,” Nate requested. “And use that leash to tie my ankles together.”
“Ooh, Patty Hearst liked that too,” Kimrean commented.
Nate pressed his knees, extracting a wheeze from the plushy toy between his legs. He then tried a quick, sudden press; the penguin squeaked.
“What are we doing?” Craig grunted.
“I don’t know. But stay silent.”
He kept twitching his knees, making the penguin sing every few seconds, all while Craig and Old Acker observed him with taxing solemnity, Kimrean finished tying him up, Xira and Princess Irya ran for tactical advantage, and Adam sat hypnotized by the screen, watching out for the denouement of that episode.
It arrived, two minutes later, in the form of padded footsteps on the linoleum floor. Not from the TV.
The head nurse in her station screamed, “Hey! Who let that mutt in?”
Tim trotted by happily, already way past the counter before being noticed, glancing back cheerfully at the head nurse like he meant to tip his boater and bid her good morning. He followed the squeaks into the living room, where the circle around the armchair opened to welcome him, flabbergasted.
“Look!” Kimrean pointed, his split brain about to explode with all the unfiltered awesomeness the day was providing. “It’s a towing dog!”
The Weimaraner ignored the audience, having already caught sight of the penguin between the knees of the straitjacketed Nate, and dropped at his feet the heavy iron hook and rope he had been carrying in his mouth. The rope extended all the way down the corridor, through the inward-opening escape-proof door to the stairwell. Inches behind the hook, secured between two knots in the rope, a funnel-shaped piece of steel was supposed to play the role of a locomotive’s fender. Nate did his best to underreact once he’d fully comprehended the parameters of the escape plan.
“And you must be Tim,” he said to the Weimaraner.
Tim sat down at the sound of his name, tail wagging with delight now that he had replaced the boring hook in his mouth with the talking penguin.
Nurse Angela and the head nurse and a security guard arrived next. It was time to go.
“Kim, hook me,” ordered Nate. “Craig. Helmet. Quick!”
“What’s happening here?” asked the head nurse.
“Werewolf!” Nate shouted toward the open window.
Outside the building, and across the garden, on the other side of the wall, Andy, hanging from a low branch of the big chestnut tree, echoed, “Werewolf!” and banged the roof of the car.
Kerri stepped on the gas and gunned the Chevy forward.
In the living room, the guard pulled out his truncheon and gave the most useless command in his career as an order enforcer in a mental hospital.
“Don’t move!”
In the next heartbeat, Nate was quite literally fired off his armchair and through the human barricade of wards and nurses, scattering them like rubber bowling pins. By the time his backside touched the linoleum again he was already halfway down the corridor, zigzagging off the walls like a pinball, zooming toward the stairwell door, scurrying through the gap opened by the fender, and flying off the first landing.
He touched about six steps in three floors. With his head.
The two guards on the first floor inspecting the rope stretched across the foyer heard the loud bumping in the staircase several seconds before the screams accompanying the noise augmented suddenly in volume and the 150-pound projectile bashed through them, bolting toward the exit.
The guard in reception didn’t see it go past his booth. He only grimaced at the shouts, turned the volume up on Xira the Princess Warrior, and resumed his lunch.
Ethan, sitting on a bench in the garden reading Mad, hardly noticed the running rope under the bench and between his feet, and simply waved at Nate after he’d dashed by, peeling off the lawn and an inch-thick layer of dirt like a derailed dining car.
“Yeah, bye, Nate.”
He even saw him colliding with the outer wall and being hoisted over it, hanging upside-down from the top of the chestnut tree like a caterpillar in a pupa.
At that point Kerri, sighting the wriggling package fly over the wall in her side mirror, stopped the car and got out, prepared to untie the rope from the front bumper as soon as Andy cut Nate loose from the other end.
“You can stop yelling now, Nate,” Andy suggested, shimmying toward him along a branch and reaching out to unhook him.
“No wait bitch don’t it’s too high no no no fuck!”
The helmet and the grass of the park surrounding Arkham Asylum absorbed the best part of the fall damage.
Andy jumped to the ground and helped him up while Kerri swerved the Chevy around and rushed back to them, already flipping the right seat and stretching to open the door. She brought the car skidding to a stop two feet short of running over them and Andy shoved the guy in the straitjacket onto the backseat and jumped in.
“Go!”
Kerri pressed the clutch, shifted to second, and drove off north along the asylum wall.
By the time they turned around the corner, every single guard from the maximum-security ward was rushing out through the gate ahead. Three of them dared to step in the car’s trajectory and order it to stop.
Kerri made a point of shifting again really loud, engine revving in an unequivocal statement.
The ephemeral determination in the guards’ eyes segued to panic in the tenth of a second before they jumped aside, dodging the stampeding vehicle.