Free Twisted by Andrew E. Kaufman Page B

Christopher.
    Not so much.
    In retrospect, and for obvious reasons, his comment needles under my skin. But there’s something else about it that’s niggling at me—something less obvious, something I can’t even quantify.
    I try to chase the thought away, tell myself I’m being ridiculous, and continue through the hallway toward my office. But much like the aches and pains waging war on my body, Donny Ray’s message is doing the same to my mind. So I unload my belongings, deciding it’s at last time to prove he’s not the villain I’ve made him out to be. I head for Alpha Twelve to check on my enigmatic patient.
    But after stepping onto the floor, I stand amid punctuated silence, and it’s not the soothing kind—it’s the weird one.
    Alpha Twelve is rarely quiet this time of day, and even when things are relatively calm, it only takes one visitor to stir things up—then before you know it, faces thrust against windows, voices shout, and the momentum of chaos continues to build. But that’s not happening today. No mattress springs bouncing or creaking, no feet shuffling across the tiles. Not a single voice to be heard. Even as I step down the hall, every window remains vacant, every patient beyond it lost in some sort of commanding, dead hush.
    I look ahead through the Plexiglas window at the nurses’ station. No sign of anyone around, and my concern ramps up. There’s another problem I can’t describe but can definitely feel: the air surrounding me is not just silent—it’s still. Unreasonably still, as if someone or something has turned it dormant. Alpha Twelve is never predictable, but it does tend to have established patterns of nuttiness, and what I’ve just witnessed strays wildly from any of them. If I’ve learned anything around here, it’s that more than disorder, quiet can often be a precursor to trouble. At least with the latter, you can see it coming.
    I move forward on edge. The flooring beneath my feet feels atypically uneven, the walls around me atypically narrow. Peering into the first room, I find that my ardent admirer, Gerald Markman, doesn’t seem so keen about anything right now. He stands in a shadowy corner and faces the wall, his body rigid, his feet firm to the floor like bolted fixtures.
    “Gerald,” I say.
    He gives no response.
    Another disturbing abnormality. Like the ward itself, most of our patients have established baselines, which the medical staff document and rely on as predictors, both in giving care and to detect potential danger. Gerald has taken a distinct and oppositional shift.
    An indiscernible whisper pulls me away from Gerald. I wheel around for a better listen and realize it’s coming from Nicholas Hartley’s room.
    I pad that way, and the tone becomes clearer, but the words do not. He’s rambling and delirious with a scrape in his voice you’d hear after someone’s been screaming too loudly and for too long.
    I find Nicholas in bed, hands no longer working the pleasure zone; in fact, his appearance is downright distraught: head to chest, arms wrapped around knees. Steadily and rhythmically rocking himself. Still whispering, but faster now, as if my presence demands it. I try to make out what he’s saying, and one sentence emerges from the chatter.
    “That sleep of death, Christopher.”
    Ice water spills down my spine.
    I check the remaining rooms, but all I find is more of the same: patients oddly subdued and detached, none of them wanting to so much as look at me.
    Except, that is, for one.

20
    Donny Ray Smith peers out at me through his window.
    I walk toward him, and those cold blue eyes beam into mine like beacons. Then in an instant, they change, and something flashes through them—a fleeting moment of stark transparency, a portal into some dark place where I don’t want to go.
    Much like what I saw in that video clip.
    Uneasiness shakes me, but at this point, I don’t know whether to trust my perceptions, and really, I shouldn’t. I’m