Free The Madman's Tale by John Katzenbach

have stretched in size, growing in ferocity with every stride. “I know! I could tell! From the moment you walked in! Stop now!”
    Francis felt frozen with confusion. Inwardly, his voices were all screaming in a cascade of conflicted advice:
Run! Run! He’s going to hurt us! Hide!
His head pivoted around, trying to see how he could escape the tall man’s onslaught. He tried to will his muscles to work, at least rise up from the bed, but, instead, he shrank backward, almost cowering.
    “If you will not stop, then it’s up to me to stop you!” the man shouted. He seemed to be preparing himself for an assault.
    Francis lifted his arms to fend off the attack.
    The tall man gargled out some sort of gathered war cry, lifted himself up, puffing out his sunken chest and waving his arms above his head. Seemed ready to leap on Francis, when another voice sliced across the room.
    “Lanky! Stop there!”
    The tall man hesitated, then turned in the direction of the voice.
    “Just stop right there!”
    Francis was still huddled back against the wall, and he couldn’t see who was speaking until the tall man turned around.
    “What are you doing?”
    “But it’s him,” the man said to whomever had come into the dormitory. He seemed, in that moment, to have shrunk in size.
    “No, it’s not!” came the reply.
    And then Francis saw that the man fast approaching was the same man he’d met in his first minutes in the hospital.
    “Leave him alone!”
    “But it’s him! I could tell as soon as I saw him!”
    “That’s what you said to me when I first showed up. That’s what you say to every new person who comes into the hospital.”
    This made the tall man hesitate.
    “I do?” he asked.
    “Yes.”
    “I still think it’s him,” said the tall man, but oddly, most of the passion hadfled from his voice, replaced by questions and some doubt. “I’m pretty sure,” he added. “He absolutely could be, I’ll say that.” Despite the conviction contained in the words, the tenor of the voice was filled with uncertainty.
    “But why?” said the man. “Why are you so sure?”
    “It was just, when he came in, it seemed so obvious, I was watching, and then …” The tall man’s voice tailed off, fading. “Maybe I’m wrong.”
    “I think you’re genuinely mistaken.”
    “You do?”
    “I do.”
    The other man came forward. He was grinning now. He stepped past the tall man.
    “Well, C-Bird, I see you’re all settled in.”
    Francis nodded.
    The man turned to the tall man. “Lanky, this is C-Bird. I met him the other day in the administration building. He’s not the person you think he is any more than I was the other day when you first spotted me. I can assure you of that.”
    “How can you be so certain?” the tall man asked.
    “Well, I saw him come in, and I saw his chart, and I promise you, if he was the son of Satan sent here to do evil inside the hospital, there would have been a notation on it, because it had all the other particulars. Hometown. Family. Address. Age. You name it, it was there. Nothing about being the Antichrist.”
    “Satan is the great deceiver. His son would be equally clever. Probably be able to hide himself. Even from Gulp-a-pill.”
    “Ah, possibly. But there were policemen with me, and they would have been trained to spot the son of Satan. They would have had flyers and handouts, and those pictures like they have on the walls at the post office, you know what I’m saying? I doubt even the son of Satan could have hidden from a pair of state troopers.”
    The tall man listened intently to this explanation. The he turned to Francis.
    “I’m sorry. I was apparently mistaken. I can see now that you are not the person I have been on the lookout for. Please accept my sincerest apologies. Vigilance is really our only defense against evil. You have to be so careful, you know, day in, day out, hour after hour. It’s exhausting, but utterly necessary …”
    Francis finally managed to crawl