The Stolen Ones (11 page)

Luther didn’t like the sunshine.

The catacombs took him from patient wards to doctors’ quarters, from the nurses’ buildings to the cafeteria, where he ate the surplus food until he was fit to burst.

Before his death from stomach cancer three years earlier, Big Luther – the man who had clandestinely cared for Luther until the boy could wander the halls at Cold River without fear of discovery or expulsion – had taught him to read in the small inpatient library. Quite often Luther had to skip sections of the books due to the feces and food smeared on the pages.

From discarded correspondence and memos, Luther learned about all the different ailments treated in his hospital: the organic psychoses (senility and syphilis), the toxic psychoses (alcohol), the affective psychoses (manic depressives), even neurological conditions like hemiplegia and chorea.

Luther did not know which of these he had. Perhaps he had them all.

Luther was not the only child ever to be born inside the vast complex of Cold River. Not by far. With the many hundreds of patients who were wards of the county and state, many of whom suffered from a litany of psychological disorders, sexual assaults were commonplace. More than once Luther had tended to newborn babies he found discarded like so much refuse around the buildings and grounds, only to have them die from exposure, or, when discovered, be taken away and sent to the proper facility. In his years at Cold River, the number of babies for which he cared, even for as short a period as days, numbered in the dozens.

It was well known among both staff and patients that many male patients over the years had themselves committed to Cold River because of the availability of free food and sex.

When Luther was twelve, one of the patients, a bipolar named Hubert Tilton, was kept by a wall in the Long Hallway for a full year, his arms and feet restrained, his food and waste travelling through tubes, looking much the same to Luther. Luther watched him from the unused nurse’s station nearby, every week making a drawing of the man as he wasted away. Sometimes Luther would read to the man at night. Hubert never responded, but Luther could tell that the old man liked the adventure tales of Jack London.

One day Luther showed up at the usual time, only to find Hubert and his bed gone. He went back to his room, a storage room off the Echo Hallway, but not before stealing a stapler from the reception desk outside the Chief Steward’s office.

That night, by flashlight, Luther stapled together all his drawings of Hubert Tilton, and made a flip book.

From then on, depending on which way Luther flipped the book, Hubert would live or die, all at Luther’s command.

In the spring there was excitement, but Luther did not know why. He eventually learned that there were two men coming: one doctor, one patient. They would be living in the new building, G10.

Luther thought that it was a terribly big building for only two people.

They had to be great men, indeed.

Upon his arrival at the hospital, Dr Kirsch assembled a small team to assist with his research – a psychiatric nurse, an anesthesiologist and one orderly.

The patient, Eduard Kross, was kept in a white padded room, lighted by a bank of twelve florescent fixtures in the ceiling. The lights were never turned off.

Every twenty-four hours, Kross was brought to a black room, and given an injection, a cocktail of pharmaceuticals comprised of morphine, Prozac and scopolamine. Within minutes he was in a trancelike state, somewhere between sleep and wakefulness, a state they called the dream arcade.

Night after night, Dr Kirsch and his team brought Edward Kross to the black room, with its sophisticated instruments and recording equipment. From beneath the black room, Luther could not hear much, mostly it sounded like men just talking. Every so often, when Luther was about to doze off in the hot, stuffy confines of the mechanical bay, he heard the screams.

Then, one day, in the fall of 1994, it all stopped. Luther heard rumors, but he believed them to be true by the very nature of the silence in the black room.

Eduard Kross was dead.

That night, from the roof of G10, Luther watched as a pair of men loaded a large body bag into one of the hospital’s fleet of patient transfer vans, and left the grounds without turning on the headlights.

Luther had seen this before, many times.

He’d lost count at around a hundred.

Dr Kirsch found Luther in the Echo Hallway. Kirsch was not a big man – there were many patients, Luther thought at the time, who could easily wrestle him to the ground – but he carried himself with an almost kingly bearing, a worldliness Luther had only encountered in books.

‘
Träumen Sie
?’ the doctor asked.

Luther did not understand.

‘Do you dream?’ the doctor repeated, this time in English.

‘No,’ Luther said. ‘I do not dream.’

The doctor took him by the hand. ‘Dreams are a magical place. Come with me. I’ll show you what I mean.’

They walked down a long corridor, through a series of locked doors, then down another hallway, by far the cleanest Luther had ever seen. The floor shone brilliantly, the walls were not scratched and scarred, the lights overhead were dazzlingly white.

They came to a door marked G10/A6. The doctor took out a key, unlocked the door. They stepped into a small dark room. The doctor closed the door behind them. When he turned on the light Luther saw a window in front of him, a window that revealed a room on the other side. In this room sat a man on a wooden chair. The man, who wore a soiled hospital gown, had his mouth open. His head lolled to one side. He had long gray hair and a full beard. Luther could see dried food in the man’s whiskers.

The doctor touched a button on the console. ‘Watch.’

Luther walked up to the glass. Within moments the door in the other room opened. Another man walked in, this one old and haggard. He wore a stained green jumpsuit, and moved with a limp.

As Luther observed, the old man took out a pair of very sharp scissors. Luther gasped when he saw the instrument, expecting a pair of orderlies to rush into the room, tussle the old man to the floor, and take the scissors away. Such things were strictly forbidden.

But that didn’t happen.

Instead, little by little, the old man began to cut the other man’s hair, which tufted out from his raw scalp like weeds on an untended walkway. Every so often the old man would step back to assess his work. Snip here, snip there, then another appraisal.

To Luther’s horror and surprise, he did not stop with the man’s hair. With the razor sharp shears he suddenly snipped off the tip of one of the man’s ears, then quickly went to the other side, snipping that one too. Bright red blood trickled down the sides of the man’s face. Luther looked at the doctor, waiting for the man to step in and stop this. But the doctor just watched. Luther turned his attention back to the spectacle.

Before long the old man went to work on the other man’s fingertips, not stopping until he had clipped away a small portion of each finger, as well as both thumbs, always retreating a few paces, considering, assessing, evaluating.

Blood began to pool beneath the chair.

‘The man with the scissors is dreaming, you see,’ the doctor said. ‘He dreams he is a horticulturalist.’

‘What is that?’ Luther asked.

The doctor told him, continued.

‘The man with the scissors dreams it is high summer – bright blue sky, warm breezes, a world in full flower – and he is creating a topiary by clipping foliage and twigs from a large perennial, in hopes of creating something fanciful. A peacock, or perhaps a dolphin.’

‘Why does he keep stepping away?’ Luther asked.

‘He is looking for symmetry.’

The old man moved on to the other man’s toes. The seated man’s hospital gown was now a deep crimson.

‘What about the man in the chair?’ Luther asked.

‘What about him?’

‘Is he dreaming, too?’

‘Oh my, yes.’

‘What is he dreaming about?’

The doctor put a hand on Luther’s shoulder. ‘He is dreaming of winter.’

Over the next year Luther saw many shows. Once he saw a man in that small room sit naked in the chair, wearing only a bib, a cloth tied around his neck with what looked like tiny red lobsters printed on it.

In his lap was a metal bowl.

As Luther and Dr Kirsch watched, the man took a pair of pliers and, one by one, pulled out his teeth, each time dropping them into the bowl with a loud clank.

When the man was finished, toothless and bloodied, an orderly walked into the room, and helped him to the door.

Luther never saw that man again.

When the governor of Pennsylvania ordered the hospital closed, and the main buildings were torn down, a lot of the patients were simply released onto the streets of Philadelphia. Some were sent to group homes, some to other long-term care institutions. Most were given fifty dollars and a bus schedule.

For weeks Luther was incapacitated with worry. He did not know what was to become of him. Most of his knowledge of the outside world was to be found in books, and the thought of wandering its dark and dangerous streets filled him with an all but debilitating sense of dread.

But through the grace and kindness of Dr Godehard Kirsch, Luther was to find a home at the end of the Long Hallway, a massive corridor which began beneath the sub-basement of G10 – the only facility left operational after the shuttering of Cold River – and ended almost a mile away, in a warren of rooms fitted like none that Luther had ever seen.

In the first six months of 1997 Luther discovered that the catacombs beneath the hospital were not the only subterranean worlds in Philadelphia.

When it came to the labyrinthine corridors beneath the city, beginning in the mazes under the hospital, Luther’s memory was eidetic. In virtual darkness he moved, often following tributaries deep into the sewer system. He learned all the tricks of the underground workers, the virtual timetables for the evening return of homeowners. Beneath the city he learned many things.

But it was in the dream arcade that Luther, with the help of Dr Kirsch and his associates, would travel the world.

Night after night, in dream after dream, Luther left the confines of G10. In the dream arcade, the recorded reveries of Eduard Olev Kross, Luther was unstoppable. In some of the dreams he was a forger and a thief. In some, a confidence man and an arsonist. In many, when cornered, a taker of lives.

In other dreams – the ones Luther liked best – he searched for a little blond girl named Kaisa. Her beautiful face was the last diorama in the dream arcade, a place to which Luther had begun to visit on his own.

In village after village Luther looked for her, in homes, cafes, train stations, even beneath the hay in barns. He would enter homes in the night, sitting for hours, watching for the first trace of dawn, searching for Kaisa.

He had many close calls, but not once did he have to draw his knife, a beautiful bone-handled blade forged of Russian steel, a present from Dr Kirsch.

Then, one day, he found the girl.

For weeks he had crept into homes all over the neighborhood, making meticulous entries in his journal. One girl had seemed right at first. But when Luther witnessed a violent tantrum on the playground near her school, he knew she would not do.

The very next night, as always, he put on the old suit, the floppy hat. When he climbed into the city above, he knew that this night would be different. The moon was in a crescent phase, a trimmed fingernail in the black sky, and Luther suddenly felt as if he might be invisible.

He entered the home through the basement, slipped into the small living room, and saw on the mantel a pair of framed pictures, two young girls about four or five years apart. When he saw the younger girl, her fine blond hair held by a thin red ribbon, his heart fluttered.

It was Kaisa.

Over the next three nights Luther returned to the house, listening, waiting, barely able to contain his excitement. On the fourth night, when the house fell silent, he crept up the stairs, and entered the bedroom. When he heard a sound from below – a machine humming to life, perhaps a refrigerator cycling – he stepped into the closet.

When he felt it was safe, he put his hand on the doorknob. Before he could open the door, the door opened for him. It was not the girl for whom he had come. It was the older girl.

For what seemed like an eternity the older girl seemed to be in a trance, staring at him, unmoving. Eventually she retreated, and leaned on the edge of her bed. Luther walked out of the closet, sat down on a small chair, came face to face with the little blond girl. She did not seem to fear him.

‘Hello,’ he said softly. ‘What is your name?’

‘I’m Bean,’ she said.

‘Do you dream?’

The little girl nodded.

‘Come,’ he said. ‘I’ll tuck you in.’

Moments later, with both girls beneath the covers, Luther reached out, flipped off the light. He took the small tape recorder from his pocket, put it on the nightstand.

The room was now thick with shadow. Luther sat at the end of the bed. He pressed
PLAY
. Moments later, the tape began to play.

‘Sleep now, little ones,’ he said. ‘Sleep.’

On his last visit Luther brought with him a bottle of apple juice, poured the girl and her sister a small glass. After they had drank from the cups, he dressed them warmly, led them down the stairs, and into the Long Hallway, at the end of which the doctor waited.

When he brought them back, he knew that the little one – the one called Bean – was the one.

As she drifted off that night Luther tucked the covers around her. She looked up at him, her eyes softly closing.

‘Many years from now, on your birthday, I will come back for you,’ Luther said.

On the night Luther brought Bean back to the doctor, he covered his ears to the screams, and thought of White Rita. He did not know her, of course – they say she bled to death in the Echo Hallway – but he remembered her in the only place he could.