Dalmoak State Mental Hospital is a sprawling cluster of outhouses dominated by a large, square building with a quaintly church-like little bell tower. Its whitewashed walls stand out in contrast to the surrounding greenery of the countryside close to the river snaking between Lochend and Levenford.
Passers by on train and in car may catch a glimpse of the innocuous-seeming building, which, in some respects, was built on the same lines as the old seminary in Arden, now rebuilt after the disastrous fire of several years past. From the road, it is sheltered by a line of chestnut trees, then a small conifer plantation which hides the double perimeter fence, the nearest one leaning inwards and topped by the lines of taut braided cable connected to insulating saucers and carrying three thousand volts. The chain link barrier furthest from the building, parallelling the outer, leans outwards, making it difficult to climb. The spirals of razor wire braided along the top, sixteen feet from the ground, add to the discouragement.
Dalmoak State Mental Hospital is one of the three most secure units for the criminally insane in the country. The second fence was constructed after two of the inmates escaped and killed a passing motorcycle patrolman to death with a single blow of a garden spade which took his head off cleanly under his helmet and batted it forty feet into the stand of chestnuts.
It is here, that some of the most notorious madmen have been locked away, without limit of time. Behind the whitewashed walls, in a barred room, sits Agnes McPhail, the child minder who one day got fed up with the job and let go the six children she was looking after. She did this by dropping them from the thirteenth floor of the tower-block apartment, holding them by the ankles, then watching them dwindle to become red smears on the concrete. Agnes sits and counts up to six on her fingers and dreams of falling bodies. She eats when told and masturbates constantly hauling up her light cotton gown to rub frantically between her legs. Her pupils have shrunk down to mere pin-points and she will never, ever, get out of Dalmoak.
There are others too. Tom Muir, the Arden butcher who filleted his wife Eadie and offered her as cutlets in his shop window during the mayhem summer that's already part of the local history. James Collins who starved his wife to death in the cellar of their home while he watched pornographic videos in the living room. Annabel Monkton, who stuck a knitting needle through her old mother's ear and into her brain because she was fed up with the clicking sound the old woman made when she knitted scarves. She was well enough, between bouts of morbid depression, to take part in handicrafts, but they never let her handle anything sharp since the day she tried to put a needle into the eye of a frail old woman who had been in Dalmoak since before the war for feeding her husband and her family to the pigs on their farm.
O'Day was brought here and the assessment team took over. They poked and prodded, tried him on barbiturates, electro-convulsive therapy and all manner of things, because in a place like Dalmoak, the inmates are lost to the world. They have ceased to be considered as human beings.
Despite it all, the man remained catatonic. He sat still as stone in his chair, or on his bed, not moving unless moved, speaking to no one, eyes glazed and unfocussed. After the initial burst of activity over a newcomer, they assigned him a room of his own, watered, fed and cleaned him down when needed. He was a model, if un-cooperative patient.
In the August of the following year the consultant psychiatrist retired and after an internal upward shuffle, a new resident joined the team. Derek Whiteford was three years out of medical school, had interned in Glasgow, and was delighted not only with the substantial increase in salary which allowed him enough to treat himself to a convertible BMW, but also the chance to work with what he considered the cream of mental patients.
Derek was young and enthusiastic. He had dealt with trauma, schizophrenia, depression and nervous breakdowns. Here, however, were the real psychopaths, people whose brains worked in different ways from the rest of the population, people who heard messages from God, from creatures under the stairs, or from whatever being they believed in. People to whom the knowledge of good and evil had been denied.
Up in the top corner of C Wing, he met Michael O'Day. The notorious Shrike sat staring at the wall, giving not a flicker of awareness. Derek talked to him, studying the man's eyes for any hint of perception, but found none. He spent a fortnight, arranged a battery of tests, trying to find a way in, until the lack of response made him give up, disappointed, to seek fresh ground.
It was a year to the day of Marta Herkik's death, with the nights drawn in to early dark, that O'Day said his first word. A winter storm was brewing over the Cardross Hills, flickering the sky green-purple in sporadic flashes. Walter McGowan, a heavy-set nurse with a short crop of iron hair and steroid-abuser's bull neck had pushed the frail little man back onto the bed. With one practiced twist, he'd pulled down the front of the one-piece hospital gown, exposing a ribbed and crinkled chest.
"Washtime, Mickey," he said, jovially enough. The patient was no trouble. As long as he was slunged down regularly, he didn't smell, and that was fine for Walter. The thin old man didn't care whether his cot was wet or dry, so there was no need to bother with the rubber sheet. It would soon dry, eventually.
The nurse stripped O'Day quickly until he lay prone and white, then dipped the sponge into the plastic bucket and drew it down the man's body.
"Hot," O'Day said.
"What's that Mickey?" Walter asked automatically, before he realised what had happened.
"Too hot," the man said, voice little more than a cackle.
Walter might have had a weightlifter's body, but he was not stupid. He had a good paying job here, and he wanted to keep it. The new doctor had given them all specific instructions about any changes in patients' condition or behaviour. They had to be reported immediately. He slung the sponge back in the pail, lifted the bucket and backed out of the room, closing the door behind him and locking it with a quick twist.
Dr Whiteford had taken off his immaculate work-coat and was heading for the door as Walter came round the corner.
"Something's happened," the nurse told him.
The young man snatched his hand up to look at his watch.
"I've just finished," he said irritably.
"But you wanted to know. That's why I came right away."
Derek Whiteford sighed. "All right, what is it."
"It's O'Day. Up in C3."
"Go on," the new resident said, taking a step towards the door.
"He just said something to me. He spoke."
Derek took another step then stopped and spun on his heel.
"What do you mean 'spoke'?"
"He just told me his wash water was too hot. Clear as day. It's the first time I've ever heard him say anything. I thought you should know."
The doctor's expression changed.
"You haven't told anyone else, have you?"
"No. I've just come down."
"Fine. Let's keep it to ourselves. Don't want to be precipitate, do we?" If O'Day had spoken, then it was a sign he could be coming out of the fugue. And if that was true, there was a certain paper in the first psychiatric examination of the notorious Shrike.
"Won't say a word, Doc," Walter assured him. Whiteford patted him on the shoulder, a patronising gesture, though Walter was ten years older than he.
"Good man." He went back to his office, took off his jacket, and got back into the hospital whites.
O'Day was completely naked, sitting on the bed. Water trickled over his ribs. He was staring blankly at the wall, and at first the doctor assumed Walter had been wrong.
"What's this, Mr O'Day. You should be in bed by now."
The man turned to him, and the vacant look vanished. Whiteford felt a surge of ambitious delight.
"Not tired," he said, vaguely, then more strongly. "No need to sleep."
"Welcome back, Michael. We'd given you up for lost."
"Lost? Lost souls, hot lost souls, burn forever."
"No doubt they do, Michael, no doubt they do," Whiteford replied gleefully.
He told none of the other two psychiatrists about what had happened. The following morning, he visited O'Day again, before seeing any of the other patients. The man was sitting in the same position, as if he hadn't moved. As soon as the doctor stepped into the room, his eyes snapped open.
"Ah, the headshrinker," O'Day said slowly, his voice totally accentless. "Come to look in my head."
"Come to have a chat, and an examination too." he brought out his stethoscope and without a word, placed it against the man's chest, then against the vein in his neck. The blood hissed pneumatically. Under the beat, Whiteford heard the faint gurgle of turbulence which spoke of valve damage. How serious, he could not say. He would have to call in a specialist. He let the stethoscope dangle at his neck and drew out the pressure meter, quickly rolling the sleeve around the man's skinny arm and pumping the bulb until it bit tight then listened again, the systolic reading was high. He lowered the pressure, waiting for the diastolic. It was way up, over the hundred. The heartbeat was raised too, and under the pressure of the sleeve, the wheeze of cardiovascular damage was unmistakeable. The man was hypertensive, heading maybe slowly, but surely, for a brain haemorrhage. The resident ground his teeth, wondering whether to call the general physician for a further examination.
"Not long, I think," O'Day said quietly in his ear, so unexpectedly that the doctor drew back.
"What?"
"Weak body. Not long." He turned to Whiteford. "And so much to know."
Whiteford made up his mind.
"I want to ask you some questions."
"Ask and it shall be yours. Seek and ye shall find. All manner of things."
He turned to the doctor and held his scrawny hand up.
"But later. I tire in this light. Come later and you shall know everything." He stared straight into the young man's eyes. Finally, and for some reason he could not fathom, the psychiatrist nodded. He undid the pressure sleeve, slung it and the stethoscope back in his back and left the room. He closed the door, and when it was locked, he reached and inexplicably rocked the light-switch to off.
At eight in the evening, when the consultant was out to dinner and the senior psychiatrist was on a night off, Whiteford went back up to C Wing and opened the heavy door to O'Day's room. He did not put the light on.
This time the man was sitting, as naked as before, on his bed, but instead of being hunched over listlessly, he was ramrod straight, his legs folded, hands on his knees.
"Ah, the seeker of knowledge. The digger into the soul."
"More the mind, actually," the doctor responded, taken aback.
"Mind, soul, self. There is nothing but the dark."
"You like the dark?"
"It is all," O'Day said in that strange flat voice. His white body was a thin ghost in the dim light.
"I want to ask you a few questions."
"And I will answer, but I need an answer too."
"Go on."
"Will you share with me?"
"I don't know what you mean."
"Will you join me?"
"Of course I will," the young man said, baffled. He was so keen to start the real file on O'Day that he would have said anything.
"But you must invite me in," the wizened man said. His voice sounded sly. "You must ask me to join you."
Whiteford shrugged. "Very well. I would be most grateful if you would join me. Please do."
O'Day lifted his hands from his knees and reached forward, taking the resident's hands in his own, a movement so smooth and so quick it was done before the other man had time to react. The hands were cold, bloodless. He drew the other forward.
A trickle of alarm ran through the doctor, then evaporated. There was no harm in this emaciated little man. Even if he decided to get violent, there was little he could achieve.
"Will you be one with me?" O'Day wheedled insistently.
"Of course, if that's what you want. But first I need...."
"Then join me," the white figure said. He leaned close to the young doctor, eyes like pits in the dark. They opened and gleamed yellow. Whiteford tried to draw back, tried to pull away, but the eyes had snagged him. They grew wider, whirling yellow orange, mesmeric circles in the dark. He stopped pulling away, found himself leaning forward, began to fall towards the sick yellow.
Something changed.
Hot hunger sparked in his mind. The smell of blood was in his nose and the taste of it in the back of his throat. A coldness welled inside him and he thought of Walter, the big nurse, lying on the floor of the pharmacy room, writhing in pain, his belly slit from groin to sternum, slathered in blood. He saw the consultant, flash Harry McLeish driving back from his dinner appointment, bloated and warm. Outside the room, through the frosted glass, the lightning pulsed in three sizzling stabs. He turned away from the light, feeling it sear his skin.
The scent of blood was in his nose and his mind was hot and sparking with the sudden urgent need.
In front of him, the skeletal man sat still. He reached for him, very gently, feeling the pulse of ailing life. He took the wrinkled head in his hands, savouring the touch, delighting in the surge of appetite.
With one sudden flex, he pushed the man backwards so fast that his head hit against the tiled wall with the sound of an apple trodden underfoot. The air filled with the damp metal scent, and something dripped in the dark.
At nine o'clock, Walter was coming out of the pharmacy, carrying a box of rubber gloves for the nightly shit-and-shovel run on D Wing when the light went out. He thought a bulb had blown, turned to put the box down on the nearest surface when something hit him from behind. He spun round and a cold slick ran across his belly.
"Wha..." he started to say, then he was lifted by a colossal power right off his feet. He felt himself forced backwards against the wall. There was a thud and a popping sound as a sharp protusion went straight through his neck. At that moment, he felt the slippery wetness tumble from his abdomen, hot softness against his legs, then a vast emptiness just under his ribs, just as the gloom in the room turned to darkness, to blackness and faded to nothing.
Dr Kirwan, the consultant who had succeeded to the job only three months before, came driving up from the security gatehouse in his new Jaguar. He spun the wheel, tyres crunching on the gravel, killed the lights and stepped out.
He never saw what hit him. A dark shape lunged from behind an azalea bush and snatched him off his feet. He felt himself tumble through the air. A sharp obstruction snagged at his foot, pulled free and he catapulted onwards. He landed on the high-voltage wires and died instantly, his body dancing in death like a puppet. Instantly the klaxons blared and one by one the outside lights came on. Overhead, thunder exploded as a jagged fork of lightning stabbed down at the chestnut trees and hailstones the size of marbles began to bounce off the gravel.