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“So that means…” I didn’t get to finish before she was doing it for me,
“He’s your patient.” She said it with a cheeky grin, as if I was being set up on a blind date and she was completely ignoring the fact he was a murderer who we had just watched break bones like it was nothing. Of course, she also had absolutely no idea what this meant for me. And it dawned on me right about then that it was exactly what my ghost had planned for.
“And that means you’re the one sitting outside that door because you know Karen will have already put you down for it, seeing as he’s your patient. I would have offered, but she’d only say no, and honestly, you’re the only one on this unit he’ll even look at and behave for anyway.”
I had no answer to that.
The seclusion suite was on the lower corridor, past the old laundry, and you didn’t go down there for any reason other than a patient who could no longer be kept safely on the ward. Because there was nothing else on that corridor except two storerooms and a fire door nobody uses.
But more importantly, it was also where the tunnel door was.
That old service door at the end of the corridor with the rusted padlock on it. The one that led down under the gardens and out beyond the fence line. I had made a point of going down there in my first week to look at it properly. It was under the pretense that I needed extra bedding but once down there I also stood in front of that padlock for a good deal longer than fetching linen required.
Which meant that I knew exactly what was down that corridor.
As for the room my patient was currently sitting in, it was nothing like what people imagine. Nothing like the movies, where the walls were padded. Instead, they were bare, smooth and washable, painted in a pale institutional gray. There was a low mattress on a raised plinth, a ligature-safe light behind a panel in the ceiling, and a heavy steel door. The type with a hatch in it at chest height and a viewing panel above that with a shutter on my side.
I sighed at the sight of the chair that sat in the corridor outside the door waiting for me. There was also a small table next to it ready for my chart as I would need to make continuous observation of my patient. That meant hours sitting in one place without leaving it and every fifteen minutes I would be expected to write down the time and what he was doing. Then I would sign it, and somebody would come and relieve me at the end of my allocated stretch.
I remember Karen, my supervisor, saying something about how he had gone down without any trouble at all and how she had never seen anything like it. Of course, I didn’t have a response to this, at least not one I would trust to say out loud anyway.
My heart started to pound the second I saw that chair waiting for me, because of who was on the other side of the door. But before I could sit down, that’s when I heard him move, as if he had been waiting for me. Just the small shift of something very large changing position on the other side of that steel door and close enough that I felt it more than I heard it. And I knew he was right there.
Against the door.
Waiting.
I should have written it down and left it alone. That is the entire job, and I knew it, yet I reached up and slid the shutter back anyway.
However, my heart sank and panic set in when…
The room was empty.
That was what I saw. Nothing on the mattress and nobody in the space I could see. I stood there with my hand still on that shutter and felt my stomach drop, because for one whole second I thought they had moved him. Or worse… He had escaped.
Then I remembered the blind spot. Every one of us gets told about it in the first week. There was a strip of floor directly under that panel you couldn’t see from the corridor at any angle. Which meant that if a patient wanted to be out of sight in there, that was exactly where they went.
So, I leaned in closer, because that was the job.
Which was when his voice came out of the wall beside me. Not through the panel. Not from anywhere I was looking. But from about a foot above my own head and two inches of steel away. Close enough that I should have felt the breath of it on my face but didn’t, and somehow that made it more frightening.
“There she is,” he rumbled softly and I went backward so fast that I caught the chair with my heel and nearly went over it.
Then he lowered his face to the hatch and looked down at me through the glass with the look of a man whose plan had gone exactly the way he knew it would.
I knew this for certain when he said…
“There’s my little bird.”
32
TWO AND A HALF SECONDS
THE GHOST
There is a particular sound a finger makes when it goes past where it was made to go.
It is not much of a sound. Most people expect a crack and there is never one, only a small dry give, and then the noise the man himself makes about half a second later. Which is considerably louder and a great deal less interesting.
