7

Reno awakened at dawn and looked at Cutshaw’s cot. It was empty. He slipped on fatigues and walked down the aisle past the cots and footlockers and out of the dormitory. All the other inmates were sleeping.

Reno searched the mansion, looking for Cutshaw, then went outside and padded through the fog. He stopped and looked around the desolate courtyard once and bitterly muttered, “Fardels!” At last he saw him. The astronaut was lurking in the lower branches of a spruce where Groper customarily stood before Assembly. He was stirring a gallon of paint balanced between his knees. Reno scuttled up the tree trunk and parted a branch. “Captain Billy!” he exclaimed.

“For Christ’s sake, keep your voice down!” Cutshaw said guardedly. “What in the hell are you doing up here?”

“It’s Kane!” whispered Reno excitedly. His eyes were shining and wild.

He was hyperventilating.

“What about him?” Cutshaw retorted, picking a pine needle out of the paint.

“Billy, none of him is him!”

“Meaning what?”

“Kane is Gregory Peck in Spellbound, Billy! He comes to take charge of a nuthouse and it turns out the guy’s really crazy himself!”

Cutshaw exhaled a weary sigh. Even among the mansion inmates it was generally conceded that Reno entertained a number of obsessions more magnificent than most. Once he had reported that while strolling “jaunty-jolly” through the grounds on a moonless night, he had detected “hissing from above,” and looking up, spied Major Groper “crouched amidst the fronds of a palm tree,” deep in whispered conversation with a giant black-and-white owl. Nothing had shaken him from this story. When Cutshaw had reminded him that the estate was visibly barren of any variety of palm tree, Reno had eyed him pityingly and said in soft rebuttal, “Anyone with money can pull out a tree. And then certain parties could very easily fill in the hole.”

From that day forward, Reno was ignored. There was only one way to be rid of him, and that was to walk away.

Cutshaw looked down. It was a twenty-foot drop.

“Kane is Gregory Peck,” Reno said again. “Last night in the middle of the night, I wake up and there’s cookies in my teeth, raisins and crap; so I go to the clinic, see, for some dental floss, and who do I see on his arse like he’s in some kind of trance or something?” Reno began to imitate the scene, his hands moving in dazed but purposeful action: picking something up; throwing something down; picking something up; throwing something-

Cutshaw interrupted the performance. He pointed to the ground: “Down!

Get down! I want you to fall like an overripe mango!”

“There’s also another possibility, Billy. The drug-chest door was sitting wide open. He could have been bombed on something.”

“Scram!”

“Lots of doctors get hooked on drugs,” Reno argued reasonably. “Lots of psychiatrists are deeply disturbed. You know that. They’ve got the highest suicide rate of any profession there is, and that’s a fact, you can check that, Billy.”

Cutshaw paused at this, an eyebrow lifting cautiously. “When did this happen?” he asked.

“About three in the morning, I swear it. Listen, here’s the capper, the proof, here’s what he does! It was just like Gregory Peck in Spellbound, Billy. It was just like the movie, exactly! I go and get a fork. Understand? I get a fork and also a tablecloth from the mess! I put down the tablecloth in front of him, with the fork I made some ski tracks on it, and he fainted! Just like Gregory Peck in the movie!”

Cutshaw pointed to the ground again, gritting, “Get down! You hear me? Get—” He broke off suddenly and put a finger to his lips and a hand over Reno’s mouth. Then he looked below and tilted the gallon can of paint so that its contents spilled out smoothly.

From below, the voice of Groper rumbled upward: “You son of a bitch!”

“Can I talk now?” Reno asked.

“Yes, go ahead.” Cutshaw beamed, satisfied.

“I forgot to mention one thing: Kane had a cat with three heads on his lap. He might have been stroking it.”

“Get down!”

“You’re right, it was on top of his head.”

“Get down!”

Reno looked at Groper. “I think I’ll go up.”

Fell appeared for breakfast in the mess reserved for the staff, a room off the kitchen, with a fireplace. He sat down opposite Kane. There was no one else there yet.

Fell was cheery and refreshed and he held out his coffee cup to Kane, who had the pot in his hand.

“I heard you were looking for me,” said Fell.

“That’s right; where were you?”

“Just walking around.”

“In the rain?”

“Was it raining?”

“Captain Fairbanks was in need of sedation last night. Please make up a duplicate key to the drug chest. I had to break into it.”