Death Rounds by Peter Clement Page A

jacket.
    “Oh boy,” he uttered, moving back from me. “He’s really confused. I better get my staff man.” He turned and walked out of the curtained cubicle I was lying in. From the sounds around us— beeping monitors, shouted orders, the spring and click noise of an ambulance stretcher having its legs extended—I knew they’d gotten me to ER.
    “I’m not confused!” I protested to Janet. “What’s he talking about?”
    She gave me a smile as phony as Bre-X. “Now just relax. Earl,” she said, patting my hands and looking as if she were about to cry.
    I took her hands in mine.” I’m all right, Janet,” I told her emphatically, sitting back up. My head hinted otherwise, but I ignored the pain.
    “Wait a minute,” she protested, pushing me back onto my pillow. I was wearing a neck collar, so my head and trunk flopped down in tandem, like a wooden doll’s.
    “Ouch.” I winced, the change in position setting my head throbbing again.
    “You’re not to move. Earl,” she cautioned, her tone of voice intense and full of concern.
    “What happened” I asked again.
    When the lights had gone out, Janet told me, she had come out of the archives department and felt her way back to the elevator. The room actually was in the opposite end of the subbasement; I’d taken the wrong direction to begin with, as I’d belatedly realized. She’d been rumbling her way along in me dark like I had, but at a lot slower and safer pace. When she’d heard a thud in the dark ahead of her she’d been frightened but had continued to approach the elevator door, albeit more slowly. She’d become terrified when she tripped over my body. She had only realized it was me after she’d gathered her wits and pressed the elevator button. When the door opened, a shaft of light had fallen across my face. She’d checked my vitals, then gotten help, and everyone, including Janet, had assumed I’d tripped in the dark and knocked myself out.
    When she finished speaking, I lay there, feeling her fingers stroke my head, thinking. Should I tell her what had really happened? It would scare her terribly, as if she wasn’t worried enough as it was. “What did they tell you was the matter with the lights?” I asked instead.
    “The maintenance people said a circuit breaker had closed down for some reason,” she answered, clearly puzzled by my question. “When I ran for help to get you up here, one of them went to check the panel. He turned the lights back on, no problem.”
    “Was that panel in the abandoned passageway leading under the old psychiatric hospital?”
    “I think that’s what he said. I know he went up that way, but frankly, I was too worried about you to pay much attention to anything else. Why?”
    “And the lights stayed on? They didn’t short out again?” A faulty breaker would likely blow a second time, but a single timely outage would suggest a hand at the switch.
    “No, they stayed on,” she said, once more sounding a bit alarmed and looking over her shoulder. “Where’s the damn staff man?” I heard her mutter.
    I had to tell her. She had to know for her own safety.
    “Janet, there’s a point to what I’m asking. It’s not brain damage. I’ve got one more question. Are there other corridors leading back to the elevator from the asylum end of the subbasement besides the one we were in?”
    “Earl, what are you going on about?”
    “Janet, I’m okay,” I insisted, grabbing her arm, and then I explained what had happened.
    When I finished, she didn’t say anything for a few minutes.
    Tears welled up in her eyes. Her lips quivered a few times. “Are you sure it wasn’t an accident? Maybe you tripped, and the force of the fall only made you think you were pushed.”
    I hadn’t imagined the hands on my back and neck, I thought, but said nothing.
    “And are you sure it was a person you heard when the lights went out,” she asked, “not a rat that came on down the corridor in the dark? I hear there