gown. Naked, he stood at the sole window, trying to force his way through it.
The casement window featured two tall panes that were hinged to the upright jambs. The mechanized panes could be opened outward only with a detachable crank, which usually lay on the sill, so that it wouldn’t be protruding if the pleated shade needed to be lowered. The crank had been removed when the room was requisitioned for a psychiatric patient.
Skinned in shadow, Shacket was a surprisingly powerful figure, straining against the metal-framed panes, neither of which was wide enough to allow him passage. He needed to force both halves of the window open by stripping the gears in the mechanism, a feat that required greater strength than any man possessed. Yet abruptly the panes shuddered and, with a metallic snapping and shrieking, began to part where the flange of one overlaid the lip of the other. A bronze frame torqued and glass burst. Shacket let out an inhuman roar. A hinge popped and cracked, squealed like a wounded thing.
A nurse approached quickly along the corridor, and Thad Fenton warned her to stay back. He drew his pistol and tried the door, but of course it was locked. He keyed the lock, gripped the pistol in both hands, and entered the room with a shout, ordering the prisoner to drop and stay down.
Just then the left half of the window sprang outward, and the right half tore away from the jamb. Shacket flung the glassless metal frame at Fenton, who ducked to avoid being struck in the face.
When the deputy straightened up, bringing the pistol to bear once more, Shacket was crouched on the stool of the open window, no less terrifying than a raging ape, a hairless ape that glared with eyes as red as if his skull were filled with fire. The autumn wind screamed around the naked creature in his gargoyle pose and blew a winter chill through the room, flapping the torn rubber restraints on the bed and rattling the IV-drip rack. Because Shacket was more than thirty feet above a concrete walkway, it seemed that he had nowhere to go—and then he launched himself into the night as though he could fly.
Stunned, Fenton crossed the room to the window and leaned into the howling wind and peered down, certain that he’d see the crazed prisoner lying broken and unmoving in a widening pool of blood. But Shacket was neither immediately below, nor to the left, nor to the right. Incredibly, the man seemed to have survived the fall. Deputy Fenton shifted his gaze farther out from the building, past a planting bed of low shrubbery, toward a visitor’s parking lot that wasn’t in use at this hour, searching for a pale, naked figure making its way toward the street. Shacket wasn’t out there, either.
Whether Thad thought first of the Edgar Allan Poe story that had scared the bejesus out of him back in the day, when his teacher had read it to his ninth-grade English class, or whether instead the two words came first through the wind and reminded him of the story, he would never know. Words and memory—or memory and words—followed each other with but an instant between. The words were “See me,” issued like a serpent’s hiss, and the story was “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” about a violent orangutan trained to commit murder. Thad turned his head and, in defiance of all logic, he looked up. Like some spider to which vertical surfaces were no different from those horizontal, clinging impossibly to the simple limestone lintel and the decorative brickwork around it, Shacket was pressed to the wall, legs splayed behind him, gazing down, eyes bright and teeth bared, face-to-face with the deputy.
The fugitive let go of stone and brick, dropped on Fenton, and dragged him out of the window. Together they fell from the third floor, through a wind that buoyed them not, the pistol slipping from the deputy’s hand, Shacket crying out in triumph. Thad Fenton landed on his back, on concrete, and all the breath blew out of him. Pain tore along every neural pathway in his body, as if a thousand knives had been thrust through him. But the agony was brief, a cruel flare of torment and then no pain at all below his neck, only in his head, his face. Paralyzed.
Gasping with excitement, making eager wordless sounds, seeming no worse for the fall, Shacket crouched upon his prey.
The