Lucidity

Chapter 15 - No Safe Haven

“Did you hear the Beast last night?”

“Yeah, what sent him off?”

“Who knows? The guy’s freaky-deaky. Makes the rest of us look down right sane.”

“He was yelling for someone named Grace. There’s no Grace here, is there?”

“You said it, brother. Won’t find no grace anywhere near this joint.”

Kat shuffled behind the grownups heading into the community room, silent, listening to their gossip. Group was the one time the freaks felt free to speak, the one time they could revert to their previous, pre-mortem, states of being.

Every morning, all the denizens of the Freak Show, except for the Beast, joined together in the community room, exchanging insights, positive reinforcement and accolades for the mandatory ten minutes until Nurse Cray was satisfied and left them to their own devices. There was a video camera in the community room, but no audio monitoring, so first amendment rights were also celebrated here.

“He’s a danger to us all,” Mr. Atomic said, thumping his fist on the pool table to emphasize his words. “I say we do something about it before someone gets hurt.”

“He’s no danger to us,” The Human Cannonball retorted, true to form. A squat, bullet-headed man, the only consistency about him was his ability to contradict everything and anything anyone one else said. “Only to this Grace person.”

“What’re you saying?” Minny Mouse squeaked. A tall, solidly built black teenager who would have intimidated anyone with his looks and glowering tattoos, he had the high-pitched voice of a helium fiend. Or in his case, a middle-class kid not much older than Kat who’d lost his voice to a showdown with crystal meth. “Y’all think we should find this Grace, give her to him or sumthin?”

That attracted the women’s attention. A much less social and more narcissistic lot than the Y-chromosome blessed among them, the two women tended to gravitate to the perimeter of the room, brooding on their own ills, each secretly wishing for the spotlight.

“Is it true?” Angie the Skeleton asked. “Is she here?” She acted as if she’d missed an opportunity to meet her favorite anorexic poster girl movie star. “Where?”

“She’s his lost love, you know,” Godiva, the diabetic, a statuesque blonde with waist-length hair and a penchant for forcing her blood sugar to plummet, said in a dreamy voice. “And he’s still looking for her. It’s so romantic. Pining away for the woman you love.”

“I heard he killed her,” the Cannonball said with a leer at Godiva. “Then he chopped her up and ate her to destroy the evidence.” His own admission ticket to the Show had been punched by a psychiatrist who was unable to banish his “obsessive” thoughts. The way everyone shut up around Kat when they talked about him behind his back, she figured his obsessions must have something to do with sex and killing people.

But the Cannonball was harmless, Kat knew. Even before he began Lucidine therapy, he’d showed himself to be all bluster and bluff, cowering whenever anyone took a stand against him.

“So, she’s dead?” Angie sighed. “That’s so sad. It’d be nice for someone to have a happy-ever-after.”

“With the Beast?” Mr. Atomic put in. “Are you kidding? No happy endings for anyone with that maniac running loose.”

“But he’s not, is he?” Kat clamped her hand over her mouth as the adults all swiveled to stare at her. Stupid. The trick was to sit quietly in the corner—she of all people knew that. “I mean,” she faltered, determined to have her question answered now that she’d blown her cover anyway, “he’s locked up, isn’t he?”