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handling medical issues doesn’t mean I have all the answers. Sometimes the unexplainable occurs. Sometimes it’s a delusion. Sometimes it happens. I’ve been here long enough to realize that there’s more to the world than has been catalogued in the medical texts. Now, what did Nicholas say?”

    “He said exactly what this woman I know said the previous weekend.”

    “Precisely?”

    “As precisely as I could recall it.”

    “You could recall it?”

    “Christ,” Layton said. He stood up. “I’d like a few days off.”
    55

    “Speak to your supervisor; as far as I’m concerned, take any amount of time you want off. Your job is secure.” Glover glanced over to his bookshelf. “You know, Conner, you’ve been here a few years. You know your ward inside and out. You’ve seen a lot. You’ve handled a lot. On the one hand, this could be your mind playing tricks on you.” Glover reached beneath his glasses and rubbed two fingers along the bridge of his nose. He shut his eyes for a moment. “On the other hand, sometimes there are things that come through the patients. I’m not even sure what I mean by that.” He took his glasses off.
    “Without my glasses, you are blurred.” He put them back on. “Now I see you clearly. Does that mean that when I see you blurred that you are in fact blurred and that my vision is perfect but your image is in flux?”

    “Sir?”

    “All I’m saying is, we can’t know everything. Assuming that Nicholas Holland said what you heard, perhaps he did know what this woman said to you. Perhaps he made it up and by some strange coincidence, for the first time in his own history, he said the exact words to disturb you. But I’ve learned in twenty eight years as a psychiatrist 56

    handling the more extreme cases of human insanity, that –“ and here Glover leaned forward, and Layton knew he would whisper, and he stepped forward to the edge of the desk, “we know nothing of the human mind. We are still in the Dark Ages of psychiatry. We are fumbling. Do you know what Nicholas said to me when he first entered this place?
    He told me that when the night came, the mechanisms changed, and that while I was eating supper the night before with my wife, he had already seen to it that the pie in the kitchen had fallen to the floor.”

    Layton, caught up for a moment, asked, “Did it?”

    Glover drew back, laughing. “No, of course not. And we hadn’t had any dessert. It was a complete fabrication. But how was I to know?”
    The laughter stopped. “I didn’t even mention it to my wife, I thought it was just a rambling delusion on his part. But a year or so later, I was at a dinner party at a colleague’s home, and some of the doctors were telling tales out of school. The usual – patients who sat up in the middle of operations, the near-malpractice suits that managed to get cleaned up in some hilarious way, the patients who hallucinated bizarre images –
    and so I had my glass of wine and told the story about Nicholas claiming 57

    to break into the house. I had them rolling mainly because I recalled all the details he added – how he sipped milk from the fridge, how he peed in the sink. And then I mentioned the pie claim, I said, ‘and he then told me that he dropped a pie on the kitchen floor just so I wouldn’t eat it,’
    And Layton? I saw it in my wife’s face, out of the corner of my eye, even then I saw that she had gone white as if something dreadful had come over her. She said nothing at dinner, but on the way home she told me that she had bought a pie at the A&P and had warmed it in the oven for a bit before letting it cool on the cutting board by the sink. ‘And,’ I asked, ‘did it fall on the floor?’ She told me it had not, but that someone had broken the crust, a man, she thought, because the handprint was big. Handprint? Yes, she said. It scared her because it was nearly perfect, almost as if someone had baked his hand into the crust. She threw it out,