Bed of Nails Read Free Page B

out in his hand. Peek through the door, Jock. What’s Yorick doing?”
    The door to room A2-5 was blue. Though the wing was sealed, the doors in this ward were unlocked. FPH was a hospital, not an asylum, so patients were free to leave their rooms at will (under the watchful eyes of the nurses stationed at one end of the hall) to go to the communal toilets, the kitchen and dining room, the TV room, the smoking room, and the quiet room for reading. Rounds were made every half-hour to ensure all was well, the procedure being that a nurse would stroll the lengths of both wards to take a surreptitious peek through the judas window in each patient’s door.
    “Christ,” said Jock, peeking in. “Is that skull real?”
    “The original was. That’s why Yorick’s here.”
    The Aussie bent closer for a better look through the window.
    “Yorick was a local actor who couldn’t land the role of Hamlet. In Shakespeare’s play, Hamlet holds out the skull of the jester who used to entertain the royal court. The prop ignites the prince’s thoughts on death and mortality. Yorick convinced himself that a genuine skull would help him master the role, so he rushed to the apartment next door and decapitated his neighbor. He cooked the head in a pot on the stove to boil away the flesh. When police arrived to investigate a complaint about the smell, they found Yorick rehearsing the graveyard scene. Addressing the dripping skull of his headless neighbor, he was delivering the ‘Alas, poor Yorick’ lines.”
    “And this skull?” Jock asked.
    “Plastic,” Rudi replied. “We purchased it at a Halloween store. It keeps Yorick happy.”
    Five inches wide by three feet tall, the window was a vertical slit through the door. Positioned off-center, near the handle, it gave Jock a view of the entire room except for the corner by the hinges. The lights were out and moonbeams slanted in through the opposite window. A thin, naked man stood silhouetted against the lunar glow. He held the plastic skull out at arm’s length in one hand so that the skeletal features of the prop faced him. As the thundering thespian recited Hamlet’s speech, his other hand was engaged in “self-abuse.”
    “How abhorred my imagination is!” Yorick hammed with gusto. “My gorge rises at it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft.”
    Crushing the lipless teeth of the skull against his own slobbering mouth, the patient in A2-5 engaged in passionate French kissing with the prop. The overpowering ecstasy of mastering the bard prompted Yorick to explode in an anticlimactic climax.
    “He shoots, he scores,” Jock reported.
    Sports held no interest for the older nurse. Rudi’s self-image was that of a sensitive, artistic, thinking man.
    “I can’t make out the writing on the wall,” Jock said.
    “That’s where Yorick scrawled his last will and testament.”
    “He’s got stuff to leave?”
    “His skull,” Rudi explained.
    “The plastic prop?”
    “No, Jock. The real skull inside his head. He bequeathed it to the playhouse to use in performances after his death. In the end, Yorick will appear onstage in Hamlet. ”
    “Humph,” Jock grunted. “He’s really out of his head. I’ll bet he’s the most psychotic patient in Ash 2.”
    “No,” said Rudi. “That would be the Ripper.”

     
    While the Goth was being led from Central Control in the Birch Unit out front through a series of high-tech security doors to an interview room in Ashworth House, Rudi and Jock rounded the V-angle in Ash 2 to check the other open ward.
    “Phew!” Jock recoiled. “What’s that stink?”
    “The Mud Man,” Rudi said, nodding toward room A2-12.
    “The Madman? You call him that?”
    “The Mud Man,” Rudi repeated, taking more care with his diction.
    Jock peeked through the window.
    “Oh, I see,” he said.
    “We’ll clean him up later. Once he’s through re-sculpting his face with his evening shit.”
    The way Rudi saw it, this was outer