The Ninth Configuration Read Free

humiliated.
    Kane. There was something odd about him, thought Groper. He could not exactly put his finger on it. It was something out of place; yet familiar.
    It made him uneasy.
     

 

     
     

    3
     
     
    Fell’s clinic reeked of defiance. On the walls, in heavy crayon, bold red arrows pointed to jars containing “Aspirin,” “Band-Aids,” “Dental Floss” and “Lemon Drops.” Another pointed out a “Suggestion Box”; and above them all, a master inscription, crayoned in green, proclaimed: “self-service.”
    Fell was standing by a skeleton that was hanging next to his desk. He tipped a bottle of Scotch that he had set in the base of the skull so that its contents poured through a space where some teeth were missing and into the coffee mug he was holding underneath the mouth of the bottle. “Don’t blame me,” he muttered. “I told them not to operate.” He sipped at the Scotch and coffee and grimaced; then he picked up a stack of folders from his desk and stepped out into the great main hall of the mansion.
    Like the exterior, the hall was a mixture of Tudor and Gothic, massive and dense, with stone-block walls and a high cathedral ceiling crisscrossed by beams. Circling the hall were a number of rooms now used as the commanding officer’s office, the adjutant’s office, the clinic, a utility room and a dormitory for the inmates.
    Plastered against one wall of the enormous area was a blowup of a poster for the motion picture Dracula; the copy read: “Bloody Terror of Transylvania.” At the opposite end, a winding staircase led upstairs to a second floor, where the staff was billeted. The hub of the main hall below was used as a therapy room for the inmates. It was cluttered with lounge chairs, chess sets, Ping-Pong tables, stereo, a motion picture screen and projectors; coffee and soft-drink and cigarette machines; writing tables and magazines; and canvases, set on easels, vivid with paintings by the inmates. No painting was quite completed. Each was a tale of horror abruptly halted in mid-narration. One showed an index finger that pointed straight up and was pierced by a needle, dripping blood. Another depicted a tree, its terminal branches metamorphosed into the coils of a boa constrictor crushing the head of a male infant; its creator had captioned it “Mother Love.” Still others were infinitely busy and chaotically detailed, yet executed with fine-drawn precision so that in a single painting one could identify a jackhammer, part of an arm and an onrushing train, the wheels of a lathe, a baleful eye, a Negro Christ, a bloody ax, a bullet in flight and a creature half-lizard, half-man. One painting depicted a city in flames, erupting clouds of thick black smoke, while above the scene, high, almost microscopic in size, hung a silvery bomber pierced by a spear; on the fuselage, in red, were the tiny letters ME.
    Fell glanced around the hall. It was strangely quiet and deserted. He walked to Kane’s office, opened the door and stepped inside.
    Kane was unpacking some books from a large valise on his desk. His back was to Fell, but as the door slid open silently, he turned with a graceful swiftness.
    “How’re you doing?” asked Fell. He closed the door behind him.
    “Do you plan to get dressed?” Kane asked him. Fell was still trouser-less.
    “How the hell can I get dressed when Lieutenant Fromme won’t surrender my pants?” he answered. “You don’t want me to rip them off!”
    “No, we mustn’t be repressive,” said Kane.
    “We mustn’t wrinkle the pants!”
    “Of course.” Kane’s voice was gentle, as though everything living were his patient. He took more books from the suitcase on the teakwood desk and moved toward some bookshelves in a wall on which an American flag now rested at a diagonal where once hung a medieval lance. The room had been a den. It was heavily paneled in a rich dark oak, and stuffed animal trophies brooded on high. Only the flag announced a present time;