Nightjack Read Online Free PDF

and pens. For years he’d been composing one long letter to his mother, who’d died when he was three. His father had drank himself to death when Hayden was eight. There were no family members to take him in. He was misdiagnosed with an IQ of 62, considered a moron, became a ward of the state, and placed in a home with the mongoloids and mentally challenged.
    The day he turned eighteen he walked into the office of the executive director of the institution where he was living, found the IQ test in the filing cabinet, answered the questions on the spot, and even graded himself. One hundred thirty-five. Pretty frickin’ good. He told the director that he wasn’t stupid, he just had more important things to worry about when he was a kid.
    The executive director decided that pretending to be a simpleton in order to live with the mentally disabled proved he was nuts, and immediately shipped Hayden off to Garden Falls. He’d been there nearly five years when Pace met him.
    The compulsive letter-writing was a symptom of hypergraphia , the obsessive need to write extensive journal entries or missives. Hayden always left the ongoing letter out in the open so somebody, if not his mother, might read it. Pace never did. After Hayden filled up one pad he destroyed it and proceeded to the next.
    Pace sat in the leather chair but couldn’t get comfortable. He drew his bottles of medication out of his pockets and looked at them.
    Dr. Brandt said, “Do you want to take your meds, Will?”
    “I guess you’re not too worried about me becoming psychologically dependent on drugs.”
    “They help you.”
    “They weaken him, you mean,” Pia said.
    “Are you prepared for what might happen if he goes off them?”
    “No, but we have no choice. I thought it was already decided.”
    “You know he needs them.”
    Hayden let out a snicker, part distilled cynicism, part little boy fear. “Not as much as we need him.”
    So, that’s the way it was going to be.
    Faust circled the small room, once, twice. He brought a hand to the emptiness where a mouth might be, stroking a bottom lip that wasn’t there. “Let him decide.”
    They all stared at Pace. Terrific. He couldn’t figure out if the meds would let him to see their faces or blank them out totally—body, voice, and memory. He thought of Ernie slapping him. He thought of Brutus punching him. He thought of Jane, burning, reaching out. Her ghost telling him not to die. He thought of the thing inside him that even now was snickering, thinking about blood and kidney pie made with human kidneys.
    It was crazy allowing a crazy person to decide whether he should take his pills or not. He wasn’t dealing with stable people.
    Pace walked to the window and looked out. The street was full of activity. Men seated on the steps of the building, drinking beer, passing a joint back and forth. The meth-heads lay out across the sidewalk. A Chinese delivery boy riding by on a bicycle. Two whores laughing, two others arguing. Cars rolled past slowly. Someone shouting in Spanish.
    Remember Cassandra and Kaltzas and Pythos.
    The dead will follow.
    He took out his pills. You had to give it to science, packing so much dread and possibility into something so small. 200 mgs of magic that slapped foam across your searing brain.
    “What do these damn things do?” he asked.
    “They help control your dissociative identity disorder.”
    It certainly sounded like serious fun. Something inside of him was being willfully obtuse, making him ignorant. It didn’t want him to remember. “What the hell is that?”
    “A condition in which two or more distinctive identities or personality states alternate in controlling your consciousness and behavior.”
    “Oh. Multiple personality. Yeah.”
    “That’s an outdated term. MPD has been re-designated DID. Dissociative Identity Disorder. Many doctors think it may be a variation of PTSD. Post traumatic Stress Disorder. There are other causes and conditions as well.