Chapter Three

ON the Monday following Peregrine's wedding, Adam breakfasted early before driving off to the Royal Edinburgh Hospital, where he ranked as a senior psychiatric consultant. Checking at his office before his first appointment of the day, he found a message on his desk from one of the secretaries, informing him of a telephone call from Noel McLeod half an hour before.

The Inspector says not an emergency, the secretary had written, but would be grateful if you could ring him back at your earliest convenience.

Adam frowned slightly, wondering what was afoot, but a glance at his pocket watch confirmed that he had only a few minutes before he was due to see his first patient. The relevant case file was lying on his desktop. Since he wanted to review his notes from the last session, he decided to take McLeod at his word and leave off returning the call until after this morning's session.

He skimmed the top few pages from the file, then headed for the treatment room, while memory supplied the background details of the case. The patient, a young man named Colin Balfour, was suffering from an acute form of obsessive behavior. Morbidly repelled by dirt, he would spend hours washing his hands, sometimes scrubbing until his skin was rubbed raw. In the crisis that had led to his hospitalization, he had taken Jye to his hands; fortunateJy, a neighbor had heard his screams and gotten help. The hands would heal with little scarring, but the psychic scarring that had prompted the attempted mutilation would require more delicate treatment.

It was not a question of finding the underlying cause. That had become clear very early on in their work together. As a child of about seven or eight, Balfour had been sexually abused by an older cousin, who had terrorized him into keeping silent with threats of reprisals. Now, some fifteen years later, Balfour was desperately trying to wash away the psychic residue of shame, confusion, and misplaced guilt.

"Just thinking about it makes me feel unclean," he had told Adam, the day he finally had opened up about this shadow from his past. "I feel grimy right down to the marrow of my bones. 1 keep asking myself how I could ever have let myself be used that way, if some part of me didn't want it to happen. I mean, I let it go on and never told anyone. So I was as guilty as my cousin, wasn't I?"

The questions Balfour had posed for himself were ones Adam had encountered elsewhere in similar cases. For this young man, as for many other victims of abuse, the traumatizing effects of the experience itself had been exacerbated by anger and a soul-sickening conviction that somehow he must have been at least partly to blame for what had happened to him. Adam had helped him work through much of the rage in their earlier sessions; today, he hoped to begin working on the misplaced guilt.

That entailed getting at Balfour's memory of the traumatic episodes, which would have been distorted by time and his growing obsession. Fortunately, hypnosis offered one effective means by which the patient himself could bring the important details of the past into focus, whilst deriving needful comfort and support from the companion-presence of his therapist. Adam had explored the possibility of hypnotic regression at their last therapy session, and Balfour had agreed, though without much enthusiasm.

As soon as Adam entered the therapy room, however, he could see that his patient would be needing some renewed encouragement. Balfour was slumped despondently in his chair, bandaged hands resting listlessly in the lap of his tan hospital-issue dressing gown. Adam greeted him cordially, without alluding to the other man's moody behavior. Moving round to the chair on the opposite side of the desk, he made a relaxed show of sitting down and consulting his notes.

"Well, it seems we've got plenty of work to do today," he observed genially. "Are you still willing to try that experiment we spoke of last time?''

Balfour seemed to hunch down even further between his shoulder blades, like a turtle retreating into its shell.

"I suppose so," he mumbled. "I guess it couldn't hurt." His expression was morose, his manner withdrawn.

"Oh, it certainly won't hurt," Adam said with a fleeting smile. ' 'On the contrary, I have high hopes that it might very well be of some help. Have you any questions you want to ask me before we begin?"

Balfour gave a shrug, not meeting Adam's eyes. "I guess not," he said in a flat voice. "If you want to play Svengali, it's up to you."

"We'll proceed as planned, then," Adam said calmly, coming around to sit on the front edge of his desk. "Why don't you put your feet up and make yourself comfortable? But if you're expecting me to don a long black cloak and make mystic passes in the air before your eyes, I'm afraid you're going to be in for a disappointment. Clinical hypnotherapists are a notoriously unimaginative bunch when it comes to stage properties."

Balfour gave him an odd, faintly skittish look, but did as he was told.

"Just don't touch me; I don't like to be touched," he murmured.

"I know that, and I know why," Adam said. "So I'll just ask you to lay your head back and have a look at that spot on the ceiling, just above your head. Do you see it?"

"Yes."

"Good. I'd like you to fix your gaze on that spot and just let yourself listen to the sound of my voice. The first part of this exercise has to do with distracting your conscious mind, so that your unconscious can come to the fore - because your unconscious is very clever and very observant, and if we can establish communication with your unconscious, it can give us valuable information that will help your understanding of what's been bothering you."

Balfour's gaze had flicked only reluctantly to the spot, but as the low voice droned on, he began visibly to relax.

"That's right," Adam murmured. "Let your conscious attention stay focused on that spot, while your body relaxes and another part of your mind just begins drifting with the sound of my voice. If your eyes get tired after a while, you can close them. There's really nothing to see with your eyes anyway, because we're far more interested in seeing what your unconscious memory might show you, as you relax more and more, drifting, floating… very comfortable and relaxed…."

Speaking softly and calmly as a father to a frightened child, Adam soon was able to lull the younger man into a state of relaxation bordering on sleep, and from there to guide him toward those deeper levels of awareness which could open up the long-locked doors to the past.

Balfour proved a ready subject, and the next half hour yielded far more fruitful results than Adam had dared to hope. When he brought his patient back to full consciousness, it was immediately apparent that Balfour had achieved some fresh insights into his situation, both past and present. After brief discussion, Adam left him with instructions to reflect on what he had learned until their next session, later in the week. But when he went back to his office to telephone McLeod, it was not McLeod who answered, but his assistant, Sergeant Donald Cochrane.

"Sorry, Sir Adam, but the inspector's gone off to the Royal Infirmary," Cochrane said. "I was to tell you that he'd appreciate it very much if you could arrange to meet him there, the sooner the better. Are you ringing from home?"

"No, from Jordanburn," Adam said, giving the psychiatric facility the name by which it was known locally. "Did the inspector happen to mention what this is all about?''

"Aye." Cochrane's voice sounded a little pinched. "He did tell you, didn't he, about that stretch of road they're starting to call Carnage Corridor?"

"Yes."

"Well, it's claimed another victim, maybe two. A man was killed there earlier this morning, and another's undergoing emergency surgery. The inspector's standing by, in case he regains consciousness, but it doesn't look good."

"I see."

"Here's the part you're going to love," Cochrane went on. "The man who's in surgery was still conscious when the police arrived. He claimed he'd veered off the road to avoid hitting a man and a pregnant woman - kept asking, 'Did I hit them? Did I hit them?"

"The problem is, none of the witnesses the police interviewed can recall seeing any pedestrians on the scene. Given the fact that the crash occurred in broad daylight, you'd've thought somebody would have seen the couple in question, but so far nobody's come forward with any descriptions. If I were a superstitious man, I'd be starting to wonder if maybe the driver of the crashed car might have seen a ghost."

As Master of the Hunting Lodge, Adam had known far stranger things to happen, but he forebore from saying so aloud. Though Donald Cochrane had received some peripheral esoteric instruction through his training as a Freemason, and McLeod had pegged him as a potential future recruit for the Hunting Lodge, his direct experience with the supernatural thus far had been solely in a support capacity. Adam himself was rapidly becoming convinced that there was more involved in the present case than malignant coincidence, but if things were about to shift into a more overt brush with the unknown, best to keep Cochrane at arm's length until they knew more.

"Well, it's reassuring to know that you aren't a superstitious man, Donald," he allowed. "I shouldn't think we'll find a ghost involved, but the situation does seem to go beyond mere coincidence. Do you happen to know the name of the surviving victim?"

"Aye, the inspector left it right here on his desk pad," Cochrane said. "The name's Malcolm Stuart Grant, with an address in Lanark. That's all I've got, though."

"That's enough for now," Adam replied, jotting the name on a notepad. "I just need to know who to ask for when I get to the Royal Infirmary."

"You'll go, then."

"Aye. Whatever the cause of these accidents, the effects would seem to be getting out of hand. I'll see what I can do to reshuffle my appointments for the rest of the morning. In the meantime, if Inspector McLeod should happen to check in, tell him I've received his message and will rendezvous with him at the hospital as soon as possible."

Uncertain how long he might find himself detained once he and McLeod met up, Adam rescheduled his two remaining patients for appointments the next day and postponed his usual morning rounds for later on in the afternoon, after which he signed out and headed for the car park.

He decided to risk the traffic on Morningside Road, and was relieved to find the route relatively uncluttered. Carrying on north and east along Bruntsfield Place, he bore right at the Toll Crossing onto Lauriston Place, whence a string of signs pointed the way toward the casualty department of Edinburgh's Royal Infirmary. He parked the Range Rover in a physicians' car park and headed toward the entrance.

It was not a hospital he normally frequented in his psychiatric practice, but its casualty department was reputed to be one of the two best in Scotland; Glasgow had the other. It was here that injured police officers and firefighters were most apt to be brought; he had watched with McLeod through several lonely nights when men's lives hung in the balance. He had been here once as a casualty himself - and Dr. Ximena Lockhart had been the on-call surgeon who had patched him up.

Shaking off the memory, he eased aside to let an ambulance crew wheel an empty gurney out of the building, then slipped inside and headed for the registrar's desk. He was reaching for his credentials when a breezy voice hailed him from farther along the corridor.

"Dr. Sinclair?"

Turning, he saw the familiar white-uniformed figure of Reggie Sykes, the orderly Ximena had been training in emergency-room procedures. Sykes's coffee-colored face split in a broad grin as he approached.

"I thought that was you, sir!" he exclaimed, the musical lilt in his voice proclaiming his Jamaican origins. "It's been a long time. Say, what you hear from that pretty lady of yours? How's her daddy gettin' on?"

The subject was one Adam would have preferred to avoid, but he knew Sykes had doted on the attractive American "Dr. X."

"I gather he's holding his own," he replied, not without some private reservations. "The last time we spoke on the phone, she described his condition as 'stable."

He hoped that Sykes would interpret the term optimistically, but the orderly pulled a grimace.

"Only stable, huh? With what he's got, that's not so good."

Adam shrugged. Ximena had told him that her father was comfortable enough, if rarely lucid, because of the painkillers they gave him, but it was only a matter of time. In fact, Ximena and her father between them had already accepted that his chances for recovery were virtually nonexistent. Her mother and brothers, however, were still determined to cling to hope, however faint and misplaced. It was as much for their sake as for anyone else's that Ximena was committed to remaining at her father's bedside.

"I could certainly wish the prognosis were better," Adam agreed. "Unfortunately, the situation is out of both our hands."

Sykes gave a sympathetic shake of his head. "Well, the next time you talk to her, you tell her from me that she ought to come back here soon, okay? Things haven't been the same since she left."

"I can attest to that," Adam said with a faint smile. "And I'll certainly pass the word along."

"Thank you, Doc," Sykes said, with another of his fleeting grins. "There aren't many like Dr. X. around. Come to think of it," he added, cocking an eye at Adam, "you haven't said what brings you here this morning. You sure didn't come all the way cross town just to see if we've had the walls repainted since your last visit."

"True enough. Actually, I'm looking for a patient by the name of Malcolm Grant. He would have been brought in several hours ago - car crash."

"Another statistic for Carnage Corridor," Skyes said with a grimace. "We get most of 'em. He's up in surgery. Don't know if it's going to help him much, though - not the state he was in when he arrived. I helped get him over to X-ray, and I don't know when I last saw anybody that bad who could still breathe at all. They brought his buddy in dead."

"Yes, I'd heard there was at least one fatality."

Sykes gave a darkling shake of his head. "I tell you, Dr. Sinclair, it's spooky business. You may not believe it, but this must be the fifth or sixth big crash we've had along that stretch of road since New Year's, all with fatalities. If I had any reason to drive to Lanark just now, man, I'd damn sure go round about by way of Livingston, just to be on the safe side."

He paused for an exaggerated shiver, then directed a curious look in Adam's direction. "But, what's your interest in this case, sir, if you don't mind my asking? Last I heard, psychiatrists don't normally do casualty work."

"You just said it yourself," Adam replied. "That bit of road has claimed far more than its share of casualties, and all in a very short time. The police are doing their best to see if they can come up with a pattern, even to the extent of calling in a psychiatrist - me - to see if anything in the victims' psychiatric profiles might point to an underlying cause. To that end, I'm supposed to be meeting one of their special investigators, a Detective Chief Inspector McLeod. Do you know him?"

Sykes pursed his lips. "Is this Inspector McLeod a big fellow with grizzled hair and glasses and a military-looking moustache?''

"That sounds like him."

"Then you'll probably find him up in the lounge next to the operating theatres. If he isn't there, I don't expect he's gone far."

"If he has, I can always have him paged," Adam said. "Thank you, Mr. Sykes, you've been a great help. The next time I talk to Dr. Lockhart, I'll be sure to let her know you were asking about her."

He lost no time getting up to the surgical wing. Here he learned that Malcolm Grant was out of surgery and had been transferred to Recovery, just down the hall. He found McLeod propping up the wall to the left of the nurses' station, moodily sipping tea from a hospital-issue mug. Through the round porthole windows in the double doors opposite, Adam could catch just a glimpse of bustling medical activity as he approached.

"Is he still with us?" Adam asked, as the inspector pulled himself erect and shelved the mug on the desk with an air of mingled relief and misgivings.

"Aye, but I don't know how long that will continue to be the case. Thanks for coming. Sorry about dragging you out earlier than we'd planned, but I hadn't reckoned on this. And it may be wasted effort. But if he does regain consciousness, I didn't want to miss it - and you might pick up something I'd overlook."

"You don't sound optimistic."

"I don't think there's much cause to be optimistic. Have a look. He's pretty smashed up."

As he spoke, McLeod moved to one of the portholes, and Adam joined him at the other. Four of the six bays in Recovery were occupied, the respective patients linked up to an assortment of monitors and life support units. A man and a woman togged out in green surgical scrubs were standing at the foot of the bed nearest the door, where lay a supine figure cocooned in bandages and surrounded by the metal frames of traction apparatus. The woman was scribbling orders on the patient's chart as the man looked on.

"That's our man," McLeod murmured, pointing the way with a jerk of his chin. "He's only just come out of surgery. I was waiting until they'd finished getting him settled before pressing for a prognosis, but any questions on that account are probably better coming from you, anyway."

As two uniformed nurses busied themselves around the patient, the female surgeon concluded her notes with a brisk flourish and presented them to her male colleague, pausing long enough to answer a brief inquiry from one of the nurses before making for the exit. Adam and McLeod stepped back from the doors as she came through, and she nodded to McLeod and pulled off her surgical cap to ruffle a hand through short, curly dark hair.

"Will I get to talk to him?" McLeod asked.

She glanced back at the doors swinging closed behind her and shrugged. "I wouldn't say the chances are very good - certainly not right away. We're waiting to see what will result from his head injury; we may have to go in again. Meanwhile, he's got a definite concussion, some cracked ribs, two broken legs, he's probably lost the sight in one eye, and he was bleeding internally. We had to remove his spleen - "

"Tell Dr. Sinclair, if you please," McLeod interrupted. "He's a special police consultant."

"Dr. Stirling," a voice called from the recovery room, as a nurse poked her head through the door. "Could you take a look at Mrs. Bell? She's looking a little shocky; she might be hemorrhaging."

"On my way," the surgeon said, giving Adam an apologetic shrug. "Sorry, Doctor. If you want, you can go ahead and have a look at Mr. Grant's chart, but I don't expect it will make much difference, one way or the other."

Murmuring his thanks, Adam snagged a spare hospital gown, plus one for McLeod, and pulled it on over his suit before following the surgeon into Recovery. The other surgeon and one of the nurses had already gone to tend the ailing Mrs. Bell, and the remaining nurse continued to adjust an IV drip as Adam picked up Grant's chart. He now could see that Grant was also on a respirator, not just oxygen; and the vital signs being monitored on the bank of machines to one side described a patient very ill, indeed.

"Bad, huh?" McLeod murmured, close by Adam's elbow.

Gravely Adam nodded, eyes scanning the chart. "I can only say that he must have a tremendous will to live. He might make it, though."

Behind them, Dr. Stirling and her colleague were preparing to wheel Mrs. Bell back into surgery, and most of the medical staff were congregated at that end of Recovery, including the nurse who had been monitoring Grant.

"Well, I very much doubt he's going to be able to talk to us, so maybe I'd better see if I can go to him," Adam said softly, replacing the chart at the foot of the bed. "This will be quick and dirty, if it works at all, but we'll see what we can pick up."

Moving closer to the head of the bed, Adam prepared himself with a single deep breath to ground and center himself, at the same time framing a silent prayer of petition to the spiritual guardians who ruled the Inner Planes. He must be very careful, for one of the nurses had just come back. Despite that distraction, however, he could feel the first faint glimmerings of rapport with the soul resident in the shattered body before him - and knew that the link of soul to body was tenuous, else he would not have been able to perceive it so clearly.

But before he could stabilize the forming bridge between them, the beep of the pulse-rate monitor increased in tempo and Malcolm Grant shuddered and roused, his one unban-daged eye snapping wide in a sudden, agitated return to consciousness. Simultaneously, he started gasping, fighting the ventilator that had been helping him breathe. Alarms began going off on all his monitors as his heartbeat faltered.

"Code Blue!" the nurse shouted. "I need a crash cart!"

Even as she moved in to begin administering CPR, and other medical personnel began converging on the patient, including Dr. Stirling, Adam bent to the stricken man's ear, both hands gently steadying the thrashing head.

"You aren't choking, Mr. Grant," he murmured. "There's a machine helping you breathe. Let it do the work. Just try to relax."

But Grant deteriorated quickly, despite the efforts of the crash team, and slipped back into unconsciousness even as a nurse wheeled a defibrillator into place and Dr. Stirling positioned the paddles on his chest.

"Clear, everyone!" she ordered, and everyone else fell back.

But though she shocked the patient several times, the monitors one by one went flat. Watching helpless and silent from behind the circle of technicians fighting to save Grant's life, Adam sensed the fraying of the silver cord that was Grant's spiritual lifeline. Powerless to knit it back together, he felt a kindred psychic wrench at the moment when the cord parted. In that same instant, the fleeting image came to him of two stricken faces, a man and a woman, staring back at him in frozen horror through the windscreen of an onrushing car.

The image exploded on impact, even as an invisible breath of psychic breeze wafted past Adam - Malcolm Grant's immortal soul winging free of his broken body. The release was untimely, leaving behind tasks undone and promises unfulfilled. All Adam could do was wish the retiring spirit Godspeed in his own heart of hearts, trusting to the wisdom of the Light to redress the balance in the fullness of time.

Lost momentarily in these reflections, he only belatedly became aware that the nursing staff had abandoned their efforts to resuscitate their patient. Even as he lifted his bowed head, one of the nurses leaned in and gently drew the sheet over the face of the deceased.

"Dr. Sinclair, was it?" said a woman's voice behind him. As he turned, Dr. Stirling offered him Grant's chart and a pen.

"Could we have your particulars, in case there's an inquiry?" she said. "I actually expected to lose him on the table, but the hospital needs to have all the details, just in case any question comes up later."

He would have preferred to retreat at once to some quiet place where he could consider what he had experienced and bounce his impressions off McLeod. Even more, he wished that Peregrine had been here to sketch the faces, either direct or from Adam's description. Holding onto the images as best he could, he jotted down his sparse observations, commending the crash team for their efforts, then signed with his particulars of consultancy and licensing and handed the chart back to a nurse. He was shaking his head as he headed out of the recovery room, where McLeod had withdrawn at the first sign of medical crisis.

"Well?" McLeod said. "Were you able to pick up anything at all?"

"Something, but I'm not sure what it means," Adam said, stripping off his gown. "Here's not the best place to discuss it, though. Why don't we head on down to the hospital chapel? That's as private a place as we're likely to find on the premises."

They found the chapel empty, and settled into a pew in the rear. Closing his eyes, Adam conjured the mysterious faces and described for McLeod's benefit what he himself had shared of Malcolm Grant's experience.

"I believe Grant was telling the absolute truth when he told the officers at the scene that he'd seen two pedestrians step out in front of his car," he told his Second. "Whether or not there was anything actually there, however, is another story entirely."

"A ghost story, maybe?" McLeod said.

What his Second meant was not lost on Adam. It was a fact, affirmed by their experience as Huntsmen, that people and incidents, especially violent ones, could generate emotional and imagistic resonances that could be inadvertently apprehended by anyone sensitive enough to pick them up.

"I wonder if, perhaps, it is," Adam said thoughtfully, glancing back at McLeod. "Tell me: Were there pedestrians involved in any of the other accidents covered by this investigation?''

McLeod shook his head. "No, they were all car crashes."

"Hmmm." Adam gave the patrician bridge of his nose a thoughtful rub. "I wonder, then, if Malcolm Grant saw a ghostly manifestation of something that predates the onset of these accidents."

McLeod turned to look at him more directly. "What are you saying? That we're not casting our nets widely enough?''

"Something like that," Adam said, with a thin flicker of a smile. "From what you've been telling me, I gather that Donald and his Traffic colleagues have been spending long hours sifting through the accident reports themselves in search of a common denominator. If they haven't found one, that could be because it isn't there. I wonder what they might turn up if they were to work backwards from the first of the year, looking for any other unusual occurrences along that stretch of road - perhaps something involving pedestrians."

"That's a very interesting notion," McLeod said. "I'll pass it on to Donald, and authorize the archival work. You really think you're onto something?"

"I don't know," Adam said. "But if Donald turns up anything promising, be sure to let me know."

"Aye, so I will," McLeod said. "I'd like to see us crack this case before Carnage Corridor claims another set of victims."