End of Watch (Bill Hodges Trilogy #3)(57)

He might even get a bonus. It probably wouldn’t happen, but a man could dream.

He entered Room 217 one afternoon in early December of 2012, shortly after Hartsfield’s only regular visitor had left. This was an ex-detective named Hodges, who had been instrumental in Hartsfield’s capture, although he hadn’t been the one who had actually smacked his head and damaged his brain.

Hodges’s visits upset Hartsfield. After he was gone, things fell over in 217, the water turned on and off in the shower, and sometimes the bathroom door flew open or slammed shut. The nurses had seen these things, and were sure Hartsfield was causing them, but Dr Babineau pooh-poohed that idea. He claimed it was exactly the kind of hysterical notion that got a hold on certain women (even though several of the Bucket nurses were men). Al knew the stories were true, because he had seen manifestations himself on several occasions, and he did not think of himself as a hysterical person. Quite the opposite.

On one memorable occasion he had heard something in Hartsfield’s room as he was passing, opened the door, and saw the window-blinds doing a kind of maniacal boogaloo. This was shortly after one of Hodges’s visits. It had gone on for nearly thirty seconds before the blinds stilled again.

Although he tried to be friendly – he tried to be friendly with everyone – Al did not approve of Bill Hodges. The man seemed to be gloating over Hartsfield’s condition. Reveling in it. Al knew Hartsfield was a bad guy who had murdered innocent people, but what the hell did that matter when the man who had done those things no longer existed? What remained was little more than a husk. So what if he could rattle the blinds, or turn the water on and off? Such things hurt no one.

‘Hello, Mr Hartsfield,’ Al said on that night in December. ‘I brought you something. Hope you’ll take a look.’

He turned the Zappit on and poked the screen to bring up the Fishin’ Hole demo. The fish began to swim and the tune began to play. As always, Al was soothed, and took a moment to enjoy the sensation. Before he could turn the console so Hartsfield could see, he found himself pushing his library cart in Wing A, on the other side of the hospital.

The Zappit was gone.

This should have upset him, but it didn’t. It seemed perfectly okay. He was a little tired, and seemed to be having trouble gathering his scattered thoughts, but otherwise he was fine. Happy. He looked down at his left hand and saw he had drawn a large Z on the back with the pen he always kept in the pocket of his tunic.

Z for Z-Boy, he thought, and laughed.

Brady did not make a decision to leap into Library Al; seconds after the old geezer looked down at the console in his hand, Brady was in. There was no sense of being an interloper in the library guy’s head, either. For now it was Brady’s body, as much as a Hertz sedan would have been his car for as long as he chose to drive it.

The library guy’s core consciousness was still there – someplace – but it was just a soothing hum, like the sound of a furnace in the cellar on a cold day. Yet he had access to all of Alvin Brooks’s memories and all of his stored knowledge. There was a fair amount of this latter, because before retiring from his full-time job at the age of fifty-eight, the man had been an electrician, then known as Sparky Brooks instead of Library Al. If Brady had wanted to rewire a circuit, he could have done so easily, although he understood he might no longer have this ability once he returned to his own body.

Thinking of his body alarmed him, and he bent over the man slumped in the chair. The eyes were half-closed, showing only the whites. The tongue lolled from one corner of the mouth. Brady put a gnarled hand on Brady’s chest and felt a slow rise and fall. So that was all right, but God, he looked horrible. A skin-wrapped skeleton. This was what Hodges had done to him.

He left the room and toured the hospital, feeling a species of mad exhilaration. He smiled at everyone. He couldn’t help it. With Sadie MacDonald he had been afraid of fucking up. He still was, but not so much. This was better. He was wearing Library Al like a tight glove. When he passed Anna Corey, the A Wing head housekeeper, he asked how her husband was bearing up with those radiation treatments. She told him Ellis was doing pretty well, all things considered, and thanked him for asking.

In the lobby, he parked his cart outside the men’s bathroom, went in, sat on the toilet, and examined the Zappit. As soon as he saw the swimming fish, he understood what must have happened. The idiots who had created this particular game had also created, certainly by accident, a hypnotic effect. Not everyone would be susceptible, but Brady thought plenty of people would be, and not just those prone to mild seizures, like Sadie MacDonald.

He knew from reading he’d done in his basement control room that several electronic console and arcade games were capable of initiating seizures or light hypnotic states in perfectly normal people, causing the makers to print a warning (in extremely fine print) on many of the instruction sheets: do not play for prolonged periods, do not sit closer than three feet to the screen, do not play if you have a history of epilepsy.

The effect wasn’t restricted to video games, either. At least one episode of the Pokémon cartoon series had been banned outright when thousands of kids complained of headaches, blurred vision, nausea, and seizures. The culprit was believed to be a sequence in the episode where a series of missiles were set off, causing a strobe effect. Some combination of the swimming fish and the little tune worked the same way. Brady was surprised the company that made the Zappit consoles hadn’t been deluged with complaints. He found out later that there had been complaints, but not many. He came to believe that there were two reasons for that. First, the dumbshit Fishin’ Hole game itself did not have the same effect. Second, hardly anybody bought the Zappit game consoles to begin with. In the jargon of computer commerce, it was a brick.