Dimiter by William Peter Blatty Page A

for the chief physician and higher ranking hospital staff.” That had done it, Mayo ruefully reflected. He listened to the scratching of the ink-fed pen as the nurse kept writing, head low to her task. She had told him she had seen something else that night. Mayo’s gaze fixed dubiously on the crimson Star of David stitched into her oversized starched white cap. His quest for unwavering faith in her accounts had been less than heroically advanced by the fact that he knew her to be a neurotic as well as a courageously innovative tester of the outermost limits of paranoia. Once she had bitterly and memorably complained that the clerks at a grocer’s near Jerusalem Hills, the inexpensive neighborhood where she lived, had refused to carry her bags to her car because “that whole creepy staff there is anti-Arab,” whereas in fact the store’s owners were Palestinians. Mayo stood patiently, waiting and hoping for the nurse to stop writing, until at last he gave up with a sigh and moved on. Instantly, the scratching of the pen behind him ceased.
    Mayo shook his head and kept walking, trudging down a corridor lined with narrow cots and restless sleepers. A breakdown of the hospital’s main computer had delayed the release of dozens of patients who had only come in for routine tests. Mayo shook his head at that, too. At the door to his office he fumbled in a pocket of his jacket for a key and whisked it out, but then as he was slipping it into the lock he turned his head to stare pensively down the length of a dimly lit hallway at whose shadowy end some beckoning mystery faintly glowed.
There
, Mayo thought.
It had happened there
. “Samia, you’re a lunatic,” he murmured. He extracted the key, slipped it into his pocket, and in moments was scuffing through the long windowed hall past idle oxygen tanks and gurneys until he had neared the dead-end wall that marked the beginning of the Children’s Ward. It was filled with brightly colored painted cartoon figures. Mayo stopped. There was something on the floor just ahead of him. He reached down and picked it up. It was a white chef’s cap, very narrow in size. Mayo judged it to be part of a child’s Purim costume and a fond, sad smile warmed his eyes as he carefully placed it on a parked medication cart silently awaiting the squeak of its rounds. He heard a faint
click
behind him, like a sewing needle falling to the ground. He turned around but saw nothing, The hall was empty. What had he expected to see? he asked himself. “Mrs. Lahkme?” he said aloud dryly. He walked on to an observation window, where he stopped and looked in at the ward’s tall gray metal cribs, in each one a sleeping child. Mayo stared broodingly at the dark-haired boy in whom the cancer and dysautonomia had vanished. The double remission was but part of the puzzle. There was yet that other mystery hovering here, that second tale of the improbable as told by Samia.
    Mayo thought he detected movement and, shifting his gaze, saw that one of the children was awake, a two-year-old girl with rosy, plump cheeks who was lying on her side with a thumb in her mouth. She was staring at Mayo with a mischievous smile most resembling amused anticipation. The moment the neurologist met her gaze she sat up with a giggly laugh of delight and clapped both hands together in front of her. After that, for a time she sat motionless, squinting at Mayo with an air of expectancy until the smile in her eyes slowly faded and,slipping her thumb back into her mouth, she gave a sigh, lay back down, and turned her head away. The neurologist continued to study her, puzzled, then at last turned around and shuffled away still gripping the mug half-filled with tea now cooler than his search for the meaning of his life.
    At the door to his office Mayo paused. He’d caught an odd flash of motion at the end of the hall, something black and quick, but when he turned to look directly he saw nothing. Mayo sighed, and with a rueful shake