But he wasn’t feebleminded or insane. Pinhead had thought so; he could tell by the way the boy had stared at him.

DON’T YOU LOOK AT ME I TOLD YOU NOT TO WATCH

And he’d shown Pin the Gemini card! He’d thought he would understand! The others were fools, no one knew how powerful Henry was, how he’d saved all those children.

DON’T YOU LIE I SAW YOU I KNOW EVERYONE KNOWS

He’d seen him before, Pinhead. He knew the boy watched him. And he didn’t behave like the other boys he ran with. Pinhead paid too much attention to how they acted, like he was looking for clues. He watched them the way Henry watched little girls.

Henry loved children. Yet as a boy he’d hated small girls, especially babies! When he was four, his mother died while giving birth to his sister. He never knew what happened to the baby.

YOU KILLED HER NO I GAVE HER AWAY NO I DIDN’T SHE RAN AWAY NO SHE DIDN’T DON’T YOU LIE TO ME I SAW HER FOLLOWING YOU THEY STOLE HER I SAW WHAT YOU DID I SAW WHAT YOU DID I SAW SHE WAS JUST A LITTLE BABY I SAVED HER

He’d spent the last nineteen years imagining her face in that of every pretty child he saw.

Other children were afraid of him. In the classroom he twitched and made frog noises and invented rhymes, trying to be funny so the other children would like him. He pretended to throw things, snowballs and baseballs that no one could see. Sometimes he forgot he was pretending. His classmates yelled when they saw him coming.

“Crazy Daisy, Crazy Daisy!”

He’d chase them, throwing real rocks or brandishing the long-bladed knife he kept hidden in a pocket of his dungarees. He skipped school, roaming the streets on his own. He started fires in vacant buildings just to watch them burn.

Finally, when he was twelve, his father had him committed to the Lincoln asylum.

He ran away repeatedly but only escaped for good when he was seventeen. He walked one hundred and sixty-five miles back to Chicago, where his aunt and uncle took him in for a few weeks. His godmother got him the janitor job at St. Joseph’s Hospital, mopping floors, cleaning sinks and toilets, emptying pails full of blood-soaked bandages and bits of skin. Every morning, he’d start in the basement and work his way to the top floor. Most days no one spoke to him at all. Not one word.

DON’T YOU LOOK AT ME WAS I TALKING TO YOU COME HERE NOW I’LL BEAT YOU BLACK AND BLUE