Book Three: Double Feature — 9.

Van watches on the room’s TV as Donna bites off Joe Valentine’s ear, then glimpses Valentine bandaged and raging in the corridor. Confined without windows and wracked by cramps and diarrhea, Van enters days of acute alcohol withdrawal, tended by rotating nurses and guarded by a muscular officer with a Spartan tattoo.

Between bouts of sleep and recurring nightmares of climbing a dark stairwell haunted by victims’ voices, Van is cared for chiefly by Nurse Dover and Nurse Lansing. He observes their clinical routines, endures humiliations, and notes blood draws while recalling the cleansing clarity of Greenland and his love for Allie.

As Van stabilizes, he asks the guard, Salem, to tell Valentine he’ll talk in exchange for an Irish coffee. Salem reports Valentine is away and hints Allie might be targeted next, which momentarily tempts Van’s desperate longing to see her—then repels him when he considers the danger to her.

That afternoon the unit erupts: Dover flees in tears, staff rush the halls, and a chubby clerk scatters papers, one showing a faxed image of a burning tree with a car. Van infers an operation went disastrously wrong—likely due to Allie. When Lansing brings dinner, Van confirms Valentine survived but is delayed; Lansing stonewalls his questions.

The next morning, a shaken Dover reacts when Van suggests Allie “wiped out someone you knew,” revealing personal losses on their side. Days pass without Valentine. At the Christmas party, staff carouse in Hawaiian-print shirts, while Van, isolated, watches and rages. Seeing Dover drunkenly collapse disgusts him into a hard vow: he hopes never to drink again. As the night ends, he realizes New Year’s approaches—time for Colin to provide King Sorrow new names.