“Dr Abel is just doing what’s best for you Why be difficult about that? Now, Harry…”
At these words Ugly Bill grabbed me in a bear hug from behind and, not for the first time, I wondered why in over two hundred years I’d never got round to learning some form of martial art. He was an ex-con who found being a nurse at an asylum just like prison but better. He worked out in the private garden of the house, an hour every day, and took steroids that caused his brow to perpetually glisten with sweat and, I suspected, a shrinking in his testicles that he compensated for by taking more exercise and of course, more steroids. Whatever the state of his gonads, his arms were thicker than my thighs, and wrapped themselves around me tight enough to pull me from my chair, feet kicking uselessly at nothing.
“No,” I begged. “Please don’t do this please please don’t…”
Clara slapped the skin on my elbow to bring a reddish flush to the surface and then managed to miss the vein entirely. I kicked and Ugly Bill squeezed harder so that heat rose to my eyes and wool filled my brain. I felt the needle go in, but not come out, and then they dropped me to the floor and told me to be,
“Not so silly, Harry! Why do you always have to be so silly about things what are good for you?”
They left me there, sat on my own sprawling knees, waiting for it to happen. My mind raced as I tried to think of an easily available chemical antidote to the poison currently slipping through my system, but I had only been a doctor in one life and hadn’t yet had time to investigate these modern drugs. I crawled across the floor on my hands and knees to the water jug and drank the whole thing down, then lay on my back in the middle of the room and tried to slow my breathing, slow my pulse and respiration, in a futile attempt to limit the circulation of the drug. It occurred to me that I should make some attempt to monitor my own symptoms so I swivelled round on the floor to keep the clock in sight, noting the time. After ten minutes I felt a little light-headed, but that passed. After fifteen I realised that my feet were on the other side of the world, that someone had sawed me in half but left the nerves still attached, even though the bones were broken and now my feet belonged to someone else. I knew that this could not possibly be so, and yet processed the fact that it quite clearly was with a resignation that dared not fight the simple truth of my predicament.
The Twitch came and stood over me and said,
“Whatcha doing?”
I didn’t think she needed an answer, so didn’t give one.
There was saliva rolling down one side of my face. I rather enjoyed it, the coldness of the spit on the hotness of my skin.
“Whatcha doing whatcha doing whatcha doing?” she shrieked, and I wondered if they’d heard of adrenergic agonists in Northumbria, or if they were a thing that was yet to come.
She shook me and then went away but was clearly still leaving something behind because I kept on shaking, head banging against the floor, and I knew I had wetted myself but that was OK too, interesting and different like the saliva, the way it was all the same temperature as me until it dried and began to sting, and besides that was a long way away and then Ugly Bill was there and his face had been destroyed. It had been broken against the ceiling above my head like a ripe tomato, the skull smashed in and only a nose, two eyes and leering mouth left in the swimming remnants of blood and dripping brain that surrounded it, and as he leaned over me, bits of his cerebellum dripped round his cheek and rolled to the corner of his mouth and formed a tear of grey-pink matter that hung off his bottom lip and then fell, like mashed apple from a baby’s spoon, straight on to my face, and I screamed and screamed and screamed until he strangled me and I didn’t scream any more.
Naturally, by this point I’d lost track of time, and thus the diagnostic purpose of the exercise was rather left behind.
Chapter 8
Jenny visited.
They tied me to the bed and shot me through with a sedative when she came.
I tried to speak, to tell her what they were doing, but I couldn’t.
She wept.
She washed my face, and held my hand, and wept.
She was still wearing her wedding ring.
At the door she spoke with Dr Abel and he said he was concerned about my deterioration and was considering a new kind of drug.
I called out for her and made no sound.
She kept her back turned to me when they locked the door.
Then Dr Abel was sitting too close to me, the tip of his pen resting on his lower lip, and he said, “Tell it to me again, Harry?”
There was an urgency in his voice, more than just the fascination with his own treatments.