Evil Beneath Us

by Laybourne, Alex

  “This is a saline solution, while the other is an anaesthetic that will numb your hand while I work my magic. Don’t look so concerned, Jeremy. I really am quite skilled at this sort of thing. I won’t even leave a scar … unless you want one, of course. A young man like you must enjoy chasing the ladies. A scar would surely drive them wild, no?” The doctor smiled and winked at Jeremy who felt his skin crawl at the notion of an old man cavorting with a much younger woman. Jeremy forced himself to smile. It was the best way to get through everything, under the circumstances.

  ***

  “Why am I here?” Jeremy asked as the doctor continued to suture his hand. It had taken a while to clean the wound sufficiently for the doctor to be certain the risk of infection was suitably low.

  “I think you know the answer to that, Jeremy. Don’t you?” Doctor Marshall turned the question around with the same delicate precision he used to seal the wound on Jeremy’s hand.

  “They think I’m crazy,” he answered. He held the doctor’s gaze for a few moments before turning his head back to the blood-smeared window. “They think I killed my best friend.” Jeremy didn’t cry. He had no tears left. His voice sounded cold and emotionless, even to his ears.

  “Did you?” the doctor asked gently.

  Jeremy turned to look at him. He could feel the caring nature that the man exuded, but there was something else; something hidden in the shadows on his face, concealed by the wrinkles on his aged skin that had Jeremy on edge. He was hiding something, maybe even wearing a mask. Jeremy didn’t know why, but he felt more uncomfortable in that moment than he had at any point since waking up in the dunes.

  “No, I didn’t.” Jeremy was curt with his reply. He did not want another round of discussions.

  “Well, that’s good enough for me.” Doctor Marshall gave a smile as he tied off the final suture. “And it looks like we are all done here, too.” He smiled again. He smiles too much, Jeremy thought. The doctor rose and pulled off his rubber gloves. His skin looked dry. “We will have plenty of time to talk. For now, get some rest.” With a final parting smile, Doctor Marshall turned and left the room, followed by Eric. The other orderly, whose name Jeremy had already forgotten departed soon after arriving when a beeper hanging on his trouser band began to sound.

  The door to the room closed, and once again the sound of a heavy lock being engaged ended all communication.

  With nothing else to do, Jeremy lay back on the bed. He could smell the aroma of drying blood. While his wound had been addressed, the mess he had made leading up to that moment remained on the floor.

  The bed was hard and un-giving, and the blanket was rough and scratched at his skin, but nonetheless, Jeremy lay down and fell asleep. He drifted deep into a black void. It seemed to smother him, choke him. He was pulled deeper into the darkness, and offered it no resistance, for he enjoyed the quiet that it brought.

  The sun was shining through the once-dirty window when Jeremy began to surface from sleep. He did so begrudgingly. Feeling as if he had been in a fight, his body was stiff and his mouth dry. He had the beginning of a headache, a deep pulsing pain in the back of his skull. Jeremy stared at the ceiling. There was no rush; he had nowhere to go. He wondered how long he had slept. He felt refreshed, and guessed it was mid-morning, if not midday already. It was a good guess, but Jeremy was unaware of the fact that he had slept through the previous day in its entirety.

  Chapter 5

  “Aha, you are awake. I was beginning to get a little worried about you,” a female voice called out. “You must feel better for sleeping like that,” she offered. The voice filled the room, but as Jeremy sat upright in bed he saw nobody. That was when the door to his room opened.

  The young nurse walked in and Jeremy caught his breath. She was a beautiful woman who, while in her mid-thirties, would easily pass for a younger woman in her early twenties. She was carrying a tray of food, but it took a while for Jeremy to notice anything other than her. He hoped she would not make him get out of bed, for his cock was already hard beneath the covers. Anja Powetzc was undeniably a gorgeous example of the female gender. She was over average height, without wearing heels, and had a slender build with large, yet well-proportioned breasts, and a small waist. She had fiery red hair, not ginger, but red, and the most striking green eyes he had ever seen. Jeremy was sure that she turned a lot of heads wherever she went.

  “There you go, sugar.” She leaned forward and placed the tray on the end of the bed. His head was dizzy with pleasure and he was certain that the nurse was giving him the come-on. She paused after setting the tray down, and lifted her head to look at Jeremy, her green eyes alive with a naughtiness that could not be faked. It also gave him a great view of her cleavage, and only served to make the rise in the bed covers all the more prominent. “You eat some of this and you will feel right as rain.” She paused, the expression on her face changed. It was only for a moment, a tiny loss of control which would, on a less captivating person, have gone unnoticed. “The doctor will be making his rounds in a bit. He wants to have a chat with you and then show you around.” Having regained full control of her facial expressions, she smiled. To Jeremy, it was as if someone had turned on a high-wattage bulb in his room. Jeremy smiled in return, too beauty-struck to muster up a real sentence. Anja gave a flirty giggle and then turned to leave. Jeremy watched her walk away, absorbing the sway of her behind, the curve of her body. She closed and locked the door. Jeremy lay back down. Breakfast would have to wait.

  The food was cold, but edible, and the orange juice was just what Jeremy had needed to clear his head and sooth his parched throat. He downed the glass in one deep gulp, not thinking about the strange, overly tangy aftertaste the juice left in his mouth ....

  The doctor arrived sometime after that. The passage of minutes and hours had merged, and Jeremy neither knew nor cared which had passed, nor in their quantity. The medication that had been slipped into his breakfast drink had taken effect.

  When Doctor Marshall opened the door, Jeremy was lying on the bed, whistling a strange and haunting tune. He noted his patient’s demeanour. He had been watching him through the opened hatch in the door for some time.

  Jeremy sat up when he heard the doctor enter the room. He felt relaxed and carefree. He even offered the man a smile. “No bodyguards today?” Jeremy asked.

  “They are not bodyguards, Jeremy. They are my assistants here. We have to deal with some very dangerous individuals. You can understand our need for caution. Especially when first meeting.” The doctor offered a smile in return, and in the light of day he looked like he could be somebody’s grandfather. His wild hair had been tamed and his moustache had been trimmed.

  “It is good to see you in such high spirits. I understand how everything must have looked when you arrived.” The doctor removed his jacket and sat down on the plastic chair; after bringing it over to the bed so he could sit and face Jeremy in close quarters. “Do you feel up to having a little chat?” Doctor Marshall smiled.

  “I guess,” Jeremy replied, feeling uneasy. His head was fuzzy. It was a sensation he had not felt before. While the drugs had done little to impede his lucidity, they had certainly made his will more malleable.

  “That’s great.” The doctor sneered. Rising from the stool he slid back into his jacket and began to walk. “Follow me then. I think we will start with the grand tour.” He spoke over his shoulder, assuming – correctly – that Jeremy was following him.

  The building had been fully renovated, as Jeremy had assumed from the first impression of his lodgings. All that remained as evidence of the building’s once grand standing was when it was viewed from the outside. Although, the split staircase was surely an aged feature. The wide steps, the grand design the way they curved around the central column – which Jeremy would later learn was the lift shaft – to end facing one another on the ground floor.

  Internally, it was every bit the institute that it claimed not to be. The whitewashed walls and the dark coloured
linoleum floor were just the beginning. Jeremy noted as he walked that the floor was not black as he had assumed, but a dark green. There were two other patients in the hallway. Both wore the same style of hospital issued pyjamas, and wandered the hall with aimless expressions, and a lack of purpose in their movements. Jeremy’s gaze fell on them and he felt a strange melancholy wash through him, unaware that he too wore a similar, albeit shallower expression on his face.

  “The upper two floors of the building are all bedrooms. We have eight bedrooms on each floor.” Doctor Marshall explained the layout of the building as they walked, the same way an art historian might show a tour group around an exhibit. He was almost enthusiastic with his praise on the way in which they had developed the building to cope with the varied demands of patient care. Jeremy wasn’t listening. Not with intent anyway.

  They ended up having to take the stairs down to the ground floor. They had in the first instance intended to take the lift, but when it arrived there was, much to Jeremy’s surprise, a young woman lying on the floor half naked, masturbating furiously. Doctor Marshall was quick to offer the stairs as an alternative, advising that it would be unwise to interrupt the girl while she was in the middle of something.

  The ground floor of the building, the one that saw outsiders – visitors, guests for meetings, other industry professionals and the like – broke from the whitewashed style of the upper floors. Instead, the walls of the entrance hall were a fresh pale yellow, while the floor was tiled with a large mural in the centre. Jeremy could not tell what it was, for his vision was starting to blur.

  “Hi there, Belle. Do you think you could possible fetch me a cup of coffee and bring it down to room seven?” Doctor Marshall stopped to ask the young girl behind the main desk. Jeremy did not hear her response, but she smiled and nodded.

  The ground floor area was a large square, with the reception desk in the middle, at the head of the floor mural. Either side were two rooms, each one accessed via a heavy wooden door. Doctor Marshall’s name plate hung on one; his office. It was the same room he had taken his parents and Detective McIlroy into upon his arrival. At the rear of the entrance hall were two corridors that ran perpendicular to one another, extending from the outer edge of each side of the wall. There were two more doorways at the rear too. They did not have the same heavy, ornate doors that the offices had, so Jeremy assumed that they were for the staff, or simple storage spaces. The stairs came down together, the final stage of their semi rotation immediately above the two side corridors.

  “Over here, you will see that we have a little sun garden. It’s a lovely spot which, in the summer months, is a wonderful place to sit and relax. I think you will like it in there.” Doctor Marshall resumed his tour, walking towards the left hand corridor.

  Jeremy remained standing for a few moments, trying to steady his head, and give himself time to flash a smile at the receptionist. She gave him a strained half smile and turned away.

  “This way, Jeremy. Don’t dawdle,” the doctor called again.

  Jeremy found his pace quickening as he hurried to catch up with the doctor. Together, they walked down the corridor, not before pausing to take a look into the sun room which was a conservatory filled with a few comfortable looking chairs and a coffee table. There was a bookcase against the wall of the building and every shelf was crammed with reading material.

  “Here we have our recreational area. It is a communal area where all of our non-violent patients can come and spend their time. Social interaction is such a large part of the treatment here. We have a television, a good selection of movies, a few games, and some books … if you like reading, and who doesn’t, am I right? We have a wonderful range of reading material, from fiction to non-fiction, reference to educational. I can never overstress the importance of reading on cultivating a healthy mind.” The doctor seemed to have gotten lost in his own description of the room.

  Jeremy looked at the room, his mind beginning to realize that there was something synthetic working against him. What he saw was a place far set from the one Doctor Marshall had described, with the exception of books. There were two large bookcases overflowing with titles, and coupled with the selection he had seen in the garden room, Jeremy readily accepted that there was in all likelihood a library on site somewhere. The room was empty for the rest. The three tables that he could see looked to be of the same cheap plastic as the chair in his room. Each had a stack of board games, five or so per table. The boxes looked old and worn.

  “Looks like the place to be.” Jeremy’s sharp reply seemed to prompt Doctor Marshall back into motion. They walked farther down the corridor where they passed a deep alcove in the wall. A desk had been set into the recess, and behind it sat four equally large and muscular men; orderlies, dressed in white shirts and slacks. They were hunched together staring at a number of monitors. They were all smiling, but when the doctor cleared his throat all four men snapped their heads to attention and their faces dropped to an expression of complete seriousness.

  Jeremy cast a glance back over his shoulder, but to him it looked as if all of the screens were black. His mind jumped to the girl in the lift. She had looked right at him. He had felt her gaze pulling at him.

  “Here we are, Jeremy,” Doctor Marshall spoke up, snapping Jeremy’s mind back to the matter at hand. They had stopped walking, and stood before an open door. Doctor Marshall stood to one side, waiting for Jeremy to enter first.

  The room was cold and empty. Once again, the single, small table was made from a cheap plastic, yet still they had gone to the extent of screwing it into the floor. The room was square, the walls were once again painted white, with a single black stripe the width of a painter’s brush running through the middle along the horizontal axis. Two plastic chairs sat either side of the table. Doctor Marshall took his seat, and gestured for Jeremy to do the same. There was a video camera set on a tripod in the corner of the room. The camera looked comically small on the large set of legs it had been given. There were no windows in the room. It was evident that there had, at some point in time, been two of them in the room. They had since been bricked up and painted over. For the rest, the walls were bare. Jeremy moved and sat on the chair that faced the camera. He didn’t need to be told that it was his designated seating location.

  “I had a long chat with your family yesterday, Jeremy. They told me everything.” The doctor stopped and studied Jeremy’s face, reading his reaction. “The police, too,” he added as another reaction-searching prod.

  “I’m sure they had a lot to say,” Jeremy answered, his attitude managing to find a way through the drug haze.

  “As a matter of fact they did. They had a lot to say about the problems you have had over recent years. Your gradual descent into the less than positive side of adolescence. Detective McIlroy was very worried about you.”

  “I bet he was.” Jeremy looked around the room, but he found the white walls and floor made his head grow fuzzier.

  Doctor Marshall cocked the right side of his mouth in a sly smile. “I heard everything they had to say about that night in the dunes and what they saw the next morning. However, I would very much to like to hear your version of events.”

  Jeremy raised his head, which he found had fallen forwards as if suddenly top heavy. He said nothing, forcing his jaw to clench in defiance.

  “You need to work with me, Jeremy. Otherwise, I cannot help you,” Doctor Marshall pushed.

  “I want to go home,” Jeremy spat, like a sulking child. “I didn’t do anything.” Even through the drugs, his body tensed with rage.

  “I understand, Jeremy. I really do. Nobody comes here of their own free will. You are here because you need help. You have been through something traumatic and until we get to the bottom of it all ….” The words trailed off.

  Jeremy closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and released it in a long sigh. He ran his hands over his face. It all felt so strange. Jeremy pulled at his hair, exasperated. He opened his eyes once more, f
ound the watchful gaze of the doctor, and the blinking light of the video camera and then gave in. He sat up straight in his chair and began his tale again. This account word for word identical to his previous tellings.

  Doctor Marshall had already listened to the tapes of the interview at the police station, and so the word for word repetition of the story did not fall deaf to his ears. The doctor began making notes on a piece of paper, watching out of the corner of his eye as Jeremy leaned closer to the table trying to read what he had written.

  “That’s everything.” The great toll of retelling his story exhausted Jeremy. “Will you let me go home now?” Jeremy slammed his hands down on the table. The effect of the drugs was beginning to wane, leaving his mind clearer.

  “Jeremy, I am afraid it is not that simple,” Doctor Marshall answered with a sharp intake of breath.

  “Why not?” Jeremy fired back.

  “Well, you see, I don’t believe that you have been very truthful with me,” the doctor stated plainly. “I don’t think what you have told me is really the truth about what happened. I think that it is a fabrication your mind has made to help you cope with the true events of that night.”

  Jeremy slammed his hands down on the table, the cheap plastic screaming from the impact. “You liar. You lying bastard!” he shouted, leaping to his feet.

  “I never lied, Jeremy. I do believe you. I believe you need help to see what you are really saying. To understand the difference between the truth, and the one you have created. I can protect you if we are honest with one other. I can help you. It will be a long road, but I will ensure you stay here until your treatment is finished.” Doctor Marshall remained calm throughout.

  Leaping to his feet, Jeremy made to attack the doctor, but the remaining traces of the drugs worked enough to slow his rage, and afford the doctor a chance to signal for help. Within moments of his chair clattering to the floor, the orderlies had entered the room. Jeremy’s arms were grabbed and he was thrown face first onto the table. His hand shot a burst of pain through his arm as the stitches were torn free from the flesh they were binding. Jeremy couldn’t breathe. The orderlies were both leaning on him, their heavy frames crushing his upper body. In panic he struggled. In response, the pressure increased. Jeremy felt his rage build, heighten, and for a brief second, all traces of the drugs boiled away. He became aware of where he was, and understood what was happening to him. He opened his mouth to cry out, but a sharp prick in his arm, followed by a rush of something cold flowing beneath his skin dumbed him once more. He turned his head as everything went soft. He saw the needle being removed from his arm. A tiny bubble of blood rose from the entry point. A scarlet dome, Jeremy watched it form and then burst. He stared at the bloody path it traced down his arm towards his elbow, fascinated.