by Richard Ayre
On that October day in 1945 he calmly told me he needed samples from my brain. He was all set up for it. There was an electric saw lying beside the usual instruments on the gurney, and he waited patiently for me to lie down.
‘You’ll recover,’ he said, matter-of-factly. ‘Half your brain was shot away only a year ago. There’s no danger to yourself.’ He picked the small electric saw up and waited expectantly for me to lie down on the gurney.
I eyed the saw apprehensively. ‘It’s over, Pfumpf,’ I told him. ‘It isn’t going to work. Whatever is in me can’t be transferred.’
I was wrong about that, but it couldn’t be transferred in the way he thought.
‘You will do as I say,’ he said. ‘Lie down so we can get this over with quickly.’
‘No. It’s over. I won’t do it any longer.’
At first he cajoled, then he shouted, and finally, as I knew he would, he threatened.
‘I will have that nurse you like so much brought into this room and I will do things to her you can barely imagine!’ he shouted, holding his scalpel like a butcher’s knife. In his eyes I saw the same dark madness I’d seen in those of Mickey Donovan when he’d stabbed me in Molly’s apartment. This man was crazy.
I think at one time, not so long before, I would have simply grabbed his scrawny throat and throttled the life out of the miserable bastard. But it was the thought of Madeleine that stopped me doing it. I knew she would have been horrified in me for letting the anger out, as I had done so many times in the past. She would hate it if I allowed myself to become anything like that excuse of a man standing in front of me.
So, instead of doing what I wanted to do, I consoled myself with belting him on the jaw as hard as I could. He went down like a felled tree. I made to leave but turned back. I couldn’t help myself, and I gave his unconscious body a kick or two as he was lying there.
I made my way quickly to my room.
Since I had been so willing to be cut about, there had been no need for me to have an escort anymore. But guards still lined the corridors and I didn’t know the way out; I needed help for that.
Madeleine turned up a few minutes later and, as soon as she was in the room, I hushed her and whispered in her ear, ‘We’re getting out of here. What’s the quickest way?’
She gave me a look that said, ‘Well it’s about time’ and then thought rapidly.
‘I go out through the main door, but there’s always two guards there. Plus we’d have to get through the gate, which has another two men.’
I swore to myself. Pfumpf would be coming round any moment and the alarm would be raised. I suddenly wished I’d ignored what Madeleine would have thought and cut the bastard’s throat.
‘But I’ve been looking for escape routes for a while,’ continued Madeleine. ‘There’s one window at the side of this building. It’s on the first floor, but I’ve checked and it’s big enough for someone to squeeze though and drop down. It’s the one window I know of that’s outside the complex. I’ll show you where it is.’
That was the first time I kissed her, and it was only a triumphant peck on the cheek, but she smiled at me, happily.
‘This way.’
We went out into the corridor and walked quickly back the way I’d come, the guards frowning but not saying anything. I suddenly had my first inclination that they perhaps did not work for Pfumpf. I’d always assumed his words about secretive government departments meant that he had the whole complex to himself, but the attitude of the men in the corridors told me they were just army personnel. They were only there to guard the building and the German prisoners. To them, Pfumpf was just another doctor engaged in work for the army.
As we hurried along the corridor, I cursed myself for my stupidity. I had been conned by a trickster who was only working for himself. I was an idiot.
At least I hoped I was.
Near the metal door to the lab was a staircase and we went up quickly. At the top was a wooden door which Madeleine opened to reveal a broom cupboard.
‘It’s in there. I’ll go out and get the car. I’ll pick you up.’
With that she was gone. I slipped into the cupboard and stared at the window in dismay.
It was tiny! I’m sure she could have slipped through it, as slim as she was, but I was going to struggle. I opened the small top sash, trying to gauge if I could get myself through it.
The sudden ringing of alarm bells made up my mind for me.
I clambered up, shoving my head and torso through the small rectangle. The latch of the sash ground painfully against my stomach and crotch but I ignored it. The pain of it was little compared to what Pfumpf had put me through.
Screeching tyres and headlights below showed me that Madeleine had arrived. But I was stuck, half in half out of the window and, to top it all, there was a drop of about fifteen feet to the concrete below. I heaved and pushed, feeling the latch tear into my skin. I redoubled my efforts when I heard footsteps running up the stairs outside the broom cupboard.
With a final heave, I tore myself free and I popped from the window like a cork from a bottle. My hands scrabbled at the outside glass for a second but found no purchase. I tipped upside down and my hospital trousers, still attached to that bloody latch, were dragged to my ankles, showing my arse to anyone who happened to be looking. I hung there for a moment, half-naked and sweating. Then my trousers tore and I was falling.
I hit the ground with a clatter, my left knee taking the brunt of it. I heard it crack, and a white-hot lance of pain shot through my leg. I hissed at its intensity.
Before I knew what was happening, Madeleine was there, heaving me to my feet and dumping me into the back seat of her old Citroen. The door banged, the engine was gunned, and then we were off down the street.
‘We need to hide,’ I shouted at her, but she already had it planned. As I said, Madeleine was an incredibly clever woman. She had been working on our escape from the day I went in there.
*
In the end, no one came looking for us. I got the feeling I could have just walked out of that building without any fuss. I don’t think I was ever a prisoner. I cursed Pfumpf constantly, not just for what he had done to me, but for taking me in as much as I had let him.
Madeleine had driven to an abandoned farm she had prepared over the weeks of my incarceration, fifteen miles or so outside the town. It was empty and had a barn in which to hide the car under tarpaulin and hay, and a cellar which she had already stocked with enough supplies to last a couple of weeks. It was all a bit of a waste really.
We stayed there until my fractured knee healed itself fully, which only took a couple of days. I had half-expected the following days and nights to be full of armed soldiers on the hunt, but we saw nobody. It was during those days at the barn that I fully realised the truth.
Pfumpf had been working alone, and the MP’s at the hospital were not under his command at all. He must have conned the money and equipment out of Washington for his mad experiments. I had no idea how much money he had cost them, but I hoped they would lock the bastard up forever when they found out.
But still, he had known about me. He had known about me and he’d known about Valin, which showed my movements had not gone unnoticed. And if he knew, then so could others. We had to be careful. I didn’t really know why I wanted to keep myself secret from the outside world; something inside me just told me I should.
Once my leg was fully functional again we moved on, hiding by day, travelling by night, eventually arriving in Le Mans in mid-October. We had seen nothing to make us think anyone was remotely interested in us, and I began to relax.
Over that journey I started to grow a beard again as a disguise and Madeleine somehow managed, in a France that had just been liberated from five years of Nazi occupation, to get something to dye her hair dark. She also cut it short.
We had no money and so, with some trepidation, I got in touch with my bank and told them who I was, sending verification through various postal
boxes. Because I’d already set up the account in the name of Taylor, the money arrived on Halloween. Still we waited, living like tramps until we were sure the transfer hadn’t been noticed.
We took out all the money and moved swiftly south, eventually stopping just south of Bordeaux. I felt we were far enough away from Cherbourg to now be invisible. We scouted around the area and found a small house on the edge of an insignificant village.
No one seemed to be on our tail. Our first night there we sat outside the house on broken stools in front of a brazier, sipping cheap wine. The place was falling down, but Madeleine, ever the optimist even with all she’d been through, said we could together build a place where we would be happy for the rest of our lives.
I smiled at her, loving every part of her, but knowing by then that we would be together only for the rest of her life, not mine.
We made love for the very first time that night, by the light of candles on a sagging couch in a broken-down cottage. And it was better, sweeter, and more satisfying than I had ever experienced before. I realised what the difference was, of course, and it was simple: we loved each other.
We made the cottage our own. We spent most of my money on fixing it up into a house which we both adored.
I told Madeleine everything: when I was born, my encounter with the Medic, my life since. She had seen me heal from a lethal head wound in only a few months and she had watched in awe as my broken knee had knitted itself back together in just a couple of days in the barn. She could have left me then, and I wouldn’t have blamed her for a moment. I even offered her as much money as I could spare if she wanted to go and start a new life somewhere else, with someone else. Someone not like me.
But, of course, she didn’t. She wanted to be with me. She loved me as much I loved her. She had healed me, and I like to think I helped heal her too from her terrible, tragic past.
She got a job at the hospital in Bordeaux and I stayed at home out of the way as much as possible.
The years rolled by. The 1940s turned into the 1950s and we enjoyed every minute of them together. I began to believe that my curse had been, if not lifted, then at least halted for a while. Madeleine had found the humanity in me and had released it once more, and if sometimes I listened to the radio and cursed humanity for their stupid, brief, useless activities, Madeleine’s presence would always make me smile.
She kept me human and I began to think I was finished with people like Professor Herbert Pfumpf. I began to look forward to our future.
But fate, that hateful bitch in which I have never believed, had other plans.
XVII
Over the next thirteen years I became more and more comfortable with our situation and on a sudden whim, in 1958, I decided to shave off my beard.
Madeleine, whose hair had been back to its normal colour for years, stared at me. I knew what she was thinking. She was forty-seven and I was sixty-two, but I looked more than twenty years younger than her. I was still cursed.
Our lives had settled into domesticity. She earned enough money to get us through each month, and the little that remained from my own money helped. We even managed to save and, in the summer of that year, I told her we should have a holiday.
She didn’t want to at first. She still had nightmares. Terrors that would throw her from her sleep, screaming. Some of them were of black-uniformed, jack-booted monsters, but some were of a tall man with black-rimmed glasses laughing as he sliced open my writhing, bloodied body. She didn’t want us to be found again.
But I persuaded her we should have a break from the norm. Pfumpf was surely no longer a problem. We hadn’t heard a thing about him in thirteen years. Whatever shadowy department he’d said he worked for would surely be bothered more about events in Russia rather than the ravings of a Professor who claimed he had once met an immortal.
The ending of the Korean War five years previously had not helped relationships between East and West, and there were still repercussions between the USA and the USSR over the recent uprisings in Hungary. It seemed the Soviet utopia was not one the people inside the Iron Curtain either believed in or wanted and the American government, using the suppression of the uprising to its political advantage, must have had bigger fish to fry than us.
I suggested Britain as a destination for a break. For some strange reason I wanted to show Madeleine where I was born; I wanted to show her Northumberland. That place breeds a pride in anyone who is lucky enough to be born there, and I wanted her to experience its wild beauty.
She eventually relented and, strangely, I think the reason she did so was because it had become obvious we could not have children and she didn’t have the excuse to not travel. God knows we tried often enough, but it never happened. I was to find out why much later in my life, but at the time I believe she thought those SS bastards had done something to her which had made it impossible for her to conceive. Maybe they had, but I don’t think so now.
Anyway, I filled her head with images of rolling hills and mountain streams and, finally, she relented.
I wish we hadn’t gone. I wish to God she had talked me out of it and we had just continued with our life. But these things happen. We grasped that line of non-existent fate and we pulled at it.
We flew to Britain, my first ever time on an aeroplane, and landed at the newly extended London Airport.
We took a taxi to the hotel. As we passed through the streets, some of them still showing the scars of the war, I remembered my last time in the city when I was on leave just before D-Day, blind drunk and totally alone. I smiled at Madeleine and squeezed her hand, loving the fact I was no longer on my own.
It was at the hotel when things went very badly wrong.
We booked in and went up to our room, which had a very nice view of Tower Bridge. Madeleine went to look out the window and I stood behind her, wrapping my arms around her waist. She turned to me and smiled.
I remember her being so happy that night. She had never been out of France and to see the famous landmarks of London was a great thrill for her. We made love as night fell on the city and the view outside was scuppered by one of the infamous, but thankfully now rare, “pea soupers” that rolled up the Thames.
We finally decided we should get something to eat and got out of bed, washed and dressed, and then went down to dinner.
It was a nice hotel. The restaurant produced some fabulous food and the waiters moved smoothly and silently amongst the well-dressed clientele. It was almost as if the war had never happened. Outside the hotel, Britain had only recently come out of the last of the war rationing, but inside everything was plush carpets and quiet, civilised conversation.
We had finished eating and I had ordered a couple of brandies when I glanced up and caught sight of an attractive woman staring at me with wide eyes from another table.
She wore a blue evening gown, with pearls at her throat, and her dark hair shone in the candlelight. She looked to be somewhere in her forties, and she was sitting next to an older man in a dinner suit and rather austere demeanour. I recognised her straight away; she really hadn’t changed that much.
It was Grace Yeo.
I quickly turned away and stood, dragging Madeleine to her feet.
‘We need to go,’ I whispered, and she followed me as I hurried out, keeping my face from Grace’s view.
Back in the room, I hurriedly explained who she was.
‘Are you sure she recognised you?’
‘Of course she did. I look exactly the same as when I knew her back in Aylesford. She recognised me, all right.’
‘This is the woman you asked to marry?’
I had told Madeleine about Grace as well as everything else in my life before we met. I nodded. ‘Yes. She was a ruthless bitch back then and I don’t suppose she’s changed now. I think we need to leave.’
‘Why? What can she do?’
‘I don’t know, Maddy. But I don’t trust her, and I don’t like the look of that man she’s with. I think it would be bett
er if we moved on now.’
‘We can’t do that. The trains are all finished for the night.’ She put a hand on my arm, trying to get me to see sense. ‘We’re leaving for the north in the morning. There’s nothing we can do about her tonight.’
She smiled at me. ‘It will be fine. Even if she recognised you, what difference does it make? Who would believe you were her fiancé twenty years ago? Everyone would think she was mad. She can’t do anything to hurt us, can she? Don’t worry.’
She was right. I still looked like a man of no more than twenty-three or so. Even dining with Madeleine, who still looked quite young for a woman in her forties, had earned us a few curious glances. There was nowhere to go that night.
She eventually persuaded me she was right and I nodded reluctantly. We got ready for bed, deciding to have an early night so we could leave first thing in the morning.
With any other person from my past than Grace Yeo, things probably would have been fine. But what neither Madeleine nor I knew at the time was that the man with her was her husband, the prominent Conservative backbencher Sir Charles Wheland.
We were also unaware that Wheland was an attaché with the American Consulate in London, working on joint scientific and medical developments between the two countries. Or, indeed, that one of his associates at the consulate was a tall, thin Professor of neurosurgery with a bald head and black-rimmed glasses and an insane need to find the man he thought was immortal.
Once again luck had turned against me. It was only a matter of time before Pfumpf would catch up with us.
I wish we’d heeded my advice and returned to France, but Madeleine persuaded me that it didn’t matter if Grace recognised me. She couldn’t do anything about it that would harm us.
