‘I’m not at all certain. There is no precedent for this condition in my experience.’
‘You weren’t prepared to ask me if there was one in my experience?’
Jane stood up. ‘I did not think it advisable, Dr Braknell, for contentious argument to take place over a patient, in whatever state.’
Braknell flipped the paper in the typewriter rudely. ‘What’s all this rubbish?’
‘A transcript of what the patient has so far said.’
‘Is his voice normal — or has he adopted some random identity?’
‘He does so at times.’
‘And you still claim he is not psychotic!’
Jane said, ‘I know of no psychosis in which the patient speaks backwards.’
‘Backwards?’
‘That is what I said.’
‘If he speaks backwards, how did you transcribe it — or do you also talk backwards during seances?’
‘I request that you withdraw that last remark.’
‘I withdraw it. How did you transcribe his words?’
‘By running the tape the other way around.’
‘And the words were clear?’
‘Clear enough to get most of it, yes.’
‘ “PONEM”. What kind of a word is that?’
‘I don’t know. He has used it several times.’
‘And of course it’s in the Oxford Dictionary?’
‘It is not.’
‘No! Nor is MENOP, to the best of my knowledge and belief. You realize the implications of his speaking backwards?’
‘I think I have an idea, yes.’
‘You need more than an “idea” with a patient in this condition. It didn’t occur to you to get a revalidation?’
‘A what?’
Braknell seemed puzzled at himself. Then he said aggressively, ‘A second opinion.’
‘Not at this stage.’
‘Do you want mine now? Or must it wait until the patient is incarcerated in a psychiatric ward?’
‘I would like it now.’
‘I think the two temporal lobes are in some way crossed up. As with mirror writing. Do you know if the patient is naturally left-handed, and has in childhood been forced to be right handed?’
‘The thought occurred to me. I do not know.’
‘How are you interpreting all this gibberish you’re getting? Or are you more interested in Metapsychology than established medical practice?’
She said firmly, ‘I am concerned with something which the patient evidently has to work out of his subconscious.’
‘You apply instant psychoanalysis on a case who very well may find abreaction a very dangerous aftermath?’
‘I could see no other course that would …’
‘Would what?’
She changed it. ‘… that would enable him to return to a normal way of life.’
Braknell glared. He knew she’d been about to say something else but couldn’t openly accuse her, at any rate in front of Father Stillwell. Braknell said, ‘And this is a normal way of life — the clandestine life you yourself are leading?’ He didn’t beg an answer. ‘Did this patient have such episodes prior to your giving him TNA in the first place?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘It didn’t cross your mind that the use of this kind of drug on an individual prone to schizoid episodes might be unwise?’
‘Dr Braknell, I really don’t see how this cross-examination of my own actions is helping the patient to recover.’
‘What — might I ask — will?’
‘An intervention of some sort into the sequencing of his subconscious thoughts.’
‘Dr Schuber, you do not even think coherently within the framework of your own analysis. If he is talking backwards, he is thinking backwards, and the events must therefore be flowing backwards. How do you interrupt what — to you — has already occurred?’
Father Stillwell said, ‘Dr Braknell has a point. Let’s admit it.’
Jane said, ‘I do. But if you are prepared to apply that kind of reasoning — even for an hypothesis — you must de facto regard the hypothesis as capable of logical analysis?’
‘I would go that far and no further.’
Jane said with emphasis, ‘No known theory about schizophrenia has ever got beyond hypothesis. Therefore you cannot disprove my own interpretation. You can only test it to see if the theory stands up to logical assessment.’
‘At the patient’s expense? No thanks. I am more concerned at the present to try and restore the patient to a slightly less frightening condition.’
Father Stillwell said. ‘Will you let Sister Ann Marie try something first?’
‘Don’t say you condone this, Father? I thought at least I could rely —’
‘Brack. Let’s try a little calm. To my untrained eye, the patient is in a dilemma without precedent. And the person he is most likely to respond to is Sister Ann Marie.’
‘Sister? You are prepared to take her back into the Order after what you said to me?’
Father Stillwell raised his eyebrows very slightly and replied, ‘One experimental kiss hardly condemns Ann Marie as a whore. I’ve just been smoking. That’s against the rules of my Order, too.’
‘It’s not setting a very good example,’ said Braknell, ‘for a priest to smoke when we know of the intense dangers of smoking.’
‘I consider that one cigarette is comparatively harmfree.’
‘And what about the harm done as a result of the conspiracy between Ann Marie and Dr Schuber?’
Jane said, ‘I really must protest. You cannot and you may not use such extreme terminology. The fact that your views differ from mine does not in itself suggest a “conspiracy”. That is outrageous.’
‘I regret to say that in my view it is what you are doing which is truly outrageous. The sad part about it is that you do not apparently realize it.’
Jane said, ‘And do you fully realize the implications of what is being done in G Block?’
He said angrily, ‘I fail to see the connection. Is there one — or is the connection merely in the mind of a very sick man?’
Jane avoided the trap. ‘I am suggesting that we should examine the priority basis upon which we judge outrageous conduct.’
‘On the assumption that two minuses must make a plus? I don’t go in for relative judgements. I believe that each and every human act has moral significance in its own right.’
Jane fought back. ‘A psychiatrist who deals in Absolutes? That presupposes rather a high proportion of wisdom. It sounds more like God.’
Stillwell said, ‘Let us all keep our tempers … Brack, will you let Ann Marie talk to the patient? As a try?’
‘Try what? Double-dutch?’
Jane said, ‘Doctor Braknell, you know very well that sometimes the only way of helping a psychotic is to play a role whereby it becomes possible to enter that patient’s fantasies.’
‘Except an alarmingly high proportion of the people trying to help him seem all too ready to participate.’
Stillwell said impatiently, ‘Brack. This is unworthy of you. To put it in plain words, let her have a bash.’
*
‘Brack?’
Braknell glanced at Father Stillwell almost guiltily. ‘Yes?’
‘There’s something on your mind. What is it?’
Braknell glanced back at Ann Marie for a moment, then led the way out to the podium, where the sweet smell of settled rainwater came up from the grass of the Bowl garden below. He said, ‘I hate to admit it, but Jane Schuber is right. The condition of that patient is like nothing I’ve ever seen.’
Stillwell had a strong personality. He used it. Fixing Braknell in an unblinking stare, he said, ‘But it is a variant on schizophrenia — or isn’t it?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then what are you bothered about?’
‘You’re trying to get me to say that Prentice’s condition is too … consistent. It has a kind of underlying rationality — however bi
zarre.’
‘You’re scared, aren’t you?’
Braknell looked away. ‘I’m curious.’
Stillwell said, ‘Then may I take you into my confidence? And I mean confidence, I don’t want it repeated.’
‘Well?’
‘This … schizophrenia … that Prentice is suffering from. It’s forcing events.’
‘What events?’
‘A very disturbed man came rushing up from the computer room. He was carrying a huge wad of printout. He asked me to safeguard it and made me promise to hide it somewhere safe, without telling anyone — even you.’
‘Why does that link up with the patient?’
‘Because I got the very strong impression that he wanted that to happen.’
‘It could have been coincidence.’
Stillwell said, ‘There’ve been a lot of those, in the last few hours. Ann Marie went out with Prentice yesterday. When she returned she was obviously disturbed. I couldn’t find out very much, except that she handed a toy rabbit into the labs, or at least, Prentice did.’
‘A toy rabbit?’
‘Yes. Made of plastic.’
‘What a very odd thing to do.’
‘It was a very odd toy rabbit, Brack. I barged in there and took a good look at it. The boys in the lab were unimpressed with the thing … They hadn’t examined it properly. I got them to let me take it to my quarters. Then, with a hacksaw, I cut it in half.’
‘And?’
‘Every detail — down to basic organs like the heart and liver — were faithfully and exactly reproduced.’
‘Then it wasn’t a toy. It was a lab model.’
Stillwell said doubtfully, ‘I suppose that must be it. Probably for “mock-vivisection”. None of which explains why Prentice and Ann Marie took it to the lab.’
‘Can I take a look?’
‘It’s down in the Chapel.’
‘That’s an odd place to leave it, isn’t it?’
Stillwell climbed into Braknell’s car. ‘Drive me down there, will you?’
To Father Stillwell, the Chapel felt eerie and alien. He had never experienced the sensation before and it made him draw himself to an abrupt standstill at the entrance.
Bracknell caught his expression, ‘There’s something wrong. Isn’t there?’
Stillwell said, ‘Animal smells … someone’s been in here.’
‘Or something has, never mind that. Where’s the plastic rabbit?’
Stillwell had taken a few brisk strides up the aisle toward a miniature font. ‘Over here. Switch the lights on, will you?’
They came on.
And Stillwell stood perfectly still, gazing, uncomprehending, at what he saw. ‘Brack! Take a look!’
Braknell did so.
What he saw was a young rabbit, cut precisely in two halves down the middle. There was blood seeping out of it still, dripping off the edge of the pew immediately behind the font. Braknell said, ‘Someone has a very nasty sense of humour. Or else …’
‘Or else one of the patients did it. And yet it seems so pointless.’
Braknell said, ‘It might not seem pointless to a schizophrenic. Especially if one of them had been up on the moor, and … Wait a minute. Don’t touch!’
‘What?’
‘In the stomach. See? Now stand right back! Where’s the nearest phone?’
‘In the anteroom. What is it?’
‘Don’t get so close! Can’t you see that small Perspex capsule? Don’t you know what it is?’
‘Radio-cobalt?’
Unaccountably, Stillwell found himself sweating. ‘Some coincidence, isn’t it? If one of the patients happened to snare that poor little thing. He — or she — brings it back here and for some reason comes into the chapel —’
‘— possibly to see you.’
‘All right. But I told no one I’d got the toy rabbit in here. Nevertheless, this person sees it, segments the real animal as I did the plastic model — and low and behold it turns out to be the one rabbit on Dartmoor that has swallowed the capsule of radio-cobalt! I’m hardly an expert on gambling but I should think the odds on all that happening must be billions to one against.’
‘Father.’
They both spun round. Ann Marie stood a little way down the aisle. She had evidently been there for some seconds. For she had observed what had happened and had come to her own conclusions.
She knelt before the altar, crossed herself, and turned. She said, ‘You needn’t worry, Father, that any of the patients were involved, or that any of them suffered radioactive contamination. What you’re looking at now is impossible. But it happened. That is the same animal that I took with Neil to the lab … No, wait! Yesterday Neil and I took the jeep up on the moor. There was a huge garbage dump — it must have been a kilometre square — just a huge place full of dirty objects made out of PVC. Neil wanted to ensure the safety of Dr Schuber’s patients. On his mind must have been the idea of finding the dangerous radio-isotope all the time … not exactly consciously, but somewhere.
‘I do not pretend to understand how it was that the one rabbit on Dartmoor that had eaten the capsule was the one that … I am sorry, you are not going to believe me but I must say … the one that got plastic cancer. But plastic cancer belongs in the future … I have heard it on the backwards tape many times. If the animal hadn’t died of plastic cancer it would have died — of course — from radiation sickness. The one thing that Neil overlooked — because he could not have known what was really happening — was the danger to him and to me … We both handled the poor animal as it ..’ She couldn’t go on. ‘So Neil and I might get ill. I do not know how much radiation we got from the capsule that was inside the rabbit. Perhaps not enough to kill.’
There was a long silence. Stillwell and Braknell exchanged glances; then the priest gestured for Braknell to leave. Braknell went as far as the ante-room and picked up the phone. In the chapel, nothing was said. Stillwell put an arm round the girl’s shoulder to comfort her. Echoing from the ante-room could be heard Braknell talking urgently about radiation detectors.
Eventually, Stillwell said, ‘I know you believe you are telling me the truth.’
‘You think I’m ill.’
‘Yes, my dear. I do.’
She said, ‘Always your credulity stops only one breath short of the truth. Yet can you imagine how it is possible to manufacture, in one solid piece, a plastic rabbit, complete down to its entrails? You say you cut it in half. I heard you. You must have seen its organs — complete in every detail. I am no expert on methods of manufacture, Father, but how do you construct a mould that will contain all that detail, yet produce the model in one single piece?’
Stillwell said dispassionately, ‘Without realizing what you were doing, you must have switched the model for the rabbit yourself.’
‘And what about the radio-cobalt it swallowed?’
‘It didn’t, Sister.’
‘I placed it there?’
‘Look at the burn on your hands!’
‘I nursed the animal all the way from the middle of Dartmoor. Father, what made you bring the toy rabbit into your chapel? Do you not realize — do you not see that you must have sensed what it once suffered?’
‘I don’t know what to think.’
‘Yes, you do. You think I too suffer from schizophrenia.’
Stillwell said calmly. ‘Of that I have no doubt. Unfortunately it leaves one question outstanding, doesn’t it? — What is schizophrenia? Why is there a kind of metalogic running all the way through these terrifying events?’
‘Father, we will have to find out. Neil now knows that the PONEM is not dead. Far from it. The PONEM has spontaneously stepped up its own power and is fast running unstable. Do you know what that could mean?’
‘You tell me.’
‘The annihilation of existence.’
11
Panic struck Central Pool as if it were a tangible entity, a visible force that rolled everything before it into a s
wiss roll of events gone mad.
Dr Rone, on his rounds in the Deviants’ Wing, tried to tread water in a flood of buckled time. Certain things seemed real: for instance there was no Screaming any more; and the inmates seemed to have returned to their normal human state.
For a few swings of the pendulum Rone found himself confronted, eye to eye, with the woman who had once been a writer. But no longer were her features shrivelled into a syphilitic travesty of the human face. Nor did she show any sign of retribution toward him. She should have been at his throat. Instead, she performed an impossible transformation; a nucleonic metamorphosis into her component molecules as if she were a sample under an electron microscope and as if he were the observer.
For a few stretched seconds he heard her voice as it had been — a serene, courageous invocation in the name of human rights, uttered on teleflickers years before. Then the voice was consumed by some element of space/time which sucked it into peaceful oblivion.
As Rone looked about him he could see that ordinary structures — like Central Receptor — were crazily inside out, so that his eyes and brain could not perceive and identify the irresolvable jigsaw that visibly quaked and then unbuilt itself, as if some child’s pile of bricks were being dissolved until there was nothing left on the floor.
Nothingness entered fleeing human beings and then froze their trogs into solid streaks of tissue which criss-crossed each other like the images produced by a camera whose shutter had been left open. And with this, Rone’s own consciousness became a continuous band of thought stretching through the forty-six years of his life; experience stacked upon experience, memory on memory, vice on vice. His Total Person was a chunk of time-ice, frozen into a lump-like effigy of cumulative evil. This effigy screamed itself down to nothingness; but unlike the sufferers in the Deviants’ Ward there was never to be any peace in it. Rather did the terrible cry find a tunnel in Time through which to resound but never escape. Into the spiralling universe entered, then, the essence of hell, which ceased to be animate and became — simply — an idea, a concept, a theoretical model for the creation of eternal doom.
To Neil, a voice was discernible and it came from this same time tunnel. The voice persisted, saying the same words over and over Who am I, where am I, why am I?
The Prayer Machine Page 23
