Inside the Whispers (Dr Samantha Willerby [Chilling Thriller] Series Book 1)

by A J Waines

  I moved on to articles about mind-control and found reports of torture techniques where individuals were kept in drug-induced comas for weeks and given electric shocks. I knew for a fact that nothing like that had happened to Con recently.

  It was all too extreme. It all sounded a bit old-fashioned too. What about more modern methods of programming people’s minds? Perhaps I should be researching illusionists or TV hypnotists?

  When the film ended Con got up, looking a little more animated and asked if I wanted to play a game of cards.

  ‘Sorry, Con. Not now.’

  ‘Coffee?’ he volunteered.

  ‘Go on, then.’

  He smiled, but it faded quickly. He leant against the doorframe. ‘Am I going mad?’ he said.

  ‘No. Of course not.’

  ‘I can’t get the fire out of my head. Why does it seem so real…? How can…?’ His questions dried up.

  ‘I don’t know.’ I cleared my throat. ‘I think you might have been involved in some weird brainwashing process.’

  ‘Oh, come on…’

  ‘I know it sounds crazy, but it’s as though you believe something bad has happened with every fibre of your body – and it hasn’t.’

  ‘But why would anyone want to cause something like this?’ He put his hands over his eyes.

  ‘Beats me,’ I sighed. ‘Did you have any extra tests at St Luke’s? Anything out of the ordinary you wouldn’t expect? Did you take part in any experiments?’ He shook his head vigorously.

  ‘Have you done any research for any hospital or university, at all – ever?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Have you been in any groups experimenting with drugs or—?’

  ‘Bloody hell, Sam – you’re beginning to sound like an SS officer.’ He stomped off to the kitchen. I went after him.

  ‘It’s really important, Con.’

  ‘No – no way. Not drugs. I’m not into any of that.’

  I grabbed his hand and tugged him towards me. ‘The main thing is to keep you safe until we know what to do about it.’

  Con returned to the television and I noticed the time: 9.50pm. Terry should have rung by now. I grabbed the phone and called his number. No reply. His phone wasn’t even switched on. This wasn’t good.

  ‘I’m going over to his flat,’ I said.

  ‘Oh for God’s sake, Sam, he’s probably in the pub and just forgotten.’

  ‘I can’t take that risk.’ I got straight on the phone to Miranda.

  ‘I’m already in bed,’ she grunted.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I’m bringing Con back to Balham – can you keep an eye on him?’

  ‘What again? I was nearly asleep.’

  I squeezed my eyes shut willing her to help me. ‘Terry hasn’t phoned – something’s wrong – I’ll bring Con right over in a taxi.’

  I heard her swear before putting the phone down.

  Miranda opened the door to Con’s flat twenty minutes later, in skimpy baby-doll pyjamas.

  ‘Why don’t you call the police?’ she said, as she kicked the door shut with her bare foot. ‘This is getting completely out of hand.’

  ‘The police can’t do anything. There’s no crime. There’s no real evidence of anything.’

  ‘Well – maybe you’re overreacting. Have you thought of that?’

  I didn’t have time to wrestle with her. Terry might be about to do something stupid at any moment. Con gave a loud sigh and sloped off to his bedroom.

  ‘Listen,’ I said firmly, ‘just make sure you watch him the whole time.’

  ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘Just do it.’ I softened my voice as much as I could. ‘Please.’

  I gave her a peck on the cheek and ran.

  There was no answer at Terry’s address in Brixton. I’d tried his phone several times, but it was still switched off. I stood outside for a while, not knowing what else to do. Perhaps Con was right and Terry had gone to his local for a drink.

  I crossed the road and walked past a cluster of shops until I came to the nearest pub. It was rowdy inside and no one looked particularly friendly. I did a quick scan of the place and made a hasty exit. I tried several more in the area. No joy.

  I was walking back to the bus stop, when my phone rang.

  ‘I don’t know how it happened,’ came a breathy voice. ‘One minute he was sitting there, the next he…’

  ‘Miranda, slow down.’

  ‘Con’s given me the slip,’ she whimpered. ‘I only turned my back for ten seconds…and his jacket’s gone…’

  Shit! I fought the white noise inside my head. ‘Okay, okay – stay put.’

  I flagged down a taxi and got straight on the phone to Danny.

  ‘No – he’s not here,’ he said.

  ‘Let me know straight away if he turns up or gets in touch, will you? Can you put some feelers out in the theatre crowd?’

  ‘Will do,’ he promised.

  I tried several other numbers, but continued to draw a blank. Everything around me felt like it was sinking under water.

  When I got back to Balham, Miranda was pacing up and down, an empty glass of whisky in her hand.

  I blocked her path to the bottle. ‘That’s not going to help,’ I said bluntly.

  She reached round me and snatched it up. ‘You haven’t got a clue have you?’

  ‘What do you mean? Clue about what?’

  ‘Oh – forget it,’ she groaned, turning away.

  ‘What happened to Con?’ I said. She was having trouble focusing and swayed slightly when she tried to stand still. This was all I needed.

  ‘After you left, I made him a hot chocolate – I’d really woken up by then.’ She hiccupped and carried on. ‘The kitchen bin was full so I went down to take the rubbish out. Honestly, Sam, I was only gone for a—’

  ‘Then what?’ I said, grabbing her wrist.

  ‘Ow – you’re hurting me.’ I let her go. ‘He must have been waiting for the chance to get out. I didn’t hear anything. By the time I came back he’d gone.’ She looked up, her eyes rolling all over the place.

  ‘Go to bed,’ I said, fighting to curb my anger. ‘And get yourself a bucket.’

  It was late. Terry and Con had both gone AWOL on ‘suicide watch’. They could be anywhere. I rang Con’s phone again, but it went straight to voicemail.

  Panic was fizzing inside my head. I tried Danny once more, but he had nothing to report. I’d called the police as soon as Con disappeared, but I knew they wouldn’t act until more time had gone by. There was nothing else to do, except go home.

  I couldn’t sleep that night. I didn’t dare take sleeping tablets in case I missed the phone. I couldn’t get comfortable in bed. I kept swallowing hard, feeling like I was about to choke. I’d been furious at first when Con had given Miranda the slip, but my rage had curdled into an acute sense of foreboding. I stared for hours at the changing shadows on the ceiling, primed at any moment for a phone call from the police to break the unwieldy silence.

  I’m afraid we’ve found him – but…

  I couldn’t bear it any longer; the sound of the clock was boring into my head like an interminable drip, drip, drip and my body was twitching, ready to get on with something. I got up and padded into the sitting room. My laptop was where I’d left it, still switched on.

  I leant over the screen, my blurry nocturnal vision turning the text into meaningless words. As I stuffed a cushion behind me on the comfy chair, I found myself humming the song I’d heard earlier on the radio when Con was in the bath.

  …this means nothing to me…

  Suddenly, I was sitting upright, my hand over my mouth. My pulse was throbbing through my fingers.

  I entered the words that had been swirling around in my mind for days into the search bar and pressed go. Nearly two million hits came up – far too many.

  I narrowed it down, adding the words, Tube, fire, tunnel and fatalities. Just like the song – it meant nothing to me, but…

  I
scrolled down the list and there it was.

  Chapter 25

  I’ve been sitting, staring at the floor for nearly an hour. Something big is going to happen, I can feel it in the air.

  It’s escalating, mushrooming right in front of my eyes. Any minute this catastrophe is going to blow up in my face and my life won’t be worth living. I don’t know how much more I can take. I’ve never felt so claustrophobic; it’s as if my whole body is too small for me and my bones are getting crushed inside my own skin. I need to escape, but ultimately, there’s nowhere to go.

  People are starting to put the pieces together and before long they’re going to have the full picture. There’s no point in regrets now. It’s gone too far. I should have known that no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t contain this.

  No one knows the truth and it’s got to stay that way. I’ve got to hold my nerve and carry on as if nothing has happened and hope I can cover my tracks.

  Needless to say, I’m genuinely sorry for the distress I’ve caused. But the damage is done. It’s gone too far – it’s too late. It will have to run its course and we’ll all have to cope with the backlash.

  That’s the problem; innocent bystanders always get hurt.

  Chapter 26

  As soon as I heard the world outside my window coming to life the next morning, I rang Con. His mobile went to voicemail, then Miranda answered his landline with a grunt.

  ‘No, he isn’t…’ she groaned, before putting the phone down.

  I tore over to Piccadilly, trying his mobile every few minutes. I tried Terry’s too – still nothing.

  The bookshop didn’t open until eleven-thirty – I’d forgotten today was Sunday. I don’t know how many times I walked to Green Park and back, before someone finally came to open the doors.

  My Kindle was on the blink and after about thirty tries last night, it wouldn’t download the book I’d found online. Terror Underground – a novel by Dexter Beaumont. Published earlier that year, it was about a group of tourists trapped on the Tube during a London terrorist campaign. Hundreds of online reviewers had given it five stars for realism.

  I rushed through to the crime fiction department and started scouring the shelves.

  A…B…Ba…Be… I flipped the spines to one side as I went, out of breath as though I’d been running. Bennett, Brontë – no, I must have gone past it. I tracked back, names turning into black smudges as I jumped from spine to spine too quickly. I stood back from the shelf in dismay. It wasn’t there. I was about to pounce on an assistant, when I spotted a book lying on its side above the Cs. Got it.

  I took the novel to a nearby table and opened it at the first page. There was no prologue; it began with a scene describing a man in prison. I flicked through passages set in an airport, a lowlife bar in Soho, a lift in a tower block, looking for specific words and phrases. I reached the end of chapter seven and found nothing, then as I turned the page my pulse gathered momentum.

  I spotted the word smoke. I slowed down and read properly. Sure enough, the next chapter opened with passengers trapped in a Tube station; a bomb had been detonated, the train had moved off and the smoke was starting to mushroom into the corridors.

  I read two more pages before I had to stop and take a slow breath. The words, the phrases were uncannily familiar: passengers scrambling up the escalators, the ticket hall suddenly engulfed in flames, the crush at the barriers, coats on fire, people blinded by smokescreens and flames, not knowing how to get out.

  I laid out my handwritten session notes and the transcript of the tape from Liverpool Street alongside the novel, crisscrossing back and forth between them. The similarities were astonishing. Identical in some cases: the heat through the floor, the screams and hysteria. Then, there it was – final proof of an undisputable connection.

  Characters in the book spoke of the terrible burning smell and the words scorched oil flashed up at me from the page. Two of the key words I’d put into the search engine last night. This was no coincidence. I could almost hear Jane’s plaintive tones, Jake’s nervous croak. It seemed as if my patients had read these passages from the book and then relived them as nightmares.

  I stared at the open pages, transfixed. This was the ‘script’ I’d begun to imagine might actually exist. I was dumbfounded. But how did it become brainwashing material? And why would anyone want to do that?

  I knew then that this was no random accident. It was coordinated, somehow. It could only indicate one thing. What was happening to these people had to be deliberate. The same story, the nightmares, the feelings of guilt – they had all been manufactured.

  This discovery was far worse than presuming the victims had been lying. This was pernicious and venomous, and somewhere behind the scenes, a mystery person was pulling the strings. Someone who was controlling this entire macabre dance.

  I went straight to the cash desk and bought the book. I asked the assistant how many copies had been sold, but as soon as I said it, I knew it was a futile question. She told me they’d sold over four hundred copies from that branch in the last month. I thought of all the bookshops in London and all the online outlets and knew there could be tens of thousands of readers, all around the world. The four victims I knew about might only be the tip of the iceberg.

  I wandered outside, pressing the book to my chest as if it was a wad of banknotes. I needed to get a grip. This was only one piece in a complex puzzle. You don’t suddenly start believing you’ve been through terrifying fictional experiences just by reading a novel!

  I tried to take stock. I’d discovered what could be the source material, but what now? How had the ‘mind-twister’ managed to persuade normal healthy individuals that they had lived through this fictional disaster? Who’d had the audacity to perform such a trick?

  On the way home, I looked up Dexter Beaumont on my phone. He lived in Manchester and had started writing after he attended a short course on crime fiction. Nothing about his website mentioned neurology or connections to a hospital; he’d previously been a history teacher at a secondary school in Moss Side. Nevertheless, I sent him a message through his website, asking him to contact me with the answer to several questions.

  Next, I began a major ring-round of all the people I could think of who knew Con, starting with the theatre. Danny and another friend, Kadir, gave me a handful of numbers and it snowballed from there. I spoke to voicemails, got wrong numbers, got passed from pillar to post, but I kept calling. I asked if they knew anything about the book or about any unusual hypnosis groups or events.

  When I got back, I looked up Con’s Facebook profile and gathered names from there. By mid-afternoon, I’d pressed my phone against my right ear so tightly, it was red raw.

  Back at work on Monday morning, the first thing I did was ask Debbie for the admission data for all four patients.

  While she was printing out the details I tried calling Con and Terry, but still couldn’t reach either of them. As soon as they reappeared, I was going to thrust the Dexter Beaumont novel in front of them both, in turn. I had high hopes they’d remember more once they saw the cover and read passages from it. That’s if they were still alive.

  Debbie handed me the sheets and left me at her desk while she answered a colleague’s phone. I ran my finger down the first page. Jane LaSalle had been the first patient, ten weeks earlier, with burns after the chip pan fire. Then Con had needed stitches in the gash in his arm. Terry Masters was next, needing a skin graft for his elbow after falling from scaffolding at work, and finally Jake had been admitted with a torn ear after the car crash.

  So they’d all had injuries requiring surgery.

  I felt a weight press against my chest. All the injuries were the sort Leo might deal with. I took the printout to my office and logged on to the computer, then ran down the list of specialists at St Luke’s in reconstructive and cosmetic surgery. There were seventeen consultants at the hospital. Leo wasn’t the only one.

  I hurried back to Debbie and asked for the cons
ultation records for each patient. I needed to see exactly what appointments they’d had at the hospital. She gave me a batch of photocopied sheets.

  ‘Help yourself,’ she said, ‘you can keep those.’

  I checked the name of the consultant beside each one. Leo Hansson was listed beside Jane and Jake. I moved further down, hardly daring to breathe. Then I found Con’s name. Leo was the surgeon who had treated him, too. I’d never thought to ask. It gave me a nasty stab of shock.

  I moved down to Terry Masters and let out a little whimper of relief. There was a different consultant beside all his entries. My mouth twisted to one side.

  It meant Leo wasn’t the common denominator.

  On the way back to my office, I spotted Professor Schneider, wheeling a trolley with what looked like an EEG monitor on it towards the lift. My mind did a double-take. Was there a serious shortage of hospital porters? Otherwise, what was a cardiac surgeon doing with a device that records brainwave data?

  I remembered what Professor Monkton had told me in Cambridge about Schneider taking ‘diversions into neurology’ and made a snap decision to follow him. I saw him press the ‘up’ button on the lift, so I headed straight for the stairs.

  I dodged out of the stairwell on the next floor, only to see the arrow still flashing beside the lift, so I ran up another flight.

  I heard the high-pitched squeak of the trolley before I saw him and immediately side-stepped into an open doorway as he came past. Fortunately, the office was empty. The trolley trundled by and I followed at a distance, around two more corners, by a drinks’ machine, a stack of blankets and an abandoned wheelchair. It looked like Professor Schneider was taking the equipment to his own office. I hung back as I saw him disappear inside, then waited a moment before getting closer. The door was slightly ajar.