“Well, it’s been a pleasure speaking to you, Jasper,” Erik said. “I’m glad I took the time and trouble to look you up.” He picked up an apple from the selection of fruit on the bed. “Since you’ve shown no enthusiasm for my presents, I might as well eat this myself. I’ve had no lunch.”
“I’m on a strict diet,” Jasper said, worming his feet further down under the blankets. “Take what you like.”
“I don’t think I’m going to wait to be shown the way out,” Erik said. “I’ll have a look around before I go.”
“You’d be unwise to do that, Erik.”
“Oh, would I? Why? I’m beginning to find this place interesting.”
“In what way?”
“All that money spent and nothing much seems to be going on, for instance. And that at a time when there’s supposed to be a desperate shortage of hospital beds in the county.”
“But it’s none of your business, Erik’ ” Jasper said, his weak voice strained with emotion. “Who do you think you are? Some kind of whistle-blower?”
“And then there’s you, Jasper. You interest me. You always have done.”
“I wish I could return the compliment, if that’s what it is.”
“Professionally speaking, of course, your interests interest me.”
“Oh, that’s it, is it?”
“What are you doing for reading matter in here? I don’t see any books around, and I don’t imagine they’d have much of your sort of thing in the hospital library. Though maybe they do. Anyway, I came upon a couple of well-illustrated titles I know you’ve been searching for the other day. Would you like me to bring them in?”
“So, it’s money you’re after.”
“There’s no hurry for payment. Any time soon will do.”
“Let me tell you, once more and for all time, Erik, I have no further use for you or your – merchandise. I thought I’d explained that before.”
“It’s no wonder people are worried about you, Jasper.”
“Nonsense. I don’t believe you. Why should anyone be concerned about me?”
“You’ve cut yourself off from everyone you knew recently, all your old friends, including Carol, who must be heartbroken—”
“That’s the result of a misunderstanding between us. She was assuming too much.”
“— and now you’ve somehow managed to get yourself incarcerated in this place, where you can indulge, in solitary splendour, in the pleasure of your illness and your voyeuristic obsession with surgical implements and procedures to your heart’s content.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“And don’t you forget it was me who kept you supplied with those – well, let’s say dubious books down the years.”
“Very much to your profit.”
“Anyway, I can’t see any sign that your stay here has done you any good at all,” Erik said as he got up and moved to the door. “In fact, you look a lot worse than you ever did.”
“I’ll tell whoever comes to answer my call that you’re on the loose out there. There are cameras everywhere, so you won’t get far.”
Erik looked at his watch. Almost three already.
“Get well soon, Jasper,” he said. “That’s not just from me, it’s from everyone who ever cared about you.”
“You bastard.”
Erik took a last look around the bleak, blank-walled little room, then walked quickly out into the corridor. He could hear distant footsteps approaching from the right so he turned left, the way he’d come. On his way to Jasper’s ward he’d noticed a couple of arched passages leading inwards towards the dome. When he reached the first of them he crossed over and stepped along it.
The atmosphere became a little warmer as he approached the dome, and once again there was an odour of vegetation in the air which grew heavier and more pungent as he advanced. The origin of this became apparent as soon as he walked out onto the floor of the dome. The central area was full of dark green exotic plants with huge uplifted leaves and numerous tendrils that hung down from the main stems and over the sides of the black-glazed stoneware jars they were potted in. Many of these tendrils had already crawled some distance across the floor around the jars and had reached out for and embraced each other in a grip that looked tight and relentless. Most of the plants were topped with fat buds, a few of which had started to burst open to permit the violet and orange flowers within to partially unfurl. A light cloud hung around the lower halves of the plants like an early morning mist.
A board on a little easel by the pots announced that:
These
Oroborelium Plants
are a gift to the
SAMUEL TAYLOR TRUST
from
THE PORLOCK FOUNDATION
Under the last words were printed the date of a day about three weeks earlier.
In among the nearest of the roots Erik could see a number of small, dark, sausage-shaped pellets with slightly pointed ends. At first he thought they must be seeds from the plants above, but the plants were in flower and seeds formed after blossoms died. Since the plants had only been in position such a short time the pellets could not be seeds remaining from the previous season. Erik dropped a few of them into his pocket for consideration later and walked on.
He took a bite out of the apple he was carrying, that he had purloined from Jasper’s sickbed. It tasted foul – there was no juice in it, and the piece he had bitten off sat in his mouth and resisted the action of his teeth, like a tiny over-stuffed cushion. He spat the fragment out into his hand and hurled the apple into the thicket of potted plants where it landed with a noise like a hardball hitting concrete. The sound echoed and amplified in a most peculiar way, as though someone was thwacking a large muffled drum inside a much bigger one, and the beat of this continued to roll around the sides of the dome for a surprising length of time. As it subsided, a man in a long white coat appeared from somewhere on the far side of the thicket of plants. He was wearing white plimsolls so his feet made no din as he approached. He stopped and, with one hand on his hip and the other plucking at his chin, stood and stared speculatively at Erik.
“You are Mr Frank?” he said, loudly enough for his voice to set off another round of echoes in the freakish acoustical confusion of the dome’s interior.
Erik shook his head. “The name’s Condon.”
“You’ve come to be interviewed?”
“Definitely not.”
While the room was still ringing with reverberations from this conversation, the man took a few steps to the side, to where Erik’s apple had come to rest, and briefly gave the remains of the fruit his full attention. “Is this yours?” he said.
“It was.”
“It’s not from our kitchen. It has a strange label on it. Has it been brought in from outside this establishment?”
Erik agreed that it had.
After hunkering carefully down, the man pulled a roll of small plastic bags from his trouser pocket, tore one off, tucked his hand inside it, drew the apple up into it, then turned the bag inside out. “What are you doing here?” he said, as he tied a knot in the top of his little package and dropped it into a nearby bin.
“I called in to visit a patient and got lost trying to find my way out.”
“Lost? You don’t look lost to me. I saw you come in. You appeared to be finding your way about in a confident way.”
“Okay, not exactly lost then, but taking a look around. I’ve heard so much about this place I couldn’t resist checking it out a little, while I was here.”
“I see.”
“There’s no problem, is there?”
“I very much regret that publicity. We all do here.”
“But this is a public building after all, built with public money. Or some of it was, anyway. I’m a member of the public, so . . .”
“Did you manage to locate the person you had come to visit?”
“With some difficulty, yes.”
“And where, exactly, did you find him or h
er?”
Something in the man’s voice and the way he looked as he asked for this information made it a question too far for Erik. He decided it was time to prevaricate.
“I’m not sure. It must have been quite a way from here. I’ve forgotten the number of the ward.”
“It doesn’t matter. We can easily trace your movements since you entered the unit.”
Erik had had enough of the man. “That’s fine then, isn’t it? I’ll leave you to get on with doing that. Right now, if you’ll move aside.”
Even though Erik was free to move in all directions but forward, that was the one way he wanted to go, because the man in the white jacket had stepped purposely in front of him, apparently to stop him doing so. It was a threatening and slightly ridiculous gesture that Erik, already irritated by the man’s persistent and, he considered, impertinent questioning, felt he could not ignore.
He said, “Get out of my way.”
The man shook his head. “I’m afraid you’re not free to leave. We can’t allow it.”
Erik was on the point of saying something foolishly melodramatic like, “Try and stop me,” when he became aware, too late, that somebody was standing close behind him. Two people were, in fact. Each of them grabbed one of his arms and jerked them backwards. Then both his knees were bent by pressure from behind and, still partly supported by the hands of his assailants, he slumped like an unstrung puppet to the floor. After a few moments one of the men standing above him leaned down to take measure of his condition and said, “You’re not in any pain, I hope?”
Erik thought about it. “None at all. You’re obviously expert at what you do. I feel fine.”
“You can get up now, sir, if you want to,” said the other man who had floored him. Both of them were a good few inches taller and wider than Erik. They were dressed in long, loosely-buttoned drab overalls. Hospital porters with special qualifications in protection and security, Erik guessed. There was probably a well-equipped gym in the building where they were encouraged to work out.
As Erik climbed to his feet, a phone bleeped in the breast pocket of the white coat worn by the man who had earlier interrogated him. Whatever the message for him was, it must have been urgent because, after a few quietly spoken words of instruction to the two in overalls, the first man stalked off and away down one of the corridors leading out of the dome.
“What now?” Erik said, giving the porters a dog-like and he hoped beguiling smile. He’d decided that though they certainly were not on his side, it would be as well to try to give the impression he was on theirs. Though built like brick buildings, they were polite enough and seemed to have whatever aggressive tendencies they might have – that may have caused them to choose their potentially violent line of employment – well under control. There could be no harm in trying to befriend them, and no point in antagonising them.
“We’re going to escort you to the labs,” one of them said.
“Labs? What labs?”
“Them. There.” The man pointed to a floor above the one they were on. Its inner walls, Erik realised, supported the weight of the many huge sheets of curved glass that formed the vast bubble of the dome that stretched above them. He had not been aware of the existence of a fifth floor before, and had seen no stairs leading up to it.
“And what sort of labs would those be?”
“All kinds.”
“Why do I have to go there, do you think?”
“I expect you’re going to have some tests done.”
“Tests?”
While Erik was absorbing the possible implications of this prediction, the two men decided it was time to leave. One of them walked ahead of him and the other behind until, after a short distance, they were on the curving corridor on the outer rim of the building, where Erik had earlier called on Jasper Jonette. The leading man came to a stop, motioned to Erik to do the same. Then, after fumbling about clumsily with his thumb, he managed to make contact with an almost invisible button on the wall in front of him.
“In you get,” he said, when the lift door slid back.
Erik hesitated. The man behind pushed him firmly forward.
As he entered the lift, Erik saw that in the corridor behind him a number of patients, still in their beds, were being wheeled out of their wards by spick-looking female orderlies. They were all moving towards the passages that led to the dome.
Erik thought he might have spotted Jasper’s head on one of the beds but didn’t have time, before the lift doors closed, to be certain.
Erik had been staring at the ceiling for a long time and wanted to look at something, anything, else. But he couldn’t move his head to either side more than a fraction of an inch because it felt as though it had been set in a vice. In fact, the only parts of his body he could change the position of were his arms, or that part of them below the elbows. If he lifted his hands, he’d discovered, he could just about see the tips of his fingers up in the air in front of him, and he waggled them every few minutes to demonstrate to himself that he had control over something, if not very much.
The rest of his body was restricted, when he tried to move, as though it was weighed down from above rather than held in position from below. Pressure on his chest made breathing uncomfortable. He found that if he made himself relax this didn’t give him much trouble, his lungs just took in a little less air than they would like to have done, but it’s not easy to relax physically when you are in a state of extreme mental confusion. Erik was lost and alone, and he had no idea how he’d got that way. There was a blank in his life.
One moment he’d been sitting in a chair in a small room with an EMERGENCY sign over the door, close to the exit of the lift that had taken him and his captors to the fifth floor, submitting himself to the taking of a blood sample from his arm by another man in a white coat. He’d been told it was a precautionary measure, for his own protection, and he had removed his jacket, rolled up his sleeve readily enough, and offered his arm for the needle. The next thing he knew, here he was, locked in position somehow on a hard high bed, with his nose a couple of feet from the ceiling. Because of this elevation he could only see a small area of the ceiling, so he had no idea how big or small was the room he was in.
He had no idea what space of time separated those two moments that had taken him in and out of consciousness, but he felt very hungry so assumed he’d missed a few meal times. There were tubes hanging around him that he guessed were probably plugged into him, but none of them could have been drip-feeding him. His stomach told him that as it whined and growled in protest at his dereliction of it.
Apart from the complaints of his gut and the catch of his own breathing, there was nothing else to listen to. All was quiet on every front. Erik was certain he was on his own in whatever space he occupied. And he’d been in his present predicament how long, since he’d regained consciousness? Hours, and many of them, or so it seemed.
Later, when he was trying unsuccessfully to consume time by sleeping, he heard footsteps approaching his bed. Very quiet footsteps made by rubber-soled shoes like those the man who had confronted him in the dome had been wearing.
They drew close and stopped. A woman said, “Dr Mallory is of the opinion we might have problems with this one. We need to be a lot more careful. I don’t want any more like him turning up.”
Erik thought her mouth must be very close – a few inches down from his left ear.
A man said, “None of us were aware that those signs had been put up this morning. Some overzealous meddler in the main body of the hospital took it upon themselves to do it.”
“They’ve been removed now, though?”
“Of course. I told Administration emphatically that we won’t be ready to open to the public for some time.”
“A long time. Tell them that.”
“I also suggested there might be a problem with some mild form of infection here in the Unit, something we had pretty well under control but that we don’t want to talk too much about. Mustn’t
put the public at risk, etc. Best to keep the place in purdah for a while, without imposing an actual quarantine. I thought a few brightly coloured tapes in strategic positions across the corridors would do the trick. The Hospital Manager saw the sense of that at once. He’s well aware if any suggestion that the slightest thing was wrong here got out, there could be more trouble with the sort of people we had waving banners out front. A lot more. They understood that in Administration. Apologised, even, about the direction signs, and promised that whoever put them up will be disciplined. They’re scared stiff of the slightest whiff of scandal.”
“I’m glad to hear it,” the woman said.
“What the fuck have you done to me?” Erik tried to shout but his voice was not much louder than a whisper.
The man said, “Do you want to take a look at him?”
The woman, as though her mind was on other things, who sounded as though she might be chewing gum, said, “No, I don’t think so. Not particularly.”
“Better give him a quick check out. Tick his card so those who care about these things know you’ve done your duty.”
“You’re right, of course.”
“Won’t take you a moment.”
The bed and Erik descended slowly and smoothly with a hydraulic sigh. The top of two heads became visible, one on each side of him. They bent down together and he caught the briefest glimpse of their faces. He raised his hands to their highest extent and, to say hello, waved his fingers like a woman drying her newly polished nails.
The man, who had an amber moustache and a bald scalp, said, “He was fairly healthy when he came in but, as you can see from his chart, we’ve done most of the preliminary work on him already. Who knows, perhaps we’ll find a use for him?”
The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 17 Page 39
