The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 17

by Stephen Jones

  “Okay. We’ll leave it at that then,” said the woman, who was far more attractive than Erik thought she deserved to be. “What’s next on the agenda?”

  Some paperwork rustled as the bed elevated to its former position. After a short pause the man said, “We’d need to take a look in D12.”

  “Surely there’s not a problem there?”

  “Seems to be. Mr Jonette, one of our first red card self-referrals, wants access to his bank account.”

  “Oh, does he,” the woman said. “We’ll see about that.”

  “He is on your list, isn’t he?”

  “And on Dr Mallory’s. We share him.”

  “That must be highly satisfactory for you both,” the man said.

  Erik tried again. “What about me?” he attempted to shout, but it came out as a whimper. His tongue felt shrivelled and dry, and his mouth huge. “I want food. Water. Please.”

  “I believe he might be hungry, Dr Stranghaver. We might allow him a little nourishment,” the man suggested.

  “I’ll permit that, since you say he’s worth preserving. But put something in whatever you give to keep him placid. Let’s have some peace and quiet in here.”

  The pair of them left Erik’s bedside. From some way off Dr Stranghaver said, “This Jonette person. I haven’t been able to get to see him for some days. What’s your assessment? How is he progressing?”

  “He’s coming along very nicely,” the man said. “As you know, his case is extraordinarily complicated. Delightfully so. A prize patient. He’s something of a prodigy, in my opinion.”

  “There’s no danger that he might be making any kind of limited recovery, then? I was somewhat concerned. He was looking a little better on my last visit, and I couldn’t account for it.”

  “No. You’ll see for yourself. That was just a passing phase.”

  “Ah,” said Dr Stranghaver, well satisfied.

  Erik tried once more to give voice to a plea for assistance, but merely managed a sound like a dying crow’s last croak as their footsteps faded away.

  The bed descended again some time later. A young lady in a pale green uniform presented herself to Erik by bending towards him and offering him half a smile. Her mouth was in it but not her eyes which were troubled, possibly deranged.

  “I’m Christabel from C and C, the Care and Comfort Department,” she said. “You’re going to be fed, you lucky man.”

  Her plump arms and hands moved around him, making adjustments to equipment and parts of himself he couldn’t see. Again he tried to speak, and this time made such an alarming noise he scared himself and startled the girl from C and C.

  “Was that a cough? Are you choking?”

  Erik was able to shake his head from side to side just a little. He opened his mouth wide and manoeuvred his right hand up and back so he was able to point a finger down towards his throat. He poked out his bone-dry tongue.

  Christabel raised her eyebrows in incomprehension and shook her head back at him.

  “Ghhhhhaaa.” Erik snatched at one of her hands that was hovering above his chest and took firm hold of the wrist. He glared at the girl in what was intended to be his most appealing way, but that was probably terrifying. He struggled in the back of his throat and made a final effort to make noises that sounded something like one word:

  “Wah-er.”

  “Ah, so that’s it,” Christabel said, making no attempt to release her hand. “I don’t know about that. I was authorised to feed and sedate you, but no mention was made of any kind of liquid refreshment.” She reached with her free hand for a clipboard attached to the end of his bed, glanced at it, held it up above his face and said, “See for yourself. That box where it says, NO LIQUIDS – it’s been ticked.”

  It seemed to Erik that the girl was losing her solidity or had become enveloped in a light mist, and he realised there were tears in his eyes. He shut them and let go of her wrist.

  The envoy from the C and C Dept. turned and walked away from him and out of sight. Immediately after she’d gone, Erik felt the seeds of a warm feeling deep inside him that seemed, literally, to be putting out roots in his guts and spreading repletion and well-being throughout his body. Before long the inside of his mouth started to dampen. Greedily he began to pump away under his tongue until his mouth filled with saliva, whereupon he subsided, relaxed and drifted away until he fell over the edge of something and stumbled into oblivion, or oblivion tumbled into him.

  A familiar face stared down at him – that of the man who had first apprehended him in the dome.

  “So what do we know about him, Hendrix?” said Dr Stranghaver, invisible to Erik because she was standing behind the head-end of his bed. He tipped his neck back, but a pillow prevented him from moving far so he still couldn’t catch sight of her. What he could see, under the roof of the great dome, was the tops of the tall plants that took up the central space of the floor. Many more of them had burst into garish blossom since he had last seen them, which could have been days ago. A sweet, sweaty, but not thoroughly unpleasant smell, that was probably their scent, hung heavy as a mist in the otherwise clear, warm air.

  “Enough,” the man called Hendrix said. Peculiarly muffled echoes of the Doctor’s loud voice and his own higher-pitched one rattled and clattered round the dome. “Erik John Condon is no one of any importance. Runs a second-hand book business from home, mostly through the Internet. Some of the stuff he specialises in is at the seedy end of the market, but not illegal. He and his customers prefer to remain anonymous. PO box numbers, that sort of thing. He’s capable of setting up some ingeniously unorthodox financial dealings. Otherwise he’s harmless enough.”

  “So, no close outside contacts there. What about family? Friends?”

  “A few old friends, mostly rackety types like himself, scattered about the country. Loners, all of them. One of them is a patient here, of course. Not sure what’s going on there. I suspect that Jonette in D12 could better be described as a customer. As to family, Condon’s mother died years ago and his demented father is embedded in a council-run home in Solihull. Our subject was married but there were no children. His wife left him to move in with a building contractor in Brisbane, Australia, which is about as far away from England as you can get, so she won’t miss him.”

  The gorgeous Dr Stranghaver moved around the bed to a position where the dumbfounded Erik could observe the front of her from the waist up. He could see, hear, and even smell her, and perceived everything else he normally could, but remained incapable of reacting to any stimuli. Speechless, immobile and thoroughly sedate, he lay on his back and watched the play of the world around him. He felt he was in a dream, but was fairly sure he wasn’t.

  Dr Stranghaver was holding against her breasts a young leaf, like those sprouting from the nearby plants. From time to time, in a thoughtless, distracted way, she tore small pieces off the leaf, rolled them between her fingers, pressed them in to her mouth, and chewed them slowly.

  “No women in his life now, then?” she said.

  She offered the leaf to her companion but he shook his head, having already produced the remains of one like it from his pocket. He set about tearing off a strip for his own consumption.

  “None have turned up so far in our investigations,” he said, “which is peculiar because he had a reputation as a small town Casanova in the past and he’s a good-looking man.”

  “You think so, Hendrix?”

  “Was before we got to him, I mean. I’ve seen photographs.”

  “Before he got to us,” Dr Stranghaver corrected. “What about money?”

  Hendrix pushed a plug of green leaf into his mouth. “There must be some somewhere,” he said as he munched. “His business was successful as these things go. Not much to show in his bank accounts, though.”

  “We have the keys to his house, don’t we?”

  “That’s being taken care of. There’s the building itself, of course, and its contents, including some valuable-looking books, though de
aling with that will all take time and a lot of work from our legal department. But there were no money bags hidden under the mattress, if that’s what you mean.”

  “How disappointing. Perhaps we ought to hold him upside down and shake him. See what falls out.”

  Hendrix considered for a moment then said, “The sort of drugs you’re thinking of, administered as an effective dose, would almost certainly be fatal in his condition.”

  “I’m aware of that, Hendrix. Maybe we should allow him to get a little better, then. He needs to pay his way and get his name up on our Plaque of Patrons if he is to stay around, and we can’t let him go. After all, he’s well on the way to becoming incurable now and the kind of treatment he’s receiving here doesn’t come cheap. Our team of outreach workers are telling us to expect an influx of new and highly promising and rewarding patients during the next weeks. Bed space will be at a premium before we know it and there’ll be no room for slackers. There is no contingency plan for creatures like this who drift in off the street.”

  “Perhaps we should devise one?”

  Dr Stranghaver tore off another, larger section of leaf. “I’m shocked by your defeatist attitude, Hendrix. I’m no longer sure you’re the right person to liaise with Administration over the handling of security on the Unit. Perhaps, coming on top of your many medical duties, the responsibility is over-stretching you.”

  “I think it’s time I sampled some of the petals from those newly opened buds,” Hendrix said, gazing wistfully up at the highest parts of the spreading jungle of potted herbage. “One or two of them may be just about ready.”

  “I’ll join you,” the doctor said. “My shift is over in five minutes.”

  “I see the ladder we ordered has arrived at last.”

  “Yes, but I’ve no head for heights.” Stranghaver giggled and the dome giggled back at her. “I’ll hold the steps so you can get to the blooms at the top.”

  Hendrix nodded enthusiastically. “Okay, let’s do it,” he said and clapped his hands, sending out round the walls of the dome a cascade of echoes that slowly drowned in wave after wave of echoes of themselves. “Today’s inspection is completed,” he called to someone nearby. “Get the Establishment patients back to their designated sites. The couple without coloured cards are for disposal, of course. Remove them first.” He tapped Erik on the chest with a finger and looked across the bed at Dr Stranghaver. “What about this one, though?”

  “A green card for him. Have him taken to one of the wards. Reduce his medication by half. We’ll put him under a bit of pressure.”

  Erik saw her wink at Hendrix, who drew in his lips, nodded to her in a mock-solemn way and said, “I know just what you mean, Dr Stranghaver.”

  “Good morning, Mr Condon. How are you today?”

  Christabel from C and C. He remembered she had come for him while he had been watching the doctor and her companion harvesting petals high overhead in the dome, and had sped away with him down measureless corridors to a featureless ward where, after connecting him up to God-knows-what, she had left him. Though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the general purport of the conversation between Dr Stranghaver and her assistant, with the exception of a few scattered sentence fragments the rest had vanished like reflections on a lake into which someone had tossed a rock.

  Erik was seriously thinking about providing an answer to Christabel’s enquiry about his condition, but he soon realised she wasn’t waiting for one and anyway, he couldn’t speak, could he? Had he been able to do so, he would have told her he felt, well – different. For a start he felt scared now; fear sat on his chest, stared into his eyes, and told him nothing was right with him and everything was wrong. And, whereas he’d been drifting in a not too uncomfortable dream since he’d been escorted up to the fifth floor by the two burly porters, he now felt bruised, full of sharp aches and pains and wide awake. Too wide awake, in fact – so very wide awake he suddenly felt like screaming.

  “Ahhhhhh,” he said, and flipped the top half of his body up into the sitting position. Tubes were snatched out of his arms by the sudden movement and blood began to flow from the entry wounds they had vacated. A grey warm liquid poured down from one tube fixed to a steel stand next to his bed and soaked the mattress beneath him as it swung back and forth in the air.

  Here was work for Christabel from C and C and she threw herself efficiently at it. She got Erik in some kind of arm lock and forced him back into the horizontal position while at the same time sliding the needles at the ends of the tubes back into place in his body with her free hand. Erik struggled against her attempts to hook him up to the machines again, and because he had been forced to lie in a pool of the warm, sticky liquid that was now pouring down over his face. But she was too much for him and easily held him down. It seemed that all members of staff in the Samuel Taylor Unit were highly trained in restraint techniques.

  Something Erik had done had set off an alarm bell. A few minutes passed and no one had come to the woman from C and C’s assistance, but by that time she didn’t need any. She had Erik under control.

  “Now don’t go giving me any more trouble,” she said, wagging a finger in front of his nose. “Cut up rough again and I’ll put you down and out. You’re only a green grade card. You’re not high priority.”

  “So I gather,” Erik said. “Sorry. But you gave me a rude awakening.” His voice seemed to be coming from deeper down in his chest than usual.

  “That’s how we do things in the ST Unit.”

  “How long have I been in this place?”

  “So, you’re talking again,” Christabel said. “Not heard a word from you before. You’ve got a weird voice.”

  “It’s not normally like that.”

  “They’ve done something to your chest. Can’t you feel the stitches?”

  “I feel as though I’ve been beaten all over.”

  “That’s what they all say first thing, when they come out of it.”

  “How long?” Erik repeated.

  “I don’t know if I can tell you.”

  “Oh, come on. What harm can it do?”

  “That’s not the point.”

  “Look on that clip-board on the end of the bed. Show me where it says I can’t be told how long I’ve been here.”

  To Erik’s surprise she picked up the board and studied it. “This is the eighth day,” she said. “They kept you in Probation for longer than most new patients.”

  “Probation?”

  Christabel disappeared and returned minutes later pushing a bed like the one Erik was stretched out on. “I’m going to switch you over, get you out of that mess you’ve made,” she said. “I don’t have to, so co-operate.”

  “Kind of you,” Erik said, as she edged him sideways. When he emerged from the soiled bedding and was being given a perfunctory bed bath, he discovered he was naked except for areas of his chest and stomach that were covered in heavy dressings and bandages, and that his body from the neck down was completely hairless.

  “I’ve lost weight,” he observed.

  Christabel, pulling clean sheets up over Erik on the clean bed, looked mildly embarrassed at this. “Well, yes, you’ve lost a few things. You’re not the man you were when you came in here.”

  “I’m not?”

  “No, you’ve been stripped down to basics.”

  This remark sent Erik’s fear and anxiety levels up to record levels.

  “I want my belongings,” he said. “My clothes, my wallet, my mobile. I need to make a call.”

  “Your personal effects are being kept safe in the Property Department,” Christabel said. “I’m off now. If there’s anything else you need just pull that cord and wait. And you’re not alone here, you know. There’re gentlemen in both the other beds. I expect they’ll introduce themselves when they feel like it.”

  Erik looked from one of these beds to the other. The nearest of them was somewhat shorter and narrower than the other. The body of the “gentleman” under
the blankets could have been that of an undernourished child of about twelve, with a large white, hairless head that was turned away from Erik. The other bed was an untidy sprawl of blankets with two long scraggy feet sticking out at the bottom. A pillow rested on the spot Erik calculated the head of the occupant might be, held in place by a bent arm and tightly grasping hand, also long and bony.

  As Christabel left, she switched off the ward’s main light so the room was only illuminated by tiny, low wattage lamps at the rear of each bed. The grey blank walls crept in a little closer and Erik was certain the ceiling had descended a foot or two. The heavy silence he’d experienced in other places he’d been held in the Unit, outside of the dome, returned, broken only by disquieting noises from the smaller of his two companions, whose quick, laborious breathing sounded like paper being crumpled in a plastic cup. Five minutes later, after Erik had established that there was no television or radio headphones attached to his bed; no aids to the passing of time at all, in fact; he started to experimentally move about. This was, as he anticipated, painful, particularly when he leaned forward and compressed his stomach and chest, but he found if he kept his spine straight and humped and bumped his torso carefully about he could swing his legs over the side of the bed and almost touch the floor with his feet. The tubes in his arms held him back at first, but he discovered that if he reached out on both sides with his arms there was enough give in the tubes for him to edge himself down a little further, which he did, until he was standing, arms outstretched, with his feet almost flat on the ground.

  “Christ Almighty!” someone said. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  The man in the messed-up bed had taken the pillow away from his head and was resting on his side with his chin on his bent arm staring goggle-eyed at Erik.

  Even in the dim light of the ward Erik was instantly certain he’d seen the man’s face before, and recently, too, though it was now much changed. Erik stared bleakly back. After a few seconds he remembered where and when he’d seen the person on the opposite bed. Now he was much thinner than he had been: his flattened bruiser’s nose and the scar tissue on his forehead were even more noticeable.