After a few seconds the pain began to ease enough to take a shallow breath. Then another. Except now he felt the whole of his goddamn neck tingling with pins and needles, including his left arm. Which was kind of strange because he could still move his elbow and wrist and wiggle his fingers, but his shoulder right down to his fingernails had suddenly numbed as if he had been asleep on it or something. A hot, restless sleep too, because his brow was clammy and his mouth was dry like he had had a real horror of a nightmare. What’s more, his vision was starting to play up. The room had blurred so much he could barely make out anything in the dim light.
Goddamn it, he thought, he needed a Kwel-Amity. He needed one right now.
He scrunched his eyes to see if that would help, then opened them to some kind of sick joke. The room was spinning like a grownup carousel he didn’t want to be on. The drapes, the door, the bookshelves, the filing cabinets, every goddamn thing in the room was rotating and moving up and down in an unsynchronized, queasy gyration, slowly at first, then quicker and quicker as the tempo of the music increased…
…Music? Goddamn it, he really could hear something. Church bells on a Sunday morning call to service. Yet there was something wrong with them. They sounded, what, out of tune? Almost as if someone was striking a massive gong that had cracked or split, striking it over and over again, faster and faster until the noise was one continuous warble that wormed inside his head and made him want to crush his skull between his hands.
Whatever the hell was going on, he wanted an immediate end to it. He wanted to get off this goddamn ride and throw up. That’s what he really wanted to do. The burning in his chest. The numbness in his neck and arm. The gyrating furniture. The goddamn warbling. He needed to puke, and he needed a goddamn Kwel-Amity.
“Mr. DeVille!” Sarah said. “Are you all right? You look pale.”
He had only just heard her over the warbling. He glanced over and saw her riding the door as if it were a wooden horse, gyrating up and down and spinning with the rest of the room. Amazingly, her breasts weren’t moving. He half expected them to be bouncing all over the place. She also seemed to be holding something in her hand, something yellow and small. “G’off thagodd’m daw!” he said.
“I can’t understand you,” she said. “You’re slurring.”
Louis scrunched his eyes and opened them again. Sarah was still spinning with the room. “Get… off… that… goddamn… door!”
Sarah frowned and glanced over her shoulder. He was about to repeat himself when another flare struck him in the middle of the chest. It scorched up his neck to his chin, then down the deadened arm to the hand he was dangling over the armrest. At first he gasped. Then he groaned, a long withering ejaculation that sounded not too dissimilar to the warbling inside his head.
Sarah rushed to the desk. “Mr. DeVille! Are you sure you’re all right? Do you want me to call the paramedics?”
Louis sucked in a breath against the pain, held it for as long as he could, then let it out between his gritted teeth, long and slow, hissing steam from his internal boiler. He told her he didn’t need the goddamn paramedics. He needed a Kwel-Amity, a whole goddamn bottle of the stuff.
“I can’t hear you,” Sarah said. She was almost crying. “You’re slurring everything you say.”
He felt his chest, neck and left arm fizzing in the aftermath of the recent flare. Focusing on her cleavage seemed to help. “Kwel… Amity,” he said.
This time Sarah understood. She rushed to his side of the desk and opened the bottom drawer. From somewhere at the back behind the bottle of scotch she removed three drug bottles, then put them on top of the desk. “I thought you knew where I put the spare ones,” she said. Louis didn’t move, just stared at the bottles in disbelief. “Here, let me open one for you.”
He snatched the bottle from her hand and poured the entire contents into his burning gullet. Some of the little white pills spilled onto his desk and lap like popcorn, but most arrived at their intended destination and these he crunched greedily, ignoring the savage bitterness at the back of his mouth and the goggle-eyed surprise of his secretary. He didn’t care what he looked like. He had what he wanted. If only he could do something for his eyes. He could barely make out anything beyond the desk, just a swirl of darkness that was once his office. “Scotch!” he said to Sarah’s cleavage.
A pill shot out of his mouth across the table, gobbled by the black abyss. Sarah grabbed the liquor bottle, unscrewed the cap and handed it to him. When he took it he noticed that the yellow thing in her hand was a goddamn Post-It note. He poured the amber liquid into his mouth, crunching and grinding the pills into a sticky paste. Biting into a cake of soap-on-the-goddamn-rope would have tasted better. Worse, sticky foam began to dribble down his chin, but he kept crunching the pills in the hope they would start to do something pretty damn soon. The fire in his chest was starting to build again. The flares were coming in waves and the next one wasn’t too far away.
“I’m not sure this is the best time to tell you, Mr. DeVille,” Sarah said.
He could hardly hear anything she said now over the god-forsaken warbling. “Huh?” he said through a spray of foam.
“Your wife…”
“Whaddabout mar wife.” More dribble splattered onto the desk. At first he thought it was bird shit, then realized his mistake. He lifted his hand to wipe his chin, found that he didn’t have the energy, then let it fall to the side. The bottle of scotch dropped to the carpet. “Whadduz the ol cow wun now?”
“The hospital rang while you were on the other line.” Sarah was sobbing. She put the yellow Post-It note on the desk in front of him. “That’s their details,” she said. “You might want to ring them.”
He squinted at the memo, a yellow blur with illegible blue squiggles. Sarah hurried to the door that Louis could no longer see, disappearing into the darkness as if she had walked into shadow. He yelled after her, suddenly frightened at being alone. “You call them!” he said. “That’s what I pay you for.”
“Don’t you care about anyone? Not even the woman you’ve been married to for forty years?” She was yelling from somewhere in the darkness. “She’s dying! She’s taken an overdose. The doctors don’t think she’ll pull through.”
Suddenly, the warbling intensified into a deafening squeal and the greatest pain he had ever felt smashed through his chest in an explosion of heat and flesh and bones. Sarah was still berating him, but he couldn’t make out anything she was saying. He sunk forward, collapsing face down onto what used to be his desk, now a chasm of nothingness. For some reason the last voice he heard wasn’t Sarah’s. It wasn’t even his. It was his wife’s.
“I was right, wasn’t I Louis?” Lady Di said. “Told you you’d die at your desk.”
Then he heard no more.
CHAPTER FOUR
Louis’ Choice
LOUIS stirred to the sound of scuffling footsteps. He was lying on something comfortable, not what he expected a hospital bed to feel like, lumpy and hard and sheeted with plastic in case your sphincters opened before a nurse slid a bedpan beneath your smelly ass. More like a leather seat with the flip-out footrest, the kind in first-class you can just lay back and sink into with a pillow and blanket all the way to LA or London, or wherever the hell it was you were going.
He then heard scuffles again, though couldn’t pinpoint exactly where they were coming from. One second he could have sworn they were to his left. The next, they were to his right. Then in front. Then behind. Then, amazingly, on the ceiling.
When they faded completely, he kept looking around. He saw only whiteness. No door. No window. Just whitewashed walls and a ceiling. A modern building, he reckoned, or recently renovated. Probably St. Mary’s Hospital, one of the private rooms in the ITU, which didn’t quite make sense either. There was no medical equipment. No beeping cardiac monitors. No whispering artificial ventilators. No bags of blood or fluid over his head. Nothing. Absolutely nothing to suggest where he might be. There wasn’t
even a call button.
“Nurse! Nurse!” he yelled. “Goddamn it! I need some help here!”
No one answered. Just good ol’ Louis DeVille and this goddamn white room, he mused. At least that horrid blackness had gone. His vision seemed pretty much back to normal, too. Better than normal, in fact. He could see everything without the need for bifocals. Close, far, in between, everything was as clear as daylight, as if the medics had fixed his eyesight while they were rerouting his clogged up coronaries. Goddamn paid a fortune for medical insurance; they damn well should have fixed his eyesight while he was under the knife.
Maybe that explained the bandages. He was covered like a goddamn mummy wrapped head to tail in cotton strips: his arms, legs, torso, just about every goddamn inch of his body. The medics had left holes for his mouth, nose and eyes, but not his ears. He didn’t feel uncomfortable, just stupid. What if he had to go to the bathroom in a hurry and there was no one around to help him unwrap? What about that, huh? Which brought him back to the room. He would have to ask the nurses to do something about it. A TV would do for starters. God knew what had been happening while he was infirmed. Another goddamn war in the Middle East could have started and he wouldn’t have had the foggiest. Worse, the stock market could have collapsed. How much money had he lost lying unconscious in this goddamn place?
Some things didn’t need to change, however. The leather bed, or layback thing, whatever it was, was comfy enough. A pillow and blanket would have been in order, but he was all right for the moment. The temperature was rather pleasant, actually, for a hospital. Damned frigid places, usually. Or worse, damned hot. They were always one way or the other. You either had to wear a coat and gloves like you were stepping into a goddamn refrigerator, or you had to strip everything off like a sauna. This hospital had it just right, though. Nice and cozy. Not too hot. Not too cold.
Still, the light was too damn bright. He would ask the nurse when she came to pull the drapes. But was there a window? He couldn’t exactly say. The light seemed to emanate from the walls and ceiling as if they were made of some kind of fluorescent putty, the kind of Glow In The Dark stuff his grandkids used to play with that radiated unnatural lime when the lights were switched off, like it had been bombarded with x-rays or gamma rays or whatever. Not that he thought this room was radioactive. The emanating light almost caressed him, you could say. Bright, but without heat, and it certainly didn’t glare his eyes like the low-lying winter sun. The emanation was – dare he say it? – almost cathartic.
It was. He had no more chest pain, and the head-crushing warble was gone. He felt fantastic, actually. Kind of refreshed, in a well-rested kind of way, like he had slept for a whole week or just returned from holidaying in the Bahamas. In fact, he hadn’t felt so goddamn good since he was a kid quaffing homemade ice cream on his grandfather’s farm just outside Fairmont, Indiana. Ice cream that was exactly what the name implied: iced cream. Not that watered down chemical crap the dairy companies had the gall to sell the kids nowadays. The stuff grandma made was the real thing. Cream churned from cows that he had even helped to milk himself, whipped fluffy and then left to settle overnight in the icebox.
Those were the days, weren’t they? Yes sir-ree, he remembered them well. He wouldn’t be able to sleep after grandma had set to work. He would lay awake all night thinking of ice cream melting in his mouth, filling his belly until it overflowed from his ears and nose. Then next morning before the rooster crowed he would sneak downstairs to the kitchen and help himself to the tub on the bottom shelf. One spoonful was enough to send him into spasms of ecstasy. Good ol’ grandma.
He probably didn’t feel quite as good as that now, but he felt pretty damned fine all the same. He wondered what miracle drug the medics had suffused him with, some kind of magic ice-cream infusion that had mended his palpitating heart and put him on top of the world. Not to mention what it had done to his vision.
Scuffled footsteps coming his way brought him back to reality, then kept going. “Nurse!” he shouted. “Don’t you leave me here! Don’t you leave me!” The scuffles faded, then they were gone. “Goddamn it! I need some help!”
All right, he thought, trying to get off the leather layback, if nobody’s going to help me, I’ll just help myself.
He couldn’t get up, however. Something was restraining him. He could move his arms and legs and neck, but something was immobilizing his torso, something like a seatbelt strapped around his guts (Waistline, dear, it’s a waistline!). He felt around for the offending item, finding nothing save the bandages. Straining against the invisible restraint, he gave up and sunk back into the leather layback wondering what he could do next.
Stuck as a pig in muck, Louis, he mused, staring at the ceiling. That’s what his grandma would have said. Yar gone and put yarself thar. Now yar gone haf’t git yarself ait.
Only he couldn’t remember how he had got there. How could he? He had been floating in a goddamn sea of blackness for god knows how long.
Yet that didn’t ring quite true. Where he had been was closer to nothing than blackness. Blackness was at least something. You might not like it, but you could at least tell it existed. Nothing, on the other hand, was nothing. It wasn’t even blackness. That’s what he remembered. Goddamned nothing. Time and space had just folded in on itself and vanished into nothingness. Then he was here. Wrapped head to tail in bandages and strapped with an invisible seatbelt to a leather layback in a room whose walls and ceiling were made of Glow In The Dark putty. What the hell was he supposed to do next?
Goddamn it, he hated losing control. That’s what he hated most about this little prank.
And it was a prank. No two ways about it. Someone – some goddamned medic and his good-for-noth’n nurse – was having a laugh at his expense. Maybe his wife had put them up to it. Maybe they were all laughing at him behind the white walls, having a little chuckle at his expense. Maybe these walls were really two-way mirrors. They could see in, but he couldn’t see out. “This isn’t funny anymore!” he shouted, straining against the invisible strap. “Get me outta this goddamn chair!”
No one came, as he had half expected. He didn’t even hear any scuffled footsteps.
“That’s goddamn it!”
He arched his back and thrashed his arms and legs, shaking his head from side to side and screaming, “Get me outta this goddamn chair!” After a minute or so (it could have been longer, five or ten minutes maybe, it was hard to tell, maybe even shorter) he gave up and sunk into the leather layback. Though he hated it, absolutely hated it, he would just have to wait until the prankster returned and let him loose.
And wouldn’t he give the scumbag a piece of his mind when he did.
Then, just as he felt his eyelids begin to sag, he heard scuffled footsteps approach and stop (from left or right, or up or down, he couldn’t tell). This time they didn’t fade away. This time he heard whispers. Like the scuffles, they were hard to locate; they were just everywhere. He couldn’t catch the whole of the conversation, but there was no doubt who they were talking about. He strained against the invisible strap and yelled, “Who the hell is there?”
The whispering ceased. Then a booming voice almost shook him off his layback, reverberating from all corners of the room. “LOUIS DEVILLE!” He was too stunned to answer. Though loud, the voice wasn’t painful like the warbling had been, just something that seemed to emanate, the verbal equivalent of the light. “ARE YOU READY?”
Ready for what? he thought. “It’s Lewey. Not Lewis,” he said, directing himself to the ceiling. Whoever was talking to him must be talking from somewhere up there. “And you’d better have a goddamn good excuse for tying me up like this. I know my rights. My lawyers will sling your sorry ass to court quicker than you can call your defense union.”
He sank back waiting for the retort, but the voice remained silent for some time. For a horrid moment, he thought he’d been left alone again. Then it spoke.
“LOUIS DEVILLE! ARE YOU READY?”
“Stop calling me Lewis! It’s Lewey, goddamn it!”
Another momentary pause, then, “ARE YOU READY?”
Struggling to prop himself on his elbows, he said, “Ready for what you goddamn piece of shit?”
“TO SIGN THE CONTRACT!”
Louis kept scanning the room for originator of the voice, failing to see anything past the bright walls and ceiling that were continuing to radiate like some x-rayed slab of Glow In The Dark putty. He wasn’t surprised. His first hunch was becoming increasingly likely; he was in one of those two-way mirrored rooms watched by god knows how many medics and professors analyzing his every word and gesture. He had seen the TV shows. He knew what they were doing behind the screen. Still propped on his elbows, he said, “What contract? My health insurance is paid up. I don’t owe you a damn thing.”
“YOU HAVE A CHOICE.”
Two contracts? Now there was a goddamn novelty. “I’m not signing anything until I read them,” he said. Then, as an afterthought: “I want my lawyers to go through them, too.”
He heard a whisper hushing around the room, above, below, forward, behind, left and right, everywhere in fact. It was difficult to tell whether there was more than one or whether the voice was just whispering to itself. Then: “NO LAWYERS.”
“Goddamn it!” he shouted to the ceiling. “Just who the hell do you think you are? I’m entitled to legal representation.”
Again, more whispering followed a studied pause. Then: “NO LAWYERS.”
Louis took a moment to think. He was in a Mexican standoff. Except he wasn’t really, was he? They – whoever they were – had him by the short and curlies. They could see him, but he couldn’t see them. They came and went as they pleased, while he was restrained like a goddamned psychopath the medics were too afraid to untie for fear of letting loose the devil. He hated it, but he really had no choice apart from accepting their conditions and making some sort of compromise. Still, at least they were offering him a choice. It probably wouldn’t do any harm to have a look. Maybe he could stall for time while he tried to work out just what the hell was happening. He didn’t have to put pen to paper just yet.
DeVille's Contract Page 4
