DECOHERENCE

Keith McCarthy

“The universe exists only because we are aware of it.”

Sir Martin Rees

“Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real.”

Niels Bohr.

Prologue: 6

Prelude to a Celebration: 7

Celebration: 9

The Three-Legged Fox: 12

The Nosebleed: 15

Blood on the Sleeve: 18

Professor Lyle: 22

The Medical Machine: 26

Mandy Chadwick: 30

Another Three-Legged Fox: 34

Another Three-Legged Fox (Again): 38

Drinks at Seven: 41

Dinner at Eight: 47

The Boy with No Eyes in the Kitchen: 51

No Boy with No Eyes in the Kitchen: 55

The Boy with No Eyes, With Eyes: 57

The Boy with No Eyes, With Eyes, and Talking: 60

A Tour of the Laboratory: 63

A Decision to Be Made: 68

A Barmaid with One Eye: 70

The Morality of Survival: 75

The Immorality of Survival: 79

A Prick with a Needle 84

Conversation 89

Observation 92

Obversion 95

Bonds 100

Observation 103

Conversion 106

Reversion: 109

Effect: 112

Affect: 114

Realisation: 116

Discussion of a Miracle: 118

No Obvious Effect: 122

An Eye for an Eye: 123

Teeth for Teeth: 128

Eyeless Once More; 131

Trickery; 134

Oddity: 137

Aggression: 141

Revelation: 147

A Walk in the Woods: 150

More Walking in the Woods: 155

Brief Encounter: 157

Bleak Encounter: 161

Ill-Met by Moonlight: 164

Sense out of Nonsense: 166

A Morning with Dickens: 169

An Afternoon without Him: 173

A Storm on the Way: 178

A Storm Arrives: 180

After the Storm: 182

Testament: 185

An Auspicious Day: 186

Good News For Me: 190

Good News For All: 193

The Last Dinner: 197

The Discovery of Knowledge: 199

Stealth: 201

Confrontation: 203

A Place Apart: 205

The First in Epiphany: 207

The Second in Epiphany: 210

The Third in Epiphany: 211

Reunion: 214

The Last in Epiphany: 215

Release: 217

Prologue:

Ninety percent of what you know is mistaken. The other ten percent is lies.

That’s what my old man used to say. He was always saying memorable things.

About two months after my Mum died of breast cancer, he took his shotgun and pumped an ounce or so of metal pellets through the top of his mouth into his brains.

That was fucking memorable, too.

Prelude to a Celebration:

The night had finally arrived and I was almost unable to get my breath, so excited was I. I had started early with a few beers and then vodka shots in the local with Janey, Baz and Tel. Our local’s not a lot to look at – fairly grubby fixtures and fittings, and fairly grubby customers and bar staff – but, as the saying goes, it was our local. Anyway, Tooting Broadway isn’t exactly known for its swish eateries and high-class cocktail lounges; compared with most of the pubs around, The Selkirk, was fairly decent. It was late March, the weather rather warmer than it should have been, although hardly Mediterranean. We began at five-thirty – the earliest I could get away from my job selling mobiles and Tel could skive from his old man’s garage – and by seven we were well into the party spirit, and the beer vouchers were seriously depleted. Baz – who’s a rich boy who drives an Audi A8 and can’t hold his drink – had already been sick in the bogs – while Janey was starting to get leery, which she always does; it’s one of the many things I love about her.

Many, many things there are that I love about Janey. I love her spirit; I love her bright blue eyes; I love her slightly buck-toothed smile. Of course I love her, because she saved my life. She was there when Dad left me, arriving in my life and doing nothing but being who she is. At that point, I didn’t need sentiment or commiseration, I needed only someone to take me in a threefold embrace with life. In the deeps of the night, when she lies beside me and snores gently, I remind myself that my life is her life, and it feels good.

And, if it’s a good night – one when there are no sudden dives into despair because my death took my mother, bewitched my father and nearly seduced me – I forget that her life may not, perhaps, be my life.

“Time to go, people,” I said.

And, indeed, it was.

We walked down Selkirk Road to the High Street, then turned right towards the large crossroads at the heart of the great metropolis that is Tooting Broadway. On the way we went past The Castle: it was, we had all agreed on many occasions, a fine drinking establishment. Somehow, we found ourselves slowing. “What time does this do start?” asked Baz. There was a faint slur about his words.

“Eight.”

“Wouldn’t do to arrive too early,” said Janey.

“Bad form,” agreed Tel.

And so we went into The Castle to make sure that its wares were still in drinkable condition, emerging one pint and one chaser later. We moved on down the High Street, past my place of employment, then played chicken with the traffic travelling between Streatham and Mitcham, to pass through the entrance of that fine example of nineteen thirties urban architecture that is Tooting Broadway underground station.

I noticed a slight headache.

Celebration:

“Sebastian! How kind of you to come.”

Milton was my agent. At that time, I still got a buzz out of using that phrase. I was thirty years old, I worked in Carphone Warehouse and, all in all, I had a good time. I had been with Janey for over a long time and it was still good. Although both my parents had died some years before, I had my health, my looks and I had my friends.

And I had just written a best-seller.

Well, to be strictly accurate, it wasn’t yet a best-seller, but everyone was telling me it wouldn’t be long. The publishers were pushing it on the newspaper reviewers and the word was that they were going to be kind, there was a large marketing budget and even a rumour that there was interest from one or two film production companies. I was being touted as some sort of boy wonder; I’d been telling everyone who would listen that I was special, but I don’t think until then that they’d believed me; until then, to be truthful, I don’t think I’d believed it. Now, I saw pound signs everywhere I looked, had given my notice in, was thinking about whether I was going to drive a Beamer or a Merc. Life was looking up; straight up. The sky wasn’t the limit, because there was no limit.

Janey said, “Chill out, Milton.” I had had the feeling before that he didn’t get on with Janey, and the look that passed across his chubby jowls was not one of unrequited love at this advice. “If a man can’t be late for his own book launch, when can he be late?” she asked, which we all thought was a good question, well worth asking.

He tried a smile, although it wasn’t one of his best. “I have some important people for you to meet,” he explained, a trifle huffily. With which he took my arm, before I had even managed to bag a glass of free plonk, and pulled me away from Janey and the others, his rotund, bow-tied presence leading me like a literary tug through swirling seas of bobbing, smiling sycophants . I cast an apologetic look back at my friends as Milton led me first in the direction of the managing director of the publishers and assorted executive suits.

We were in a small, exclusive hotel just off the Old Brompton Road. There were perhaps forty or fifty people there, all of whom I didn’t know and, if I’m honest, didn’t want to know; I was reassured, though, that none of them really wanted to know me either. It was just that I had something to sell, something that they wanted, something that they thought might make them a lot of money. There were large posters of the cover of the book all around the room – An Unreconstructed Murder – and as Milton lead me through the throng, I was happily aware that these people – these people who three months before would probably not have pissed on me if I was on fire – were looking at me with something that at least wasn’t contempt.

The headache was worsening.

I got pretty drunk, I admit that. I had made a lot of very small, increasingly garbled talk, and signed a lot of books in a hand that was, by now, not entirely my own; certainly the signatures were no longer my own. I knew it was the booze; except that it didn’t seem quite right, and that bloody headache was hanging on to me like a blood-sucking tick. And weird things were happening, too. The people I was talking to kept growing smaller; in fact, everything I was look at kept growing smaller. It was a strange effect. I clearly wasn’t growing bigger, but the world seemed to be retreating from me. As the evening wore on, it got worse, and became accompanied by curious distortions in what they were saying; there was no way that I could describe the effect – it was just that everything seemed to sound strange, and to sound stranger the longer the evening went on. While having to plumb the depths of my brain for polite inanity, I tried to work out what was happening. It took a while, but then I twigged. One of those bastards – probably Baz – had spiked my drink.

I had barely been able to snatch a dozen words of conversation with my so-called fucking ‘friends’ throughout the course of the ordeal but, at long last, Milton gave me some time off for good behaviour and I made my way over to their table in the corner. Baz and Tel – who had only ever gone along for the free booze – seemed to have kept Janey well occupied with a steady supply and they were all clearly well gone. I sat down – rather more heavily than I intended – with every intention of giving them what for.

Except that suddenly it all became a thousand-fold worse. A pain – no, a molten needle – skewered both my eyes; a thrumming started inside my soul, a thrumming that rapidly became a pounding; everything in my vision swung away from me, the babble around became smeared into a woolly clamour and, quite without warning everyone burst into flame...

They all began to scream in agony, spasm and writhe; I could smell their fat burning, hear it spitting, hear the sizzle of meat as it is grilled. I saw Janey’s face looking blindly towards me with melting eyes and, as I stared, she seemed to grow larger, or closer, or both, until she filled my vision, and I, too, screamed.

The Three-Legged Fox:

As I step from the taxi that first afternoon, into the shimmering, sweat-laden heat, I see the fox at once, and I see that it has only three legs. The lid of the car boot springs up behind me with a soft yet moist ‘click’, opened by the driver from where he sits, and he’s not about to get out to help me. Still looking at the fox – and with the fox still looking at me – I move to extract my luggage, then close the boot. The taxi pulls away at once, squirting gravel from beneath its wheels over my brogues as evidence that the driver – a man whose bulbous, glistening neck and porcine eyes are all I have seen of him – is, in the common parlance, narked; he did want to come so far in the first place and he clearly believes that his act of unparalleled generosity in so doing deserves more than my meagre tip.

Ordinarily, I think that I would have been overawed by The Hall. It’s three stories and stretches away on either side for perhaps fifty metres; there’s a short portico leading to a front door that is so black and highly polished it’s like a portal into the netherworld. And on top is a proper, bona fide, say what you like, dome. Not a patch on St. Paul’s, but definitely one up on a weather cock.

Ordinarily.

At this moment, though, I don’t care, for I have the fox.

Yet what I don’t have is a headache.

It sits and looks at me from beneath the shade and comparative cool of a large pink hydrangea, perfectly poised upon only the left front leg. It is perhaps fifteen metres away across a stretch of that fine, yellow and baking gravel. Its eyes are bright blue, the kind of blue that takes your breath and pins you while it does so. I wonder, can a fox have blue eyes? Who cares about that, for this one does, and they mesmerise me. They are eyes that hold intelligence; not the bestial, unknowing intelligence one would expect to see, but something deeper. I have the distinct impression that there’s sentience behind those sky-filled eyes, perhaps even that it is waiting for something, although what that can be is incomprehensible. And so I am held for a long moment by what appears to be an attempt at more than communication, for this creature seems to stare at me superciliously, almost as if it pities me, or at least feels sorrow for me. What does it know that I don’t know? What can it know? What can a wild animal ever know?

Yet it knows something.

Moreover, I can see with absolute clarity that it wants to tell me what it knows. It is an epiphany to realise that here is a messenger; perhaps even an angel, I think, and with that thought the possibility evolves into certainty. Yes, I realise, this being has been sent to speak to me; whence it was sent is as unknowable to me as what it may have to convey to me. And, accompanying these revelations is the certainty that here is an angel for me, and for me alone. I am part of a conspiracy, I now appreciate with a mixture of equal parts joy, fear and consternation. Joy because I have always enjoyed having secrets; fear because I cannot comprehend the scale or nature of the conspiracy which such a strange creature should want me for; consternation because...

The front door of the house opens; not loudly, but with a defined ‘click’ that’s like a shock of cold air in that humid place. I look across at once, but not as quickly as the fox. Like it (at least, I assume, like it), I see blonde woman in perhaps her middle thirties step out into the heat; that she has long golden hair is all I could make out clearly, for the air between us seemed to be hazy and glimmering. I feel short of breath and can smell a strong perfume; is it hers, or is it from the shrubs that fringe the semi-circular drive on which I stand?

I look back to the fox and, with a synchronicity that can only have been rigorously choreographed on some other plane, it looks back to me. Sweat falls into my left eye and I feel slightly sick, but there’s still no headache. A cricket begins to sing in the distance; sheep are bleating somewhere else. The fox winks at me, and then is gone.

“Mr. Shockley?” She has a faint Scottish brogue. In acknowledgement, I turn back to her, but then hesitate. The fox, my friend, has gone; the day is as hot as ever, and I discover that I am oddly enervated. I don’t want to move; I’m hot and sodden enough as I am, without further effort; the sun seems to be magnified by the perspiration on my neck.

She steps out of the shade of the porch into bright light; she’s tanned, I see. There’s a welcoming smile on her face, but her head is slightly on one side and there is faint frown above her eyes because she’s unsure who she’s addressing. Mr. Shockley, she said. Suddenly I don’t know who I am. The name is familiar, yet not obviously mine; it floats in my mind, unattached by association, a thing with no reference points, a piece of flotsam. It seems an odd name, not a name that I would choose...

She is quite close now, perhaps five metres away. She says, “It is Mr. Shockley, isn’t it? We’ve been expecting you.”

Abruptly, I think, yes, I am Mr. Shockley. Sebastian Shockley. How could I have forgotten? The sense of weariness has passed despite the continuing heat, gone as quickly and imperceptibly as it arrived. I manage a smile, manage even to move towards her, my right arm extended. “How do you do?”

She does not answer. Instead, she says, “You’re late. The others are already settled in.”

“Sorry about that. I was delayed at the station.”

Which is true...

...I think.

The Nosebleed:

I set off three and a half hours before, boarding a fast train from Paddington to Reading, a considerably slower one from there. I was wondering, as I do all the time now, how I could live with what I’ve become... or perhaps, what I think I’ve become...

...Or even, what I think I am thinking I have become...

...Or even...

And that way lies madness, which is perhaps technically what I am suffering from. None of the numerous doctors have ever used the phrase, but it’s always there, that word, that concept, that label.

The English climate decided that, after four years of disappointing summers that grew torpidly from pallid springs and then died imperceptibly to become mediocre, mewling autumns, it would remind us to be careful of what we wish for. English summer heat is like no other; not particular hot, it drowns us, saps the strength, weakens the will; it succours only humid winter, with its bone-deep aching cold and those all too brief days that are swaddled by endless grey.

The journey was turning me stiff and sore; the carriage was airless, almost lifeless; it was little better than a foetid, overheated tube of wilting humanity moving agonisingly slowly from Reading to Hereford. Beside me was a woman who had a not inconsiderable moustache, who smelt of sickly perfume water, and whose corsets groaned like the rigging of a tea-clipper whenever she moved; she overflowed the seat, filling my personal space with adipose tissue and strange mixes of perspiration and lavender. She had a large bag of Maltesers from which she took regular handfuls, clearly enjoying each loud, chocolaty crunch.

I had had better days.

And I had a headache, which meant bad news.

We were just outside Ledbury, the bag of Maltesers nearly empty, the lavender losing to the smell of sweat, the cry of the rigging a soft creak to accompany the masticatory sound effects, when she began, quite suddenly to bleed from the nose. The first I knew about it was when I felt a small spot land on the back of my right hand as I held the paper up in front of me and battled for the arm rest. I looked first at my hand, and then at my neighbour. She was oblivious of the blood streaming down her nose; perhaps this was because her face was sheaned in sweat, but I thought it odd that she had not tasted it yet, had not noticed her dainty pink blouse becoming heavy with the viscous fluid...

This is not happening, I thought then.

And I thought it with conviction. That is to say, it was not, looking back on it, a thought at all; it was a perfect certainty. A mind set was established. I could relax. I need not panic. It was just another example of the tricks my brain had taken to playing...

And, when she at least realised what was happening to her (or appearing to happen, to my senses at least), she of course firstly looked horrified, then began to screech. I could not call it screaming, for it was hoarse, without proper pitch and polytonal; yes, I mused from my vantage point of detachment, it could not be dignified with the word, ‘scream’. The train was crowded and at once I saw other passengers reacting; surprise and irritation transmuting quickly into shock; it was all as I would have expected. I looked on in interest, confident that I was in the middle of a hallucination, and that no matter how perfectly realised everything seemed to be, this was not in any way actually happening.

She stood up, ejecting herself from the seat with surprisingly little effort and, I am pleased to report, thereby giving me no little relief. She was still screeching and had dropped her paperback novel, the better to raise her hands high; other people were standing now, their faces registering various emotions including consternation, horror and incredulity. It was all really rather interesting...

The ticket collector appeared from the other carriage. He was a saturnine fellow with the look of a man who had seen it all before; I fell to wondering which of the elements in this crisis was real; perhaps, it occurred to me, I was not on a train at all... When the collector saw my erstwhile companion exsanguinating and vocalising with gusto (if not much finesse), the look on his face rapidly transmuted to mirror those around him; her screeching increased both in volume and pitch, seeming to rise and rise and rise, quickly reaching levels of both that were almost beyond endurance. The ticket collector approached her, clearly saying something to judge from his facial movements but the words were to be forever unknown, at least to me. A lot of people were standing now, most of them participating in a background babble, forming a chaotic chorus to the main event. This was the most vivid hallucination yet, I decided. Six months ago, it would have left me catatonic with stress, terrified by this sudden step into the surreal, unable to comprehend what was happening; now, although these episodes were inconvenient and restricted my life, they were no longer a source of horror to me. Soon, I knew, I would start to feel an ache behind my eyes...

The train began to slow as we approached the station at Ledbury. The ticket collector was trying to persuade the woman to leave the train so that she could be taken to hospital, but she was adamant that she would not. She had by now been ushered to a seat on the other side of the carriage and was loudly wailing; she had a sodden, red handkerchief jammed to her nose by a middle-aged Asian woman. She looked as though she had been seriously wounded, perhaps stabbed. The ticket collector took to calming us all in officious tones. There was blood on the floor and a scent of hysteria in the air, but that scent was fading. People began to stand to leave the train, some of them glancing surreptitiously at the woman, although others were plainly staring at her. As I stepped down onto the platform, sure enough, the pain in my head began to ease and I began to feel drowsy...

Blood on the Sleeve:

“My name’s Joanne Thompson. I’m the head nurse.” Her hand is dry as I shake it, her skin taught on her face. I judge that she has seen a lot of sun in her time. I say nothing, wondering when the pain behind my eyes will start and the somnolence will creep over me. Usually, it would be only a few minutes after a hallucination such as that of the fox. Any time now, then.

She looks at me, presumably sensing that I’m not giving her my full attention, which is true. “Is everything all right?”

I nod, smile. “Yes.” To which she smiles back, while I wonder, where is the headache?

She indicates my bags. “Do you want a hand with those?”

“No, no. Thanks. I can manage.”

I bend down to pick them up and she says then, “Oh! Have you hurt yourself?”

I don’t understand. Straightening again to look at her, I reply, “No. Why?”

“There’s blood on your sleeve.”

And I turn to gaze at my jacket and, indeed, there is. Quite a lot of it is to be seen on the upper arm, at the side so that I haven’t noticed it before. Uncertainty that changed to certainty, transmutes yet again into uncertainty. Consternation becomes incredulity, becomes fear. The nosebleed couldn’t have been real. It just couldn’t. It was such a bizarre thing to have happened, and it was heralded by the headache, and followed by drowsiness...

It takes me a long moment to stop staring at the inexplicable blood. Eventually, I look back at Joanne Thompson and ask nervously, “Did you, by any chance, see the fox?”

My reward is only a frown. “A fox?”

“The three-legged one. It was over there...” I indicate the hydrangea. “It winked at me.” At which point, I hear what I am saying...

She’s taken aback – that, I can see – although perhaps it’s her training that means that her face bears only a fleeting expression of shock. She has the politeness to look at the aforementioned shrub, before turning back to me, shaking her head. “No. I’m afraid I didn’t.”

Of course she hasn’t seen it; it wasn’t there. Foxes, whether fully limbed or not, do not wink; winking was a solely human method of communication; animals have no need of it. One of my ‘episodes’, just as the woman haemorrhaging on the train was...

Except that there’s blood on my sleeve...

And the characteristic headache and drowsiness – ‘post-ictal phenomena’ as one of the neurologists called them, as if he were naming a ship – aren’t happening now.

I make the best of it. A weak smile, a sorry shake of the head at my own peculiarities, and, “Sorry. It must be the heat.”

She jumps at the chance to move on. “It is hot, isn’t it? And there’s no end in sight, they say.”

She leads me into the shade of the house and then through the broad front door.

“Welcome to the Hall.” She does indeed sound welcoming. She sounds proud, too. I’m starting to like her.

I drop the bags on to a marbled floor of black and white cheques and there’s a faint, cool echo; when I look upwards, I can understand why, for above directly us is the dome, perhaps forty metres distant at the apex. A stately staircase begins behind Joanne Thompson and curves in an upward helix around us with doorways leading off to the left and right on two floors above us. The light of the stifling summer afternoon is brilliantly white as it floods the vaulting space and shines down on us, a near supernatural effect; I feel warmed by it, and not just by its temperature...

“It’s pretty amazing, isn’t it?” She breaks the spell, but I’m not annoyed; it’s felt too much like slipping from reality, and that’s something that I’m finding happening increasingly often. “It was built nearly two hundred and fifty years ago. Renovated since, of course. I don’t really know the history. Prof does, though.”

“It’s wonderful.”

“I’ll take you to your room, and let you unpack and freshen up. While you’re doing that, I’ll tell Prof you’ve arrived. You’re the last.”

She leads me across the cool, bright hallway to the staircase. Double doors are positioned to right and left of us. She says, indicating one to our right, “That’s the East Wing...” Then she says, “And that’s the West Wing.” This is accompanied by a symmetrical gesture to our left. The double doors that lead to the West Wing are closed, but those to the East Wing are open and through them I can see what looks like an elegant library. In a wing-backed chair just inside it is an elderly, thin man with lank, greying hair and a stiff posture. He’s reading a book but doing so in a most peculiar manner, eyeing it out of the corner of his eye. He doesn’t notice us until my guide calls out to him, “Are you all right, Dr. Symonds?”

He looks up at once from his book, but it’s immediately obvious that his reaction is in odd, although in what way I can’t at that moment define. He looks through the doorway and directly at Joanne, but doesn’t appear to see her. Then he moves his head on his neck slowly around to his right, as if scanning the horizon; only at the extreme end of this sweep does his face show a reaction that’s other than uncertainty. “Oh, Miss Thompson.” He nods, still looking at us out of the corner his eye. “Fine, thank you.” His voice is polite and educated. His gaze shifts to me, but only by twisting his neck as much as he can.

“Good,” she says and she sounds as if she means it. Yes, I think, I’m starting to like Nurse Thompson. We move on, ascending the staircase. As the curvature brings us again within sight of Dr. Symonds, I can see that he’s still regarding me curiously, still in that peculiar stance, his reading for the moment forgotten. We’re now on a semicircular landing, a door immediately to our right that leads to a straight, carpeted corridor ending in a sash window that stretches almost from floor to ceiling; another window looks out over the portico halfway along the landing, past which there’s another door diagonally opposite us, beyond which is a second corridor. Then another round of the curving stairs that ends on an identical landing.

Joanne Thompson explains, “All of the sleeping accommodation is on this floor; the laboratories and offices are on the top floor. Your room is along here, at the end.” She leads me through the doorway to our right. There are three doors on either side of the corridor ahead of us; we go through the last on the left; the window at the end of the corridor gives a view onto rolling hillsides dotted with copses, sheep and monstrous white cattle; I could be looking back three hundred years.

My room has two windows with the same view. It’s high-ceilinged, and deeply carpeted, with a double bed, triple wardrobe, high chest of drawers, three easy chairs around a low table, and two bedside cabinets; it reminds me of the better sort of boutique hotel. Even though both windows are open, it’s still uncomfortably hot in there. A partially opened doorway on the far side reveals an en suite shower room. I drop my bags and survey things while Joanne Thompson looks anxiously at my reaction. “Is it all right for you? All the rooms are pretty much the same...”

“No, no,” I hastens to assure her. “It looks fine.”

“Good.” She relaxes.

“All of the rooms have on-call buttons.” She indicates a remote control on the bedside cabinet. “There’s a member of the clinical staff on twenty-fours a day. If you experience any odd symptoms, you can call us immediately. Professor Lyle will explain further when the treatments begin.” I thought about the symptoms I was presently experiencing; did she mean odder than those, I wondered. She adds, “Okay?”

“I think so.”

“I’ll leave you alone then. Prof will be along in about an hour to welcome you officially. Make yourself at home.”

And with that she leaves me, and I’m thinking that in the assessment process I have to go through over the next two days, Nurse Joanne Thompson is definitely going to go in the ‘plus’ column.

Professor Lyle:

The knock on the door wakes me. My bags are still on the floor, and still unpacked; the room is still as hot, the day still as oppressive, although the nature of the light coming through the windows suggests that we’re now into late afternoon. I’m momentarily befuddled, the kind of confusion that, in a normal person, a sudden awakening from sleep can bring; in me, that sense of unreality is something I have to live with constantly. I now have a regular refrain running through my head – Is this real?

The knock comes again.

“Yes?”

The door opens to admit a short, trim man, dressed in a dark suit; ‘dapper’ is my immediate reaction. He has small feet immaculately shod in patent leather slip-on shoes and he looks as though he could give Fred Astaire cause something to think about on the terpsichorean front. He’s perhaps sixty years old with a large mouth that’s moulded into a welcoming smile. “Mr. Shockley?”

I swing my legs off the bed, then propel myself to a standing position. “Professor Lyle,” I guess, coming forward with my hand out held. We shake hands and there follows a short but embarrassing pause as neither of us quite feel able to take the lead. Eventually he says, “Shall we sit down?”

It seems a good idea and I follow him to the easy chairs where we sit opposite each other; I’m thirsty and, although there’s a bottle of spa water on the table between us flanked by two glasses, I don’t feel confident enough to pour any. From where we sit we can look out of the window at a scene of bucolic peace. He says, “Thank you for coming.”

“Thank you for inviting me.” And I mean it.

He nods and I get the impression that whereas my statement is heartfelt, his was born merely of politeness. “Good journey?” he asks.

“Interesting, at least.”

He doesn’t ask why it should have been so. Instead he says, “We’re a bit out of the way here, I know but, you have to admit, it’s a quite strikingly beautiful neck of the woods.” He looks beyond me, out of the window behind me. I agree; how can I not? He becomes lost in reverie. “We’ve been working here for five years now. It hasn’t always been easy.”

Slightly at a loss to answer that one, I respond, “Hasn’t it?”

“Oh, no. Research is never easy. You have an idea and you rack your brains to think of a way to prove that it’s right, perhaps not being successful for weeks, or even months...” He is softly spoken, and possesses a tone that’s almost soporific; he sounds exactly as I expect men of scientific brilliance to sound. “...Occasionally it can even be years before inspiration strikes.” Was there something bitter in the way that he said that? He continues, “And there are always setbacks, sometimes quite serious.”

His voice, cultured and assured has almost lulls me into some sort of trance, so that it takes a few moments for the words to become more than sounds. He’s saying something about the plans for the evening as I interrupt him. “Serious setbacks? What does that mean?”

He stops, showing some irritation that I’ve spoken out of turn. For a moment, he’s at a loss for what to say, as though such a thing has never happened before; he’s surprised, it appears, that the order of his universe has been disturbed. “Nothing,” he offers at last. “Nothing at all.”

But I’ve understood enough of the wodge of scientific jargon and technical mumbo-jumbo they’ve been feeding me for the past month to want a tad more information. “What kind of setbacks? This is safe, isn’t it?”

He smiles. He has a wide smile and I vaguely remember Dad once telling me that only crooks and crocodiles have wide smiles, but it’s only the crooks deserve punishment. “Of course it is, Mr. Shockley. This is a phase two trial. We have done extensive – almost obsessive - animal testing and experienced no problems at all.”

“Did the animals experience any?” I ask.

He doesn’t like that and gets huffy. “We have full approval from the LREC and full licensing from the MRHA. They are entirely satisfied that phase 2 trials are appropriate.”

The initials mean nothing to me; he may just as well have been telling me that he’s had love letters from the RSPB and MI6; when he talks about ‘phase 2 trials’, as far as I’m concerned, he could have pilfered terms like that from an episode of Star Trek. “So these ‘setbacks’ weren’t dangerous to anyone?”

There’s a hesitation in his reply that is so small it’s almost not there, and yet it’s inescapably present. He hurries to say, “Not at all. Technical problems, nothing more.” Until the birth of the bestseller, I held down – more or less – several jobs in retail; I wasn’t bad at it, either. Customers think that sales people are all liars; sales people know that all customers are. And we get pretty good at reading body language. In almost every ‘sales opportunity’ (as they’re called in the trade), there’s a point when the customer lies to you – usually, it’s the reason why he or she isn’t going to buy, but sometimes it’s about why they’re buying the bloody thing, or why they’re only going to buy the cheaper, crappier version – and it doesn’t take long to learn to spot it when it happens. In my head – even before I became a basket case – I used to hear a faint but distinct ‘ping’ in the back of my mind. I hear that ping now.

“Okay,” I say, with my salesman’s smile, which is as much a weapon as a defence. He has things to hide, but don’t we all?

I am on the point of leaving it at that, but suddenly Professor Lyle wants to make it all right again between us. “For the purposes of ethical propriety, we need you to understand exactly why you’re here. You’ve received the research protocol and the patient information sheet, of course...” I have. I even tried to read them. “But just to make sure that we have done our duty and that, when you finally give written consent, it is fully informed, we have arranged for all of you to attend for these two days, so that you can be totally reassured.”

I know all this and wonder whether he just thinks I’m stupid or whether he’s saying it for his own benefit. I ask, “How many are there of us?”

“Six. We had three thousand responses to the original mail shot. It took a lot of careful work and consideration to whittle that number down to half a dozen. You’re the last to arrive.” I’m not sure whether that observation is tinged with criticism and say nothing. He continues, “The important thing is, you’re here. Over the next two days, I want you all to understand as fully as possible what we aim to do here, how we aim to do it, and what the benefits are.”

And the risks, he doesn’t say, but then he doesn’t need to. It’s not entirely out of the need to fill a gap in the conversation that I say, “If it helps with my condition, I’m ready to try anything.”

He nods. “Of course, of course. Your letter and subsequent reading of your medical record make it quite plain that your life has become intolerable.”

“Do the others have similar problems?”

“In that they have neurological deficits of one kind or another, yes. The details of those deficits are different, however, and have different causation. It is not for me to confide to you those details, though. If they choose to discuss them with you, then so be it...”

“I get it. Medical confidentiality.”

He’s delighted at my perspicacity. “Exactly!” He takes the initiative, grabs the bottle of water and opens it. With a gesture he enquires if I want some – which I say I do – then pours it into two glasses. Sipping it, he says, “May I ask how you have been since our last correspondence?”

“Not good,” I admit.

“Are the episodes getting more frequent?”

“Yes...”

He picks up on my tone. “Is there something more? Something new, perhaps?” he asks, almost eagerly, quite the enthusiastic medical researcher.

“I think they’re becoming worse.”

He leans forward and whether this is through academic interest, prurience or compassion is beyond me to say. “Really? How so?”

“There was a time when the episodes were frightening but... ‘clear-cut’, I guess, would be the best way to describe them. They were weird, but once I had learned what they were – that they weren’t real – I could come to terms with them...”

The Medical Machine:

I’ve never taken hallucinogenics; too young for that shit. Modern stuff has been more to my taste, and never to excess; well, never to excessive excess. After all, there’s no point in having a Ferrari and just doing the shopping in it; the skill is not to drive it so fucking fast that you take off when you go over that hump-backed bridge. I’m well aware, though, that all drugs alter perception to some degree or another. My old man was a doctor – smoked himself to death by the time I was fifteen – and he told me often enough that nothing you eat, drink, smoke or rub in ever has just one effect; you just have to trust that the other effects – the ones you don’t want – aren’t a nuisance, or intolerable, or (of course) lethal.

So, anyway, the point is that what was happening was starting to scare me shitless. After the events at the book launch, everyone assumed I was just a wild pisshead (Baz and Tel denied vehemently that they had been having a bit of fun by doping my drinks) - for which I suppose I couldn’t really blame them; anyway, the book sales were sufficient compensation to excuse me in the eyes of most present. Money equals tolerance, after all. The second time it happened was a month later, and this time it involved a man who exploded directly in front of me; flesh, blood, teeth, bone everywhere; I was deafened by the explosion – I mean, seriously deafened, so that for a moment there was this huge eye-cracking bang and then there was absolutely nothing – and then just I found myself screaming uncontrollably, on my knees, in the middle of Tooting Bec common. It’s a place that’s seen a fair amount of strange behaviour in its time, but I think I made it onto the leader board on that afternoon.

And, after a while, there was nothing, except a lot of people of all ethnic groups, genders, sizes and ages were looking at me with expressions that ranged from disbelief, through amusement to embarrassment. It wasn’t one of my better days.

The third time, a mother and baby mutated in front of me as Janey and I were at the open air lido. The woman, ‘a right chav’ in Janey’s scorning words, was standing in the paddling pool with her toddler, and his squeals were getting on Janey’s nerves; still, what can you say? I was just telling Janey to keep her knickers (and it was quite out of character for me to say that, too) on when a particularly loud babyish squeak made me look at them again. What I saw was a thing from a nightmare, a gelatinous thing that was devouring the toddler, dissolving it with acid or something while it made horrible sucking sounds and the child bucked and kicked and keened...

By the fourth time, even I could tell that Janey was becoming strained, and Tel and Bas were suddenly always too busy to come for a drink. I may not be the sharpest pencil in the stationery shop, but I could see that I had a problem. I had been to my GP after the third time but he decided, on the basis of a four minute, desultory interrogation and no examination, that I was suffering from stress and dished out a packet of Valium. I could envisage Dad rotating in his grave; or at least he would have been, had he not been cremated and scattered to the four corners of the globe on Streatham Common. After the fourth, and worst, occurrence I decided enough was enough and insisted on a referral to a specialist. It was a toss-up whether it was going to be a psychiatrist or a neurologist until I made it as plain as I politely could that I would sooner saw off my dick with a blunt hacksaw blade than be caught in some head quack’s waiting room next to some smelly old sod wanking away with both hands and a far-away look in his eye.

So neurologist it was. Two weeks later, I had a diagnosis, but it took a couple more months to be able to pronounce it correctly - oligodendroglioma; if someone ever reads this out loud, they’ll need a deep breath and a long run up for that one, even if they’ve still got their own teeth and haven’t had a liquid lunch. To you and me, it’s a brain tumour. The neurologist told me cheerfully that it was in an unusual location. When I asked if that was good or bad, his cheerfulness evaporated somewhat. “Perhaps I should say a tricky location,” he decided thoughtfully, from which I deduced it was bad.

My next port of call was the neuro-oncologist. She was short and dumpy with rosy cheeks and bad teeth; she kept smiling relentlessly, even when she was telling me bad news; looking back on it, that was all she ever did. “There are three ways of treating brain tumours,” she began. “The first option is normally surgery, but in your case, that’s a non-starter because of the extent and position of the tumour. The other two options are radiotherapy, where we focus radiation on the tumour cells to kill them, and chemotherapy, where we give you cytotoxic drugs to achieve the same effect.” Which I found very interesting, as I wondered which of these was going to be my treatment. “Now, the CT scans show that your tumour is located in the medial side of the left temporal lobe, pushing into the occipital and parietal lobes on that side, with some extension across the midline.” I nodded as if she hadn’t been speaking Chinese backwards and I knew exactly what all that meant. “We could try radiotherapy...”

“Good,” I said, more or less because I thought I ought to say something at this point.

“But it would leave you blind, and probably with severe memory deficits, and most probably intractable epileptic fits.”

I didn’t need to have had a medical dad to know that that was bad. “So it’s chemotherapy, then?”

She hesitated; even while she was hesitating, she was giving me the full benefit of her maculate dentition, which was nice. “Well...”

And that told me all I needed to know.

For the record, it turns out, that I had a brain tumour that was going to kill me, yes, but it was going to take its time about it. Cancer, I was surprised and not a little put out to learn, did not always kill you quickly; if it was going to, chemotherapy sometimes worked and sometimes didn’t; if it was going to kill you slowly, in which case chemotherapy never cured you at all. I guessed that Mum had had the former type.

“Steroids should help,” the oncologist said, apparently by way of compensation. “At least in the early days.”

I said, “Thanks,” but I think she could tell I didn’t really have my heart in it, and I left her clinic with the prescription and a sense that I had been short-changed.

And so I drifted along for the next few months. I lost my job when I hit my manager with the fire extinguisher, because he had turned into a huge three-headed snake and was about swallow a customer whole; only a letter from the neuro-oncologist managed to keep me out of chokey on charges of assault and actual bodily harm on that one. I had already lost most of my friends, and was in danger of losing my flat because the property agency were getting a lot of letters from my neighbours about my odd behaviour, when I came home one day to a flat that was strangely empty, despite all the usual furniture and unwashed plates, all the slightly odiferous crap in the kitchen bin. I didn’t have time to ponder this, though, because I got a Tweet just as I walked through the front door.

Janey didn’t need one hundred and forty characters, just ten.

Sorry, Seb.

That same day I opened a letter from a research institute I’d never heard of – Cytocure – and, nine weeks later, here I was.

Mandy Chadwick:

Professor Lyle has left, telling me that there is to be a drinks reception at seven, followed by a buffet meal. It is just as well he goes when he does, because I’m getting a headache and he’s beginning to sprout horns from his head. I unpack, switch on the telly – it’s a large flat screen job in the corner of the room that, I’m relieved to discover, has all the Sky channels – then switch it off and decide I’m bored. The headache’s wearing off, so I feel it may be safe to go out and explore the house; it’s only half-past four so there’s plenty of time before the drinks.

I make my way back to the central staircase, mentally toss up whether to go up or down, decide on up and spiral my way in that direction. The stairs end in a semi-circular landing that runs along the back wall of the central hall-come-atrium. At either end of this there’s a forbidding door; they’re both, I quickly discover locked, with entry via keypad. They each bear a notice – LABORATORY AREA. AUTHORISED PERSONNEL ONLY. A rectangular window in each just shows a long corridor, identical to those on the floor below, except that the floors are polished.

I go, therefore, down to the ground floor. Dr. Symonds is no longer in the library which, I discover, has a an expensive looking writing table, several antique-looking sofas and low tables on which are some magazines; two of the walls are covered floor to high ceiling by crowded bookshelves; there’s an ornate chimney on the third wall and, between the sash windows there are hung a variety of portraits that might even be authentic, for all I know. I go through a bright blue door to find myself in a room in which is a long dining table; it’s already laid for a meal and the cutlery looks mighty fine. I’m starting to see that life as a guinea pig may not be too bad. This room has windows on two sides, doors on the other two – there’s a second door to my left; I open this and find myself looking into a large kitchen in which there’s a middle-aged man dressed in chef’s whites working at various stations. Two young girls, also in whites, are assisting him. The nearest one looks up in surprise as I come in. “Sir?”

“Sorry,” I say, looking around nosily. “Just exploring.” I’m no expert, but it looks bloody well equipped.

They’re all looking at me; not in a nasty way, though. The guy in chef’s whites says patronisingly, “This is the kitchen.”

Which is fair enough and, as far as I can see, pretty accurate. I reply brightly, “Good, good. Keep up the good work.”

He is small, in his thirties with a shaved head; he has gaunt features. He nods gravely. “We’ll try, Sir.” His tone is now not just patronising, it oozes contempt.

“Fine.”

I leave, unsure if my dignity is still intact, suspecting that it isn’t.

The other wing of the house, the one under the bedrooms, contains first a second sitting room replete with ginormous flat screen TV on the wall, then a room in which there’s a full-sized snooker table, a darts board, a card table and a games console; things, it occurs to me then, are looking up. The place, though, seems to be deserted and I wonder where everyone is; perhaps they are in their rooms, perhaps they’re wandering around outside, scaring the wildlife and upsetting the locals. After all, Christ knows what a bunch of weirdoes I’m amongst. I turn around and make my way back to the central entrance hall, then out through the front door and into the heat.

I stand in the portico for a few moments, trying to get acclimatised.

“What’s eating you, then?”

The voice makes me jump. My first thought is that it’s hallucination, even though I look around for its source. There’s a girl sitting on a park bench against the wall of the house, about twenty metres away; she doesn’t look like a hallucination – most of mine tend towards the outré, if not completely blood-soaked – but I’ve been fooled before. I walk over to her. She’s short, about twenty-five and has black, bobbed hair as well as slightly elfin features. She’s staring at with dark eyes in a challenging manner; her lips are bright red, but contracted and disapproving. On her lap is a notebook in which she’s been scribbling. I respond, “Eating me?” I’m not sure what she’s getting at.

“What have you got?” she explains impatiently. “What kind of cancer?” Then, a pause. “Or are you one of the mad scientists?”

“Oh, I see.” I sit next to her. “No, I’m a guinea pig. Oligodendroglioma.”

She’s less than impressed. “That’s a crap tumour. I’ve got an astrocytoma.”

“Is that a better one to have?” I ask, unaware that there’s such a thing as Top Trumps when it comes to brain cancer.

She considers. “It sounds better, don’t you think? Astronauts, all that kind of thing. Yours – oily something – just sounds naff.” She speaks with some sort of northern twang, although I’m no good with accents and can’t place it. I’m sure whether I really like her or just want to smack her in the chops.

“I didn’t choose it,” I point out defensively. “It chose me.”

She nods. “Yeah, of course. It’s a fucking bummer, isn’t it?”

For the first time in perhaps six months, I laugh. No doctor has ever described my condition better. “You can say that again.”

She sticks her hand out. “Mandy.”

I take it and we shake. “Seb.”

She frowns. “Seb? What kind of name is that?”

Once more I have cause to thank my mother and father for their lack of foresight in choosing that particular soubriquet. It isn’t the first time in my life that someone has asked me that question; in fact I’ve asked it myself several hundred times. I say wearily, “It’s my name.”

She shrugs. “Fucking poncey name, if you ask me.”

Leaning further and further towards the ‘smacking’ option, I say tersely, “I didn’t.”

Thankfully, she merely makes a screwed sneer of her face. A moment of silence follows while she writes something in her notebook, then she says, “Fancy a drink?”

This is more like it. “You bet. Where can we get one?”

“I’ve done a reccy of this place. There’s apparently a pretty full wine cellar, but it’s kept under strict wraps by the bloke who owns this place; the kitchen chef says he’s fond of a drop of claret, but not so good at sharing it.”

“Who’s that? I assumed it was all Cytocure’s.”

“But who runs Cytocure?” she asks knowingly.

“I take it you know..?”

“Word is, the big cheese is a codger called Michelson.”

The name means nothing to me. “So if we can’t help ourselves to the wine, where do we get refreshment?”

“Same chef says there’s pub about half a mile away in that direction.” She indicates the back of the house. “Fancy a walk?”

It’s still fiercely hot, but the prospect of a cooling pint of lager so near is an irresistible force. I say that I do and we set off around the side of the house. I ask, “What’s it called?”

“The Three-Legged Fox,” she replies at once. “Funny name, isn’t it?”

Another Three-Legged Fox:

The Three-legged Fox turns out to a typical old English pub, with beams, low ceilings, uneven floors, horse brasses and pewter tankards on hooks, plaster fish in cases on the walls, and old men in stupid hats sitting at the bar sipping from half pint glasses. There’s no juke box, no games machine and no wide-screen TV. It has everything about the English pub that I hate. I prefer urban pubs, the ones with highly polished wood bars, chandeliers, huge mirrors, at least three games machines, a pool table and flat screen televisions everywhere you look. Still, as my old Granny used to say, ‘Beggars can’t be choosers’; she had a large stock of such wisdom – ‘worse troubles at sea’, ‘you’ll never see a rabbit wearing glasses’ and ‘if wishes were pennies, I’d be a millionaire’- prominent among them. The lagers have been bought, the crisp packets opened out and Mandy and I sit opposite each other in a bay window which doesn’t look as though it’s been cleaned since England won the World Cup.

“Fancy her, do you?” she asks, as she puts her glass down, already half empty.

“Who?”

“The fat bird pulling the pints.”

I frown. “No. Why do think that?”

She snorts scornfully. “Because you were chatting her up. All that shite about why the pub’s called what it’s called. Who care’s why it’s got a wanky name?”

“I was just wondering, that’s all.”

She smirks, then winks, then buries her face in her lager. I don’t know her well but, I’ve already learned in our short acquaintance not to bother arguing or explaining. Her glass is nearly empty when she puts it down. “So, what are your symptoms?” she asks.

Mandy, I am discovering, is always direct. There seems no point in being coy. “Hallucinations.”

She nods. “What kind? Sight? Sound?”

“Everything. Quite often, even smell and touch. It’s almost like virtual reality.”

“Cool.” She sounds genuinely impressed, as though I’ve gone up in her estimation. She has the notebook in front of her on the wooden table and does some more writing in it. I wonder what she’s doing; perhaps, I mused, she’s an author like me.

“What about you?” I ask.

“Fits.” I don’t follow for a moment and she explains, “Epileptic fits.”

“Oh.”

There must be something about the way I react because she gives me a hard stare. “You gonna be like all the rest?”

“Which is like what?”

“Think of me as a freak, like I’m going to start thrashing around and pissing in my pants, and that they’d rather I wasn’t around.”

I have to admit, to myself if not to Mandy, that is precisely what I have been thinking. To her I said, “Are you?”

She’s staring intently at me, as if trying to read my mind but not seeing any too well what the print’s saying. “No. My fits aren’t like that...not yet, anyway.”

“What are they like?”

But perhaps she finds the subject embarrassing to talk about, because she says only, “Aren’t you going to finish that pint? You’re a bit of a lightweight, aren’t you?”

Stung, I down the rest of my pint in one, then smack the glass down on the table. “Your round,” I say.

She shrugs, spreads her hands, palms upward. “No money,” she explains. “Sorry.” She doesn’t sound too sorry, though.

I return with new pints a few moments later – The Three-legged Fox isn’t too well patronised on a hot Saturday afternoon and I’m served immediately – and put them down between us. “What are they like, then?” I ask.

She makes a face. “I just lose consciousness. None of the theatrical stuff.”

“How long for?”

“Sometimes just a few seconds, sometimes much longer. Once it was for a whole day.”

“Doesn’t sound too bad,” I decide and realise, too late, that I’ve spoken ill-advisedly.

“What the fuck do you know about it?” she demands angrily.

I think about some of the horrible things I’ve experienced over the past year, and about the fact that I’ve lost my girlfriend, my mates and my job; I think about never knowing if I’m going to start seeing weird things wherever I look, and how I’ve just hallucinated about a woman having a torrential nosebleed and got blood on my sleeve, and about how I’ve just seen a three-legged fox...

I look down at my sleeve; the blood’s still there. “Nothing, obviously.” I sigh. “Sorry.”

“Too fucking right you should be.” She takes another elephantine sip of Stella. “I lost my job because of this shit.”

“What did you do?”

“I was in the army.” She looks at me and there’s a challenge there. When I say nothing funny, she relaxes a little and says, “They got kind of spooked when I went mentally AWOL while driving a tank.”

“Did you really?”

She nods. “On Salisbury Plain. When you’re in a tank, it’s tricky getting someone who’s unconscious away from the controls. I drove the fucking thing into a farmyard and knocked over a cowshed before I came to.” I don’t know whether or not to laugh, afraid of what she may do. She solves my dilemma by adding ruefully, “Driving tanks was the only bit of army life I liked,” then beginning to giggle. “The rest was just being shouted at by lesbians.” She has an infectious laugh and it isn’t long before the fat barmaid is looking at us oddly. More beer meets its appointed fate.

Suddenly, though, she stops; she says softly and more tenderly than I have previously thought her capable of, “And I’m going to die.”

It’s an awkward moment. I’m used to girls fronting up but never know what to do or say when they revert to girly. Janey used to do it occasionally, back in the day... I opt to do what I always do, which is to take a swig of lager and play for time. She follows suit and by the time our faces are again visible she seems to have recovered. I deem it wise not to point out the lapse in what is an otherwise robust front. She says, “Trouble is, it wipes my memory.”

“What does that mean?

“I come to, and I can’t remember things.”

“What kind of things?”

“Anything that happened before I lost it. Sometimes it’s only a minute or two, sometimes it’s a few hours that go. The witch doctor said something about ‘long term memory potentiation’. Apparently my astro-thingy is interfering with it. Whatever it is, it’s a fucking pain. I have to keep a diary now, else I’d have no idea what went on just before a fit.”

“Not good,” I guess.

She drains her glass, then smacks it down on the stained wood of the table. “It’s not as bad as an empty glass,” she proclaims.

Another Three-Legged Fox (Again):

With glasses again full between us, the conversation resumes. I’ve noticed that she has a curious way of gesturing while she’s talking, one in which her wrists are bent back at more than right angles; it’s vaguely disturbing. When I comment on it, she explains, "I’m double-jointed, same as my mother. She used to be a contortionist in a circus but she got badly screwed by the ringmaster.”

For a moment I don’t catch on and it’s only when she continues to stare at me and I get the impression she’s waiting for something that I twig. “Oh,” I say. “Very funny.”

“I try,” she says with a smirk. “No, but it does run in the family. My brother’s the same.”

“Good for Twister, I should think.”

She grins. “When we were kids, it sometimes took the fire brigade to untangle us.”

She seems to be slowing down a bit when it comes to emptying beer glasses, for she’s only drunk a third of the latest in her first draught; between you and me, I am not entirely sorry about this. I ask, “How long have you been here?”

“Arrived this morning.”

“You’ve met Professor Lyle, then?”

“Crusty old cock with small feet and a big smile?”

“That’s the one.”

“Yeah. He gave me a pep talk first thing. Seemed to think I was stupid.”

I think about my father. “That’s doctors for you.”

She shrugs. “What do they know?”

I think again about my father. “They only need to know enough to bullshit you. All the knowledge beyond that is a bonus.”

She doesn’t understand. “Huh?”

I ask, “And have you met any of the other guinea pigs?”

“I’ve seen an old bloke with a kink in his neck.”

“Dr. Symonds?”

“Dunno. I said, ‘Hello’, and he looked like I’d stuck my pinky up his arse. I was standing right in front of him but he couldn’t see me. Looked fucking startled for a moment, then turned slowly around and eventually found me.”

“Yeah,” I agree. “That’s the one. I wonder what’s wrong with him?”

“Dunno about his brain, but I reckon he’s got a rod up his backside so stiff he can’t bend over to shit. He was as frosty as Old Nick’s prick. Seemed to think I’d been playing a joke on him.”

Although I have had little experience of Dr. Symonds, I can see where she’s coming from. “Anyone else?”

“There’s Alice. She’s cool. She reminds me of my Gran - smells of talcum powder. And I saw a big looking bloke in the distance when I was mooching around the grounds; dunno who he was. Haven’t seen anyone else.”

“Prof Lyle said there were six of us, and I was the last to arrive.”

“Perhaps he or she is hiding in their room. I’ve been around the place pretty thoroughly.” The way she says this makes me ask her why. “It pays to know the lie of the land. Where the exits are, that kind of thing.”

It seems an odd thing to say. I’m on the point of asking her what she means but she forestalls me by making a small grunting sound; at first I think it’s just an unladylike belch because of lager gas, but the look on her face tells me otherwise. It is vacant, a house without an occupant. She stares straight ahead, mouth slightly open, eyes open not wide but constant, without blinking; as I watch her, a small trickle of saliva appears at the corner of her mouth. “Mandy?” I ask with no little trepidation.

I am not blessed with the reward of a response. I look around; the barmaid is on her mobile phone and the only other customer – an ancient codger with a tweed hat that had a fishing fly sticking out of it – is just staring at his half pint of beer, lost, presumably, in the past. I don’t know what to do. She has told me she won’t start flailing around (although I remembered her words – my fits aren’t like that...not yet, anyway), but that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t be doing something. Will she collapse, and so should I be lying her down on the floor? I suspect she won’t thank me if I do that and it probably isn’t necessary. And how long will it last? We could be here until last orders... I sit there for a few moments, trying not to panic, wondering whether I should return to The Hall and summon help; I decide to give it fifteen minutes first, again suspecting that she’s the kind of person who would prefer it that way.

Well, it turns out to be fifteen minutes that stretch like fifteen hours. There’s an ancient grandfather clock in the corner of the room that ticks softly into the stifling, dusty air of that hot afternoon; the longer we sit there, the slower it seems to tick and the louder it becomes, until I can swear that it’s clockwork within my head that is sounding. My bladder is filling up rapidly from two quickly drunk pints of ‘wife-beater’, but I don’t feel I can get up and point Percy at the porcelain, leaving Mandy just sitting there, staring out to sea like the French Lieutenant’s Woman. If the barmaid comes over to clear the glasses, I suspect she’ll get the screaming heebie-jeebies. Because of thoughts such as these, I remain and count the ticks while trying not to, attempting to look as if the two of us have just sunk into one of those natural lulls that all conversations between friends fall into.

And then after thirteen minutes exactly, two things happen. The first is that a movement to my right catches my eye. We’re sitting in a broad bay window; I’m on the bench seat under it, while Mandy is opposite. I look instinctively to see what has caught my attention. There in the middle of the beer garden, perhaps twenty yards distant, is that fucking fox again. Just as before, it stares at me, its face full of knowledge, full also (I am now convinced) of pity for me.

At the same time, and to my great relief, Mandy gives a small twitch and life returns at once to her face. She blink, focuses first on the view out of the window behind my shoulder, then on me, gives her head the smallest of shakes, then sucks in air deeply, as if she has been holding her breath all this time. She looks around, frowning; I say nothing, unsure of what I should say. Finally, her gaze comes back to me.

“Who the fuck are you?”

Drinks at Seven:

We arrive back at The Hall late and slightly drunk, although not drunk enough to know it. It’s taken me over an hour firstly to persuade Mandy of what happened – she at first denying point blank that she’d had a fit, although she’s unsure of how she came to be sitting in a strange pub with a complete stranger – and then to fill her in on the past two hours, a task that was helped by her notebook. She recalled arriving at The Hall; indeed, she recalled everything until shortly before she met me. I was eradicated from her view of existence, existentially rubbed out, alive only in the notes she had been making. It’s a habit she developed when the fits began, a way of re-establishing equilibrium following a fit as quickly as possible. It’s an odd feeling for me but, I suppose, even odder for her once I convinced of the truth.

“Fucking hell,” she says, with some feeling as we walked back to The Hall. “That’s never happened before.”

“What?”

“I’ve always known I’ve had an episode. This time, there was nothing. I just lost some time out of my life.”

“But you must have known. One moment you were sitting on the bench outside The Hall, the next you were in the pub, presumably.”

“Yeah, it was weird, but until you reminded me, I didn’t know about the fits. I’d completely forgotten about them.” She is frowning hard, chewing at her lower lip, clearly worried. “What does that mean?”

“Probably nothing,” I say to be reassuring; I can tell that I fail, though.

“They said things would get worse eventually.” She’s talking to herself, not to me, so I don’t reply. In any case, that is also exactly what I’ve been told, so reassurance on that point isn’t in me. Obviously, and just as I am, she’s scared by what’s happening to her – and equally obviously, she’s not about to admit it. But that is nothing as to what I know she’s feeling about the future; I don’t know Mandy but I know what she’s facing, and I know that she’s almost catatonically terrified of what is going to happen to her. It’s why we are here, an unspoken bond between us.

“Seb! Mandy! Where have you been? Come and meet everyone.” Joanne Thompson has an empty glass in her hand, but I’m not entirely convinced she picked it up that way; clearly the legendary wine cellar has coughed up a little bit of its booty. She seems relieved, as if our presence has been holding things up although, looking around, I can’t see that it has. There are about twenty-five people in the dining room, grouped into irregular clusters. The long table is covered in a white table cloth with bottles of red and white, sparkling and still water, and orange juice; next to these are a few wine glasses. Joanne leads us to this and pours white wine for Mandy, red for me. I take a sip and experience relief in finding that it’s decent plonk; since Mandy already has only a little of her wine left in the glass, I take it that the white is of a similar standard. Joanne says, “Come on,” and leads me through the crowd while Mandy stays behind to top her drink up.

“Dr. Symonds? Mrs. Wilson? Can I introduce you to Sebastian Shockley?”

It’s one of those questions that is an answer in itself. They both turn to look at me; Alice in the normal way, Dr. Symonds in his own, possibly patented, way. He has, as is apparently his habit, been staring at Alice – a woman of about sixty who is no more than five feet and has, I kid you not, a pink rinse – from the corner of his eye but, because she’s so short and he so comparatively tall at over six feet, he has been bending his neck at what seems an uncomfortable if not unnatural angle. My appearance causes him to uncrick his neck and rotate his head (and whole body a little) in my direction.

“Hello, Dear.” This, in case you are wondering, is Mrs. Wilson speaking. She smiles at me in a friendly way and holds out her hand. “My name’s Alice.” She loudly proclaims a broad East End accent. Her eyes are pale, her teeth imbued with a secret life all of their own, for their movements are not entirely those of her jaws.

Dr. Symonds doesn’t seem quite so amicable, but I figure that might have been an illusion caused by his peculiar stance. He says solemnly and not a little sniffily, “Mr. Shockley.” He forgets to hold out his hand; presumably his mind is on things higher than Shockleys.

There follows one of those silences that seem to follow me around. Joanne has left us to our fates and there’s insufficient social glue to hold us together. We’re saved by Mandy who arrives and says cheerily, “Hello, Alice.”

Mrs. Wilson – Alice – is delighted. “Hello, Dear!”

Mandy’s glass is full; I have a shrewd idea that it isn’t her first refill that she’s now enthusiastically imbibing. She looks at Dr. Symonds and smile. I discover that she has an engaging smile when she chooses to arrange it thus. “We haven’t met. I’m Amanda Chadwick.”

He doesn’t have to rotate too much to take her in. “George Symonds.” A hand is held out and I wonder why I wasn’t so privileged.

Mandy, in what I am discovering is typically direct fashion, asks him, “What is wrong with you, George?”

Well, the room doesn’t exactly go silent and I don’t think anyone turns to stare, but there is then a moment when I think George, Alice and I forget to breathe. Then George shakes himself as though someone has slapped him, clears his throat and says, “It’s homonymous hemianopia.”

Mandy says at once, “Oh, God! How awful for you.” And she sounds as though she meant it. She turns to me. “See? That’s a proper disease, that is. A hundred times more impressive than your olly-thing.”

What happens then is miraculous. Dr. George Symonds unwinds before the sextet of our eyes, both mentally and physically. He still has to peer at things with his head facing approximately east-south-east, but there’s a palpable softening in him. He asks, “You understand?”

She nods, lips to glass and somehow not spilling anything, then says, “It’s horrible.”

He relaxes even more. “People think I’m a freak,” he admits.

Alice murmured quietly, “Oh, surely not...”

Mandy says, “I can see that.” Is she being facetious, I wonder, but then she points out, “We’re all freaks here, though, George.” Without waiting for him to respond, she turns to Alice. “What symptoms have you got, Alice?”

“Just headaches.” There is a tinge of shame in this, as if one should hide such mundane problems. “They’re getting worse all the time, though,” she adds, trying to gain brownie points. “And I had a fit last week.” There is a slight pause before she tops this proudly with, “The doctors say I’ve got less than a year to live.”

“It is likely that I will soon go blind,” is George’s counterbid.

A tricky stalemate ensues but, thankfully, Joanne reappears. “Let me introduce you to the others. Unfortunately, David’s unwell and can’t join us.” She scans the room. “Ah! There’s Marcus.”

She pulls me away (socially rather than physically), Mandy trailing, to the other side of the room, where a tall chap, about my age, is talking to Professor Lyle. They’re standing in front a huge portrait of some bloke who has a pale face, a long curly black wig and a frock coat made out of the wallpaper from an Indian restaurant. The Prof looks less than delighted to be interrupted in his conversation, but says nothing. We’re introduced to Marcus Teller-Mead who, it turns out, is gracious and charming. We all shake hands and then he frowns at me. “Shockley? Are you the chap who wrote that book – An Unreconstructed Murder?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

His smile becomes genuine. “I read it. Good book.”

I swear I don’t blush, although I do grin stupidly. “Thanks.”

Mandy is now looking at me with an expression that I haven’t seen before; it feels quite good. El Professero is also looking at me with something of a new attitude and, for a moment, I swear that it’s alarm. Joanne exclaims, “You’re an author! How wonderful!”

“I’ve written a book,” I point out. “I’m not sure Charles Dickens would say that makes me an author.”

Marcus will have none of this. “I thought it was brilliant. Really scary.”

His grin isn’t confined to his mouth either, but has spread to his eyes and I believe him. “Thank you.”

Mandy, glass in hand empty, stares at me with an odd expression, although she says nothing. Professor Lyle continues to stare at me, but it seems to me that he’s trying to work something out. Joanne twitters on about buying a copy; her boss is emptying his glass and trying, rather successfully I think, to look unimpressed. “What do you do?” I ask Marcus.

“I used to be an investment banker.”

Mandy’s face tells me what she thinks of that, but Marcus seems to be unaware that a substantial proportion of the British population believe castration followed by drowning in pig slurry to be too decent a fate. Never good at small talk, I am at something of a loss to reply, opting for, “Used to be?”

“I was sacked.” Blunt doesn’t come anywhere near. His stare is challenging.

“Oh.”

“I was accused of embezzlement.”

Mandy’s expression has changed from contempt to surprise. She asks, “Were you guilty?”

He shrugs. “No more than any other capitalist pig.” There is something about the way he phrases this that tells me he has summed Mandy up fairly accurately. To me, he says, “They couldn’t prove it but they made it plain they wanted me gone. I didn’t have a choice, really.”

“Sounds as if you were lucky,” is Mandy’s opinion.

“That would be ‘lucky’ as in I lost my job, lost my marriage, lost my reputation and lost my friends.” This is greeted with silence into which he adds, “And now I’m dying of a brain tumour.”

We are saved from further discomfort by the arrival in our little group of a youngish chap with curly blond hair and enough acne scars to make me wince internally; he’s drinking orange juice. We are reliably informed by Joanne that he’s Professor Lyle’s second in command and that his name is William Moffat. More handshaking all around, except with Mandy who’s gravitated to the wine bottles again. Dr Moffat proves to be irritatingly enthusiastic about the research.

“We’ve got high hopes we’ve got it right this time,” he says. The door to the kitchen opens and the people from the kitchen start bringing in plates of cold meat and large bowls of various salads.

I ask, “What does that mean? How did you get it wrong last time?”

Momentary consternation makes its home on his face before being evicted. “Oh, I only meant that the treatment wasn’t as effective as we hoped.”

“I seem to remember a long list of side-effects.”

Dr. Moffat chortles. “So does aspirin. So does that wine you’re drinking.”

“There are side effects, and then there are side effects,” I point out. I am recalling phrases such as spontaneous subarachnoid haemorrhage, bone marrow aplasia, necrotising fasciitis and blindness (temporary). “Just how long does ‘temporary’ blindness last?”

A repeat performance of Dr. Moffat’s chortling act is this time tinged, I think, with embarrassment. “We’re really hopeful that you will see real benefits from the therapy,” he assures me.

Marcus’s eyebrows hoist themselves up his handsome face. “I doubt whether you’re as hopeful as we are,” he points out drily. He has a soft but deep voice.

Professor Lyle adds blandly, “I think what William is trying to say is that we are extremely confident that the treatment will be effective and without any side effects. The only previous problems we’ve had have been with the specificity of the drug.” His tone is, as I said, bland but it has undercurrents of irritation.

“Thank Christ for that,” comments Mandy who has a habit of popping up unexpectedly.

Lyle looks across at the food that’s now spread across the table, then at his watch. “If you will excuse me, I must say a few words.”

Dinner at Eight:

He stands on a chair to make his speech, and it’s not the most dignified of sights; I suspect, too, that Professor Lyle does not like to look undignified. He made the mistake of clapping his hands too quietly at first so that no one took any notice of him; his second attempt is accompanied by him calling with some asperity, “Excuse me, everyone!” He thereby makes his next mistake, which is to sound slightly cross and slightly pleading. Only gradually, and with the help of Nurse Thompson and Dr. William Moffat making ‘shooshing’ noises, does the room quieten.

I look around. Apart from George Symonds and Alice Wilson, most of the professor’s audience seem to be under forty and a lot of them under thirty; some of them seem to be barely out of school. Their expressions are all, however, respectful; I suspect the Professor Lyle might not have great personal presence in a crowd, but he seems to invoke a degree of respect amongst those who work for him.

“Before you all get too drunk...” He pauses for a laugh that comes too slowly and without heart. “...I would like to say a few words.” Beside me, Mandy murmurs, “I bet you would.” Dr. Moffat looks at her with a frown. The esteemed leader continues in a voice of slightly higher register than was natural, “Before we start eating, I would like to welcome our guests. Over the next twenty-four hours, the plan is to take them through the whole project so that they understand completely what we are trying to do here. After that, if we have managed to make them fully conversant with our aims, and our methods, and what the treatment involves, then they will be asked to make the final decision as to whether or not they wish to proceed. That will be tomorrow evening; if they decide not to do so, then they will leave on Monday morning; all their expenses will be paid and they will have had a pleasant weekend in the country. If they consent to participate in the trial, we will ask them to sign the consent papers on Sunday evening and the trial will commence on Monday morning with the first of the treatments. Is that all clear?”

Marcus calls, “This is all very nice, but is it all entirely necessary? You sent us a forest’s worth of paperwork when we responded to your advert. It all seems quite clear to me.”

Professor Lyle smiles. “I’m sure it is, Mr. Teller-Mead. However, we here at Cytocure are totally aware of our obligations to ensure that the research we undertake is as ethical as is humanly possible; when we talk about ‘informed’ consent, we intend to make sure that it is as fully informed as possible. Through a series of illustrated seminars, discussions and tours of our facilities, we hope to achieve that.”

Marcus makes a face – ‘a waste of my time,’ he clearly thinks. When I look for Mandy, I see she’s crouched in a corner of the room scribbling in her notebook; she looks up and sees me with a peculiar expression on her face, one I can’t interpret.

Mrs. Wilson says, “I think it’s wonderful.” She is wearing a broad, capacious smile. “It makes me feel safe.”

The Professor tries a different smile, one in which I think I detect more amusement and, unless I’m much mistaken, more of a patronising attitude. “And so you should.” He pauses, looks around, and continues, “Most of you will be leaving either this evening or tomorrow morning and I wish to thank you for all your hard work over the past few years. I am convinced that we have now made a definite breakthrough; it is one that will revolutionise, perhaps, the whole of cancer therapy.”

There is a muted cheer, as if no one actually believes this hyperbole, but he seems satisfied. He then asks, “Any more questions?”

There are none. He claps his small hands and, relieved, announces, “Good. The food is ready for us to consume, and I feel sure that you won’t be disappointed. Please help yourselves. Breakfast for our guests will be served from seven-thirty until nine in here. After that, there is a meeting room in the laboratory area on the second floor and we will have our first seminar at ten.”

It was good grub, no doubt about that, and none of that mixed cuisine, over-greased smorgasbord so beloved of caterers the country over – pakoras sitting uncomfortably beside chicken satay, both looking disgustedly at white bread ham sandwiches while the dim sum can barely contain its derision as it contemplates a plate of egg mayonnaise rolls. No, the Professor told no lies when he talked it up. I tucked in with gusto, as did most of the assembled company. As honoured guests we were allowed to be first in the queue, although Mandy declined, preferring to attack the wine again, more of which had been brought forth.

I now find myself next to Joanne Thompson. “Well, you I know,” I say. “And also the Prof and Dr. Moffat, but who are all the others?”

She has her mouth full of prawn vol-au-vent, flakes of pastry adherent to her rather full lips; it takes a few moments for her to compose herself to speak since she chews very daintily and with great assiduity. I so want to brush the crumbs away with a light forefinger as she swallows, then replies, “They’ve had a team of twenty-four people working on this for three years.” She points out two well-groomed men of about my age, one short and one tall, who are talking earnestly to each other in the corner; my gaydar starts pinging off them. “Professor Appleton couldn’t be here tonight – he’s been in charge of the research. Over there are his two team leaders – Dr Barry Stott and Earnest Raper. They’ve each been working on different aspects of the design.”

“Design?”

“Yes. Resolimab has been designed.”

“A designer drug?”

She smiles. “You could say that.”

“Or Frankenstein’s monster?”

This earns a frown. “Not at all.”

“How many of you will be remaining after tonight?”

“Professor Lyle, Professor Appleton, William and me.” She stops, then adds quickly, “And the chef, of course.”

“Is that all?”

“I assure you that’s enough. After all, there are only six users.”

I find her description of me as a ‘user’ slightly odd; ‘subject’, ‘guinea pig’, even ‘lab rat’, but not ‘user’. It sounds as though we’re regarded as consumers, perhaps even drug addicts. The air smells of euphemism, not a scent I’ve ever particularly cared for. Dr. Moffat comes up, all smiles and acne scars. “Joanne? I’ve been meaning to ask you if you’ve had a chance to go through my report yet? Prof wants it by Monday, you see, and I need someone to check the grammar and spelling. He’s such a stickler.”

He’s eager, exuding pheromones, hormones and body language messages that I’ve seen many times while spending innumerable hours standing in a mobile phone shop. He’s smitten; Joanne, I can see, is amused and even excited by this attention but not especially inclined to reciprocate. She strikes me as the kind of woman who naturally used men; William strikes me as the kind of man who inevitably gets used; he thinks it is the way of things.

At which I think of Janey. Perhaps, I find myself wondering, he’s right.

She shakes her head and, with a small smile says, “Sorry, no.” Her hand brushes his arm; his eyes don’t look down, but then I know he doesn’t need to, because I can see his reaction. He looks as though he’s enduring an erection that is about to make his underwear unsuitable for human consumption. She continues, “Should get a chance tomorrow. Okay?”

His smile suggests that it most definitely will be.

I feel a distinct whiff of gooseberry coming off my clothes and excuse myself. For a while I’m happy to get my mouth around a few more c.c.s of wine, then turn around at a tap on my arm to find Mandy there. She’s got a huge grin on her face.

“Fancy a shag?” she asks, her voice unashamedly loud.

The Boy with No Eyes in the Kitchen:

We lie side by side, not embracing, not even touching; we aren’t lovers after all, just people who have made love. As usual, I’m full of self-doubt concerning my performance; as usual, the woman I’m with isn’t about to say anything about it, not in a hundred years; not to me anyway. There’s complete darkness in the room and, now that we are no longer concerned with each other, this is bothering me. I grew up in Croydon, spent the last six years in Tooting; like some sort of organism that had mutated in the depths of the sewer, I need pollution – in my case, light pollution. And then there’s the quiet; to people like me who have matured in the womb of eternal traffic rumbling - with odd punctuation by drunken singing, faint sobbing or screams, even occasional gunshots - silence is a terrible thing. It screams at you; it unnerves you. It is something that is unknown and unknowable, an intangible thing that is as horrible as pain.

“What?” asks Mandy sleepily.

“Nothing.”

“You said something about ‘pain’...”

“No, I didn’t.”

She turns over, facing away from me; as we made love I noticed that she had a tattoo on the nape of her neck in the form of some sort of oriental characters. I wonder now what they mean. There’s an alarm clock on the bedside table telling me that it’s just after one. I’m starting to get a headache, but I’m not sure that it’s the herald of hallucination since it’s at the back of my head and not the front; probably it’s due to the wine and the sex. Beside me, Mandy’s breathing slows, becomes unlaboured, becomes regular. I fall to wondering how much she’s drunk that day, not because I’m bothered, but because I have nothing else to do, certainly not sleep. No matter how much it was, she doesn’t seem particularly affected.

Something outside makes a hooting noise; presumably an owl. This is followed by more silence for a while, after which a cat begins yowling; then another starts. Brilliant. I’m the sole member of the audience at a cat concert; I wanted a bit of background sound effects, not a fucking full on animal opera. I breathe a few obscenities, then turn over so that our backs are against each other – the beast with no backs, you might say; perhaps I move slightly more energetically than I need to because I half want to wake her. Mandy, as I am to discover is a trait of hers, does not do as I want.

It’s at two twenty-three that the foxes begin. In Tooting, I quite often heard their urban cousins doing their screaming thing, but that is against a background of good old, safe, dirty, mechanical human noise. Here it’s stark, almost wounding; it’s something that takes me back several thousand years and makes me fear for my safety at a primaeval level. “For fuck’s sake,” I whisper.

Mandy says at once into the darkness on her side of the room, “It’s only foxes.”

“I know what they are.” She doesn’t reply; the foxes keep at it. I ask the darkness, “Got an aspirin or paracetamol?”

“No.”

Neither do I. My mouth is swollen with dryness and the headache’s getting worse.

Mandy says suddenly, “You didn’t say you’d written a book.” She sounds accusatory, almost hurt or betrayed.

“Didn’t know I was supposed to.”

“What’s it about?”

That’s always a difficult one for a writer; I intended it as an existential take on the whodunit; a bit like Paul Auster, only with slightly more readability. No one else, though, has seen it like that. It’s perceived as just another crime novel. Hey-ho... I say, “It’s just another crime novel.”

She thinks about this, then says simply, “Good one.” With that, and having appeared to have achieved some satisfaction on the subject (for her breathing is almost immediately once more soft and regular), she resorts again to sleep. I, however, find myself less sanguine. The foxes are displaying prodigious amounts of sexual energy. Eventually, I can stand it no more. “Christ on a bicycle!” I throw back my side of the duvet and swing my legs over the side of the bed, groping for my underwear.

“Where are you going?” she asks, rising on to her elbows in the near-total darkness.

“To find something for my headache.”

“Why not call the nurse?” She waves her hand in the very general direction of the emergency button.

“For paracetamol?”

She doesn’t respond. I pull on my jeans and tee-shirt, and leave her room.

I figure the kitchen is going to be the likeliest place to find painkillers. I don’t have a torch and there isn’t much light to go by, but Mandy’s room is right next to the central hallway with the helical staircase, and I haven’t seen any suits of armour, so I reckon I’ll be able to navigate my way there without too many collisions with noisy country house furniture. I don’t suppose that there’ll be much traffic about at that time of night, so walk out without fear of accident out into the hallway. At once, a movement to my left makes me jerk my head round; it’s devilishly dark but I dimly see something at the end of the corridor; it comes from one room and immediately enters the one opposite, appearing almost to sidle, as if there’s something of the crab about it, as it moves across the window and then enters the room opposite. It’s Dr. Symonds.

Wondering what he’s up to but not feeling able to have it out with him mano a mano, I wait a few moments after the door closes behind him, the walk down the corridor and enter the central hall. Hand on the banister rail, I pad quietly around and down, then go through the closed doors of the East Wing, passing through the library to the dining room beyond. I manage to avoid most of the furniture on my way - although my shins protest soundlessly when I bark them fairly badly on a low coffee table and, quite inexplicably, I nearly walk into a full length mirror – and am quite quickly in the kitchen, where it immediately strikes cold. I feel on the wall by the door for a light switch, find one and do the necessary.

Imagine my surprise to discover someone else in there.

He’s sitting at a long wooden kitchen table, back towards me. It is the figure of a young man, perhaps not even out of his teens; he has cropped black hair and a slim frame. As soon as I see him, I jump and my heart does a little squeezing thing in my chest, as if to say that it isn’t a happy bunny; strangely, the figure doesn’t react at all, although I must have made plenty of noise. Perhaps he’s deaf, I wonder in the long moment that follows. I call out, as one does, “Hello?”

No immediate response. I catch a whiff of iron, wonder what that is, feel the cold of the stone on the soles of my feet. Then slowly he turns around to face me, hands held out towards me with the palms up; with one of them he grabs my hand and squeezes it hard; really hard, so that his long nails dig in. He’s grinning, which was odd. Very odd.

Because his eyes are scratched out, and his palms and fingers are coated in bloodied red and white pulp, and two eyeless sockets stare sightlessly at me above that happy smile.

No Boy with No Eyes in the Kitchen:

I become aware of how cold I am first, then of how stiff I am, then of my position on the flagstones of the kitchen. I push myself up quickly as I suddenly think of the eyeless boy at the table but, of course, there is nothing here; no shreds of eye, no blood, no slightly maniacal grin on an impossible face. It was all hallucination, although the headache was like the usual ones. I didn’t know whether to be relieved at the realisation that there is no ghoulish figure stalking the house, or dismayed that my experiences seemed to be getting worse.

It is, as I have said, cold; the intolerable heat of the day has long gone, leaving cold moisture on the stones at my feet and in the air around me. I wonder if I screamed; if so, it has not been heard. Looking at my watch, I see that approximately twenty minutes have passed; surely enough time for someone to come? My headache is gone, although now I just felt generally shite; stiff and cold and hung-over. I no longer feel that I want painkillers, just the warmth of a bed, so I make my way back through the obstacle course of the lower floor to the stairs, then circled slowly up the stairs. It never occurs to me not to go back to Mandy’s bed.

I crawl back under the duvet with a soft sigh, glad to be back on a gentle mattress and within a warm cocoon. I have a lot of things on my mind, of which, paradoxically, the occurrence of another hallucination is not the most burdensome. Oh, no. Not in the least. There was something about that particular hallucination which disturbs me greatly and won’t let me rest easily. For a long time, I wonder what’s happening, and whether it’s happening to me, or just around me, and what it all means. I turn over and this wakes Mandy. She asks sleepily, “What happened?”

“Nothing,” I lie, and only after a small pause that is no pause at all, and yet...

“Yes, it did,” she says, her voice less sleepy. I can hear in her voice that her eyes are open. She isn’t looking at me but at the other side of the room, though.

I think how certain she seems to be, as I admit, “I saw something.” It doesn’t sound right in my ears, so I add, “It was just another hallucination.”

A long time passes and she could be asleep, but she isn’t. In a disturbingly sure tone, she says, “You don’t believe that.”

I’m about to argue, decide there’s no point; she’s right, after all. “No, I don’t.”

“Wanna talk about it?” She hasn’t moved; not one solitary muscle, except those, I suppose, for breathing and talking.

But, no, I don’t. Not yet, least ways.

She says no more and neither do I. I lie on my side, back to Mandy as hers is to me, fully awake, and not just because of what I’ve seen, but because of what I feel.

Only gradually do I slip into some sleep, feeling the pain of the scratch marks on my hand where the boy with eyes grabbed me. I wake in the early morning light when an angry and slightly hysterical voice asks of me, “What the fuck are you doing in my bed, you cunt?”

The Boy with No Eyes, With Eyes:

“It’s good to see you all here.” Professor Lyle sounds as though he means it, and I wonder why he finds it quite so good. We are sitting in pleasantly comfortable chairs in an air conditioned seminar room on the upper floor of the house, in the East Wing. The carpet is dark blue and quite deep; the walls are covered with laminated posters full of scientific mumbo-jumbo; there’s a machine in the corner that dispenses our choice of hot beverage into white china cups, and we have all been given our choice of digestive, oat crunch or chocolate cream biscuits. By ‘we’ I mean the five potential experimental subjects (David is still apparently unwell), Joanne Thompson, Dr. Moffat and a cove I haven’t seen before. He is about fifty or so, with combed back, greying and thinning hair, a look of irredeemable seriousness on his face and thick-framed glasses that make him look owlish; by ‘owlish’ I suppose I mean as much coldly hostile as intelligent. My ignorance concerning his provenance is soon dissolved as Professor Lyle says, “I would first like to introduce you to Professor Jeffrey Appleton; it’s his theoretical work on which the experimental cure is based.” I don’t know whether he expects a standing ovation, but all Professor Appleton gets is a few nods and smiles, after which he looks even more serious, adding a frown to his general air of imperious wisdom. Lyle continues, “We want to give you a simple explanation of the procedure you will hopefully be undertaking.”

Mandy leans across to me and whispers, “Notice how he emphasised the word, ‘simple'? Twat thinks we’re all stupid.”

Mandy and I are on speaking terms again, although it took a lot of fast talking on my part to stop her attacking me with the Tazor she dug out of her bag by the bed. It didn’t help that her memory deficit stretched back to about halfway through the drinks party, and she failed to make a note of the fact of our liaison. Matters were made worse by her uncertainty about whether or not she had suffered a fit. I like to think that it was only my intelligence and charm that saved the day, but I think that only went so far. When we went down to breakfast at eight-thirty, she was still suspicious and distant.

Breakfast was served in the kitchen and I admit to a certain frisson as we entered, but there was, of course, no sign of anything untoward, with regard to blood and tissue fragments on the floor. We had to serve ourselves from a buffet table, but there was a pretty wide choice of what we could have – full English, kippers, porridge, cereals, toast, pastries, fruits, cold meats, cheese. It strikes me that this is probably this is the best free hotel I’ve ever stayed in, and I suspect the same is true of Mandy. Alice was the only other person there and when she saw us she adopted a huge leer and, with a wink, asked us, “Did you both sleep well?”

I think it was at that point that Mandy finally believed my story.

Professor Lyle begins his ‘simple’ explanation. Standing in front of a laptop computer connected to a digital projector hung from the ceiling, he says, “As you may know, the nerve cells of the central nervous system do not ordinarily divide, yet cancers are, by definition, composed of cells that divide and keep dividing, at the expense of all others. This was for some years a discrepancy that we were unable to answer. Recently, however, due in large part to the work of Professor Appleton...” A nod and a smile are proffered to the aforementioned who, perhaps at last relieved to be receiving the kind of recognition he so clearly reckons he deserves, gives up his frown in exchange for a lofty reciprocal smile. “...We now appreciate that CNS cancers are in fact tumours of stem cells.”

This last is given a sort of hushed emphasis. I look around. Joanne Thompson is sitting with the sort of rapt attention I generally only see when there’s a stripper in the room; Dr. Symonds is, to all intents and purposes, sitting at right angles to our speaker, his face turned towards the window, although he’s squinting, as is his habit, at Professor Lyle with awesomely fierce concentration. Marcus Teller-Meade is looking bored and fiddling with his Smartphone; since he’s no longer an investment banker, we can be fairly sure that he’s not manipulating huge volumes of expensive stock on the world’s financial markets, and thereby engineering the ruin of a small country and the deaths of countless innocent victims; probably he’s just playing The Sims. Alice has fallen asleep and her snores are just becoming audible. Mandy lies back in her chair, hands behind her head, cynical expression on her face.

The first of the Professor’s slides appears on the screen behind him; I know that it shows cells and, he hastens to assure us, they are stem cells, although to me and, I suspect, most of his audience, a cell is a cell is a cell. He continues, “You may have heard of stem cells..?” Perhaps some of us have – I have, sort of – and perhaps some of us haven’t, but no one responds to this half question. He continues quickly, “They are, in effect, ‘young’ cells, not yet grown into nerve cells, and still capable of dividing. They are the culprits who are responsible for your cancers.”

He says this last as if expecting a cheer, but in an astonishingly patronising tone; it is, perhaps inevitably, a cheer that never arrives. I’m starting to feel sorry for him; Mandy, though, suddenly sits forward. “Really?” she asks.

If he was on fire and Mandy put him out by pissing on him, he could not have been more grateful. “Yes!” he exclaims.

“Fuck me,” she says in soft wonderment. If you don’t know her, you would swear on any sort holy text you like that she’s genuinely impressed. By now, I do know her, though.

Professor Lyle is reinvigorated, even if his distinguished colleague peers round at Mandy disapprovingly, presumably because of her language; he has a lot to learn. Lyle says, “The treatment we have developed is designed to act specifically against these cells...”

He’s interrupted by the door opening behind us. Heads turn to see who is coming in. Lyle says, “Mr. Boyle! Please come in. It’s a pleasure to see you up and about again.”

So this is David Boyle. He’s about nineteen years old and painfully thin, and quite pale. He reaches over six feet tall and is dressed in a fully buttoned black shirt and jeans. He has crossly cropped ginger hair and dark, brown eyes.

Which is something of a surprise to me, because when I last saw him, he had apparently just scratched them out.

The Boy with No Eyes, With Eyes, and Talking:

The day is heating up nicely and it’s lunch and I feel more knackered than after a morning in the phone shop, and all I’ve done is sit and listen for three hours. After Professor Lyle came Professor Appleton, a speaker even more boring than his colleague. He is American, representing the science behind the cure, which might cause some to cream their jeans, but which does little for his audience. I stay awake, but only because I like to think I have superhuman abilities; Mandy gives up her pretence at interest and falls to reading a paperback with no attempt to suggest that she’s paying attention; Marcus sits with a sour look on his face, as if he has ingested something that has disagreed with him; Alice just vacillates between somnolence and semi-wakefulness, sonorous snores indicating which particular state she’s in at any one time; Dr. Symonds continues to stare in his peculiar manner, demonstrating what I think is an impressive stoicism. Only Nurse Thompson and Dr. Moffat evince any apparent enthusiasm, and they must have heard it a couple of thousand times before...

...but then again, they’re being paid.

The last hour was given over to Nurse Thompson giving us the lowdown on the potential side-effects of the cure and, it soon became clear, this was not about to be an easy gig. No one wants to know that when they take a drug it doesn’t just do what they want it to do (and even then it may not), but that it also does an average of a hundred things more. Joanne Thompson has the task of going through them all. Most of them are trivial – rash, malaise (how will I tell?), nausea, light-headedness, and suchlike – but some of them seem, while not necessarily serious, (how shall I put it) potentially troublesome. Faecal incontinence, for example; I mean, everyone’s used to a touch of follow-through after a heavy night, but we’re potentially promised something a little more diverting; and then there are, in no particular order, ‘changes in sexual desire’ (is that up or down, and therefore is that necessarily a problem?), jaundice, the production of too much saliva, and hair loss. But then there are the ones that give anyone a bit of food for thought. There’s the possibility of the aforementioned ‘temporary’ blindness, gastro-intestinal haemorrhage, impotence, ‘sudden heart problems’ (what the fuck does that mean?), retching and bloating. Most worrying – and problematic of all – are the ones that, although she describes them as ‘rare’, are particularly worrying. We may expect, the delightful Nurse Thompson tells us with slightly inappropriate cheeriness, one or more of the following: euphoria, dysphoria, hallucinations, delirium, fits, blurred vision and nightmares. Mandy looks at me, and I look at her; my eye is then caught by Marcus; Alice is gently asleep, a soft gentleness descended on her face, while Dr. Symonds frowns strenuously, but then he always does. David is up at the beverage machine and, as he has been since coming in, seems not to care much about anything. It’s Marcus who speaks, his voice deep and heavy with caustic irony. “How then, Joanne, will we know what is the cancer and what are the side effects?”

David proves to be quite likeable; certainly more to my taste when with eyes than when without. As we stand in the dining room and munch our way through daintily wrapped tortillas washed down with our choice of juice or water, the conversation falls inevitably to his symptoms; in David’s case, his take the form of Pickwickian syndrome. Dr. Symonds, facing the door but addressing David who stands in front of the window, says with sudden interest, “Really?”

Mandy asks with characteristic bluntness, “What’s that, then?”

The oblique, searchlight stare of the good doctor swings around. “He falls asleep without warning.”

David adds, “It’s getting worse.”

If he expects comfort, he is left disappointed; he is in the wrong company. Mandy snorts. “Join the fucking club, sunshine.” The glass in her hand contains something that looks not like apple juice, nor like orange juice, nor even like water, whether it be still or sparkling. I speculate where she got it from.

David was a student at Bath Spa University, studying history. He is quietly spoken, and seemingly thoughtful. I ask, a propos of nothing at all, “Did you sleep well last night?”

I sense that I’m not altogether successful in my application of a veneer of innocence to this enquiry, for I collect a full house of odd glances from the assembled company. David replies with a questioning expression, “Yes. Why?”

Of course he did. It was just another hallucination; you don’t excoriate your eyeballs in the depths of the night and then wake up the next morning with everything working normally again. I scratched my hand with my own nails, in some sort of frenzy; that’s a perfectly plausible explanation, although when I look at David’s nails, they are quite long...

I just shrug, unable to supply a reasonable explanation for the question. Not for the first Mandy rides to my rescue. “What was wrong with you yesterday evening, then?”

“Gut rot. I had a dodgy curry night before.”

Alice has joined us. “Ohh,” she says with genuine sympathy. “That’s horrible, that is. I remember once I got really ill following a kebab. It went straight through me like liquid slurry.” This vivid description causes the good Dr. Symonds to wince slightly.

Mandy catches me looking at her glass and winks at me with a slight smirk. Marcus has been talking to Professor Appleton, whose body language suggests that he is having a hard time of it. Mandy looks at her watch. “Fifteen minutes before a no doubt riveting tour of the labs,” she says and drains her glass. “If you’ll excuse me...” With this she slips away from our group. I keep my eye on her, while listening to Alice ask Dr. Symonds whether he’s a GP or (and quite why she should have thought this is unclear to me) an ‘orthopaedic surgeon’. He says with some dignity, “I am now retired. I used to be a Doctor of Theological Philosophy, Mrs. Wilson.”

She looks mightily impressed, yet is clearly none the wiser. Mandy has slipped into the kitchen. “That sounds interesting,” declares Alice with quite awesome mendaciousness. “What does your wife do?”

“I am a widower.”

“Oh, dear!” She sounds startled by this, a reaction it is difficult to fathom. Dr Symonds is beginning to look slightly wild-eyed at the turn in the conversation, as if he fears she is about to propose to him.

I make my excuses and walk across the room, past Dr. Moffat who is trying his luck once again with a slightly amused Joanne Thompson; I go through the doorway just in time to see Mandy giving the chef’s tonsils a fucking good tongue tickle.

A Tour of the Laboratory:

We reconvene in the seminar room. When Mandy comes in I ignore her, which she doesn’t notice, which in turn pisses me off even more, of course. Professor Lyle gets up and faces us, mentally taking the register. “Does anyone know where Dr. Symonds is?” he asks. No one does, or at least no one responds. “Well, I’m sure he’ll be along soon.” He waits again for a response, is again unsuccessful, and then continues, “I hope you have enjoyed lunch, but not so much that it makes you sleepy.” I cannot stop from glancing across Alice, who is already looking a tad drowsy. Lyle continues, “I hope also that you now have something of an idea of how Resolimab works.”

Well, I suppose that depends on how you define ‘something of an idea’. We have heard talk of ‘CD numbers’, ‘monoclonal antibodies’, ‘intrathecal injections’, ‘the blood-brain barrier’, ‘targeted therapy’... These terms have come at us like bullets – little bullets of jargon – making small holes in our ignorance, and changing nothing at all. All I know is that they are going to take a drug and inject it into the base of our spines once a day; every day, too, we will have to undergo a variety of tests, both physical and mental. As an added incentive, once a week they will inject us with a radioactive tracer, then undertake a special sort of brain scan. William Moffat has the job of explaining all about how and where they’re going to stick the needles in, and what the brain scan will be like. It sounds a bit dodgy to me and, when I look around, I can see that I’m not the only one. Alice, for once unequivocally compos mentis, looks especially queasy.

All this will go on for four weeks. “We anticipate that at the end of this period, there will be a considerable improvement in both the objective parameters and in your symptoms,” says Dr. Moffat cheerily. He strikes me as a natural optimist, and not a little bit of a fool.

It sounds too good to be true, I think.

Dad once said that all optimists are fools, and all fools are wrong. I think it was on the day of Mum’s funeral; the day he started to die.

“He was probably right,” murmurs Mandy.

Startled, I whisper to her after an incredulous pause, “Did I say that out loud?”

She nods. “Of course you did,” she replies out of the corner of her mouth. The door opens then, but it isn’t Dr. Symonds sidling into the room; no sidling for this man, who instantly give all the impression that he’s important and we had better fucking accept that as a fact. He isn’t particularly tall but is powerfully built, but there’s something about him that tells me that his belief in himself and what he does is adamantine. His suit is expensive and he hides behind a deep tan on his slightly upturned face. This is a man who sees the world as a series of opportunities to be exploited and doesn’t think there’s anything wrong with that.

Lyle says, “Before we take you on a tour of the laboratory and clinical areas, the Managing Director of Cytocure, Mr Alfred Michelson, wants to say a few words to you.”

Michelson comes forward, bearing a smile much as a doctor might advance with a loaded syringe held out; it exposes his teeth and they are startling in their white virginity, apparently purely ornamental, with no obvious sign that they have been soiled by use; certainly not the vulgar use of eating. He nods to Lyle. “Thank you, Professor.” His voice comes down his nose as much as it flows over his tongue, which is a shame because a lot of it misses the view of some immaculate dentition, his teeth as white as perfect pearl.

At which the door opens and in advances Dr. Symonds, sideways of course, mouth open about to speak. I say ‘about to’, but then he catches sight of Mr. Michelson, and said orifice closes again without intelligible speech. Positioned at the back, I see it better than most. I am come to terms with the fact that his expression is never the most jollified, but now it becomes curiously curious. I see fifty percent shock, thirty percent anger, twenty percent fear. When I look to Michelson, his face bears one hundred percent anger.

Symonds stands still for a moment before turning and walking out again, the door slamming behind him.

We have been the shown the carrots, and been shown that they are carrots worth having indeed – excellent food, the life of Riley, a luxury holiday for a few weeks deep in the English countryside during a long hot summer and, most enticing of all, the possibility that we will outlive our cancers. Michelson’s job is to show us the sticks, although he’s good at his job and does this with charm and makes them seem not so much like truncheons, more like feather dusters. He ensures that the baseball bats and maces seem entirely reasonable, a price worth paying, and things that we will not even notice...

...not unless we transgress, anyway.

We have already signed confidentiality agreements concerning this weekend and our potential participation in this trial. They stand no matter what we decide, but if we do sign the final agreements and stay on for the treatments, things become really heavy. Mobile phones are to be surrendered, and there will be no communication with the outside world at all; perhaps more significantly, the outside world will have no knowledge of what happens in this place. We – the six test subjects, together with Professors Lyle and Appleton, William Moffat, Joanne Thompson and the chef – will be completely on our own.

Marcus asks, “Supposing something goes seriously wrong? Something that requires hospitalisation?”

Michelson is so smooth, so assured in his answers. “In the unlikely event of an occurrence such as that, there is an emergency line.”

“To where?”

There is the slightest pause, yet no change in his features, as he replies, “To me.”

For a moment they stare at each other, as if it’s a sort of trial of strength, before Marcus smiles tiredly and says, “I thought that might be the case.”

Do I see a fleeting look of triumph on Michelson’s face? I really cannot be certain. He continues with his recitation of restrictions. There will be no leaving the grounds, he tells us, at which I whisper to Mandy, “That’s the pub out, then.”

Michelson turns his gaze upon me; it is an uncomfortable experience. “I am afraid, Mr Shockley, all alcohol will have to be strictly controlled during the course of the trial.”

Lyle adds, “And all medications will be surrendered; if you need any painkillers or suchlike, you will have to go through Dr Moffat or Nurse Thompson.”

I glance at Mandy; she doesn’t seem particularly bothered by the restriction on alcohol, which I find somewhat surprising. Michelson nods to Lyle and picks up the litany. Whatever happens to us, we are forbidden to speak to anyone about it; at least not until the results of the study have been published. He doesn’t actually spell out the sanctions available to Cytocure, but he makes it plain that they exist, and they are impressive, and they are not to be trifled with. His demeanour is open, it is frank, it is encompassing and (I can’t help but feel), it is totally synthesised. His might be an iron fist in a velvet glove, but the glove is totally transparent - intentionally so – and the iron is white hot. Alfred Michelson wants to charm us, and calm us, and reassure us, even as he intends to disturb us and unsettle us and make us think. He does it very well, for it’s only some hours afterwards that I get to thinking not just about what he has said, but what he means.

Joanne Thompson follows Dr. Symonds out, returning a few moments later to come to whisper into Professor Lyle’s ear while Alfred Michelson ignores them and gives all his attention apparently to us. Lyle nods, his face betraying nothing, and then Joanne returns to her seat. I look around; Alice is dozing gently, a soft rumbling snore leaking furtively out of her opened mouth every now and then, and tiptoeing past Alfred Michelson so that he doesn’t seem to notice; David, still fully equipped in the optical department I am pleased to see, is half paying attention, half staring out of the window, much as a schoolchild might midway through double maths on a Friday afternoon. Mandy stares intently at Michelson, as if she’s heard that looks can kill and she wants to test the proposition. Marcus is back playing a game of some sort on his Smartphone, by now not even bothering to hide his uber-boredom.

Eventually, Cytocure’s managing director comes to the end of his roll of softly spoken, razor sharp threats and we’re allowed a break for beverages and tea, after which William Moffat takes us on a tour of the laboratories, and then Joanne Thompson does likewise with the clinical areas. The lab seems to do what it says on the tin; they’re exactly what I’ve come to expect from innumerable films and TV shows; pipettes and centrifuges and bottles of coloured liquids are on the shelves. There are two remaining scientific staff packing things away. The guy as a goatee beard which he wears proudly as a badge, although badge of what seems to me to be open to rumbustious debate; the girl has freckles and a look of disdain, as if she has already seen enough of the world in her young life to have made a final judgement. They prefer jeans, somehow inevitably (and extremely fashionably) ripped at the knees. William Moffat informs us what they have been doing in these mysterious places, and no doubt he informs us truthfully, but it means nothing to me; for all I know, they could have been busy working on a new recipe for pile cream. As we’re led through, we are largely ignored save for surreptitious glances and the noticeable fading of the conversation as we pass; the only point at which there is any interest is just as we’re taking our leave of the lab area. There is a loud crash including that peculiarly musical sound of fine glassware shattering from behind us; we all turn, of course, to see David collapsed on the floor amidst broken flasks, beakers, pieces of paper, plastic racks and various mysterious pieces of plastic ware. Everyone moves at once – test subjects, Will Moffat, Joanne Thompson and the researchers – converging on the inert body that is David. At first, the general opinion is that he’s dead, but Will Moffat comes up with a different conclusion. He makes a cursory examination before standing up. Still looking down at him, he announces, “He’s just asleep.”

A Decision to Be Made:

We abandon David on a couch in an examination room in the tender of care of Joanne Thompson and the two researchers while Will Moffat takes us through the clinical areas. In addition to the examination room, there’s an anaesthetics room and, beyond that, a sterile room like a small operating theatre. “This is where you will receive the intrathecal injections.”

Alice, breaking all records by staying awake (unlike David) throughout the session, asks worriedly, “Are you sure it’s safe?” It seems to me a bit late to ponder that one; how they get the stuff into our heads is likely to the least of our problems.

William laughs; to a worried, cynical ear it could be thought to sound slightly hysterical. “Goodness, yes!” He repeats a little bit of what he said earlier. “The injections are made through a tube that is inserted into the base of the spinal canal; it’s perfectly safe because the spinal cord actually ends a couple of inches higher, but the fluid that bathes the brain still circulates there; within a few minutes of the injection of Resolimab at that point, it is inside the head. Everything is done under aseptic conditions, so there is no danger of infection.”

“I don’t know,” avers the redoubtable Mrs. W. “It sounds painful, all that injecting.”

“We use local anaesthetic when we put the tube in,” was Dr. M’s confident reply, an efficient forehand just inside the tramlines. “After that, no more needles.”

“You have to inject the local anaesthetic too, don’t you?” she asks, a backhander with noticeable top spin.

This disconcerts the good doctor, presumably because he misjudged the amount of spin on the ball. It takes him a few moments to get himself together and lob feebly back. “Well, yes, we do, but it’s only a small needle.”

The look on Alice’s face – one of triumphalism – is the overhead smash that leaves William Moffat looking stupid in the middle of the court. We move on at his suggestion, this time down a flight of stairs at the back of the building, one that leads all the way down into the cellar. My use of the word ‘cellar’ refers only to its topographical location in the building, not in any way to its appearance. There are no cobwebs, patches of damp, dust or rotting cardboard boxes filled with last decade’s detritus, the stuff that isn’t quite rubbish, isn’t quite good enough to use, but that might come again into its own one day in that nebulous indeterminacy that is the future. This cellar is brightly light, air-conditioned and clean. “In here,” says Dr. Moffat grandly, “Is the Scanner.”

He audibly capitalises the word, as if it’s an alien entity, something with a sentience. It is about two metres and high and two across and shaped like a ring doughnut; a padded flat surface stretches through the hole, which is just about big enough to accommodate a person. Dr. Symonds, who has rejoined us by now and who until then has been silent, suddenly decides it’s time to join in. “What kind of scanner is this?”

“It is a high resolution PET-CT scanner. State of the art.” He is almost crooning as he speaks. He is by now standing next to it.

“You expect us to go in that?” asks Symonds.

“It is quite safe.”

“Safety is not the issue,” responds the prickly Dr Symonds. “It is claustrophobia.”

“Ooh, yes,” chips in Alice. “It looks a bit of a tight squeeze for those of us who are on the buxom side.” Alice is, it has now to be admitted, well endowed of breasty substances, but the effect is rather negated by her overall stature, which a crueller man than me might describe as one of obesity.

“Only your head needs to go in,” is Moffat’s attempt at reassurance.

“Which hardly improves matters for me and my claustrophobia,” is Dr Symonds’ acid reply. “How long will I have to endure a session in that thing?”

“The scans take about thirty to forty minutes.”

Dr Symonds snorts but offers nothing more. William Moffat first hesitates, then stutters slightly in the face of this hostility. “W-w-well... There it is. The tour of the facilities. Are there any questions?”

There is only one. Marcus asks, “You haven’t shown us what’s in the rooms on the top floor of the other wing. I noticed they were locked like the labs.”

“That’s because they’re labs too.” William Moffat’s smile is one of total reassurance. “They’ll be completely empty for the next four weeks.”

A Barmaid with One Eye:

“What are you going to do?” Mandy is already halfway down her first pint and we’ve only been sitting down for three minutes. We found The Three-Legged Fox to be much the same as before, just slightly busier, given that it’s the evening; there are now three old men dressed in unsuitable headgear and dodgy suits, as well as a couple of elderly woman and a middle-aged couple who are clearly tourists and who are clearly wondering what they’ve wandered into.

“Sign up, I guess,” I reply. “What about you?” She shrugs. I turn to David. “And you?”

David came to about an hour before. When our tour finished, we were told that at eight we would be given the final papers to sign. If we chose not to, then transport would be provided to the station; if we applied our monikers to the papers, we would be. After that we were going to be, to all intents etc., etc. locked in. David is pathetically keen. “Of course I’m going to. I’d be mad not to. Aren’t you going to? The only alternative is death.” He’s hyper; I wonder if it’s a side effect of his particular brain cancer.

The barmaid is talking to one of the male regulars; she has plastered on her face a smile that would look okay only on a clown; she has on her body a flowery dress that’s on the point of giving up the struggle and letting the mammaries roam free, like pink barrage balloons that have become untethered . Mandy points out to David, “Maybe they’re wrong. Maybe this stuff will kill us worse than the tumour. I wouldn’t fancy some of the side effects they keep going on about and we’re the first humans to get this stuff.”

“There’s no good way to die,” he replies. He’s noticeably worked up, as if Mandy’s arguments are pressing his buttons and making him react.

“Isn’t there?” she asks. “Dying in my sleep sounds pretty good to me. Or maybe something quick, like in an explosion.”

And suddenly David is serious. I’m actually starting to quite like the bloke, especially his eyes. They’re bright and sparkly and certainly not worth removing. Because he’s tall and thin, he comes across as slightly gawky, and he has a wide grin. Up until then, he’s been fairly easy going, but when Mandy says this, there’s immediately a cloud, and a big one, on the emotional horizon. He says, “You wouldn’t want to die, full stop. Believe me, I know.”

Mandy, bless her, isn’t going to have that. “What the fuck do you know?”

“Because I’ve been through the experience.” he says simply “I know, you see.” Which takes her back a bit.

“You’ve died?” she asks suspiciously.

He nods.

I ask, “How, David?”

“I was a twat, is how. I overdosed on antidepressants. I was feeling fucking low, because I thought my foster parents were treating me like shit; it wasn’t supposed to do anything more than make people pay me some attention. All it did was tell them what they already knew; I was an up-my-own little prick who didn’t think he was getting the attention he thought he deserved...” He snorts. “ I was in a coma for seven months...” His voice fades, as if he’s submerging into memories, and those memories are none too pleasant.

“David?” I prompt. Mandy, I note, has stopped drinking.

He’s seeing things as he speaks next. “I died. My heart never stopped, and I carried on breathing, but I know I died, whatever they say.”

I’m impressed not by what he’s saying so much as by the way he’s saying it; he’s back there, in what he thinks of as a state of death, and he’s fucking scared. I wonder what he saw - by extension, what I would one day see – and in turn I am suddenly fucking scared. Mandy, though, has decided that she’s having none of it; she clearly thinks he’s a fruitiest of fruit loops. “How can you carry on breathing and suchlike and be dead?”

But he can’t seem to draw his gaze away from that time. He has a prominent Adam’s apple, and it’s quivering slightly and we’re just ghostly voices in the background to him. His reply is almost lost in his past. “Dunno, but I know what I was, and I was dead.”

She thinks about this and thinks little of it. “What’s it like, then?” she enquires, her tone one of disbelief; she’s back with her usual gusto at the lager. “Being dead, I mean.”

At which he comes to, quite abruptly. He looks at Mandy quite coldly, as if he only now realises that she’s taking the piss. He says quite clearly and slowly, “There’s nothing. Absolutely nothing.”

He impresses me, but not Mandy. “That doesn’t sound so scary,” she opines.

He looks at her and for a moment I can’t place his expression, then it dawns; it’s pity. He replies, “You don’t understand, but why should you? When I say ‘nothing’, I don’t mean blackness or coldness, I mean you are nothing, and you are in nothing. You are alone, and you are without change and without hope of change, and therefore without hope. You have no memories for comfort, either. There is just this complete absence that you are an infinitesimal part of, that will last forever more.” Mandy is wrinkling her nose and not, I think, because she’s about to sneeze. David sees this and suggests, “Try it some time, Mandy. Try it for a day; try it for a week. Then, try it for a million years. After you’ve done that, go for the big one, and try it for eternity.” If she thought to respond, he doesn’t give her chance. “Dying’s just a passing phase, after all. Death is for life, and then some.”

And I think he gets through to her, at least a little bit, although she isn’t about to admit it. She finishes her drink, puts the glass down with a small smack that means she’s ready for another, and says only, “Well, I don’t intend getting to know any time soon.”

David and I are only halfway down our pints, but she suggests I might like to get the next round in. By the time I returned and am again sitting down, David announces suddenly, “Anyway, I don’t think we are the first human subjects.”

Well, that’s news to me and, I can see from her expression, is a bit of a breaking story for Mandy, too. “Yes, we are,” she contradicts him flatly.

David is scared of Mandy, I can see; scared, and quite conceivably smitten. He doesn’t want to get into an argument with her for both those reasons, but he has his pride and, anyway, he has clearly reason to believe otherwise. He shakes his head. “I think there was a previous study.”

“How do you know?” Her tone isn’t quite totally contemptuous, just almost completely so.

“I overheard the two lab techs talking when I came round this afternoon. They didn’t realise that I was conscious.”

“What did they say?”

Her insistent questioning, almost bullying in natures, rattles him. I can see that he’s thinking he should have kept his mouth shut. “Not much...”

“What does that mean?”

He looks at me for help. “Give him a chance,” I advise Mandy, who glares at me and then takes solace in some more of the amber nectar.

David explains hesitantly, “They were a bit twitched, is all. The bloke said that it wasn’t a good omen and the girl she told him to not be so stupid. She said that we hadn’t even signed the consent papers yet, let alone started the treatment, so it couldn’t be the drug this time.”

“Is that it?” asks Mandy witheringly, I think interrupting him rather.

He reacts with some dignity, “No, there was a bit more. The bloke mumbled something I couldn’t hear. The girl seemed to get excited at that, because she hissed at him to shut up. She said that there had been no proof that it was the drug the first time, anyway. Then there was something about Professor Lyle saying that an autopsy showed that it had been the tumour that was responsible.”

“Could mean anything,” decides Mandy at once. “It could have been an autopsy on a rat or a monkey.”

But I’m not sure. I ask David, “Were those the exact words? ‘The first time’?”

He nods. Mandy makes notes of the conversation in between sups, but in her eyes I can see that for all her words, there’s a small tint of uncertainty.

An hour later and the conversation has moved on and moved about, but it’s an aimless thing, for it was tethered to the decision we have to make, and have to make in the not too distant. Now we’re sitting in a silence that I seek to break by pointing out to Mandy, “We haven’t got long before we have to decide.” It isn’t the most profound of statements, in that it’s stating the fucking obvious but Mandy, whom I would have expected to pick up on the imbecility of the remark, is clearly also feeling the weight of the impending decision.

“I’ll know when the time comes.”

“We won’t be able to slip out to the pub for the whole of the time of the study,” I say.

She smiles slyly. "Maybe, maybe not.”

“Michelson seemed pretty serious, Mandy.”

“What’s he gonna do? Kill us?”

It’s David who says, “Kick us off the trial. We lose our chance to be cured.”

“Or our chance to go blind, or mad, or maybe even dissolve in a puddle of piss, blood and brains, if they’ve got their calculations wrong. What’s all the top security for anyway? Seems over the top.” I’ve known her only just over a day, but I can already recognise that this is vintage Mandy.

“You heard him. It’s commercially sensitive,” I say. “They have high hopes for this, and stand to make a lot of money. They don’t want any rivals getting hold of anything that could put them at a disadvantage.”

She says nothing but she doesn’t need to; she isn’t convinced. Actually, neither am I. There’s a lot of money tied up in Cytocure, and where there’s a lot of money, there is often a big incentive to bend or even break a rule or ten.

David sighs. “We’ll all sign. That’s why we’re here; the only other option is dying, and dying soon.”

Mandy responds at once, “You’re going to die sometime, Davey. You’ll sit there as a ‘piece of nothing’ for all time to come as some point. Why bother putting it off?” She is being purely cruel and her words, her tone, even her stance, are all unadulteratedly harsh.

Yet, perhaps with strength born of his previous experience, he isn’t intimidated. “I know it’s going to come sometime, but at least I want to choose when and I want to choose how.” On a slightly louder note, he adds, “And this isn’t it.”

I look up and accidentally catch the eye of the barmaid. She winks at me and I look hurriedly away.

The Morality of Survival:

This night, dinner is a more formal affair; we sit at the dining table and we are served three courses. Mandy, it turns out, is a vegetarian but, if she hopes to upset things, she fails, for there are vegetarian alternatives. Alongside the six of us, there are the two professors (one at either end), Joanne Thompson and William Moffat. There is one empty place. As the starter is being served – tomato soup – Mandy asks Lyle, “Who’s gone AWOL?”

He’s deep in conversation with Joanne Thompson and looks up in surprise. “Um...Mr. Michelson....” He pauses. “He was called away to London.”

For some reason all eyes turn to Dr. Symonds, but he’s enjoying his soup in his own inimitable style; peering fiercely out of the corner of his eye at the bowl, while his mouth faces towards his side plate; only at the very last, when he has secured a spoonful of sustenance and it’s close to his face, does he turn his head so that he’s in position to receive it.

Mandy, who’s been watching this process with undisguised fascination, opens her mouth but I get in first. “Where do you get your money, Professor Lyle?”

He’s perplexed; or maybe he’s affronted. It’s difficult to tell. “I beg your pardon?”

I have a knife in my hand with which I’ve been buttering a granary roll; I wave it around. “For all this. Where do the spondulicks come from?”

“Cytocure,” he says, as if I’m something of an idiot, perhaps even everything of an idiot.

“And they get their money from...where?”

“I believe they’re owned by a venture capital company.”

Beside me, Mandy says under her breath, “Caring and sharing, then...”

Alice has been consuming her soup with gusto, as in noisily, and she’s just finished. “It’s all very nice,” she pronounces. “Thank you so much for everything.”

With this she shames us, for it occurs to me then that she’s the only one of us who’s expressed gratitude for the hospitality. The food is brilliant, the accommodation good and we’re enjoying a rest in the country, no matter what we decide; yet none of us can see it for anything other than a cynical exercise in manipulation. What does that make her? An innocent? An idiot? Or just a good person? And, perhaps more to the point, what does it make the rest of us?

Lyle bows his head. “Thank you, Mrs. Wilson.”

Marcus, his soup consumed, lays down his spoon. He looks up at the gathering around the table. “The venture capital company is called, Cavendish Holdings. It is registered in the Isle of Man for tax purposes and I have had no little trouble finding out any details about it.”

Professor Lyle smiles, Professor Appleton frowns (but then he seems to do a lot of that). He says in a curious tone. “Does the source of our funding matter?”

Mandy pipes up that. “You bet your sweet fucking A-hole it does, Mon Professeur.”

I do not think I am mistaken when I think I see a little frisson of shock pass across the faces of our hosts at her use of such ripe, and undoubtedly arresting, language. Lyle has yet to finish his first course but it’s now forgotten. His smile looks to me exactly as it always does, so how did I know that he’s not happy? Perhaps because it’s always looked falsified. He asks, “Why?”

Marcus replies. “You see, gentlemen, one of the golden rules of finance that I learned before I left my job – as it is in most areas of commerce and industry – is that if you don’t know the provenance of the funds, then it’s no deal.”

Professor Appleton speaks up. It’s always been obvious that he’s a taciturn cove and on the odd occasion when he gives voice, his American drawl is always a bit of shock. “Are you suggesting that we are being funded by criminals?”

“I don’t know. That’s the point.”

Appleton doesn’t know whether to be affronted or amused; he achieves neither, partly because he’s interrupted by Lyle, who opts to be merely affronted and does it really rather well. “Your insinuation is outrageous, Mr Teller-Meade.”

Marcus has probably looked more uncaring during his life but, if so, I wager not by much. The door opens and the chef comes in to clear the plates and serve the next course, forcing a hiatus in conversation, except for Alice who says, “But they wouldn’t be criminals, Marcus. Not doctors and suchlike.”

Mandy winks at me slyly; she’s enjoying the aggro. She says loudly to Alice, “Not all criminals wear masks and rob banks.”

“Well, really!” William Moffat is astonished. He asks in a slightly comical, higher-pitched voice, “You are joking, aren’t you?”

Mandy shrugs. Having stirred the pot, she seems now content to hand the spoon back to Marcus. There’s another hiatus as the second courses are served; roast chicken for most of us, spicy vegetable tagine with couscous for Mandy. When we’re again alone, Marcus says, “Yes... and no. Who is behind this company, Professor?” Lyle s non-plussed and doesn’t answer. Marcus turns to Appleton. “Can you tell us?”

Appleton eats in the American style, using the concave surface of his fork while his knife rests on the edge of the plate. Laden with chicken, roast potato, peas, carrot and (I can now see) a rather nice sausage meat stuffing, it now stops on its way from plate to slightly stained and irregular teeth. The good professor affects a look of perplexity. It’s a habit of his to consider questions laboriously and only then to answer them. He says after a short pause, “We are.”

The reaction from my comrades is immediate; it is one astonishment; they seem to equate this answer with an admission that the whole operation is being funded by, for instance, a Columbian drug cartel, or perhaps Ted Bundy. Mandy snorts, Marcus draws back in apparent surprise at this admission of ignorance, and Alice looks a little taken aback; Dr. Symonds is squinting steadily to Appleton, his mouth slightly open, as if hypnotised; only David seems unconcerned.

“You are?” asks Marcus. He looks at our hosts. “All of you?”

Appleton nods, the epitome of insouciance in the face of their reaction. “To a greater or lesser extent. Mr. Michelson is the majority shareholder, but we have all put some money in.”

“Is that ethical?”

Lyle swallows something and does so with no little difficulty; perhaps it is chicken, perhaps it is irritation. He says stiffly, “Perfectly.”

Why, then, does everyone seem so disturbed by the revelation? What was that I had thought so idly back in the pub? ...where there’s a lot of money, there is often a big incentive to bend or even break a rule or ten...

Yet I want to carry on living, and I can bear a certain amount of uncertainty about their motives if that’s the price, and this is presumably David’s position. Will the others, I muse, really put their doubts about the ethics and morals of the researchers above survival?

Appleton continues to speak in a calm, logical tone, addressing himself to Marcus, presumably because he’s the self-appointed voice of the conscience. “You have no reason to think anything other than that we are all solely interested in giving you a cure, and that we are governed by the highest ethical standards.”

If he’s hoped that this will be the end of the matter, he’s swiftly disabused of this aspiration, for Dr. Symonds says then, “But Alfred Michelson is very far from ethical. In fact, I would so far as to suggest that he is a murderer.”

The Immorality of Survival:

For a moment I think we’ve all reacted almost as one to this announcement – who wouldn’t? – but then I see that David doesn’t appear to be listening; he’s just carrying on eating, his attention completely on the plate in front of him. As for the rest of us, well, we all respond in our own particular way. Alice utters a squeak and is covered in a look of awed shock; Marcus (who I think was enjoying tweaking the tail of our professorial hosts, and being the centre of attention) contrives a look of surprise and annoyance; Mandy utters a low, excited whistle through pursed lips. The research staff bear expressions that carry behind them varying proportions of incredulity, discomfort and, I think, anger.

And me? Well, all I know is that I am, I think, shocked by this accusation yet, at the same time, not at all surprised. Perhaps it’s that damned fox, winking at me, and all...

It’s Marcus who articulates the atmosphere, and he does so in a voice suggesting that despite his earlier cynicism, he’s as perturbed as the rest of us; if not at the allegation, than at least at the fact that is has been made. “That’s a pretty damning thing to say, Dr Symonds.”

The retired doctor of theological philosophy swings around, a compass that sees magnetic north only obliquely. “It is, nonetheless, the truth.”

“It’s slander,” points out Professor Lyle.

Marcus is quick. “Only if it isn’t true.”

“And it is true,” insists Dr Symonds. He follows David’s example and begins to eat his second course, almost as if the matter is now over; Mandy and Alice join in with gusto, but the rest of us do so only distractedly. Joanne Thompson asks, “What happened, Dr Symonds?” She sounds genuinely interested and not a little worried.

For a moment it’s as if he’s forgotten it all; he just keeps eating, squinting at the plate in his unique manner, taking snatched sips of his glass of white wine. I think it’s only when he considers himself ready that he gives an answer. He looks up from the plate and peers around at the assembled company, chewing and swallowing the rest of his food with due care and deliberation; he has an audience and he knows how to play it. “I had once had a wife, but she left me seven years ago. I once had a daughter, too. She left me just before my wife.”

We are all immediately entranced; we can all tell from the suppressed passion in his clipped, desiccated voice that this is not fiction. His voice is low, but not so low that we can’t hear that he’s speaking from a long past but infinitely sad place, a place that still holds him and always will. Even the professors are listening, albeit with expressions that front, I think, a degree of cynicism. He continues in a tone that becomes increasingly acrid, “Mr. Michelson had a son, too, called Angus; the difference is that he still has - although had we a justice system that does little more than pay lip service to the term, that is a facade for a corrupted, broken process, little more than a farce...”

He pauses quite abruptly, both in his speech in the oscillatory motion of his gaze that sweeps from side to side like a lighthouse glaring at us from the corner of its Cyclopean eye. A pause, then, “I am sorry. I was letting emotion overcome my higher sensibilities.”

Mandy asks, “What did he do, Doctor Symonds?” Her voice is soft and compassionate; it is not at all the usual cynical, sarcastic, irreverent Mandy who is talking.

He smiles at her, clearly grateful; his eyes might even be slightly moist, I fancy. “My daughter was leaving her lodgings at university in Brighton; Mr. Michelson’s son was also a student there, studying law. On the way to the Students’ Union, she was knocked over, dying of her injuries three days later in hospital. It was a hit and run accident without witnesses.”

Mandy asks, “But you think it was Michelson Junior?”

“I know it was Michelson’s son.”

Appleton snorts quite loudly, but Marcus asks quite reasonably, “How do you know that?”

“I received an anonymous letter implicating him.”

The tension in the room broke. Professor Lyle says at once, “Well, if that’s all...” He speaks calmly, almost patronisingly, I suspect. Appleton snorts again. Joanne sighs quite audibly, almost slumping back in her chair. Everyone seems to relax, except for David, who just keeps on eating as usual. Does he have worms?

Marcus points out, “That is hardly proof.”

It isn’t clear to me whether the goodly doctor heard or not; his voice doesn’t allow me to determine this. He may have done, or he may not; he just keeps on speaking. “I hired a private detective...” this in a peculiarly disgusted voice... “and he determined to my satisfaction that the letter was accurate. He was quite dogged in his investigation, I have to admit. He was able to determine that Angus’s car had been seen a few streets away just after the incident; it had been speeding. The next day the car went to a small garage in Hove; it apparently needed some bodywork repairs and a respray.”

He finishes and I think most of us are expecting a little more. Appleton forgoes snorting and tries to express his derision by the use of the back of his throat, as if he’s got something green and mucoid clinging to the farthermost part of his tongue. “Pretty circumstantial.”

Alice, though, is held in thrall. She exclaims, “This is like a murder-mystery meal!” To Marcus Teller-Mead she says in only a slightly lower voice, “I’ve always wanted to go on one of those.”

His response to this is no response at all. Instead he says, “I assume from his reaction that your presence here came as a shock to you both.” He turns to Lyle. “How come Mr Michelson didn’t know who we were?”

“There is no reason why he should have done. Who we chose was purely for us; we neither consulted him nor were put under any coercion to do so.”

“A rather large coincidence,” persists the ex-investment banker.

Lyle shrugs and it’s left to Appleton to take up the debate. “Nevertheless, a coincidence, I think, and nothing more. Do you suspect that someone has deliberately engineered this situation? How could that be so? Dr. Symonds has a brain tumour; Alfred Michelson is a managing director and major shareholder of a company that is developing a potential therapy for CNS cancers. Who could have arranged those events?”

Marcus Teller-Mead doesn’t know, and neither does anyone else. Mandy looks up from her notebook by the side of her plate and asks abruptly, “I thought we were the first human guinea pigs. We’re not, are we? There have been others.”

Wow, that has an effect and no mistake. Apart from David, Mandy and I, the lab rats look nothing less than stunned; the experimentalists appear, to a man (and woman) fairly surprised too, but – and here I am fairly certain - pretty uncomfortable. Marcus speaks first. “Is this true? I had been led to understand that we were the first human subjects.”

Professor Appleton clearly belongs to the school that believes there is no defence like offence. “That is not relevant to you.”

“I think it is.”

I notice Lyle looks only at his half-eaten main course as his academic colleague take up the cudgels and say, “Mr. Teller-Mead, firstly I do not know where you gained the impression that there has been previous small-scale human study of Resolimab; certainly, I have never told you that. Secondly as I said before, it is of no relevance to you. For both legal and sound scientific reasons, it would be inappropriate of anyone to discuss any previous trial with you.”

Dr. Symonds wades in. It’s funny, but I think I’m getting to used to the fact that he’s addressing the assembled company around the table while facing the pendulum in the grandfather clock. “How do you come to that conclusion? We have a moral right to know what happened the previous subjects.”

But Professor Appleton is having none of that, thank you very much. “There are legal reasons because the non-disclosure contracts we have all signed with Cavendish Holdings explicitly prevent detailed discussion of the previous trial until the results are published – and they are not; there are also scientific reasons because such discussion might compromise the objectivity of the results. Your impressions of what is happening to you are very important and any knowledge of what occurred during the first trial might prejudice those.”

This explanation, whether entirely composed of sophistry or merely shot through with the stuff, at least satisfies Alice Wilson, who starts to nod vigorously while frowning and pouting her lips in that way that people have when they want everyone to know that they are completely conversant with what is going on, and when the exact opposite is true. Dr. Symonds looks disgusted though, and Marcus Teller-Mead is none too happy either; David’s finished Hoovering up his dinner and speaks for the first time. “What happened to the first trial subjects? Are they all right?”

“We can’t answer that.” Appleton is unapologetic.

The reaction of Dr Symonds, endorsed by the vigorous nodding of Marcus Teller-Mead is immediate. “Why should we participate, then? You are asking us to undertake a dangerous procedure. We have every right to be given all the information that is available to you.”

Appleton shrugs. It’s Lyle who offers some explanation, looking up suddenly from his plate, as if he’s just put his thoughts into some sort of order. He speaks in an anodyne manner and I can hear a good thirty years’ worth of patient interaction in every mellifluous phoneme. “We appreciate that you are concerned, but let me reassure all of you that there is no sinister motive in our reluctance to divulge fully any previous results, but there are very significant scientific reasons why we cannot. Let me reassure you with complete sincerity that, while I cannot be specific, the last trial yielded very promising results; we would not have been allowed by the appropriate authorities to proceed with this trial if that was not the case.”

Alice, who’s been watching Lyle intently, says, “No, of course not.” She swivels her head to look at Dr Symonds as if he’s shown himself to be a bit of a berk.

David sits back in his chair giving an air of someone who is replete. “That’s always assuming that the ‘appropriate authorities’ know what’s been going on.”

Appleton’s expression might have been the same if David had stuck his pinky up the professorial A-hole. “How dare you?” he demands.

Alice looks shocked too; I am not sure she fully understands what has just been said but she knows just enough to appreciate she should be outraged. In the short but profound silence, Mandy responds. “We ‘dare’ because in a few months we’re going to be dead, my dear old cock.” She stands up slowly, her balled fists on the starched white of the linen table cloth. “We ‘dare’ because we’re shit-scared of what is going to happen to us if we have your snake oil, but even more shit-scared of what will happen if we do.” Her voice rises slowly but ominously, like a storm front that’s menacing the horizon. “We ‘dare’ because we’ll do anything to live. We ‘dare’ because we a fairly good idea of when we’re going to die, and you’re still innocent of that burden.”

She turns suddenly and left the room.

A Prick with a Needle

We all sign, of course. No matter what ghastly side effects they warned us against, we were all going to sign no matter what. We would do so if the program was funded by the Nazi party and administered by paedophiles. We want to live and this is our final chance. Mandy and I return to the pub for our last – at least our last legitimate – drink, then go to bed at closing time. She is almost animal in her desire that night, and I suppose that it is a result of tension; I have the impression that she would shag anyone or anything. Eventually I practically have to fight her off, for fear that my Uncle Percy is in danger of being rubbed into a mass of raw, bloodied flesh. She swears at me when I do that; most unladylike it is, too. Not at all the kind of language I expect from a gentlewoman.

She is asleep by the time I hear the sound of a door opening in the corridor outside. Without thinking, I slip from under the duvet, stride to the door and pull it quietly open. This time I see David, but he is heading in the opposite direction to Dr Symonds the night before. A game of musical bedrooms? Are they lovers? Are they conspirators? Everything that comes to my mind seems ludicrous. I shut the door. I am now in possession of more information, yet also in possession of more perplexity. My Dad used to say that modern life had too much information, too much opinion, and too little understanding. I remember him saying this while shaking his head over his pint on a summer’s day in the pub garden, wiry grey hair hidden by his old school straw hat.

I stand at the window looking out at the moonlight grounds, seeing nothing. I wonder what the next few days and weeks will bring, imagining lots of possibilities, with not one of them a hope that I will be cured. Then I see my friend, the fox. He (or she – I don’t know how to sex a fox, so I just have to make an assumption) limps across the grass out of the shade of a large cedar tree. I see as he comes closer that he’s carrying something in his mouth, then come to appreciate that he’s looking up at me again; oddly, even though the moonlight gives everything else a monochromatic, silvern sheen, the eyes are quite clearly sky blue, even at that distance. This is obviously peculiar, but not as peculiar as the thing he’s carrying.

A human head.

But not just any old head, for this head seems to have a tail.

Then, as if it’s come forth with the sole intention of letting me see it, the fox turns and disappears back the way it’s come. I stare after it, looking into the shadows for a long time, seeing nothing more, so I go back to bed. Mandy, exhausted by both her invective and her love-making, is by now asleep. No headache. I lie awake and will one to occur, but nothing comes.

We have each been given a time to attend the clinic room, spaced at hourly intervals. Marcus Teller-Mead goes first, Mandy is third, I am fourth. In the course of that hour, I am given a full medical examination including ECG, EEG, respirometry, eye tests, biochemical and haematological tests, hearing tests and a baseline CT head scan. I also have to do what William tells me are ‘psychometric tests’, which seems to be scientific jargon for ‘fucking stupid questions’. I can tell you I am fucking exhausted by the time William Moffat, says to me that it is, “Time to put in the cannula.”

“What’s that?”

“Rather than stick a needle into the base of your spine every week, we’ll inserted a line today that will remain there for the rest of the experiment.” I must look doubtful, because he goes on, “It’s no big deal, Sebastian. You’ll hardly notice it after a while.” And then, the killer line, the one that cannot be countered, “It was all explained in the Patient Information we sent to you.”

So I curl up into a foetal position on the couch, staring the wall, my knees pulled up to my chest, feeling a right dork as he, assisted by Joanne Thompson, does a lot of elaborate preparations with rubber gloves, and needles and syringes, and glass vials. I wonder idly what Nurse Thompson thinks as she looks at me lying in this position; she’s undoubtedly seen it a thousand or more times before, but that doesn’t help assuage my feeling of indignity. Moffat says, “Just a little wipe down,” as he vigorously rubs the base of my spine with a swab that is soaked in something icy cold; the smell of alcohol – not the pleasant scent of jungle juice, but the chemical odour of surgical spirit – comes up my nostrils. “And now just a tiny scratch.”

Just a little prick, I think but that thought is gone at once as he jabs a needle into my back and I blurt out, “Fuck a duck, doc.”

“Sorry.” He sounds about as sorry as a man strangling his daughter’s rapist.

The initial pain was short and sharp; there then follows a gradually increase stinging, one that it seems is going to increase and increase and increase... “There,” he announces in a satisfied tone. “We’ll just wait for that to take effect.”

We all endure a pause while I examine the bland yellow of the wall’s emulsion in silence, trying not to think about what I must look like to them. Behind me, Moffat engages in a bit social intercourse with Joanne Thompson by way, I presume, of moving on to a bit of the sexual kind at some time in the not too distant. “Did you get a chance to look at the paper?”

“Not yet.”

Give it a rest, William. Try your luck with a hole in a melon, why don’t you? You’ll have more luck.

“Oh...Well, when you get a chance.”

“I will,” she assures him, in a tone that he should recognise offers no assurance at all.

Perhaps it’s this disappointment that prompts him to take up a needle and prod me hard with it. “Ow!”

“A little bit longer, I think,” he decides blandly.

“I would fucking think so, yes,”

A further wait, this time in an atmosphere that is, I sense, embarrassed, before he tries again; there is a slight pressure, nothing more. “Good,” he says. There’s so more rustling of paper and then he says, “I’m going to insert the trocar now.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s a hollow needle. I’ll put the tip just into the epidural space, then feed the line – the tube – through it, then withdraw the needle and Bob’s your uncle.”

It goes surprisingly well, because I am beginning to wonder if William Moffat, MBBCh, is as competent as he would like me to believe. The tube is taped down so that it leads back up my spine and over my left shoulder, where it ends in a complicated arrangement of stoppers and screw caps. I am allowed to sit up and face the audience and I crane my neck to look at my new friend. “Can I shower, that kind of stuff?”

“Yes. Just don’t disturb the dressing or take any of the caps or stoppers off. If you do, tell one of us immediately.”

If he thinks I am going play silly buggers with a tube that ends next door to my spinal cord, he’s underestimating me. “What now?”

“Now we inject the first dose of Resolimab.”

“Will I feel anything?”

“I hope not!” He appears to think this funny, which just goes to show that one’s sense of humour depends on one’s point of view. He turns away and there’s the sound another breaking vial; he sucks up the vial’s contents – clear but apparently slightly viscous fluid – into a syringe then turns and comes towards me. After unscrewing a cap on the end of the line, he screws in the syringe nozzle and squeezes the plunger. Then he detaches the syringe and reseals the stopper, before standing back. “Feel anything?”

I shake my head. “No.”

“Excellent.” To Joanne Thompson he says, “Three down, and all’s well.”

Perhaps I’m being paranoid. “Are you expecting trouble?” I enquire.

“Good Lord, no,” he replies easily, but I don’t entirely believe him for some reason. In fact, for some reason I have the impression he’s a lying bastard. Maybe he catches a sense of my distrust because he goes on, “Whenever one takes a drug for the first – even something as mundane as penicillin – the medical staff always worry about unexpected adverse reactions.”

I don’t say anything. Joanne Thompson helps me put on my tee-shirt. “Can I go?” I ask.

“Of course.”

“So that’s it?”

“For today. Another dose tomorrow, but that should only take a couple of minutes. We’ll do some baseline measurements – blood tests, blood pressure, basic neurological examination, psychological tests - every day, with a more thorough work up once a week.”

It doesn’t seem too tricky. My hand is on the doorknob when he says, “You may feel slightly ‘off’ later today.”

I pause. “What do you mean?”

“Nothing too serious. Some people experience slight flu-like symptoms, or perhaps a little gastro-intestinal upset such as nausea or loose stools. It’s perfectly normal, and doesn’t last.”

“I might get the shits, you mean?”

Joanne Thompson joins in. “It’s temporary and, even if you do get it, our experience is that gets less and less with each dose.”

There doesn’t seem much point in debating the point. I leave, wondering how they can be so sure if we’re only the second small batch of people to be given the stuff. But then, perhaps they aren’t sure. Perhaps they’re talking crap.

Conversation

I go looking for Mandy but can’t find her. Dr Symonds is in the library, reading out of his peripheral vision; he greets me without obvious enthusiasm for my company, so I go on into the games room, where David is knocking balls around listlessly on the snooker table. He looks to be good at it, but I suggest a game anyway.

“Been done then?” he asks, as if we’re being neutered. Fuck, perhaps we are; I’m suddenly sure that I can remember that potential gonadal atrophy was mentioned somewhere along the line.

I nod.

“What’s it like?”

As I set up the balls, I explain and he watches me intensely, clearly anxious. “It doesn’t seem too bad,” I say reassuringly. “Toss for break?”

He wins and bends down over the table, taking a line along the cue; his break is expert, bringing the cue ball back to nestle behind the green; I’ve always thought myself pretty good at snooker, but suddenly I don’t want to play anymore. My shot is a foul; on his next go, he pots first a red, then the pink, then misses on the next red. I ask, “When are you due to go in?”

“After Mandy.” He looks at his watch. “In about forty minutes.”

“You’ll be fine.”

He asks, “Does it hurt? Having a needle in the spine?”

“Not really.”

We play on, the game desultory; clearly he’s becoming more terrified with every second and, accordingly, he starts to miss. After we each fail to make our shots four times in succession, we agree to call it quits and stop. Another glance at his watch – like he’s been doing every minute for some time now, and he says, “I think I’ll just go to my room and lie down for a bit before my time.”

An unfortunate expression, it occurs to me, but I say nothing.

Left alone, I wander outside and stroll around the house, hoping maybe to meet Mandy – hell, hoping to meet anyone, I think – but have no success. There’s a breeze somewhere abouts because I can hear it rustling leaves in the trees, but I can neither hear it or feel it. Jesus, it’s hot out here. I spot a bench and sit on it under the shade of a cedar tree – it’s the same tree that I can see from the window in Mandy’s room. The memory of what I saw the night before makes me stand up and look around the cropped lawn, searching for drops of blood. Strangely, even though I don’t find any, it brings me no comfort. It’s as if the lack of positive evidence means nothing, as if the lack of blood might well be as much illusory as the vision was the night before.

I return to the bench. Lunch will be available in an hour’s time and I’m feeling drowsy. Is that the injection? Perhaps I should find someone and tell them, but I can’t be fucked. I just want a quick kip is all; nothing wrong with that. I begin to dose.

I come to, slowly at first, then rather more suddenly, for I’m no longer alone on the bench, which is a bit of a surprise. Next to me there is now a woman I cannot immediately place. “Oh,” I say. She smiles at me and says conversationally, “Morning. Hot, isn’t it?”

I cannot but agree with her. She’s about fifty-five, overweight but looking fairly cheery; her hair is white and quite long, being platted into a long pony tail. She wears a white blouse with the cuffs hanging open, and jeans that look freshly pressed; her shoes are white trainers.

Oh, and her eyes are bright blue.

I’ve seen her before, but where? And what’s she doing here? If she’s one of the lab staff, she should be long gone on her four-week paid holiday by now; not that she looks like a scientist. Mind you, perhaps that’s just my prejudice. What does a scientist look like when shorn of white coat and test tube? I get the impression from her that she knows me, and that therefore the niceties require me to pretend the knowledge is reciprocated. Into my discomforted uncertainty, she says, “How’s it going for you, Sebastian?”

“Okay, thanks.”

I earn a smile. “Good.” Then, “Still, early days, eh?”

This seems to imply she knows something about the study, so maybe she is a scientist. “The earliest.”

“It’s going to be tough, you know.”

This is not the kind of think I want to hear. “I hope not.”

Her face tells me that I’m being naive. “It’ll be very tough.”

“Oh.” Two things occur to me. The first is that she’s being a trifle negative; the second, that there’s suddenly a piercing pain behind my eyes, one going from temple to temple.

“Still, it’s too late now.”

“I don’t want to be rude,” I say (as perhaps I should have done at the start), “But just who are you?”

She turns bright blue eyes on me; they are exactly the same colour as the fox’s. “My name’s Annette Morley. I thought you knew that.”

“I’ve never heard of you.”

“Yes, you have. You just haven’t realised it.”

She’s being a bit an annoying bint, if you ask me (which you haven’t) and my headache is worsening quickly. She’s an illusion; no one has said that hallucinations all have to be frightening, so presumably they can be irritating as well. Perhaps it’s the drug doing this, already tempering my symptoms. “What are you?” I enquire of her, exasperation leading me to be rather more brusque than is generally allowable among those who are mere acquaintances.

The conversation takes a sharp left turn. “The library has been a great source of comfort to me. Especially Dickens. I love Dickens, don’t you?” She frowns and, perhaps coincidentally, as he does so the pain in my headache explodes. My vision begins to sparkle and polytonal whistling start up in my ears. I am becoming nauseated and hot; so hot that I begin shaking. She just sits there and looks on as I double up, feeling everything swirl around, at first at a stately, decorous pace but very rapidly in a vertiginous rush. I am just puking up a rich chunder of the remains of that morning’s breakfast onto my rather pricey Converse shoes when I hear her say, “Believe me, I know just how you feel.”

I am just going under the blanket of consciousness as I realise why she is so familiar, but the thought is gone as nothingness embraces me with fervid hunger.

Observation

“Cor, fucking hell.”

Not the words one wants to hear when one is having some sort of febrile fit – ‘rigor’ my father used to call it, and he would roll his tongue at both ends of the word, as if it were adorned with flamboyant curlicues – especially when the tone is one of disgust; double especially when the underlying voice belongs to someone like Mandy Chadwick. I try to try to get up off the grass but don’t have the strength even for that, as I find myself distantly aware that I smell of sick and that I am covered in the stuff – shirt, trousers, shoes, hands and head.

“Hang about. I’ll fetch help.”

I have no idea what’s going on since I can’t even get my head off the ground, but drift through a wait of a few minutes that seems weirdly like half a lifetime; one that eventually brings the sound of voices. I don’t care, since my head has decided that I should suffer and it’s doing all it can do to bring from my mouth screams of agony.

Joanne Thompson is leaning over me and I can smell some nice perfume that’s coming from the general direction of her cleavage, although in the prim nurse’s uniform she’s wearing, this last is for privileged customers only, as it’s tucked up nice and warm behind the curtains. She’s stuck something in my ear, taken my pulse, stuck a loose-fitting clamp on the end of my index finger, and is now taking my blood pressure. I’m undressed down to my grunties and have been washed with a damp flannel, although the smell of sick still clings to me, bringing back memories of childhood of too much ice cream and coke. She looks delightfully cool and efficient; Lyle, on the other hand, has the air of a very worried professor as he watches her work from the end of the bed while making notes on a tablet computer. After a few moments I decide that, to my unpractised eye, he actually looks as if he’s shitting himself, but trying desperately to regain control of an errant anal sphincter.

“His pulse is eighty-four but regular; the blood pressure is 145 over 90. His temperature is 37.8 Celsius, but his sats are fine.” She flings this jargon over her shoulder (and effectively over my head) to Lyle. He listens to it with a frown.

“We’d better do some baseline bloods – urea and electrolytes, full blood count and an infection screen.”

“No problem.”

While she gets needles, swabs and glass tubes of various sizes and with variously colours of stopper, he speaks to me at last. “What happened, Mr. Shockley?”

Now, maybe it’s because I’m still feeling a trifle out of sorts, but I have the fleeting impression that this is the question, not so much of a caring physician, more of a detective who has grave suspicions that he has before him the perpetrator of a heinous crime. Nevertheless, I strive to put my side of the story as accurately as I can, although I own to you now that I do not mention that fucking fox, or the fact that it now has a partiality to heads, and specifically ones of the human kind.

He makes notes as I speak, his expression unreadable throughout. When I’ve finished he sucks in his checks, breathes deeply in and says, “Well, that’s quite a tale.” For some reason, I once again have the fleeting notion that he thinks I’m making it all up, perhaps to cover up some nefarious activities. I say nothing, although not because I have nothing to say; I’m still left with a feeling of nausea, and my headache has yet to abate. “May I just have a look at you?”

I allow myself to be subject to the indignity that is medical examination. He shines lights in my eyes, makes me follow it without moving my head, taps my knees and elbows, tickles my feet, strokes my face and orders me to clench his fingers in mine; it comes across as a kind of asexual foreplay, although the thought of what it might lead to is distinctly alarming. At the end he opines, “You’ve clearly had a slight reaction to the first dose of the drug, but the rest of it – this character talking to you on the bench – isn’t part of that, I think. It’s one of your hallucinations, nothing more.”

“It doesn’t feel a particularly ‘slight’ reaction.”

“It isn’t uncommon to have a low grade fever, nor to have nausea or even, as in your case, vomiting. The remainder of your physiological reactions are secondary to your hallucination. Tell me, there’s nothing in your medical record, but have you been more prone to hallucinations when you’re fevered?”

“Not that I’ve noticed.”

“Co-incidence, then.”

“Is it possible that the drug caused the hallucination?”

“Not at all.” He smiles, as if the thought is comical in its stupidity but he’s far too polite to point it out.

Joanne Thompson comes in with a small slip of paper that she gives to Lyle. He lets his eyes wander over it, although it seems to me that he doesn’t give it too much time before looking up at me. “All perfectly fine. I suggest you go your room and rest. I’ll prescribe you some paracetamol.” A pause. “You might care to shower first, though.” His words are perfectly balanced between the sympathising and patronising ends of the tonal spectrum. Before I can respond he says to Joanne Thompson, “Four-hourly neuro obs for the rest of the day, please.”

Joanne asks of me, “Are you hungry? Would you like something brought up to your room?”

Just a couple of pints of Stella. “No, thanks.”

“Good,” pronounces Lyle. There is undoubted relief in his voice.

“Is this going to happen after every dose?” I ask.

That smile again. It isn’t a crocodile’s smile, I think; no, it’s an executioner’s. Don’t worry, you won’t feel a thing. “Good Lord, no. It won’t be too long before you won’t be bothered by anything like this ever again.”

Why can’t I feel comforted by these words?

Obversion

I take his advice and shower, before retiring to my bed; it’s actually the first time I’ve used it. I doze for a while – not sure how long – then am woken by a soft knock at the door. It opens immediately and in comes Mandy. She has a large handbag; I’ve never seen her with a handbag before.

“You OK now?”

I sit up, putting my hands together on my lap; despite our previous intimacy, I don’t like the idea of being naked under a single top sheet while she’s standing by my bed. “Pretty much.”

“Missed you at lunch. You were sole topic of conversation.”

“I bet I was.”

“You scared them shitless.”

“Did I? What a bastard am I.”

She looks at my bedside cabinet. There’s a bottle of sparkling water on it from which I have drunk a glassful, partly out of thirst and partly to get rid of the taste of bile and acid. “You thirsty?” she asks in a tone that only Mandy can use.

“Not really.”

“Pity,” she replies as she reaches into her handbag. She produces a bottle of red wine and a corkscrew from it; there is a hint of a fruity version of Mary Poppins as she does so. “Sure?” she enquires with a grinning wink.

I know where she’s got it; it’s more the ‘how’ of the matter that’s of interest. When I ask, she replies, “You got know the right people to get on in life.”

“The chef?”

“He’s a good bloke, once you get to know him.” It’s a statement that leads to questions that I do not want answered in too many specific particulars.

Getting into the wine proves to be an oddly painstaking process for, instead of just ripping the lead cap off the bottle, Mandy very slowly frees it, taking care not to rip it. Only when it is removed, almost perfect intact and in shape, does she get to work with the corkscrew. “Why so slow with the cap?” I ask.

She looks at me pityingly. “It pays to take your time and attend to the details,” she says enigmatically.

The wine tastes good, anyhow; it’s Premier Cru and, although I’m not a wine snob, I know it’s pricey; ipso facto, it’s good as far as I’m concerned. She fetches another glass from the en suite and we do some appreciative imbibing. Mandy’s on her second glass before she asks, “So what happened?”

So I explain again, only this time I think it’s time to tell someone everything and I can’t see any other candidates in the propinquity (which is a good word and means ‘proximity’; I know because I came across it while I was writing the novel and made sure I used it).

By the time I’ve finished, she’s near the end of her second glass and I’m just starting on mine. I wait expectantly. She says nothing, however, so I ask, “Well?”

“Well what?”

“What do you think?”

“Does it all mean something?”

She looks at me and I can’t be sure if she’s considering an answer or just considering me to be a twat. She says slowly, “I reckon it means something if it means something to you. It means sweet fanny-fucking-all to me.”

“I don’t think the fox is a hallucination,” I persist. “And Annette Morley was trying to tell me something.”

“What?”

“I don’t know.”

She snorts. “Why didn’t she just come out and say it, then?”

Mandy might have a tongue that would have make a salty sea-dog blush in shame, and she might have a thirst for alcohol that’s eye watering just to behold, but she’s also sharp. I can’t answer that. “I suppose you’re right,” I’m forced to concede. “But things have changed, Mandy. The most recent visions are somehow different. Before they were just weird and terrifying; now they’re somehow...portentous.”

She pours the rest of the wine equally between our glasses. “Maybe it’s just the cancer getting worse.”

Which is the likeliest explanation and, therefore, the one that I don’t want to be correct. “Maybe,” I admit grudgingly.

She takes pity on me. “And maybe also this treatment will work. Perhaps we’re all going to live.”

She leaves shortly after that, probably to give the chef’s tonsils another good lingual licking and secure another bottle of illicit plonk. I make her wash the glasses and take the empty bottle, which is fortuitous because not many minutes pass before Joanne Thompson comes in to do nursely things; she’s wheeling a trolley on which are various bits of medical equipment. We go through the same rigmarole as we did earlier in the examination room. She pronounces herself pleased as she notes her findings by inputting them into a tablet computer. “What are those things?” I ask.

“Remote terminals. All the medical results are kept on a central server.”

“Am I okay?”

“You’re fine. Everything’s back to normal.”

“So I can get up?”

“No reason why not. I’ll have to continue the four-hourly obs tonight, but there’s no reason for you to be stuck in here.”

I begin to get out of bed, then remember my au naturelle state, and so pause. In order to cover my temporary discomposure, I ask, “Has anyone else had any ill-effects.”

“No one at all.”

I’m not sure if I feel relieved or aggrieved. She’s packed her equipment back on the trolley and is wheeling it away when a thought occurs to me. “Did you undress me?”

She looks up in surprise. “Yes.” Her voice seems to me to hold a touch of challenge; what of it?

I wimp out by merely nodding and she leaves me to my own devices.

I descend the stairs and go into the dining room. It’s half past three, so the lunch has been cleared away. I make my way into the kitchen, half expecting to see the Mandy getting to know the chef a bit better, but he’s alone. He looks up enquiringly. “Any chance of a sandwich?” I ask. “I missed lunch.”

“What type?” He doesn’t seem in any way put out.

“Something simple. Ham and mustard?”

“Sure. White bread?”

“Please. And a drink – lemonade, or something.”

“I’ll bring it to you in the dining room.”

I decide that this was the kind of service I can get used to.

Back in the dining room I sit down in a chair by the end window and look out at the dust-bright, parched landscape, relieved not to see any differently-abled foxes. Not many minutes pass before I’m slightly startled by a quiet cough and, “Mr. Shockley?”

It is Dr Symonds, standing behind me, fiercely squinting at a sort of sub-Impressionist still life of a wine carafe and block of cheese while addressing me. “Hello, Dr. Symonds.”

“I understand you’ve had a reaction to the drug.”

“So they tell me.”

“Nothing serious, I hope.”

“I’ve had more enjoyable experiences.”

“Of course, of course.” He stops after that, but it’s plain that he has more to say; this prediction comes true within the minute. “Could you possibly tell me what happened? I ask merely, you understand, so that I may recognise the affliction early, should it descend upon me.”

I tell him, although I give the official, Bowdlerised version, without the odd links to the recurring blue-eyed, three-legged fox, etcetera. When I finish, he’s most grateful; by that time the chef has appeared with my sandwich, and I’m beginning to feel quite the patient, what with all this attention. He leaves me to eat in peace and I realise then what the entire conversation has all been about. He’s terrified but, I think, not just for himself. He’s terrified for all of us.

Bonds

We’re bonding, becoming a group of people with more to unite us than to divide us, six people against the world, our differences reduced in importance when compared with the problems and fears that are besetting us; that much has become pretty obvious to me. My reaction has somehow catalysed the process, I think; the mutually repulsive tendencies of the British psyche meant that, until that moment, it was a slow, perhaps almost imperceptible process. Throughout the afternoon, I find myself in conversation with my fellow guinea pigs, all full of a terrified empathy, all eager to reassure me, because they seek to gain assurance for themselves in doing so. Oddly, it’s Alice Wilson who asks the most probing questions of me; the others are mostly content to hear a few generalities about what happened – they’re content to be told that there was a bit of puking, a general sense of ill-being, and a hallucination – but Alice wants to know more as we sit together on the front terrace in the shade of the house, looking out on to the gravel drive that bakes in the late afternoon sun.

“Was it horrible?” she asks.

“I’ve had worse.”

“I know,” she replies in a sympathetic tone. “I remember you saying. I don’t know what I’d do if I saw things like that.”

“Well, as I said, this wasn’t a particular frightening one. Just a man sitting there, talking mostly gibberish.”

“What about?”

“She said she was pissed off.”

She laughs. “Did she?”

“She also said that I knew who she was...although I’m not sure.”

Her eyes widen. “It sounds like a spirit,” she decides.

“Does it?”

“Ooh, yes. Quite often they’re fed up. It’s not all wine and roses on the other side of the Great Divide.” She sounds knowledgeable and I can see that she’s the type of person who would be; I don’t know anything about her background, but I can see that she might be a long time widow who has sought comfort in the money-grabbing arms of Spiritualists. I find it difficult not to mock her.

“You know all about that kind of thing, then?”

She smiles broadly; she always gives me the impression that she thinks that I, and most young people for that matter, am very nice but a bit of an innocent in the true ways of the world. “I’ve been to my fair share of séances.”

“I think this was something from out of my head, though, Alice.”

Her smile broadens and she leans across to me. “Maybe,” she whispers, perhaps because she’s a feared that the spirits are listening. “And maybe not.”

Mandy emerges from the opened front door. She looks groggy and I wonder for a second if this is because she’s been ‘getting to know’ the chef, but I soon discover this not to be the case. She catches sight of us, and comes over, sitting heavily down on a light stone wall that runs along a large shrubbery in front of the house. Her head is in her hands. “Are you all right, dear?” asks Alice solicitously.

“I don’t know,” she answers. She fumbles in the pocket of her jeans, bringing out her notebook and paging through it, reading intently. Her lips form words, her frown forms deep furrows that are still there as she looks up at us. “We’ve started?” she asks. “We’ve all had a dose? That’s what this thing is, right?” she means the line that is taped to her shoulder under her tee shirt.

“That’s right.”

“Shit!” she says loudly, angrily.

“You’ve had a fit?” I ask.

“Of course I’ve had a fucking fit! Don’t be a stupid arsehole.”

Her anger is monstrous, a thing that rages and dares us to argue. I try anyway, of course. “We were told it would be days or weeks before we saw any effect. This doesn’t mean anything.”

“You don’t understand. I’ve lost nearly a whole day.”

Alice tries. “Give it time, Love...”

Mandy erupts again. “I haven’t got fucking time!” She shouts this, but then takes a breath and seems to calm down slightly, although she’s still almost gasping for breath. “They’re getting worse,” she begins again. “They’re getting longer.” Her voice is rising already again. “I’ve been timing them. Everyone is double the length of the last. What will happen when they merge into one?”

There are tears in her eyes and she storms off before either of us can say anything. Alice winced slightly at the language but now she sighs. “She’s disappointed. I understand how she feels.”

But I doubt that she does.

Observation

I make my apologies of Alice and go looking for Mandy but wherever she’s gone, she’s done it quietly and without leaving a trace; I even ask the Chef, as hard as it is, but he denies knowledge of her whereabouts and even manages to do so in a voice that suggests I’m slightly barking thinking he would. She isn’t in her room, or in any of the common areas that are open to us. Accordingly, I go outside figuring that she must have been wandered off into the grounds.

There’s certainly plenty of space to get lost in. During his conducted tour, William Moffat told us that there were twelve acres of landscaped garden, including a small boating lake. Much of it is woodland, but over half is gently undulating grassland dotted with fir trees and suchlike. It’s the first time I’ve ventured far from the house and I only now realise how much space there is. By the time I make it across the main lawn at the back of the house and am in the relative coolness of the shade of trees, I’m sweating and exhausted, despite it being a gentle downwards slope. The wooded fringe is relatively sparsely populated, but that soon changes as I make an uneven and oscillating pathway through to its deeper realm. I consider calling out Mandy’s name, but not for long; it’ll make me look like a fool, and she won’t answer anyway. After about fifteen minutes I come, quite abruptly, to the lake. It’s probably two, maybe two and a half acres in area; there’s even a small boat house and, at the centre, a small, overgrown islet. On the far side I can see a figure sitting on a large under a silver birch tree, but it isn’t Mandy. It is Marcus.

I make my way round the water’s edge to him; he merely sits, watching me approach. His face bears a strange expression, one that is slightly discomforting. “Hello,” say I, coming to sit beside him.

He nods, looking across the lake and not at me. “No more trouble?” he asks. I’ve spoken to him earlier about what happened.

“No, thank God.”

He snorts. “Why not? Thank God indeed; it won’t do any harm, and it may even do some good.” He keeps his eyes fixed on the lake, as if he’s whale-watching. Over the trees on what is now the far side, I can just make out the very top of the house.

“Have you seen Mandy?”

He takes a moment to respond. “No. No, I’m afraid not.”

“She’s in a bit of a panic.”

At last he turns his gaze to me. “We’re all in a bit of a panic, Sebastian. All Mandy’s done is to show it.” Which is true and doesn’t need an answer. He says, “Why don’t you ask our keepers? They probably know where she is”

Surprised, I ask, “Why do you think that? I’ve looked all over the house, and she isn’t to be seen. She must be out here somewhere, and there’s a lot of ground she could be in.”

He looks at me for a long time, his dark brown eyes reflecting the golden sunlight, his lips pursed as if he’s trying to decide something. “Looked everywhere in the house, you say?” he asks eventually.

I nods. “She’s not there.”

It is then that I appreciate what it is that he is trying to decide; he can’t be sure if I’m an idiot or not. I fear that he decides on the positive answer to that question. “Tell me, Sebastian. Did you enjoy our guided tour yesterday?”

“’Enjoy’ would be the wrong word...” I venture cautiously.

“Still, it was informative, wasn’t it? It gave us insight into what’s going on, didn’t it?”

“As much as we can appreciate it, I guess. Some of what they’ve been doing is highly complex.”

He laughs. “You never spoke truer words, my friend,” he exclaims and leans back to grasp both my shoulders to squeeze them. “You are indeed a most wise fool.”

I’m a bit pissed off at that. “Here, steady on, Marcus.”

He laughs again, then says gravely, “I apologise. It was not unkindly meant. We are all fools, although I fear Shakespeare would despair of us.”

“Would he?”

“Of course. The fool in classical literature is no fool at all; he is the wisest of men able, by gift of his court position, to point out the stupidities of the noble without fear – too much fear, at any rate – of retribution. His role is to bring some sense of perspective to the heady atmosphere that monarchy engenders.”

“But we’re not doing that?” I venture, still bobbing along in his trail and beginning to feel the first tinges of mal-de-mer at the laterality of his conversation.

“We’re certainly being fooled, though.” He says the word forcefully, then stops and sighs, and asks plaintively. “But why?”

I occurs to me that is time to try to get a grip on what he’s talking about, or at least prove that he’s dropped a sandwich or two from the hamper on his way to the picnic. “What are you getting at, Marcus?”

He stands up and turns around, so that he’s facing away from the lake and the house beyond it. “That.”

I also stand up to look where he’s pointing. At first I can’t make anything out, other than foliage, and branches and yellow sky. Then I see it.

It is a CCTV camera strapped to the trunk of, I think, a sycamore and it’s staring at us.

Conversion

“They’re all over the place, once you notice them. I don’t think that there’s a square yard of the whole estate that isn’t covered.” He’s whispering as if it may be listening to us but then, perhaps it could be.

I try to rationalise it and, I believe, make a fairly good fist of it. “Presumably they’re just there for our safety.”

He’s still peering at it, his face full to brimming with an emotion that could be curiosity, could be anger, could even be delight. “Make sure that if we fall in the lake, we won’t drown, you mean. Quite right, too; health and safety are so very important, especially in this litigious age.”

“Exactly.”

He cocks his head to one side. “They have our best interests at heart then.”

His inflexion – shot through with enough irony to be, in all but name, sarcasm, could not be missed, even by me. “Well, clearly, if we were to have some sort of episode while near the lake, that would be potentially disastrous.”

“And all the others? The ones that cover the perimeter fence, for instance?”

It takes me a moment to come up with the reason. “That’s just for our security.”

He says instantly and in an ambiguous, “This place is very secure.” He may have been agreeing with me, but I guessed not.

“Is it?”

“Have you examined it?”

On our way to the pub, we certainly passed through a gate in it. It’s a chain link fence, supported by ugly concrete struts that angle over, and it’s topped by three lines of razor wire. “Not in detail.” Why would I?

“Take my advice, Seb. Don’t try to climb over.”

I haven’t been planning to, but I don’t say that. “Why not?”

“The razor wire is electrified.”

That makes me think. While I stare at him, he stares back. I ask, rather stupidly, I admit, “How do you know?”

“There are signs every hundred yards or so.” He laughs. “Obviously, for reasons of health and safety.”

“But do you know for sure? Maybe it was once live, but now it’s deactivated. Have you touched it with something?”

He looks at me sourly. He’s changed since yesterday, although not in a fundamental way; he was always suspicious, now he’s paranoid. “You first,” he suggests. Do I believe him? Do I disbelieve him? Do I dare disbelieve him? I find myself in perfect equipoise. Into my uncertainty he says tiredly, “No? Probably very wise of you.”

I thought hard about it all. “If it really is electrified, it must be for security again.”

“There comes a time when I am forced to ask whether measures such as these are designed to keep others out, or us in.”

“Rubbish.”

“Is it?”

“When can leave whenever we want. He have that right under the contract.”

“Go on, then.”

“I don’t want to. I’m perfectly happy staying here.”

“And receiving their magic drug?”

“If you like.”

“Then you can’t leave whenever you want, can you? You’re imprisoned here by your own desires.”

It is then that I appreciate that he really isn’t thinking right. Perhaps it’s a subtle effect of the drug as much as my – albeit somewhat more florid – episode was. He’s losing his grasp on reality. Immediately I’m slightly uncomfortable, not really believing that he is bonkers enough to be violent, but somewhat disconcerted, nonetheless. At least I know that my visions are just a result of bioelectrical misfiring in my bonce; they may be variably weird and prone to be accompanied by violently unpleasant and distressing physical side effects, but at least I know what’s real and what isn’t. I say nothing for a while and, thankfully, neither does he. A few minutes pass before I say, “Well, I’d better carry on looking for Mandy.”

He doesn’t respond to that, although when I’m about ten paces from him he calls after me, “On the tour today. Did you count the number of rooms we were shown?”

“Not really,” I admit. “Why?”

“I did. They showed us seven, including the scanner in the centre.”

I wait for him to explain the significance of this. When he doesn’t I am coerced into asking, “What of it?”

“I reckon that, at a conservative estimate, there are at least another six that we didn’t get to see – the ones on the top floor of the others wing - and that’s not including the attic space; you could get a lot of rooms and equipment up there.”

“I don’t understand.”

“What’s in those rooms, Seb? Why weren’t we shown those?”

I have the fleeting thought that he’s becoming more unstable with every passing thought and I’m glad to be a little distance from him. “They were just empty labs. They said so.”

This earns a laugh. “You think?”

“Why not?”

With a wave of his hand around us, he enquires of me, “Who’s watching the TV screens, Seb? Where is he?” It’s a good question, and one I can’t answer with certainty. Marcus adds, “Don’t worry, though. I’m sure it’s all being done in the interests of security, or health and safety.”

Reversion:

I spend another hour looking for Mandy but have to give up because it’s starting to become dark; anyway, I have to get back to be checked over by Joanne Thompson again. I make my way to the corridor on which the medical unit was situated and press the buzzer for admission. While waiting for a response, I look across the curved landing to the locked door opposite, wondering if there’s anything in what Marcus said. I am afraid I can’t conjure up any sense that there are evil scientists dissecting living specimens behind it. Then Nurse Thompson lets me in.

“How are you?” I say that I’m okay, thank you. She does her tests. “You’re fine. Everything back to normal.”

“So what now?”

“Professor Lyle said that provided you were checking out as normal, then one more set of obs before bed, and that will be that.”

“And I still get the second dose tomorrow?”

“Absolutely.”

“Will this happen when I do?”

She hesitates; I recognised the body language from my father. She’s stuck in that place that medical professionals hate, where they might be about to make a fucking great fool of themselves if they are too confident, but where they also want to give some hope to the patient, and where they have to say something that sounds at least vaguely knowledgeable. “I doubt it.”

I am that most awkward of customers, the patient who doesn’t want platitudes. “What if it does?”

“We’ll face that when we get to it.” Suddenly I’m being given to understand that she and I are parts of the same team; I’m her colleague perhaps, which is a new feeling for me; up until now, it has definitely appeared to be me and them. She smiles and puts her hand on my arm. “You’ll be fine.”

By now it’s nearly seven and I’m getting hungry, which I take to be a good sign. We’ve been told that, except for Sundays, the meals will be far more informal from now on, with no set time – for dinner, the chef will cook to order from a menu that’s simple but fairly catholic and available between seven-thirty and ten. Breakfast is exactly as you would expect in a small hotel, with a cooked menu if we so desire; lunch is to be sandwiches, wraps or suchlike, prepared from whatever there is in the kitchen. I go downstairs and into the lounge area. Mandy’s in there, talking to Alice. The television projector is on and David’s watching a film of some sort, possibly a Bond movie.

“Where have you been?” I demand.

“Here,” she says, as if I’m an idiot.

“I was looking for you earlier. I looked everywhere.”

“Obviously you didn’t, because you didn’t find me.”

“Where did you get to?”

Her eyes widen slightly. In a voice that’s dangerously low, like a dog’s growl, she elucidates. “I did a spot of sunbathing on the back terrace.”

I looked there, I know, and she won’t anywhere to be seen. When I say so, I get the reaction that perhaps I should have expected. She has been simmering because Mandy always seems to be simmering, but now she boils over. “What the fuck is this? The fucking Spanish Inquisition? Are you keeping tabs on me? Are you my keeper, or something?”

I see Alice wince slightly – probably both at the language and the violence of her response - but she makes no other reaction. David doesn’t even turn his head. “I was worried about you.” It sounds pathetic, especially when addressed to someone like Mandy who, generally speaking, is feisty enough to go head to head with a rabid Rottweiler and win with a knock-down.

“Why the fuck should you be worried about me? You’re the one who went tits up.” She makes it sound as if I let the side down, and done so badly.

A glance at Alice doesn’t help, for her face is neutral; she looks as if, to her, this is a spectator sport, and rather a good one, too. I say to Mandy, “But you were so upset. You’d had another fit, and you were afraid of how bad they were getting.”

She screws up her face. “What the hell are you talking about?” She sounds suspicious, as if she thinks I’m trying to pull a fast one on her. “I’ve been perfectly all right for the past two days.”

“You had one this afternoon...” I look at Alice, but she isn’t nodding as she should have been; in fact, she’s looking at me with interest, as if she also has doubts about my motives. “You were there,” I say to her.

A frown. “When, dear?” she asks in a slightly fogged tone.

“When Mandy told us. She was panicking, you said.”

This time she adds a shake of the head to her denial. “I don’t recall that. When was it?”

I look from one to the other, searching for signs that will explain all this, finding none; Mandy has a scowl, Alice an expression of worry. Even David has forsaken Bond and is craning his neck round to look at me as I’m a carnival exhibit - Roll up! Roll up! Come and see the Incredible Disintegrating Loony! I feel something for the first time then. Only afterwards do I realise what it is; it is a sense of falling.

Effect:

I leave them – after all, what else can I do? – and go out onto the back terrace for some air, trying not to panic and breathing deeply, yet still feeling I’m about to expire from asphyxia. What the fuck was that all about? I have perfect recollection of a conversation with Mandy and Alice just after she had her fit; why don’t they? In a court of law, there would be no contest and I would be the mistaken one; or the liar, perhaps; even the criminal...

Hell, what kind of thinking is that? We’re all under stress, even without the effects of the tumours and, just to make life really interesting, the potential superadded effects of the treatment. Marcus is clearly starting to become seriously delusional, I had quite a severe physical reaction and possibly a mental one; maybe both Alice and Mandy are suffering from some sort of amnesia. Is that one of the side effects? I can’t recall; I’ll go up to my room and check the forest-load of literature they sent us...

I go back inside, through the short passageway that opens out under the curving stairs in the grand central foyer. It’s here that I meet Dr. Symonds, but it’s like no other Dr. Symonds I’ve ever seen before. He is standing in the doorway to the library – which seems to be his perfect ecological niche – looking daze. There’s something odd about him, too.

“Are you all right, Doctor?” I ask.

He’s looking at his hands and I begin to suspect that here is beginning another bout of peculiar behaviour, although whether it’s on my part or his, only God would probably be able to say. He looks up at me. Yes, there is definitely something odd about him.

“I can see you!” he exclaim.

It hasn’t been a good day, so you must forgive my first reaction which is one of impatience. What is the bloody man talking about? He was never blind. I am on the absolute, immediate verge of using that most pusillanimous of weapons, sarcasm, when I appreciate that he isn’t looking away from me and squinting, that he is looking directly at me and, accordingly, I stow it back in the arms locker. “Really?”

He’s joyful, ecstatic, changed. It’s a bit like that moment in A Christmas Carol when Ebenezer twigs he’s in a fable and better start dancing to the music. “Yes! Oh my good Lord, yes!” He comes forward and does a bit of personal space invasion by grabbing my shoulders and hugging me. I do believe that there are tears in his eyes. “It’s a miracle.”

I suppose being a theological philosopher (or is it philosophical theologist?) might lead one down the road of such supposition, although it would not be a route that I, personally, would take. “I’m glad,” I respond. I am, too, I think.

“The treatment works! I didn’t think it would, but it does!”

Too many exclamation marks, I decide, ever the author. Actually, I’m beginning to realise that, while I might be a bit glad for him, I am also bloody pissed off. Why him? Why not me? I say, “That’s good.”

I am saved from further expressions of strained, empathetic joy by the arrival of others; Dr Symonds was quite loud in his proclamations, uncaring of whom he was disturbing. First Mandy, then David, and lastly Alice come out into the foyer. Dr Symonds turns his, now straight, gaze upon the newcomers and does a bit more proclaiming. It isn’t too much longer before Joanne Thompson and Dr Moffat are there, too, and I can slink away.

Affect:

I slip away from the fun and games and go up to my room to pull out the paperwork they have sent us. It doesn’t take long to find what I want; it’s buried in that long, frightening list of possible adverse effects, in the ones labelled ‘Uncommon’. Temporary retrograde amnesia. I don’t know what ‘retrograde’ means but I reckon that’s what Mandy and Alice are experiencing; it explains a lot. I am embraced by a sense of relief.

Tonight, there is the choice of lasagne for dinner and I eagerly accept the offer from the chef of some; it has always been one of my favourites. I sit in the dining room eating alone and liking it that way. Doctor Symonds has been whisked away to the scanner and, after that, a battery of tests; I haven’t seen him since he accosted me in the foyer, but I should imagine he would still have a smile on his face if they were to stick a pineapple up his arsehole just for larf. I have nearly finished when Marcus comes in; he has a definite hunted look, poor bastard. Unbidden he sits down opposite me.

“He’s a lucky man,” he says. He does not sound bitter, but there is a definite edge to his voice, one I cannot immediately place.

“You can say that again.”

He is staring at me, as if he were appraising me. He says slowly, “It’s almost miraculous.”

“I suppose.”

Suddenly, he leans back in the high-backed dining chair. “So you believe in miracles?”

I look up at him, suddenly realising that he’s back in conspiracy mode. “Almost a miracle.”

He shrugs. “I don’t believe in them at all.”

“What are you driving at, Marcus? That it’s all been faked?”

He laughs softly; it sounds in my head uncomfortably like a mad man’s laugh, poor sod. Then he says, “I don’t know, my friend. I really don’t know.”

People who call me ‘my friend’ do not endear themselves to me, but I say nothing about it. That seems to me to be the end of the conversation; Marcus is wallowing in his paranoia like a pig in shit, but it’s becoming a bore for me. I get up with my plate and take it out to the chef in the kitchen, declining a dessert. When I return to the dining room, Marcus is up and examining the bric-a-brac on the mantle shelf. I decide to leave him and go back up to my room; he doesn’t appear to notice my departure.

On my way up the curving staircase, I meet Mandy. She appears slightly suspicious of me, but doesn’t display outright hostility. “How’s things?” she asks.

I assure her that they are fine. I decide not to tell her that she, too, has experienced a side effect of Resolimab. “I’m going for something to eat. Want to come?”

“Just eaten. Sorry.”

She nods. “No problem.”

“Marcus is in the dining room.”

She gives me an odd look. “So?”

I hesitate for a moment, but feel it incumbent upon me to warn her of his odd mood. When I’ve finished, she continues to stare at me as she says thoughtfully, “Cameras? I hadn’t noticed any.”

“Actually, there are a few around the grounds, but that’s hardly unusual these days.”

“Electrifying the fucking fence is, though.”

“He says it’s electrified,” I point out. “I’ve got no proof of that, and I’m not sure he has either. It’s the same with his suspicions about Dr Symonds.”

“Why the hell would anyone want to pull a stunt like that?”

“Exactly,” I say. She snorts, but I can see that I have made her think. “Will I see you later?” I ask.

“Maybe,” she says. I think that she understands what I mean.

Realisation:

We have access to the full Sky package; the best thing they’re showing is a repeat of a game from last year’s Spanish League. It is entertainment at its best, the culmination of tens of thousands of years of human endeavour; I am lucky to be alive at such a time, yet so satiated and cynical, that I can’t be bothered to watch. I lie on my bed trying to work out what is going on and how I feel about it. This latter is easy – I feel fucking scared. The former is rather harder. I am forced to admit that I haven’t a fucking clue. I am not even sure if anything is actually ‘going on’. Moreover, whether or not there is some sort of weird shit occurring, is it real, is my cancer, is it Professor Appleton’s Patented, One Hundred Percent Vitamin Tonic?

I think I am over the reaction to my first dose of the drug and, I fervently hope, it won’t happen again, but am I? When do hallucination end, dreaming begin, and the lies of others take over?

At midnight, I finally accept that Mandy does not desire my company that night; at one, I discover that I am wrong, for the door opens stealthily and I turn my head to see her silhouetted shape to the left of the window, undressing. She is unsteady and, in taking off her jeans, trips over and sits heavily on the bed. “You all right?” I ask.

“Yeah. ‘Sno problem.”

She is drunk. When she climbs under the duvet next to me, she burps gently. I lie on my back and ask, “You made it to the pub, then?”

“Naw. The gates are most definitely locked and chained.”

“And electrified?”

She laughs derisively. “Not so I noticed.”

“Would you have noticed, though? If it’s just the razor wire at the top...”

“I tried to climb over, only couldn’t the angle right. I’d have noticed, believe me.”

Once again, she has stunned me. “You tried to climb over?”

A pause ensues until she says in a slightly defensive tone, “Without wire-cutters, I couldn’t think of any other way to get to the pub.”

“Jesus, Mandy! You could have been killed.”

“‘Cept I wasn’t, was I? There’s no juice in that wire and Marcus has fallen for the propaganda.”

I think about this. I feel both relief that the world according to Marcus is, as I had suspected, a product of a delusional paranoia, yet I also feel sadness for him. The only question now is how Mandy got drunk again, although it isn’t too taxing to work out. “You been socialising with the chef again?”

She burps once more. “Yeah,” she says dreamily. I don’t respond. After a few moments, she says in a voice that is both dozy and curious, “Funny thing, though.”

“What’s that?”

“The top of the external fence. The way it’s angled, it’d be easier to get in to this place, than out of it.”

She falls asleep almost at once; I don’t want to make love anyway, I decide.

I dream, although I can remember almost none of it except one thing, for this thing is a revelation. It is a rerun of the vision of the fox and the head that I had before; as far as I can tell, it is perfect in its reconstruction, although, as you know, such certainties are not to be trusted in dreams. Perhaps then the certainty with which I recognise the head in the fox’s mouth is also not to be trusted. Perhaps it was not the head of the woman on the bench, the woman who, I now recall as if this knowledge had until then been deliberately hidden from me, is called Annette Morley. Perhaps also the tail attached to the head was a true tail, and not a pony tail.

Discussion of a Miracle:

Mandy has gone by the time I awake the next morning. Perhaps she wasn’t there; how would I know? If she denies coming to my room in the night, it might be because of her tumour, or because of the drug, or even because she really didn’t come. I might be the one with problems interacting with reality; for fuck’s sake, I know that I am. I’ve been having trouble with coping with what’s real and what’s in my head for quite a few months now and, I now realise, the only thing that’s kept me anywhere near happy to distinguish what’s illusory and what isn’t has been trust. It seems, though, that this is a commodity that’s leaking away in this place.

I shower and dress then, at about a quarter to nine, go down to the dining room for breakfast. David is there, talking to Alice. They both greet me in a friendly enough way. I confine myself to cereal and toast, although there is a full English buffet breakfast available. They are talking about the happenings of the day before; in particular the one that centred on Dr. Symonds. Alice asks me what I think.

“If it lasts, he’s a lucky man.”

David is frowning. “But it can’t be the drug; not after just one dose.”

Alice who, I have noticed, has the habit of always agreeing with the last thing said, nods. I am unable to comment from any position of knowledge, and so just shrug. David persists. “Marcus says it’s a hoax.”

“Marcus has a particular perspective on things.”

“He says that Dr. Symonds was planted. He was never really half-blind, only pretending to be.”

“Really?” Alice is horrified at such duplicity. “Why?”

“To give us hope and make us stay.”

Alice purses her lips, shakes her head; her pink rinse remains firm, however. I point out, “If that were the plan, it hasn’t worked very well, has it?”

“What do you mean?”

“You say it can’t be the drug; so does Marcus. The two of you are going around telling all of us that it’s a trick.”

He is momentarily nonplussed, then, “Just because it hasn’t worked, it doesn’t mean that it isn’t some sort of trick.”

“If I were doing it,” I say, “I’d have had Dr. Symonds’ miracle occurring after, say, a week of doses. Much more convincing, don’t you think?”

Alice agrees in enthusiastic silence. David considers, “I suppose...”

I am afraid, that I cannot resist then adding, “But then, that might be too obvious. Perhaps it was arranged to happen so quickly because we’d be expecting it to be done after a few doses, so by having it just a few hours after the first dose, we’re suppose to assume that it must be real...” Alice is looking very confused, David only slightly less so. I conclude, “Except that Marcus is too smart for them.”

Alice asks plaintively, “So what do you believe?”

I shake my head sadly. “I believe that I’m going to stay and see it out,” I sigh. “Whether or not I’m being manipulated.”

The daily briefings are to occur in the seminar room at nine-thirty each morning. By the time I arrive, the academic dynamic duo that is Professors Lyle and Appleton are already there, as is William Moffat (looking slightly uncomfortable, I think). Mandy is at the front and does not look at me when I enter, doing so in that sort of pointed manner that means that the act of not looking is quite clearly a deliberate, active thing, a shiny bright sign being broadcast; I wonder what’s got up her backside and, quite honestly, can’t be bothered to find out. Marcus Teller-Meade is there, too. He doesn’t look at me either, seeming to find the carpet between his feet of unsurpassing fascination; what is this, I wonder. From what I can see of him, he doesn’t look too bad; I had been half expecting him to be drooling and eating insects by now, and still wearing the same clothes as yesterday, but he looks to be as dapper as normal. I sit on the opposite side of the room to Mandy; Alice and David come in a moment later. When they are seated, Professor Lyle stands up. “Thank you for coming,” he says.

Suddenly Marcus asks loudly, “Where is Dr. Symonds? Shouldn’t he be here?”

Lyle deploys his medical smile, the one that is intended to reassure from a rarefied intellectual height - a place that would be utterly hostile to those of normal mental capacities. “Dr. Symonds is still in the medical suite. Nurse Thompson is with him. We are continuing to perform tests on him.”

David asks, “Is he still cured?”

“His sight still seems to be recovered, yes.”

“What did the scans show?”

Lyle hesitates. His answer, though, makes this seem odd. “The scans show that his tumour has completely resolved.”

It is a cliché, but one that is supremely apt, if say that this is greeted by a silence that is stunned.

“Can we see him?”

Lyle hesitates. “I’m not sure that would be a good idea at present.”

Marcus demands, “Why not?”

“We are doing intensive monitoring and testing.”

“Surely you can spare a quarter of an hour..?”

He looks unsure, glances across at Moffat but I can see that he receives nothing in return. He concedes eventually, “We’ll see what we can arrange.”

Mandy asks, “How did it happen? It can’t be the drug, can it?” I hear desperation in her voice.

Lyle gives way to Appleton on that one. “Some of the early murine trials did show a surprisingly high efficacy,” he announces in his desiccatingly emotionless voice. “Especially if the neoplasm is high grade and therefore composed of a relatively high percentage of totipotent or even pluripotent cells.”

Mandy’s expression says it all but she asks anyway. “What the fuck does that mean? Yes or no?”

Appleton bites down on a big dose of irritation. “It’s not inconceivable,” he says, putting in a double negative just in case (God forbid) anyone should accuse him of dumbing down.

Marcus makes a sound, which can’t be written down but translates as ‘bullshit’.

Lyle ignores this, except that he doesn’t really, as is obvious by the rather rushed and embarrassed way he says, “You will all be aware of Mr. Shockley’s episode yesterday. Whether that was directly related to Resolimab is at this point moot. No one else has reported any significant problems, however.” He pauses expectantly, looking at us, clearly giving us time to contribute, should we so wish. I think about piping up about my diagnosis of amnesia in Mandy and Alice, decide that discretion is not only the better part of valour, it is the only part worth anything but a bunch of shit. Maybe I’ll bring it up later, when I’m having my daily dose.

“Good,” he says. “Any questions?” There are none. “Right.” A glance at his wristwatch; it is a Rolex, I notice. “We’ll get on with things then. It is important that we continue just as before; we cannot be distracted by this.” A pause. “We need to get the rest of you cured.” There is something oddly crass about this last sentence and it is greeted by embarrassed silence. Perhaps he senses this, for he then asks a tad plaintively, “Okay?”

There is no dissent but, I wonder, is it really okay? Is any of this actually okay?

No Obvious Effect:

And so, when it is my time, I do the tests, trying to answer the questions no matter how imbecilic (What is your favourite number? Which do you prefer – a white sighted kitten or a black but blind dog? Which colour do you associate with Wednesdays?) or difficult (Magnet is to granite, as flesh is to...? What is the next number in the series 1, 2, 3, 13, 376...?). It takes me an hour and a quarter, after which, I am taken to the treatment room and, as if I am the star of ritual sacrifice, William Moffat and Joanne Thompson perform a final set of physical tests, and then solemnly inject another dose of Resolimab.

Nothing happens. I find myself holding my breath and, I fancy, they are holding theirs, but there is no immediate adverse reaction; no fits, no hallucinations, no r-r-r-rigor-r-r-rs. I am forced to wait with them for half a long hour, but there is no they are given no reward. In vain do I point out that the hallucination yesterday occurred sometime after the drug was given; they have been given their orders, and they will follow those orders.

Nothing happens the rest of that day either. Unless, you count a non-occurrence as ‘something happening’, for Dr. Symonds fails to make an appearance and nobody seems to have the authority necessary to allow any of us trial subjects in to see him. I catch Marcus’s eye over a dinner of coq-au-vin; he is staring at me and I can see quite clearly that he is telling me, I told you so.

Poor, paranoid sucker.

An Eye for an Eye:

I awake early, having dreamed, and my dreams were not nice, although I cannot recall the details. That bloody thing at the base of my spine is uncomfortable at the best of times; it is impossible to lie on my back at night for too long. There is daylight and when I look at my watch, but I see that it’s only ten past five, the dawn just beginning. I am alone, in my own bed and I am developing a headache. Is it just a headache, or is it a harbinger of something different, something more disturbing? I try to go back to sleep, but it is beyond me. I think about switching on the television to catch some early morning news on the BBC, then decide I don’t need to know what is going on in the normal world; I think about switching on the radio but the thought of the imbeciles who DJ on the radio at this time makes me feel queasy. It could be the start of normal day.

The shower is hot, which helps at least a little, washing away the grime of a hot night’s restlessness, and scalding out the aches of muscles that have not rested properly; it doesn’t, though, eradicate that fucking headache. It is inevitable that it won’t, I suppose because, whatever it is due to, it isn’t due to strain or tension, or too much alcohol (chance would be fine thing at the moment). It is due to the thing in my head, the thing that I have spawned and which now is an entity totally independent of me; in fact, it is now totally antipathetic to me. And it is more than a headache, I am now coming to realise. I had assumed that it was merely a harbinger of the hallucinations, but it is clear that these two things are merely part of some sort of growing, feeding, pulsing thing that is mutating and, in turn, mutating me. My perception is changing, my subconscious thoughts are shifting; I am starting to believe my delusions and disbelieve reality. Except that I can no longer be entirely sure what is delusion and what is real. And I am starting to buy into another’s delusions; except maybe my conviction that Marcus is having a delusion is in itself a delusion.

I dress and go downstairs, enjoying the quietness of the house. Outside, it is still cool; cool enough, in fact, that I wish I had put on a pullover. I expect to be alone, but I am not because Marcus is there, sitting on the bench to the right of the main entrance. He does not show surprise at my appearance; I try to hide my dismay at finding him there. I really could do without another dose of his conspiracy theory. That is, if he really is saying these things to me; perhaps I am confabulating this, and perhaps he is tucked up in bed, getting in the Z’s, wasting his sweetness on the sweet, bedroom air.

I sit next him. My head is throbbing, and it is doing so ominously. I feel that I am riding a crescendo of dread. I say, “Morning, Marcus.”

He smiles at me, but doesn’t reply; the smile looks to me to be dangerously close to one of pity. I ask, “Couldn’t sleep either, then?”

“I always get up early. In my experience, it’s a good strategy; this is the time when the brain works best and when there’s a minimum of distraction. No one’s about, and that means you can maybe get a head start.”

What, I wonder, would Marcus need a head start in? By his own admission he hasn’t worked for two years. I start to rise, genuinely believing that I am intruding, but he puts out a hand to my arm to restrain me. “Not you.” But he whispers this, as if we are being overheard.

I start to reply but his finger is at his lips and in his dark eyes there is a look of warning. Before I can point out that he is behaving insanely, he taps me on the arm and gets up, clearly expecting me to follow him. I don’t want to, but do so anyway; what else can I do? He leads me into the house; more specifically into the library. He picks up two of the straight-backed chairs that are on either side of the writing table by the window, one in each hand. These he takes to the corner of the room before turning to me, indicating without speaking that I should join him. As I do so, he steps on to one of the chairs; I frown but with some impatience he gestures silently to me and so I, too, step up.

Every available foot of the walls of the room is covered in shelving made of some sort of dark hardwood, and every inch of these shelves is covered in books, except for the top foot or so. In this space just below the plaster coving, an eclectic collection of ornaments resides; a stuffed badger, a plaster carp, a shield of some sort, crossed spears... Standing on the chairs, we are level with this space; more specifically with a bust of Napoleon. I wonder what interests him about this but, it transpires, he has something else in mind. Almost under his breath, he says, “This is the likeliest place.”

“What is?”

“That is.” He gestures into the corner, past Napoleon, at a PIR detector. Okay, I think, let’s take go back a step. “The likeliest place for what?”

He looks at me as if I am being dim; it is, unfortunately, a look that I have grown used to in my life. “The camera,” he says.

Of course. Up until then, I’d been thinking that it was nothing more than a part of alarm system, but then I’m notoriously trusting on these things. It was his obsession again. “There’s a camera in here, too? In the house?”

“I should think there’s one in every room; probably more than one, to achieve maximum coverage.”

It makes sense, but then delusions tend to have internal logic; the human mind is a fabulous thing. He begins to fiddle with the cover of the detector. I say, “You think there are cameras in the house?”

He is working hard at prying off the cover of the detector. From somewhere he has produced a small penknife and he says without stopping, “Of course there are. They’ll have put them in every room we have access to. One in each PIR detector and, I would guess, an assortment of others in more obscure places.”

“Even the bedrooms?”

He stops at that, then turns his head to look at me with an expression that is open to a few too many interpretations. “Even the bedrooms,” he says gravely. He returns to his task. A clock somewhere in the house strikes six. He has given me much pause for thought, but then I realise he is insane – whether because of his disease or its cure – and I have nothing to feel embarrassed about.

“Why would they do that?”

This time he does not stop as he replies, “Why indeed, Sebastian? You tell me.”

At which I finally lose it. “Because you’re just a fucking weirdo, Marcus.”

And he then succeeds in getting the cover off the PIR. It springs away from the base unit with a faint ‘click’, and does so suddenly, causing him jerk forward and knock a small bust of Napoleon, so that it falls to the floor but doesn’t break. The plastic cover falls just short of his face but, nonetheless, it makes him flinch so that, for a small part of a moment, he does not see what he has uncovered.

I do, though.

And then so does he.

He screams and startled, jerks backward, falling off the chair, clattering into the heavy wooden writing table and then falling to the floor with a thud that is both sickening and horribly biological. I don’t look down at him though, not at once, for I am transfixed by what he has uncovered.

A single, bloodied human eye stares at me, at the room, at everything; a cloud passes over the sun, the room dims slightly, and the pupil dilates. Even as I appreciate that this is not real, that this is either a dream or hallucination (and what, after all is said, is the difference), I feel too much horror to remain aware. The world, this world at least, becomes black.

I open my eyes. I am in the medical suite. Joanne Thompson is at the end of the couch; at that moment she is writing on his electronic tablet, but she looks up at once as I stir and comes to my side. “How are you?”

My head hurts, but it is not the pain of the headache that bothers me now; the headache is now just a residuum, nothing more, a thing that has done its worst and is now receding. The major thing now is an intensely sore area on my forehead, as if a spear has been thrust into my head, just above my nose, one that is being slowly twisted. I put my hand up to it, feel first a dressing there, then exquisite tenderness. “Shit!”

She grimaces. “Painful?” she asks and I reflect that this is not a clever question.

“What happened?”

“You fell off a chair in the library.”

I remember. Now I come to think about it, I ache all over.

“What about Marcus?”

She frowns and I can see on her face that she does not have good news to tell me. “He’s not good. Dr. Moffat is putting him through the scanner.”

I digest this information. Is this still the dream, or is it all over? If not, when did it, and when did it start? Perhaps I did get up, and the hallucination began at just the moment that Marcus pried the cover off the detector. That would make sense.

At which point, Professor Lyle comes in. He does not look happy; in fact, on a scale of one to ten (with one as very sad and ten as ecstatic), I would say that he looks fucking sick. He says, “How are you, Mr. Shockley?”

“I’ve been better.”

He nods absently, looking at the tablet computer that Joanne hands to him. “I think you’ll be fine.”

He turns to go. I have to call after him, “How’s Marcus?”

He stops dead. There is a definite pause before he turns slowly and looks back at me, his head peering over his right shoulder so that I can see only one eye. He replies, “I’m afraid Mr. Teller-Meade is dead. His fall resulted in a massive subarachnoid haemorrhage and we couldn’t save him. The study is at an end.”

Teeth for Teeth:

I awake, not having slept at all well. That bloody thing in my back is uncomfortable at the best of times and it is impossible to lie on my back in bed. I look at the time; it is six-thirty. I have dreamed all night long, it seems to me then. Beside me, facing away, Mandy breathes heavily, but does not wake. I think about staying in bed, then decide it would be fruitless; I might be dog tired, but I am awake now. Anyway, I need some reassurance. I climb stealthily out from under the duvet, appearing successfully to do so without waking Mandy. In the en suite I shower quickly, then sneak past her to the door; she makes no sign that I have woken her.

I pad down the stairs, feeling a sense of déjà vu, wishing I didn’t. There is a slight sense of greyness in the morning light, but we are clearly going to have another hot day. There is no one about inside; I go out of the impressive front door, knowing what I will see, knowing that I will go and sit next to Marcus, knowing that I don’t want this to be real, but fearing that it is.

He is looking out over the front drive and the gardens, the sky bright but hazy. His head is back against the whitewash of the house front, his eyes are half-closed and he doesn’t react to my intrusion. I say “Are there cameras inside the house, too?”

His only reaction is say quietly, “Of course. What would be the point of observing us outside but not in?”

“Is this all part of the study?”

“I guess.”

“Where are they?” This is a question for which I already have the answer but I cannot resist asking it.

He takes his time before saying simply, “I don’t know.”

“Have you looked?”

“Of course; everywhere I can think of, but I haven’t found any yet.”

“Then how do you know they’re there?”

He has an immediate answer to that one. “Because it’s logical that they are.”

It occurs to me that logic is the last thing that dares to show its head around here; I don’t enunciate this, however. I say instead, “Have you looked in the PIR detectors?” I am suddenly acutely anxious; it is a question that I dread to ask, but am desperate to have answered.

His reaction is surprising. For the first time, there is real animation in him; his head comes forward off the wall and he turns to stare at me. On his face is a look of wondrous consternation. “Of course!” Before I can even move he is on his feet and walking past me back into the house, muttering as he does so, “How stupid of me...” He walks rapidly to the door of the library, opening it just as I catch him; he is through it in an instant, but stops in the doorway.

I come up behind him. The library is not empty, as I had thought it would be. Alfred Michelson is sitting in one of the wingback chairs, readying a book. He looks up at us, his face passive. “Good morning, gentlemen. You are up early. I trust you are both well?”

I look up at the PIR detector. The cover is on; it is just an electronic device, a part of the security system. Marcus collects himself quickly, “We’re well, thank you.”

There follows something of a stand-off. It is almost as though he knows what Marcus wants to do, and is staying put to thwart him; the expression on Michelson’s face is bland yet challenging, that of a man who has secrets and who knows that we are desperate to have them. We enter the room and Marcus says, “You’re up early, too. You must have driven all night.” Michelson shrugs but has nothing to say, so Marcus continues, “Must be something important.”

“This is an important study.”

In a tone of curiosity, Marcus enquires, “Are you here because of Dr Symonds?”

Michelson smiles, allowing us a peek of his dental dead. “Amongst other things.”

“It seems to be an amazing result.”

“So I understand.”

“We’re not allowed to see him.”

“No? Well, Professor Lyle knows best, I’m sure.”

At which point, the sound of someone coming down the stairs comes to the library and Michelson, with some alacrity, goes to the door. It turns out that the newcomer is, as if summoned by necromancy, the aforementioned Professor Lyle. He barely glances at us as he takes Michelson back up the stairs, presumably to his office.

I have not joined in with the conversation. I am distracted, you see, for I have spotted what Marcus has not. In the corner, on the rug behind Michelson’s chair, lies a bust of Napoleon, exactly where it fell in my dream. I begin to feel sickness slithering around my belly. Before I can comment, Marcus is up at the PIR sensor, swinging a chair across and almost springing up on it. “Is that wise?” I ask, nervous of what may be about to happen.

“Why wouldn’t it be?” He has not turned around.

I do not answer, because there is no answer; at least, not one that I feel I can translate into speech. He carries on. He is using a penknife; of course he is using a penknife and, of course, it is a penknife that I have seen before. I hold my breath.

Just before the cover springs off, as I know it will, I wonder what I should do. Should I ready myself to try to break his fall? Is that the purpose of all this? Am I supposed to save him, to alter the course of events, and thereby avert not just perhaps his death, but also all its ramifications. On an impulse, I step forward. The cover is released, he jerks his head back, but he does not fall. Not this time. Instead, he utters a single word of triumph. “Yes!” I have to step around from directly behind him to understand, but when I do so, I see the reason for his delight.

In the body of the detector, behind a fine grille, there is a tiny lens peering into the room.

Eyeless Once More;

That morning’s briefing begins fifteen minutes late, because there has been an incident over breakfast.

Marcus was elated by his discovery and professed himself much indebted to me; an encomium I felt strangely cheap in accepting. “What’s going on, Marcus?” I asked faintly while asking myself if it would have been worse if the sensor had hidden a bloodied eyeball.

As pleased as he was, he cannot – or will not – furnish me with an answer. “I don’t know. But I mean to find out, my friend.”

With which he left, evidently renewed in his enthusiasm for seeking out surveillance equipment. I went for a walk, sitting by the lake and thinking for an hour, no wiser at the end of it. I returned, finally feeling some hunger, entering the dining room just as it all kicked off. Mandy was there, talking to Alice. I went to the kitchen door, intending to ask for some scrambled eggs, when from behind there came a keening cry, horribly high, and amazingly piercing. I turned to see Alice jerked erect in her seat, face upturned, rigid. The noise had come from her; Mandy was staring open-mouthed at her. Then Alice began to shake, at first it was only slight but very quickly it became more and more violent, until she was thrashing about wildly. Little gasps and grunts came from her. Her head was being whipped this way and that and, when her face turned towards me, for an instant I saw in her eyes utter terror, as if she were a trapped, helpless witness to all this.

Mandy and I pressed our alarms simultaneously. We did what we could until first William Moffat, then Joanne Thompson, arrived, but it was precious little; Alice had fallen off her chair and was rolling around, jerking so strongly we could barely restrain her. “Diazemuls,” said William Moffat and Joanne Thompson ran out at once. The three of us were just able to restrain Alice until she returned, drawing up a creamy thick fluid into a syringe as she hurried over. We managed to get Alice’s arm straightened and still long enough to allow him to find a vein and inject the drug. Within a very few minutes, Alice was still.

I am still not fully calmed as I sit in the seminar room, waiting. Mandy, too, looks jumpy; she sits in her customary corner; it occurs to me that we have all adopted our favourite chairs. Marcus is in his usual place, a look of grim amusement on his face. David has heard what has happened to Alice and looks worried sick. Eventually, Professor Lyle comes in, followed only by Joanne Thompson. He says at once, “I am sorry for the delay. You will not have been surprised by it.”

“How’s Alice?” asks Mandy.

“She has stopped fitting. She is unconscious, and Dr. Moffat is tending to her as I speak.”

David asks fearfully, “Is it the drug?”

Lyle does not hesitate. “I see no reason why it should be. Mrs. Wilson had experienced a fit such as this prior to her participation in the study.” Marcus snorts audibly, though not loudly. He is looking around the room, presumably for more hidden cameras. Lyle ignores him. “Please be assured, she is in very good hands.”

Suddenly Mandy asks, “What about Dr Symonds? How is he?”

Lyle smiles broadly. “I am delighted to tell you that he is extremely well.”

“When can we see him?”

The smile does not falter, nor even waver. “Alas, that will not be possible. In view of the sudden improvement in his condition, we have decided with his full co-operation, to withdraw him from the study. He has, in fact, left the grounds and returned to London, where he has agreed to comprehensive testing as to how this wonderful result has been achieved.”

This announcement is greeted by profound silence. Even Marcus, until then rarely at a loss for a cynical word, is momentarily bereft of speech. Only momentarily, though. He asks, “Why are we under constant surveillance?”

Lyle stares at him, his face at first unreadable, then adopting a mask of puzzlement. “What do you mean, Mr. Teller-Meade?”

“There are cameras everywhere. There’s one in every room.”

Everyone is staring at him, although there is an eclectic mix of expressions on show; Lyle’s is one of incredulity, Mandy’s one almost of sorrow, David’s of surprise, Joanne Thompson’s of something that might even be of fear. Marcus turns to me. “Tell them, Sebastian.”

Not happy to be suddenly the centre of attention, I explain, “There certainly seems to be one in the PIR sensor in the library.”

“And they’re all over the grounds,” adds Marcus

Lyle explains tiredly, “The cameras in the grounds are just for your safety.”

Marcus catches my eye. I told you so. He asks, “And those inside?”

Lyle has turned to Nurse Thompson, as if she’s head of security and really ought to have something to say about this; apparently, she doesn’t, though. He turns back to Marcus. “Perhaps you could show us.”

We trek down to the library, all six of us silent, Marcus in the lead, playing every inch the man who has triumphed. At once, I realise that it isn’t going to be that easy; not around here. The bust of Napoleon is back on top of bookshelves, positioned just to the right of the sensor, where it normally is, and I certainly didn’t put it back. Marcus had replaced the cover on the sensor so now he climbs up on the chair again, working away with his penknife for a third time (at least in my experience). The cover springs off quite easily now.

There is no camera.

Not unsurprisingly, Marcus looks stricken, baffled, almost outraged. Lyle does not gloat, however; if anything he looks slightly worried. David is clearly relieved about it all and Mandy shakes her head slowly and catches my eye. Into my head, brought there by a breeze I cannot feel, float the words Poor cunt.

Trickery;

He makes a fuss, of course, and I can’t blame him. He claims that it has been removed, that this proves nothing; perhaps he is right, because clearly if there are watchers, then they will have seen him discover the camera, and so possibly done something about it. Nobody else believes him, though. He enlists me, and I do my best to support him, but my heart isn’t in it. My grip on reality is too loose to pretend conviction, and he is left to resort to storming out, a man who has been thwarted and who hates it.

Lyle takes Joanne Thompson to one side and whispers to her, after which she nods. To the rest of us he says, “Please feel free to examine any other part of the alarm system that worries you.” I’m fairly sure that he makes absolutely no effort to hide the sound of patronising sorrow that hangs from every word. He leaves with Joanne Thompson.

David says, “What’s going on?” All I can offer is a shrug. He asks, “Was there a camera in there?”

It takes me while to decide how to answer that one. “I really don’t know,” I say at last.

After I have been a good boy and been poked and prodded and bled, and after I have been measured mentally and physically and psychologically, and after my wonder drug levels have been topped up, I return to the library to ponder things. I sit in the corner under the PIR detector, not sure if I am being watched, not sure if I’m not, trying not to think about that eye, and whether or not it was nothing but a dream. Or perhaps it was hallucination; after all, what’s the difference between dream and hallucination, except a subjective impression of one’s waking state? As far as I understand it, psychotics don’t necessarily believe on all levels that hallucinations are real (unlike delusions); one man’s vivid dream is another woman’s hallucination; don’t you dare have delusions, either, unless they’re about supernatural entities called ‘God’.

I don’t know how long I sit there, just pondering things, glad to be slightly removed from the heat of the day and the heat of all the different kinds of lunacy there seem to be going on around here. Mandy comes in, although she doesn’t say anything to me, just sitting on the opposite side of the writing table, looking out at the grounds; the light has brightened, the sky blued. Eventually, I ask, “You been done?” I am rewarded with a nod. Her face is drawn, I think. “What about Marcus? Is he playing ball?”

“Of course he is,” she sounds surprised I should ask.

“I wondered. He seems to think that this is all some monstrous trick.”

“So it might be.”

“So why doesn’t he just walk out? Is he afraid they’ll stop him?”

As she so often does, she has the air of someone who knows a lot more than me as she does, “He told me that he’d been given three months tops just before he came in here. He’s scared witless, Seb. If he left, where would he go? He has no family; his work was his life and they’ve taken that from him. He’s orphaned. If this is a trick, he’s lost nothing more than he’s going to lose anyway, except his dignity. If he walks, he’s lost a chance – a chance no matter how small – that he might go on living for a little while longer. Of course he’s going to stay put and play the good little lab rat.”

And she might as well add, ‘It’s the same for all of us’, although she doesn’t.

I say, “If it is a trick, I don’t know how they’re working it, or why they should bother.”

She ponders this, looking from the view to the pen set that is so neatly set out on the writing table. “You know what I was thinking? Maybe the trick isn’t on us.”

“What does that mean?”

“Maybe we’re part of the trick. Maybe it’s a trick that’s being played on someone else.”

“I don’t understand.”

She grins, but it is not a nice grin. “Neither do I, playmate. Neither do I.”

She returns to the window. I lean back in the chair, suddenly tired, and close my eyes. Mandy exclaims, “Lord, fuck a duck!”

I open my eyes to see her face filled with excited wonder as she looks out onto the grounds. I turn in the chair to see what has excited her. It is the three-legged fox, eyes still very much a-blue, sitting on the gravel of the drive, staring in at us. I look away to Mandy’s profile. “You can see it, right?”

She nods, still staring at it. “I thought you were becoming seriously head-fucked...” This is just a whisper, as if she is afraid to scare the creature off.

“You believe me now?”

She turns angry eyes on to me. “Of course I do. Why wouldn’t I?”

“But what does it mean?”

She has no answer, it seems. She turns back to the fox, but it has gone and she shows petulant disappointment. “Shit!”

There was plenty of time for it to slink off, I tell myself as, also disappointed, I implore her, “You saw it, right? You definitely saw it?”

“Yes.”

“Write it down, Mandy. Right it down, in case you forget.”

Perhaps my eagerness disturbs her, for she looks at me steadily for a moment, but she does do as I suggest.

Oddity:

Mandy tells me that it is the chef’s day off (he’s watching porn in his room, she tells me, and I have no reason to doubt either that that is what he is doing, or that she knows from personal experience), although he has prepared a selection of sandwiches for us, along with snacks, soft drinks, fruit and cakes. Joanne Thompson joins us as we sit in the dining room; she looks tired, looks even exhausted when William Moffat comes in shortly afterwards. He sits next to her, studiously ignorant of her body language (which is enunciating that, whereas she once found him merely boring, now she finds him both tiresome and boring; I have been in his position often enough to know that the next stage will one of aggravation followed, in the terminal phase, by contempt and hostility; ‘twas ever thus and ever more will be so). He eats with his mouth open; Janey once commented that she didn’t care what IQ someone had, if they showed you the act of mastication, they were officially subhuman, end of. I tend to agree with her; I think Joanne Thompson did, too.

Mandy finishes her food – two apples and one banana – then leaves for a nap. It is not long before William Moffat’s bleep goes off, much to his annoyance. He goes to the sideboard, where there is a phone (only internal, of course), listens, then puts the phone. He flicks his eyes across to me – meaning perhaps nothing, perhaps everything – as he say, “Got to go.”

Joanne hasn’t finished her meal. “Do you need me?”

A shake of the head. “No.”

He leaves, casting another glance at me, for no reason that is obvious to me; goodness me, I reflect, perhaps I’m getting paranoid. Now that would be an interesting development. I rise from my chair, fetch a banana from the large dish, and then go and sit beside her. “May I?”

She smiles and, I think, does so genuinely. “Of course.”

“How’s Alice?”

“She’s resting; she’s very drowsy, but that’s to be expected following an epileptiform seizure.”

“She’ll be all right?”

“Yes.”

Except that she won’t, because she’s joined a very exclusive club and is dying of an inoperable brain cancer. I enquire, “What are my chances?”

This nonplusses the comely Joanne, so that for a moment she stops midway through eating a flapjack and, her mouth being open, I see the semi-masticated food; I decide to forgive her, though. She continues to chew, then swallow, but does so slowly. “Of some sort of effect of the treatment, you mean?”

I think that I might well have experienced an effect or two already but remain schtum on that one. “Of some sort of improvement. Maybe even of a cure.”

This makes her uncomfortable. She puts down the remains of the flapjack. “It’s difficult to say.” That good old medical caution, again. It takes two measures of bullshit, two of caution and one of hubris to make a doctor; add a dash of recklessness for a surgeon, a dash of compassion for a nurse.

“But there is some chance, right? I mean, this isn’t all complete quackery, is it?”

She smiles that nice smile that I have noticed before; the one that tells me she is not just a professional and not just a paid goon. “No, it isn’t.”

“You really believe that?”

She turns slightly more so that she is completely open to me; my old man used to tell me that, as body language this means she is being honest; unless, that is, she already knows this and is therefore deliberately trying to deceive me. Such is the world in which I now live. She says (her face a paradigm of earnestness, her voice one of sincerity), “Yes, Seb. I really believe it. I’ve seen the initial papers produced by Professor Appleton’s laboratory. They appeared in prestigious, properly peer-reviewed journals such as The Journal of Clinical Oncology and Cell.” As far as I’, concerned, she could have told me they’d been well-reviewed and praised by the Radio Times and Lady magazine, for all those titles mean to me. She continues, if anything turning the knob on the sincerity control up max with the ‘super bass’ button pressed, “They achieved a complete clinical, radiological and pathological remission in nearly fifty percent of the mice that were tested.”

“You’ve had to rest this stuff on monkeys, though, right? I mean, I might be partial to the odd bite of cheese, but I like to think I’ve got something on a small rodent.”

She persists with her smile and never takes her eyes off me as she takes my hands in hers applying the lightest of pressures; her skin is soft, her nails short but well-manicured. “It’s been given to macaque monkeys. It was perfectly safe.”

“Did it cure them?”

“The monkeys didn’t have brain tumours.” At my frown, she explains, “There is a species of mouse that’s been genetically engineered – in the trade, it’s called a ‘knock-out’ mouse – so that it’s prone to brain tumours; that’s what Professor Appleton used in his experiments. Unfortunately, there’s no such equivalent in the primate world.”

“So you’ve gone straight to us humans?”

She nods. “That’s right.” I consider this and perhaps she takes my silence as doubt, for she adds, “There were no recorded side effects in any of the animal experiments, other than slight reactions at the commencement of the injections – like you had.”

Oh, dear, I think. You’ve over-egged the pudding. I wonder how you know if a mouse is seeing three-legged foxes with heads in their mouths, or cameras that come and go, changing en route into gouged-out eyeballs. After all, how paranoid does a macaque have to be before you notice? These are questions that I know she cannot answer, so I do not ask them; that’s the trouble with questions – the really good ones are those it’s best not to ask.

She is relaxing, pulling away slightly, clearly believing she has reassured me, although she hasn’t much. The smile is still there, though. On a whim, I decide (perhaps out of a kind of spite) to try to see if I can remove it. “I think Marcus is going mad, and I think it might be the drug.”

But the smile remains. She shakes her head, “Professor Lyle thinks it’s the effects of his tumour. There were definite paranoid tendencies on his initial psychometric evaluation.”

“Is he co-operating?”

“William talked him round.”

Pity for William he can’t do the same with you. I pause a moment, just to make her think that I have no more questions, but I do. “Does the name Annette Morley mean anything to you?”

Bingo!

The smile slips for just an instant; it returns at once, but it is a shaken smile, one that has just been shown how close to the edge of the deep ravine it is, one that is unaccountably afraid. “No,” she replies. She is lying.

“She wasn’t one of the subjects in the first trial?” I venture.

The edge of that ravine is crumbling fast now. Joanne Thompson, good looking nurse of this parish, opts to switch from deception to evasion, always a pretty good sign of duplicity, I find. “I can’t discuss the first trial, Seb. You know that.”

“Does that mean she was one of the subjects?”

Her smile broadens; in my life, I have sold enough gizmos and gadgets to members of that beneficent society that goes under the eponym of ‘Joseph Public’ to recognise that particular bit of body language; Annette Morley was most definitely one of the first trial subjects. Nurse Thompson says, “No comment,” however.

And thus she quotes the politician’s mystical litany, the one that tells the world here is deception, but that carries with it total impunity. In the course of it, she has kept her smile and thus defeated me; more or less, anyway. I, too, smile and I make it one of sympathy. “Of course. I understand that, Joanne. May I call you Joanne, at least when we’re alone?” I am not entirely sure any of us is ever entirely alone in this place, but don’t emphasise the point. She agrees eagerly to this; I sense that she is just relieved that we appear to be getting off the subject of Annette Morley. I wonder why.

Aggression:

We are in the library that afternoon; by ‘we’ I mean David and I; Marcus is there, but not there, if you see what I mean. He is sitting and appearing to read a magazine – Top Gear, I think – but he clearly isn’t taking much of it in; he isn’t taking much of anything in, I think. I don’t know where Mandy is, but that’s pretty much par for this particular golf course. David is watching a DVD, but I can’t tell you what it is; I am too interested in the PIR detector that stares down at us from the corner of the room.

I say, “David?”

“Mmm?” It’s a horror film of some sort, although I’m not sure which. Under other circumstances, it’s probably the kind of thing I’d find worth a couple of hours of time and the sacrifice of ten or so beer vouchers; it seems to involve a lot of evisceration and I remember that, back in the day, Janey could never get enough of such innocent entertainments.

At this moment I have other things on my mind, though. “Have you ever heard of Schrodinger’s cat?”

Even then, as his head turns to me, David does not seem to be entirely with it (or, at least, not with me). “Whose?”

“Schrodinger’s.”

“His dog?”

“Cat.”

His chin goes down on his chest, and he makes a face that expresses, with a degree of clarity and precision that even a thousand words could not encapsulate; it’s a combination of ignorance, incomprehension and disinterest. “No.”

I have, but I don’t know where and I don’t know why I should think of it. In a low voice, Marcus says, “Schrodinger was a scientist in the early part of the last century; he was one of the leading physicists working on the then revolutionary theory of quantum mechanics.”

David doesn’t even bother to feign interest; he is back in his film, his mouth slightly open. “So what was it about his cat? Why does everyone remember it?” I ask Marcus. For some reason this has been nagging me.

His reply is in a voice that contains an element I cannot place. “There was no actual cat. It was a thought experiment; they were very fond of thought experiments in those days.”

That PIR keeps staring at me. I ask, “What was the significance of it?”

Marcus sighs. “He postulated a cat this is in a box...”

Suddenly David says, “That’s fucking cruel.” He means it as a joke, I think. From the plasma television there is a lot of screaming; out of the corner of my eye – perhaps rather in the manner of Dr Symonds - I can see what might be a dungeon, or perhaps just a darkly lit film set, in which a middle-aged woman is being slowly strangled by barbed wire. David’s eyes do not leave the screen.

Marcus continues in exactly the same tone, betraying no sign that he has heard this. “The observers – us – have no way of determining what is happening to the cat. There is a poison gas cylinder in the box with cat and the release of the gas is dependent upon an event that occurs at the quantum level.” David is now paying attention, although the look on his face suggests he is less than impressed. Marcus continues, “Because at the quantum level, that event can be said both to have occurred and not occurred at the same time, so we can, in a very real sense say that the gas has been both released and not released; ipso facto, quod erat demonstrandum and all that shit, the cat is similarly in a non-determinate state of being alive and not alive.”

I’m a tad fogged by all this, but it does sound vaguely familiar. David is just a little bit more forthright. “Sounds like a load of cock to me.”

Marcus doesn’t look at him. When he replies, whatever it is in his voice, has grown; his tone remains low. “The point was too illustrate the weirdness – some might say, ‘absurdity’ – of the quantum world, where there are fundamental limits to the scope of our knowledge, where particles (and they are the particles that comprise everything we are and everything we see) seem not to exist, or too exist in ‘smeared out’ forms that are at once everywhere and nowhere.”

David snorts. The movie is coming to an end; the mayhem has stopped and there is, I think, some sort of resolution being played out. Marcus carries on in that low tone, his head bowed. But it is not the same low tone, I am starting to appreciate; it is ever-changing; no, it is ever-intensifying. From somewhere, an ache in my head begins.

“Our belief that we live in a world of certainty is thus demonstrated neatly to be totally false. The only reason that we are permitted the delusion that there is such a thing as certitude is because of statistics. We’re talking about events happening at a scale where an atom is the size of the Solar System, and where a gram of air is the size of a galaxy. Sum all the colossal numbers of strange, incomprehensible events, non-events and impossibilities, and somehow this world, our world, emerges.”

“If you say so, Squire.” This from David, his voice drenched in sarcasm topped off nicely with disdain. He hasn’t turned his head a single degree, a single radian, in the direction of Marcus.

There is silence, not to say a silence, for this silence is like no other I have experienced before; it is an absence that has as much character as any construct, as any physical object. In the film there is a sudden, loud flurry of action, designed to catch the audience off guard; I glance at it to see bright flashes – an amalgam of kaleidoscope and strobe – as multiple machine pistols fire in the gloom of what appears to be a cellar, in fact what appears to be a wine cellar, given the amount of glass that’s being broken, the amount of fluid flying around. David stares at it, his face showing a mix of fascination and engagement. Marcus gets up slowly from his seat, his eyes downcast. I watch him; David does not. He walks across the room towards me, which means that he moves behind David’s head. He is still only looking at the carpet – which is threadbare and ornate, some sort of oriental design – but he heads for me in a strangely mechanical fashion, and I begin to be anxious for my safety. He’s clearly not right in the head; I’ve known this for some time, but this is new.

I start to rise. “Marcus?”

David isn’t paying attention to him. In fact, it is me he turns to. “That’s it, Seb! That’s where...”

Marcus hasn’t hear me, or doesn’t appear to have heard, or doesn’t want to have heard; I don’t know. All I know is that he doesn’t react. Not to my voice anyway; he does react, though. React as in act, as in pick up a brass carriage clock – antique, I’m sure – from a small, round occasional table, turn, swing it high and collide it with a perfect, precise and exquisite impact on David’s head.

The sound is not loud, but it is sickeningly moist. The clock partly implodes, partly explodes; its mechanism irrupts, as does David’s skull; the clock case is left, badly bend, embedded in David’s brain, one of its corners driven deep into the home of his innermost thoughts and secrets. He spasms, nearly rises from the sofa, blood streaming from the vertex of his scalp, running down his face in rivulets, into eyes that are bright and staring and turning red, into an opened, voiceless mouth. He freezes quite abruptly, as if suddenly paralysed, then falls to one side, away from Marcus, towards me, hitting the floor with a heavy, extended thump, allowing the blood release onto that exquisite carpet that has known so many feet, so many days, until now so little blood.

“Jesus wept, Marcus!”

I am cast into immobility by the shock of this action. Marcus, is not, though. He springs around to the front of the sofa, moving not as a man but as a madman. He seizes with both large, black hands David’s throat and begins to throttle him. “Got you, you bastard!” he screams.

I am terrified. He’s flipped. He may do to me what he has just done to David if I go to try to stop him; he may do so, anyway. “What the fuck are you doing, Marcus?” I shout, taking a step forwards in a sort of mealy-mouthed compromise of fight and flight. He does not react. Instead he begins to claw at David’s eyes in a frenzy and within seconds he has punctured them, has his fingers covered in blood and jelly.

“For fuck’s sake, stop it!” I scream in near hysterical horror. He looks up at me then, his hands dripping David’s mashed eyes; David who is either dead or deeply unconscious and probably in a place beyond caring. The look in Marcus’s face is surprisingly rational, I realise. He explains, “Eliminating the enemy, my friend.”

He stops, then turns the body, pulling it over as if it were a dog’s carcass, without heed of the humanity and deference that all my upbringing demands should be shown. With hands that must be sticky, he starts to pull at the tee shirt tucked into David’s jeans. “He’s not the enemy, Marcus. He’s one of us; one of the lab rats.”

He has succeeded in freeing the tee shirt, almost ripping it as he pulls up the bloodied cloth to expose the back. He pauses for a moment, then looks up at me; he is finally breathing hard and sweating, showing the first signs of exertion. “Is he?” he demands.

He stands up and I look down at David’s bare back. Despite my fear that this might be a trick, I move forward a little, wondering what I am supposed to see. The tube that snakes over his shoulder – the one we all have – is as I would expect it to be. There is nothing else on the back except a tattoo of two tumbling dice on the left shoulder blade. “What am I supposed to be seeing?”

He stares at me for a long second, then bends down, grasps the tube and yanks it away from the base of the spine. I wince, even though I think that David is a long way below worrying over such trauma. “See now?” he demands with a hint of a sneer.

And I do.

The tube is blind; the skin is unbroken. It has not been inserted into David’s spine at all.

I look back at Marcus, staggered by this. He says calmly, “It made sense that Symonds isn’t the only bogus test subject around here.”

“Why..?”

He is staring intently at me in a way I do not care for. “We’re in a test study, my friend, but I’m not sure that it’s just about any kind of new drug.”

“This is madness...” Not perhaps the wisest of things to say.

He is still staring me. He takes a little while to reply. “I knew that there couldn’t be just one and so I figured there’d be two...”

His voice submerges into his thinking in a way I don’t much like. I began to move backwards slowly and steadily, trying not to be noticed. He looks down at David. He barely breathes the words, “But maybe not just two...”

With speed that I cannot credit, his hand flashes down, grabs the clock to pluck it from the David’s brain, steps over the corpse, and heads for me. I step backwards, fall into a small table knocking it over and tripping as I do so. He is upon me at once, dropping to his knees on my belly and knocking the wind from my chest. His face is full of curiosity; it is the kind of disinterested curiosity that no one sane could feel. “Do you mind if I check out your back?” he asks.

And then he hits me with the battered, bloodied clock and, fuck, does that hurt. I slip away from everything thinking vaguely about the pain and the warm sticky blood that I can feel pouring down the side of my face, but thinking mainly of David’s eyes as he had uttered his last words to me, thinking of how surprisingly blue they had been.

Revelation:

I come to with Joanne Thompson inserting something in my left ear; I stare at the ceiling, unsure if I’m focussing on nothing or not focussing on anything; how would I know which is which? I hear William Moffat say from somewhere, “Is he febrile?”

“Thirty-eight point four,” is her reply. I smell enough perfume to be aroused.

“Really? That’s almost exactly the same as last time.” Dr Moffat is excited but not, I suspect, for base reasons. My head hurts, but not as I would expect it to after being assaulted with a heavy carriage clock. I am sore and stiff, though.

Joanne suddenly realises my eyes are open. “Seb? Can you hear me?”

I say, “Yes,” but I don’t, if you see what I mean. All my muscles do the things that are required to say this, but nothing save a rasping sound comes.

Moffat heaves into view on my right. “He’s conscious.” It occurs to me when I hear this particular piece of inanity that they seem to let any old Tom or Dick become a doctor these days. He says, “Sebastian? Sebastian?”

I repeat my vocal manoeuvre, this time with more success; a word recognisable as ‘yes’ emerges from my mouth.

“How are you?”

How does he expect me to be? I have apparently escaped death at the hands of a madman... Yet even as I think his, I know that things are not right. My head is not bandaged; the pain within it is that of an ache, not of serious traumatic injury. The truth is there at once, not so much a faithful friend, more a frightening ghost that won’t leave me alone.

“I had another hallucination?” I ask.

He nods. “I’m afraid so.”

“Shit.”

“No need to worry,” he says and I appreciate he is being optimistic for my benefit; I can recognise medical optimism because it has a distinctive, not to say rank, scent. “You’re over it now. You’ll be right as rain soon.”

What’s so right about rain, I wonder, although I say nothing to his retreating back. Joanne is taking my blood pressure using a machine that seems to possess a worrying degree of robotic sentience as it inflates the cuff and beeps and whirs and ponders. I ask her, “How are David and Marcus?”

She frowns at my question. “They’re fine,” is her reply, one tinged with puzzlement. “Everyone is.”

“Dr Symonds, too?”

Her reply strikes me as odd. With a short laugh she says, “Who knows? He’s gone now.”

“What does that mean?”

She pauses in the act of entering the blood pressure measurement on the tablet computer. “He’s in London. Not our concern.”

Maybe I’m getting as paranoid as Marcus, I muse. I ask after a short while, “Did the first study go wrong?”

She looks up at me immediately. “What do you mean?”

“Did it go as planned?”

She considers her answer carefully before opting to say nothing at all. “You know I can’t really discuss it.”

“Did something happen to Annette Morley?”

She looks close to panic, I think; or perhaps I am second guessing. I tend to do that, especially when I think everyone’s lying to me. “Please, Sebastian.”

“Why can’t you talk about it?” I look about the room. There is one of those ubiquitous infra red detectors in the corner of the room, to the left of the door. “Is someone watching us? Is that it?”

She laughs. Not obviously hysterically, but then not entirely unhysterically. “Don’t be silly.”

“Is this really a study of a wonder drug? Or is it a study of something else?”

“It’s a drug trial.”

“And no one’s hiding anything?”

“Of course not.”

“But you are. You won’t tell me what happened during that first trial. How come it’s got to remain such a secret?”

“As Professor Appleton said, it’s for reasons of objectivity.”

Now, that’s funny. Objectivity is a precious and rare commodity around here, it occurs to me.

A Walk in the Woods:

“They said you’ve had another turn.” Mandy seems wary of me, as if my particular brand of madness were catching. We are in sitting room, the one with the television; nothing is broken and there is no blood on the rug.

“That’s what I heard.” She frowns but says nothing. I ask, “Are David and Marcus okay?”

“Far as I know.”

Well perhaps that ought to be the end of it all. Somewhere along the line I slipped from a reality on which most people agree to one that it is peculiarly, most definitely mine and mine only. David isn’t dead with a clock-shaped whole in his skull; Marcus hasn’t come at me with his favourite horological death weapon and madness in his eyes. So there’s nothing more to be said. It happens. Especially around here, it seems, and especially to me. “Good.”

“Wanna talk about it?”

Now, there’s a question. In fact, it’s such a question, I have to think about the pros and cons, the risk-benefit ratio, the potentialities that might be played out. I want to tell her about what happened, or seemed to happen, figuring that the one thing I need right now is a point of reference, and maybe Mandy can be one; trouble is, she’s prone to her own extreme neurological symptoms – whether caused by the disease or the treatment - and maybe I only think I’m telling her anyway. But I tell her. After I’ve finished, she says simply, “Wow.”

“But you say they’re fine? Marcus didn’t assault David?”

“He didn’t assault you either.” This I consider to be harsh, but I cannot but see a modicum of truth in her words.

“No.”

She shrugs her shoulders. There you are then.

“There’s something going on, Mandy.”

She raises a fine line of an eyebrow and looks at me. “You’re making that a tricky one to get hold of,” she points out.

“There was a previous trial. Annette Morley was on that trial. Why are they denying it? Why won’t they tell us what happened on that trial?”

“Perhaps because nothing actually happened?”

“And you believe that? Marcus doesn’t.”

“So he’s loony too.” Mandy’s philosophy in a hazelnut shell.

“That’s two of us, then. And that only leaves three of you, not counting Dr Symonds, who might be have been a plant, might be dead for all we know, but most certainly isn’t here anymore.”

Her head bobs from side to side as she considers this. “You have a point.”

“I’m not saying it’s all a sham, Mandy.” I say this because I have suddenly realised that the one thing I mustn’t do is take away her hope; if I do that, she won’t believe me and she won’t forgive me. I have to play the game because the rules are the rules and, if I don’t play by them, then I can’t win. “But something’s not right. I think it’s to do with the first study.”

She says nothing. She’s good at saying nothing, is Mandy; when she does say things, though, it’s generally fairly incendiary. I admit that it is with some desperation that I now ask, “Why does the name ‘Annette Morely’ freak them out so much?”

But she doesn’t seem as intrigued by this as me. “Does it? I hadn’t noticed.”

It was a forlorn hope, I now realise. I sigh, because I have nothing else to do. Or perhaps I don’t sigh. Perhaps my sigh is a false memory.

I don’t fucking know.

She asks, “You saw her head in the fox’s mouth, right?”

I am cautious. “Yes.”

“You think she was decapitated? Is that it? You think she had her fucking head cut off?”

“I don’t know.”

She is relentless. “By whom? Another test subject? Appleton, perhaps? Maybe Michelson, because he’s one mean fucker of mothers.”

Her scorn withers me, as the blast front from a nuclear bomb withers all before it. I have no concrete bunker behind which to hide; I have to stand there and take it, my eyes boiled away, my skin scalded, personality eroded in an instant.

Having stared at me thoughtfully and then having quickly scribbled something in her notebook, she says, “Why don’t we go for a walk?”

She hadn’t struck me as the walk-in-the-woods, holding hands type and, for a moment the idea that this might be the start of another hallucinatory episode takes hold of me - Mandy transmuted into a soppy girl-next-door is potentially as frightening as Marcus changing into a mind-fucked berserker, after all – but this soon passes. I may be wrong, but I think the offer is real; it’s just her motives that aren’t what they seem. We go out into the afternoon sun; it is nearly six and the sky is covered in high bright cloud, a glaring nebulousness that is almost too bright to look at. We are walking across the lawn towards the wood and the lake when she says, “Everyone thinks you’re losing it.” I don’t respond. After a few more steps, she adds, perhaps for emphasis, perhaps to provoke me, “Big time, too.”

“What about you?”

I suppose, if I am honest (and I’m not, particularly; not in an emotional sense, anyway), I want reassurance that she still thinks I’ve got all my marbles, sandwiches, bricks or whatever other metaphors for sanity and insanity you care to employ; we’re talking about Mandy, though, and Mandy doesn’t do reassurance. She says immediately, “I’m not sure.”

I am forced to reflect that on a scale of one to whatever you choose, that’s about as straight down the middle as you could possibly get, which is about as good as I can hope for. “Okay,” I say guardedly.

We have reached the relative cool of the shade of the woods; there are rich, pungent vegetable odours in here and, on a day such as this, they seem to have an intoxicating edge to them, as if I’m being asphyxiated by their cloying embrace, and I am happy to be so. Mandy’s next remark is a change of subject. “There are no rabbits here.”

“Aren’t there?”

“Or squirrels.”

I look around, not because I hope to prove her wrong, but because it’s the sort of thing you do when people say things like that. “Perhaps the fox has had them all.”

“I haven’t seen any foxes.”

Her tone stuns me. “Yes, you have,” I correct her. I remember the occasion well; after all, it wasn’t long ago at all.

She has stopped and is looking at me. “You told me about a magical fox, but you’re the only one who sees it, Seb.”

“No...” Even as I am arguing, I am thinking that this is not an argument I can win. I can’t win it with myself, because perhaps my memory is only the memory of a dream, or hallucination, of a period of madness. Accordingly, I stop, take a long breath in to calm myself, then remain silent. She begins to walk forward again. High above us I see a security camera on the trunk of a tree, partly hidden by foliage.

We reach the lake without further conversation and there she stops and stares across the water, watching midges dance crazily on its surface. It suddenly occurs to me that there are no ducks, or geese or any sort of wildfowl either. She says without looking at me, almost as if she doesn’t want any observers – if there are any observers – to know that she is talking to me, “I wonder, though...”

Standing beside her, I wait while she wonders, wondering what she wonders, scanning the tree line for cameras, seeing none. There’s no birdsong either, I realise. Is that new? I can’t recall whether I have heard them there before. Imperceptibly a sense of unreality has come over me, as we stand there in what is now to me an oppressive silence, as we are bathed in a sultry heat that causes the air to shimmer under that dead white sky.

Mandy says slowly, “What if this is not as it ought to be, as we have been led to believe it is?” I don’t want to say anything, fearful of breaking this fragile thing that seems to be birthing in front of me. She takes her time, though, before continuing, “But why, though? Nothing makes any sense if you don’t everything at face value.”

I can’t stop myself from breaking her reverie. “So I’m just a loony.”

“You’re a man with a brain tumour,” she says, her voice harsh. “You’re a man who admits to having weird hallucinations because of it.”

I smile. “Thanks for that, Mandy.” That smile, by the way, is not a relaxed one.

She moves closer to me and finally looks at me. “I didn’t mean it in quite that way.” I resort once more to silence; things seem better if I do that. She says, “We’ve all got our problems, I know that.” Another pause. “I want to believe you, you know.”

Well, that’s something, I suppose. I offer her thanks but she doesn’t seem grateful.

It’s the story of my life.

More Walking in the Woods:

We move in silence, Mandy leading with me behind, like a dog. We go along the shoreline, following its irregular curves, scrambling among ferns, over fallen trees and through brambles. The lake is behind us before she says quietly but suddenly, “You could spoil this for all of us.”

Another moment, another perspective. I hadn’t thought that far through the thicket of potentialities. Trying to keep with her as she strides through rampant undergrowth and insects – there will always be fucking insects, even if every other form of life in the universe has been eradicated – bombard us. I call out to her, “Is that it? You think I might be on to something, but you don’t want to know because it might spoil your chances in the trial?”

She stops abruptly at that, twisting around. “Yes!” she screams at me. “Of course I don’t want to know!”

There is nothing like honesty. Nothing at all. It stops me dead in both my tracks and my thinking. Before I can respond she goes on, “Who the fuck cares what happened before? So what if it was bad? They don’t want to tell us for whatever reason; so be it. I don’t have anything to do with it. It’s another study, another life, another world. Why can’t I just have my chance at life?”

I’m unable to formulate the answer to this that hovers inside my mind but outside of my grasp. It’s obvious to me, and I had thought it obvious to Mandy – to everyone, in fact; this shift in perspective leaves me lost. It is with some consternation that I eventually suggest, “Suppose whatever it was happens again?”

“Suppose it never happened before?”

Say what you like about Mandy, she has an answer for everything. I continue, “Maybe you’ll be the victim this time.”

She is scornful. “Suddenly there’s a victim, then? What are you saying? That there was a killing...a murder?” A good question and one that, now she mentions it, I suppose I might be saying. Certainly something went wrong and I think that whatever it was involved Annette Morley, quite possibly her death. She steps towards me and I realise I have lost her, that she and I are now on opposite sides of the argument. She says, “This stuff seems to work, Seb. Maybe there are side effects, but it seems to shrink tumours down. Hell, it fucking worked for Symonds, didn’t it?”

I bite down on the obvious reply that Marcus doesn’t seem too impressed about that particular miracle. “It works in mice and maybe it worked for Dr Symonds,” I concede.

“So maybe it’ll work for me, because nothing else will.” Another step towards me. She’s quite close now. “I’m terminal, Seb.”

“So am I.”

One last step and we’re practically face to face. She shouts at me, “Then shut the fuck up! Keep a lid on the lunacies for the sake of all us.”

And then she turns again and goes on, almost running this time. I see no point in following.

Brief Encounter:

It isn’t long before I realise that I am lost. The heat, the scents and the mad, insectile dancing around my head have all combined to produce disorientation within me. Mandy is gone, in both a physical and spiritual sense and I am left to ponder her arguments. Is she right? What does it matter to her, to me, to anyone, if there was some sort of mishap? She has a point if, by prying too much, I should prematurely terminate the study and potentially condemn us all to an avoidable death. My old man always used to say that sometimes in terminal patients, you can see the kind of soulless savagery that not even starving Hyenas show. Anyway, what’s the problem if there’s a ratio of one death to five success stories? We all read the paperwork (to a greater or lesser extent), we all sat through their interminable seminars (sometimes even listening to the odd slimy gobbet of fact); we know the score. We’re rolling the dice and – ask any gambler - if you play games of chance, you might just lose everything you have, including the ability to stick a finger up at God every morning and say, “Still alive, so fuck you, Big C.” Why should we care if there’s been a death that they’re a bit embarrassed to tell us about? Mandy’s right, we can’t let that stop us.

The ground slopes downwards, becoming steep very quickly. The trees are suddenly growing towards me, the roots exposed on the far side, the side on which the sun now shines almost horizontally as it dies for the day. It is no less hot or humid, though. I’m tired by now, wishing that I knew where I was, thinking that the grounds of this place seem to go on and on and on...

The fox appears. No, to be strictly accurate, it does not actually appear as in ‘move’, as in ‘come into being in front of my gaze’; rather I see it as I stumble along the slope, thinking all the time that I have to start going up again, because that is the direction in which the house lies. The angle of my perspective changes and it is suddenly there, a little further down the slope, about a hundred yards distant, eyes as blue as ever, as full of sentience. It is looking at me, but not in a wary sense, but in an expectant sense. It betrays no fear as I walk towards it; no fear at all. If anything, it is I who has the fear.

I walk up to it and it doesn’t move an inch; it just stares at me. Then I see what is beyond it. The ground slopes even more steeply so that looking through the trees I can see only bright blue, as if the world here ends, falling away into the sky. Before this happens, however, there is what seems to be a broad ledge on which there is a clearing in the trees, perfectly circular, perhaps twenty yards in diameter and standing perfectly in the centre of it is Dr Symonds. He is looking away from me yet, as was his way when first I met him, he is looking directly at me. I walk past the fox, aware that it is staring at me as I do so; it doesn’t move, and neither does Dr Symonds. I break into the circular clearing and cross to the doctor. He looks real, but then I would never have doubted that he would. I halt about a yard from him and wait, unsure how to greet him. What is he, after all? Is he figment of my past, my present or perhaps, conceivably, my future? Is he here – as in ‘having actual existence’ – or does his presence at this place at this time depend on my mind, on electrochemical interactions in my brain? And, if the latter, what of it?

It is an awkward moment, perhaps you can appreciate. What do you say under such circumstances? I have several questions I would like to ask him, but in the short while he have known each other, we have not struck the kind of relationship that makes posing them easy; we had barely moved on past the formal structures of human social interaction, those that developed in order to stop hostility being translated too easily into violence, the informal diplomacy that operates between humans a billion times a day, the kind that is broken down by ethanol or tiredness.

He solves my dilemma for me. “Mr Shockley.”

“Dr Symonds.”

He nods. “How are you?”

The answer to that one depends, really. I might be all right, but then I might not. If he’s really standing there in front of me in a clearing at the edge of the world, then I’m probably all right, although there’s clearly something very wrong with the rest of the reality. If he’s only a wraith, though, and I’ve gone loopy again, well, all ante post bets are null and void. “I’m not sure.”

Another nod, this one (I think) of understanding. Fair enough is the subtext. Standing there in front of him, he really does give the impression that as he talks to me, he is contemplating the infinite that seems to have its presence just beyond the falling tree line. I point out, “Your sight seems to be suffering again.”

“It’s getting worse,” he says sadly.

“I’m sorry about that.” He gestures wearily; it is an effete gesture, one made by a man who knows that he is nothing when compared to the immense world around him. I try to gain a little more information. “When did the effect wear off?”

With a frown, he turns his head a tiny fraction. “What effect?”

“The effect of the drug.”

He becomes testy, as if he feels that he is the butt of some jape of mine. “It has had no effect.”

Once – and not too long ago – I might have argued. Now, as is the way of existence, with the passage of time has come the baggage of experience. There is no point in my insistence that he’s wrong, or that I think that he’s wrong. In his universe, clearly, there was no miraculous cure; perhaps there will be, though. Perhaps we are talking tangled time lines. It’s another possible explanation, as likely as all the rest. I say guardedly, “I can remember the drug appearing to cure you. It happened a few days ago.”

After a silence, he says bitterly, “How fortunate for me.” At least he isn’t backing away from me, ready to cry for help.

“It was a miracle.” As I say this, I am aware that I knew at the time that his recovery was too good to be true, and that we all felt thus, although we had different reactions to it.

He breathes heavily and then, after a pause, replies in a tone that I cannot identify, “Do you know what my field of study is?”

I recall he had flung a few syllables at the assembled company on the first morning of our time together, but as to what they were, in what order they liked to hang about, and what they meant, I could not now say. “No,” I admit.

He is angry, I now see. Very angry. “I will not bore you with the details, merely to say that a large part of my studies over forty years has been the analysis of miracles.” I open my mouth in order, I think, to say, “Oh.” I don’t get as far as utterance, though. I can see an irony here; one that is just possibly the work of a cosmic jester. “I have yet to find a single instance that diligent reading of the archives does not cause to wither away, leaving not a rack behind. Most are just plain lies, some are accidents, a few are the misinterpretations of the ignorant; all are merely Chinese whispers propagated over perhaps millennia, usually centuries, occasionally (since the interlinkages by which we communicate have grown exponentially over the past fifty years) just decades.” He pauses for breath, but only as fuel for another rocket burst of anger. “Believe me, Mr. Shockley, I know better than most that miracles are artefacts born of superstition, manipulation, greed and wish fulfilment. They are the perfect gift for everyman; they suit the churches, they suit the gulled, they suit the crooks and, assuming such a thing exists, they suit whichever almighty godhead is being venerated.”

One last pause before he declaims, certainly to me and quite possibly to whichever godhead might be passing by, “There is no such thing.”

All I can say is, “Sorry,” as if it’s my fault, but he seems disgusted by me now. He turns away from me – I mean really away, so that his back and head are towards me – and says, “Please go.”

I don’t think seriously about arguing; he wants to be alone and I’m not about to force my company on the crusty old codger. When I turn around to go back the way I have come, the fox (of course) has gone, as if it has done its job and so retired from the scene. Before I have gone a hundred yards, I hear Dr Symonds shout, “You should read my treatise, Mr Shockley. It’s all in there, you know.”

Bleak Encounter:

I have wandered a long way through the woods, but managed to find myself again at the perimeter fence, not far from the back lane that, such a short while ago, yet in a former life, Mandy and I had made our escape to the pub. Perhaps two hundred yards ahead is the gate; from this and to my right the lane leads back into dense trees above which the house rises. The air is different now, distinctly cooler, with a hint of dew in the air, almost as if it’s early morning. I hear a noise, at first not knowing what it is, knowing only its direction until, behind the gate I just see a human figure; it is small and indistinct, far off and the air shimmers between us, but it is real. The sound comes again, this time obviously from the figure, which I can see is moving; more, it is jumping up and down, waving its arms, as if trying to attract attention, but there is something not quite right about it.

I think I recognise who it is and say a name under my breath.

“Janey?”

I start to walk towards her. She carries on her calling and gesticulation, but she is not looking at me.

I begin to run. It is still so hot; the foetid, sapping warmth of the woodland has been replaced by a harsh, flaring heat as the sun spots its prey and seems to want to burn me out. Still she has not seen me. “Janey?” I shout.

Of course I do.

Of course she doesn’t respond.

My voice, though, is odd. I hear it come from my throat, and yet I hear it as if called from some way away. This is not real and it’s an easy one to spot. Part of me even has contempt for this poor excuse for reality. Perhaps I am winning the struggle after all, for I can spot the fakes, so perhaps I can steer a course through this archipelago borne of islands of truth amongst high seas of surreal reefs. I continue to run towards her, not knowing what to expect.

From my right, away from the house, appears another figure. I can see from the geometry of the situation that this figure is running towards Janey and that it is to this figure that she is calling. I can see also that this figure is me. Despite the certainty that this is not really happening, I call out again but the figures of Janey and I pay no attention (this is not a sentence I have thought ever to write, even as a published writer). Janey (always athletic in more senses than one) begins to climb the fencing. Once more I call; no, I fucking scream.

I – as in the other I – am (is?) screaming too; exactly as I do. He knows what I know, what Janey doesn’t seem to know. Mandy thought that the top of the fence wasn’t electrified, but both of us ‘I’s know different; truth and certainty shift in this space that is my reality, this particular part of the universe that is in my head. Who knows whether it is now? Janey is ignoring us, though. Janey is being what Janey always has been, which is impulsive and foolhardy and, therefore, wonderful. More screaming from both us, just as irrelevant to Janey; she wants to climb up and in, and so that is what she will do. It is her philosophy, the credo by which she lives.

It is now the credo by which she is going to die.

She reaches up to grasp the first horizontal strand of razor wire as the concrete support posts angle over – God and she alone knew what she expected to achieve by this – and there is a dreadful, stuttering burst of white static. She twitches violently, spastic jerks that try to fling her away from the fencing; they fail because her fingers are contracted like talons around the wire by the current. The sound continues; she makes no contribution of her own to this atonal composition, though. I am still some hundred yards away, but I can smell the burning of flesh; what it must to be like to me closer, though...

Faint curls of blue-green smoke are flicked away by her curiously confined dance of death. The sound continues for a little while longer until, her muscles exhausted by this final call on their tenacious contractility, Janey falls away, quite dead.

I continue to run, as does my other self, but now I am just desperate to stop him from doing something foolish. If he does, I know that the consequences will fall upon me. And I can see from the anguish on his face that he will do it, that he will climb the wire in a stupid bid to reach a woman already dead, who has passed beyond the ability to touch him, except in harmful, hurtful ways.

This is my dilemma. I know that this isn’t real. Yet also I know that there are consequences of what happens now. Somehow, should he be stupid enough to die in front of me at this time, in this universe, then things will somehow have changed in that other universe, the one in which I was born, the one in which I thought I would live forever, the one to which I still hope I will return. Maybe I won’t, though. Maybe that universe is gone, and I entered another when first my brain cancer decided that I see should my friends melt and burn and die before me; and maybe it was yet another when William Moffat, MD, introduced me in the most intimate manner to Resolimab. Who knows? I sure as shit don’t.

“No!” I shout, because that’s what you shout, isn’t it? What else can one shout at such a time?

It makes no difference, of course. Every time I shout, so does he. My words are his words. He – I – reach the fencing and climb. I do so with an agility that surprises me. Am I so lithe? Perhaps propelled by the desperation he so blindly feels, I could be. I call again; without response. Can he hear me? Could he see me if he were able to hear me? I am fifty yards away now, and he is climbing still. He reaches out to the overhead razor wire and there is from his mouth a wordless howl.

Which is when I collapse into blackness and, plunging into oblivion I hear at a distance the sharp, staccato cracks of static

Ill-Met by Moonlight:

Alice is back among us and we are all happy. We crowd around her when she appears in the television room, a wanderer returned, a companion restored. It seems to give us all cheer. She is fine, she tells us. Dr. Moffat and the professor are very pleased with her, apparently; she says this as if they are teachers and she has done well in her end of year maths exam. She says that she has no memory of what happened and no one can say that she hasn’t. Marcus and David seem on exceptionally good terms and, for a fleeting moment, I wonder if this is some sort of sham; but only for a moment that is exceptionally fleeting. The only interrelationship that seems at all soured is the one between me and Mandy; she does not catch my eye, nor does she talk to me; as the afternoon wears on, it seems that we are unable to approach each other, that we are doomed never to occupy the same space, as if repelled by a fundamental force of nature, one that everyone knows is there, but no one can define.

She’s not the only one I’m in the shit with, either. I was late for my medical obs and Dr. Moffat was testy with me, much as a small child gets testy with an adult. Joanne, too, was cross, although her annoyance is less stern than William Moffat’s and, when she chastised me, I saw that her anger had not risen as high as her eyes; I saw also that Dr Moffat noticed this and was, I believe, a tad jealous.

I don’t tell anyone why I am late, not even Mandy. It seems that, for one reason or another, I cannot confide in anyone. Or am I merely saying that I have no confidence? Either way, I have not told anyone what I saw; I have not told a soul that I awoke from some sort of blackout at the side of the lane, that there was no sign of two bodies, nor even of one, although I remember witnessing two deaths, one of which was my own. It has just been as well, though, for I seem to want, or perhaps seem to have thrust upon me, my own company for the rest of that evening. At ten I retire early to bed, not expecting to have Mandy for comfort that night but I am awoken suddenly much later as the door opens slowly but silently; I don’t know why or how it wakes me. It is so dark I can barely see her shape as she steals in, closes the door with great care, and then moves quickly to the bed side where she stops for an instant, drops a dressing gown from her shoulders and at once climbs in beside me.

I am unable to say whether I appreciate immediately before or immediately after her finger is pressed against my lips in a wordless warning for silence that it is not Mandy, but Joanne Thompson who is lying naked beside me.

Sense out of Nonsense:

She leaves an hour later, exactly as she came in and, in the interval, not a word has been spoken, nor even a sound uttered. Her lovemaking has been passionate, almost frantic, as if pent up for too long. In the deprivation of both sight and sound, the other senses were intensified, especially that of touch; for a long while afterwards I lie in the bed and remember the tactile pleasures of her secret places, of her hard tongue, of her harder nipples. As she goes, once more her finger – long, thin and bony with, I recall in the blindness of that time, a manicured nail, is pressed again to my lips. Say nothing. This is our secret.

The foxes begin again, as they have not done for some nights now. I wonder what I will see if I go to the window and look out onto the lawn. I content myself with merely wondering, although it’s not just the foxes about which I wonder.

It would be trite and obvious to say that there is something odd around here and, anyway, it gets me nowhere. It seems to me that I have no evidence on which to determine whether the oddness emanates from me – that I am deluded, essentially insane – and that everything and everyone else is ‘normal’, or whether I retain a bedrock of sanity and that therefore what is happening is ‘real’; ipso facto, I have to make the decision without it. Because I have to make that decision; not to would be the worst thing I could do. Also, and for the same reason, there is no actual question of what that decision must be; I cannot decide that this is all in my head. I cannot proclaim myself deranged; to do so would be mad...

Therefore, without any evidence, I have convince myself to continue on the assumption that the oddness does not spring primarily from me.

This act brings me some tranquillity, but only a smidgeon, only, in fact (as Janey was wont to say), enough to tickle a tomcat’s todger. Not everything that has happened to me can possibly be real. For fuck’s sake, I saw Janey – shit Macgregor, I saw myself – electrocuted. Also, I saw Marcus kill David and claw out his eyes, only to see them both chummying up to each other some hours later. Something tells me that these ones, at least, are clearly a product of some sort of mental derangement.

Or influence...

Maybe it isn’t those shitty little cancer cells getting into my wiring like termites, and maybe it isn’t Professor Appleton’s patented snake oil antibodies doing the dirty work. Perhaps it’s something else...

That just leads me back either to the supernatural or the science fictional, which are just two different shades of the same shit. What influence am I proposing here? Time travel? I’m having visions of the future, or maybe the past too. If I was seeing him in the past, it would explain seeing Dr Symonds in the woods and he know nothing about his supposed cure. But it would have to be foresight to have seen first Janey, then me, electrocuted.

Well, then, maybe it’s some sort of game, as Marcus seems to believe (or believe he believes?). Maybe we’re in the middle of one of those bizarre, psychological experiments, the ones you read about in the Sunday supplements, where people are made to believe impossible things, and do hideous things to each other. That’s actually a theory that’s got quite a lot going for it, especially if you throw in the possibility that they’re adulterating our food with psychedelic drugs. Maybe none of us have tubes inserted into our backs and the apparent injections are some sort of sleight of hand; perhaps William Moffat isn’t a bona fide doctor, just a hired hand, a member of the Magic Circle.

I find myself racing through ramifications and possibilities. Is it conceivable that, buried deep in the acres of verbiage that constituted the Patient Information and the consent forms, there were a couple of paragraphs that spelt out the truth, that said that we’d all been fed a load of horse cack and that what they were really interested in doing was testing our psyches to destruction?

In this light, the existence of the cameras is elucidated; more than that, it becomes startling logical. It is not our physiological status that is of primary importance to the investigators, it is our psychological one. Many of the daily morning tests are concerned with our state of mind; it is conceivable that the others are merely window dressing. Hence the cameras, so that they can observe us continually, whether inside or out; cameras not just in the trees outside, not just in the dining room and the library and the lounge, but everywhere. Someone may be watching us as we shit, as we sleep, as we...

...Make love.

Joanne Thompson’s behaviour suddenly makes total sense. She did not wish to be recorded fornicating, perhaps because as one of the investigators she was breaking a taboo by indulging in such intimacy with a test subject; hell, perhaps merely because she was merely embarrassed.

It is an explanation that answers much, but one that makes me feel flushed. Mandy was not coy in her lovemaking; indeed, Mandy enjoyed the visual as much as the tactile; we had performed by the light of the bedside lamp, and this would have provided ample illumination for any cameras that might reside in our supposedly private bedrooms. Mandy was inventive too...

I lie there, my heart suddenly but understandably restless, trying to come to terms with this prospect, telling myself that it is only a possibility, one among many; nothing has condensed into certainty; all is as yet uncertain. I am not even sure that Marcus is right in his assertion that there are cameras inside the house; the ones outside may be merely precautionary, the ones inside might be merely hallucinatory.

Anyway, as an explanation, it is far from perfect, for it answers some questions but it leads to many others.

After a time that might be an infinitesimal part of a second, might be the issue of many languorous hours, I drift off to sleep and, as I do so, I realise that if I am to understand what is going on, I must find out if Annette Morley ever really existed and, if she did, what happened to her.

A Morning with Dickens:

After a taking of toast and tea, and after the morning’s ritual probing and prodding and assessing and testing, and after my next dose of wonder drug has been bestowed upon me, I am in the library. It is, I think, about half past eleven, although my watch is in my room. I have had an idea and, as with all great ideas, there is nothing that must stop its fruition. Accordingly, I am reading texts. Mandy comes in.

“Hi,” she says hesitantly.

“Hi.” I say this distractedly.

She says, “Marcus is behaving oddly.”

“Really?” Am I, I wonder, supposed to be amazed at this snippet? She is telling me about the defaecatory habits of bears as if it’s just off the press.

“Yeah.” But I am too absorbed and too far from giving a grade A shit to answer. She asks then, “Did we have a row yesterday?” This stops me and I look up from the book I am perusing. She asks then, “What are you doing?”

I bite back sarcasm. “Just looking through some books.”

“Why?”

On the face of it, this question is either rude or stupid, but perhaps from Mandy I should not consider it so, given the kind of person she seems to be, and given the kind of person I have presented to her. Yet I find I cannot reveal to her my real reason for a sudden interest in the works of Charles Dickens, an author whom, prior to this little sojourn, I had considered boring to the point of self-immolation. “Nothing to do,” I murmur with a sigh, hoping to put her off proceeding with more questions. To make sure of the success of this manoeuvre I add, “And, yes, we did have a bit of a tiff.”

“Oh.”

She sits down at the table by the window, under the PIR detector; I wonder idly what’s in there today. I don’t think I’ll bother trying to find out. I say, “You’ve had another fit?”

She nods. “About an hour ago. I was hooked up to one of Will Moffat’s machines. He practically creamed his jeans.”

I could imagine Dr Moffat doing that; he seemed to me to possess the temperament of a puppy dog. With me that morning, he seemed a tad stiff and formal and I could not help but wonder if he somehow knew that Joanne Thompson and I were exchanging the ‘bodilies’ last night; her attitude to me was frosty, too, but I forgive her for that. Mandy asked, “What was it about?”

“Haven’t you written that down?”

She opens the ever-present notebook and leafs to the last entry. “All I’ve got down here is, Fucking pissed off with that wanker, Seb.”

She isn’t in the least embarrassed when she reads this out. “Thanks,” I mutter.

“So I know I was angry with you. I wondered why.”

I am caught between telling the truth, telling an outright lie, and steering a course somewhere between. I just hope that I choose right. “I pissed you off.”

“What about?”

“I was jealous of you and the chef.”

“What the fuck for?”

“Do we really have to go through this again?”

I saw the anger rising within her; I see it now subsiding as she considers the answer to this. “No,” she concurs. “Maybe not.”

“I was wrong, okay?” She nods. I ask innocently, “How much has been wiped out?”

“A lot,” she admits and hers is a voice pregnant with worry. “Most of yesterday and all of this morning.”

“That’s a big hole to carry around.”

“Don’t you think I know that, you fuckwit?” she demands at once. I’m about to answer – although I don’t know how – when she bursts into tears. There follows an embarrassed pause in which she is weeping furiously, heeling her hands into her eyes as if trying to jam the tears back in, and I am standing there, the epitome of juvenile Englishness, then I step towards her and pull her gently to her feet by her elbows. We embrace.

“I’m sorry, Mandy. Stupid thing to say.”

“Too fucking right,” she mumbles into my shoulder. I say no more and neither does she for a few minutes until, “I’m scared, Seb. They’re getting worse. It’s never been so long.”

I say, “There, there. Don’t worry, Mandy. I’m sure it’ll come good.” I am wondering about the odd faint chimes of coincidence; she said once before that she was worried her fits were getting worse, except that was one of my hallucinations, wasn’t it?

“I fucking hope so.”

More silence between us and around us as I hold her, until she pulls away from me, not roughly, but as sentimental fools do. “Alright now?”

She nods. She’s not the sort of girl to have a tissue or a handkerchief, and has to sniff and wipe her eyes on her sleeve. Something occurs to me. “Mandy?”

“What?”

“Would you do me a favour?”

“What?”

“I need some reassurance.”

She looks doubtful, as if she considers herself incapable of such. “What about?”

“Would you take a peak under the dressings on my back?”

“Why?”

“Just tell me that the tube really does go into my back, will you?”

“We’re not supposed to interfere with them because of the danger of infection.”

“Just a quick peek.” She does not move. “Please?”

And still she looks at me for a long while and I think that for an instant she perhaps sees through my lie about our argument, but then she nods slowly. I turn and lift my tee shirt as she kneels down behind me. I feel tugging at the dressing. The wait seems far too long as, for seconds, there is nothing from her. “Well?” I demand.

More tugging, this time with pressure, then she stands up. “Okay,” she says. Her voice is soft.

I turn to face her. “Well?”

“The tube goes into your skin,” she says.

Her eyes, though, are dull and I do not like her tone.

An Afternoon without Him:

I do without lunch so engrossed am I in my research on the works of Dickens and, after several hours, I am sick to my back teeth of Fezziwigs and Bumbles, Pecksniffs and Dorcases, Jollies, Jellybys and Jeddlers, and my opinion of Dickens is confirmed. But I have found nothing that could relate logically to the mystery of Annette Morley. I was especially hopeful of The Mystery of Edwin Drood but that, too, had proved duff. Not, of course, that I read a great deal of the guff, given the verbal squits that had obviously afflicted poor Charlie. I had ‘skimmed’ the material, as I had learned that publishers do to unsolicited manuscripts but, even so, there was a lot of it to skim. There were no hidden notes, no ciphers written on the back page, no seemingly random under-linings of scattered words to form a message. Maybe whatever it was that Annette Morley had hinted at was written in invisible ink; maybe I needed to heat the books in an oven, or rub the pages with lemon juice. Maybe it’s subtle, and you have to be a Dickens scholar to grasp this particular clue, on intimate terms with the texts and subtexts, the plots, subplots and sub-subplots in which CD seemed to indulge.

Maybe there isn’t a clue, and she just liked reading Dickens, poor soppy cow.

Maybe she never existed and I’m wrong about everything.

My old man used to say that there are a lot of right answers in the world, but there are an infinitely greater number of wrong ones, so the chances are you’re going to get it wrong. He said that while he was drunk, but it made sense then and it makes sense now; don’t knock the drunk, because there’s a lot of truth out there when the inhibitions go.

In the TV room, are Marcus and David, just as before. It gives me a nasty turn because they are just as before, with David sitting in the sofa watching a film, while Marcus sits to his right and reads a magazine. The magazine is Top Gear and there’s something about his demeanour that suggests that he’s not really taking much notice of it. There’s a degree of inevitability about all this that tells me that the DVD will be the same one as was on in my hallucination; when I swing my gaze to it, I think I recognise it as such.

Shit.

It occurs to me that it would be one fucking dandio of an idea not to mention Schrodinger’s cat. Nor his dog. Nor anyone’s cat. Nor, indeed, any bullshit about quantum

mechanics. I go to the chair by the window and David looks up at me. “How’s it going, Seb?” he asks.

I reply, “Good,” although my eyes are on Marcus. “You okay?”

“Sure.”

I nod. I cannot ignore Marcus, so I say to him, “How’s it with you, Marcus?”

He doesn’t answer. He makes no response at all. This isn’t good, I think. David glances across to him and then to me; he makes a loco face and shrugs before the film drags him back. What do I do now? I can’t leave because as soon as I walk out the door, Marcus might decide to do a bit of manslaughter and mutilation on David. Mind you, asks the little voice of reason that we all know is really cowardice, what good will it do if you stay? You didn’t do much to protect David last time, did you?

But there wasn’t a last time, was there? It was my cancer, or the treatment.

-Wasn’t there? Are you so sure?

There can’t have been. Because David’s here now, and he’s got both his eyes.

-So how come they’re in exactly the same positions again, and how come the same DVD’s on, and Marcus is reading the same magazine?

It must be some sort of déjà vu.

-Yeah, right.

“Seb?”

Marcus is looking at me through eyes that are dull. It takes me a moment to compose myself. “Yes?”

“Come over here.” His voice drags like a weight that is sinking to the bottom of a muddy river bed.

The film is heading towards a climax; I can see that it is the same climax as before. The voice of reason screams wordlessly at me not to do as he asks, but I cannot seem to obey it. Marcus’s voice has a strange, drugged power, as if contagion comes from contact with his slow, turgid words. I go to him.

He says, “I need to talk to you.”

Please, Marcus, nothing about that quantum shit again. “Fine.”

I stand by his chair and he looks up at me. Has he been dribbling? Surely not. That wouldn’t have gone down too well with the clients in the City. He whispers loudly, “I’ve found another camera.”

Before I can stop myself – through relief, I think – I say, “That’s good.”

His finger goes to his lips in a gesture that I find disturbingly familiar, but there is something wrong with the way he performs the gesture; it is as though he is drunk, I realise. I lower my voice and repeat, “That’s good.”

He gestures for me to bend closer to his face. When I comply, he says, “I think they’re drugging me.”

No shit, Sherlock.

Casting around for something reasonably neutral to say on the subject, I come up with, “You don’t look well.”

He nods and says, “I can’t seem to think straight.”

Drugged as he may be, he has lobbed the conversational tennis ball back into my court, wrong footing me so that I scurry back to baseline and flail around wildly to produce an effective stroke. “Where’s the camera?”

Not such a good riposte; in fact, a fucking awful one. I feel dragged into someone else’s lunacy, which is the last thing you want when you’re struggling with your own. He takes an age to decide. On the flat screen television, they’re back in that cellar again and David is right there with them. Marcus says eventually, and in a voice that is slow coming through lips that are barely moving, “In the dining room. If you look at the chandelier very carefully, you can see that one of the eyelets is hollowed out; catch the right reflection and you can see a tiny lens in it.”

“You’ve only found one?”

Perhaps that is an unfair question; it sounds as though I’m belittling his efforts. Luckily, he does not take it so. In a sorrowful tone, he admits, “So far. They took out all the ones in the PIR detectors when I discovered the first one.”

Suddenly David, whom I didn’t think was listening or was even able to hear what we’ve been saying, calls out over his shoulder, “Is he trying to rope you in on this conspiracy theory, Seb?”

I do not answer at once, for I am looking at Marcus, who is looking at the magazine; not at the text or illustrations, I think, but merely at the object that is the magazine. Carefully I say, “Something like that.”

“Load of fucking cock, if you ask me.”

Marcus looks up slowly, across to David’s profile. His expression is unreadable. “I wouldn’t say that,” I venture, not even trying to keep the tremor out of my voice, wondering why he should say such a thing, and why he should say it in such a provocative manner.

On screen there is rising tension, as portrayed by eerie music interrupted by smatterings of dissonant chords. “I would. I reckon you’ve lost the proverbial, Marcus old son.” If anything, this is couched in even more inflammatory terms. Something is clearly so wrong here.

Marcus continues to stare at him, now with an intensity that seems to me be to supernatural. He begins to rise from his chair, the magazine forgotten. I say softly, “Marcus,” but he doesn’t notice.

David is back in the action of the film as he continues obliviously, “All that crap about cameras everywhere. I hope they don’t have them in the shitters, because they might catch one of us giving a tug or two; they might even catch Alice with her steam-driven mechanical dildo...”

Marcus stands totally still but on his face there is evidence of an internal struggle, he begins to shuffle forward. “Marcus,” I say more loudly, again to no effect.

I try a different target. “David?”

“What?” he replies distractedly.

Marcus is slow but, boy, is he implacable He is not moving directly towards David but towards the heavy brass carriage block that rests on the table by the sofa. He moves as if weighed down with dreadful thoughts that lie on his shoulders like a pharmaceutical yoke, but it isn’t heavy enough to stop him. Not Marcus, not when his theory and his insanity are being impugned.

Another one of Dad’s was, ‘Never question the sanity of the insane; it drives them mad’.

“David,” I repeat more loudly.

He turns just as Marcus reaches the clock, and just as, on the screen, there is an explosion of screaming and rapid gunfire. I am at an angle to the screen so cannot see detail, can only discern flashes of bright light, but it’s so sudden and loud that I jump. So does David: so does Marcus. He pauses, looks at his hand on the clock – he has big hands and he almost envelopes the timepiece – then pulls away from it, as if he fears it might be contaminated. He turns and looks at me. David asks of me, “What do you want, Seb?”

Marcus returns slowly to his seat and for a moment I am at a loss for something to say. “Nothing.”

Marcus is seated again, leaning back, looking at the ceiling, perhaps searching for more cameras, but trying to work out what has just happened, or maybe even what hasn’t just happened. I want to get out of there at once, and move behind David to do so. Only then do I see more detail of what has been going on in the film. I stand still for a moment, then ask, “Weren’t they in a wine cellar just now?”

David twists his head around and up to look at me. “Wine cellar? Where’d you get that from? This is set in an abandoned slaughterhouse.”

A Storm on the Way:

Alice is sitting on the back patio, just in the shade. She is reading one of the books from the library, as has become her wont; yesterday it was one by Barbara Cartland. She is smiling, as is also her wont. “Hello, dear,” she says brightly. “You look flushed.”

“Oh, you know,” I reply vaguely.

“Yes,” she says sagely. “It must be the heat.”

“Probably.”

“I think there’s a storm on the way.”

It is true that there are tall cumulus clouds – the first for many days – beginning to gather above the trees to the west where they are backlit dramatically by a lurid westering sun. I ask, “Have you seen Mandy?”

She considers this, giving it the proper attention that only the elderly dare to give a question because, unlike the young, they are mortally afraid of being caught forgetting. “Not for a while,” she decides at last. It was worth a try, I think to myself, but then she says, “She said she was going to sunbathe by the lake, I think.”

She has taken a towel and I find her lying on this on a fallen log by the side of the lake. She is lying on her front, topless, her head turned away from me; she does not move when I approach her. The clouds are growing, the light is dying. Without moving, she says, “There’s going to be a storm.”

“You’ve got a key to the wine cellar, haven’t you?” Her head rises slowly from the towel, then turns towards me. She takes a long time to find a reply and, when it comes, it’s silent and in the form of a slow nod, her eyes remaining still and on me. “I’d quite like to visit it,” I reply.

Her stare is intense. “You fancy a drink?” she asks.

“Why not?”

“Well,” she says. “We have to be careful. Can’t have too much of the Herr Michelson’s valuable wine going missing in case he notices.”

“You don’t appear to be stinting.”

She grunts a laugh and suddenly turns over, exposing her breasts; they’re good breasts, too. “One or two us taking the odd sup is one thing; more than that...two of us...well, that’s bumping the risks up a fuck of a lot, isn’t it?”

A thought occurs to me. “Has Marcus been taking the ‘odd sup’?”

“Why do you ask?”

“He’s behaving very oddly.”

She laughs again, this time for longer and with more amusement. “He’s joined the fucking club, then.”

“Please, Mandy? I could do with a drink.”

She considers, looks up at the clouds and, as she does so, there is a low rumble of thunder from somewhere far away yet oh so close. She says, “Why not? I think I’ve seen the last of the sun for today.”

She gets up, showing no embarrassment at her partial nakedness and puts on her blouse. As we begin to walk back to the house, I ask, “Would it be all right if I go into the cellar too?”

She looks at me out. “Why would you want to do that?”

“I’m interested. I’ve never been in a real wine cellar before.”

At which she continues for a moment to look at me, slowing somewhat in her stride, before, “If you like.”

“What about the chef, though? He’ll object, won’t he?”

“No problem. It’s his day off.”

“Really? He’s only just had one, hasn’t he?”

She looks at me and frowns. “No.”

Which gives me pause for thought, although I make no comment about yet another discontinuity in my perceptions and memories.

A Storm Arrives:

There is no key as such, merely an electronic combination lock, exactly like the ones on the doors to the labs. Mandy punches in five numbers and then twists the handle; she doesn’t let me see what the code is. She stands aside. “After you.”

I imagined it would be dark and dusty, becobwebbed and musty, but I’m wrong. Alfred Michelson’s wine cellar is clean and, when the overhead fluorescent lights go on, it is bright. Also it is large; I’d expected some poky hole with barely enough room to swing the proverbial, but this is an example of serious wine storage. It is a square room at the bottom of a flight of steps; it is about ten yards by ten yards, and it contains floor to ceiling racking at about four feet intervals, with just enough room to walk through it. There must be several thousand bottles of wine here. I know that it’s a cliché, but I emit a low, impressed whistle and follow this with the perhaps less clichéd, “Fuck a duck.”

“Not bad, is it?”

I wander along between rows of racks; as I believe I have said before, I am no connoisseur of wine, whether it be fine or otherwise, but I just know that here is a lot of liquidity, in both senses of the word. Even I recognise the moniker ‘Baron Philippe de Rothschild’ when I read it, as I do on not a few bottles herein present. One thing I do not see is empty spaces, although admittedly there is so much here, I could easily be mistaken. When I point this out to Mandy, she says, “You won’t find any, either. I’m fucking careful when I take off the cap. When I’ve finished, I fill the bottle up with water, stick the cork back in and put the cap back on; it goes back exactly where I got it from and no one cries, ‘foul’.”

Once again I wonder about her background, even as I admire her resourcefulness. “There’s a lot money here,” I say.

She is watching me closely as I wander along the aisles, as if she strongly suspects that I might be about to commit a grievous sin and pinch a bottle. “Just one of many investments, I’m told.”

“I don’t suppose he’d be very happy if he knew we were drinking his assets, I guess.”

“He’s not very happy at the best of times,” she points out.

All I can see as I look along the rows are bottles upon bottles. Perhaps I was wrong; perhaps there is no significance to the wine cellar; the hallucination was just that, containing no hidden lights or subtle clues; perhaps all my visions have been like that. Her words bring my mind back to the conversation. “He must be fucking loaded.”

“’Overextended’, too, is the word on the street.”

I am out of sight of Mandy now; I raise my voice to reply. “I wonder if that means he’s relying a lot on the success of this drug.”

I hear her snort. “I’ve heard he’s got his cock out on the chopping block for it.”

Does that matter? I think it might. I come to the last aisle, the one furthest away from the door and Mandy. She calls out, “Are you going to inspect every single fucking bottle?”

And there it is.

What it is, I do not know, but I can make out clearly that it ain’t just a bottle that’s nestling down by the floor at the far end of the row. I say, “Won’t be a tick.”

I hurry to the spot, bend down and pluck out...a handwritten notebook. Just a small one, and cheap too; barely thirty small lined pages. It’s dog-eared, as well, but it’s got writing in. I straighten up.

“You cunt.”

It’s just a soft whisper, but it doesn’t have to be anything more, because it’s said up close; I mean really up close, as in right behind me. This startles me. Upon turning I am even more startled when she snatches the book from my hand. “What’s this?”

I am unable to reply because I don’t rightly know. I guessed there would be something, but I didn’t know what, nor what it would mean; hell, it might still be nothing, given the fact that I haven’t been given a chance to examine it yet. She flicks through it, back to front, coming to a stop on the first page. Then she looks back to me, the notebook held open within her hands. “You fucking lied to me.”

“No...”

She erupts as only a woman can; that is, suddenly and violently and more implacably than any man ever can. “Yes, you did, you motherfucker!” she screams. But there’s more, just in case I was thinking she’d peaked. “I knew you were lying. I knew it, I knew it, I knew it!”

“Mandy, I didn’t lie...”

“We didn’t row about the fucking chef. We rowed because of your fucking obsession with what may or may not have happened during the first study.”

She has left me a gap and I rush to fill it... “You remember.”

“I remember that you’re off your trolley.”

I detect that I have been unsuccessful in getting my point across, so I try again. “But, Mandy, you remember.”

“You’re a liar, Seb. Nothing but a shit-faced, fucking liar.”

“Mandy, don’t you see?”

She is beginning to cry, which is worse than her anger. I’m used to the anger of women – all young men are, I think – but not their tears. Her voice is full of all sorts of things that I don’t want to hear – betrayal, incandescence, bereavement, incredulity – as she continues her dissection of my misdemeanours. “How could you? You were my memory, and I trusted you. I needed you to fill in the gaps, and you, you absolute fucking shit, you lied. And now you’ve lied again, haven’t you? You don’t want any wine, you just wanted to snoop around here, you just wanted to see if you could find something that would prove you right, prove your stupid theories.”

She had taken up the posture of a fighter, as if she were about to give me the old left-right-left to the solar plexus. She didn’t do that, though; she gave me a ringing smack across my left cheek. She’d done it before, I could tell, because it was done with style and grace, so that perfect technique made up for lack of power. ‘It’s in the wrist action’ as they used to say.

I tried again – ‘Mandy...’ – but I was talking to her back. Without turning she called out, “Let yourself out.”

After the Storm:

I take to my room, much as a lovelorn or grounded teenager might; in truth I feel exactly like both of those. What Mandy said was pretty much bang on the truth; I most certainly had lied to her about what had happened during her ‘absence’, and I therefore let her down; worse I deceived her. She brought home to me just how much she was relying on me to be her memory and only now do I realise what a terrible thing I have done. My lie to get into the wine cellar only worsened that initial deception, but worsened it exponentially, I fear.

Do I love her?

Now that’s a good question. Another one is, does she love me?

Not now, certainly. Did she ever, then?

As the shock of the last hour subsides, I find myself becoming curiously objective about this. She is not unattractive, but would I have picked her out as lover had she been merely a scurrying face in the crowd, one of the crush at the bar? Would she have sought me out amongst the hustling, bustling hurley-burley of the normal universe? I doubt it. I doubt it very much.

So why the misery?

It isn’t sadness; it is fear, I realise. It is not that I have lost a lover, it is that I have lost an ally. Lovers are luxuries, allies are essential.

I want to make it up to her, but fear that I will not be able to, and certainly do not know how to.

And all because I had an insane idea that I was being directed by some strange power – be it from my tumour, the effects of the treatment, some supernatural source – to look in the wine cellar. What have I found? A few scribbles in a notebook. I don’t even know what it is. It may be completely irrelevant; it may be the ravings of a lunatic – plenty of those around here – or may be some tasting notes on a particularly fine Beaujolais. There’s no way I can know, until I look at it.

So I do.

On that first page I get my answer.

I am Annette Morley.

What do I feel now?

I suppose the most prominent emotion is relief. I have not been wasting my time, I have am not mad... Unless, of course, I am hallucinating at the moment and I am rapidly coming to the conclusion that it’s best not to think about things like that. The problem is, this reaction has a whole garbage truck load of buddies along for the ride, like anxiety, and puzzlement, and perplexity, the last because Mandy saw the name, too. She saw it and still she will not acknowledge that there is some grounding in truth for what I have been saying. I cannot explain that. I mean, she’s scared and she’s pissed off big time with yours truly, but she saw that name. So why didn’t she at least acknowledge it?

I suddenly appreciate that I really do have no friends.

Testament:

I had to let the chef fuck me to get hold of the chance to get in here. It was’nt pleasant, but at least I’m here. This is the only place that I can get to that does’nt have any cameras. For all I know there are microphones everywhere too but I shouldn’t think there are any in here.

Things have gone really apeshit and I do’nt really know whats going on but I do know everyones gone mad. Charles seemed so nice at the start but now hes become completely obsessed with all sorts of imagined wrongs done to him. The others are also varyingly mad as well, but hes the dangerous one. He has murder in his eyes.

Hes subtle though. Hes as good as gold when he talks to Professor Lyle or the others but hes made it plain to me that he thinks Im the one who is somehow the key. He has’nt said what, and he probably would’nt make much sense if he did but it does’nt matter does it?

Im writing this now because I do’nt trust Lyle or Moffat or even Joanne although she seems nice enough. Jimmy did some poking around on the internet before he came and he says their all shareholders or something. If Resolimab does what it says on the tin then their all going to hit pay dirt. The last thing they need is that it gets out that it turns people into killers. I do’nt know how to get out though without telling them. I ca’nt trust

Shit.

Someones opened the door

An Auspicious Day:

A big day today. After the usual round of physical and mental tests, and the daily dose of the wonder drug, we are each to have our first on-treatment scan. In honour of this, Professor Lyle himself is present to do the prodding and probing. I ask, “Will you tell us the results of the scan?”

“Of course. He appears to think the question slightly bizarre.”

He signals to William Moffat, who smiles at me in that ersatz way that medical people have when they are leading you towards some noxious test or other. Dad used to say that this smile served several purposes – it means they don’t have to make asinine small talk, it fools the victim into thinking that it won’t be too bad after all, and it hides the contempt they feel for everyone who is non-medical. Accordingly we leave the medical suite in silence and descend to the scanner in the basement. There, and with the minimum of fuss or discussion because we have done this only a few days previously, I am put into the scanner; and, by ‘put’, I mean inserted. Straps across my ankles, abdomen and chest hold me down, while my head is held by a device that clamps it and that ensures no movement will spoil the scans. Then, because this scanning business is a noisy and frightening thing, William puts headphones on me through which I hear slightly tinny, undistinguished music; in his little booth, William can interject and let me know what is going on; I can only communicate with him via an emergency button on a remote that he gives to me and that I now clutch in my right hand as the tray slides into the maw of the machine and I battle a feeling of claustrophobia. My head and shoulders are now in a shaded white tunnel about two feet in diameter, its upper curve only inches from my eyes; I can see the rest of the world only from the very lowest part of my vision, and then only a little of it; a tiny slither that is dimly lit anyway.

I know what will happen now. There will be a pause that seems to go on forever, and then William will tell me that the first phase of the scan is starting and that it will last for blah-blah minutes; I know this because, since that night way back at my launch party, I’ve had a few of these things. So I wait.

And I wait.

And I wait.

And...

“Sorry to keep you.” The voice, even if it is the slightly nasal, immature one that is William’s, is welcome I must admit. I say nothing, because there is nothing to say. Another long pause, before he continues. “I’ve disabled the panic button.” The same conversational tone; this is, after all, William Moffat, MD (or whatever fucking qualifications he’s got – ones that he’s probably got printed on his bog paper) speaking. There is something disquieting about this. He ought to be about as menacing as Minnie Mouse straight after pelvic surgery yet he’s quite put the wind up me. So, fair play, he does a good job, all in all.

I suddenly have what, being an author, I know to be qualms. Simultaneously, I have something to say but there is no one to hear it, not even me because the headphones block it out. I suspect that William doesn’t have much interest in my pontifications, anyway.

“We bought this machine from Queen’s Square.” He pauses as if this should mean something to me; when it sinks in that it may not, he continues, “The National Hospital for Nervous Diseases.”

At this point I would like to be insouciant, like James Bond, but I’m not. I’m too terrified to speak coherently. Not that anyone knows or cares.

“It was originally intended for work on pituitary gland tumours.”

And?

“You probably don’t know where the pituitary is.” My old man had a lot to say on a lot of subjects, but the location of this particular object was not amongst anything he ever told me; not to worry, William is keen to set me straight. “It lies at the base of the brain, a bit behind the bridge of the nose; it’s small, too, no bigger than a pea. It requires precision surgery to reach it.”

There is a noise. It’s not a loud noise, but then I’ve got the headphones on. Whatever, it’s a fucking scary noise.

From a small hole directly above my head, a dull silver needle descends towards me with mechanical implacability. It comes slowly, but it keeps coming. “William?” I call. The needle continues. “William?” I repeat, more loudly. I know that he can’t hear me, but the needle is getting fucking close. It is coming directly at my right eye, right in the centre of it, I believe. It is hollow and wickedly sharp. My head is clamped tight and there is no play, no matter how hard I struggle. So, because I can do nothing else, I continue to shout, “William!”

But still it comes, while William says nothing.

“WILLIAM!” I scream. It is about to puncture my eye, I can already feel the agony, see my vision turn to incarnadine torture... I press my head back into the clamp until I fear that I might fracture my skull.

It stops, just above the surface of my eye, so close that when I blink – and I am blinking a lot – my lashes brush it. My neck is screaming with muscular pain and there are tears running down my temples. William speaks at last into my ears. “Actually, the needle’s going to go lateral to the pituitary, but I’m not particular interested in doing pituitary surgery today.” His voice is calm, exactly the same as it always is. “I might, though, consider brushing up on my eye surgery...”

He lets that one hang for a moment before continuing; this time, though, his voice has changed and done so very much. It is in a low, but deeply angry tone. “Joanne doesn’t want your attentions, Sebastian. Do you understand?”

Oh, I understand all right but I reckon it’s not in my best interests to argue about who wants who, and which of us is the gooseberry. Trouble is, I can’t exactly signal my agreement with what he says, either. Still, for the time being at least, it seems I don’t have to, because it transpires young William’s prepared a speech, it transpires. “Jumped up little shits like you aren’t her cup of tea, you see. She has enough to do without fighting you off. Joanne and I love each other and your behaviour is stressing her very much.”

It is an odd speech, almost as though he is reading from a list of notes; it is disjointed, not flowing at all, so that as someone who has managed to write and get published a book, it jars on my ear, but that is not uppermost in my mind, not when the noise of the needle starts up again.

“WILLIAM! PLEASE! FOR GOD’S SAKE, PLEASE!”

The needle moves barely a fraction, but it is now so close, it doesn’t need to; now it is so close, I cannot see it; my neck muscles scream and I realise that I dare not now even speak, for even that movement might jab my eye into its point. His voice insinuates its way again into my ears, and it has changed again; now it is almost as if he’s deeply, deeply puzzled. “You will be a good chap, won’t you, Sebastian? I am a doctor, after all. I don’t enjoy hurting people... But you know how it is – you have to be cruel to be kind...” He is slowing in his speech, as if his thoughts are taking him somewhere away from me. “And I am being kind, you know...”

The rest, for the moment, is silence. I am left dangling, pinned by this man’s jealousy, pinned and wriggling in my mind, scared into catatonia in my body. The quiet stretches as I wonder what will happen again, trying to suppress the dread that the noise will start up again...

The noise starts up again and despite the danger I cannot stop myself from opening my mouth to cry out, but the pain doesn’t come, and the needle gains definition as it tracks slowly, steadily back, further and further away from eye, until it eventually withdraws into the metallic arc above me.

More silence.

“The first scan will take approximately seven minutes. As you know, it can be a bit noisy, but I’ve lined up some Bach for you, Seb.”

William’s voice tries to layer on assurance that I will not be bothered by the experience to come.

Good News For Me:

As he comes into my room (after a peremptory and totally ornamental knock on the door), there is something about Professor Lyle’s demeanour; even in the strange cosmos which now envelopes me, I find it disquieting. His face twitches and his shoulders, if not actually shaking, are certainly quivering in a manner I’ve not seen before. Only when he speaks do I comprehend what is the matter with him.

He is happy.

It is an hour later. After forty-five or so minutes in the scanner, William releases me. Neither of us mentions what occurred and, save perhaps for a near-indefinable air of increased satisfaction about his attitude, there is no obvious sign that anything untoward, anything that might be a teeny-weeny at odds with the Hippocratic oath, has happened. Yet, perhaps it didn’t. Perhaps it was all in my mind. I could hardly ask him if he remembers threatening to make a shish-kebab of my right eyeball just before he got down to business. I toddled off to my room and lay on the bed, thinking; after all, I had a lot to think about.

It seems that I have lost a lover and gained an enemy, and not just any enemy. This one can hurt me more or less at will and all my protests will be as the incoherent paranoid ravings of a man beset by the daemons of a brain tumour and the imps of an experimental treatment; no one will believe me – most certainly not Mandy who now patently believes me to be verging on total insanity, if not trespassing deeply into its territory.

Why, though? Why does Mandy not acknowledge what she saw in that notebook? There it was, Annette Morley’s name writ, if not large, then certainly clearly. Surely it is undeniable evidence that there is some basis for truth in my assertions? Is there some agenda there that I do not yet know? Is she all that she seems, therefore? Or am I, in losing the ability to judge what is real and what is not, becoming submerged, drowned by paranoia?

What do I do about the notebook, the one that is at present secreted in my pocket, impossible to forget as if I have a hand grenade snuggling up to me testicles? It is evidence that something strange, perhaps even criminal, occurred during the first study. It may even be that she was murdered, although I cannot say this with certainty. Lyle and his team know about it, yet refuse to talk about it. Perhaps I should opt out of the study in order to publicise what seems to have happened here...

“I’ve got the results of your scans,” says the Professor.

“And?” I don’t know how to pitch this question; whether to sound eager, insouciant, world-weary or anxious. It comes out almost deadpan, as if I’m drugged.

He hesitates, is if he’s on some pusillanimous TV talent show over-pausing for dramatic effect. “The measurements indicate that there has been a two millimetre reduction in tumour diameter.”

As far as I can see, as an announcement it falls fairly short of the dramatic impact of say, the declaration of war on Germany made by Neville Chamberlain. “Two millimetres?” I say, and I own that I fail to keep the disappointment well away from my voice.

Unperturbed, he explains, “Simple arithmetic calculation equates this to a fifteen percent reduction in tumour volume.”

There is a moment in which I don’t react but that is because, in this moment, I am still registering what he has just said. When it finally penetrates, when the words blossom in my brain into blooms of understanding, my heart begins to skitter erratically, as if twitched by unseen strings. “Fifteen percent?” I repeat, stupidly. It sounds a lot. Fuck, it is a lot, surely. Now you’re talking, Monsieur Le Professeur.

He smiles and it is a smile of false modesty; he is a magician who has pulled off a trick to stun the audience; I don’t give him a standing ovation, but I think he finds my reaction gratifying. “Sounds a bit better when you put it that, doesn’t it?”

“That’s good...yes?” I ask, just to make sure.

He nods gravely. “Very good indeed, considering you have been on treatment for so short a time.”

“Fuck.” I hear wonder in the profanity; if Jesus were to appear in modern day Blighty, it would be greeted by the witnesses in much the same way, I think.

He strives in a manful, academic and refined manner to avoid my use of labiodental fricatives. “Worth continuing, I think, Mr. Shockley.” When I nod enthusiastically, his smile is broad; is it also, I wonder in a vague and fleeting way, also relieved?

When he is gone, I am left in a state of wonder-filled excitement and relief. It is only after twenty minutes or so that I think of the notebook of Annette Morely and realise that there is no way on earth that I could now abandon the study, no matter what happened to her.

Good News For All:

The atmosphere is odd, this evening. Everyone is, to a greater or less degree, elated and relieved for, it transpires after discussion (much as schoolchildren gossip to each other about exam results in an excited and thankful way), all of us have been told that our tumours have responded to Resolimab; Marcus is the winner with a twenty-two percent reduction in tumour volume, while Alice has to be content with only a six percent fall. When she learns this, I can see that she is a tad disappointed and has to put a brave face on her relative failure; at one point I espy Mandy talking earnestly to her in the corner of the dining room and their body language suggests Mandy is laying on whole dollops of reassurance. The chef has cooked Coronation Chicken and we will shortly eat it at a formal dinner with the Professorial duo, William Moffat (as benign and seemingly ineffectual as ever) and Joanne Thompson; neither of these latter two so much as looks at me as we converge in the library, and I wonder what this means. Because this is a special occasion, we are allowed sparkling wine, although it is low in alcohol and subsequently low in festive spirit. David has been dragged from what we now refer to as the television room where he has been watching yet another effects-overlaiden blockbuster, but even he looks quite chirpy, despite being traumatically amputated from his audiovisual umbilical cord. Marcus takes me to one side.

“Pleased?”

Why shouldn’t I be? “Yes.”

He nods and smiles. “So am I.”

We are sitting opposite each other at the hardwood table by the window; it is scratched but elegantly so, in the way that only antique furniture manages to possess. I am pleased that he is pleased, although I say nothing. He leans back in the chair. “Although one thing strikes me as odd, my friend...”

This causes within me an instant dive in my spirits, and one so precipitous that I feel almost winded, as if sudden turbulence has caused the world to drop a hundred feet in a second. We are in the zone where Marcus is referring to me as ‘My Friend’ and, in the past, this has always been associated with a set decorated by his paranoia.

As he has paused, I ask (and not a little trepidatiously), “What’s that?”

He looks as if he is reaching for the right words. “I have my worries that this is not what it seems,” he begins. “You also have your doubts, I think.”

I nod cautiously; the past week or so has taught me caution and taught it well. He asks, “Would you say that you’re less suspicious than me, my friend?”

“I suppose.”

“And how paranoid is Alice?”

Poor Alice. She just carries on as ever she did. She harbours no suspicions but is happily buffeted by the trade winds of fate, changing attitude and belief without any cerebration or celebration at all. “She’s not.”

“It is interesting, therefore, that my tumour has shrunk the most, yours the next, while poor Alice brings up the rear in the tumour reduction stakes.”

I grope for a minute for his reasoning. “Meaning?”

He sighs, as if I’m dense. “Alice will stay the course, even without the carrot of a significant response. If I were told that this fucking thing in my head was still practically the same size, I’d be out of here; I guess the same would be true for you.”

“Maybe.” I am cautious, because the thought of that notebook and its implications is in the back of my mind.

He is dismissive. “Of course you would. You’re like me, my friend. There’s no such as free lunch, let alone a free luxury holiday.”

I am trying to get my mind around what he is implying. “You think the results are rigged?”

“Don’t you?”

I consider this. “You think they’ve titrated our results according to how suspicious we are, and how likely we are to jump ship?”

“The most secure prison is the one that has no walls, remember?”

Never quite got that one, myself, but I wasn’t about to argue the point. “So...Has the stuff had any effect?” I ask.

He smiles so broadly that his bright, regular teeth peep through as he spreads his large hands wide. “Who knows?”

“But we could ask to see the scans.”

That, it turns out is worth a laugh, and a big, booming one that. He gets up, still laughing; it’s the way I tell ‘em. As he looks down at me, he asks, “Do you know what the inside of your head looks like, Seb? Would you be able to tell if they showed you a picture of the inside of someone else’s head?”

In the hall, where I find myself about ten minutes later, I come across Mandy. It is not an easy encounter; I should explain that, by ‘not easy’, I mean ‘fucking difficult’; such is the fluidity of the English language.

“Hi,” I say.

She raises her chin and twitches her lips but says nothing. Her eyes look at me for just a moment, but they do not see me; they see something else and they do not like it; actually, I don’t like it too much anymore, either. She walks away into the dining room but I am destined not to be alone. As if from nowhere, Alice is suddenly there. She asks, “Have you two fallen out?”

“It looks that way.” It hurts to admit it, too.

She nods sadly. “I thought so.”

I have nothing to say, so I say nothing. Neither does Alice, at least for a short while. Then she unexpectedly pronounces, “I’m not as stupid as you think I am.”

Taken unawares, I can only say, “I...”

“I learned a long time ago that I had a choice between striving for bliss, and striving for knowledge. You can’t do both, you know; it’s one or the other. The whole world’s forgotten that.”

I don’t know how to respond. She might be spouting nonsense, or she might a mouthpiece for the wisdom of the gods; I can’t tell. I have lost any ability to judge. I think I may have lost it some time ago. She pats me on the arm. “It’s not too late, Mr Shockley.”

“No?”

She is solemn. “No.” Then she sighs. “Shall we go into dinner?”

The Last Dinner:

The food is good; no matter what his dick might do, the chef’s hands can certainly make fucking good grub. Perhaps it is this combined with the minuscule intoxication induced by the sparkling wine that induces the air of frivolity, but I suspect this is due to generalised relief. We, the guinea pigs are relieved because apparently we are on the road to response, possibly even cure; yes, even though Marcus is sceptical and I have my doubts, we cannot avoid the subconscious desire to hope that this might be real. What is perhaps surprising – perhaps even faintly disturbing – is the air of happiness that the researchers around the table exude. Were I a cynic – like Marcus, for instance – I would suggest that this, too, is relief. But why should they be relieved?

There is a lull in the conversation, one of those moments that always comes, no matter how erudite the company, how much the wine has flowed, or how interesting the topic. An imp of the perverse takes command of me. Professor Lyle is sitting opposite me and it seems a not unnatural question to ask of him, “Does the name Annette Morley mean anything to you, Professor Lyle?”

He looks up at me from his crème caramel at once. “I’m sorry?”

I’ve got everyone’s attention very quickly, which is quite unlike the usual reaction to my dinner table conversation; unfortunately, most of it is hostile. “Annette Morley. Does that name have any significance for you?”

He says, “No, I don’t think so.”

I almost believe him. “What about the names ‘Jimmy’ and ‘Charles’?”

I think I see a flicker cross his face, although it is fleeting and there is much distraction. Mandy breathes, but breathes loudly, “For fuck’s sake.” Beside me, Marcus mutters, “Go on, my friend. You interest me greatly.”

Lyle shakes his head but it is William Moffat who speaks. His tone is an attempt, I think, at condescension but, to my ears at least, it sounds a trifle false. “We haven’t got the foggiest idea of what you’re talking about, Seb.”

Joanne Thompson’s head is down over food. She sits next to William but there is, I think, some distance between them, even if it is only a spiritual one. At William’s denial, David makes a face as he nods, as if to say, ‘Fair enough’; Alice is looking at me intently.

It’s my turn. “I think they were subjects on the first study. What’s more, I think that Charles killed Annette Morley, and you’re trying to cover it up.”

William laughs, a trumpeting sound. “’Cover it up’? How could we do that? Wouldn’t she be missed, or something?”

Lyle, it seems, is content to let his deputy do the talking. Unfortunately, I don’t have an answer to his question, only a certainty that I’m right. “Apparently not.”

William is quick. “What evidence do you have for this, Seb?”

Well...I don’t have any, do I? Nothing Inspector Plod and PC Pig are going to take an interest in, anyway. I mean, I’ve got a three-legged fox with blue eyes, odd people popping up now and again to have a chat, and scribbling in a notebook that seems to have been written in something of a two-and-eight. Even I can see that Criminal Prosecution Service won’t be kept late at work deciding whether or not there’s enough evidence to prosecute.

The wait for my reply descends into a fathomless silence. I was never any good in balloon debates at school. Professor Lyle speaks at last. “Perhaps, Mr. Shockley, you are a little tired and overwrought. You have all been under great stress, but I hope that your news today will bring you some relief. I think it would be appropriate to propose a toast to your victory.”

In a rush to smooth over the embarrassment that yours truly has brought down on the party, there is a general move to comply with this suggestion. We all stand – some more enthusiastically than others – and the toast is proffered and answered. There is a general clinking of glasses.

When we again sit, I cannot help but see Mandy staring malevolently at me.

The Discovery of Knowledge:

Fifteen minutes have passed and I am sitting alone on the bench by the front entrance of the Hall. The dinner is over and most of the subjects and researchers are in the library or television room; Mandy has gone, I know not where. Perhaps she is helping the chef wash up. I am just thinking. Of course, I realise, I have been doing too much thinking of late; there are circumstances, I see, in which thinking is not the best thing to do. It can confuse matters; it can lead to paralysis in the old mental processes although, as an honest citizen. I must own that there was never a huge amount of intracranial activity in the first place.

It is not a comfortable bench, but at least it is at a time and in a space that does not present me with either improbability or incredulity, that does not make me believe that the impossible is possible and that the world, in contrast to what I have always thought it, is a thing of inescapable uncertainty.

In the darkening of the day, moths batter the windows like thwarted lovers and something calls in the distance; for a moment I think that it might be from beyond the confines of this place, but then I realise that, in this universe at least, there is nothing beyond. Nothing at all. The world is finite but unlimited, expanding yet forever threatening to collapse in on me. I am in the world, and I am of the world, but I am only the smallest part of the smallest part of the world.

“Fuck,” I whisper, and it seems a good thing to say.

How long passes? I cannot say; nor do I want to. There is bliss to be had in oblivion, a concept that I’ve never before understood, nor even thought about.

I open my eyes suddenly, knowing that I will see the fox, but I don’t...

...Or maybe I do.

I see two bright blue eyes looking at me from the gloom; they could be, should be, the fox’s. I sit up straighter on the bench for in my lethargy I have slumped. In doing so, I stretch out my arm along the back of the bench, my little finger falling on the whitewashed ledge of the window behind. One of the eyes is extinguished momentarily and, for a second, this puzzles me, until I appreciate that the fox has winked. I sit up straighter, and move my hand, and the outside tip of my little finger encounters the edge of something, moving it slightly. I snatch a glance at it; it was in shade but now the smallest part of it is illumined by a crack of light from the house, angling through the gap in curtains.

It’s just a book. In fact it’s the book that Alice was reading; I now recall that she left it on that window ledge. Another Barbara Cartland, perhaps; or maybe an Aga saga. I look across to the bright blues, expecting to seem them gone, but they are still there, still apparently fixed on me. I look down to see that I have the book in my hands. It is a slim volume, and quite old. It’s binding is black leather, almost like a Bible, and quite unlike (at least I think) the usual kind of skin for bodice-rippers. But then, I see that it isn’t a bodice-ripper, nor Aga saga, nor cosy crime, nor any kind of fiction at all. It is a treatise.

It is a treatise entitled, Saint Francis of Assisi; A Textual, Contextual and Subtextual analysis of the Miracles.

And it is by George Symonds, DD

Stealth:

I do not know what time it is when I finally rise silently from the bed and, in near total darkness (for the moon is waning and soon to set), put on jeans and tee shirt. I make as little sound as possible, try not to disturb any of the furniture, although I only just miss the low table in front of the curtains, the one at which Professor Lyle and I sat at a different time, in a different existence. I take my time turning the handle to open the door, trying to muffle it with my body, assuming that there are not only cameras in my room but also microphones; certainly Joanne Thompson’s behaviour in the night would suggest this.

I walk slowly and gently along the carpeted corridor, out onto the spiralling staircase where for a moment I stop and look around, straining to hear any noises, discovering none. Then I walk gently up the stairs to the top landing, treading on the outer side of it in order to avoid floorboards creaking. To my left and right are two doors, both entered by a door that can only be opened via an electronic combination lock. The near one, to my right, is the one we were shown around on our guided tour; the farther one I have never examined closely and it is this one that interests me. ‘More laboratory space’ had been the glib answer; I had never really been able to digest it, and now I think it complete inedible.

It took me a long time to find Dr Symonds’ secret. His treatise seemed to me to be well written and, from the thicket of references, well researched; but its style was relentlessly dehydrated to the point of mummification. It was a cream cracker of a literary meal. The grammar and syntax were so pedantically perfect that they represented intellectual torture. The subject matter bore only minimal interest for me, too, yet I waded my way through it, as I sat in my room.

The irony is, that I needn’t have bothered. Dr Symonds’ message – for by now I was convinced that I was receiving an arcane message – was in the references. All the way through the book there had been annotations – presumably but not definitely done by the good doctor himself while he sat in the library. I poured over these with avidity but could uncover no hidden subtext in any of them; mostly they were unintelligible squiggles done in the blackest of inks, occasionally they were notes to himself – ‘must check reference’, ‘needs revision for next edition’, and the like. When I got to the references – all five hundred and sixty-seven of them – there was no immediate significance either. Right in the middle of them – starting at reference number two hundred and eighty-four – single digits had been underlined in the reference numbers. Eight, eight, one, three, nine.

I walk along to the door; above me the dome vaults into the skies, giving a quite awesome view of the night skies, stars partially veiled by high, cirrus cloud. Through a long narrow window in the door I see a corridor exactly like the one opposite, the one where the professor’s offices and the medical suite are. In the dim starlight that comes in from above me, the uncarpeted floor looks black enough to be void, as if it isn’t there, as if it descends straight to oblivion and treading there will be as washing in the waters of Lethe.

The keypad of the combination lock also is poorly lit, but I can still make out the individual buttons. I punch in the number, each key press making a soft click.

No reaction.

I try again therefore, and still nothing.

Shit!

I have convinced myself that this was the door behind which were the secrets; convinced also that they were great secrets. Clearly not, though. I turned and looked across the central space towards the other door, so exactly alike. Surely not that one? We had seen all there was to see behind that one. I look back to the lock I had just tried.

“What the fucking hell are you doing?”

I am so startled by the voice, I nearly shit myself. It is low and almost feral, filled with quite astonishing hostility. I look down over the banister rail; Mandy is standing below and opposite. She is quite naked, but that isn’t what bothers me.

Her eyes are vividly blue.

Confrontation:

“What are you doing?” Her repetition of the question is perfect; there is no change in tone, pitch or tempo. It might be a digital reproduction, electronically produced for my aural delectation. This faultlessness is chilling, because it isn’t human.

What can I say? It’s obvious that she has a good idea what I am doing and that she doesn’t like it; ‘doesn’t like it’ as in ‘is fucking boiling with rage about it’. Accordingly, I say nothing. It turns out this is not a successful placatory strategy; ‘not successful’ as in ‘uber antagonistic’. She emits a sound that is a remarkably good imitation of a snarl, turns, and begins to walk up the stairs in what I perceive to be an aggressive manner.

I turn back to the keypad. I don’t have much time before she reaches me and, although she might be naked and unarmed, there is something about her attitude that informs me I don’t want to tangle with her. I punch the numbers back in. Same effect. Mandy is approaching, climbing the stairs with robotic rhythm. I try a third time and, perhaps not surprisingly, for a third time nothing happens. Mandy is nearly on the landing and her ascent is completely, unnervingly noiseless. What the fuck am I doing wrong? For the first time I take a proper look at the keypad and see that it isn’t just nine numbers; there are also three keys with letters on – ‘C’, ‘X’ and ‘Y’. All very fine and dandio, but there were no letters underlined in the good doctor’s treatise; it was only numbers, I am sure...

...Or were there? Did I miss something?

She is on the landing, perhaps twelve yards from me, staring at me as she strides steadily towards me, eyes glowing blue, stark naked and about as sexy as a pink praying mantis. Have I been stupid? Is the secret behind the other door? Is it that there is no secret?

Eight yards.

It doesn't really matter now because I can’t do anything other than keep trying at this door. What could I be missing?

Six yards.

There was no letter underlined...unless it was further on in the references; I only skimmed briefly through them...

Five yards.

Shit!

‘C’, ‘X’ and ‘Y’ makes no sense. Why not ‘A’, ‘B’ and ‘C’, or ‘X’, ‘Y’ and ‘Z’...

Four yards.

...Because ‘C’ is different? Because perhaps it stands for ‘Clear’?

Three yards.

I punch ‘C’ and then the number sequence from Symonds’ book. The door clicks open, I push it then immediately whirl around to slam it shut; as I do so, she bangs on it. It isn’t just any bang; it booms and shakes the door and is accompanied by an inchoate, mindless scream, one that might be in the air, might be in my head.

A Place Apart:

The sensation that there is nothing beneath my feet persists and the contradiction between what I know to be the case and this impression is disorientating, for I feel as if I am floating over nothingness. I am leaning against the door, feeling the vibrations of each of Mandy’s blows against it, feeling the rhythm change so that it becomes regular, like the beating of a titan’s heart; as it does so, it becomes louder, too, filling the silent gloom in that corridor. From somewhere I hear her voice whisper in the space behind my eyes. She breathes in a way that is as intimate as a sex act, yet as cold as a rotted corpse, I’m going to kill you, Seb.

I push away off the door, looking around me. There is a window directly ahead of me, but the blind is pulled down, a face of blank indifference. The banging on the door has become a monstrous mechanical thing, completely devoid of humanity, sentience or even intent; it’s just a noise, as if some gigantic clock were counting out time and Mandy has become a part of the clockwork, merely a mindless part of the whole. Surely it has woken some or all of the others?

Three doors are space evenly on each side of the corridor, two of which are immediately to my right and left. In each there is a thin strip of window, although I can only see anything at all through those that are closest, and what I see suggests nothing odd; they are just two laboratories, kitted out with benches and shelves, all empty. I try the handle of the door on my left; it opens and I walk in, glancing around to ensure that my initial impression is correct. It is. I do the same with the room on my right, with the same result.

I walk – perhaps float – along the corridor to the next pair of doors, the resounding banging on the door continuing, now so monotonous and invariant that it has become the pulsing of a monster that stalks me. Immediately there is something different about these doors. I can see now that the narrow windows in the doors are obscured by blinds on the inside, so that the rooms cannot be seen. Expecting the doors to be locked, I try the handle of the door on my right, expecting it to be locked, but it isn’t. It opens, but not onto a laboratory, nor into an office, nor even into an empty room. I am looking into a dark space that stretches away to the far end of the corridor and to the outside walls of the house. There are bare floorboards and the walls have no plaster or any covering of any kind. It is empty, the windows blacked out by heavy dark blinds.; the whole effect is curiously unsettling, yet there is nothing obviously menacing here, although it is dark. It gives an impression that I have strayed backstage in an elaborate theatrical production.

I turn to look out of this room across the corridor to the door opposite. The booming beating thumping of the door fades into and out of my consciousness; it is now counting out the moments in my life as surely as does my heart, for it seems to be synchronised with my existence, as if I depend on its continuation for my life. This feeling intensifies briefly as I cross quickly to the other door to grasp the handle, then turn it. A similar dark, unadorned room confronts me, as if I am now in the other wing of what is an auditorium. Here, there is something extra. Here, there is, at the far end, a huge screen, perhaps ten yards by five. In front of it is a single wooden desk, much like the one I used to have at school, and behind it is a wooden chair; on the desk is a single opened laptop computer.

The large screen is blank but as I approach the table and chair through the gloom, I see that the computer screen is alive with tiny images, forming a regular mosaic. Each is no more than half an inch square, the screen resolution too low to make out detail, but I can see movement in each. I sit at the desk and move the cursor at random to one, then double click on it. At once the large screen comes alive.

The First in Epiphany:

I was wrong, as Annette Morley had been wrong. There are cameras in the wine cellar and what they have seen with their sightless eyes is now being played out for whoever wishes to watch. A woman is in the picture, crouched down in the far corner, scribbling in the notebook; she is gasping for breath; terrified sobbing, intersperse with sniffles and low, unintelligible muttering are the only sounds; although I cannot see her face because it is bowed, it is obviously Annette Morley.

Oh, my God...

I think I am to see Annette Morley’s death.

The sound of a door opening makes her look suddenly up and gasp, and I see her for the first time, confirming what I already know; she is the woman on the bench, the woman whose head was carried by the fox.

Am I going to see her decapitated?

I hear footsteps slowly descending the stair, exactly as I heard my own not so very long ago. Annette Morley stands up, backs away, although there is not far for her to go. Her face is distorted by terror. I do not like this; this isn’t a movie full of clever-clever effects and dubious acting, this is a proper snuff movie, the stuff of urban legend.

The sound of the footsteps changes; the floor of the wine cellar has been reached. There is a pause and then they begin again to tread their wary way; they get gradually but noticeably louder. And then there is a voice. “Annette?” It is a deep, male voice and it is filled with strain. I recognise the tone, for I have heard it before – not the actual voice, just the state of mind behind it; it is exactly as Marcus sounds.

Annette is hysterical; she bites her lip, crying and yet trying to make not a sound; she is trembling and I can see clearly the notebook curled tightly in her hand.

The footsteps continue. “Annette? Are you in here?”

Suddenly she darts forward and puts the notebook beside a bottle, just where I remember finding it. At once she is back against the wall. Now she is almost gibbering.

“I’d really like to talk to you.”

The footsteps are slow and without relent, each one slightly clearer than the last. My nerves scream at me in deafening silence as awful and profound as the cry of the dying. There is nothing I can do to stop this; it has already happened, yet it is happening now, before me; it will happen again; it will, in a sense, never stop happening. I am powerless before it. I cannot turn away from it, though; what does that say about me?

Into that so large, so encompassing picture there walks a man. From the perspective of the camera, his head is huge and his body funnels downwards. I think that he’s tall, because his grey-haired head is almost touching the camera lens, which seems to be high in the wine rack. I cannot see his face, but I know that this is Charles. He says, “I knew you were down here.”

“What do you want?” she hisses; her eyes seem to be bulging.

He moves forward slowly, arms stretched out; I cannot see his hands, cannot see what he is holding.

This isn’t right.

Right or not, here it is. The screen has no morality, nor the camera that caught this vignette; the computer is similarly in a state of grace. Yet I have no morality, not anymore, and I am in no state of grace; far from it. I am in the region of the damned. And without morality I am nothing, I know. Dad always taught me that. On screen, Annette Morley says, “Don’t come any closer, Charles.”

“Annette, we’re all worried about you.”

“No, you’re not. You’re planning to kill me. I heard Dr Moffat talking to Professor Lyle in the library. He said that something was going to have be done about me. You’ve come to kill me, because they told you to. You’re one of them.”

“That’s not true, Annette...”

I can see that he is moving slowly forward as he talks, trying to do so imperceptibly. She shouts, “DON’T MOVE ANY MORE!”

But he doesn’t comply. He is inexorable. What is that in his hand? I can’t see clearly...

Suddenly she lunges at him and I gasp for she seems to be running straight onto what is in his hand; she will impale herself, surely.

But she doesn’t.

He spasms as they come together in a sick parody of a lovers’ embrace and through his back comes the shiny wicked pinpoint eye of a knife, smeared red with his dying life. He screams, a thing that pierces the universe, rends anguish from the air as if a million ghosts have come to mourn. He collapses to his knees at once, blood dripping at his knees. She steps back, bloody splatters on her shirt front. Her face holds many thoughts: I can see that she is relieved to be safe, curious at his dying, perplexed at her own action, and anxious that perhaps this is not what she should have done. He falls to one side and I see at last the hilt of a long knife; probably a carving knife from the kitchen.

Quite suddenly, with inhuman unconcern, the screen goes black.

The Second in Epiphany:

It is a long time in that dark space before I can think, but what I have just seen remains elusive, as if quarantined; I know what my eyes have perceived, yet I am not allowed to consider it. It is too large, too momentous to allow me to gain perspective on it. It is a thing that I know exists and yet that is all I can know about it, at least for the time being. It is like the cosmos for, although I am part of it, it is beyond my comprehension, almost a godhead.

What now? I suddenly realise that the banging on the door has stopped; perhaps Mandy and the implacable clockwork forces that controlled her have run down. Without conscious thought, I move the cursor and double click at random.

At once the large screen is again alive.

Two people copulating in the darkness. The bedroom is similar to mine and to Mandy’s, but it is a different one, one I think I have never seen. Although only shades of grey shapes can be made out, she is clearly enjoying it, given the amount of moaning; under other circumstances, it might be comical, or arousing. Is it Mandy? Who is her lover tonight? The chef, perhaps. Yet how long has passed since she was thumping the door in metronomic fury? Could it really be her? Or is it another recording? I am sure that the badly lit back on top of her is not mine.

And then he comes, and there is a groan, and I hear in that groan the tones of William Moffat.

I hear, too, in those urgent, pathetically grateful whispers the husky voice of Joanne Thompson.

I seem to lose sentient thought for a moment, coming imperceptibly back into consciousness while the scene plays out before me. I am weeping, I find, although I cannot understand why I should be.

The Third in Epiphany:

Looking at the computer screen, I wonder if all of the tiles in this ever changing, curiously hypnotic mosaic bear some scene of significance for me, like some impossible correctional instrument, designed to show me where I have gone wrong, when I have gone wrong and far I have gone wrong. It is with something approaching dread yet something close to compulsion that I pick another at random to view in monstrous detail.

It is the meeting room. Professor Lyle is there, seated around a table with Appleton and, to my surprise, Michelson; when, and how, did he get there? There seems almost to be a secret entrance that allows them to come and go at will and unobserved. Lyle is talking.

“The psychometric testing and our general observations indicate that he is becoming dangerously unstable.”

Michelson turns to Appleton and is pitiless. “You assured us that the adjustments you made would not result in a repetition of events that occurred during the first study.”

Appleton, uncharacteristically subdued, responds defensively. “The science of protein conformational manipulation is in its infancy. The changes we made to the antibody structure were all we dared to make, given the fact that we know a small change in three-dimensional structure can result in huge changes both in efficacy and unwanted effects.”

“I believe the words you used were ‘the new iteration of the drug will have significantly increased action against stem cells and a greatly reduced tendency to induce psychotic tendencies’.” Michelson has read this from a sheet of paper. He looks up at Appleton with an open sneer.

“It does have increased action against stem cells. Look at those reductions in tumour volume, Alfred...”

Lyle intercedes. “The pattern of psychological damage in the case of Shockley mirrors almost exactly – perhaps surpasses - what happened to the Morley subject...and we know what happened then.”

Appleton is obdurate. “You have to admit that even the smallest of responses – that of the Wilson subject – is quite astonishing. The results are far better than before. In achieving that I have succeeded quite spectacularly. The drug will revolutionise the treatment of brain cancer; in time, it will revolutionise the treatment of all cancer. It’s potentially worth billions.”

Lyle seems incredulous. “Am I the only one here who remembers what Annette Morley did? We were lucky to be able to cover it up so effectively.”

Appleton’s indifference is a thing of deep cold. His bass voice with its American accent is emotionless. “The subjects were chosen precisely because of their lack of close kin or relationships, and because they would not be missed, should things go slightly awry. There is no need to panic.”

Michelson points out, “Except that mistakes were made, weren’t they?” He is looking at Lyle. “Shockley is something a popular celebrity.”

“When he applied, he wasn’t. He was a nothing.”

“You should have double-checked.” This helpful advice is from Appleton.

“Did you know who he was?”

Appleton shrugs before putting another deft strike. “And then there was the unfortunate recruitment of George Symonds.”

Lyle says quickly, “That was pure misfortune. How could I have known?”

Michelson hold up his hand, palm out. “Symonds is no longer a problem. As for Shockley, I feel we can finesse the situation, as long as we can control his psychological problems.”

Lyle shakes his head. “That is far from easy. He is close to complete paranoia.”

Michelson is obdurate. “We all stand to become multimillionaires if we hold our nerve; we stand to become criminals if we don’t.”

Lyle shakes his head; Appleton looks uncertain as he says, “Surely we can prevent a recurrence of the worst-case scenario. Shockley has already had a significant response. We could give him placebo from now on; as long as we keep continual surveillance on him, we should be safe. The psychological effects should wear off with time.”

“Something that we signally failed to do in the case of Annette Morley.” This from Lyle.

Michelson seems barely able to contain his impatience with such spinelessness. “We’ve tightened procedures this time.”

“Have we?” asks Lyle. Of Appleton, he enquires, “Who’s keeping an eye on the subjects at the moment?”

“Moffat.”

Lyle snorts. “I worry about that young man. He is dangerously overconfident. He makes mistakes; he is slap-dash.” His voice as he enunciates the last word is precise and contemptuous; Moffat has been condemned.

Michelson points out unforgivingly, “It’s your responsibility to make sure that he takes his duties seriously, Lyle.” At which Appleton nods, a look of quiet triumph on his face.

The screen goes blank again and I am suddenly aware of someone behind me.

Reunion:

“Dad.” This is not a question; it is a greeting and I whisper it with a degree of affection that I think I cannot control.

“Seb.” A hand is placed upon my shoulder.

I know not to turn my head; if I do, I will spoil things and he will go.

I look at the blank screen on the wall, and then at the laptop with its ever-changing wall of teeny-weeny tiles that are in fact views from cameras both past and present and...

I ask impulsively, “Why did you leave me?”

The hand tightens, but only slightly. The voice – it is indubitably my father’s voice – explains, “I didn’t know what I was doing.” The tone is lost, as bleak Lear’s blasted heath. “I wasn’t thinking of you.”

“I needed you, Dad.”

There is a long pause in which I have only those randomly changing, meaningless little tiles to look at, before I hear a sigh, “I know.”

Eyes fixed on that small screen on the table, head down, I say, “You shouldn’t have done that.”

“I’m sorry, Seb.” There are tears in the voice now.

“I didn’t know what to do without you.”

“I know.”

The Last in Epiphany:

The large screen is once more suddenly alive, although I have not touched the keyboard. The picture on the large screen is of this room, seen from directly behind me, but the figure seated at the wooden desk is not me. It is the chef. He appears to be staring fixedly at the images being portrayed in front of him. It is only after a few seconds that I realise he is smoking and that I see a glass of red wine his right. On the screen is a shot of the central hall in the Hall, taken from overhead, presumably from the dome; it is vertiginous. As I watch the chef watching, Alice appears from the corridor on which our bedrooms are located. She is moving slowly, but there is nothing wrong odd in that. She turns to descend the stairs, but at the top step she suddenly freezes; this paralysis probably only lasts a few moments, for it becomes apparent that she is beginning to shake, a chorea that, with every passing instant becomes more erratic and violent. She is having another fit, the sequence of events exactly as before. I know what is going to happen; there is an inevitability to it all, one that is nauseating and yet head spinning. The chef is transfixed. He reaches out to the wine glass without moving his head from the screen.

Alice loses her footing and begins a slow, bone-cracking fall around the descending stairs; they are lushly carpeted but that is of no consequence to the invisible yet universal forces that pull her downwards and onward.

The chef knows over the glass of wine and it falls to the floor, breaking explosively and splashing a purplish stain on the bare wood; I look to the floor in front of me, but it is mute about all things. Despite this, the chef is unperturbed, keep his head perfectly still.

Alice is still falling and still jerking, small mewling noises coming from a mouth that cannot be seen until, at last, she reaches the bottom, and it is reveal as slack and moist. Even now she is not permitted to rest there in broken pain; still she dances wildly and randomly, throwing her limbs just as she did in the dining room, except that now there is fractured freedom in the movements as the breaks in her bones act as joints and her arms and legs seem to be superhumanly, agonisingly supple.

Then the dance abates and she is allowed some peace – some bliss, perhaps – albeit with the price of death.

On the screen, the screen goes black. The chef stands up suddenly, pushing the chair back and over to the floor. He turns and begins to walk away purposefully and with confidence.

This despite the fact that he has no eyes in his flesh-tagged bony sockets.

The screen – my screen, the one on which I have seen a blind man watch intently another screen (the same screen) as it shows an old lady fall to a death – also goes black. Again I do not have to turn to know that Dad has gone.

But then, he left me many years before.

Release:

The sun has just risen as I walk out of The Hall for the last time. Mandy had gone when I opened the door onto the landing, leaving no trace that she had ever been there, and perhaps she hadn’t. I recognise now the mutability of perception, the liquidity of memory. Nor was there anyone to question or impede me when I walked down the staircase, across the hall and out into that bright, fresh morning. I walk around the house, finding the back lane that leads to the pub; it won’t be open yet, but I can wait. I reach behind the small of my back, grasp the plastic tube and the dressing that adheres to my skin; with a sharp tug that elicits no pain I am free of it. The feeling of relief washes me away, but I am not bothered. I find that I just want to escape from things.

As I trudge along the lane towards the fence, I see the fox just under the tree to my left. I know that it is the same fox, although this time the eyes are brown and I think that it has four legs. Seeing it, I am content. Something seems healed within me.

I hear a voice calling my name excitedly and, suddenly, far ahead by the gate, I see Janey standing behind the fence. A jolt of joy runs through my body, so fast that my mind has no time to form coherent thought. “Janey?” I shout; it sounds odd in my ears.

Emotion animates – energizes – me. My only thoughts are that I want her so much. I begin to run so that, after so long, I can be with her again, be forgiven, be wanted.

I play my part in the drama because, as my Dad once said, that’s all we ever do.