Dr. Franklin's Island

by Ann Halam

  “I don’t think so, Miranda. I think he used to have a conscience, but he strangled it.”

  “He cares about the animals,” said Miranda. “I know he hates us, because we make him feel so guilty. But I was watching his face when we were walking around the zoo. He’s sorry for them. And he’s afraid.”

  “Yes, I noticed that. Well, of course he’s afraid! His boss is going to . . . going to make him murder two teenagers, basically.” I swallowed hard. I still couldn’t possibly believe those two teenagers were us.

  “Mm. I wonder what Dr. Franklin has got on him, to keep him here. Maybe he’s been in trouble with the law, maybe he’s been thrown out of respectable science too, and this is the only job he could get. But he must be lonely. He must be starved for friendship. We’ll have to try and get him to talk, make personal contact.”

  It’s what you’re supposed to do if you get kidnapped, or if you get trapped by an evil psychopath. You’re supposed to talk to the attacker, humor him, befriend him, make him realize that you’re human so that he can’t do what he planned. That’s the kind of strange thing, like how to be a castaway, that you learn from films, from newspapers, documentaries, from the TV news. . . . But never in a million years do you think it will happen to you. A faint hope rose in me. Maybe, maybe it could be done. Miranda had saved me so often. Maybe she could even save us now. . . .

  I thought about those animals. The capybara with the human lips, the parrots plucking at the growths on their breasts, the bats with tiny, dangling human legs. Suddenly I remembered something.

  “Miranda, I saw one! I saw one of those piglets with hands!”

  “What do you mean? We both saw them—”

  “No! Ages ago, before Arnie disappeared. That day we went foraging . . .”

  I told her what I’d seen in the northern woods, by the pool in that dark clearing.

  “Why didn’t you tell me about it?”

  “Because I thought I was seeing things. And then Arnie . . .” My eyes filled with tears. Miranda was being tough and calm as ever, but I was losing my grip. “The truth is I didn’t want you to know,” I wailed. “I didn’t want you to know I was having hallucinations. I was always the weak link, wasn’t I? You and Arnie, you were both okay. He was big and strong, and you . . . you can do anything. But I was useless, I knew I was. Remember the snake in the shelter? I nearly got you killed that time. . . .”

  I was breaking down, beginning to sob. I couldn’t help myself.

  “Oh, come on. The snake probably wasn’t even poisonous. I’m stupid about snakes, that’s all.” She slipped her arm through the bars, took my hand and squeezed it. “You were not useless! Who invented the shadow clock?”

  “I didn’t think of that myself. I remembered it out of a book.”

  “You remembered lots of brilliant things. What about the ant-proof food storage?”

  “The ants got into it.”

  “Yeah, but only at the very end. And you invented the firebox.”

  “I didn’t. I just thought of making one. You made it. If I’d told you about that piglet, we’d have known something weird was going on. We’d have had warning.”

  Miranda shook her head. “Nah. I’d never have believed you. How could anyone believe something like that? What could we have done, anyway? We were trapped. They’d have come to fetch us in the end, if we hadn’t found the passage.”

  Silence fell. It seemed as if we’d run out of things to say.

  “Hey,” said Miranda at last. “If your piglet escaped, maybe we can escape too—”

  “We’ll have to hurry,” I said. “We’re going to be operated on in the morning.”

  The room had grown dim. Outside, the brilliant sunlight was fading into the swift tropical dusk. Soon it would be night. I wished I knew if it was Day Forty or Day Forty-one. This seemed to matter a lot. If this was my last day on earth, I would have liked to be able to think I’d still been free when it began. A free castaway, a prisoner in paradise. But I had no way of knowing.

  Operated on in the morning.

  She kept holding my hand, and I kept holding hers, but each of us was alone, a million miles apart. I saw my information pack lying on the floor. I let go of Miranda’s hand, grabbed it, and threw it away from me so it whammed against the bars. As if I cared what kind of a monster I was doomed to become. Yes, that was it. Better face up to the truth. There was no escape. Either we were going to be tortured to death, or we were going to be turned into monsters. Depending on whether Dr. Franklin was a crazy genius, or plain crazy. I got up and flung myself on the bed. Miranda lay down too.

  We didn’t cry, we didn’t talk anymore. We just lay there.

  chapter six

  Someone was shining a bright light into my eyes. My brain dissolved into a puddle of terror. I thought this was it, Dr. Franklin had come to take me. Then Dr. Skinner turned the penlight beam the other way, shining it on his own face. “Come on,” he snapped, in an angry undertone. “Get up, let’s go.”

  When he’d hustled me out of bed, he grabbed my pillow and shoved it down under the sheet. It was dark in the ward, but I could see that Miranda was out of bed too. When she saw what he was doing she did the same thing with her pillow. He let me out and then her, and shut the cage doors behind us. The three of us slipped out into the corridor, and he locked the door of the ward too. We walked along to a recessed panel in the wall, which he opened. He pressed a couple of buttons. I thought, He’s turning the security system back on . . . and it was only then that my brain caught up, and my heart leaped.

  He was helping us to escape! We were going to escape!

  “Come on,” he whispered. “Don’t mess around. Keep up.”

  Miranda and I were barefoot; Dr. Skinner seemed to be used to walking silently. We followed him swiftly along dark corridors, then through some automatic double doors into a big dark hall. There were long tables, chairs. Light gleamed faintly on glass-fronted counters. It seemed to be a canteen, or a cafeteria. He pointed to us to sit down at one of the tables, whispered, “Not a word from either of you,” and went off. We stared at each other, two shadowy faces, the dark making my eyesight as good as Miranda’s. Our hearts were beating hard in hope and fear.

  Dr. Skinner came back, with his arms full. “Not a word,” he repeated. “Listen.” He still sounded as if he hated us. “I’m going to let you out of the compound, you’re going to make your way to the east shore. There’s a motor launch. There’ll be no one in it, it will be moored against a jetty. You get into that launch and hide yourselves below, in the cabin. You will be taken to the coast, the mainland. Then you’ll be on your own. You’ll have to walk. Head north. You’ll find a place called Menozes, where you can find someone who will understand English. Say you were shipwrecked on an empty atoll, there are a few around here. Say you built a raft, say you floated for days. Say you lost everything and you have no idea where you were stranded. Say what you like, but I’m saving you, so don’t you tell any secrets about what happened to you here, don’t say anything about what he planned to do. Is that agreed?”

  We nodded, frantically, and tried to whisper our thanks.

  “Don’t thank me. I don’t even think you’ll get away. The people at Menozes will send for Dr. Franklin when two castaways turn up, he’s a big man around here, the local jefe, you know what that means? They’ll send for him, and you’ll be back.” He set his teeth and grimaced, as if he was in pain. “He wants to study the psychological effects. Do you understand me? I’m warning you, he doesn’t only want to change you, he wants to play games with you as well. Do you understandme? I don’t know why but I think . . . in a way . . . that’s what I really can’t endure.”

  We stared at him blankly. We didn’t have a clue about these “games.” We were worried about being killed or changed into monsters.

  “Here, take these. Food and water. Come on.”

  He shoved a backpack at each of us. We struggled to put them on as we followed him, walking fast and
silently again through the dark hall, through a room with gleams of metal and smells of food that must have been the kitchen, and out into the night.

  We crossed a pitch dark yard that smelled of rubbish bins and petrol, and came to a door in a wall, where Dr. Skinner stopped and tapped buttons on another keypad. Through that door, and we were in Dr. Franklin’s zoo. I could smell the caged animals, I could hear rustlings and faint chittering sounds. As we passed the aviary, a parrot gave a sleepy squawk, and then the jungle cat started crying. Beside me, Dr. Skinner started and drew his breath sharply.

  “It does that,” he muttered. “It does that all the time. We don’t know why. We gave the pair of cats an infusion that did something to their brains. We don’t know what we did, and it can’t tell us. Its mate died, it howls. Sometimes it goes on all night and all day. I wish I could kill it, but he’d find out, and he never wants them killed. Never, he always wants to keep his pets alive. It’s unbearable. It would drive a sane man mad. Can’t hurt me, though. I hate the racket, that’s all.”

  He wasn’t talking to us. He was talking to himself.

  We crossed the zoo, and left by another door. Then we were outside all the buildings. I could see the stars overhead, each of them given a glowing halo by my miserable eyesight. I was glad to see them again. Dr. Skinner pressed on. Every few seconds he’d switch on his penlight, and flash the white beam around us.

  Nothing stirred.

  “Quickly,” he muttered. “I have to get you through the perimeter fence, and then I have to get back to the buildings and switch the fence back on. He makes his rounds at night. My boss doesn’t need sleep. At midnight he takes a break from work, comes out and walks around the compound, checking every building, every door, it’s a habit with him.”

  His pace had speeded up, we were half running to keep close to him. I could feel dry stony earth and stalks of rough grass under my hard, bare feet.

  “There’s a gate in the fence, and a footpath leading through the mountainside. It’s a shortcut to the launch mooring; the kitchen staff use it. When you get to the boat, hide. Don’t try to speak to the man who’ll be taking it to the mainland, don’t show yourselves. Our technicians know more than the orderlies, about what goes on, but don’t push it. He’ll help you but he doesn’t want any trouble with the boss.”

  I was thinking about movies I’d seen of people escaping from prisoner-of-war camps. I was praying the floodlights wouldn’t come on, praying there’d be no sirens, no voices yelling at us to stop. Now we’d reached the fence. There was a small gate set in it. There was an ordinary padlock, no buttons to tap. We waited as he fumbled with the key. He was still muttering under his breath, almost sobbing.

  It howls, I heard, and then, Oh God, howls, and it’s only an animal—

  Miranda and I looked at each other. “I think he’s drunk,” whispered Miranda. “I smelled his breath. Whisky. Dr. Skinner,” she said aloud, “you’d better come with us. Think about it. He’s bound to know that you helped us escape. You have to take this chance.”

  I knew she wasn’t thinking of Skinner’s well-being. He had to come with us. If he stayed behind, hysterical and jabbering like this, he’d be telling Dr. Franklin all about our escape, ten minutes after we’d gone. Now he’d dropped the key. He got down and crawled on his hands and knees, scrabbling for it in the grass.

  “You’d howl,” he was mumbling. “I know you would. You’d howl too, you girls, and I have no conscience, but I can’t stand that noise—”

  He stood up again, with the key. The penlight beam reflected in his glasses, giving him two mad white pennies for eyes.

  “But there’ll be others,” said Miranda quickly. “He’ll get hold of some other teenagers, and they’ll howl too. You said it’s bound to happen. Come with us. You’ve been brave so far, you planned everything really well. Now be braver still. Leave him.”

  “I can’t leave. You don’t know him. He’ll know I let you go, but he’ll forgive me. He needs me. It’s not easy to find a scientist of my caliber who is . . . who is . . .”

  “So hard up for a job that he would torture children,” Miranda finished for him.

  Dr. Skinner flinched, but he was beyond being insulted. “This is my great work,” he whimpered, swaying on his feet. “You don’t understand. This is the work. It must go on! Except that you’ll howl, you see. I can’t stand the idea of lying awake at night, listening—” At last he’d managed to unlock the padlock. He held the gate open. “Go on, go. Go!”

  We couldn’t risk arguing with him any longer. Miranda had grabbed my hand, we were in the act of darting through the gate, leaving Dr. Franklin’s hateful compound—

  When the floodlights came on.

  It wasn’t actual floodlights, it was the headlamps of two big Jeeps, parked about a hundred meters away from us. They’d been invisible in the darkness. Dr. Franklin was standing beside the nearer of the two, with a party of the uniformed orderlies. Some of them were holding big flashlights. Some of them had guns in their hands. Dr. Franklin shone his light over our faces, and then fixed the beam on Dr. Skinner.

  “Well, Charles,” he said, in that calm, smooth, cheerful voice, “I had a feeling you were going to try something like this. Inevitable, I suppose. Luckily forewarned is forearmed. . . .”

  The light had paralyzed us, but the sound of that voice spurred us into desperate action. We ran together through the open gate, into the mouth of a narrow footpath between high banks. Fronds of greenery leaped out of the dark and smacked our faces; the men came pounding after us. We pelted down the hillside, barefoot on sharp stones, looking wildly for some way to leave the path . . . straight into the arms of more of Dr. Franklin’s men.

  He was like that, Dr. Franklin. He liked playing games. Maybe he’d wanted to catch Dr. Skinner in the act of helping us, to give him a scare. Maybe he’d forced Skinner to pretend to be helping us, so he could test our “resilience”; or soften us up so we’d give them no trouble in the morning. It didn’t matter much, either way. We’d never had a chance. He’d known exactly what Dr. Skinner would do. He’d known exactly what was going on. We were brought back. Miranda kept pleading with the big men, begging them in English and French to have pity, to think of their own children, to let us go.

  It had no effect at all.

  Back into the brilliant mesh of white beams, the Jeep headlamps and the flashlights. One of the orderlies locked the gate behind us. Dr. Franklin took out a mobile phone, pressed buttons on the keypad, listened for a moment and said something in Spanish. Then he said to us in English, in a kindly tone, “The power is restored to the fence, young ladies. Remember this, if you try to escape again. It would be irresponsible of me not to protect my experiments, so that fence is electrified. Do not ignore this warning!”

  I felt as if I was standing on a stage, one of my worst nightmares. Two big men held my arms. The other uniformed men were staring at me without pity from behind the lights. Dr. Skinner was huddled up beside Dr. Franklin. He’d taken off his glasses and he was wiping them, carefully, over and over. Dr. Franklin was smiling. He wasn’t angry with us for trying to escape. We couldn’t make him angry. We were experimental animals.

  I thought I could hear the jungle cat howling, though we were far away from the zoo. I could see those blurred images on the screen in Dr. Franklin’s office; I could see the drawings and computer images in the information folder. Those were pictures of my body. Those hideous changes would be happening to me. I knew I was helpless in the grip of someone who was truly evil. I had to scream or my chest would burst open. I think Miranda was trying to calm me, but it was as if she wasn’t there. I started to fight. I know I bit a man’s arm until I tasted warm salty blood in my mouth; I know I got free.

  Dr. Franklin had said, “The power is restored.”

  The words flashed on me like a promise, the only possible promise of escape. I ran and leaped for the towering wire mesh, praying the voltage would be enough to kill me.

 
But the fence didn’t fry me. Dr. Franklin had been lying. I climbed until I lost my grip. As I fell, I heard Dr. Franklin saying coolly, “Well, now we can switch the power back on. That was very interesting! I see we’ll have to be careful how we deal with you, Semirah.” The orderlies carried me back to the prison ward, with me screaming and punching and biting and kicking at them all the way.

  They knocked me out again. When I came back to consciousness I was in the prison ward, in bed. I’d been washed. I felt clean, and I knew I wasn’t wearing my tattered old castaway clothes. I had bruises all over, same as the morning after the plane crash. I could feel that one of my eyes was closed by a throbbing lump. I tried to sit up. I couldn’t. I tried to free my arms from the tight sheets. I couldn’t. I finally opened my eyes as best I could and looked down at myself. In the gray light of another dawn, I saw my body wrapped in a whitish linen jacket, with the arms crossed in front and fastened at the back. The material was tough and stiff. It was a straitjacket. Across my chest there was a thick rubbery band, pinning me to the bed. There was another band at my waist, another across my legs, and two loops fastening down my ankles.

  I don’t know how to describe the horror of that waking.

  “Miranda?” I whispered.

  “I’m here, Semi.”

  I turned my head, and saw her through the bars, strapped down the same as me.

  “Oh God, Miranda, I’m sorry.”

  “What for?”

  “They wouldn’t have tied you down. This is my fault.”

  “It doesn’t matter. Semi, listen. This is going to happen. We can’t stop it.”

  “Oh God, please—”

  “No, don’t cry, listen. The only thing to do, is we must accept our fate.”

  I couldn’t stand this. I was going to start screaming and screaming and this time I wouldn’t stop until I was out of my mind. I would die insane, howling like that jungle cat as they tortured me. But Miranda kept talking. Her voice was a light I could follow, like the little glowing lights that led to the emergency exit.