I felt like I was blind. Rachel could be trying to contact me, and I’d have no way of knowing.
When Byrne got to the bottom of the stairs, he slowly looked around. I looked down a couple of steps at him.
The corridor stretched forward and backwards at the bottom of the steps, and then left and right at the end of each part. He gestured at each of them, and looked at me with raised eyebrows. Asking me which way we should go.
I shrugged to indicate to him that I wasn’t sure. I didn’t know where his cell had been. I knew where mine had been, but we’d been kept separate.
He looked around again. Then he moved forwards.
They were moving towards me. They’d stopped talking. I crouched down and took aim. The second they came around the corner, I’d start shooting.
Byrne came to the bottom of the corridor, and paused, listening intensely. He looked, left, then right, trying to decide. Then he flattened against the wall, and sidestepped so he could look down the corridor without stepping out into it.
Whoever it was had their back to me and was looking at the other side of the corridor. If they were making sure it was clear, they’d be checking this one next, but they didn’t know I was waiting for them.
There was nothing there, so he stepped back, and then crossed to the other side of the corridor and began to repeat the motion. I glanced behind me but there was nothing from that end.
He edged sideways. I lined up the shot. I could see his shoulder. Another half step and …
Byrne took one step further and a shot rang out.
I fired.
Byrne went down. He shot as well, and then a third shot came from the other side and buried itself into the wall behind him. I ran forward, and fired two shots wildly in the general area that they’d come from.
The first one went down, having taken a shot and missing me. I’d shot back on instinct, and was about to line up for the second one, when he ran out and started shooting at me. I ducked and ran for cover, falling backwards and scrambling.
I saw him.
I saw him.
Chapter Seventeen
He held his gun at me. I held my gun at him. I tried not to let my hand shake.
‘Where are they?’ I shouted.
‘You don’t deserve them,’ he said.
‘Where are they?’
‘Why should I tell you? Do you have any idea what you’ve taken from me?’
‘I didn’t take anything from you,’ I said, and started edging my way towards him. ‘Rachel! Natalie!’ I shouted.
‘They can’t answer you,’ he said, a smile developing on his face.
‘Please.’ I begged.
He got to his feet, and the smile broke into a grin. ‘Or what?’
A shot rang out, and everything stopped for a moment.
He ran down a corridor, and the ringing in my ears convinced me for a moment that I’d just been shot. I couldn’t feel anything. I glanced down, looking for what had just happened, and then looked behind me.
It was Byrne, who had crawled into the corridor and taken the shot. ‘I didn’t get him,’ he said. ‘Missed …’
He was bleeding heavily. The shot had caught him in the chest, and he was bleeding from the mouth as well. ‘You need help,’ I said.
‘Police are already … they’re on their way …’ he said. ‘Go. They’re your family. Go.’
I nodded, and began to turn away.
‘John!’ he shouted.
I looked back at him.
‘He never got past this place. He finished here. You started here.’
I didn’t nod. I didn’t say anything. I just started moving, following the direction the other John had run towards.
My ankle was sore, but I ignored it. I just hoped it wouldn’t buckle underneath me. I had to get there.
I killed him already, but it didn’t work. He’d come back. Somehow, he’d come back.
I could do it before he got here.
It didn’t matter.
I got to the cell, and walked straight in, right up to Rachel and I pointed my gun at her head. I looked at Natalie.
She looked back at me. Right at me.
She looked at me.
That anger. That fear.
I held the gun, and I tried to pull the trigger, but something stopped me.
I’d seen that look before. That exact look.
I closed my eyes for a moment, trying to break the moment. But when I opened them, she was still looking at me.
‘Stop it,’ I said to her.
‘Please,’ Rachel said. ‘She’s not doing anything. Let her go. Please.’
‘Shut up,’ I said, and looked at Natalie, trying to work it out. Where I’d seen it.
And then it hit me. All the anger, the rage, the grief, the fear. For so many years, looking in the mirror. Seeing all of that. The same colour. The same shape. He may be her father, not me, but the genetics were still the same.
She had my eyes.
And everything crumbled around me. Everything I’d built up. Everything I’d done. Everything I wanted to do.
Everything that had been done to me. All the chances he’d been given that I never had. The life he had, that should have been mine. The child he’d fathered with my genetics.
With my eyes.
I tried not to fall to my knees, as I realised.
It wasn’t his fault. It wasn’t their fault.
I’d taken so much.
I looked at Rachel, and then back at Natalie.
‘I’m so sorry,’ I said.
I couldn’t give it back. I couldn’t change what I had done.
But I could end it. And the most unexpected thing was that after all my attempts, after all my cowardice, I could do it with absolute conviction. Because the thing that was wrong was me. Not them, not him. I couldn’t be fixed. But I could be ended.
It had taken all my strength to keep standing, and not break down in tears and beg for forgiveness. And now, I could see a new path and a new ending, and I didn’t hesitate.
She had my eyes.
I pointed the gun at my own head and fired.
I ran.
I got to the cell that the shot had come from, and ran in with my gun in front of me, ready to shoot him.
Natalie and Rachel were sat there, eyes wide open and looking terrified.
He lay on the ground in front of them. There was blood everywhere.
I put the gun down and started to untie them.
Chapter Eighteen
Natalie, Rachel and I were at Byrne’s funeral. There were plenty of uniformed police there, but not many of the public.
We were told that he wasn’t very sociable. I could believe that. But we were glad we went, and grateful to him. He’d saved my life. He’d saved us.
Two days later the other John MacFarlane was cremated. We were the only ones there.
Legally, it was a strange situation. Technically, we were his next of kin. We got the ashes.
Natalie seemed particularly satisfied at this. ‘He didn’t get away with it,’ she said.
I have quite the scar in my forehead. It’s like a little divot right in the centre. I could have plastic surgery and cover it up, but I don’t want to.
It makes me look different from him. That’s a good thing as far as we’re concerned.
I did have the option to have IDRoPS replaced. The connections could be fixed, if I desired.
I chose not to.
They had their benefits, but I’d decided against it. Rachel had hers deactivated as well. We didn’t want to change the way the world looked any more.
The world looked different than it had done. I didn’t want to pretend it hadn’t happened. It felt important that this had changed me, and I wanted to honour that.
The anxiety and the guilt has gone now. Natalie grew up into a wonderful woman, and Rachel and I stayed together and were comfortable and happy.
This works for us. No pretending, no personal realities.
The End
The Warning
‘On the 22nd of November, at twelve forty-five, an earthquake will hit Prague. It will kill two hundred and fifty thousand people.’
I didn’t take it seriously at first. In this job, you don’t take things like that seriously. I had one patient tell me, every night, that the sun wouldn’t come up the next morning unless a black child was killed. You don’t take things like that seriously. You’d go crazy if you did. So, I thought nothing of it, gave him his medication. An hour later, he was asleep in his room.
The next day, at eleven minutes past three in the afternoon, he said it again. Word for word.
‘On the 22nd of November, at twelve forty-five, an earthquake will hit Prague. It will kill two hundred and fifty thousand people.’
I would say that I thought nothing of it this time, but there was something unusual about the way he was saying it. He wasn’t anguished about it. He wasn’t shouting it, screaming it, or in any way frantic. He was stating it calmly, as absolute fact. The same way he would state what was on the lunch menu on a Tuesday.
Most times, when the patients come up with ‘prophecies’– a word that I use very, very lightly – it’s a form of transference. It comes from a fixation on something else, which they have begun to loosen their grip on. Then, with the mental energy that they were using to fixate on this thing, they obsess over something. It usually involves celebrities. Ten years ago, we were being told that Michael Jackson would die three days before he hit forty. Now, we’re told that some other celebrity will die the day after his wedding. Other times, it involves politicians, or whatever environmental threat is inthe papers. Natural disasters aren’t unheard of either, but usually, whatever they fixate on, they obsess on. This wasn’t the way this patient was.
I asked him why he thought this would happen. He didn’t know. I asked him if he read it somewhere. He didn’t know. I asked him where he got the idea from. He didn’t know. He said he knew it in the same way that he knew that fire was hot. He just knew it. So, while I thought nothing of the specific points he was making, I was intrigued by the way he was saying it. It was almost like he was saying ‘why wouldn’t this happen?’
It quickly became part of the routine for the day. Ten a.m.: hit work. Eleven: start one-on-one sessions. One o’clock: lunch. Eleven minutes past three: earthquakes and Prague.
He didn’t just say it to me– he just said it, regardless of who was around. Other patients, other doctors. He said it in exactly the same tone. And in exactly the same way it happens with everything else, once it becomes part of the routine, it stops being something important.
Until I spoke to an old colleague in London at a party. I’m embarrassed to admit that the party was a ‘Friends Reunited’ one. A group of twenty-year-old students meeting again as forty-year-olds. Long hair and sexually transmitted diseases replaced by two cars, two mortgages and worrying about your own child’s long hair and sexually transmitted diseases. There was flowing alcohol, and stilted conversation, until I caught up with Neil, an old classmate of mine.
Neil and I had been close friends throughout most of university but hadn’t kept in touch. It happens. You swear you’ll be lifelong friends, then promptly move to opposite sides of the country without leaving forwarding addresses. We talked for a while, and compared notes on our lives, and eventually just got drunk together. We talked about alcohol, we talked about what our hopes and goals had been, we talked about the women in our lives, and we talked about work. And then he mentioned something strange about a patient he knew.
Since being raped by three men, this patient had been catatonic for three years. She had been in denial first, and then became withdrawn. As the court case came closer, her withdrawal became so intense that, one day, she stopped talking or moving. She was able to be moved, and could be prompted to basic moves, but was otherwise totally catatonic. Until two weeks ago, that is. She didn’t break the catatonic state for long, but she broke it for a few seconds. The few seconds it took for her to speak two sentences, her voice barely audible.
‘On the 22nd of November, at twelve forty-five, an earthquake will hit Prague. It will kill two hundred and fifty thousand people.’
She said it at eleven minutes past three. For the first time, three weeks ago, and then daily, at the same time every day. It was now the nineteenth of October.
I sobered immediately. And once I told the story of my patient, so did Neil. We compared stories in more detail, and we compared notes. We couldn’t find any common ground between the patients, other than the basic fact that they were dealing with mental issues – and even those mental issues had no common ground.
The next day, I drove to Neil’s work, having called in sick to my own, and we spent hours discussing how to proceed. Did we believe what they were saying? Not yet. We were more interested in trying to find out why the two patients were sharing a prophetical experience. Over the next few days, we exhausted every possibility we could work out about the two people’s histories. The chances of them having crossed paths were minute. And so we wasted three days. Three days closer to the 22nd of November.
We had decided to quietly begin to spread some information out, colleagues speaking to colleagues, and two days later, we heard back from a doctor in Scotland. She, too, had a patient who was repeating the same thing, day in, day out.
With anything like this it starts off small, and begins to pick up speed very quickly. It starts off with three, but quickly grows. Two weeks later, we knew of no fewer than fourteen patients around the UK who were repeating the same two sentences at the same time each day. And no matter what we tried, we couldn’t find any links between any of the patients, other than the fact that they were all in institutions.
We didn’t go to the papers with it or alert the authorities. Not at that point. To be honest, I couldn’t really tell you why. I could come up with a list of excuses but the truth is, we just didn’t think we’d be taken seriously. We kept it within the medical community, more or less – we were also fairly sure that if somebody was to keep doing it every day, chances were that it would either break in the newspapers, or somebody would make a path straight to their nearest psychiatrist.
A doctor in Cornwall came up with the idea of mass hypnosis, which seemed to ring true for a while. We worked on it for about a week, actually. As a hypothesis, it made a lot of sense – a TV hypnotist plants some subliminal idea on one of their shows, something that would only work on those who happened to be extremely suggestible. It wasn’t totally beyond the realm of possibility – not that all of these people were fully hypnotised, but that they’d picked up the same thing. Until we found out that one of the institutions made a policy of having no televisions in the building, and there was no way that a patient could have seen one recently. We were frustrated. That one had been working so well.
The next day, we found out about a case in Ireland.
Then two in Africa.
Seventeen in Germany.
More than forty in the United States.
Eventually we had exactly a hundred in total. All around the world. Different corners of the globe. All of them saying it at exactly eleven minutes past three in the afternoon, UK time. Some were even saying it in their sleep.
We couldn’t work it out. There was no link. None whatsoever. There was no medium that could have reached all of these people at the same time, in the same way. Every path we went down came to a dead end.
And so we spent hours, and days, trying to work it out when instead we could have been trying to do something about it. It was the 15th of November when we actually began to stop thinking about why they were saying what they were saying, and actually think about the implications of what they were saying. We’d been approaching all of this so clinically and logically, we had never stopped to think that it might actually be true. All of that time wasted, when we could have been trying to convince people to listen to us. To take us seriou
sly.
We started contacting people. Not newspapers, not quite yet; but we got in touch with the Czech Academy of Sciences, the closest thing to an authority in the situation. They took us about as seriously as you would expect. It didn’t help our case that the Czech Republic is a seismically quiet area.
So we took it to the newspapers. Days to go and we finally took it public. A lot of us knew that we would be effectively ending our careers by doing so, but we could no longer take the risk that we were wrong. We knew that the best way to do this was to present ourselves as a group. One that was geographically disparate, and one with few obvious other links. A group of doctors may just be taken seriously.
Let me pose you a question. You’re reading a newspaper, and on page thirteen, there is a story about how one hundred crazy people are predicting Prague will take substantial damage, causing hundreds of thousands of deaths, and a bunch of doctors are taking it seriously. Would it make you leave the city?
I thought not.
On the 22nd of November, at twelve forty-five, an earthquake hit Prague. There was no way of knowing exactly how many people were killed, but eventual reports estimated the number to be close to three hundred thousand.
I eventually took my theory public. My belief is that some people are more sensitive to the planet itself. If your body feels pain, it sends messages to your brain. When we damage the planet, it sends messages to us, but it sends it to that portion of our brain that we’ve either left behind through evolution, or that we haven’t evolved enough to use properly. Except for a tiny, tiny amount of people. But being so sensitive makes these people vulnerable to breakdowns, and to psychotic episodes. They all break down in different ways, or they become more vulnerable to mental trauma. And when the brain is wiring itself differently in order to cope, it listens to what the world is telling it.
The world was sending us a very clear message, but we couldn’t hear it. It wants us to stop damaging it. And it doesn’t want us to kill ourselves.
POV Page 7