“Yeah. Remember that stuff we brought back from Layton House. I want to have a look at it. I have a feeling that this situation has something to do with my father’s death.”
Jenny shrugged her shoulders, “Let’s have a look at it, see what we can see,” she said and drank from her can again.
Patrick went upstairs and got the notebook and disc from the drawer and brought them down. He switched the television and the DVD player on and inserted the disc into the machine. He grabbed the remotes and went and sat next to Jenny again. She shuffled over and lay her head on his arm. Patrick pressed the button to play the disc. For a moment nothing happened and then a moment later a face appeared on the screen. To Jenny, the man on the screen looked like an older version of Patrick. The facial structure was the same and the facial features were strikingly similar, except for the age lines that were etched into his face around his eyes and his mouth. The man on the screen shuffled the camera around a little and then sat back. He began to speak. Patrick was transfixed. It was the first time he had seen his father’s face that he could remember. There were hazy memories and nothing more.
“My name is Richard Hurst. I am a scientist that is currently employed by our government. For many years I have been working on a project that will save lives and change the face of modern medicine as we know it. It goes by the name of ‘Project Pharmacon.’ Before I explain exactly what it is, I need to get some things on the record that have been weighing heavily on my mind for such a very long time now. Many years ago when I was just a student, trying to learn as much about physics and biology as I could, just so I could help to develop new and exciting cures for all the diseases that ravage mankind in this modern age. More specifically, I was trying to find a cure for cancer, which had taken the life of my mother when I was just eight years old. During my years as a student, one of the many alcohol induced conversations that me and my various colleagues had was about the ability to atomise a human body and piece it back together again. I was of the opinion that it was impossible to do so but it seems that I am programmed not only to have an opinion on everything but to try and prove my point with experiments and facts. I met up with my friend, a man by the name of Harry Thomas and we constructed a small table top machine that accelerated the subject with to the speed of light without it ever moving. Then a large electromagnetic field was passed through it at the peak of the speed. We put a mouse in the machine and fired it up and as soon as the electromagnetic field was passed through it, the mouse was pulled apart into atoms. The theory of Harry Thomas was that as soon as the machine was turned off the mouse would be reassembled. But, just as I suspected, the mouse was atomised and there was nothing left at the end of the experiment but dust. There was no way that the structure of the mouse could be maintained. We left the experiment for a few months and I was contented that I had proved without a shadow of a doubt that it couldn’t be done. But it weighed on my mind, the possibilities that could be realised if I could get it to work. Why wouldn’t the structural integrity of the mouse stay intact. Then it came to me in the middle of the night. I don’t know if I dreamed it or if I just joined the dots when my mind was at rest. I went down to the lab and set up the machine again, but this time I installed another electromagnetic plate to the bottom of the machine to be activated when the machine was winding down. Anyway, I tried it, thinking that it wouldn’t work in a million years. That mouse was pulled apart, just like it was before and when the electromagnetic plate was activated at the end of the cycle, the mouse reappeared. I remember standing there looking at it, unable to believe my eyes. I picked the mouse up and looked at it and it was completely unharmed. It must have known that I was experimenting on it because it bit me right on the finger. I dropped the little bastard and he ran away. To this day, I have no idea where that mouse went and I never saw it again. But, I had learned something invaluable. I had the ability to pull apart a living being and reassemble it perfectly. But it didn’t end there. About a year later I had been thinking about cancer cures and the best way to remover tumours with the minimal amount of invasive surgery. I got to thinking about the little machine I had built and that damn mouse. What if I could pull apart a living body, extract all the pieces of it that were defective and then put them back together again, sort of like a cellular cleansing. I could, theoretically, pull apart a diseased life form, remove the defective pieces from it and reassemble it again, but this time cured. I….”
Patrick paused the playback and looked at Jenny, who had sat up and had been staring intently at the screen.
“That’s quite some idea he had. Do you think he got it to work?” said Jenny.
“I don’t know, but I can’t wait to find out. Do you know what it would do Jenny? To be able to cure any disease in that way, no surgery or anything like that?”
“It’s…”
There was a loud knocking on the front door upstairs. They both jumped. Patrick stood up.
“It must be the Pizza. I’ll go and…” he broke off and looked at Jenny. She had the same look on her face that he did. They were both thinking the same thought. Was it the killer?
“The police are outside, surely they will be watching,” said Patrick.
“I’ll come with you,” said Jenny standing up. Patrick felt such an overwhelming urge to protect her. If the killer was at the door and he tried to do anything to Jenny, he would go for the bastard, no doubt about it. He didn’t know how successful he would be but he would certainly go down swinging. He nodded at Jenny and they both made their way up the stairs. They got to the door just as the second knock came.
“Who is it?” shouted Patrick, trying, but failing miserably to sound brave.
“Pizza delivery,” said a disembodied voice on the other side of the door.
Patrick unbolted the door. His hands weren’t quite steady as he did so. He turned the key and pulled the door open. He came face to face with the man he knew as Franco. He had ordered so many times from the same place that he knew the delivery guys off by heart.
“Hi Patrick, are you O.K. this evening?” said Franco.
Patrick caught sight of one of the police officers from the unmarked van making his way across the road. He waved a hand at him to let him know that everything was in order. The policeman returned his wave and then sloped off back to the van.
“I’m good Franco, how are you this evening my friend?”
“I’m very well, wish I could have a fucking night off though, but I gotta earn my keep.”
Patrick looked over at the van and the police man that was climbing back in. He grabbed his wallet off the kitchen counter and opened it. There was a still a serious wad of money in there and he pulled out one hundred and fifty pounds. He set the money down on the counter and took the pizzas off Franco. Then he picked up the money and offered it to him.
“Do me a favour Franco, here’s one fifty. Go over to that van in the car park and tell them they can have anything that they want from you and it’s on me. Whatever is left over from this money, you keep for yourself brother.”
Franco looked at the wad of money in his hand open mouthed. “Wow Patrick, you are now my number one customer. Every time you order from now, you get extra wedges.”
Patrick laughed and offered his hand. “It’s a deal.”
Franco shook heartily. “I’ll get right on it, enjoy your food my friend,” he said and started to make his way across the road.
Patrick closed the door and was about to grab the pizza boxes. Jenny grabbed him and planted a kiss on his mouth.
“What was that for?” he said.
“Just for being such a lovely, kind man. You are a rarity Patrick. Kind, good looking and a hell of a fuck.”
Patrick felt a blush rising on his cheeks. “And you are the most amazing, beautiful and sexy woman I have ever met. And you are a hell of a fuck too,” he said.
They both laughed and then shared a slower and more intimate kiss.
“Right mister, let’s go. I’m fucki
ng starving,” she said and Patrick laughed.
They took their food downstairs and sat down on the couch. The frozen picture of Richard Hurst was still on the screen. A part of him wanted to continue to watch it, but there was another bigger part of him that wanted a little bit of normality back in their lives.
“Do you fancy watching something else, perhaps something a little more amusing?”
Jenny nodded frantically, she would have said yes but her mouth was already full of pizza. Patrick ejected the disc and set it to one side. He reached up onto the shelf above the television where all his films were stored and grabbed a few of them.
“This is part of my prize John Hughes film collection for occasions such as this one. Choose,” he said.
“Start at the beginning and we will work our way through them,” said Jenny.
Two and a half films later, Jenny was leaning on his chest and his arm was around her. Considering that a few days ago he wasn’t even entertaining the idea of having a girlfriend, to find himself cosying up with a girl that he was really into was a little bizarre to say the least. Still, he was enjoying it and he liked how naturally they fitted together and not just in the bedroom department. She had begun to gently snore on his chest. He looked at the clock on the wall and saw that it was just past eleven. He gave her a gentle nudge. She made a longer, more pronounced snore and then her head popped up off him.
“Did you say something,” she muttered, her voice thick with sleep.
“I think it’s bed time missy. It’s been a long day, all things considered.
“I think you are right. Lead the way.”
“Just got to shut everything down and make sure all the doors are locked. You go up and choose a side of the bed.”
They both stood up and she wrapped her arms around his neck. She planted a slow kiss on his lips. “Thank you for tonight, I really needed it.”
“Thank you for staying. I love having you around.”
She smiled and kissed him again. Then she let go of him, grabbed her bag and set off up the stairs. Patrick turned the television off and clicked off the plugs, an old habit that he had been unable to break, even when he had finally managed to live on his own. He turned the lights off and made his way up the stairs. When he got to the kitchen he double checked the locks on the door to make sure they were all in place and then he turned the light off and climbed the last flight of stairs to his bedroom. Jenny was already under the covers. He was about to get in in his scruffs when he realised that she was naked.
“I’m not quite finished with you yet,” she said with a gleam in her eye.
He stripped, got in and they made love. Within a few minutes of finishing Jenny was snoring gently at his side. He turned the lamp off and tried to get to sleep, but his mind was whirring a thousand thoughts around at a hundred miles an hour. He had too many questions he needed answering and he was certain that they were on that video diary of his fathers. He kissed Jenny’s cheek and whispered in her ear that he was going back downstairs for a while. She opened her eyes briefly, acknowledged that she had heard him and then turned over and resumed her gentle snore. Patrick went downstairs, made a cup of tea and then carried on down to the living room. He put the plugs back on and fired up the television and DVD player. He put his father’s disc back into the machine and got it back to where they had left off. He lit himself a cigarette and watched his father talk on the screen.
“With the technology I developed I was able to identify DNA strands that were defective and cellular construction that was abnormal. I couldn’t destroy the defective cells without the risk of damaging the cells that were not defective so we decided to utilise a laser that could extract them and keep them in storage for disposal later on. The first few experiments on rats that had cancerous growths were a success. The machine cured them. The only problem was; it was impossible to destroy the extracted diseased cells afterwards. After the laser extracted them it turned them into a toxic cloud which, whilst contained, could be potentially deadly if we tried to open the containment device. So I had to come up with something and quickly. My funding for the project was running out and the university was already short on funds. They were already making noises to the effect of not wanting to support a crackpot project such as mine. Anyway, I found out that if you have a host in the machine and you reverse the process, all the stored diseases can be safely purged into the subject. But that means that the subject that you use inherits all the diseases that have been extracted from the other subjects, and believe me it isn’t pretty. The first time I did it I used one of the laboratory rabbits as a host. It got hit with seventeen cases of cancer all at the same time. When it was reassembled in the machine it was a mess. It was just a pile of growths and fur. Fortunately, it died a few minutes later. I made the presentation to the university and they called me to one side afterwards. They had somebody else that was interested in funding the project. Now, I have no idea who this guy was, but he told me that he worked for the government. They were willing to pay a lot of money for me to develop the machine. They asked if I had anything else of interest to them and I showed them every idea and invention I had come up with. They were most interested in the microchip technology that I had come up with and so they paid me a very healthy amount of money for it. But their big priority was the machine, the Pharmacon. Their idea was that if such a machine existed that they would save millions on the cost of running the national health service. They built me a house up in Layton Valley so I wouldn’t be disturbed and they kept on pumping up my bank account with huge amounts of money.
The project took many years to get to a point where it would work on a grander scale. In that time, I was given a helping hand. That’s when I met the woman who would become my wife. Her name was Caroline Kirby. Now I’m not going to harp on about me and Caroline, except to say that she is dead now and has been for some time. She was killed because of me and our boys are now gone because of me.”
Patrick sat forwards in his chair, his long forgotten cigarette still burning between his fingers. He made the video go backwards a few seconds and then he played it again.
“…our boys are now gone because of me.”
He paused the playback for a moment to take in exactly what he had heard. His father had said ‘boys.’ That meant that there was more than one. That meant he had…
“It was just a slip of the tongue, surely,” he said to the empty room.
He tapped his overly long ashes into the ashtray and hit the play button again. Richard started talking again.
“Caroline got pregnant less than a year into our relationship. She ended up resigning from her position as a government advisor. It wasn’t as if we needed the money, I was earning enough to keep us on easy street well into the next century. As far as the idea of becoming a father went, I couldn’t have been more excited. It just so happened that a few days after we had found out our good news that the Pharmacon was ready for human trials. The first batch of people to try it out all had terminal illnesses, most of them cancerous. Each one of them went through the machine and came out cured. People that couldn’t walk came out of there standing up straight for the first time in years. The machine was such a success, far beyond anything I could have ever predicted. But there was the problem of all the defective cells that were extracted. After about a hundred or so cures, the machine needed to be purged or it wouldn’t cure anything anymore. I started using pigs for the purging process and when I did the first one the results were sickening. The first pig I used was so diseased it was unrecognisable. There was fat, ugly tumours all over its body that were so heavy the damn thing couldn’t even stand. It lay there in the machine squealing and writhing until it after a few minutes it died. I took it outside and buried it in the woods near the house and I continued to do the same thing with each set of trials that I completed. Every single disease set from the most serious illnesses to the common cold would be cured by the machine. Everything was going so well, until we started to exper
iment on those with mental deficiencies. The man from the government wanted me to clean the minds of some of the most heinous criminals you had ever seen in your life. The theory went that if you put them through the process then the bad wiring in their brains would be made better and they could re-enter society without the urge to kill or rape or anything like that. I began the trials and they seemed to work. The criminals that were put through the process came out rounded members of the human race. Their urges to kill and violate had been taken away. About three quarters of the way through this trial Caroline went into labour. Twenty-six hours later she gave birth to Patrick then an hour later she gave birth to James. But something went wrong. The cord got caught round his neck and he was strangled. It left him severely brain damaged. The doctors told us that he would never be able to look after himself, or even speak. Patrick was healthy and we should have just been grateful for that but it wasn’t enough for us. Caroline asked me just three days later if I would put James through the Pharmacon. I resisted at first. I wanted to see if the damage was permanent or if he would ever recover. I didn’t have much faith in what the doctors said. I was always ready to believe that anybody at any given time could defy the odds. I was allowed time to focus on getting James the best help that I could and to see if he would actually recover. It took two years before I realised that he wasn’t going to get any better. I decided at that point to put him through the process. I lifted him out of his little wheelchair and put him into the machine. I turned the machine on and without any prompting from me the machine started to purge the extracted cells of the damaged minds of all those criminals. I tried to turn it off, but I wasn’t quick enough. The machine took him away. He vanished into thin air just like all the others had done and then there was a flash of lightning from the pylons above the house that I used to power the machine. Then he winked back into existence. At first I thought he had been cured. He was sitting up straight on his own with any aid for the first time in his life and then I saw that look on his face, that sickening, evil grin. Caroline came into the room. She had heard the machine running and then she saw James sitting there with that horrible smile on his face. I’m only guessing that she didn’t see the same look of evil on his face that I saw because she opened the chamber and gathered him up in her arms. She was saying his name over and over again. I raced towards her, telling her to stop, but it was too late. He darted forwards and sank his teeth right into the middle of Caroline’s throat. He tore a huge chunk right out of her, God, there was so much blood. She dropped him and then fell down clawing at her throat. James just sat there slowly chewing on the flesh chunk that he had just ripped out of Caroline. I tried to save her. I tried to get her into the machine before she died, but it was too late. The machine can’t cure death, I know that for a fact. There was nothing I could do. I phoned my man from the government and he brought a team in to clean everything up. When Caroline was killed and I tried to resurrect her I turned round and Patrick was standing there in the doorway. He witnessed the whole thing. I’m not sure how much of he remembers, I hope he doesn’t recall any of it. I guess I will never know. At the request of the government Patrick was sent out for adoption straight away. The machine was now considered dangerous and it was no good for Patrick to be around it any more. I couldn’t be trusted to make a rational decision with the machine if something happened to him. They were going to take James too, but I begged them to let me keep him. I wanted to cure him, make him better and eventually they agreed. The very same day I put him through the machine again. He tried to bite me several times as I was putting him into the machine, but I was careful enough not to let him take any chunks out of me. I ran the machine on him and he came out exactly the same. The machine had fused the defective cells to his DNA makeup. It couldn’t distinguish the defective cells from the rest of him. I kept him in a specially constructed holding cell. I couldn’t let him roam free, he was just too dangerous. As he got older, he kept talking about his God and how his God was talking to him and telling him to do these awful things. It was a nightmare, such a terrible nightmare. But then I stumble upon something. I managed to take a sample of his DNA and splice it with some of my own. There were enough similarities in the two strands to create enough data to reprogram James’ genetic makeup and remove the defects from his mind. I put him through the machine with the new programming and it worked. James came out a normal child with none of the violence and none of the defects that he had picked up. For about six months he stayed the same and then it began to grow in him again. It began to come back. This time it was stronger, more violent and more psychotic. I did the same thing again but this time the cure only lasted four months. It kept on going like this until the cure only lasted three weeks at the most. The problem was, that my DNA only accounted for half of his genetic makeup, the rest of it came from his mother. It wasn’t a good enough match for a permanent cure. The only hope we had was to find his brother, his twin brother Patrick. He carries a DNA similar enough to stem the damage on a more permanent basis. But I have no idea where he is and there is no way on earth anyone would ever help me find him if they knew the reason why I needed him back.”
Duet Page 29