Id

by P. Craig

  With no reason other than that thought to urge him on, the man again struggled to break free from the leather straps. He wriggled his legs and upper body as best he could, trying to work himself a little more space in which to move, to pull at least one arm free. He was determined to succeed this time, no matter how much it hurt, no matter how long it took, no matter what he had to do to get himself out of there—this time he was going to get out.

  Sweat coursed down his body and the mattress was soon damp beneath his bare skin; his frantic movements bunched the thin sheets under his legs, adding to the discomfort, but no matter which way he squirmed, the straps remained tight across his body.

  He fought on, refusing to give up. Soon, his arms began to feel like they were on fire, his muscles burning from a build-up of lactic acid caused by the continuous pressure he was applying against the restraints. A thought flitted through his mind—one more ounce of effort and I’ll either bust the strap in two... or myself.

  Gritting his teeth, the man pushed hard with all his strength and managed to work a shoulder up high enough from the bed to slip an arm free. He lay there a moment, panting from the effort. He couldn’t help but notice that his clothing—little more than a thin gown, in truth—was drenched with sweat; the gown was sticking to him like cling film.

  After a moment’s rest, the man unbuckled the strap around his chest. He sat up, grabbed onto the frame to stop himself from sliding off the bed, and then unfastened the buckles pinning his legs down. As he tried to shift his weight, his left foot slipped on the damp mattress, and the blanket covering his legs dropped away, tumbling down through the metal prison towards the pair of limp heads below him.

  Perched precariously on the edge of the bed, he looked down and tried to work out a safe route through the twisted wreckage. It wasn’t easy; everything was a complete mess. Eventually, the man grew exasperated and decided to take his chances. He reached across to the other stretcher, grasping the metal frame with one hand while keeping hold of the frame of his own bed with the other. Bracing himself, he carefully swung his legs down until his feet found something solid to stand on near the foot of the two beds.

  The man studied his surroundings from his new position; it didn’t take long before he began to see his prison in a new light. The tubes and wires hanging from the ceiling; the monitoring equipment; the symbols on the walls; the syringes; the boxes full of bottles; the clothes worn by the two dead men below him; the very clothes he was wearing himself—they all seemed to indicate that this twisted prison around him wasn’t really a prison at all.

  Craning his neck forwards, the man peered down past the motionless heads below, his eyes narrowing and focussing on something directly beneath one of the dead. A steering wheel? Yes, it's a steering wheel.

  He knew at least one thing now—he had survived a car crash. Yet that one fact didn’t tell him why he had been in the car—an ambulance, he assumed, judging by everything around him—in the first place. His clothing suggested that he was a patient, yet he didn’t feel ill or weak or that anything was physically wrong with him. He figured the straps that had been holding him down hadn’t being doing so to keep him restrained; they had been there to prevent the stretcher from moving around and jostling him while the ambulance was in transit. Damned things actually saved me.

  The dead man lying on the other stretcher clearly hadn’t been so lucky. Yet, ignoring the blood and the twisted, unnatural angle of the body, it was obvious that he too had been a patient; wires from monitoring equipment were still connected to his torso, and a chart, hanging limply from a broken clipboard, was poking out from somewhere below his legs.

  A chart!

  The man reached across and grabbed the clipboard. Pulse quickening, he ran his eyes over the front page. But it didn’t tell him anything—it was just a page full of meaningless diagrams and scribbled numbers.

  Shaking his head, he flicked through torn page after torn page until he finally found something of substance—something that was priceless to his inquisitive and otherwise entirely blank mind.

  David Carter.

  That was the dead man’s name. He was forty-two years old, a writer by trade, but he had been effectively invalided from his work—from his life, it seemed—by a severe brain injury, resulting in a deep coma, caused by surgery to remove multiple tumours.

  The man studied the dead man’s face, thinking that the years had been kind until remembering that those years were now at an end. The scar around Carter’s head was pink, a sign that the surgery hadn’t been recent, and the man guessed Carter had been in a coma for some length of time—a coma he would now never wake up from.

  The man wedged Carter’s chart under his blood-soaked mattress and then turned his attention onto looking around for his own file. He scanned the wreckage for a few minutes; finally, he spotted a clipboard lying partially obscured underneath an equipment rack a few feet below him.

  Carefully, ever so slowly, the man crouched down and reached out until his fingertips were almost, but not quite, brushing against the chart. Biting his lip in concentration, he shuffled forwards and stretched down even further, all the while teetering on the brink of falling. After one last stretch, his fingers had enough of a grip to slide the file from its resting place.

  But in his eagerness, he forgot about the need to maintain his balance. In an instant, his left foot slipped and then he was tumbling down through a chasm of metal and detritus into the bowels of the wreck.

  The man landed with a clatter against the hard backs of the seats occupied by the two dead men; the sudden explosive force knocked the lifeless bodies forwards, the driver’s head falling into the centre of the steering wheel, striking the horn.

  Winded, the man reached a hand over the seat, grabbed the driver’s hair and pulled the dead man’s head away from the wheel; the man’s stomach turned at the wetness—the cold blood—under his fingers, but the horn was silent once more.

  The man studied the smear of dark red on his hand. A feeling of nausea swelled within him. Closing his eyes, he wiped his hand across the back of the seat. He hoped that the dead men hadn’t suffered too much in their final moments; more important, he hoped that the driver could forgive him for the undignified way in which he had hauled his limp head away from the horn.

  As the man shifted round to climb back up to retrieve his chart, something dug into his hip. He glanced down and, spotting the cause, smiled with wry amusement. His file had fallen through the wreck too, smacking against him a split second after he had thudded into the seats, yet only now had he noticed its presence—frankly, it was a welcome distraction from the spilled blood all around him.

  He picked up the clipboard and turned it in his hands until the charts and text were the right way up. As he started to read, he could feel his body tensing and his pulse racing. At last, he was about to find out why he was in the ambulance, where he was going, where he had come from—and who he was. The missing link, the empty chasm, in his head was about to be filled.

  His eyes skimmed down the front page until he found the first piece of information of any real importance to him; a piece of information that was important to everyone and their sense of self.

  Joseph Sheldon.

  Reading that name in relation to himself was an unsettling, alien experience. The name literally meant absolutely nothing to him; it had no significance, nothing whatsoever attached to it, other than it was his. Thinking about the name was like thinking about someone else, someone who was unimaginable—a no-one, a nothing, a stranger.

  His age—thirty-four—offered even less of an insight; it was a meaningless number that spoke only of how long he had been in existence—and nothing else.

  The man needed more; he craved more; his mind, the blanks inside it, demanded more, demanded that he read on and give his name and his age more substance, more depth, more explanation, some kind of context. He scanned further down the page, skimming over incomprehensible diagrams, figures and medical jargon
. Finally, shockingly, he found something else that demanded closer inspection.

  Joseph Sheldon is a convicted mass murderer. Remain vigilant at all times.

  The man re-read the scribbled note in the margin—a warning written in red ink—and reeled as the revelation hit home like a hammer blow to the skull. The man shook his head and covered his mouth with his hand; he was stunned by the cold, hard realisation of who he was and, more important, what he was.

  A murderer!

  The feelings of nausea swept back through his gut like a tornado, forcing bile up his throat and into his mouth; a trickle of vomit escaped from the corner of his clenched lips. He closed his eyes, fighting back the bad feelings and trying to get the words out of his mind.

  What kind of sick joke is this? This can’t... this can't be true!

  The man opened his eyes and looked at his chart. He prayed that the words would be different, that maybe he had read them wrongly before and somehow just misunderstood. But the red letters told him exactly the same story for a third time, for a fourth time, for a fifth time, every time he read them, ad nauseam.

  Cursing, the man flicked over to the next page in the hope that maybe, that somehow, someone had made a mistake and written those words as a joke; a sick heartless prank designed to scare some poor hapless, unknown victim.

  But the red ink continued, filling the blank space at the top of the page before spilling over into the right-hand margin again—and the words were every bit as galling and numbing as they had been on the previous page.

  The police, the doctors, the psychologists, the judges—they all considered him dangerous, a menace to society. Dangerous beyond measure to women, in particular. Those last few scribbled words had been emotive, obviously intended as a warning, but the clean, crisply typed words further down the page were even more resonant—and even more blunt and to the point. If what he read was true, he had killed nineteen people over a two-year period. All of the victims were women; all of them were between the ages of eighteen and forty.

  There was a short paragraph on his conviction that stated he had shown no remorse for his actions, that he would likely kill again should a parole board ever release him from prison, that he could never be rehabilitated back into society.

  The man didn’t want to continue reading—a numbness had swept over him, making him feel cold, ill in his gut—but his eyes carried on down the page regardless. It was as if something beyond his control was driving him on to find out more. What he had read so far just didn’t make any kind of sense to him. This murderer, this terrible man called Joseph Sheldon—it can’t be me.

  He ran his eyes over the next page, a more detailed medical report, and then flicked back up to the top before reading it again. This section, although littered with more medical jargon, finally seemed to shed some light on the emptiness in his head; in some ways, it helped explain his inability to make sense of what he had seen elsewhere in his file.

  His condition was similar to what he had read in the dead man’s chart; like Carter, he too had been in a coma. The root cause, however, was markedly different. His surgery hadn’t been carried out to save him from dying from a tumour; instead, his surgery had been ordered, demanded, approved by society—it was surgery to remove certain areas of his brain in order to try to correct his behavioural deficiencies.

  The man was horrified; the court order to remove part of his brain, part of himself—his sense of self—galled him to such an extent that tears welled in his eyes. He wondered if it would have been more humane to have just killed him—a straightforward eye for an eye that would have repaid his murderous ways in kind. Taking away the part of him that had made him who he was—whether that person was a killer or not—was like torturing, like punishing, an innocent man; after all, with his mind now empty and devoid of the memory of his past misdoings, he was now essentially a different person.

  In the short few minutes in which he—this new person—had existed, he now found that his life was effectively over. And all because of something that he—his body, but not his sense of self as he now knew it—had done in the past.

  This is insane.

  The man didn’t see any justice in punishing an innocent for someone else’s guilt—even when that someone else was technically the same man. Because I’m not that person. Not now.

  The swarm of horrible thoughts and shocking conclusions very quickly overwhelmed him. The clipboard fell from his shaking hands as tears streamed down his cheeks.

  The man’s grief seemed to last for longer than he had lived; the minutes since he had woken from his coma and discovered the history of his true self were soon outnumbered by the minutes of numb emptiness—this hell—in which his awakening had plunged him.

  Eventually, the man’s sobbing and shaking began to subside. This has to be a mistake, he thought. This is all wrong. The file is clearly full of lies, half-truths, with nothing to corroborate them one way or the other.

  For all he knew, the file may not even have been his—the dead man, who he’d assumed was Carter, was as likely to be the killer as he was. There was no way of telling who was really who.

  Yet somehow, deep down, he knew that glimmer of hope was flawed, barely even clinging to the reality of the situation, but there was a chance that it was true all the same.

  If either file had included a photo, then that would have been conclusive proof about each man’s identity.

  But neither file has one.

  Although maybe I already have all I need.

  He knew, of course, what the dead man looked like—and his serene and unblemished face seemed to point towards the conclusion that the man had initially reached—yet he hadn’t seen his own face. And that’s the piece of the puzzle that might just shed light on who I really am.

  Looking over the top of the seats, past the two dead men below him, the man spotted the rear-view mirror hanging down from the cracked, half-shattered windshield; he carefully reached over the bodies and pulled it from its fitting. The mirror was fractured and chipped, but it was intact enough to perform its most basic of functions. The man wiped the mirror with his finger, cleaning away a fine smattering of blood, then tilted it so that he could finally, for the first time since his awakening, see who he really was, and see with his own eyes if he was the man, the cold-hearted monster, that his file was leading him to believe.

  The eyes staring back at him were the cold, scarred, dead eyes of a born killer.

  No! No! No!

  The man recoiled in horror, repulsed by what he had seen. He shook his head furiously, trying to clear the image from his shell-shocked mind—but he knew he needed to look again. Steeling himself, he returned his gaze to the mirror.

  The scarring around his eyes was heavy and gruesome; a deep cut underneath one eyebrow was raw and red, as though it had happened recently and not yet had a chance to heal fully. The left side of his face was bruised and particularly swollen over his cheekbone, while scars—lots and lots of long, thin scars—criss-crossed the right side. His nose had a misshapen look to it too, as though it had been broken more than once. Taking pride of place, however, was a thick, red scar that curved from his temple all the way round to the back of his shaved head.

  The man looked away and sat quietly, shaking his head. His face spoke volumes; his own reflection had dispelled any hope he’d had that he’d mixed up the charts. If someone were to ask him to describe what a killer might look like, he would have used what he had seen in the mirror as the basis of his answer. There was no denying the truth now. He may as well have had ‘guilty’ written all over his face; his own eyes spoke only of murder, hatred and contempt for life.

  Horrified, the man hurled the mirror against the shattered windscreen. He sat motionless for several minutes, scarcely daring to breathe, hoping that maybe Death would come back for him, to take him away as it had those poor men around him. What had felt like a lucky escape now seemed like a cruel irony—he hadn’t really escaped at all.

 
Yet maybe he had been lucky. A convicted killer like him, strange though he found it to be thinking of himself in those terms, could never expect to have his freedom restored in the proper order of things; for him, a life sentence literally meant life.

  But now he had it again—his freedom. The outside world, the free world, was mere feet away, calling out for him to come, and no one was around to stop him. This was a second chance he would never have had in normal circumstances; this was a chance that only the luck of the draw had thrown into his path. The man realised it would be churlish on his part to turn his back on such good fortune. How could he be ungrateful to the god that had spared him? How could he just sit there and wait for someone to find him and take him back to permanent confinement in some misbegotten prison? He knew he couldn’t do any of that. It would be foolish in the extreme, especially when in his mind—that empty void of a mind—he knew he would still receive his punishment, still be considered a threat to all, even though he now had no recollection of those past atrocities. Leaving the wreck and answering the call of freedom—that was his only sensible course of action.

  Decision made, he felt a surge of adrenaline coursing through his body, reinvigorating his limbs. He glanced around, looking for a way out of the twisted wreckage. The door next to the driver was jammed hard up against a tree trunk, yet the passenger-side door appeared to be free from any obvious blockage.

  The man clambered over the back of the seats, carefully avoiding the dead men, and sat down next to the door. He peered through the cracked window and took in the view of the outside world—a forest, as far as he could tell. As he reached for the catch to open the door, he glanced down and noticed for the second time his bare legs beneath the thin gown he was still wearing. I won’t get far like this.

  The man slowly turned his head and looked at the two dead men sitting next to him. He grimaced as he saw the cause of their death—thick tree branches had punched through the dashboard and impaled them both. He closed his eyes but the brutal image had already etched itself into his mind, adding to the macabre gallery that he had unwittingly collected since his awakening.