Id

by P. Craig

  The feel of cold metal wrapping and then clicking into place around his wrists soon told him everything; thick straps binding his ankles together only emphasised the truth of the situation. The orderlies were keeping resolutely quiet, letting their actions do the talking for them, but the man already knew what they were going to do—handcuffs seemed to mean only one thing in this godforsaken place.

  The two orderlies—both strong, brutish men—grabbed the man by the arms and lifted him off the floor, while a third orderly appeared and ushered the terrified nurse outside; he held the door open for the two brutes as they dragged the man across the room.

  As he passed by, the man glanced up at the orderly holding the door. Their eyes locked for a brief instant; in that moment, the man could see an all too familiar look of hatred and disgust.

  His two captors continued to drag him onwards, carrying him headfirst out into the corridor. They pulled him past the nurses’ station and then marched towards the doors at the end of the hallway. As they drew nearer, one of the doors opened and another orderly stepped out; with a curt nod of the head, this new devil indicated that they were to enter the room.

  The man snapped at the air, desperately trying to bite the orderly to try to delay the fate he knew was waiting for him. But it was a futile attempt; he didn’t even get close.

  As the brutes carried him into the room, his eyes fell upon the grim sight of an old wooden table that stood isolated in the middle of the room—a table that he hadn’t wanted to see again. Not after last time.

  The man struggled frantically, twisting, turning and wriggling, but deep down he knew he wasn’t going anywhere. The archaic machine lingering on a rusty trolley in the far corner of the room suggested that he wasn’t going to remember anything of it later either.

  Defeated, he hung limply in the orderlies’ hands as they carried him across the cracked tiled floor and hoisted him up onto the table. While one brute held his feet down, the other quickly unfastened the straps still binding his ankles together, only to lock them within a set of restraints bolted to the table. Together, the orderlies raised the man into a sitting position; they held him tightly while a third orderly—the one the man had tried to bite—unlocked his handcuffs before pinning each arm down into yet more restraints on the table.

  For once, the man lacked the will to continue the fight. As the orderlies buckled two thick leather straps across his chest, the man just lay still and waited, deadpan and silent, for what he knew was only moments away. He turned his head to observe as one of his captors pulled the rusty trolley bearing the machine of ill intent closer to the table, but just as his eyes focussed on the myriad of dials and controls, an orderly placed his hands on the man’s temples and re-positioned his head so that it was facing straight up. The third orderly brought another strap down over the top of the man’s head; with a sharp tug and a click, he pinned it into place on the table next to the man’s shoulder.

  “Bite down on this.”

  An orderly was holding a mouth guard over the man’s closed lips; for once, he duly did as they asked and bit down hard. He flinched as he heard the click of a switch, followed by the steady vibration, a low buzzing, coming from the machine somewhere out of sight behind the top of his head. He flinched again as the door fell back into place after a fourth person entered the room.

  The newcomer came to a halt somewhere beyond the man’s limited peripheral vision. “Has he been properly secured?” asked a familiar voice—the doctor’s.

  The man didn’t hear an answer; he assumed the orderlies must have simply nodded their heads by way of reply. A minute passed, maybe two, and then finally he felt another pair of hands on his head, tips of fingers gently circling at his temples, rubbing something, something wet, onto the skin. He knew the end was coming now, these last thoughts almost certainly to be just that—his last.

  The humming, the buzzing, the vibrations, grew louder and soon the machine’s sound had engulfed the room, filling the man’s ears, his head, with its horrible wail. The table beneath him seemed to be vibrating too, buffeting his body with a thousand rapid pulses a second and making his teeth rattle even despite the bit in his mouth. It felt like they were going to try to shake him out of existence.

  An orderly slipped a pair of paddles over the man’s head and positioned them flush against his wet temples. The man didn’t react. He just stared up at the white ceiling, with its flaking paint and long cracks, and listened while his captors slowly turned a dial on the machine, cranking up the power.

  The sensation was almost imperceptible at first—a warm tickling around his temples that was mildly irritating—but gradually it grew stronger, changing and causing a different effect, another response; a response that wasn’t quite so comfortable. The warm tickling soon became a mild burning and it felt like some unknown force was pushing against both sides of his head, as though trying to squeeze his skull against his brain.

  “Keep going.”

  The pressure and the burning sensation both intensified. A faint aroma of cooking flesh reached the man’s nostrils, though he wasn’t sure if it was real or imaginary; either way, it made him gag.

  The world around him began to blur, strange colours and images flashing before his eyes, before shadows crept in from the outer edges of his peripheral vision and slowly darkened everything.

  He shut his eyes. Instantly, the pressure grew again; it felt like someone was trying to force a pair of blunt objects through his temples. Sweat poured down the man’s face and he pictured his skin melting away under the intense heat coming from the paddles. But he still wasn’t experiencing any genuine pain; that sensation, if he was feeling any at all, was lost somewhere behind the drummer-like pounding in his head.

  Suddenly it all stopped.

  The pressure, the burning sensation and the pounding—they all slipped away, leaving the man with a moment of clarity, of unity, about everything that was going on around him. For a moment, a heartbeat, he remembered everything.

  “Turn it on again, please.”

  The thought, the memory, exploded out of his mind as an orderly flicked a switch and fired a powerful burst of electricity into his head.

  Darkness, nothingness, consumed everything.

  Eight

  February 8, 8.23 a.m.

  The first thing he noticed was the silence; before that, there had been nothing.

  The next thing he noticed was the darkness, a murky greyness tinged with red.

  What’s happening?

  Curious, the man opened his eyes, but blinded by a powerful overhead light, he quickly closed them again. The darkness was safer, almost reassuring in comparison to the sudden, overwhelming light, but there was a strong compulsion that stirred from deep within, urging him to discover his surroundings.

  He opened his eyes slowly second time round, letting the light gradually filter in until he had grown accustomed to the glare.

  Calmly, he looked around. Everything was still bathed in the radiant light—the ceiling, the walls, the window, the floor—but as his eyes roamed around his surroundings, shadows began to creep back into the picture, helping him to make sense of what he was seeing.

  He was in a room—a clean, white, almost entirely sterile-looking room; the kind of room that was instantly recognisable as a hospital room, a fact that the wires attached to his body by small round pads and linked to a machine beeping quietly next to him only served to reinforce.

  I’m in a hospital?!

  The man broke out in a cold sweat as the weight of that sudden realisation hit home.

  Why am I here? Has something happened to me? Have I done something wrong?

  Those first three thoughts flashed through his head almost as one, but as he tried to search for the answers, he found that there was nothing in his mind, his memories, to help him. Even more disconcertingly, he soon realised he remembered nothing whatsoever—he didn’t even know who he was.

  The machines next to him were beeping furiously, mi
rroring the frenetic beating of his heart, which was aching inside his chest, threatening to explode and consume his whole body.

  But just when he thought he couldn’t possibly take any more, the chest pain suddenly stopped, disappearing as if it had never been; a split second later, however, it was replaced by a searing, blinding pain in his head that instantly pushed him over the edge and down into an abyss of agony. His first instinct was to clutch at his head with his hands, to try to squeeze the torment out into the open, where he could see it, know it and put an end to it. Yet, try as he might, he couldn't move his arms; it was like they were rooted to his sides on the mattress.

  Panic flared within him once more, but his mind—despite the battering it was taking—was sufficiently able to grasp that something was deeply amiss. That realisation didn’t help with the pain, however, and with no other recourse open to him, the man closed his eyes, opened his mouth and screamed with rage at the agony that seemed as though it would never end.

  Through the mists of pain sweeping through his tortured mind, the man felt a vibration in the air around him, as though something, someone, was responding to his tearful pleas to end his misery.

  “Hold him down. Stop him convulsing.”

  The voice had come from nowhere—but nowhere could very well have been anywhere, for the man, with his eyes firmly screwed shut, had no sense of his surroundings. The pain, continuing unabated, was now all consuming, eating him like fire greedily devouring dry wood.

  “Shall I inject him?”

  “What do you think, dammit?! Of course you should inject him!”

  The voices made little sense to the man, blind and adrift in his personal hell as he was, but the urgency and despair in their tones got through to him, and he had a feeling that he was already beyond their reach. With his eyes shut, the darkness was all that the man could otherwise sense, though beyond the darkness he knew that the nothingness was waiting for him once more, ready and willing to envelop everything—and ultimately smother the life out of him.

  “Increase the dosage.”

  “How much?”

  “I’m not sure… maybe double.”

  The man was content to wait for the nothingness, for with it would surely come the end to his intolerable pain. He knew he was still screaming as loud as he could; he knew his body was still jerking side to side with as much vigour and as much fight as he had left in him—but within himself, he was now ready for the end. Within himself, he could wait for the comfort and peace the emptiness would give him.

  But the nothingness, his one hope of salvation, never came.

  The agony intensified, ravaging his mind to the point where every sense felt like it was on fire, but just as it reached its zenith, the pain began to fade away; soon, the man was left devoid of all feeling.

  Time passed slowly, but finally a sense of self and his surroundings began to coalesce within his mind.

  A chink of light, gradually widening and expanding, raced across his field of vision as the man slowly, cautiously, opened his eyes. Before, when he had first woken up, a strong light had turned everything white, washing away all colours; now, he could see that the source was nothing more than a dimmed overhead light. It puzzled him a little, for he had expected the same strong light from before to be present again. As his eyes adjusted to the gloom, he realised that the absence of light wasn’t the only difference in his surroundings. His hearing, if he had focussed on that sense initially, could have told him that much without the need to open his eyes, for with a cacophony of sounds reverberating all around him, it was clear that he was no longer alone.

  Or in the same room, he thought with a stab of alarm.

  Turning his head, albeit with some difficulty, he stared down the length of the long room, letting his eyes seek out the causes of all the unfamiliar noise. Down both sides were dozens upon dozens of beds, similar to the one he now realised he was lying upon, and on many of those beds, lying comatose like slabs of cold meat, were people like him.

  But not entirely like me, he thought, for these people—men and women alike—were bald, and though he had no memory of what he looked like, the man felt sure he had hair.

  The unfamiliar sounds were of greater interest, however, and he didn’t have to look far to find their source. Three women—nurses, he assumed—were talking loudly while they clipped at speed down the aisle between the beds, blithely unaware of the distress they were causing with the dual torment of their echoing voices and clattering footsteps.

  To the man’s dismay, one of the nurses noticed him looking in their direction as they approached; a second later, all eyes had turned his way.

  Like a three-headed hydra, the nurses stopped as one at the foot of the man’s bed and smiled in unison, baring their teeth, which glinted malevolently even in the dim light.

  “How are you feeling?” asked one, though the man couldn’t tell exactly which one—their heads seemed to interchange without their bodies moving.

  He didn’t answer her, them, whoever it was, and instead his head drifted from one side of the pillow to the other, letting his eyes wander slowly, painfully, over their nauseating faces. Their smiles, as he had hoped, began to slip away.

  “Is his hearing...?”

  “He doesn’t seem responsive, does he?”

  One of the nurses, the elder of the three, reached down and picked up a clipboard from the foot of the bed. “A side effect of the medication, possibly,” she said quietly, though he could hear her clearly enough from the other end of the bed.

  “At least he’s awake now, though,” said one of the other two.

  “The doctor will want to see him in the morning, then,” said the older nurse, as she slipped the clipboard back into place. “I’ll let him know.”

  The man rolled his head away and closed his eyes, hoping that the nurses—the hydra—would take the hint and leave. His hearing was fine—perfect, in fact—but he had no desire to hear more. The darkness was waiting, just as it had been before, just as it always seemed to be from what little his memory could tell him; its presence, now more than ever, was his only source of comfort.

  Time passed again, slowly like before, and as each moment gradually slipped by, the nurses’ voices faded away, vanishing into the nothingness that was once again creeping over his mind.

  ***

  The man glared at the red, puffy, old face watching him with curiosity from the chair next to the bed. He ran his fingers slowly over his head; again, he felt the deep rut in the skin that, until a moment earlier, he hadn’t known was there.

  “The surgery was complicated, fraught with danger and took significantly longer than we expected,” said the puffy-faced man. “The scar is healing but, as I’m sure you can feel, it’s still quite raw at the moment. In time, however, the swelling around the incision will lessen and it should all knit together quite wonderfully. You’d be surprised how neat the end result can often look on other patients.”

  The man was indeed surprised, but only because he was still coming to terms with the fact that this man, a doctor, his surgeon, had cut his head open; he didn’t have the capacity at that moment for anything else to surprise him.

  “Now, as I explained previously, though it would appear that you may now be unable to recall it, the rehabilitation for such a procedure will require a great deal of time and, accordingly, a great deal of patience on your part.”

  The man looked blankly at the doctor.

  “Naturally, Nurse Bouchet and I will endeavour to speed up the recovery process, but I should add—for I think it pertinent—that the journey back to full health, both mental and physical, will be arduous and, at times, quite frustrating for you.”

  The man glanced at the woman standing next to his surgeon; she was part of the hydra, the elder of the three heads, who had briefly visited him during the night. The cold smile she gave him by way of acknowledgement filled him with dread.

  “Now, I would like to conduct a few tests, if you have no objectio
ns?” the doctor asked, though it came across as more of a statement of intention rather than a question as such.

  The man chose to respond with silence and a disinterest that mirrored the nurse’s demeanour.

  “I shall assume you have no objection, then,” said the doctor, giving the man a thin smile. “To begin with, I would like to test some basic verbal skills, if I may?”

  Again, the question seemed more like a statement of intention. This time, however, the man opted to respond with a barely perceptible nod.

  “Very well,” said the old surgeon, his smile widening and revealing his top row of teeth. “Nurse Bouchet, if you would be kind enough to hand me the cue cards.”

  The nurse bent down out of sight behind the doctor’s back. She reappeared a moment later, clutching a deck of large square cards, each backed with white plastic.

  “Thank you,” the doctor said with a curt nod, as she placed the deck into his waiting hands. “Now, what have we here, then, eh?”

  The man could scarcely contain his excitement. With a look that bordered on outright disdain, he watched as the older man shuffled the cards for a moment before placing the deck on the bed.

  The doctor poised a liver-spotted hand over the topmost card. “This test is quite simple, I think,” he said, looking up. He sniffed sharply, as though something had irritated his nose, and then smiled at the man. “Basically, I will show you a card and then I want you to tell me the word you most associate with what you see. Sound fair enough to you?”

  The man nodded slowly.

  “Excellent.” The doctor sniffed again as his eyes dropped to the hand that was picking up the top card from the pile. He lifted the card into the air, keeping the shiny white side facing the man, and then, after a quick glance, turned it round with something of a flourish.

  The man’s eyes moved slowly up and down the card; then he lifted his gaze up onto the surgeon’s face and homed in on the dark, narrow eyes watching him expectantly. The man said nothing.