The second thing is what happened after I regained consciousness.
I woke flat out in a gurney, a trolley bed. It was dark; only a couple of soft glows from night-lights illuminated a large space the size of the day room at the end of my own corridor, maybe bigger. The ceiling looked higher than in my room or the day room. I felt groggy and sleepy but in no pain, unharmed. I tried to shift a little, but either the sheets were very tight or I had temporarily lost a lot of strength – I was too groggy to tell which – and I had to remain lying flat out. Listening carefully, I could hear gentle snores.
I turned my head to one side, then the other. I was at one end of a large open ward, the kind of thing you see in old photographs, or poor countries. My trolley was at the end of a line of beds, lying conveniently near the set of half-glazed double doors. On the other side of the room, beneath tall windows, was another line of beds. To see more, I tried again to raise my upper torso, attempting to bring my arms up so that I could support myself on my elbows, but without success.
Whatever sense we possess that informs us of such matters was busy informing me that I was not exhausted or hopelessly weakened; my muscles were working normally and were simply being physically prevented from accomplishing their allotted tasks. Something was stopping me from moving. I forced my head up as far as I could, to the point where my neck muscles were quivering, and realised, as I looked down the length of the sheet covering my body, that I was strapped in.
Strapped in! I felt a moment of panic and struggled to release myself. There were four straps: one across my shoulders, another over my belly, pinning my arms to my flanks, a third securing my legs at my knees and a fourth gripping my ankles. None of them seemed prepared to release me by as much as a millimetre. What if there was a fire? What if my attacker from the other night came back to find me helpless? How dare they do this to me? I had never been violent! Never! Had I? Of course, obviously, yes, ha, I had been extremely violent in my earlier life as a famously inventive ultra-assassin, but that was a long time ago and far far away and in another set of bodies entirely. Since I’d been here I had been a lamb, a mouse, a non-goose-booing paragon of matchless docility! How dare they truss me like a psychopathic lunatic!
All my struggles were to no effect. I was still tied tightly to the bed. The straps were as tight as they had been when I’d started and all I’d done was raise my heart rate, make myself very hot and sweaty and half exhaust myself.
At least, I thought, as I tried in vain to find any sort of seam or opening or purchase with my wriggling fingers, if the person who had tried to interfere with me in my room the night before did discover me lying helpless here they would be faced with the same problem of absurdly tight sheets as I was. I had to hope that it would be as impossible to squeeze a stealthily insinuating hand into the bed as my hands were finding it going in the opposite direction.
Nevertheless, I was still terrified. What if there was a fire? I’d roast or bake or burn to death. Smoke inhalation would be a mercy. But what if my attacker did return? Perhaps they couldn’t get a hand under my sheets without undoing me, but they could do anything else they wanted. They could suffocate me. Tape my mouth, pinch my nose. They could perform any unspeakable act they wanted upon my face. Or they might be able to undo the bedclothes at the foot of my bed and gain access to my feet. There were torturers who worked on nothing but feet, I’d heard. Just being severely beaten on the feet was allegedly excruciating.
I continued to try to free my feet, and to work my hands towards the sides of the bed where it might be possible to find some weakness in the confining sheets and straps. The muscles in my hands, forearms, feet and lower legs were starting to complain and even go into cramp.
I decided to rest for a while.
Sweat was running off me and I had a terribly itchy nose that I could not scratch or move my head enough to relieve against any part of the sheets. I looked around as best I could. There must have been two dozen people in there at least. Still not much detail visible, just dark shapes, lumps in the beds. Some were snoring, but not very loudly. I could just shout, I thought. Perhaps one of these sleepers would wake, arise and come to my aid. I looked at the bed next to mine, about a metre away. The sleeper appeared to be quite fat and to have his – her? – head turned away from me, but at least there were no straps securing them to their bed.
I was surprised that my struggles to free myself hadn’t woken anybody up. I must have been quiet, I supposed. There was a funny smell in the ward, I thought. That terrified me too for a moment or so. What if it was burning? Electrical burning! A mattress burning! But, when I thought about it, it wasn’t a burning smell. Not very pleasant, but not the smell of burning. Perhaps one of the people in the ward had had a little night-time accident.
I could shout. I cleared my throat quietly. Yes, no problem there; everything felt like it was working normally. And yet I was reluctant to shout out. What if one of these people was the person who had attempted to assault me? Even if that wasn’t the case, what if one of them was of a similar proclivity? Probably not, of course. Anyone dangerous would be in their own room, wouldn’t they? They’d be locked away, or at least restrained as I had been, erroneously and absurdly.
Still, I was reluctant to shout out.
One of the other patients in the ward made a grunting noise, like an animal. Another one seemed to answer. That smell wafted over me again.
An appalling thought insinuated its way into my mind. What if these were not people at all? What if they were animals? That would account for the lumpen misshapenness of so many of the shapes I could see, for the smell, for all the grunting sounds they were making.
Of course, over all the time I had been here, there had been no hint that the clinic was anything other than a perfectly respectable and humanely run establishment with impeccable medical and caring procedures. I had no reason beyond whatever my highly constrained senses could supply to my already terrified mind and feverishly overactive imagination to believe that I was in anything other than a ward full of ordinary patients, asleep. Nevertheless, when a person has a completely bizarre experience, faints, and then finds themself strapped helpless to a bed in an unknown room full of strangers, at night, it should come as no surprise that they start to imagine the worst.
The corpulent figure looming dimly in the bed next to mine, from whom it now occurred to me there was a good chance that the strange smell had been coming – as well as some of the grunting noises – made motions as though they might be about to turn over, bringing them face to face with me.
I heard myself make a noise, a sort of yelp of fear. The thing in the bed stopped moving for a moment, as though having heard me, or waking up. I decided I might as well make more noise. “Hello?” I said loudly. With a tone of authority, I trusted.
No reaction. “Hello?” I said again, raising my voice somewhat. Still nothing. “Hello!” I said, almost shouting now. A few snores, but the shape in the bed next to mine made no further move. “Hello!” I shouted. Not a soul stirred. “HELLO!”
Then, slowly, the shape in the next bed started to turn round towards me again.
Suddenly, a noise outside, on my other side, forcing me to look in that direction. There was a shape advancing on the barely lit glass of the half-glazed doors as someone or something came down the corridor. A figure, backlit, and then the doors swung open and a male nurse padded in, humming softly to himself, walked up to my gurney and looked, squinting, for a moment at the notes attached to the footboard. I took advantage of the slightly increased light and looked briefly round at the man in the nearby bed. I saw a dark, fat but entirely human face with a week’s worth of beard. Asleep, dumb-looking, mouth and facial muscles slack. He snored. I looked back and saw the young male nurse stepping on the wheel brakes, releasing them.
He wheeled me out into the corridor and let the double doors swing closed themselves, seemingly careless of the noise. He unclipped my notes from the end of the trolley and held them u
p to the light. He shrugged, replaced them and started pushing me up the corridor, whistling now.
He must have seen me looking at him because he winked at me and said, “You awake Mr Kel? You should be asleep. Well, don’t (I didn’t understand this middle bit) out of those and into bed. I don’t know why (something something).” He sounded friendly, reassuring. I suspected he was surprised that I’d been trussed up like that in the first place. “Don’t know why they put you in there with the…” I didn’t get the last word, but the way he said it it probably meant something mildly insulting, one of those snappy, honest but potentially shocking terms that medical people use amongst themselves that are not supposed to be for public consumption.
We went up in the big rattly lift. It always went very slowly and he started undoing the straps pinning me to the bed while we made the ascent. Then he wheeled me along to my room, released me from the trolley and helped me into bed. He wished me night-night and I wanted to cry.
The next day, the young mousy-haired lady doctor visited me and asked me questions about what had happened two nights before. I did not understand everything she said but I tried to answer as fully as I could. No insulting dolls nonsense this time, for which I ought to have been grateful, I supposed. No apology or explanation regarding my being strapped to the trolley in a strange ward for the first part of the previous night, either, mind you. I wanted to ask her why that had been done, what was going on, what was being done to identify the perpetrator and what was being done to prevent them trying to interfere with me again. But I lacked the vocabulary to express exactly what I wanted to say, and anyway felt shy in front of the delicate young lady doctor. I should have been able to deal with this sort of thing myself. There was no need to trouble her and risk either of us being embarrassed.
The day passed. I sat up in bed or sat in my chair, mostly, thinking, eyes shut. The more I thought about it, the more I felt there had been something odd about that ward downstairs.
The atmosphere was too placid. The man who turned over to face me looked too out of it. Could they all be sedated? I supposed they might be. Problem patients often are – the chemical equivalent of the restraining straps I was unjustly subjected to. Perhaps the place would have been in uproar if they hadn’t all been given sedatives.
And yet it seemed to me more than that. There was something about the place, something almost familiar that woke a half or a quarter or a smaller fraction of a whole memory in me, something that might be important, one day if not now. Was it just the feel of the place, the atmosphere (I feel there ought to be another word, but it eludes me)? Or was it some detail I noticed subconsciously but which slipped past my attentive mental processes?
I resolved to investigate. I was aware that I had resolved the day or the night before to investigate the matter of my attempted assaulter, to ask questions of the staff and the slack-jaws in the day room, but had not done so. However, I decided that perhaps it was all best forgotten about and that so long as it did not happen again we’d say no more about it. It wasn’t worth granting the fellow the attention. The mystery of the very quiet people and the silent ward: that seemed more important somehow, more serious. That definitely did deserve a degree of scrutiny. I would take a look down there tonight.
I opened my eyes. I ought to go now. In daylight. The silent ward would tell me more in waking hours than it might at night when everybody was meant to be sleeping anyway.
I got out of bed, donned slippers and dressing gown and made my way down the corridor to the stairwell and the corridor below. The cleaners were washing the floor and shouted at me from near the doors to the silent ward. Mostly from the pointing, I gathered that I mustn’t walk on their still-wet floor.
I tried again in the later afternoon and got as far as the doors of the silent ward itself before I was turned back by a nurse. The glimpse I got of the ward through the closing door showed a tranquil scene. Hazy sunshine illuminated sparkling white beds, but nobody sat upright or sat at the side of their beds, and nobody was wandering around. It was, admittedly, a brief glimpse, but I found that very tranquillity disturbing. I retreated a second time, resolved to try again at night.
* * *
I slip out of my bed in the depths of the night and pull on my dressing gown. I feel only a little groggy and fuzzy from my usual post-supper medication; I swallowed just one of the pills and spat the other out later. I am allowed a little torch which I keep in my bedside cabinet. It has no batteries but works by being squeezed, a little flywheel whizzing round with a faint grinding noise to produce a yellow-orange light from the little bulb. I take that.
I also have a little knife that the staff do not know about. I think it is called a paring knife. It was on a tray they brought my lunch on one day, hidden by the underside of the main plate. It has a sharp little blade and a nick out of the dense black plastic which forms the handle. There was some slimy vegetable matter adhering to it when I found it, as though it had not long been used. It must have been misplaced by the kitchen staff, ending up on what happened to become my tray.
My first instinct was to report it, summon a member of staff immediately or just leave it lying obviously on the tray to be picked up and returned to the kitchen or thrown out (that nick on the handle might harbour germs). I don’t really know why I picked it up, cleaned it on my paper napkin and hid it on the little ledge at the back of my bedside cabinet. It just felt right. I am not superstitious, but the appearance of the knife felt like a little present from fate, from the universe, and one that it would be impolite somehow to turn down.
I take that with me too.
My room is not locked. I let myself out and close the door again quietly, looking down the dimly lit corridor to the day room and the nurses’ station. There is a small pool of light there and the faint sound of a radio, playing jingly music. How much more daunting the journey ahead seemed now compared to exactly the same one taken twice in daylight a few hours earlier.
I walk to the stairs, the soles of my slippers making only the quietest of slapping noises. I open and close the door carefully. The stairwell is better lit than the corridor and smells of cleaning fluids. I descend to the ground floor and enter the lower corridor just as silently as I left the one above. Another dim expanse. I approach the two half-glazed doors and the darkness beyond them.
I shut the door behind me. The ward looks just as it did the night before. I approach the fat man lying in the bed nearest the door, the one my trolley had been parked next to. He looks just as he had last night, I think. I walk down past the other beds. They are just ordinary people, all men, a mixture of body shapes and skin colours. All sleeping peacefully.
Something nags at me. Something about the first man I looked at, the fat man near the doors. Perhaps it will become obvious when I look at him again, on my way back out. Near the far end of the ward, I notice that one of the sleeping men has something on his neck. I have to use the torch, shielding it so that it does not shine in his eyes. There is dried blood near his Adam’s apple. Just a little, though, nothing sinister. A shaving nick, I suppose.
Ah. That’s it. I pad back up to the fat man. He has been shaved. He had a week’s worth of beard last night, but now he is clean-shaven. I look back down the ward. They are all clean-shaven. You see men with beards here, and moustaches; there seems to be no particular rule regarding facial hair. Out of over twenty men you’d think at least one or two would have beards. I study the fat man’s slack, smooth face. He has not shaved – or been shaved – very well. There are little tufts of hair here and there, and he has been nicked with the razor too. On impulse I put my hand on his shoulder and shake him gently.
“Excuse me?” I say quietly in the local language. “Hello?”
I shake him again, a little more vigorously this time. He makes a sort of grumbling noise and his eyes flicker. I shake him again. His eyes open fully and he gazes slowly up at me, his expression only a little less vacant. There does not look to be much intelligence in th
ose eyes. “Hello?” I say. “How are you?” I ask, for want of anything better. He looks up at me, seemingly uncomprehending. He blinks a few times. I snap my fingers in front of his eyes. “Hello?” No reaction.
I take out my torch and shine it into his eyes. I have seen the medics do this, I’m sure. He squints and tries to move his head away. His pupils contract very slowly. This means something, though I’m not entirely sure what. I stop squeezing the torch’s handle. It wheezes to silence and the beam fades to darkness. Within seconds the man is snoring again.
I choose another man at random halfway down the ward on the far side and get the same responses. I have just switched the torch off again and he has just fallen back asleep when I hear footsteps in the corridor. I duck down as a figure approaches the doors, then I crouch out of sight as one of the doors starts to open. I crawl underneath the bed, banging my head on a metal strut, and have to make an effort not to cry out. I can hear the person walking down the ward, and I see a soft light flicking on and off. A pair of legs comes into view: white shoes and a skirt. The nurse passes by the bed I am crouched beneath without pausing. I lower my head so that I can watch her. She goes to the far end of the ward, stopping at a couple of beds, flicking her small torch on and off each time. She turns and walks back down the ward, stops at the door for some moments and then leaves, letting one of the doors swing shut against the other without closing it especially quietly.
I wait a few minutes. My heart calms. In fact I become so relaxed I think I might even drift off to sleep for a few moments, but I’m not sure. Then I let myself out. I negotiate the lower corridor and stairwell without being seen but the light is on in my room when I return. The duty nurse for our floor is in my room, frowning as he looks at my notes on the clipboard. “Toilet,” I tell him. He looks unconvinced but helps me back into bed and tucks me in.
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