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A short story I might be entering for a competition, so please criticize it as much as you can. If you also read St Valentine's Sweethearts you might recognise a couple of names in here, but the two stories are unrelated. I just felt like using the names again.
The patient stirred his limbs sluggishly, moving his fingers slowly as if in they were sliding through thick mud and then gradually curling them into a weak fist. His eyes rolled around loosely beneath the thin membrane of his eyelids. Then, quite suddenly, the eyes flew open, the dilated pupils cringing to the size of a pinhead underneath the sudden strong light and then widening again in terror. The weak fist was suddenly clenched so tightly that the bone of the knuckles glowed palely through his skin, and as he gathered his strength and attempted to bring his arm up he found his actions hindered by the thick straps around his wrists.
A needle loomed over the bulging vein in his arm, but at the briefest shake of Doctor Grant’s head the nurse pulled back. The patient relaxed his feeble muscles, but the fear was still present in his eyes. At an instruction given in the form of another barely visible gesture, the nurse exited the room.
‘Well,’ Grant said with a quiet smile. ‘It is good to see you awake. If you can keep yourself calm then perhaps we will be able to reduce the strength of your medication. You’ve been showing some signs of improvement.’ He quickly swept his gaze over the equipment and recorded what he saw in the chart. The patient’s eyes attempted to gain some focus on the doctor, and his mouth moved wordlessly for a few seconds before he remembered how to make sounds.
‘Guh-’ he gurgled. ‘Luh-let…’ He licked his dry lips with a dry tongue. ‘Let … go?’
Grant sighed heavily. ‘The surgery will take place in five days, as planned, Michael,’ he repeated patiently. ‘It has already been discussed and postponed for too long. I’ve asked every other consultant at this institute and they all agree with me. We have excellent facilities here, the best in the country.’ With a rare glow of compassion Grant added, ‘I want to help you, Michael. I want to make you better, so you can lead a normal life.’
But Michael was not convinced. A tear coursed down the curve of his cheekbone and trickled into the whorl of his ear. ‘Please,’ he whispered, his voice stronger now, with an edge of frustration. ‘You’ve got the wrong guy. Let me go home. The rats … for God’s sake, they’re eating me!’ At this last bit his voice broke in terror. He began struggling and yelling, and his cries were echoed by other patients in other rooms, like dogs barking to each other.
Grant called the nurse in again and she quickly sedated the patient again. But even though he fell back into the clutches of drug-induced half-consciousness and his voice faded away to a whisper, the other patients continued to moan and scream. Grant gritted his teeth, composed himself, and swept out of the room so quickly that his white coat fluttered like a cape.
Yes, if you were rich enough, Grant was the man to turn to.
It wasn’t as if you could hand out surgery on street corners, after all.
The institute had state-of-the-art security, and it was nearly as difficult to be admitted as it was to escape. Millionaires and billionaires alike paid for themselves, their spouses or their children to be treated there, and they expected results even if results were not promised. Needless to say there was a lot of pressure on Grant to succeed. Many would crumble under this pressure in five minutes but Grant seemed to revel in it, lapping up people’s expectations like a bee with pollen and meeting them every time.
At a glance, he was a lonely man. He was unmarried and childless, and lived alone. His only real friend was his colleague, Dr Simon Finch, who was accomplished but nowhere near as brilliant as Grant himself. Yet Grant never thought of himself as lonely. He lived with the company of his work and that was all the company he needed.
After Grant had left his patients room he went immediately to Simon’s office to discuss it with him. Simon was sprawled on his couch, his shirt button undone and his tie loose, the sheer cheek of his unkempt appearance a vivid contrast to Grant’s neatness, which he worked hard to perfect every morning.
‘Rats, eh? That’s a new one,’ was his only comment, after Grant had gone through the case and the new developments in painfully precise detail.
‘Yes,’ Grant replied. Logically, Simon’s very nature should aggravate him to the point of insanity, but the younger man never bothered Grant particularly. ‘Eating him, apparently. And I got the distinct impression that if I loosened the restraints just a little he’d have jumped up and throttled me.’
‘Oh, don’t take that personally. Everyone feels that way when they first meet you. You have to wait a while before they see the adorable, fun-loving Cabbage-Patch Doctor that hides under all those books.’
Grant sighed. ‘Hopefully Saturday will go well and there’ll be no more rats.’
As a general rule he did not get close to his patients. Comfort came from the nurses, who were hand-picked from the friendliest trees in the orchard. But something about Michael affected Grant. Perhaps it was because they shared the same name, although Grant doubted that that was it. Michael was a common name and he’d treated plenty of Michaels before. This particular patient was the son of a successful businessman who was deeply embarrassed by his son’s illness and simply wanted it “taken care of”. Perhaps this rejection was what had awakened some form of paternalistic need to care for Michael in a manner that extended beyond the surgery. Whatever it was, it filled Grant with guilt at his lack of professionalism.
Simon thoughtfully toyed with a murky green marble, tossing it from one hand to the other. ‘You know, this rat thing … the psychosomatic responses he’s been having … it sounds incredibly similar to a case I had a couple of years ago. Could I pay him a visit later in the day, when he’s awake again? Just to take notes, I won’t try to change his treatment or anything.’ He laughed. ‘I’d hate to improve on perfection.’
‘Of course,’ Grant replied, eager to help Simon out. He knew his friend was writing up a paper on characteristics of schizophrenic patients and wanted to help out in any way he could. After all, Simon was the only person who reminded Grant that there was a whole world beyond work.
‘Yeah? Where’s Freud when we need him?’
‘Dead and outdated. Would you like to hear about the dream or not?’
‘Was I in it?’
Grant thought, trying to remember. The details of the dream were fading. ‘No, I don’t think so,’ he replied at last.
‘Oh, it sounds boring.’
Grant was surprised. Simon usually lived for the moments when his friend revealed something personal, and would normally have dragged the subject out until he’d scraped every last detail from Grant’s mouth. But he seemed unusually subdued. Grant asked him if anything was wrong.
‘No. I’ve just been having a few bad dreams myself.’ They turned a corner. ‘What the-?’
He lifted his foot, grimacing. It was dripping water from the puddle they were standing in. Grant noticed flecks of rust and algae and other impurities floating in it. Beneath it the clean white linoleum looked grey and ugly. Grant searched for the source of the water and saw that it was rushing out from underneath Michael’s door, with waterfalls spurting out from the gap between the door and the wall.
‘Shit,’ Simon breathed, and without warning he ran for the door, unlocking it as fast as he could.
‘Simon, wait!’ Grant yelled, running forward as the door burst open, a rush of water cascading into the corridor.
Simon turned to look at him, and within seconds he was dead. What looked like a length of metal piping was buried so deeply in the back of his skull that not even Grant could have saved him. Simon reached up to touch the alien object in his cranium, but suddenly crashed to the floor before he even had time to look surprised.
Michael wrenched the piping from the back of Simon’s head and a torrent of blood and mashed grey and purple brain-tissue flooded into the puddle of water. The panicked young patient hurled himself drunkenly towards Grant, his muscles still rubbery and weak from the sedatives, but at that moment security guards seemed to appear from nowhere. Michael was so enraged that they were forced to club him into submission before a nurse could inject him with something that made him collapse just as suddenly as Simon had done.
Blood had soaked through Grant’s shoes and into his socks. He looked at the two bodies – one dead, one unconscious, both bloody. At a glance they were identical. He heard people saying things to him, but he was deaf to them. He blocked them out. All he could think was that something, somewhere, had failed to be perfect, and it had torn his world apart.
‘Water, please, I need water,’ Michael rasped.
Water. Where had the water come from? Where had the piece of piping come from? Michael had been in a padded cell, strapped to the bed, and it would have been impossible for him to break through any of the walls to the water pipes. Besides, the room had been intact when Grant had inspected it later. Which meant the pipe must have come from elsewhere.
But where? The security at St. Valentine’s was so tight that nail-clippers couldn’t get in without being detected, so how had Michael got his hands on a broken pipe? This was what Grant had been quietly asking the young man, without luck. When he responded at all, Michael simply said “up there,” as if the pipe had been presented to him by God.
Grant felt his patience begin to slip. ‘How did you get the weapon, Michael?’ he repeated, and for the first time his emotions at Simon’s death slid unchecked into the usually calm tone of his voice, turning it angry.
‘Please, God, let me go,’ the patient sobbed. The machines beeped wildly, measuring his shallow breaths and his pounding heart. ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, please don’t cut me open.’
‘The operation will take place tomorrow, as planned,’ Grant replied stonily, all compassion gone.
‘No!’ Michael squealed, thrashing his head from side to side. ‘Let me go. Let me go. Let. Me. Go.’ He repeated the mantra over and over again, until it became a chant with a rhythm that matched the frantic beating of his heart. ‘Please, my father … he’ll pay you anything.’
‘He’s already paying for this operation.’
‘Liar! You, sick, twisted freak. You…’ Michael reeled off a list of shocking obscenities, regressing to the rage-filled demon that Grant had encountered when he’d first started treating him. It eventually melded into an incoherent mixture of sobs and half-formed curses.
While Grant knew that Simon’s death was more due to a rare breakdown in security, and that Michael’s condition distorted his view of the world and prevented him from thinking rationally, it did not change the fact that Grant hated the man on the bed in front of him. He had never hated anyone before. It was an unpleasant feeling that turned his stomach and made his heart pound so hard so that he could hear it drumming in his ears. Simon Finch had been Grant’s only friend. Grant attempted to picture the faces of other people in his life and he drew a blank.
He was brought back to reality by a loud clatter. Grant looked at his patient and saw that the eyes were wide, bulging and bloodshot with terror. He was trying very hard to hold Grant’s gaze, as if he desperately did not want Grant to break the contact and see what had fallen on the floor.
Grant looked down.
Simon’s mobile phone lay on the floor, a bloody handprint splayed across the cover as if Michael had been gripping it so hard it had begun to bleed. Grant reached down and picked it up, and traces of Simon’s blood stained his hand. He looked back at Michael. ‘What is this?’ he asked, his voice shaking. ‘How did you get this?’
The fear in Michael’s eyes turned to bitter amusement. ‘They’re coming,’ he spat, and would say no more.
Grant’s hair was covered by a surgical cap and the lower half of his face obscured by a surgical mask. If Michael had been awake the only part of his doctor that he would have been able to see would have been the two eyes, glinting in the half-light like diamonds in the face of a rock.
The walls were cast into a darkness so deep that it was impossible to make out their colour or texture. The distant sound of sirens was just audible, although neither man heard it, and there was a faint smell of fish and saltwater in the air.
Grant leaned forward.
Michael’s eyes suddenly snapped open and he saw metal shining above him. He began to scream.
When Grant came in the room I closed my eyes. I wanted him to think I was still asleep. He’d been drugging me constantly since he’d got me here and when I was awake he would talk to me, and tell me exactly what he was going to do to me on Saturday.
I was in a bad way by this time. The warehouse had been abandoned for a long time. It was so damp and cold that I’d got a fever within days, but this I didn’t mind because the smell of the water reminded me of how close I was to the ocean, and how close I was to the outside world. My wrists were red raw from the rope he’d tied me down with. There were rats in there too. In the beginning I’d only had a few bites, but then they worked out I couldn’t fight them and had stayed behind, chewing on my flesh until all I could hear was their gnawing and my own blood dripping on the floor. I felt hot and angry, and I thought I must have rabies from the bites.
‘Michael,’ Grant hissed. I gave myself away by shivering at the sound of his voice. I told him I wasn’t Michael and I begged him to let me go, I told him once again that my father would pay him however much he wanted, that I wouldn’t tell anyone who he was. Grant politely informed me that I was delusional, and that he was going to increase my medication.
I asked him for water. He never gave me water. Luckily the broken pipe was directly above my head and if I kept my mouth wide open dirty water would sometimes drip in there. But I didn’t like to do this. I was afraid a rat might crawl in and bite off my tongue. The back of my head was caked in dried blood from where Grant had hit me with the pipe that I’d ripped from the ceiling. The pain reminded me of the price of trying to escape, but I hadn’t given up just yet.
Maybe it was the illness, but I was braver today. Almost as brave as I was when I first arrived. ‘You’re a fucking monster,’ I told Grant conversationally, knowing he didn’t listen to what I said.
He was filling a syringe with more drugs. ‘I’m trying to help you Michael,’ he said for about the fifteenth time that day.
‘You’re going to kill me, I know it. I played a guy like you once. In that horror movie, you know?’ I didn’t mention that I had actually enjoyed playing a psychopath in “First Cut.” It might make him think I empathised with him. ‘I killed people in that, and you’re going to kill me on Saturday.’ Every word echoed in this place, as if there were a hundred more “patients” in there.
‘I’m going to cure you on Saturday, Michael. Nurse, can you help me?’ There was no nurse, except in his head. The drugs shot into my bloodstream and everything started to go dark. But just before the welcome relief of unconsciousness, I thought I heard him say my name, or something like it.
‘Atta boy, Grant, ya crazy bastard,’ I yawned.
The story had been on the news for two weeks and anyone with a sense of morbid fascination had been following it hungrily. People talked about it in loud whispers. Headlines howled out the story every day, promising news when all they had were new rumours, new guesses, new “no comments” from the police.
But one man had a lot to say for himself. A retired rockstar went from newsroom to podium to talk-show. He told the story of how, on the way back from the premiere of his new film, his young actor son had been kidnapped, limousine and all, and had not been seen since. It was as if he had simply vanished into thin air.
The actor was extremely handsome and well-loved. He had been born with a fairly mundane name but had changed it to Sy Finch, glamourizing it in much the same manner as he styled his hair and whitened his teeth. He had a whole army of fans, and during the past two weeks various fansites and blogs had been overrun with prayers and pleas. Some had prematurely given him up for dead and their sites had pictures of him with “SY FINCH 1978-2006” written across the top in sad, bold letters. Magazines and radio shows ranted about nothing else. The father spoke out in press conferences, begging for Sy’s kidnappers to release him, or begging Sy to come home to him. “I love my son,” he would proclaim defiantly in every speech.
One night, as Sy’s father sat in his mansion, waiting with the police and a bugged phone for a call demanding ransom money, the phone’s harsh tone suddenly broke the awkward silence. Sy’s father picked it up.
‘Dad?’ There was much sobbing and gasping for breath, broken with small cries of pain. ‘Dad … you’ve got to help me…’
The police eventually traced the call to a warehouse on the coast, 30 miles away. They found the right warehouse and burst in, searching the whole place until they found a small back room. Sy Finch was restrained to a table and was undergoing an amateur transorbital lobotomy.
“Doctor” Mike Grant – the schizophrenic son of Simon Grant, an American billionaire – was arrested on the spot, but not before demanding to know how the policemen had got past security. A week later he was transferred back to St. Valentine’s Psychiatric Hospital: the institute he had vanished from two years previously. Incidentally, his father cut all ties with him, claiming that Mike was not his biological son.
It took a neurosurgeon three hours to remove the ice pick from Sy’s eye socket without damaging his brain. The young actor made a swift recovery and within weeks was telling his story to the world, an eye-patch not entirely concealing the bruising on his face. His army of fans doubled after the publication of his book, which began with the words:
“I knew one of us wasn’t seeing straight in there. But if you’d asked me at the time, I couldn’t have told you who it was.”
END