Douglas Child - Fever Dream

"Her husband lost his apparatus in Desert Storm," Slade said. "Blown off by an IED. I've stepped in to fill the breach, so to speak."

"How nice for you," said Pendergast.

"Go stuff your conventional morality. I don't need it. Anyway, you heard June." The mad sheen to his eyes seemed to fade somewhat, and he looked almost serious. "We're working on a cure."

"You saw what happened to the Doanes. You're a biologist. You know as well as I do there's no hope for a cure. Brain cells cannot be replaced or regrown. The damage is permanent. You know this."

Slade seemed to go off again, his lips moving faster and faster, the hiss of air from his lungs like a punctured tire, repeating the same word, "No! No, no, no, no, no!"

Pendergast watched him, rocking, the snooker balls moving more quickly in his hand, their clacking filling the air. The clock ticked, the smoke curled.

"I couldn't help but notice," Pendergast said, "how everything here was arranged to remove any extraneous sensory trigger. Carpeted floor, insulated walls, neutral colors, plain furnishings, the air cool, dry, and scentless, probably HEPA-filtered."

Slade whimpered, his lips fairly blurring with maniacal, and virtually silent, speech. He lifted the flail, smacked himself.

"And yet even with all that, even with the counterirritant of that flail and the medicines and the constant dosings of morphine, it isn't enough. You are still in constant agony. You feel your feet upon the floor, you feel your back against the chair, you see everything in this room. You hear my voice. You are assaulted by a thousand other things I can't begin to enumerate--because my mind unconsciously filters them out. You, on the other hand, cannot tune it out. Any of it. Listen to the snooker balls! Examine the curling smoke! Hear the relentless passage of time."

Slade began to shake in his chair. "Nononononononoooo!" spilled off his lips, a single never-ending word. A loop of drool descended from one corner of his mouth, and he shook it away with a savage jerk of his head.

"I wonder--what must it be like to eat?" Pendergast went on. "I imagine it's horrible, the strong taste of the food, the sticky texture, the smell and shape of it in your mouth, the slide of it down your gullet... Isn't that why you're so thin? No doubt you haven't enjoyed a meal or a drink-- really enjoyed--for a decade. Taste is just another unwanted sense you can't rid yourself of. I'll wager that IV drip isn't only for the morphine--it's for intravenous feeding as well, isn't it?"

Nonononononononono ... Slade reached spastically for the flail, dropped it back on the desk. The gun trembled in his hand.

"The taste of food--mellow ripe Camembert, beluga caviar, smoked sturgeon, even the humblest eggs and toast and jam--would be unbearable. Perhaps baby food of the most banal sort, without sugar or spice or texture of any kind, served precisely at body temperature, would only just be bearable. On special occasions, naturally." Pendergast shook his head sympathetically. "And you can't sleep--can you? Not with all those raging sensations crowding in on you. I can imagine it: lying on the bed, hearing the least of noises: the woodworms gnawing between the lathe and plaster, the beat of your heart in your eardrums, the ticking of the house, the scurry of mice. Even with your eyes closed your sight betrays you, because darkness is its own color. The blacker the room, the more things you see crawling within the fluid of your vision. And everything-- everything --pressing in on you at once, always and forever."

Slade shrieked, covering his ears with claw-like hands and shaking his entire body violently, the IV drip line flailing back and forth. The sound ripped through the stillness, shockingly loud, and Slade's entire body seemed to convulse.

"That is why you will kill yourself, Mr. Slade," Pendergast said. "Because you can . I've provided you with the means to do it. In your hand."

"Yaaahhhhhhhhh!" Slade screamed, writhing, the tortured movements of his body a kind of feedback from his own screams.

Pendergast rocked more quickly, the chair creaking, rolling the balls ceaselessly in his hand, faster and faster.

"I could have done it anytime!" Slade cried. "Why should I do it now? Now, now, now, now, now ?"

"You couldn't have done it before," Pendergast said.

"June has a gun," Slade said. "A lovely gun, gun, gun."

"No doubt she is careful to keep it locked up."

"I could overdose on morphine! Just go to sleep, sleep !" His voice subsided into a rapid gibbering, almost like the humming of a machine.

Pendergast shook his head. "I'm sure June is equally careful to regulate the amount of morphine you have access to. I would guess the nights are hardest--like about now, as you're quickly using up your allotted dose without recourse for the endless, endless night ahead."

"Eeeyaaahhhhhhhhhh!" Slade screamed again--a wild, ululating scream.

"In fact, I'm sure she and her husband are careful to limit your life in countless ways. You're not her patient--you're her prisoner ."

Slade shook his head, his mouth working frantically, soundlessly.

"And with all her ministrations," Pendergast went on, "all her medication, her perhaps more exotic means of holding your attention--she can't stop all those sensations from creeping in. Can she?"

Slade didn't respond. He pressed the morphine button once, twice, three times, but apparently nothing more was coming through. Then he slumped forward, head hitting the felt of the desk with a loud crack, jerked it back up, his lips contracting spastically.

"Usually I consider suicide a cowardly way out," Pendergast said. "But in your case it's the only sensible solution. Because for you, life really is so much infinitely worse than death."

Still, Slade didn't respond. He banged his head again and again onto the felt.

"Even the least amount of sensory input is exquisitely painful," Pendergast went on. "That's why this environment of yours is so controlled, so minimalist. Yet I have introduced new elements. My voice, the smell of the charcoal, the curls and colors of its smoke, the squeaking of the chair, the sound of the billiard balls, the ticking of the clock. I would estimate you are now a vessel that is, so to speak, full to bursting."

He continued, his voice low and mesmerizing. "In less than half a minute now, the cuckoo of that clock is going to sound--twelve times. The vessel will burst. I don't know exactly how many of the cuckoo calls you'll be able to withstand before you use that gun on yourself. Perhaps four, perhaps five, perhaps even six. But I know that you will use it--because the sound of that gun firing, that final sound, is the only answer. The only release. Consider it my gift to you."

Slade looked up. His forehead was red from where it had impacted the table, and his eyes wheeled in his head as if set free of each other. He raised his gun hand toward Pendergast, let it fall back, raised it again.

"Good-bye, Dr. Slade," Pendergast said. "Just a few seconds now. Let me help count them down for you. Five, four, three, two, one..."

78

HAYWARD WAITED, PERCHED ON A GURNEY, in the gleaming room full of medical equipment. The other occupants of the large space--June Brodie and her silent husband--stood like statues by the far wall, listening, waiting. Occasionally a voice would sound--a cry of rage or despair, a strange gibbering laugh--but they drifted only faintly through the thick, apparently soundproofed walls.