Mike Carey - Vicious Circle

‘I’m telling you all I know,’ I snarled, finding it hard to talk with my head tilted back so sharply.

‘We’ll see,’ said Gwillam tersely. He tore the bubble-wrap open, loaded the syringe with the snap-in ampoule and pumped it lightly, sending a thin jet of fluid spraying from its tip. ‘Hold him steady,’ he warned Sallis, bending back over the doctor bag for a moment so that I lost sight of him. ‘If this goes into his carotid artery it will probably kill him.’

That was bad news, whichever way you looked at it. But even if I survived this, it was obvious that Gwillam was about to shoot me full of some thiopental derivative to ensure a fuller and franker discussion. Was there anything I could do to stop him? I couldn’t think of a damn thing.

What did I know about truth serums? Only what I’d picked up from reading cheap spy thrillers, but that was enough to know that they didn’t work. They were just disinhibitors, cutting the brake cables of your subconscious so that you freewheeled endlessly, gabbling on about whatever came into your head. People injected with propofol or pentathol couldn’t consciously lie, but they could and did talk a load of free-associative shite. That was why truth drugs didn’t turn up much any more even in cheap spy thrillers.

On the other hand, did I want to free-associate in front of Gwillam about Asmodeus and Abbie and Juliet and Saint Michael’s church? No, I didn’t. This was definitely a good time to be keeping my thoughts to myself.

And just then, another bit of trivia that I didn’t even know I knew popped up out of nowhere. I suddenly remembered what class of drugs the truth serums belonged to – and it gave me the bare bones of an idea: thin and pathetic but marginally better than nothing. No harm in trying, anyway: the only downside was that if it didn’t work, I might never wake up. I started to breathe fast and deep, forcing air into my lungs.

‘Would it be better if he was unconscious?’ Sallis asked, with what from my point of view sounded like an indecent amount of enthusiasm.

‘Hardly,’ Gwillam snapped. ‘How will he be able to answer any questions if you’ve put your fist through his skull?’

He loomed back into my field of vision, the needle raised in his hand.

‘Gwillam!’ I growled, still breathing in fast, forced gasps. I must have looked like I was starting a full-fledged panic attack.

Gwillam hesitated. ‘What?’ he asked.

‘I’m allergic.’

‘Allergic to what, exactly?’ Gwillam asked, his tone dangerously mild.

There could be any of twenty different drugs in the syringe. All I could do was guess.

‘Propofol,’ I said.

Gwillam shrugged. ‘Then you can relax,’ he said. ‘This is something different.’

The needle came down towards my neck. I twisted suddenly in Sallis’s hands, and Gwillam stopped: he didn’t want to kill me – or at least, not until he’d asked the rest of his questions. ‘Hold him steady,’ he rasped. Sallis threw one arm around my neck and leaned in hard against me to restrict my movement as much as he could.

All of this was just playing for time while I drew as many breaths as I could, working my lungs like bellows until the actual moment when the tip of the needle slid into my skin and Gwillam’s thumb pushed home the plunger.

A red curtain fell across my mind. A black one followed, half a second later. But they weren’t curtains at all, they were solid walls, and I crashed into unconsciousness so fast and hard that I actually felt the impact.

I woke up slowly and painfully, bleeding fragments of thought running together like mercury and pooling like ultra-cold lakes in the fractal wastelands of my cerebellum.

The ‘I’ came first, but there was nothing to join it to. Just I. What I? Where I? Who the fuck cared? It couldn’t matter. Whoever he was, let the bastard wait. There was pain going on somewhere nearby and I wanted to lie low so that it didn’t find me.

A minute or an hour later, an ‘am’ trickled down from somewhere and attached itself to the ‘I’. I am. I therefore think.

It was me, again, bubbling up from under the chemical sludge of anaesthesia whether I liked it or not; being harshly, achingly reborn in a dark, cold room which seemed to be hanging at an angle. But no, that was me. I was lying skewed, my cheek pressed against the floor, my legs canted up into the air. I couldn’t figure it out so I let it go.

I was still alive, anyway. And I was still thinking. Any brain damage? How would I tell? If you’ve lost enough of your brain function to make a difference, you’ve probably lost the ability to see it as a problem. Maybe the terrific throbbing inside my skull was a good sign: there had to be a lot of nerves in there still doing their jobs.

Truth serums are general anaesthetics. They’re the primary inducers that you’re given to kick your conscious mind away into the long grass so that your body can be cut and spliced and sewn without any kickback from your cerebellum. By hyperventilating, I’d tried to make sure that I got as big and fast a hit as the dose in Gwillam’s syringe could provide. I’d been hoping that I’d go straight past the rambling stage into full unconsciousness. It might even have worked: I didn’t have any memory of talking, anyway. But maybe a hole in your memory was normal with these things.

I opened my eyes, but there was nothing to see. Either I’d been struck with hysterical blindness or I was in an absolutely dark space. I tried to move, and couldn’t. I could lift my head, just, but that turned out to be a mistake because it made the throbbing worse. I opened my mouth to swear and discovered that my tongue was glued to my dry palate.

Belatedly I remembered that I’d been tied to a chair. It seemed that I still was, but that the chair was now lying on its side on the ground. That explained the weird position I was in and the fact that I couldn’t move.

Son of a bitch! Didn’t the Vatican ever sign the Geneva Convention? They’d just wheeled or dragged the chair, with me bound to it, over to some cupboard and pushed it inside so hard or so clumsily that it had fallen over. That was no way to treat a prisoner.

As the pain gradually subsided, I worked at the ropes. They felt pretty loose: the original intention had just been to stop me moving while Gwillam interrogated me, not to keep me a prisoner for ever. Consequently Sallis and Zucker hadn’t bothered to check whether the knots were within reach of my fingers.

All the same, it took me a long time – I guessed more than an hour – to get my hands free. By that time, my fingers were so sore and abraded from the stiff sisal fibres that I had to rest up for a while before I started on my legs. Getting them free was much faster, but it took a good ten minutes of massaging life back into them before I could stand.

Okay, so I was free. But where the hell was I? I set out from the chair in tiny, inching steps, my arms straight out ahead of me, until I found a wall. Then I worked my way along it to the corner. This was no cupboard, obviously: it was a fair-sized room, although the roughcast feel of the walls still suggested a storage area of some kind rather than a public space.

I was intending to circumnavigate the room, but a little way along the second wall I found a door – and then its very welcome neighbour, a light switch. I turned it on with a silent prayer, and three strip lights flickered into life over my head, leaving me blinking in a harsh white radiance.

I’d guessed right: this was a storeroom, high-ceilinged, with deep shelves running the entire length of the far wall. They were all empty, though, except for a few circular drums about a foot and a half in diameter, which were presumably old movie reels. When the standing exhibition went walkabout, they must have taken pretty much everything that wasn’t nailed down. Either that or Gwillam had ordered the room cleared to make sure I didn’t find anything that might help me escape.