Nicholas Royle - Regicide

I stared into his eyes, searching for a sign that he was telling the truth.

‘Now go,’ he said, withdrawing his arms and curling up on the bed.

‘Gledhill.’ It was my turn to grab hold of him. ‘How do I get there?’ I hissed.

He turned and lay on his back again. ‘Go out of the Secure Unit and turn immediately left, then left again and you won’t be far away.’

There was a sound behind me. Footsteps coming our way. Gledhill tensed and his head whipped around to watch the corner of the wall. I saw terror in his eyes and as I crawled around the back of his bed to hide I understood why they didn’t need to put locks on his door. The man had been so profoundly frightened by something — whatever he saw in the Dark perhaps — that he no longer had the nerve to turn a simple corner.

A thin man in a white coat appeared. He had unruly eyebrows and wore glasses that were lopsided on his squashed face due to their missing arm. He reminded me of someone but I couldn’t think who. I felt sick with fear and a growing sense of paranoia that I hadn’t wanted to acknowledge. White Coat asked Gledhill if he was all right; he had heard voices.

‘Dreams,’ said Gledhill. ‘I was having dreams.’

‘Well, keep it down. You’re disturbing the other patients.’

With that he was gone. I stood up and looked at Gledhill. ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘I’ll go now.’ He didn’t speak. I touched his cold hand briefly, which elicited no response, and then I walked around the corner.

The long ward was as before. No sign of White Coat. I walked to the end and, as Gledhill had reluctantly advised, turned left and left again. I was in another long corridor, this time darker and seeming to dip as it went. I shivered and pulled my jacket tighter around me. I could hear something in the distance. Somebody moving furniture around or wheeling heavy trolleys on a resounding surface. Enough to make sweat bead on my forehead.

I reached a door with a small window. I looked into a white-shining lab. There was noise. People moving around, talking, rattling metal and glass things in sinks, but I couldn’t see anyone, not even shadows. Then, I saw White Coat pass right by the little window. He was inches from me and would have seen me if he hadn’t been looking down at something he was carrying. I didn’t see what it was because I’d bobbed down out of sight. He must have been standing at the workbench just to the right of the door. I heard him walk back past the door and I moved away down the corridor. Only ten yards away the corridor came to an end. To the left was a fire-exit door with a push bar. Outside was a dark, empty courtyard. I had only to go through that door and I’d be out of immediate danger. Possibly there’d be a quick escape route out of the grounds. But Gledhill had put the idea in my head that somewhere down this corridor I’d find my way into the Dark. The fire exit didn’t look that significant. I followed the corridor around to the right. A little way up was another door. I stepped through into a warm, stale, reeking ward and my flesh started to crawl.

The ward probably connected with White Coat’s lab by an interconnecting door in the far right hand corner. I went the other way, towards the beds and the tiny muttering, chattering forms that moved under the blankets.

A bitter film coated the inside of my mouth. As I got nearer to the beds the noise of one pathetically abnormal voice chanting rose above all the other sounds: ‘Two three, Two three… Two three, two three…’

I realised who White Coat reminded me of and stopped in the middle of the ward, too frightened to go on, too far committed to go back.

‘Two three, two three…’

I started walking again, sweat running down my back, sticking my shirt to my skin.

‘Two three, two three. Two three, two three.’

There were at least a dozen beds. All the occupants were small children and all of them were strapped into place with leather restraints. They shifted their little bodies about but despite apparent strength could not loosen the straps. Their heads moved freely, swivelling at the neck. I wanted to free them but was too scared to attempt to do so. They had been strapped down for a reason, after all. The bed I was approaching was the first one on the left hand side of the ward.

‘Two three, Two three.’

The boy’s head, twisting from side to side on the bolster, was covered in a fine layer of dark brown hair. It was lighter under the eyes and around the mouth, where the pink skin showed through more clearly. His small ears were flattened against the side of his head and he had no lips. His eyes were very nearly those of a healthy, normal boy. There was intelligence in them but it was in their accentuated roundedness that you could see most clearly the canine influence. In the eyes and the mouth, which jutted subtly like a sculptor’s failed attempt at a snout.

The child was trying to count. But because of his deformed mouth he couldn’t manage to round the ‘O’ to say one and the lack of lips prevented him pronouncing four . So he went no further than two three .

This was what I was thinking as I watched him, my throat constricted by a lump, my stomach tying itself in knots. Anything to occupy the mind while I beheld the atrocity. It turned out I was wrong. As I backed away I saw the clipboard hooked on the end of the bed. The chart was headed with the patient’s number: 2323.

The boy was proclaiming his identity. He wanted people to know who he was. I wondered what kind of awareness he had of what he was.

The other beds held little boys — and two girls — all in different stages of development. Some appeared to have more dog in them than others. 2323 was one of the most human-looking. None of the others spoke their number like 2323. Some uttered gibberish, a few could only manage certain vowel sounds. Others barked and yelped.

I stood over the first boy’s bed. His head whipped from side to side like a metronome. With shaking fingers I reached forward and drew the sheet back an inch or two. There were straps under the covers as well. One chafed at his neck. It was red and sore. I couldn’t bear it any longer. When I looked into his eyes it was like meeting the stare of the bed-ridden man in the flashlit, blood-stained house — the man who looked like me.

‘Two three, two three.’

The Thin Controller had always spoken a call-sign twice. I was always Two Three, Two Three , never just Two Three .

The head beat hard against the pillow. A thread of saliva flew out of his mouth. And he kept on repeating his number, his name. I reached under the covers and undid the buckle on his leather neck restraint. His head shot upwards, checked again by straps lower down, and it jerked violently from side to side.

I heard a noise and whirled around. The ward behind me had become as dark as a forest in the thick of night, impenetrable. I turned back to the poor twisting creature in the bed but he’d gone too. Where his bed had been there was just blackness. Vivid colours flashed in my head and formed into tiny fish swimming in the night’s endless sea. They darted one way then shimmied back on themselves in a vast shoal and vanished. In turn I felt giddy, sick, weightless and afraid. Helpless and very small. Alone, completely alone in the night.

I went with my mother and father to visit relatives on the coast. I called them Uncle Billy and Auntie Nan but in actual fact they weren’t family. Uncle Billy had worked with my father’s uncle on the fishing boats and Billy and Nan had become such close family friends that they were always Aunt and Uncle to me.

They kept a dog.

We were sitting in the front room having a cup of tea and some fruit shortcake biscuits, my mother and father talking animatedly with Uncle Billy and Auntie Nan while I sat back on the settee eyeing the white Staffordshire bull terrier. I wouldn’t have stared, only it was looking right at me and I was scared to look away. I imagined it coming for me, snapping and biting, and the four of them just carrying on their conversation. Or they’d turn and laugh, thinking the dog was playing with me. Uncle Billy wouldn’t call the dog off until it had drawn my blood.