Nicholas Royle - Regicide

White Coat was getting into his stride. He had never seemed happy with his lot in our world as the Thin Controller. Over here agreed with him. I was going to enjoy dispatching him when the time came.

The grimace slid off his face as the door swung open and a security outfit bustled in. They came to the end of the bed and the goon in charge muttered an exchange with White Coat while Gledhill released my bonds. I stretched, cracking my joints, and stood up.

‘You could have taken my boots off,’ I remarked to Gledhill.

White Coat left the room by the door in the far corner and I barely had time to glance at the faces and dark uniforms of the goon squad before he came back with an upright bed base which he pushed along the floor on castors. There were leather hoops at the four corners of the frame and three broad straps flapping loose across its width. White Coat parked it in the middle of the ward and two of the guards dragged me across. I was strapped in place, my body assuming the X position. What was coming next? Why these elaborate preparations? I felt an uncomfortable piece of apparatus descending over my head and White Coat himself affixed four sets of pincers that were attached to it onto my eyelids to prevent them from closing. Then he signalled to Gledhill, who drew a plastic bottle from his pocket and approached me.

‘No,’ I cried. ‘No, no.’

‘But you don’t know what we’re going to do, King killer,’ White Coat sneered.

One of the soldiers lit a cigarette and I imagined them burning me with it.

Gledhill opened his plastic bottle and pulled out a pipette. He reached up to my eye. I couldn’t close it, though I tried and the pain cut through my face like a knife. He squeezed the rubber bulb on the pipette and a drop of liquid fell into my eye.

‘Don’t worry, King killer, it’s only water,’ Gledhill said. ‘We’ve got something to show you.’ He moistened my other eye. ‘We want you to have a good view.’

There was a commotion at the far end of the ward. The doors swung inwards and a party of soldiers entered. They had three prisoners. One man was frog-marched between the beds until he was only two feet from me. Soldiers held his arms while he struggled like a child. His wide, staring blue eyes pierced mine.

‘Wolf,’ I said.

Tears fell from his eyes. They ran into the greasy stubble covering his pinched cheeks. The two soldiers drew him back from me and White Coat stepped forward, followed by another soldier carrying a steel poker. The heat coming off its red tip caused distortion in the air.

‘You see, King killer,’ White Coat said, ‘we are humane here in the City. We don’t like to see people suffer and your friend has been suffering ever since he went into the Dark. He must have seen such terrible things and he’s still seeing them now.’

I understood at last the reason for his awful stare, although I would never know what he’d seen in the dark. ‘Let him go,’ I pleaded.

For all my suspicions at the time, Wolf and his colleagues had been on my side. I could see the dark form of Giff and the rake-like Professor bound by chains among the soldiers at the far end.

‘Let them go. I’m the one you want.’

But White Coat had stepped aside to let the soldier with the poker stand in between Wolf and me.

‘We don’t want him to suffer these sights any longer,’ White Coat said, and the soldier lifted the poker. From Wolf’s open mouth came a scream so high-pitched and ragged I thought it would rip apart my eardrums. Soldiers held his head so that he couldn’t dodge the attack. I heard a terrible fizzling as the poker put out his left eye. Matter and fluid spat outwards, striking the soldier’s uniform. Still Wolf screamed. The soldier withdrew his poker before it lost all its heat to one socket. Gledhill continued to drip water into my eyes so that I could see clearly. I cursed him and all of them. The poker sank into Wolf’s other eye and I saw his knees begin to buckle as the eye boiled and sputtered before slumping misshapen down his cheek.

I thought the show was over but I was wrong. Another frame similar to my own was wheeled in and Wolf lifted onto it. Once Wolf had been secured, White Coat stepped forward with a scalpel in his hand.

‘Stop,’ I shouted.

But White Coat took no notice as he cut off Wolf’s sleeve and twisted a tourniquet around his upper arm. Wolf stirred and moaned. The soldiers tightened his bindings and White Coat sliced into Wolf’s forearm, opening a gash three inches long and deep to the bone. A soldier staunched the flow of blood with a rolled-up length of torn bed sheet. White Coat reached around the soldier to get something from a trolley. It was a thin but strong-looking length of plaited leather, like a lead.

Gledhill’s face hovered beneath mine as he dripped more water into my eyes.

White Coat threaded the leather strap under the bone and tied it there. He tugged on it and Wolf’s screams became shriller. Happy, White Coat pressed the two sides of the forearm together, his ungloved thumbs slipping on the raw flesh and bloody skin, and with a needle handed to him he stitched up the incision.

He turned and looked at me. Gledhill watered my eyes. The leather strap dangled out of Wolf’s arm, a steel ring glinting in the loop at its end.

One of the soldiers snapped his fingers and the doors were pushed open again. A dog handler entered, pulled along the tiled floor by a dark brown pit bull, snarling and spitting. Behind me the children and little creatures started up their howling, yelping chorus again. The soldier unclasped the pit bull’s lead from his chain and fastened it to the lead that emerged from the wound in Wolf’s arm.

The dog strained at the new lead. It tore open two of White Coat’s stitches before the soldiers were able to undo all of the hoops and straps holding the all-but-broken man. Once Wolf was free, the dog pulled him to the floor. He managed to stand up but the dog raced down the ward and the blind man fell headlong, hitting his head against the end of a bed. Two soldiers picked him up and let his guide dog drag him screaming from the ward. His screams echoed down the corridor as the pit bull led him away into the night.

The goons released me and marched me off past White Coat, who watched with bloody-sleeved arms folded across his chest, and past the soldiers holding Giff and the Professor, who stared through me at the prospect of their own fate.

‘Don’t worry, fellas. None of this is real,’ I said to them. ‘This is not happening.’

‘You tell yourself that,’ said White Coat.

Before we left the ward, one of the soldiers pulled my hands behind my back and secured them with a plastic grip that dug into my wrists. My legs were cracked repeatedly with a baton as I was pushed along in the middle of the group. A black van stood waiting in a floodlit courtyard. I was bundled in and we left the hospital grounds by the main gate. I had to sit on the floor in the back of the van and when we went around corners I rolled over, banging my head. One of the goons leaned across and poked me with his baton.

‘Keep still, King killer,’ he spat.

I said nothing and was sick in the corner. I wondered about what I’d said to Giff and the Professor. I asked myself where the impulse to say that had come from.

The van jerked and the engine was killed. The guards jumped out and I heard their boots scrunch on grit as they came around to unlock the back doors.

‘I guess you’ll have a jeering crowd ready out there,’ I said to them. ‘A braying mob.’

They dragged me out of the van and missiles and abuse rained down on me from all sides.

‘What did I tell you?’ I said.

The guards frogmarched me into the back of some building. I was expecting a gaol cell but it soon became apparent that it was to the law courts that they had brought me. Within three minutes I was standing in the dock, my hands still bound behind my back and my ankles fastened together by a chain. A chorus rang out from the public gallery — ‘King killer, King killer, King killer!’ Things were moving much faster than I had anticipated.