The Complete Short Stories: Volume 1. Adam Thirlwell

night.’

      He leaned back to let Gorrell pass him, and then started to follow the others round the narrow space between the armchair and the walls.

      ‘I don’t know how Neill expects us to stay awake in this hole for twenty-four hours a day,’ he went on. ‘Why haven’t we got a television set in here? Even a radio would be something.’

      They sidled round the chair together, Gorrell, followed by Avery, with Lang completing the circle, their shoulders beginning to hunch, their heads down as they watched the floor, their feet falling into the slow, leaden rhythm of the clock.

       This, then, was the manhole: a narrow, vertical cubicle, a few feet wide, six deep. Above, a solitary, dusty bulb gleamed down from a steel grille. As if crumbling under the impetus of their own momentum, the surface of the walls had coarsened, the texture was that of stone, streaked and pitted …

      Gorrell bent down to loosen one of his shoelaces and Avery bumped into him sharply, knocking his shoulder against the wall.

      ‘All right?’ he asked, taking Gorrell’s arm. ‘This place is a little overcrowded. I can’t understand why Neill ever put us in here.’

      He leaned against the wall, head bowed to prevent it from touching the ceiling, and gazed about thoughtfully.

      Lang stood squeezed into the corner next to him, shifting his weight from one foot to the other.

      Gorrell squatted down on his heels below them.

      ‘What’s the time?’ he asked.

      ‘I’d say about three fifteen,’ Lang offered. ‘More or less.’

      ‘Lang,’ Avery asked, ‘where’s the ventilator here?’

      Lang peered up and down the walls and across the small square of ceiling. ‘There must be one somewhere.’ Gorrell stood up and they shuffled about, examining the floor between their feet.

      ‘There may be a vent in the light grille,’ Gorrell suggested. He reached up and slipped his fingers through the cage, running them behind the bulb.

      ‘Nothing there. Odd. I should have thought we’d use the air in here within half an hour.’

      ‘Easily,’ Avery said. ‘You know, there’s something –’

      Just then Lang broke in. He gripped Avery’s elbow.

      ‘Avery,’ he asked. ‘Tell me. How did we get here?’

      ‘What do you mean, get here? We’re on Neill’s team.’

      Lang cut him off. ‘I know that.’ He pointed at the floor. ‘I mean, in here.’

      Gorrell shook his head. ‘Lang, relax. How do you think? Through the door.’

      Lang looked squarely at Gorrell, then at Avery.

      ‘What door?’ he asked calmly.

      Gorrell and Avery hesitated, then swung round to look at each wall in turn, scanning it from floor to ceiling. Avery ran his hands over the heavy masonry, then knelt down and felt the floor, digging his fingers at the rough stone slabs. Gorrell crouched beside him, scrabbling at the thin seams of dirt.

      Lang backed out of their way into a corner, and watched them impassively. His face was calm and motionless, but in his left temple a single vein fluttered insanely.

      When they finally stood up, staring at each other unsteadily, he flung himself between them at the opposite wall.

      ‘Neill! Neill!’ he shouted. He pounded angrily on the wall with his fists. ‘Neill! Neill!’

      Above him the light began to fade.

      

      Morley closed the door of the surgery office behind him and went over to the desk. Though it was three fifteen a.m., Neill was probably awake, working on the latest material in the office next to his bedroom. Fortunately that afternoon’s test cards, freshly marked by one of the interns, had only just reached his in-tray.

      Morley picked out Lang’s folder and started to sort through the cards. He suspected that Lang’s responses to some of the key words and suggestion triggers lying disguised in the question forms might throw illuminating sidelights on to the real motives behind his equation of sleep and death.

      The communicating door to the orderly room opened and an intern looked in.

      ‘Do you want me to take over in the gym, Doctor?’

      Morley waved him away. ‘Don’t bother. I’m going back in a moment.’

      He selected the cards he wanted and began to initial his withdrawals. Glad to get away from the glare of the arc-lights, he delayed his return as long as he could, and it was three twenty-five a.m. when he finally left the office and stepped back into the gymnasium.

      The men were sitting where he had left them. Lang watched him approach, head propped comfortably on a cushion. Avery was slouched down in his armchair, nose in a magazine, while Gorrell hunched over the chessboard, hidden behind the sofa.

      ‘Anybody feel like coffee?’ Morley called out, deciding they needed some exercise.

      None of them looked up or answered. Morley felt a flicker of annoyance, particularly at Lang, who was staring past him at the clock.

      Then he saw something that made him stop.

      Lying on the polished floor ten feet from the sofa was a chess piece. He went over and picked it up. The piece was the black king. He wondered how Gorrell could be playing chess with one of the two essential pieces of the game missing when he noticed three more pieces lying on the floor near by.

      His eyes moved to where Gorrell was sitting.

      Scattered over the floor below the chair and sofa was the rest of the set. Gorrell was slumped over the stool. One of his elbows had slipped and the arm dangled between his knees, knuckles resting on the floor. The other hand supported his face. Dead eyes peered down at his feet.

      Morley ran over to him, shouting: ‘Lang! Avery! Get the orderlies!’

      He reached Gorrell and pulled him back off the stool.

      ‘Lang!’ he called again.

      Lang was still staring at the clock, his body in the stiff, unreal posture of a waxworks dummy.

      Morley let Gorrell loll back on to the sofa, leaned over and glanced at Lang’s face.

      He crossed to Avery, stretched out behind the magazine, and jerked his shoulder. Avery’s head bobbed stiffly. The magazine slipped and fell from his hands, leaving his fingers curled in front of his face.

      Morley stepped over Avery’s legs to the gramophone. He switched it on, gripped the volume control and swung it round to full amplitude.

      Above the orderly room door an alarm bell shrilled out through the silence.

      

      ‘Weren’t you with them?’ Neill asked sharply.

      ‘No,’ Morley admitted. They were standing by the door of the emergency ward. Two orderlies had just dismantled the electro-therapy unit and were wheeling the console away on a trolley. Outside in the gymnasium a quiet, urgent traffic of nurses and interns moved past. All but a single bank of arc-lights had been switched off, and the gymnasium seemed like a deserted stage at the end of a performance.

      ‘I slipped into the office to pick up a few test cards,’ he explained. ‘I wasn’t gone more than ten minutes.’

      ‘You were supposed to watch them continuously,’ Neill snapped. ‘Not wander off by yourself whenever you felt like it. What do you think we had the gym and this entire circus set up for?’

      It was a little after five thirty a.m. After working hopelessly on the three men for a couple of hours, he was close to exhaustion. He looked down at them, lying inertly in their cots, canvas sheets