Ward watched with his eyes bulging.
Ten. Twenty. Thirty more devastating incisions. Unnecessary. Life had long since left her body along with most of the blood it had contained.
Finally he removed the blindfold and, almost carefully, plunged the knife into first one eye then the other.
Left it stuck in the right socket.
Glistening.
Christopher Ward turned away from the screen, his stomach contracting. For long moments he was sure he was going to vomit but the feeling gradually passed.
It was another five minutes before he could bring himself to look at the screen again.
AFTERMATH
Ward reached for the bottle of Jack Daniel’s. He poured himself a full glass and drank it in two massive gulps.
He drank until he passed out.
OBLIVION
Ward didn’t wake until after one that morning. He stared at the now-blank television screen, rolled on to his back and blacked out once again.
Life sometimes seems so pointless. What is the reason for it? What is the reason for our being? Scholars throughout the ages have laboured over the question and none have come to a satisfactory conclusion. I myself have often wondered what the true nature of life and being is but they are fleeting thoughts in a world too preoccupied with relevances more tangible than anything so ethereal. Why would any man want to devote his life to discovery
of the object of being? Of being on this planet and in this life. How incredibly supercilious of man to imagine, for one moment, that he is the only inhabitant of this world. There are many worlds about which mankind has no understanding. The world inside a man’s mind is the most uncharted territory ever. No one fully understands, nor will they ever, the workings of the human mind. What some desire others find abhorrent. What some find beauteous, others may barely countenance. So many contradictions within the mind of man and none will ever be truly and irrevocably solved.
Take the question of morality. Who is to say “what is moral? By whose criteria are we to judge this question? That of God?
The morality embodied within those commandments that the Bible speaks so proudly of? Those ten rules designed for destruction. Rules that man is incapable of keeping. God issued those rules knowing that those he had created were unable to uphold them. God is a trickster. God wishes his children to fall by the wayside because if they do then they call on him with even greater volume. Their prayers grow more desperate and they rely upon their deities to an even greater extent. A vengeful God. A caring God. The God of cancer and war. The Lord of child abuse and illness. The Holy Spirit of madness and destruction. The Trinity of suffering.
In every man there is the capacity for evil and yet has anyone ever truly defined the meaning of that word? Is it evil to kill? Is it evil to steal? No.
I feel it is not. If a man has the strength to commit any act, no matter how depraved then he should be applauded for his honesty. There is a purity in the act of anyone who knows he is answerable to no one but himself. The law is unimportant. Man must live by the law he creates for himself. He must live by a code of honour that he himself invents, not that handed down to him by the church, society or the masses. Man’s biggest crime is to lose his identity.
Without it he is nothing and that identity is defined by a man’s actions. Not as they are perceived by the world at large but by himself. Once that code of behaviour has been established, one that is peculiar to each individual, then its rules and parameters must not be broken for the retribution that accompanies such a transgression is limitless.
STRANGE WORDS
Christopher Ward read the words but they made no sense to him. He sat at his desk and scanned the two sheets endlessly.
The only thing he knew was that the handwriting was not his.
DILEMMA
Christopher Ward sat staring at the blank monitor before him then, as if a switch had been thrown somewhere deep in the recesses of his mind, he typed: 1. Where is the girl?
2. Did I kill her?
3. Who wrote the words I found today?
4. Hallucinations?
He underlined the last one three times.
5. If I killed the girl, where did I hide the body?
6. What would have made me kill her in the first place?
Ward sighed almost painfully and looked at what he’d typed. He picked up the two handwritten pages he’d found in the office that morning and re-read them.
When he’d finished, he placed them gently on the desk to his right, next to the box of printer paper he kept there.
He got to his feet and crossed to one of his bookshelves. He selected a Dictionary of Psychology and flicked through the pages.
‘Amnesia,’ he murmured to himself as he found the entry. He read it quickly then replaced the book on the shelf. There was nothing worthwhile there.
Nothing that helped him.
He switched the monitor off and made his way down the stairs, locking the office door behind him.
Inside the house it was cool, almost chilly, and he shivered as he wandered through into the study. He switched on the computer there and waited. No point in checking e-mails. No one ever sent them any more. He went straight to the
Internet and tapped in: Short-Term Memory Loss.
The computer buzzed and whirred. Ward got to his feet and padded back into the sitting room where he retrieved a bottle of Glenfiddich and a clean glass. He carried these back into the study and sat down at the computer once again.
A series of different coloured images appeared before him. He placed his hand on the mouse and waited.
Search Results: 11 matches found
2 in symptoms and conditions 1 in special topics 3 in medical abstracts 5 in drugs
1. Memory loss
2. Stress in childhood
3. Post-cardiac defibrillation
4. Zopiclone (systemic)
5. Temozolomide (systemic)
6. Zaleplon (systemic)
7. Zolpidem (systemic)
8. Dronabinol (systemic)
9. The nature of early memory
10. Memories lost and found — part II
11. Acute traumatic brain injury in amateur boxing Ward scanned what was before him then clicked on ‘The nature of early memory’.
He read quickly then took a gulp of his whisky and shook his head.
He clicked on ‘Memories lost and found’. He read that more slowly, occasionally reading aloud.
‘There are different kinds of memory,’ he read. ‘Declarative or explicit memory includes learning of facts … culture of victimisation … may cause patients to deny responsibility for their problems … memories can contain varying elements of truth and distortion.’
He sat back in his seat and drank more whisky. In less than an hour, he’d finished the whole bottle.
