purpose-built room. The engineering was quite complicated — and very expensive — but your Professor Mulbridge seemed confident that she could duplicate it.’
‘We have very extensive resources at the MOU,’ said the doctor, sounding cool and detached and giving no sign at all of noticing the duty manager’s crisis of etiquette. ‘Our annual budget is eighty million, and that’s supplemented by donations from various sources. Mister Ditko’s cell is already built and waiting for him.’
The duty manager winced. ‘We don’t like to use the word “cell” . . .’ he began. But they’d reached their destination by this time, and the massive steel door, like the door of a bank vault, made the mouthful of euphemisms that he was about to utter taste a little sour, so he let the remark tail off.
A burly male nurse was waiting for them at the door, and on the duty manager’s nod he now unbolted it. Three large bolts, at top, midpoint and bottom, and a formidable-looking mortice lock — another recent addition — at which one of the two orderlies (not the pirate, but his colleague) stared with undisguised fascination.
‘I would have expected Professor Mulbridge to supervise this transfer herself,’ the duty manager remarked conversationally. ‘She’s been trying for so long to make it happen.’
‘She’s got a lot on her plate right now,’ said the man who’d been ogling the mortice lock. ‘Saving the world, one ghost at a time.’
The remark struck the manager as surprisingly irreverent, and so it stuck in his mind. Like the nurse on reception, though, he was finding that the unfeasibly gorgeous doctor was acting like a kind of lodestone to his mind, pulling his attention inwards towards her whenever he tried to think of anything else. God, she smelled like — what? What was it? Whatever it was, you wanted to eat the smell, in shovelled handfuls.
The door swung open, revealing a room that was basically a featureless cube, without furniture or ornament. A sourceless white radiance, harsh and even, filled it. The walls, ceiling and floor were also white.
In the centre of the room — the only thing it held — was a steel frame, about seven feet high by four wide. It was just a rectangle of steel: two uprights joined by two horizontal struts, to the bottom of which three sets of rubber-rimmed wheels had been fitted on cross-axles which had been set very wide to give the whole structure some much-needed stability.
Around the inside edges of the frame there were twenty or more steel loops to which thick elasticated cables had been attached. A man hung in the centre of the frame, dressed in an all-over-body straitjacket to which the free ends of the cables had been fitted. The overall impression was of a fly in a spiderweb. The man in the frame thrashed and squirmed, but his movements were absorbed by the cables so that he never moved more than an inch or so in any direction.
And his movements were sluggish and uncoordinated in any case. He seemed to have been drugged. His eyes were unnaturally wide, the over-enlarged pupils filling them to the point where no whites showed. His mouth was slack, and a little gluey liquid had collected at its corners.
‘OPG,’ said the duty manager, as if any confirmation of that was needed. ‘Thirty micrograms, intramuscular. If you need any to take with you, we’ve got some doses made up already — and it’s not likely we’ll need them any more once Ditko is–’
‘We’re good,’ said the man who’d spoken before. ‘Thanks. We’ve got our own ways of calming Mister Ditko down.’
The duty manager shrugged. ‘Fair enough. Now, this thing is heavy.’
‘We’ve got it,’ said the doctor, stepping into the cell. She turned the frame around one-handed — a feat which made the manager’s eyes widen, because he knew exactly how much it weighed.
The man hanging in the frame twisted his head around to look at her. He said something that the duty manager couldn’t make out. It sounded like a single word — possibly a name — but it had a great many syllables and it certainly wasn’t Powell.
‘Asmodeus,’ the woman answered, dipping her head in acknowledgement. ‘It’s been a long time.’
The man’s head sagged. He was fighting a big enough dose of the drug to kill a small herd of elephants. OPG was a neurotoxin, cleared for clinical use only in a very narrow range of situations. This patient, Rafael Ditko, was explicitly one of them. ‘Bitch,’ he muttered thickly, sounding like a wet-brained alcoholic. ‘Hell-bitch.’
‘Does he know you?’ the duty manager asked, curious.
‘We met,’ said the doctor. ‘A long time ago.’
‘You diagnosed him? He was your patient?’
‘No.’ The doctor gestured to her two attendants, who came and took the two ends of the frame. ‘It was before he was confined.’
She didn’t offer any further explanation, and since the context wasn’t a clinical one the duty manager didn’t feel as though he had any right to press the matter. He stood aside as the two men wheeled the frame out of the cell. It was noticeable that they had to lean into it and apply their weight with some determination to make the heavy structure move: the woman hadn’t done any of those things. She must be scarily, thrillingly strong, the duty manager thought.
Although he wasn’t needed, and his job was done, he walked in procession with the little group as they made their way back down the main corridor. He offered the opinion that this transfer ought to have been carried out years before. ‘Ditko has always been a problem for us,’ he said. ‘We’re not a specialised facility, in the way that you are. We can’t afford to watch him as closely as he needs to be watched. And we’re under different kinds of scrutiny.’ He lowered his voice. ‘It’s fair to say,’ he murmured, with a quick smile at the doctor, ‘that you can put him to some good use, yes? I mean, that you’ll be doing more than just keeping him sedated? Professor Mulbridge has some research in mind, I’m sure. Into Ditko’s condition. And it really needs to be done. He’s an incredible specimen. I don’t mean to be cold-blooded, but seriously — incredible. With the right equipment, and the right person directing things, you could find out a lot. And if you needed some input from us here; observations and conclusions, based on . . .’
The duty manager faltered into silence as the doctor turned to face him, raising a hand to stop her two attendants in their tracks. She stared at him, and her bottomless black eyes seemed to pull him in closer to her as though she had her own personal gravity field.
‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘That’s very good of you. I’ll be sure to call on you at some point. Soon. I’ll come soon, and we’ll work together. Just you and me. Intensively.’
She turned her back on him and walked away, the two men resuming their efforts and pushing the steel frame after her. The duty manager remained rooted to the spot, staring after them. He no longer had an erection. Doctor Powell had brought him to climax with her voice.
The doctor gave the nurse at the reception desk a civil nod as they left, and the nurse as she buzzed them out responded with a smile, feeling the warmth of the doctor’s attention sweep over her like an intimate caress. She continued to watch them as they lowered the rear ramp of the van, loaded the steel frame onto it and raised it up again. These operations took perhaps three minutes, during which time the duty manager limped past her into the gents’ washroom and did not emerge again.
The van pulled away, and the driveway was empty and quiet for perhaps a further minute or two. Then another van, dark blue this time, drove up and stopped. A sleek black car rode before it, and another behind it.
A large delegation emerged from the three vehicles, assembling itself behind an imposing grey-haired woman in her early fifties, dressed in a three-quarter-length dark blue coat in an antiquated and somehow faintly reassuring style. Her face bore an expression of calm and benevolence, which contrasted with the hatchet-faced mien of the big black-suited men who flanked her.
The nurse buzzed them in, but she was puzzled. The Rafael Ditko transfer was the only note on the duty sheet for the night, and this didn’t look like a casual drop-in. In fact, it looked like a formal visit from a head of state.
‘Jenna-Jane Mulbridge,’ said the grey-haired woman, with a smile, presenting the nurse with a set of documents that was the exact duplicate of the ones she’d just filed. ‘From the MOU at Queen Mary’s. We’re here to collect one of your patients for formal transfer. I think you were notified.’
The nurse boggled at them, her mouth opening and closing. She looked down at the paperwork, which seemed to be all present and correct. She looked up at the woman in the long coat, whose amiable, expectant smile was starting to turn down at the edges.
She paged the duty manager, who did not emerge from the bathroom.
‘Well, this is going to sound funny . . .’ she said, in a quavering voice.
