Captives

FOURTEEN

3 APRIL 1977

The man came hurtling across the room, mouth open, arms outstretched, his eyes bulging wide with rage.

Dr Robert Dexter took a step back from the observation slit in the door, relieved that three inches of solid steel separated him from the patient beyond. Inside the room, the man continued to fling himself at the door, banging his head against the metal partition, finally spitting on the glass of the observation window, the thick mucus obscuring Dexter's view of him.

'Increase his medication,' Dexter said, glancing down at the clipboard the held.

'He's on 50mg of Thorazine twice a day already,' Andrew Colston told him.

'Well, it doesn't seem to be working, does it? Up the dosage.'

Their footsteps echoed through the high ceilinged corridor as they approached the next door. Dexter slid back the observation panel and looked in.

The occupant of the cell was sitting cross-legged on his bed in a meditative pose, his head bowed. He was naked.

Dexter fumbled with the bunch of keys that dangled from his belt, inserted one in the lock and walked in. Colston followed.

The man looked up and smiled, then lowered his head once more.

'How are you this morning, Roger?' asked Dexter, sitting on one end of the bed. Colston stayed behind him.

Roger Lacey looked up and smiled broadly, revealing a row of off-white teeth. His hair was cropped short, so short in fact that it was little more than stubble at his temples and the nape of his neck. His body was slender, heavily muscled, his hands resting one on each of his knees. As the two men watched he gently lifted his right hand and gripped the massive erection he sported. He began moving his hand up and down his shaft.

'It's time,' he said quietly.

'Roger, stop that for a moment,' said Dexter, his eyes fixed on the man's face.

Colston found his own gaze rivetted to Lacey's busy right hand.

'Where are they, Roger?' Dexter asked.

'Under the bed.'

Dexter nodded and Colston knelt down and reached beneath the bed. His hand closed over a thin plastic tray. He slid it out into view and passed it to his colleague who set it down on the bed in front of Lacey who had slowed the pace of his masturbating now.

On the tray were twelve watches, not one of which was working. The hands were frozen, all stopped at different times. Dexter lifted one and turned it over. The back had been clumsily but effectively opened then wedged back into position again.

With his breath coming in gasps, Lacey watched as Dexter pulled a pair of surgical gloves from the pocket of his jacket, lifted one of the time pieces and, after slipping the gloves on, flipped the back of the watch off.

The inner workings of the mechanism were coated and clogged by a thick, congealed substance Colston recognised as semen.

The other eleven time-pieces carried a similar cargo within them.

'You're not going to take them, are you?' asked Lacey, his face losing its colour, his hand now slack on his penis.

'What do you think would happen if we did?' Dexter asked.

Lacey shook his head agitatedly looking first at one doctor then the other. He licked his lips and tried to swallow but his throat was too dry.

'Roger,' Dexter repeated. 'What do you think would happen if we took the watches away? Do you know?'

Lacey shook his head even more vigorously.

'Did your wife take the watches away from you?' the doctor asked.

'Yes.'

'Is that why you killed her?'

'Yes.'

'So what do you think is going to happen if we take them away now? Can you tell me?'

'There have to be some survivors,' said Lacey fal-teringly.

'Survivors from what?' Dexter wanted to know.

'The war. When the war comes, everyone will die except those who are prepared.'

'Like you?'

'Yes.' He smiled.

'Why do you keep semen in the back of these watches, Roger?'

'They will be the survivors. They will grow. When the time comes.' He chuckled at his own pun. 'The time will come.' He began masturbating again. 'Every male discharge contains approximately two hundred million sperm. I have created enough to re-populate the world after the war. From each of them a person will grow.'

Dexter replaced the watch and got to his feet. Followed by Colston he headed for the door.

Behind them Lacey quickened the speed of his strokes, his breathing now harsher.

On the other side of the locked door Dexter pulled off the surgical gloves and shoved them into his pocket.

'How did he kill his wife? Stabbed her, didn't he?' the doctor mused.

Colston nodded.

'Apparently the police found traces of semen in every wound. All twenty-eight of them.' Colston looked through the observation slit to see Lacey reach his climax, thick white fluid pumping from his penis onto his hand. The doctor watched as the patient tried to scoop it up, desperate not to waste any of the precious ejaculate. He snapped the slide across and looked at Dexter.

'Do you think he's ready to be moved?' he asked.

'Not yet,' the other man proclaimed. 'Even though he killed his wife he didn't and still doesn't display any latent homicidal or psychopathic tendencies.'

Dexter shook his head. 'He's not right for us.'

They moved further down the corridor, past other cells.

Past a young woman who had systematically torn out every finger and toe-nail to prevent dirt settling unseen on her body. (The interns called her Lady Macbeth.) Past a man in his early thirties who had killed both his mother and father with a garden fork because they refused to attend the baptism of his half-caste daughter. He had covered their bodies in axle grease to 'blacken' them, anxious that they should know what it felt like to be 'coloured'.

Dexter looked in on the man, checking his name. Colin Wells.

'Does he have any family?' the doctor wanted to know.

'A sister,' Colston informed him.

'What about his wife?'

'She ran away after the killing of his parents, took the baby with her.'

'Where's the sister?'

'She lives nearby. She still visits occasionally.'

'Damn,' murmured Dexter under his breath.

There were two doors left.

Dexter crossed to the first of them and peered inside.

The occupant was kneeling in the centre of the room wearing only a pair of boxer shorts. His body was thin and wasted, his face pallid. He was bald except for some snow-white hair over his ears. Even the hair on his chest and the thick strands that curled from his nostrils were as white as milk.

Thomas Walsh had been institutionalised for nearly thirty of his seventy-three years.

As he heard the key turn in the lock he turned, still kneeling, to face his visitors.

Dexter and Colston watched as he rose imperiously then pressed his palms together, touched his fingertips to his chin and bowed.

'Good morning, Tom,' said Dexter, peering around the room.

Hardly an inch of the wall was untouched, barely a fraction of the white paint showing through the mass of scribblings which had been completed with crayon, marker pen. Even blood.

The pattern was uniform, duplicated hundreds, thousands of times over and over again on the walls.

It looked like two musical notes joined together but the lines were harsher, drawn with quick flourishes.

It meant power.

Tom Walsh had been captured by the Japanese in Burma in 1940, forced for five years to work on the infamous Burma Railway, subject to the whims of brutal guards, starved and tortured. He had returned to England after the war a broken man both physically and mentally. Ten years in and out of hospital being treated for diseases he had picked up in the Malaysian jungles had seen his mental state deteriorate even further, his hatred of the Japanese grow ever stronger.

He'd been working in a car factory when a Japanese delegation had visited one day back in 1958.

Tom had managed to kill two of them and blind another with a soldering iron before he was stopped.

He'd been committed. He was the asylum's oldest patient.

Dexter exchanged a few words with him, then watched as he bowed ceremoniously when the two doctors left.

That left the last cell.

'I can check it if you like,' Colston said quietly.

Dexter thought a moment and shook his head. He took a step towards the final door, fumbling with his keys, his mouth dry. He didn't look through the observation slot first.

As he lifted the key to the lock, his hand was shaking.