Necrom

The White Room

THE TV FINALLY went off in the white room in the very exclusive clinic. The lights followed five minutes later. Joe Gibson lay in the darkness too drugged to move. He didn't miss the TV. How many back-to-back game shows and reruns of M*A*S*H could he watch? He didn't even miss the light. In the darkness, he could let his imagination wander and create pictures. In the light, he was clamped into a sterile reality with the TV as the only escape. Not that his imagination worked too well after Nurse Lopez had administered the shot. It was sluggish and had difficulty grasping on to entire concepts; fragmented images and disjointed words and phrases were mostly all it could manage. Right at that moment, two words, a name, kept going round and round in his head. The words were Gideon Windemere. He couldn't put a face or a personality to the name. It stood alone, unconnected to events or memories. Gideon Win-demere.

Deep in his mind, though, in the area that the drug tried so hard to suppress, and even to obliterate, a single tenuous link remained. The name came from somewhere in the lost memories, the ones that the doctors wanted to take away from him, the memories they claimed had never happened and were making him sick. He groped around, fighting the drug and going as deep inside his mind as he was able, Gideon Windemere. There had to be something else, something tangible to which he could anchor the name and force it to start making sense. Gideon Windemere?