I had an idea and turned to face Gledhill.
‘I want to make a telephone call,’ I said.
He appeared unmoved by my request.
‘You have to allow me a phone call, Doctor,’ I pressed him. ‘Ask him if you have to.’
He got up and walked over to the door in the far corner. I was left alone with the crossbreeds whose cacophony continued unabated. After some minutes Gledhill reappeared wheeling a trolley. White Coat was two steps behind him. Gledhill brought the trolley to the side of my bed. An old-fashioned black telephone sat on it. There was a long flex which Gledhill bent down to plug in behind the bed. He lifted the handset and, finger poised, looked at me.
‘Number?’ he said.
‘I’ll do it myself.’
Gledhill looked at White Coat, who signalled his assent. The necessary straps were loosened and I took the telephone down from the trolley, dialling the first few digits of Annie Risk’s number quickly and in the shadow of the trolley so they couldn’t follow it. I heard the ringing tone at the other end and swopped the phone over to the left side of the bed. White Coat and Gledhill stayed where they were. The ringing tone ceased and I heard Annie’s voice through a squizzle of interference.
‘Hello?’
‘Can you hear me?’ I said.
‘Hello?’
I tried again, shouting, but she couldn’t hear.
‘I can’t hear anything,’ she said and was silent for a moment, then: ‘Carl, is that you?’
‘Yes,’ I shouted.
‘Carl, if that’s you’ — her voice sounded anxious — ‘come back, you’ve got to get back. We’re in terrible trouble. Awful things are happening. People are disappearing. You’ve got to come back. Come back and help us, Carl. We need you.’
‘I’m coming, I’m coming.’
The line went dead. Gledhill stood up straight, the plug dangling from his hand.
‘She can’t hear you, King killer,’ White Coat said with a sneer. ‘You can hear them but they can’t hear you. That’s how it works. All those wrong numbers you used to get, picking up the phone and there’s no one there, that’s people calling out of the City. Just to listen to your confused babble because they know you won’t be able to hear them. Or maybe like you they want to ask for help, but they soon realise there’s no escape, and what links there are only go one way.
‘She’s right though,’ he continued. ‘Terrible things are happening over there. Our influence is spreading thanks to you.’
I frowned.
‘Yes, you, assassin,’ he said. ‘Our agents of darkness are slipping through into your world via the gap you so conveniently left in the side of the City when you walked in off the motorway.’
‘Your lot have been around in our world longer than that,’ I said, remembering what Stella had told me — how she was snatched from beside the railway line on her way home after jumping a quintuple salchow at the local rink.
‘But we could only maintain a small presence and only along the canals and railways and in the grey areas,’ said Gledhill, clearly getting over-enthusiastic. White Coat cracked a sharp look at him that caused him to shut up and withdraw like a whipped dog.
‘What he means,’ White Coat said, taking up the story, ‘is that now we can put more ambitious campaigns into action. All thanks to you. Your friend was right: people are disappearing. We have infiltrated the police and their dog handlers with some of our own security and our own dogs. Well, you can imagine the rest.’
White Coat was getting into his stride. He had never seemed happy with his lot in our world as the Thin Controller. Over here agreed with him. I was going to enjoy dispatching him when the time came.
The grimace slid off his face as the door swung open and a security outfit bustled in. They came to the end of the bed and the goon in charge muttered an exchange with White Coat while Gledhill released my bonds. I stretched, cracking my joints, and stood up.
‘You could have taken my boots off,’ I remarked to Gledhill.
White Coat left the room by the door in the far corner and I barely had time to glance at the faces and dark uniforms of the goon squad before he came back with an upright bed base which he pushed along the floor on castors. There were leather hoops at the four corners of the frame and three broad straps flapping loose across its width. White Coat parked it in the middle of the ward and two of the guards dragged me across. I was strapped in place, my body assuming the X position. What was coming next? Why these elaborate preparations? I felt an uncomfortable piece of apparatus descending over my head and White Coat himself affixed four sets of pincers that were attached to it onto my eyelids to prevent them from closing. Then he signalled to Gledhill, who drew a plastic bottle from his pocket and approached me.
‘No,’ I cried. ‘No, no.’
‘But you don’t know what we’re going to do, King killer,’ White Coat sneered.
One of the soldiers lit a cigarette and I imagined them burning me with it.
Gledhill opened his plastic bottle and pulled out a pipette. He reached up to my eye. I couldn’t close it, though I tried and the pain cut through my face like a knife. He squeezed the rubber bulb on the pipette and a drop of liquid fell into my eye.
‘Don’t worry, King killer, it’s only water,’ Gledhill said. ‘We’ve got something to show you.’ He moistened my other eye. ‘We want you to have a good view.’
There was a commotion at the far end of the ward. The doors swung inwards and a party of soldiers entered. They had three prisoners. One man was frog-marched between the beds until he was only two feet from me. Soldiers held his arms while he struggled like a child. His wide, staring blue eyes pierced mine.
‘Wolf,’ I said.
Tears fell from his eyes. They ran into the greasy stubble covering his pinched cheeks. The two soldiers drew him back from me and White Coat stepped forward, followed by another soldier carrying a steel poker. The heat coming off its red tip caused distortion in the air.
‘You see, King killer,’ White Coat said, ‘we are humane here in the City. We don’t like to see people suffer and your friend has been suffering ever since he went into the Dark. He must have seen such terrible things and he’s still seeing them now.’
I understood at last the reason for his awful stare, although I would never know what he’d seen in the dark. ‘Let him go,’ I pleaded.
For all my suspicions at the time, Wolf and his colleagues had been on my side. I could see the dark form of Giff and the rake-like Professor bound by chains among the soldiers at the far end.
‘Let them go. I’m the one you want.’
But White Coat had stepped aside to let the soldier with the poker stand in between Wolf and me.
‘We don’t want him to suffer these sights any longer,’ White Coat said, and the soldier lifted the poker. From Wolf’s open mouth came a scream so high-pitched and ragged I thought it would rip apart my eardrums. Soldiers held his head so that he couldn’t dodge the attack. I heard a terrible fizzling as the poker put out his left eye. Matter and fluid spat outwards, striking the soldier’s uniform. Still Wolf screamed. The soldier withdrew his poker before it lost all its heat to one socket. Gledhill continued to drip water into my eyes so that I could see clearly. I cursed him and all of them. The poker sank into Wolf’s other eye and I saw his knees begin to buckle as the eye boiled and sputtered before slumping misshapen down his cheek.
I thought the show was over but I was wrong. Another frame similar to my own was wheeled in and Wolf lifted onto it. Once Wolf had been secured, White Coat stepped forward with a scalpel in his hand.