Thicker Than Water

‘Mister Ditko is in the annexe,’ he explained, adjusting his walk a little to de-emphasise the bulge. ‘In a 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 whisel loophich 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.’