Read Online Truth Dare Kill by Gordon Ferris - Free Book Online Page A

pinned to my bed by the huge rock on my forehead.
    “We’re going to give you some EST.”
    “Fine.”
    “Electric Shock Therapy. A new treatment from Italy. We’ll put some mild current through you to see if that alleviates the pain.”
    I screwed open my eyelids. “Are you just guessing?”
    “The results have been very good. It’s worked for other head injuries. And people with trauma.”
    “But you don’t know?”
    “We can’t give you any more medication. As it is, you’re at the limit. Look, there’s no harm trying this. It’s perfectly safe. Been used scores of times to good effect.”
    I’d heard. My mother told me of a neighbour who went doolally at times and had to go in for some wee shocks, as she put it. I remember the neighbour, always drooling. But hell, she seemed happy in her own wee world. What choice was there?
    They wheeled me into the room and helped me climb on to the bed. There were three people tending me – stopping me running away – all in white coats and –
    conspicuously and bizarrely – wearing Wellingtons. The bed was covered in a thick rubber sheet. It felt icy and silky and smelled of old petrol.
    They fastened my arms and legs with thick straps and I began to think I preferred the headaches. I felt the helplessness overwhelm me. The same feeling I had just before the guards hit me. I started to struggle.
    “It’s all right, Danny. You’ll be all right.” The Doc made it all right by sticking a needle in my arm and filling it with happy juice. I settled down and let them wheel the machine over next to my bed. I let them wet my forehead with jelly of some sort – it was chilly and greasy. Then they clamped two metal pads on the same patches and put what looked like a scrum cap on my head to hold them in place. The Doc held up a rubber mouthpiece, like you get when you go to the dentist to keep your teeth open. I hated dentists.
    “Stops you biting your tongue,” he explained.
    He prised my jaw open and jammed it in. It tasted of cold rubber and meths. I thought I would choke and fought back the panic. My chest was heaving. Doc smiled at me to make me brave. It didn’t work.
    “We’ll start with some low level current to see how it affects you, Danny. All right?”
    Even if I could speak, what could I say? He didn’t really care anyway.
    “Stand well clear, please.”
    So they didn’t want to get electrocuted as well. I heard a click and felt a tickle, then a jolt. My head and body twitched like a frog’s leg in the science lab. That’s what I’d become. They did more, lots more, and increased the level.
    I don’t remember going back to the ward after that. In fact I don’t remember much about the next few days. The pain was less but so was everything else. Just a kind of numbness, as though they’d cut something out of my head.
    They gave me four more sessions over the next two weeks. Then they let me vegetate. Most days when it was fine, they’d wheel me into the sun and park me under a tree. I’d sit there and gaze at the early summer flowers. Or maybe the flowers were gazing at me; we seemed to share the same level of sentience. I didn’t have many visitors. Couple of army types. I even think Caldwell showed up once but I couldn’t be sure.
    I know my mother came. She came every day for a week. She’d got lodgings nearby in Warwick and got a bus over to the hospital every day. Once she got past the crying stage she just sat and held my hand. We didn’t talk much. We were never great talkers. But on the second day she brought out a book from her shopping bag – Ivanhoe, one of my favourites – and began reading it to me. Reading till I fell asleep in the sun listening to her quiet Ayrshire burr recounting tales of glory and struggle. I suppose she was trying to tell me something.
    I missed her when she went. But already I was feeling better. The pain would come down like a tempest a couple of times a week, but mostly I was free of it.
    The dreams started, and the memories began to erupt, like waking up