Taking the Tube to the Outer Limits Read online

  “A goat once,” George recalled, “when I was very young.”

  He wouldn’t even eat goat’s cheese now.

  “I don’t think that a film about ‘Goat Man’ would be quite as popular at the cinema as The Avengers,” the doctor joked. “Have you tried anywhere new, or exotic, to eat at, any new restaurants?”

  “Where I live, there were queues around the block for the new Burger King when it opened,” George said with a twinge of actual sadness. “The Chicken Royale with cheese is considered both new and exotic.”

  “Well, I think that covers all the obvious causes, unless you were recently abducted by aliens?”

  George smiled, thinking that the doctor was joking once more, but the big man stared at him as though expecting an actual answer. The size and whiteness of his eyes in the dark face made the stare quite a hard one to meet.

  “Unless they erased my memory, no,” he answered haltingly.

  “Fine,” the big doctor rose from his seat and was even taller and wider than George had imagined. There were WWE wrestlers who would probably have thought twice about attacking him. Teams of WWE wrestlers, even. “Let’s get on with it, shall we.”

  When George returned home that night he was more sore than he was in pain. The usual sparks of fire in his legs, or arm, or chest, had been subsumed into a more general wash of pain that came from all the parts of him that had been poked, prodded, scraped, punctured, scanned, irradiated, manipulated, pressured and pulled. He had been placed beneath, above and alongside more medical equipment than he would have imagined the National Health Service could afford. Some of these had whirred, some had clunked and some had pinged, but the scariest ones were the ones that made no sound at all.

  Worst of all, he had been required to give samples of some things that nobody really ought to be asked to give samples of. On the whole, it was an experience that he would rather forget, but he was also feeling happier and lighter than he could remember feeling in a long time. Something was happening. Something was being done. After all the things that he had been put through in the day, he couldn’t believe that they weren’t going to find out what the cause of his ‘phantom’ pains were. They might be phantoms to Doctor Cooper, but there was certainly nothing insubstantial about them to the man who suffered them.

  “George!” Sharon hurried out to greet him with a distracted hug. “Why didn’t you call? I would have come and picked you up if I ‘d known which part of the hospital you were in.”

  “That’s all right,” he reassured her by returning her hug a little tighter. It was the kind of body language that married couples develop over the years and means so much more than the words that they use to each other. “I needed the time to get my head together.”

  “Was it really terrible?” she asked, concerned.

  “Yes, it was pretty awful,” George admitted, and there were details about the examinations that he would never go into with her, no matter how long they remained married, “but it was necessary and maybe now we’ll get somewhere.”

  “I hope so,” she told him and he could see in her eyes that it wasn’t only for his sake that she was hoping for an improvement. “I really hope so.”

  “Well, I have good news and I have not so good news,” Doctor Kaanange’s voice made the phone physically vibrate in George’s hand, “and I always give the good news first, so I can tell you that we have eliminated almost every serious illness, condition and cause that might be giving you these pains.”

  “And the not so good news,” George asked, knowing full well what was coming next.

  “We still don’t know what is actually causing it,” the doctor delivered the expected news in almost the exact wording that George had predicted in his head. “The bloodwork came back negative for anything, as did all the other samples.”

  George didn’t want to think about the other samples.

  “The scans were clean and there were no culture reactions to any of the pathogens and poisons that we tested for.”

  Poisons!? George wondered.

  “I would be prepared to give you a completely clean bill of health right now,” the bass rumble on the telephone continued, “except that we both know that’s not the case. Tell me George, do you believe in witchcraft?”

  George was surprised. Then again, considering the doctor’s ethnic background and accent, he hailed from some part of Africa and maybe they still considered that sort of thing to be real there.

  “Erm, no, no I don’t,” he admitted at length.

  “Good. Neither do I,” the doctor agreed heartily.

  “So where does that leave me?” George asked, dispiritedly. “Even stronger painkillers?”

  “There is one thing,” the doctor said and this time he was the one sounding hesitant. “Perhaps you could come into my office and we could discuss it.”

  “Or we could discuss it right now,” George suggested strongly.

  “It is not the kind of thing that I like to discuss over the telephone.”

  “And spending an hour and half on three buses getting to the hospital is not something that I like to do,” George countered.

  There was a long pause. “All right, Mr Wilson. I said that all your scans were clear, which is not quite the case.”

  George’s heart took a leap that wasn’t pain-inflicted for a change.

  “On one of the scans, there was a shadow on the bones in your legs.” The doctor continued quickly, “We ran the scan again immediately and there was nothing there at all, and nothing showed up in any of the X-rays or other tests that we carried out.”

  “You think that there is something there?” George demanded.

  “No, I don’t,” Kaanange denied, but less convincingly than he might have. “The truth is that this was the only anomalous reading in all of the tests and I am clutching at straws.”

  “So what do we do about it?” George asked, as only a man who knew a thing or two about clutching at straws could.

  “There is something,” Kaanange said slowly. “I hesitate to mention it because it is invasive and I cannot even be sure that it is necessary.”

  “It is necessary,” George told him with absolute surety.

  “In order to see what is going on in there, I would have to open up your leg and take a core sample through the bone.”

  “You want to drill into my bones?” George said, being prepared for a lot of things, but not that.

  “As I said, it might be better for you to come into the office and discuss it more fully then,” the doctor suggested.

  “There’s no need,” George said firmly. “I’m in. I want you to do it.”

  “There will be pain afterwards,” Kaanange pointed out.

  “There will be pain afterwards no matter what happens,” George agreed.

  “I suggest that you discuss it with your family and decide how you wish to progress,” the doctor insisted.

  “I don’t need to discuss it with anyone,” George was just as firm.

  “Discuss it with your family, Mr Wilson, and then we will talk.”

  Kaanange hung up before George could say anything more.

  “They want to do what?” Mark demanded in a shocked voice.

  “Open up my leg and drill into the bone,” George repeated his description, though it sounded even less pleasant the second time.

  “And they don’t even know what they’re looking for?” the young man asked angrily. He wasn’t angry with the doctors, or his father, or even the world. He was a young man and anger was their go to emotion for situations like this.

  “No, they don’t,” George admitted immediately, “but this is apparently the only chance there is of finding out anything at all.” He paused and looked at his son, the boy with boundless enthusiasm who had grown into a man that made his father proud. Even the anger was a sign of how much emotion he felt for his father and that made George love him even more. He admitted that there was almost nothing that he wouldn’t do for his son. Almost. “Mark, I
need this. I can’t go on the way that I have been. I need for them to do this… and I think that your mother does to.”

  Sharon looked at him sharply, in both surprise and fear. A wife’s place was with her husband, supporting him and helping him through everything as an equal in the partnership, but a long period of sickness can be as wearing on the healthy party as it is on the sick one. He reached out and took her hand, his smile telling her that he understood and that he was in no way judging her, and even if he was, he did not find her wanting.

  “Have they tried leeches as well?” Mark demanded, but George could tell that he had accepted his father’s decision. He wasn’t happy about it, but he wouldn’t stand in the way.

  “No, and I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t suggest that to Doctor Kaanange. I can’t imagine that they taste very nice.”

  Nobody laughed.

  “Are you comfortable?” Doctor Kaanange enquired. Even though he was swathed in the blue surgical gown, hat and facemask expected in the operating theatre, he was obvious for who he was. Nobody else in the room, or in the hospital for that matter, could have been mistaken for him.

  “Not really,” George replied, “but since I can’t feel anything below the waist I can’t say that it’s a problem.”

  “Better that than the alternative,” another of the masked occupants of the room said.

  George had first met Carlton Parker in the surgeon’s office at the hospital. Once he had informed Kaanange that he was willing to go ahead with the procedure, no – that he was keen to go ahead with it, the reaction had been pretty swift. The first step was a consultation with Kaanange in a difference location. That location had been the office of Carlton Parker. Kaanange had made the introductions and Parker had taken George’s hand in a rather limp handshake.

  “Carlton’s the man who will be carrying out the operation,” Kaanange explained.

  “You won’t be doing it?” George asked in surprise.

  “I’m a clinician, not a surgeon,” Kaanange pointed out, “but if you read Doctor Parker’s press, you’ll find that they think very highly of him at the hospital.”

  They think?

  “I can assure you, Mr Wilson, that the facilities here are only recently built and therefore pretty much state of the art,” Parker had interjected to reassure his patient. “And we have the staff to go with it. I would be happy to have any one of the people who are going to be in theatre with us to be in the team operating on any one of my family, or me for that matter. They are all first rate.”

  “And Doctor Parker is a first-rate surgeon,” Kaanange added.

  “Even though the circumstances surrounding this procedure are out of the ordinary, the operation itself is fairly straightforward,” Parker had continued. “We’ll use a wide local anaesthetic. You will be conscious throughout the whole thing.”

  “I’ll be able to feel it?” George asked, alarmed.

  “No!” Kaanange said at the same time that Parker said, “After a fashion.”

  “Let me explain,” the surgeon had said into the embarrassing silence that followed. “You won’t feel any pain. You will be completely numbed against that. You will, however, be able to feel some pressure and pulling and the like as the operation progresses. No pain, though. I can completely guarantee that.”

  And he had been right about that guarantee. The anaesthesia had been given by a girl who seemed barely old enough to go to medical school, let alone to have graduated, and within a couple of minutes George’s legs had become wooden dead things. The relief from the pain was blissful to George, though he was also concerned by the fact that he couldn’t wiggle his toes or make contact with any part of his lower body. What if the anaesthetic didn’t wear off? Would it be better to live out a pain-free existence in a wheelchair or to be able to move around, but be in constant pain? That seemed an impossible decision to make. The anaesthetist seemed unconcerned by the state of George’s body and so he decided that he ought to be as well.

  “Are you sure that you wouldn’t like the headphones?” Parker asked once again. He had explained that some patients who were conscious during operations got a little anxious by what they heard being discussed by the surgeons and nurses and so they were offered a choice of music piped through headphones if they would prefer. The surgeon could still ask them direct questions by breaking into the music if it was required.

  “Quite sure,” George said, even though he was no such thing.

  “Then let’s get things underway.”

  George tried very hard not to think about what was happening to his leg. He was not one of those people who faint at the sight of blood, including his own, and could watch with interest the surgical documentaries on the satellite TV channels that delighted in rubbing the viewers’ noses in the gory reality of what humans looked like when you stripped the outer covering away. Even so, the idea of watching the doctors at work, fiddling around inside him, did not appeal. He could hear everything that was going on around him, but that was easier to deal with as it consisted of a mixture of surprisingly banal small talk and incomprehensible medical-speak.

  “So, what do you think?” Parker asked Kaanange after a while.

  The clinician leaned over George’s leg and examined it closely. “There’s definitely discolouration, but nothing that immediately suggests a cause.”

  “So we drill?” Parker asked.

  “I think so,” Kaanange confirmed. “George?”

  “If you need it, then I agree to it,” George agreed, more confidently than he felt.

  “Good man,” Parker approved.

  It was much harder to ignore the drill. It whirred like the ones that dentists use, only with a slightly more bass note. When it came into contact with the (presumably) exposed bone, however, the note turned into a grinding sound that George first thought indicated that it was broken.

  After a surprisingly short time, however, the drill suddenly regained its higher-pitched whining.

  “What?” Parker’s low exclamation made it obvious that this was not an expected development.

  George stifled his natural curiosity. This was not a time to be distracting the doctors.

  “Well that might certainly explain a few things,” Kaanange said, leaning in towards George’s leg to get a better look. Parker, having placed the drill to one side, mirrored his movement.

  “I don’t think I’ve ever seen…”

  With a sudden jerk, the surgeon straightened up and lurched backward. Kaanange stumbled away and the look on his wide, dark face frightened George badly. The white, white eyes were bulging in shock and looked almost set to pop out and dangle against his cheeks on the end of their optic nerves. His mouth was an ‘O’ of surprise and shock and revulsion.

  As he had jumped away, Parker had bumped into the bank of equipment and knocked the support for the suspended mirror that directed light onto the wound upon which he was working. George leaned to his left and then right, trying to see what they were seeing. The assisting nurses and the anaesthetist had also backed away from the patient.

  George finally found an angle where he could see something in the mirror. There was his leg, but the skin was cut open and peeled back. The muscles had been pushed aside, held by clamps and the bone, an off-white colour with some red staining, was clearly visible. It was an odd feeling, seeing his insides like this, but the lack of pain, of any kind of feeling, rendered it a surreal, remote sort of experience. Though he knew that it was his leg intellectually, he couldn’t form any sort of emotional connection to what he was seeing.

  Etched into the leg, was a hole. It looked larger than he thought it would. The drill hadn’t seemed that wide and Kaanange had explained that they were only going to take a small core sample that they could examine under a microscope and subject to chemical testing to find out what was causing the mysterious scan discolorations.

  Then something crawled out of the hole.

  George was as shocked as everyone else, but he was not able to ju
mp away. His whole lower body was locked in uselessness and it wasn’t as though he could crawl away from his own leg anyway.

  The thing, the creature (for there was no doubt that it was alive) was half the width of the bone and black, but the kind of black that shone with iridescent colours when the light reflected from it. It was an oval on several legs, but it was too far away for George to see any details. Another emerged whilst the first shook itself and opened its carapace, testing the stubby wings that lay underneath.

  “Oh my God, the other leg!” one of the nurses cried and everyone looked.

  George had to readjust his line of vision in the mirror to be able to see anything at all. He eventually found an angle where he could see his other leg reflected off the mirror. This leg was intact, but it was bulging, the skin stretching tight over small domes that moved with difficulty beneath the skin. There was still no sensation and so it was like watching some unreal horror movie, that one in space where a barely convincing puppet burst out the spaceman’s chest for example. It was a wild connection to make at such a time, but George’s mind had been knocked off kilter and was leaping about in all directions.

  Pain blazed up his arm and took him completely by surprise, causing him to yell out. He knew the location of it immediately, but this was a different kind of pain. He heard the sound of the bones in his arm breaking and that shocked him into immobility and banished the pain for a moment. Then whatever was inside started to chew its way through the muscles and tendons to get to the surface and this time there was no anaesthetic to dull the agony.

  George screamed. This was no surprised yell; this was a full-on scream of agony. He had never felt anything like this. What was left of his conscious mind considered that he could go back to his previous condition and never complain about it for the rest of his life. His eyes searched for help, but there was nothing to see. He couldn’t move and there was nothing within his reach. He only had one hand with which to reach out anyway.

  His vision settled on his arm again. He didn’t want it to. He wanted to look anywhere other than there, but there was the only place that he could look. The skin was stretching, distending, thinning as the creatures beneath fought to get out. Then there was a tearing and three pairs of claws tore through the abused epidermis. He knew he ought to scream again, but he seemed to have moved beyond that. In the words of that song from the self-pitying Pink Floyd album, he seemed to be turning ‘comfortably numb’.