TWICE by Susanna Kleeman

Author:Susanna Kleeman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: John Hunt Publishing
Published: 2021-05-08T00:00:00+00:00

27

The therapist, who’d told me her name was Ramona, manhandled me back down the stairs with help from three burly men dressed as hospital porters.

‘Are you going to inject me?’

‘If we need to.’ I’d had a troubling day, she said, who knew what I might need. Lots of old fears and repressed memories bubbling to the surface. The very best thing for me was going to be trusting her, telling her everything, all those old stories of Alan’s rattling around inside my head, that seemed to be mixing me up, delaying my recovery so. And after that sleep, which my body and mind so needed to heal, after all I’d been through.

They mangled me down the humming corridor.

Back to the ward, my old room—what seemed to be my ward and old room or cabin? But what did I know: grey empty identical floors, corridors of closed doors.

The room seemed the same: books and toiletries strewn in the exact mess I’d left them and even, from the bathroom, the same linger of vomit. But it seemed brighter, no peeled paint, and there were new elements: a large print of Alan’s Chinese map up on the far wall and below that the old white Ickthwaite chest of drawers. On an easel: Alan’s pinch chart: a drawing of a human palm with letters and numbers at each point and knuckle line. On the table: a thin silver laptop, a thin silver phone, two books and what looked like the green welly box. The books seemed to be the Alphabet, last seen in the blue Ford Fiesta in Ickthwaite, and A Little Key To Drawing, last seen in Vengeance Street with brailed newspaper tucked inside. And next to the shelves: a new white door, seemingly to the next cabin, with a small black panel where the handle should be.

‘Let’s pick up from where we were,’ Ramona said. ‘Your books. That you’ve been making such a fuss over?’ Good news: real Chris had wangled them from police evidence lock-ups, for me to work through with her, tell her everything Alan had ever said about them, every last Scritch.

Whoa, I said. Real Chris, that fine fellow, so very cold he’d really let them do this to me to squeeze out Scritch stuff? Really and truly? I knew Chris had morphed into something awful, I hadn’t realised it was this awful. My old chum, selling me down the river so they could find out what? Ancient mysteries Alan had buried in us? That meant so much they’d go to all this trouble? Bunch of freaks. Why not—I didn’t know—hypnotise real Chris, inject him with their nanocams to film his memories—real Chris already knew all the Scritch stories, had grown up with them too, if he really was real Chris. Or was he Don or some other clone or triplet gone bad? Could Ramona be sure? Could she be sure of me? Maybe I wasn’t me. Perhaps I was duping her, perhaps we all were. And where was

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