Lord Byron's Prophecy by Sean Eads

Author:Sean Eads
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: gay, Lord Byron, dark fantasy, premonitions, literary
Publisher: Lethe Press, Inc.
Published: 2015-10-01T04:00:00+00:00

Part 2: George

chapter five

He opens his eyes to an unfamiliar environment. He’s on a bed that’s angled in a way that makes his lower half feel like it’s sliding off the mattress at a glacial pace. He looks down at his arms. There’s a handcuff on his right wrist. After the initial shock, Fane realizes it’s not a handcuff at all, but rather a plastic identification bracelet of some sort.

Where is he?

It must be the town hospital, the same place where Gordon was born. Fane can picture the building—across the street from the orthodontics office where Gordon’s smile was perfected through three years of labor akin to soldering and welding.

Fane flinches at a sudden image: bloody teeth on the sidewalk and on the grass, the grass blades glistening red. Vicious grass, switchblade grass, as if Walt Whitman had gotten an attitude. Where is Gordon? What has happened to him?

He groans, feeling an intense throb in his left temple.

Now he hears his own panting breath mixed with the sound of machines stationed behind him. They seem to be activating all at once. Fane cranes his neck back to see them, though their connection to him is not mysterious. He has an IV in his left arm. God knows what they’re feeding into him. Truth serum, perhaps. Staring down the length of his body, mostly draped under a white sheet, he sees both feet visible and naked. One looks quite normal, the other narrower and yellowed, the unnatural conclusion of an unnatural leg. He tries to kick the sheet over it and thinks, not for the first time, of Frankenstein’s creation. It’s a hideous thing to open your eyes and discover you seem to be a man constructed from different animals.

He swallows, alarmed by the sharp dryness of his throat, the act itself producing a low, raspy clicking sound as from a machine that hasn’t operated in years. Wincing, he studies the room with growing despair and confusion. Despite various health problems, his worsening leg being chief among them, Fane has assiduously avoided hospital rooms over the years. It surprises him therefore to find this room is not as sterile as he would have supposed; what he sees—which has some of the trappings of a musty motel—makes him wish it were. Is there some psychological advantage in making a patient feel like a stranded, desperate tourist?

But why is he a patient?

A doctor enters, a man with short red hair, his body gangly, too thin for his clothes. The doctor ignores him, spends the first two minutes studying the machines and typing on a computer console. Fane’s right hand reaches automatically for something that isn’t there.

“Where’s my cane?”

Now the doctor says, “Glad you’re awake, Adam. Do you know where you are?”

“Why wouldn’t I?”

“Humor me,” the doctor says, his tone quite kind.

“This is the hospital near campus.”

“Which campus?”

“Westervelt, of course. What happened to me? Was I in a car accident?”

“Tell me the last thing you remember.”

Fane blinks. “I was...I was auditing a junior professor’s class.

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