The Storymaker (Part Nine)

© 2012 David Jasmin-Green

Once more Gordon found himself fastened to the bed in his ugly alien nightmare. This time he could read the thoughts of the creature he inhabited; he had the unsettling experience of having two minds at once, which was like being a sentient ant creeping around in the folds of a grudging host's cerebral cortex. He didn't like the creature's thoughts much, he decided. They were mostly cold and impassive, but in places they were worryingly cruel, so he tried not to listen – except when he really needed to.

A nurse leaned over a slab jutting out from the wall beside the window filling a large hypodermic needle from a dark green flask - or Gordon assumed it was a nurse. Yes, his host told him, roughly speaking that was what it was. The nurse was female, the host said, a fact that he wouldn't have figured out unaided in a month of Sundays. She wore a floor length apron that looked like it was made out of old sacking and a face mask (just like any ordinary nurse, he tried to tell himself). Predictably enough she wasn't human, but she looked a little more human than he did.

The nurse was a walking skeleton with an oversized head, a skeleton with limbs too long and thin to be feasible, at least in Earth gravity. She had thin, semi-opaque skin of a pale beige colour tightly stretched over her delicate frame, and there was only a tiny amount of muscle between skin and bone. Her tiny eyes, sunk deep in their oversized sockets, were a pretty hazel colour and they were by far the most appealing part of her, but the rest, well, she was far from attractive. Not by human standards, anyway. She was familiar though, Gordon sensed that, and more importantly she didn't mean him any harm. Apart from the harm involved in performing her duties.....

“Hello Hannah,” the insectile thing that Gordon's mind inhabited tried to say, but instead of words a stacatto clicking came out of his bone dry throat. “I seem to have been alone for days, and I've missed you.” The nurse's name wasn't Hannah, but it sounded a little like that and Gordon's mind translated it as Hannah. She turned around, leaned over him and looked into his eyes through his goggles. A soft, lilting squeak like the sound of an old transistor radio surfing between stations assaulted his ears, if he had any – he could hear the noise, so he must have possessed hearing of some sort.

“You have to speak quietly if you wish to converse, Essalia,” the host translated the nurse's words. “You know that any communication other than the necessary minimum between staff and captives is forbidden, and I will be punished just as severely as you if we are caught.”

“I..... I don't want the sedative. I have to keep a clear mind. Something is different about me, my mind..... My mind is different, that's all I can really tell you, I don't know how or why. I have to monitor the situation, somehow I have to figure out what's going on. Flush my dose down the drain and tell your superiors I've had it, Hannah, just this once. Please. Will you do that for me?”

“That's not wise,” she whispered. “I have to milk your glands soon, and you'll find the process very distressing without your sedative.”

“Oh, I love your blow jobs, Hannah, and I'm sure I'd enjoy them even more without a shot of that brain numbing frigging sedative.....”

“Uuh,” she said. Gordon sensed that she didn't catch the meaning of the term 'blow job,' and though she hadn't gotten around to considering the word 'frigging' he was sure she wouldn't understand that either. “I hate to remind you,” she continued, “but it won't be long before the surgeons take you to the blue room to harvest your limbs – heaven knows what for. Food, I assume, but I can't be sure. The surgeons and the masters are far more advanced than your race or mine, and we can't possibly guess why they do such things. Your limbs will grow back, of course, given time, you've been here long enough to know that. “

“Don't give me the sedative, Hannah,” Gordon croaked. “I don't want it.”

“I have to, for your own good. You're not administered the drug for pain relief, of course, you're dosed because even slight mental distress taints your sap, it makes it bitter, and the masters would make it their business to track down the source of such unpalatable juice when they feed. Quite possibly they'll snuff you out as soon as you're identified, or they'll send your crawler to do the job for them.”

“That's not the reason, you know that as well as I do. The drug is administered to anaesthetise the minds of myself and my fellow prisoners, it's injected to keep us in line. The staff are also chemically controlled, I'm sure of it, only in a different way..... They're frightened of us, the masters and the surgeons, believe it or not. We may be feeble, but we're very cunning, Hannah, your species and mine – I'm sure that if we combined forces we could easily overthrow our gaolers. They are few and we are many.”

“You should know better than to speak such sacrilege,” the nurse whispered. “You'll get yourself terminated and ingested, and then all your wishful thinking, all your gaudy hopes and dreams will be dashed forever.” Just then there was a scuffling noise in the corner, then a scratching sound that seemed to come from beneath the floor.

“What's that?” Gordon said. Curiously his host fell silent – obviously it didn't wish to discuss the matter, so he couldn't discern the information that way.

“Ach!” Hannah said, visibly distressed, waving her spindly arms as if she were shooing away a pesky fly, and the fettered creature whose eyes Gordon peered out of refused to translate. “Ach! Ach! Tis a crawler. I have to go, my friend, I have to love you and leave you as much as I hate to abandon you to the monster's mercy. Your crawler has been kind to you so far, Essalia, and hopefully this time will be no different. Remember, you've been here much longer than any other prisoner without falling prey to your crawler. That's because you're strong, it's because you're worthy – who knows, you might even survive the remainder of your sentence. I'll be back later to administer your injection. Take care.”

The nurse fled from the room at a greater speed than Gordon thought her flimsy body was capable of, and he and his wriggling host were left alone to anticipate the arrival of the crawler, whatever that might be. Though the scratching grew more insistent it was impossible to pinpoint its source, but for some reason Gordon's goggled eyes focused on the far corner of the room beside the broken window where a thick, battleship grey pipe emerged from a hole in the ceiling, snaked oddly across the wall and disappeared into a similar, slightly larger hole in the floor. He didn't have to wait long before the crawler began to emerge.