The Book: Chapter 37

Security was coming. Alice pressed herself flat against the door, fighting her rising panic. The buzz of radio static came to her, punctuated by the heavy thud of boots. They weren’t here for tea and cakes. They were coming to drag her away. But she wasn’t leaving. Not yet.

The book pulsed, absorbing her tension like a parasite. Static crawled along her skin making her hair rise and she felt one with the text. It had led her by the nose, whispered secrets, and made her see what nobody else could. She’d spent months deciphering, fearing, and obeying it. Now, she needed it to protect her. If the book wanted her to be there, it would do something to make it happen. She waited.

She put her fingers on the book’s lizardry cover. ‘Help me,’ she said.

The air in the office shuddered. A boom of invisible power erupted around her.

The electrics went feral. The room had already been smothered by semi-darkness when the bulbs burst like gunfire, but her monitor cracked, and symbols she didn’t recognise blinked in and out like a dying heartbeat. It glitched into nonsensical lines of code flashing across the screen as it melted.

The static in the air was a living monster, sinking into her skin. It loomed tall, swallowing the room. The security feed to the cameras cut out, displaying their silicone, dead, blackness. Alice listened to the security team reacting outside. Everything was malfunctioning, including the emergency equipment. The guards were cursing. They’d lost control and were confused by the sudden electrical storm inside the building. ‘It’s impossible,’ she heard Louis say.

The emergency alarm system blared to life and a message came over the Tannoy. ‘Attention, all staff. Electrical failure detected. All non-essential personnel evacuate the annexe immediately.’

The sounds of chaos ripped through the ward, throwing the patients into a frenzy of paranoia and mania. She heard them melting down like her computer screen. The alarm siren screeched over the intercom, interspersed with the disembodied voice telling them to evacuate. Alice risked a look out of her door.

Betty ran past Alice’s office, tearing through the corridor with her cardigan flapping in billowing wings and dropping tissues like shot doves. ‘It’s a nuclear attack. The missiles are coming—BAE is gone,’ she shouted. She clutched Debbie’s arm with white-knuckled fingers. ‘We need to get underground. Now!’

Molly stood at Alice’s door ripping handfuls of hair from her head, and Annie, bedside her, covered her ears and wailed. Alice couldn’t help them. It was every person for themselves The red glow of emergency lights washed over the halls outside her office and flashed across her viewing window. The security team had stopped hunting her. They had broader concerns than a deeply broken psychiatrist.

A nurse’s panicked voice shrieked along the corridor. ‘The machines are going berserk. We need everyone on the floor—now.’

Alice waited.

The book had done it—but at what cost?

The security team ran, and she listened to their footsteps receding. She’d bought herself more time.

Her pulse pounded in her ears as she went back to the book with a frantic urgency. It had saved her. It never acted without reason or gave without taking.

A new chapter had appeared.

A surge of power yet to come, an instant of silence, and then a heart ceases to beat.

Alice’s stomach twisted. She knew the pattern and what it meant.

The book was predicting another death.

The power surge had caused everything to malfunction, it had to be related. She left her office. The book was leading her, she knew where to go. The power surge. A death. But who? When? How?

She looked at the clock. It was 4:37 PM. She wondered how long she had left. The prediction was vague, but the book had never been wrong.

She was drawn to ICU Room 5. The patient inside—Michael Rawlins— had been there for six years, atrophied and broken after a drug overdose. He was in a permanent vegetative state—dumped to fester in a corner room of the annexe for want of somewhere better to keep him. Mike was on a ventilator, his body frail, his breath mechanically measured by the rise and fall of his chest. He was turned over, like a bag of flour, to prevent pressure sores every two hours. And he had his pad checked at the same time. These days with the damned staffing shortage, it was closer to four and sometimes as long as six. He was in a coma, and he never complained.

The book’s words clattered around in her skull.

A surge of power.
         Alice burst into the tiny room, big enough for a free-standing bed the staff could work around. His medical equipment was the only furniture. There were no chairs and fewer visitors. She expected to find Michael dead from the electrical malfunction, fried to a crisp like overcooked bacon. But his ventilator bellows went up the clear tube and came down again like a helter-skelter at the funfair. Its whoosh and gusting of breath sounded reminiscent of an iron lung below the surface of the ocean and the beep of his life support continued unabated.

Alice was confused. The book led her here. But she doubted herself, thinking she’d got it wrong. Dread slithered up her spine. She forced herself to remember the exact phrase. The words were a toffee hammer striking her skull. A surge of power—yet to come. She’d acted too soon. The real danger was still coming.

It hadn’t happened yet.

Alice felt her adrenaline rise and it pitched at Top-C. The disaster hadn’t happened and the book was still going to kill Mike. There’d be another wave of electrical disturbance, Alice was sure of it. She could save this man’s life.

Electricity. The machines. It was going to hit the ventilator.

Why do you want to save the wretch? Look at him—contorted like the blackened limb of a dying yew. It’s shrivelled and starved of life.

‘Shut up.’

What good is it, lying there day in and year out taking up a bed, denying a more-deserving case?

‘I’m not listening.’

It’s as lifeless as a corpse left to wither in salted earth. Look at the living cadaver, a burden, a waste.

‘Get out of my head.’

Save it from its misery. It’s a cabbage, Alice. That thing’s no use to anybody. Go on. Turn him off.

She’d been here before, second-guessing, and had trapped herself between belief and paranoia. But there was a crucial component to playing her part. She had to ignore the book’s influence—it was drilling in her head. It wanted her to hesitate so she’d do the opposite. She had to work fast to avoid the snakes and move her counter along the board.

Her fingers hovered over the ventilator’s control panel. She had one minute available. One chance. If she powered it down at the right time, she could stop the machine from short-circuiting during the surge. She just had to get it right.

The lights flashed. Alarms sounded. It had changed tactics. Now it was pressing her. The walls vibrated, humming with an unnatural force, like something massive and unseen was breathing just beyond reality, waiting to break through. She wasn’t given time to think this through. It forced her to act. Think dammit. What to do. The monitors around the room blinked. The cameras died. There were two clunks as the door locks malfunctioned, and she was locked in the room with Michael. She panicked.

The emergency lights came on, painting everything in prostitute red—flashes of reality, darkness, then something worse. She heard the static building in the cables.

Turn him off, bitch.

It’s now or never. She took a deep breath. And turned off Michael’s life support.

The spirometer gave its last whoosh and dropped to the bottom of the clear tube. The monitor flatlined, heralding the young man’s passing with a monotonous tone. The death beep rang around the room. But Alice wasn’t doing the book’s bidding. She was saving this life, not ending it.

Alice counted. She had one precious minute.       

The electrics went haywire. Overhead wires exploded around her, showering her head in a halo of golden sparks. The locks disengaged and the door slammed open.

She had to hold her nerve. They were all right. Plenty of time yet.

‘Fifty-eight. Fifty-nine. Sixty,’ she said. There was a loud bang as something outside the room exploded and she eyed the oxygen tank beside the wall. There was so much in here that could kill her, but she was safe. The book had never let her die before. Today was no different. She was always safe.

The room crackled with static and she felt electricity moving like a fungal carpet beneath her feet. It gave her pins and needles up her legs. Did the book have enough power to ramp up the voltage? The bastard could fry her where she stood. She didn’t need to turn around to know its power was all around her—she felt it as a heavy pressure in the air. It was a presence pressing against her mind, a thumb holding down an insect’s wings.

It was time.

She scrambled to switch the machine back on and flicked the switch. It didn’t respond. She tried again. Nothing. It was dead. So was Michael. It should have fired back up. ‘No, no, no. He should have been saved.

The alarms screamed, red lights flashed, and nurses rushed in. Alice stood by the bed, devoid of thought or substance.

You killed him, Alice.

‘Piss off.’

‘I’m sorry?’ Mara bristled at being sworn at as she rushed in. ‘Oh God. Alice what have you done?’

This is on you, babe.

‘I warn you. If you don’t shut up I’ll cut you into a million pieces,’ Alice said.

‘Get her out of here.’ Mara was shouting, and Alice didn’t understand anything anymore. It should have worked.

Trying to do anything was futile. Michael was gone and she stood immobile with her finger on the switch.  They pushed her out of the way to get to the patient. ‘What have you done?’ Mara rpeated.  

This wasn’t how it was supposed to happen. Calvert shoved past her. ‘What happened?’

‘I turned him off,’ Alice said.

‘Lay him flat.’ Calvert said, preparing the defibrillator paddles.

‘The book made me do it. It’s okay. He’s going to be all right now.’ Alice heard her voice. It came to her from somewhere above her head, flat and emotionless. ‘I had to. There was going to be another surge.’

‘Clear,’ Calvert said.

 ‘I wanted to save him.’ Before Alice could explain, another alarm went off in the next room.

‘Damn it,’ Calvert shouted. ‘Go and see what’s going on next door.’

Alice whirled around to leave.

‘Not you.’  

More nurses were running—not to Michael, but to Room 6.

The power surge hit in there, too. But it hit the wrong patient. She was meant to protect Michael. She’d felt it pulling her to this room.

It made her choose the wrong patient and Michael had never been in danger.

Sid Green had been sitting in his armchair looking out of the window. He did that a lot. He watched for his wife coming to take him home, but his wife had long since moved on to another man. Sid was fried like chicken as an internal fork of lightning appeared from the ceiling and struck him through the dome of his bald head. Alice knew because the book sent another bolt through him as she ignored Calvert and followed her team into the room. It showed off its energy in a supernatural sideshow and for a split second Sid’s eyes glowed like a table lamp from inside his skull. He’d been killed from the impact of the first hit. The second was to taunt Alice.

She turned around, laughed at the irony of it all, and left the room. Nobody stopped her as she went back to the sanctuary of her office.

Two for a deuce. Two in the bush. she read in the book, and she laughed again. It was a one.

The pages that had been stuck together had peeled apart on their own. She looked at the new words, and her stomach clenched in horror. Sid Green’s name had been written there all along.

Your move, sugarbutt.

She was mildly fascinated to see the words appear, one letter at a time, as she watched. But then her gaze was distracted and she watched a bird fly past the window. It made her laugh.

The world faded as her mind spun. She thought she had control this time.

She heard a whisper. Soft at first, curling around the edges of her hearing like smoke. It grew, expanding. There were more voices. Dozens of people, all talking at once. They spoke to her in a language she couldn’t understand, their tones melodic but sinister. Discordant calliope music played in the background and Alice danced. She was a ballet dancer and her arms came up, so pretty, as she swayed. But the noise built and layered, voices on top of one another rose in an infinite chant. She heard monastic singing.

Alice clamped her hands over her ears, but it didn’t help because the sound was inside her. They brought her out of her breakdown state and into the stark reality of her world. She had killed a man. The police would be coming. ‘Focus,’ she said. ‘Don’t let it win.’ Grabbing her sanity by the coattails she straightened. She stumbled, crashing against the wall and her chest tightened with panic. Her vision swam as darkness crept around the edges. ‘Shut up now. Just stop. Let me think.’ The noise continued. ‘Stop,’ she shouted at the top of her voice. And the room was still.

And then she heard laughter, low and guttural, something ancient and cruel. It came from the book.

Worse than making the wrong choice it had never given her a choice at all.

 

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