Chapter 18: Telling the Truth
John squints his eyes at the evil woman. This is a trick question, he knows. "No," he begins uncertainly. "I know I'm not supposed to answer that. It'll give me away, and Sherlock wouldn't like to be exposed before he's-"
"Sherlock?"
"Sherlock Holmes. I'm helping him in the vivisection case. Hey! That's you. We figured that out last night. We followed Goatee over there back from the club. We were dancing first-" she cuts him off again. The screaming, horrified part in the back of John's brain is more relieved that he kept back how snogging with Sherlock had been unexpectedly wonderful, than it is distressed about spilling his guts.
He is in a strange, divided world. It is not that the drug is forcing him to tell the truth. It just makes his mouth run and his brain is so foggy he can't be bothered to filter, or sort through the information to see what should be twisted or held back.
"Why are you and Sherlock Holmes looking into these deaths? Are you the police?"
"No, although we work with them. Well, Sherlock does. He's the world's only consulting detective, and they come to him with the cases that they can't crack."
"And you're his assistant?"
"Well. Since I hatched. It's only been a week. He's really amazing, though. Got a brain the size of a planetary superc- cop – compmuter. That's right. Knows what you're going to say before you even say it. He'll probably-"
"Did you say 'hatched'?"
"No. No I didn't," John gives lying his best shot, but just can't stop the torrent of words. "He found my egg in the basement apartment and brought it upstairs. I've been out for a week, and we've been working on this case, and he really is fantastic-"
She actually puts her hand over his mouth. He quiets for a moment, and then thinks to bite her, but he is too slow and she pulls her hand away. The operating theater seems filled with clear jelly: the outlines are not crisp and sharp but jiggly, moving constantly, fracturing the light. John squeezes his eyes shut. This is wrong. He knows it's wrong. But that part of his brain is utterly sidelined.
"What do you know about this case?"
"What? We know it's you. That you're doing it to harvest organs to sell to wealthy people who then get the surgery done right here. We know that you knock the victims out with a combination of zolpidem and propofol and then perform vivisection to obtain the organs. We know that Bernie here pulls for your victims and that you're the one with the blade-"
The woman's face whitens as John speaks, and he feels intense satisfaction. Her expression twists into fury, and she grabs his jaw, digging her nails into the skin of his cheek as cruelly as she can, and turning his head too sharply, overclocking his neck. "Are the police coming?"
"Yes, of course they are," John again attempts to lie. He can't keep it up for more than a few seconds. "No, Sherlock wanted to check out more records at the bank, and I came here to meet you and see what I could suss out-"
She crushes his mouth again to interrupt the stream of words. "Does anyone know you're here?"
John interprets this question as specifying the operation theater he is currently in. "No-"
Dr. Linley interrupts him again. "Good. Tell me how you got off the roof."
"No, I'm not going to do that because then you'll know about my wings. Dammit. I didn't want to tell you that. I'm sure it isn't safe. And, of course, not true. Not true at all."
"Tell me about your wings, Dr. Watson." Her face is avaricious and cold at the same time, and John feels a deep jolt of fear, inaccessible, but evident.
"I can't. I can't tell you." John shuts his eyes, as if they are a metaphor for his mouth.
She steps forward and squashes his head down on the mattress. She thumbs his lid up, forcing it open, and it pops away from the moist curvature of his eye with a tiny sucking sound. Sheet wrinkles poke at his eyeball, sharp and dry. She stoops until they are inches from one another. "Tell me."
"They didn't exist before. In my life before, in Afghanistan. Only when I hatched. Then they were just there. I can pull them whenever I want, just like my knives. Except I can't do the knives now because you're restraining my wrists. I didn't know if I could fly, when we were on the roof. But I had to risk it, because Sherlock would have died. I'd do anything to stop that. Anything. I had to try!" She keeps his head viciously pushed down, his eyelid pulled tortuously back, until there is an air-filled gap between the fragile bit of skin and his eyeball, and the sheet corners have sucked all the moisture from it, scraping painfully against the dried cornea.
"Show me the wings."
"No. No I can't. I mustn't. They're impossible anyway. You shouldn't see them. Only Sherlock can see them. Only Sherlock can touch them. And maybe we'll go to his house in the country and try flying again.
"You know, you can make this shit pour out of my mouth, but you can't make me take out my wings. You don't control my body." John laughs shortly, and Dr. Linley pulls her hand off his head and then viciously returns it in a mighty slap. It hurts, but John keeps laughing. "You can make me talk, but I still control my body. That doesn't hurt much. I'm not scared of you. Much. Sherlock will come-"
The verbal diarrhea stops abruptly when Dr. Linley leans over to the defibrillator machine and snaps it on. A resonant hum fills the sudden quiet. "What-" John takes a deep breath. "What are you planning on doing? You can't hit me with that. You'll induce a fucking heart attack. Do you want to kill me? Christ." The heart monitor begins blipping sharply again. Of course, caught like an animal in a trap, confined face down on a hospital bed, it is abundantly clear that they intend him no good.
And then John remembers that he is in a large, functioning hospital. Twenty-four hour operation. "HELP!" he yells as loudly as he can. "Help! I'm being tortured-"
"Use his fucking shirt," Linley says over him, and Bernie snatches up a bundle from the floor and crams it against his face, shoving part into his mouth.
"Shut up. Shut up," Bernie mutters. "Goddamned freak." He pushes more of the wadded up fabric into John's mouth, until he can only frantically suck in air through his nose, pulling his head back as far away as he can, torquing his neck, grunting behind the makeshift gag.
Linley returns, face blank and cruel. John stares at the paddles in her nasty thick-fingered hands. He thinks of Sherlock's fingers, lithe, and long, and proficient. Oh, god. He rolls his eyes back to her face.
"So, Dr. Watson. Show us your wings."
He shakes his head.
She lunges forward, and presses the paddles to his skin, one under his left armpit, and the other on his back. John thrashes and arches, but can't dislodge her.
"Bernie! Clear!" And Bernie pushes the button.
The room goes white. John is barely aware of the whipping of his body through the crushing pain in his chest. His teeth clench on the shirt in his mouth. He can't breathe. Can't think. The heart monitor is shrieking and shrieking. Has a car dropped on him? Jesus. It is like being kicked by a horse. Repeatedly. Linley says something, but he can't see, can't hear, can't get back inside his own head; for how long, he doesn't know. His body rattles and echoes with the rapid, erratic, tachycardic thumps in his chest. His heart is frenetically flailing. Until it stops entirely.
They are trying to tug the stuff out of his mouth, and he knows he should let go in order to breathe, but can't unclench his jaw. I'm having a fucking heart attack, he thinks distantly, but somehow can't be arsed to care.
Linley snaps out an order, and the paddles are back. Oh, god. John tries to tense against it, but has absolutely no control over his body. This time he feels the current, sharp-edged like razor wire, sliding through his chest. That is his only sensation, razor-wire mining through his muscles and into his heart.
Everything stops.
And then starts again.
His mouth is clear. He pulls in a gasping breath, and another. Low moans are coming out, and his body trembles with aftershocks, shaking and icy cold with sweat.
Dr. Linley holds a paddle in front of his face. "Wings, Dr. Watson. Or next time I'll do this on your head."
John closes his eyes, exhausted and defeated. He draws his wings out. They lay, lax and shaking like the rest of him, spilling sideways off his back, trailing to the floor. It is slightly warmer under the feathers, and John feels a fraction of relief.
Dr. Linley gasps. Bernie says, "What the fuck?"
But John is still trying to breathe, trying to control his heart, and just lies there.
"Bind them up," Dr. Linley orders. And then his wings are being lifted slightly, and he figures it must be Bernie, wrapping them tightly where they joined his back, using long gauze ribbon. It doesn't feel good; the soft tertial coverts are pulled at the base, caught up in the gauze. His stomach jumps and heaves at foreign fingers in his feathers, bile rising sharp and vile up in his throat. John convulses at the sensation of hands on his wings, and begins to struggle. He beats his wings furiously from the carpel joint, and knocks Bernie back.
"Christ!" Bernie shouts.
"Restrain. Them. Now. Moron!" Linley hisses. Bernie pushes his way past the heavy wings and twists more gauze around the carpel joints, tying them together over his back. John jerks as secondary coverts are painfully crushed and broken, the tape mercilessly cutting through them to hold tight against the skin and muscle underneath.
John thinks, for a ridiculous, hallucinogenic moment, that he must look like a trussed turkey. But he can't speak, still, choking on air. His body feels like one great internal bruise. As if all his insides have been gouged out and then poured back in fractured, calcified pieces of individual pain.
Linley paces around him, heels clicking under her heavy, graceless tread. "Amazing," she mutters. She brushes her hand against one of his painfully raised wings, and he shudders. He'd rather this evil woman grope at his cock than his wings. It would feel less intimate.
His breath begins to get some traction. He inhales.
She turns to glare at him. "If you try to shout, we'll just gag you again." John remains still, trying to calculate his odds. She picks up a scalpel off a nearby tray, and he sucks in breath to scream. "Shut it!" She's moved so fast, the scalpel is already pressing into his neck. He can feel the sting, and the slithery warm trickle of blood. "Bernie, wrap his fucking mouth over."
Bernie glares. The rough bandage over his side is bright red again, so the struggle with his wings must have knocked it awry. John is heartlessly glad. Unfortunately, Bernie is just plain heartless. He pulls John's head up by the longer hair on top, and works an entire roll of gauze into his mouth. The he takes out another and begins to wind it around and around his head. John is left with his mouth gaping wide, strangling on the giant wad of fabric, nose partly obscured as well. He has to concentrate on breathing, on staying calm, so he doesn't hyperventilate and die. Fucking hell. Of all the ways to die in a hospital, this is not one he'd ever imagined.
"You know what I specialize in, Dr. Watson?" Dr. Linley bends over a little, to look him full in the face. "Transplants. I'm very good at it. Very good. It has made me quite rich, yes, indeed. But you know what I've never transplanted before?" She pauses, as if the idiot woman thinks he can possibly answer. Or would want to. John doesn't even blink. "Human wings, that's what. If I can get £80,000 for one measly kidney, can you just imagine what I can get for you?" She trails the scalpel lightly down the long curve where wing meets back, not breaking the skin. "How do they attach?"
It's a direct question, and John is still pumped full of the sodium thiopental mixture. He shakes his head. He and Sherlock don't know. They haven't done x-rays with his wings present, yet. And now, he thinks, perhaps they never will. His mouth is dry. So dry. The gauze is sticking to his tongue, touching his tonsils, gluing to his uvula: wicking up every drop of moisture. Dr. Linley tosses the scalpel back on the tray and picks up a black Sharpie.
"Let's see if I can guess," She says, and begins to draw cut lines along his spine, tickling and cool, sweeping down under a wing to trace along his ribs.