Grantchester Grind

12

The same thought might have crossed Kudzuvine's mind when he came to the next morning, if Kudzuvine had had anything of a mind. In any case, because of his concussion and Dr MacKendly's medication, what little mind he had was working with the greatest difficulty.

'I think we'll give him something mildly soporific and hypnotic, Matron,' the doctor had said when he first examined the unconscious American. 'No need for an X-ray or anything like that. Waste of money. Chap's obviously got a skull like a steel ball and if he hasn't…' He left Kudzuvine's future well-being in the balance.

But the so-called soporific and hypnotic drug he injected twice into him exceeded the doctor's expectations. The effect was not in the least mild. When Kudzuvine came to he was virtually catatonic. He could see and hear and feel but that was about all. What he couldn't do was move. And what he saw made him extremely anxious to move. It did more. It filled him with the utmost dread. Close beside the bed, a bed Kudzuvine had never been in before and in a room he didn't begin to recognize, there sat the most malevolent creature he had ever seen since Quasimodo in a reshowing of _The Hunchback of Notre Dame._ In Kudzuvine's condition this creature was infinitely worse to look at and it was far, far worse to be looked at by it, whatever it was. Kudzuvine had no idea. Worst of all, he was incapable of shutting his eyes and cutting out the sight of this thing that sat looking at him so malignantly. Not only couldn't he shut his eyes but he seemed to be paralysed. And naked. In a huge bed and bedroom he had never been in before. In a desperate attempt to find out if he was able to speak or had been struck dumb into the bargain, Kudzuvine struggled to find words. So, quite evidently, did the ghastly creature in the chair and now that he came to look at it more closely, not that he wanted to in the least, he could see that it was Quasimodo, updated to a clinically chromed chair that had been provided by the Mayo Clinic or some other hospital for the Mobilely Challenged. Not that the expression was at all adequate even if he had been able to bring it into play. What was sitting a yard away from him didn't just have a Mobility Challenge Problem. It had the fucking works. It was, as Kudzuvine would have put it had he been able to, man, but Totally Challenged, Mentally, Physically, Vocally and Morally, extremely Morally Challenged. Or, to put it in the sort of language Kudzuvine personally preferred but hadn't got the courage to use, this thing was fucking evil, man, like the fucking Devil in a bowler hat. And it was only two yards away from him and making noises. In the ordinary way Kudzuvine would have been relieved to know that he could hear and hadn't gone deaf to add to all the other system failures that had evidently occurred since he didn't know quite when. But not now. Now all he wanted to do was to cut out the sounds emanating with such evident effort and inarticulacy from the thing in the chair.

'You shouldn't have done that,' Skullion said. He had to repeat the sentence several times to make sure Kudzuvine got the message but Kudzuvine was way ahead of him. He knew that whatever he had done he shouldn't have done it. That was fucking obvious. Like he'd taken the wrong sort of dope, man, like crack cocktailed with LSD and Toad and fucking, nerve gas. It had to be something catastrophic like that, it just had to be. But why the fucking bedroom with fat, very fat, white babies flying around the fucking ceiling and the Quasimodo update sitting there like he was waiting for fucking tenderloin to fry just right for eating?

'You damaged the Chapel,' said Skullion after another struggle. 'You damaged the Chapel.'

Some part of Kudzuvine's neural network stirred and died away. He knew the word 'Chapel', and he sure as hell knew the word 'Damage', though he usually used it with 'Limitation' and 'Exercise' and neither of the latter had the slightest relevance to his present situation. Kudzuvine stuck to 'Chapel' and was still hanging onto it when the Matron came into the room and said, 'Now, Master, you mustn't wear the gentleman out. Let him rest in peace.' Which would have been fine except that for a large woman in a nurse's uniform to call the Thing in the chair 'Master' gave rise to such appalling notions in Kudzuvine about the nature of the Thing's colossal power and influence that he knew with absolute certainty that it had to be the Devil. 'Rest in peace' didn't do much for him either. He put it together with Chapel and came up with Chapel of Rest, which explained his condition, the huge bed and the room and those fucking angel babies flying around the ceiling.

It also explained why he was stark naked. He was in a morticians' funeral home waiting to be buried or cremated and maybe embalmed first. That would explain why the Thing in the wheelchair had been looking at him like that. It had been measuring him up for the coffin or calculating how best to cosmeticize him for embalming. Above all it explained mat black bowler hat and the fact that the Thing had been wearing a vest with a gold chain across it. If anything was needed to send Kudzuvine into a frenzy of terror, it was the notion that he was going to be buried alive. Or cremated. Or embalmed. Kudzuvine didn't know much about embalming people but he was certain it involved opening them up and taking all the organs out and then putting something else back inside. And all this was going to take place with him fully conscious-well, for part of the time, the first part, which was undoubtedly the nastiest. It wasn't. It mustn't happen. He had to show them he was still alive. Somehow.

Kudzuvine made gurgling noises and said 'Fuck' several times quite loudly and then made up for it by getting 'God' out quite a few more and 'Help' a great many. Then he lay back and went to sleep again, only to be woken some time later to find a tall thin and positively cadaverous old man and a shorter stumpier middle-aged man with ginger hair standing on one side of the bed. The big woman in the nurse's uniform stood on the other. But at least the Thing wasn't with them.

'And how has he been, Matron?' the man with the red hair asked. Any trouble?'

'None whatsoever, doctor,' said the woman. 'Slept like the dead.'

'Help, help,' Kudzuvine managed to gurgle.

'He seems to be trying to say something,' commented the tall thin man. But the doctor had sat down on the edge of the bed and was shining a torch into Kudzuvine's eye. He obviously didn't like what he was seeing. 'That new stuff I tried on him last night has done rather more than I'd expected,' he said. 'It's a synergistic combination of several major anti-psychotic tranquillizers with some muscle-relaxant drug in case there are any violent tendencies. Very new on the market and it certainly lives up to the maker's claim. You'd think to look at him…'

'Help. God. Help,' Kudzuvine tried to scream but failed pathetically.

'I'm sure he's trying to say something,' said the cadaverous old man.

'Yes, you'd think so, wouldn't you?' said the doctor. 'But it's merely some sort of reflex action. He's not with us at all. Ah well, I don't think I need give him another shot. He'll keep just as he is. Has he passed water or anything like that?'

The Matron lifted the bedclothes and shook her head.

'Well, just to be on the safe side,' he said and took out a tube. 'I always carry a spare one for the Master.'

The Praelector turned away and looked out of the window to avoid having to watch the distasteful process of feeding a catheter into Kudzuvine's penis. And Kudzuvine wasn't enjoying it at all.

The Praelector's next observation horrified him too. Ah, here comes the Chaplain,' he said. 'He'll be coming to have a chat with the Master. He usually comes over once a day. A curious relationship, I've always thought.'

But Dr MacKendly and the Matron were discussing the possibility of seepage from the back passage. 'It happens fairly frequently,' he said. 'I should put a piece of plastic under him. One of those black garbage bags will do nicely, and it will be very appropriate too.'

They looked at Kudzuvine one last time and left the room while he was still muttering, 'Help. God. Help.' It didn't do him any good at all.

His colleagues at Transworld Television weren't helping him either.

'Yeah, so Kudzuvine's in some kind of shit. Ever known when he wasn't?' was Skundler's comment when told about the incident at Porterhouse. 'So he's got to paddle his own. Not my business. You work in the media business you got to take risks. Some come back, some don't. That's the way it is.' And no one else argued with the Assessmentation Officer's judgement. As someone else said, as it happened with more prescience than she dreamed, 'So K.K. 's gone. So he's gone. What's new?'

In Bangkok Edgar Hartang sat with a six-year-old boy on his lap. That was new for the boy, but not for E.H. He tweaked the child's nipple and giggled and took off his blue glasses and his toupee. Good old E.H. He was having one hell of a time.

So was the boy. It was just a different sort of hell.