Green Eyes

  2) You possess, as do we all, a commanding presence. I realize you are prone to deep anxieties, insecurities, but nevertheless you can exert a profound influence on our nurse maids. Argue forcefully and you will achieve much. This may sound simplistic, but in this way did I convince Brauer to bring me files, various materials, and, eventually, to allow me access to the laboratory where I secured my means of exit from this world.

  3) Trust your intuitions, especially as regards your judgements of people. I have discovered I can discern much of a person’s general character and intent by simply looking at his or her face. It may be there is a language written in the wrinkles and muscular movements and so forth. But I have no clear idea of the process. The knowledge simply comes unbidden to my brain. It is my contention that when we stumble across someone we cannot read - our fellow patients, for example - it causes us nervousness, trepidation. I have only been able to read the other patients on one occasion: during Edman’s social. And then it was as if a light shone upon all of us, perhaps engendered by our group presence. This particular ability is extremely erratic, but I would trust it when it occurs.

  There is more, much more, all sounding equally mad. The ledger contains all the proof of which I have been capable.

  I am not overborne by the prospect of my imminent death. This body is vile and stinks in my nostrils, and the condition of death seems far more mutable to me than it did when I began these investigations. That is what most astounds me about the project personnel: they have raised the dead and see nothing miraculous about it, treating it as merely an example of technological prestidigitation. Ah, well, perhaps they are correct and I am totally deluded.

  Use this information as you see fit, Mr Harrison. I will not instruct you further, though I will tell you that had I the strength I would have long ago left Shadows. I believe that outside these walls I might have been capable of vital action, but within them I could not see in what direction I might act.

  Goodbye. Good luck.

  Donnell folded the letter. The exhilaration of his race down the hall had worn off, and his muscles were cramping from the exertion. His mind was fogged with gloomy, half-formed thoughts. The doctors blocked his view of the body, ringing the counter, leaning forward, peering downward and inward like gamblers around a dice table, and over the wall speaker came the tinny reproduction of a splintering whine as Ezawa broke into Magnusson’s skull.

Chapter 8

  May 3 - May 17, 1987

  ‘Looking onto the top of the brain,’ said Ezawa, ‘I find the usual heavy infestation of the visual cortex… Is the recorder on?’

  Dr Brauer assured him it was; some of the doctors whispered and exchanged knowing glances. Between their shoulders Donnell saw a halation of green radiance, but then they crowded together and blocked his view entirely.

  ‘In addition,’ Ezawa continued, ‘I see threadlike striations of bioluminescence shining up through the tissues of the cerebral cortex. All right.’ He brushed a lock of hair from his eyes with the back of his hand, which contained a scalpel. ‘I’m now going to sever the cranial adhesions and lift out the brain.’

  The doctors attended Ezawa with the silent watchfulness of acolytes, bending as he bent to his labor, straightening when he straightened, bending again to see what he had removed. ‘Let’s get some shots of this,’ he said. The doctors moved back, enabling one of the orderlies to obtain good camera angles, and Donnell had a glimpse of the brain. It was resting on Magnusson’s chest, a gray convulsed blossom with bloody frills and streaks of unearthly green curving up its sides, like talons gripping it from beneath. He looked away. There was no need to watch any more, no need to puzzle or worry. Form had been given to the formless suspicions which had nagged him all these weeks, and he was surprised to discover that he had already accepted a death sentence, that this crystallization of his worst fears was less frightening than uncertainty. Veils of emotion were blowing through him: anger and revulsion and loathing for the glowing nastiness inside his own skull, and - strangely enough - hope. An intimation of promise. Perhaps, he thought, riffling the pages of the ledger, the intimation was simply an instance of the knowledge springing - as it had to old Magnusson - unbidden to his brain.

  Flashcubes popped. He wondered if they would pose with their bloody marvel, link arms and smile, get a nice group shot of Ezawa and the gang to show at parties.

  Ezawa cleared his throat. ‘On the ventral and lower sides I find a high concentration of bacteria in those areas traversed by the catecholamine pathways. Patches of varying brightness spreading from the hind brain to the frontal cortex. Now I’m going to cut along the dorsal-ventral axis, separating the upper and lower brain.’

  The doctors huddled close.