He appeared to be the antithesis of villainy, and he wore a gentle smile, but he carried a length of highly flexible rubber tubing. Like a snake. Two to three feet long. No inanimate object, whether a spoon or a meticulously stropped razor-edged switchblade, can be called evil; but while a switchblade might be used merely to peel an apple, it was difficult at this perilous moment to envision an equally harmless use for the half-inch-diameter rubber tubing.
The colorful imagination that served Dylan’s art now afflicted him with absurd yet vivid images of being force-fed through the nose and of colon examinations most definitely not conducted through the nose.
His alarm didn’t abate when he realized that the rubber tubing was a tourniquet. Now he knew why his left arm had been secured with the palm up.
When he protested through the saliva-saturated gag and the electrician’s tape, his voice proved no clearer than might have been that of a prematurely buried man calling for help through a coffin lid and six feet of compacted earth.
‘Easy, son. Easy now.’ The intruder didn’t have the hard voice of a snarly thug, but one as soft and sympathetic as that of a country doctor committed to relieving every distress of his patients. ‘You’ll be just fine.’
He was dressed like a country doctor, too, a relic from the lost age that Norman Rockwell had captured in cover illustrations for The Saturday Evening Post. His cordovan shoes gleamed from the benefit of brush and buffing cloth, and his wheat-brown suit pants depended upon a pair of suspenders. Having removed his coat, having rolled up the sleeves of his shirt, having loosened collar button and necktie, he needed only a dangling stethoscope to be the perfect picture of a comfortably rumpled rural physician nearing the end of a long day of house calls, a kindly healer known to everyone as Doc.
Dylan’s short-sleeve shirt facilitated the application of the tourniquet. The rubber tube, when quickly knotted around his left biceps, caused a vein to swell visibly.
Gently tapping a fingertip against the revealed blood vessel, Doc murmured, ‘Nice, nice.’
Forced by the gag to inhale and exhale only through his nose, Dylan could hear humiliating proof of his escalating fear as the wheeze and whistle of his breathing grew more urgent.
With a cotton ball soaked in rubbing alcohol, the doctor swabbed the target vein.
Every element of the moment – Shep waving to no one and blitzing through the jigsaw, the smiling intruder prepping his patient for an injection, the foul taste of the rag in Dylan’s mouth, the astringent scent of alcohol, the restraining pressure of the electrician’s tape – so completely engaged the five senses, it wasn’t possible with any seriousness to entertain the thought that this was a dream. More than once, however, Dylan closed his eyes and mentally pinched himself… and upon taking another look, he breathed yet harder when nightmare proved to be reality.
The hypodermic syringe surely couldn’t have been as huge as it appeared to be. This instrument looked less suitable for human beings than for elephants or rhinos. He assumed that its dimensions were magnified by his fear.
Right thumb firmly on the thumb rest, knuckles braced against the finger flange, Doc expelled air from the syringe, and a squirt of golden fluid caught the lamplight as it glimmered in an arc to the carpet.
With a muffled cry of protest, Dylan pulled at his restraints, causing the chair to rock from side to side.
‘One way or another,’ the doctor said affably, ‘I’m determined to administer this.’
Dylan adamantly shook his head.
‘This stuff won’t kill you, son, but a struggle might.’
Stuff. Having at once rebelled at the prospect of being injected with a medication or an illegal drug – or a toxic chemical, a poison, a dose of blood serum contaminated with a hideous disease – Dylan now rebelled even more strenuously at the idea of stuff being squirted into his vein. That lazy word suggested carelessness, an offhanded villainy, as though this dough-faced, round-shouldered, potbellied example of the banality of evil could not be bothered, even after all the trouble he’d taken, to remember what vile substance he intended to administer to his victim. Stuff! In this instance, the word stuff also suggested that the golden fluid in the syringe might be more exotic than a mere drug or a poison, or a dose of disease-corrupted serum, that it must be unique and mysterious and not easily named. If all you knew was that a smiling, pink-cheeked, crazed physician had shot you full of stuff, then the good and concerned and not-crazy doctors in a hospital ER wouldn’t know what antidote to apply or what antibiotic to prescribe, because in their pharmacy they didn’t stock treatments for a bad case of stuff.