Sneak Peek: SPOILED 2 (text only)

LOKITU'S NOTE: Welcome, Titans. As with other stories I've written, I'm giving you a very early look at the upcoming gainer mystery story SPOILED 2: The Island. This is just a segment of a chapter, so there will be plenty more to come. Enjoy!

***

Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick.

‘Mmmh…?’

‘He’s waking up, Doc.’

‘Uugh…’

‘Is he now? Ah, that’s grand. Took a while, eh?’

Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick.

Lucas’s eyelids felt like lead. When he tried to bring his head to an upright position, he found it equally dense. A deep black sleep was turning slowly to bright white. Difficult to focus. His limbs weren’t particularly responsive.

‘Wha… Wwwh…’

Speech wasn’t forthcoming either. And somewhere a damned clock wouldn’t stop ticking. There were people talking nearby. 

‘Need me to take care of him?’

‘Ohh no no, I don’t think that’ll be necessary. Not yet.’

Lucas looked around with smeary vision. Where was he…? Stark white walls, windowless each. Brushed steel tables and trays. Monitors. He glanced down; he was reclined in a large padded chair with fancy armrests, like something you might find at a dental practice.

What was this place? How had he wound up here?

‘What…,’ he tried again. ‘Whh… Where am I…?’

To his right stood a - frankly - absurdly burly man; a guard, looked like. Or an orderly, maybe, from the outfit. All crossed arms and knotted brow. 

To the left was an older gentlemen: A tallish man perhaps in his fifties, both thinning hair and bushy beard a warm chestnut shot through with plentiful grey. Under his lab coat and argyle, a dicky bow tie and off-white shirt, all snugly filled by a plump-bellied physique. When the man spoke, soft, deep Irish tones rose and fell with an almost lyrical quality. ‘How’d you do, young man? My name is Dr Nightingale.’

Lucas watched as the doctor consulted a clipboard through serviceable spectacles. 

‘Says here you’re… Lucas, is that right?’ he asked. 

Lucas wanted to nod but evidently his neck and cranium weren’t in much of a mood to comply, at least not promptly. 

‘Y-Yeah,’ he uttered. ‘But… What am I… doing here? I was… I was… at the market… I don’t understand…’

Dr Nightingale flipped a page of notes and carried on, ‘I’ve got here… Let’s see now… Twenty-four years of age, five foot nine, and one hundred and sixty pounds. Have we got that right, Lucas?’

It was hard to focus. The man’s voice was like pure ASMR; not at all helpful in stimulating Lucas from his stupor. More like vocal honey to the ears.

‘I don’t… understand…,’ he repeated. ‘Am I in the hospital? Am I sick…?’

A look passed between the doctor and the guard, the former saying, ‘Hoh hoh, no, no, you’re quite well. Quite well. A little small but we’ll soon have that sorted out, hoh hoh.’ 

Small? What was this guy talking about?

Then the doctor unhooked a stethoscope from around his neck. ‘Lucas, I’m just going to lift your shirt a wee bit while I listen to your heartbeat now. This’ll be a smidge cold on your chest for a moment, I do apologise…’

It was cold, but that wasn’t the problem. While Dr Nightingale performed his test, Lucas could only combat a rising feeling of fluster. 

‘But if I’m not sick… why do I need a doctor…?’ he asked. ‘I’m confused.’

‘Mmm,’ the doctor replied, listening through the stethoscope and nodding. ‘It is confusing to start with, I know…’

‘I’ve been staying at the Conrad Hotel. I-I-I’m backpacking around Europe…,’ Lucas went on, still hoping to understand. ‘I was at the market, in Istanbul… and then… and then…’

And then what?

He’d been perusing market stalls all morning. Then everything had gone dark. That’s all he could recall. He must’ve passed out or… something…

‘I don’t know what happened. I just… woke up here…’

The doctor nodded again and made some vaguely affirmational sounds before responding with, ‘Could you just poke out your tongue there for me now?’

Lucas did so, and the older man laid a wooden splint onto his tongue and shone a small pencil-torch down his throat. At this proximity, Lucas’s senses could pick out the doctor’s gardeny cologne amid the sterile, chemical smell of this room.

‘Seems fine,’ the doctor muttered to himself. Then louder, ‘Backpacking! How fun! I’ve got in my notes here that you’re from the good old U S of A originally; Wyoming, is that right?’

‘Uhhh, uh-huh… It’s my first time abroad… But listen, Doctor… Sir… Please, what’s going on? Why am I here? Where… What is this place? Are we still in Istanbul?’

‘Ha!’ The volume of such a caustic laugh in response from the doctor caused Lucas to jump. ‘Oh, sweet Lord above, no. Ohhhh no no. Oh my, hoh hoh.’ 

‘Then where-‘

‘I should think we’re just about ready to get things underway now, hmm?’ Dr Nightingale spoke over Lucas, to the hulking sentinel guard, who nodded once as an answer. Then both were out of Lucas’s periphery for a moment. 

‘Doctor… Doctor, please… Please tell me what’s going on…’

But in place of receiving a reply, something far more bizarre happened:

A flowing, ethereal kind of singing began to play, presumably from some unseen speaker system. There were synth-piano accompaniments, too; the whole thing sounded a bit retro, and New-Agey. 

The doctor plodded back into view, bringing his scent with him. ‘Now, I’ve already got this in my notes, though I always like to ask,’ he began. ‘Can you confirm for me, Lucas - What’s your favourite food?’

But the music was distracting, only compounding the oddity of this scene. 

‘Is that… Is that Enya…?’ Lucas asked. 

At this, Nightingale’s eyes practically lit up behind his glasses. ‘Why yes! Yes it is!’ he proclaimed, stunned and grinning. ‘You see?’ he then addressed the huge guard. ‘Some people around here do know good music when they hear it! Hoh hoh!’

While the doctor had been gleefully expunging, another bizarre thing occurred: A long metal chute lowered down from the ceiling, suspended by thin metallic rods. Down and down it came, its origin somewhere in the darkness of the ceiling, its tip now all the way down to Lucas’s bottom lip.

‘P-Please, Doctor… what’s happening…?’ he tried again, going slightly cross-eyed in trying to focus on the chute before him. 

When the guard suddenly stomped over in two mighty footsteps and clapped semicylindrical cuffs around Lucas’s forearms, he gave a start and a thin yelp. Before he knew it, a tight leather strap was brought across his forehead, pinning his skull to the headrest. He felt metal bind over his shins too.

‘D-Doctor…!’ 

He couldn’t control his panic. Any attempts to free his limbs or move his head were impossible; he was strapped in tight.

‘W-What’s happening…?!’

The echoing, processed sounds of Enya weren’t helping in the slightest.

‘I’ve got ‘ramen noodles’,’ Dr Nightingale suddenly spoke up again. ‘For your favourite food, I mean. That’s what it says here. Ramen noodles. So we’re going to press on with that, if you don’t mind? It’s a wee bit late in the day to change it out now anyway, but I always like to check.’

Lucas didn’t understand any of this. He wanted out. He wanted to get out of this chair, out of this building.

‘Nice easy one for the chute, that,’ the doctor rambled on. 

And suddenly a buzzer sounded, and a green light illuminated on the side of the chute, and a procession of noodles came flowing down it, down towards Lucas’s mouth.

‘Oh, I almost forgot,’ Nightingale said, then produced from the breast pocket of his lab coat a nasal peg which he placed firmly over Lucas’s nose. ‘I’m sorry it can get a little uncomfortable. And it does tend to dull the sensation of taste, sadly, but needs must, I’m afraid.’

Lucas wanted to ask, ‘What the fuck is going on?’ But the moment he opened his mouth, in went the ramen noodles. And they were sliding down the chute in such limitless quantity that they began to stack up inside Lucas’s mouth. He closed his lips and chewed, but with his nose pegged, it was only a few short seconds before he had to open up to breathe again. And when he opened back up, more noodles piled in. 

He tried to look to the doctor, or even to the guard, for help, for answers, anything! But Lucas’s head was firmly pinioned in place. All he could do was keep eating. It was quite literally impossible to do anything else.

‘Thaaaat’s it, lad, hoh hoh,’ the doctor chuckled and gave Lucas’s average midriff a pat. ‘That’s it. You eat your fill now.’

Lucas felt the pressure of more and more food mounting in his mouth. He tried to ply excess noodle into his cheeks while he chewed and swallowed the incoming batches but that only swelled his cheeks up like little balloons. Doing all of this while trying to breathe through his mouth was causing mushes of foodstuffs to flop down the sides of his face. He was trying desperately not to hyperventilate. And not to choke.

‘You know she’s from the same county as me: County Donegal,’ Dr Nightingale proceeded cheerily. ‘Enya, that is. We went to the same school. But she was a couple of years above me, hoh hoh.’

Why was this happening? Why were these people forcing Lucas to eat and eat like this? It didn’t make a damned bit of sense! He was sweating from the effort, his jaw already aching.

‘Now, you must tell us if you start to feel any nausea there, okay, young man?’ the doctor asked him.

Of course, Lucas couldn’t nod, or really speak, but he did make a kind of ‘Unnnffgh!!’ noise in response.

‘There’s a good lad,’ Dr Nightingale smiled. Then he consulted his clipboard and brought a sleek-looking watch wrapped around his hairy wrist into view. ‘Right, I’ve a few errands to see to. The Lab doesn’t run itself now, hoh hoh! But I’ll be back in a few hours, okay?’

Hours???!!

‘And don’t forget to holler if you feel sick.’

Lucas tried to plead while the plump doctor left the room, widening his eyes as large as they could go, sounding ‘UUNNFGH!’s along the way, but it was to no avail. 

More noodles came, and were chewed, and were swallowed, and Lucas felt it all beginning to settle in his stomach, getting uncomfortably tight and full. 

The guard paced away, out of view. He might have made a little grunt of laughter.