I Puncture Him All Over by Sean Monaghan

I have a new sedative and glucose drip.

My sister visits. She looks well and I tell her.

"Thanks," she says. "I had a weekend spa. Dad bought it for me, after all the stress."

"And the new job," I say.

"Whew," she says and wipes her hair from her forehead. "Let me tell you about the new job, Alex."  And she does. For a half hour. Everything is the same, the same as I remember from the last time she had a new job.

These are the things at a new job: a young woman who is always late and flirts with the young men, a coffee machine that is always broken, a photocopier that is often broken, a supreme view of the city, a cute man in another cubicle. These are the things she told me last time she had a new job. She tells me them now. Almost the same

"So," my sister says after thirty-two minutes of telling me about the new job, "what is new with you?"

"They are giving me a little more Diazepam," I tell her. They increased my dosage. It is now sufficient to tranquilize a horse. The orderlies laughed when they said this. I need a number, I told them. They laughed some more, said that questions like that will get my dosage jacked up even more. I stopped eating and the doctor told me that I was getting 12mg in each of my three doses. This was before the drip.

"Twelve one thousandths of a gram," I said.

"Mmm," he muttered, wanting to leave.

I wanted him to leave too, but I said, "A gram is one one thousandth of a kilogram."

"What?"

"I weigh seventy three kilos and two hundred eighty three grams."

The doctor said nothing.

"The useful dose is a tiny percentage of my body weight. A fraction of a fraction of one percent."

"You'd like a Double Gulp, perhaps? One thirty-fifth of your body weight? Three percent? A nice round figure."

Oh, he was a funny one that doctor. He had an enlarged hole in his heart. "I just want to know how you can be so precise with your dose."

"How's your anxiety?"

"About the same as yesterday."

The doctor smiled. "Then we're pretty on the money with our dose right now. I have other patients."

* * *

My sister brings me grapes.

"Sorry for all our stuff," she says.

"Stuff?"

"History."

"It's not your fault," I tell her.

"I always think of the shed," she says.

I remember when my father first bought the vineyard across the continent. It was filled with sprawling wild grape vines and he would spend days and weeks manicuring it towards prosperity. My sister and I adventured within the boundaries, climbing down wells, scaling the derelict buildings, swimming in the muck-filled dam. She locked me in a wooden tool shed, then ran off laughing.

This was before I knew locks.

My father found me the next day, battered and bruised from my attempts at escape.

She went to boarding school.

I take a grape. "I'm sorry you got sent away."

"I'm sorry about all this," she says. She sits in silence for a while, asks me some more light questions, then goes.

* * *

They are giving me medication other than Valium, I know. Time blurs, sometimes a day feels like a year, then other times it is Saturday, when it seems like moments ago it was Tuesday.

"Tell me about it," my therapist says.

"Let me show you."  I ask for her watch to show her time dilation.

"No," she says. She is twenty-seven, sleek like mink, soft and gentle. Fresh from med-school. She knows her stuff, textbook stuff.

"I like you," I tell her.

She laughs. Dr Prescott.

Lara Prescott.

I ask her out.

Psychiatrists don't date clients. Ethics.

Psychiatrists operate in a net of ethics. They get scrutinized, file monthly, quarterly and annual reports. They have lives and families. They sing bad karaoke on a Thursday night, high on vodka slammers and an adrenalin rush of not having to listen to the insane for two and a half waking hours. They take the subway home to a Long Island brownstone where in the weekends they bake chocolate chip cookies for Ava age 10 and Sam age 8, and go to Verccurini for pasta and pizza over candlelight and wine and discuss plans for a big house on the Connecticut shore with a husband who's knocking back 150K on retainer for a petroleum company that's been polluting Long Island Sound for two decades. Married psychiatrists don't date patients.

Removing the drip is easy. I can't go out through the main lobby, I need to be unseen. I take the stairs. Circumventing the locks is easy. "Alarm will sound when door is opened" is just a warning if maintenance has been slack.

In the garage I use the needle from my drip to puncture a man's eye, then his throat. There is a nice vein in there that, if you hit it right, blasts corpuscles out in a cascade. I take his clothes and Cadillac and find the Long Island Expressway.

The man has crap music. I ditch Bon Jovi and Def Leppard and Kiss and stop at a gas station for fresh CDs, but all they have is "drive music.”  It is late so only gas stations are open, no music stores. I gas up and buy a Snickers and a Three Musketeers and a 64oz Dr Pepper from the fountain. I drive around neighbourhoods until I find an instrument and sheet music store. Circumventing the lock is easy. A light begins flashing and bothering me, but behind the counter they have a stereo with a stack of CDs. I take a few moments, select a Rachmaninoff and return to the door. There is a security company car pulling up outside. I stay in the shadow of the open door.

A heavyset uniformed man gets out of the car and approaches me. "Hey buddy," he calls.

I'm not anyone's buddy. He has a nightstick flashlight, a cell phone, a radio and a gun. I have my needle.

"Fella?" he says. "Whatcha up to in there."  He shines the flashlight in my eyes and I nearly drop the CD. That upsets me a little.

When I get back in the car, I realize I have blood on my shoes, so I go back to switch with the security guard. A couple come around the corner laughing, stopping as they see me. The shoes are too big for me anyway, so, after puncturing the couple, who had tiny shoes too, I drive in socks.

It turns out a lot of people live on Long Island. The lights and signs are very confusing. I stop and get a map. I use the needle in many places on the clerk's body and while he bleeds out I get the nice pair of Nike sneakers from his feet. I'm careful to get no blood on them. I can hear sirens far off. I figure out from the map how to get to my date.

Nice house, little two storey place with an attic. Probably 1930s, I think. Nice place for a dog, not too far from the local elementary, so it's a good place for kids, though not so great for public transport. Just as well I have my own car now. I park out front and finish up my soda and eat half of the Three Musketeers. I feel very awake and realize that I am way overdue for my Valium. The needle feels much better in my hand than it had in my arm.

There is no one home, I decide after an hour, or perhaps it is only fifteen minutes. If those sirens are cops and the cops are coming then maybe they will know that my new car isn't really mine. I am parked in a row of cars along the side of the street, maybe five or six. It is one of those tree-lined lanes they show in the movies when they want you to think it's all safe and normal middle-America before they let the unsuspecting suburbanites get torn apart by a blood-crazed reject.

I pop open the trunk. There are some files with tax papers and a smelly gym bag with fifty dollars in the side pocket, but there are no tools, not even a tire-iron. Who owns a new car and doesn't have a tire-iron? Or even a screwdriver? How am I going to do my little job?

I look up at the psychiatrist's house. That's an idea. They'll have a toolbox in the basement or in back of the garage. All I need is a straight-head screwdriver and maybe a crescent wrench. Just to switch the tags over with one of the other cars.

It is still dark, no one around really. Maybe a jogging co-ed and somewhere nearby I can hear a dog barking. I cross the road and go up the walk. The front door is locked. Side window locked. Next window locked. But locks are no problem, no problem at all. I can feel the edges of fireworks in my head now as the Vali-Diazepam friend dies off between my cells.

Around the back everything is locked too. Well, not the garden shed. I find a coil of wire with plastic sheathing like my sister would use for tying up vines. With the pointed end of wire I shuck the door open.

The house smells of apples.

I walk inside, letting my eyes grow accustomed to the different light inside. I wonder when she will be home. I stand at the kitchen door, seeing the light from the outside streetlights glint off the surfaces and implements. They are cleaner than I had expected, not like a busy happy family. Like something from TV. I realize this idea of their unreality is making me a little agitated so I breathe.

I walk along the hall and find the basement door. It is locked too. I still have the coil. The moment the door jumps open I hear a sound from upstairs.

"Mrs Precott?" someone calls.

Then I think, they have a nanny. A live-in nanny, how nice for them. Of course everything is as clean and tidy as a laboratory. I need my screwdriver to do my job, but it's too complicated and messy now and my brain is bursting like it's maybe going to catch fire and I don't want to hear voices, like Shelby from the other ward does.

"Your brother came over," the woman calls. "We forgot to pack Ava's inhaler."

This nanny woman is bothering me and I just want to see Lara, and if the children wake it will all be yucky and I don't like yucky.

I go to the stairs and see her standing at the top in a faded nightgown. She is a bigger woman, perhaps in her fifties and I can imagine her whole life laid out. Two adult kids, both living in the West and hardly ever coming back to see her, husband dead for a decade. She now struggles with money since he'd lost it all in uninsured medical expenses and after a fairly nice life, she is forced to be in an upper-middle class home as live-in nanny to a couple of brats.

She screams. I almost feel sorry for her.

I bound up the stairs and before she has time to turn I strike her down with the needle. I'm really glad I kept this little souvenir.

She slumps to the floor and rolls on her side gagging. I stand watching her, watching as the blood stains her nightgown and then the carpet. She takes gasping breaths and reaches up for me. I wonder if the children have been woken.

Listening, I can't hear anything. I step over the woman and along the hall. I find the door with the handmade painted clay sign which reads "AVA.”  I take the handle and push open the door.

There is a smell of lilac and a nightlight is turned on. Strange that someone as old as ten would have a nightlight. The bed is made up and there are some soft toys on the pillow. I step over and pick up the pink bunny with glass eyes. I look around the room at the mobiles and teddy bear wallpaper and realize that that the missing girl is not ten, she must be more like three. There, on a shelf, training diapers. Not ten at all.

I go across the hallway to the room with a little laminated sheet headed "SAMUEL" on the door. On the sheet is the meaning of the name—"God has heard"—and a prayer. I push open the door and see a crib. Sam is a baby.

I have been wrong about some things. This makes me a little edgy. Perhaps those flirtatious moments were just hay fever after all.

But where are the children? I glance at the rabbit and realize that I have smeared a little blood on the plush.

I turn to go to the bathroom to rinse the bunny's ear, when I see the reflection of car lights strobe through the front of the house. I hear the car. She has returned.

I stride down the stairs. There seems to be more light coming in but this is the light of my rapidly enhancing peripheral vision as the medication fades away. I can hear her outside. The door glimmers. We will go out, a show, a meal, it will be beautiful.

I can hear laughing, two people. I unlatch the simple bolt and pull open the door. There she is, resplendent amongst the stars and glistening sparkles of my eyes. The man is holding her hand.

Across the road a police cruiser is parked blocking in my new car. The cop shines a glaring flashlight at my license plates.

They are surprised, Lara Prescott and this man. She opens her mouth to speak. How can she be holding his hand? I feel the prick of the needle against my thumb, then I launch myself forwards.

That's right. A memory dials in. The lawyer husband.

I strike his neck. He staggers back. He tumbles off the stoop. She is aroused by the grace of my movements.

The night has begun pulsing as if someone is moving stage lights in delicate choreography. I dance down the path as he falls to the concrete. I crouch over him and stab down with the needle. His belly, his arm, his neck, his crotch, his eye, his mouth, his ear. I puncture him all over.

Lara, poor Lara, is screaming. There is blood on the walk. The man is not moving anymore. I leave the needle buried in the bone of his forehead. I stand and face Lara. She is still screaming. She is not Lara, I realize.

What has she done with Lara? I leap at her, but I don't have my needle. Then someone pulls me back, holding me hard, holding my arms.

"What have you done?" this faux Lara wails.

I look over my shoulder. It is Lara, my Lara. It's okay. My meds imbalanced, but it's okay. "Maybe we could grab a bite to eat," I say. "Before the show."

She stares at me with blank black eyes and in the distance I can hear more and more sirens. My hands are bound behind me in manacles and I get shoved into the patrol car.

* * *

I am in a new hospital. A steel door, wrist restraints. I am locked and bound and I cannot get at these locks.

My sister no longer visits.

Sean Monaghan's vineyard visits have always been circumspect and brief. Sean tutors in creative writing and reviews books. His stories have appeared in Flashes in the Dark, House of Horror and Horror Through The Ages, amongst others. More information at his website www.venusvulture.com