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Back Neuropath Save as PDF
Chapters (20)
  1. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
  2. AUTHOR'S NOTE
  3. CHAPTER ONE
  4. CHAPTER TWO
  5. CHAPTER THREE
  6. CHAPTER FOUR
  7. CHAPTER FIVE
  8. CHAPTER SIX
  9. CHAPTER SEVEN
  10. CHAPTER EIGHT
  11. CHAPTER NINE
  12. CHAPTER TEN
  13. CHAPTER ELEVEN
  14. CHAPTER TWELVE
  15. CHAPTER THIRTEEN
  16. CHAPTER FOURTEEN
  17. CHAPTER FIFTEEN
  18. CHAPTER SIXTEEN
  19. CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
  20. AUTHOR'S AFTERWORD

I turn you on your stomach, the way I always turn you on your stomach. I run a finger down the cleft of your back. My erection is immediate and insistent.

I reach for the bolt cutters, my fingers sticky. I sever your spine at the base of the lumbar curve. Suddenly you are a doll from the waist down. A doll that shrieks and weeps.

You do not feel me fuck you.

I sever your spine again, this time at the base of your neck. Careful—careful—I must make sure you can still breathe. I roll you over, dab your hands in your blood. I use them to make prints across my body, welts where you never struck.

Theories, please?

I masturbate with your slack hands, your slick palms.

I watch you watching me. Our silence is hooded. I see you realize. Before you were opaque, but now you are a window, transparent to my desire. Oh yes, I see you. As still as a magazine cover. As blank as a porn star between takes. So sweet. So sweet. At long last, you mean only what I want you to mean…

Your blood is not so hot as my semen.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

August 29th, 10.15 a.m.

Nora squeezed Thomas's hand so tight his fingers tingled.

The office was supposed to be reassuring, to be what some decorator somewhere would call a 'positive emotive environment'. The personal items—the baseball cap, the family photos, the gift-shop knick-knacks—were meant to convey a sense of privacy, to mask the fact that only institutional transactions were possible in this room. The furnishings—the cherrywood bookcases, the vintage desk, the arabesque rug—were meant to convey a sense of affluence, because most everyone conflated wealth with competence. But Thomas knew otherwise. He could picture the cinder-block behind the wainscoted walls, as clearly as he could see it behind Dr Chadapaddai's expression.

This was a room where people were told they were going to die.

After some enigmatic tapping on his keyboard, the Chief of Neurosurgery at St Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital stood from his computer and walked to a series of panels on the wall. They flickered to life with old-fashioned reluctance, illuminating the haggard contours of his face. A three-dimensional fMRI of Frankie's brain materialized on the screen before him, looking far more like a textbook illustration than little Franklin Bible's soul.

'If you look at this scan, here,' Dr Chadapaddai said, 'you can see that a device of some kind has been attached to both amygdalae.' He had the exhausted posture and build of a truck driver, yet he was immaculately groomed and dressed, like a corporate lawyer wearing a lab coat.

'Device?' Thomas asked.

The long-lashed eyes studied him.