Prayer for the Dead Read Free

awake?”
    The man kept his eyes closed and tried to breathe in what he felt was a sleeper’s rhythm.
    “How long have you been awake? I need to know so I can adjust your dosage. Open your eyes … Open your eyes.”
    Dyce touched the man’s eyeballs gently. The lids shot up.
    “There you go,” said Dyce. “Now I want you to close your right eye if you’ve been awake more than an hour. You would know because you would have heard the clock chime at five o’clock. Did you hear it? Close your right eye if you heard it.”
    The man’s eyes stayed open, wide and frightened.
    “It’s for your own comfort, so you’d be smart to cooperate. You’ll feel better if you’re asleep, don’t you think? Yes? Did you hear the chime? No? All right, now I want you to estimate for me just how long you’ve been awake. Close your right eye if you think it was more than half an hour. No? More than fifteen minutes? No? Did you wake up just a minute or two before I got home?”
    The man closed his right eye and kept it closed.
    “Good, good,” said Dyce. “So five point five cc’s is just about right. It varies a lot, you’d be surprised. It’s not just body size. Personal tolerance seems to have a lot to do with it, too. Some men just seem to want to be awake more. I don’t know. Some like to sleep. You’re sort of a sleeper yourself This is your third day—did you know that? This is your third day with me—and I must say you’ve been very good, very little trouble.”
    The man was secured to an inclined board, tilted back at an angle of a few degrees, so Dyce’s face was level with him as he spoke. The nearly vertical position was helpful in draining blood when the subject was comatose, Dyce had found. Gravity did the job when the heart weakened.
    The man could see Dyce’s face swimming in and out of his line of vision like a beach ball riding the waves.
    “I’m just going to empty this bottle for you,” said Dyce, dropping out of sight. “It’s nearly full; you’re doing very well, very well, you’d be surprised.”
    Dyce straightened again and held the bottle of blood in front of the man’s face. “See?”
    The man’s eyelids fluttered and his eyebrows arched upwards. Dyce laid a hand on the man’s cheek.
    “Now, Bill … I’m sorry, I don’t remember your real name. Is it all right if I just call you Bill? It’s less confusing for me that way. You didn’t like looking at that. I should have asked you first. It’s funny how some people react to the sight of blood. Frankly, I’m indifferent to it myself It makes some people queasy, though. I realize that, and it looks like you’re one of them. Sorry, I won’t do that again. It takes a while for us to get to know each other, after all. I can’t be expected to guess your likes and dislikes right away.”
    The man had broken into a sweat. He felt the stirrings of nausea in the pit of his stomach and tried to swallow to fight them back. He was afraid that if he threw up he would choke on his own vomit. The object in his mouth depressed his tongue and made it very difficult to swallow and he thought for a moment he would choke to death.
    Dyce stroked the man’s face with a dry cloth, then put something very cold on his temples.
    “It will pass,” Dyce said comfortingly. “You’re fine, you really are. There’s no reason to be upset. Just breathe deeply. That’s it, breathe deeply.”
    Dyce gently massaged the man’s throat with one hand while running the ice cube across his forehead to the other temple. Droplets of ice water ran into the man’s hairline.
    “It’s just your imagination that has made you feel upset. You don’t need your tongue to swallow, you know. You just think you do. Relax those throat muscles, just relax them. That’s it, let them go. Now swallow. There, you see? You mustn’t let your imagination run away with you like that. You’re perfectly all right. I won’t let anything happen to you, you know that, don’t