The morning after I signed the contract, my situation rapidly declined. Never in my life had I been in so much pain that I wished to die. Sure, I didn’t have a particular wish to live, but nor had I ever wanted to die to end my suffering. Helena had been there all night with me, sitting on a chair beside me, so she alerted the doctors, and without any explanation, I was taken to the roof of the hospital and whizzed away in a helicopter while blind and lying in a bed. The only comfort I had was Helena’s voice, but that too was overtaken by the sound of the rotor blades.
By the time we arrived at wherever the hell I had been taken to, I was more painkillers than man. I had been injected and given every drug known to man to reduce the pain and lie painlessly, and yet to remain fully conscious at the same time. If I could have spoken anymore then I would have asked them to give me some anaesthetic, but then I did not know that it was necessary for their plan that I be conscious. I could no longer feel the comforting touch of Helena’s hand, nor could I sense which direction I was turned in or what position my body was in; even the basic sense of what was up or down was lost.
Suddenly, all sound stopped, and with my sense of hearing gone, a fear took hold of me as I sensed that the end was coming.
To resist this, with the greatest effort I had exerted in my whole life, I slowly opened my eyelids and, miraculously, for one single moment alone, I could see with my eyes again. There was a glass pane in front of me, and I was floating fully submerged in some kind of liquid which emanated a blue light, tinging my vision but not distorting it in any way. Beyond the glass pane, a few yards away stood some men in lab coats, one of whom was comforting a nurse who was wiping tears in her eyes. There were also tense-looking military personnel, but the most surprising and odd thing was the presence of an ear-to-ear grinning face belonging to a man in tweeds that I’d never expected to see face to face, let alone through a blue-tinted glass pane; it was Joseph Ellseworth Chamberlain, the current Prime Minister.
