Zoe now had two overexcited and agitated parents leaping about her room, neither of whom had noticed that their daughter was unable to move or speak. Twenty minutes passed before Mr and Mrs Marshall ceased their histrionics, accusations and petty squabbling, and turned their attention to their daughter.
Mrs Marshall once more ordered Zoe to keep the noise down and get into bed, even though it was her and her husband who had created the prolonged commotion. When Zoe failed to respond by not moving any part of her body except for her eyes, despite both parents’ attempts to pull her to her feet and propel her towards her bed, Mrs Marshall finally realised that something was wrong. She sat Zoe down again and examined her face closely. Within a matter of minutes, Mrs Marshall realised that her daughter couldn’t move of her own volition. Pushing her husband out of the way, Zoe’s mum grabbed Zoe’s mobile from the dressing table and phoned for an ambulance, before she broke down, sobbing loudly, and held tightly onto Zoe’s hand while murmuring over and over “Oh my poor, poor Zoe. Don’t worry help, is on its way.”
Soon afterwards, an ambulance arrived to take Zoe to hospital. She heard her mother tell the paramedics that although Zoe appeared to be unconscious or paralysed, she had found her trying to play a computer game in the middle of the night.
Mrs Marshall added, “So maybe it’s the shock of seeing me bounce into her room unexpectedly, or perhaps she was sleepwalking… and you know what they say… you should never wake up a sleepwalker as they might go into shock.”
The paramedics just smiled, and ignored Mrs Marshall’s diagnosis, before putting Zoe on a stretcher and carrying her to their waiting vehicle.
The journey to the hospital passed without incident. However, this didn’t prevent Zoe from having even more worries and fears as she listened to a conversation between the paramedics, who were talking about how good the game ‘Being There’ was and how much they’d enjoyed playing it.
“Do you think that was the game she was playing?” asked one of the medics, jerking his head towards Zoe.
“Hope so,” replied the other one. “It will be much easier for her in hospital if it was.”
When she got to the hospital, Zoe was placed in a bed on one of the wards. She was told that a doctor would be along to examine her as soon as one became available and then lay in the bed, still trying to go over the evening’s events in her mind. She remembered the spider and its bite to her arm.
Where did it come from? she wondered. Why was it in my bed and where did it go?
She was unable to come up with even one plausible answer or explanation for any of her questions and eventually gave up. Her next thoughts were centred on Benson. She didn’t ask herself the obvious question of why Detective Sergeant Benson, whom she hadn’t seen for three years, would suddenly appear in her bedroom at such an unearthly hour. Nor did she query how he might have got there. Her thoughts were focused only on his behaviour.
He tried to get me to play that game, Zoe mused and that means he must have played it himself. And if he has, he is probably now in the same state of mind as my dad and Jake… and those people that Simran and I saw in the nightclub. Does that make him dangerous or just different? Perhaps both… but why would he want to make me play the game too, especially as I was paralysed and unable to move at the time? Is there something I’m missing here?
Zoe’s chain of thought was interrupted by a bright light being shone into her eyes. She saw a man standing at the side of the bed on which she lay. He was dressed in a white coat. He didn’t speak at all as he observed her. Zoe hoped he was a doctor and not a painter and decorator.
“Hmmm,” said the man, turning to a woman in a nurse’s uniform standing next to him. “Her body is still functioning but she is unable to move or speak, and her eyes look dead. I’d say she’s been drugged.”
“What do you think it is?” asked the nurse.
“We’ll need to do some tests,” said the doctor, giving the nurse a sideways glance. “She’s hardly in a position to tell us is she?”
Over the next few days Zoe underwent various tests and examinations. She was poked, prodded and wheeled back and forth between a number of different hospital departments and clinics, where she had so many needles pushed into her body that she began to feel like a pin cushion. When she wasn’t being experimented on or probed and scrutinised, Zoe lay in a hospital ward bed hooked up to a drip from which she got her sustenance and hydration.
After what seemed like a lifetime, the doctors finally discovered what had caused the poisoning. It was a combination of tubocurarine and bupivacaine. Zoe later found out from her doctor that the former is an alkali that is present in curare, which in turn is a paralysing poison prepared from various tree barks in South America, and with plant additives supposedly used commonly by Inca warriors to dip the tips of their arrows into – while the latter is a type of long-lasting local anaesthetic.
But what really intrigued the doctor was the fact that these two drugs had been mixed with a third substance. He had no idea what this was, or how the three had been expertly blended so that the end result produced instant paralysis but not death. It was this third substance that had been responsible for keeping Zoe awake rather than her eventually slipping into an unconscious state, as is often the case with curare.
The third drug had been analysed but its components, elements and origin had defeated scientists in toxicology, anaesthetics and pharmaceutical departments of the hospital. No one had ever seen such a substance before. What they could tell was that when blended with the other two chemicals, it acted as both a binding agent and a catalyst to enable the mixture to activate throughout the whole body and to prolong its effect.
The doctor further explained to Zoe, who was now slowly getting the power of speech back, that tubocurarine can affect your body by numbing and relaxing muscles, and bupivacaine is an anaesthetic that is used locally, rather than generally, to numb body parts prior to minor operations. But the added agent speeded up the effect so that potency was increased and enhanced, and the paralytic influence became instantaneous once the combination was injected into Zoe’s body.
“The spider bite,” gasped Zoe. “It must have been the spider bite.”
“No,” said the doctor. “I don’t know any spider that could do that… let alone one native to this country. You must have been mistaken… or maybe hallucinating or dreaming. It has to be a human being that injected that concoction into you, though where he or she got it from I don’t know. We’ll keep on trying to identify the mystery drug, but I can tell you that you should be okay now. Your body is clearing out the remains of the drugs and in a day or two, they will have gone completely. You can move a little now, but I advise you to take it easy. You need to rest as your body is still quite weak.”
Zoe smiled at the doctor. She was grateful for the explanation he had given her. She was also pleased to see that he showed no signs of having been hypnotised by the ‘Being There’ game.
*
It hadn’t been easy for Zoe in hospital. For the first few days when she had been unable to move or speak, she had spent her time watching the staff. She was alarmed to see the number of people who displayed the same benign and passive behaviour she’d observed in Jake and her father after they had played the computer game. Zoe also noticed similar behaviour in patients. She was extremely worried. She was now more convinced than ever that something sinister was happening and she was alarmed at the amount of people who seemed to have succumbed to whatever it was that was putting people into a trance. Zoe was also worried about why this was happening, and what might be the purpose of such action.
As each day passed, she grew more concerned about what might happen to her when she could move and talk again. Would she get found out? And if so, what would they try to do to her? Perhaps someone would try something before she left the hospital? She’d already seen the extremes that whoever was behind this thing would go to, from her experience with Benson. It was clear that whoever was in control had targeted her as someone who needed to be hypnotised. Zoe decided that from now on she would watch everyone very closely and try to mimic their actions, and if anyone asked her she would say that she had played the game.
On the fifth day, these repetitive thoughts set off another reaction in Zoe’s thinking patterns as she struggled to remember which game her brother and father had chosen from the menu, so that she at least had something to say as an answer if anyone asked her about the games she had played.
After a fruitless half-hour search through her memory, Zoe gave up and lay back with her head resting on the pillow. It was then that she remembered that she’d been hooked up to the Wimbledon tennis final when her mother had burst into her room. That will do, she thought, I can tell them about that… and what’s more I can even describe it.
Zoe sighed with relief and closed her eyes before drifting off into a troubled sleep haunted by strange dreams in which Jake, her father and DS Benson all turned into big hairy spiders and chased her around Mr Araz’s office.
She awoke with a start, just as the spiders were about to pounce on her after hemming her into a corner. Her mother sat at the side of the bed. Zoe could see that she was crying.
“Oh Zoe, if you can hear me… please hurry and wake up. I’m worried sick about you and I miss having you around at home. Your dad and Jake keep acting strangely. They’ve been like it ever since they played that blessed computer game. They never listen to anything I say and they don’t talk to me much either; it’s as if both are in a trance half of the time. The only conversation I get with either of them is when they are trying to get me to play the game. I’ve refused time and time again, but sometimes I think it would be easier to give in and just do it. Maybe things would get back to normal then.”
Zoe was alarmed at what she heard from her mother. She was still completely immobile at that time, but she could manage to say a few words, although it hurt her throat to do so. She hoarsely, and briefly, explained her condition to her mother and begged her to refrain from playing the computer game. Then Zoe’s voice gave up and she was speechless once more. She hoped that Mrs Marshall could find the strength to hold out and resist the pressure to play ‘Being There’, until Zoe got her full power of speech back and was home from hospital.
Zoe needed her mum when she got out of hospital. She could be an ally in helping Zoe to fight against this thing, but if her mum succumbed to the wishes of her husband and son, then Zoe would be the only person in the house not to have played the game – which would make her life even more difficult than it was now, unless she could convince her family that she had played it on that night in her bedroom and it had left her in the same condition as they were.
When her mum had gone home, Zoe tried to get back to sleep, but her mind was now wide awake and she began trying to fit the pieces together to make sense of what was happening. She was now completely convinced that Mr Araz had something to do with it. She remembered the rhythms and the subliminal messages she’d noticed in the game which his company produced. Why was he delivering a free copy to every household? Was he trying to hypnotise the people of Cristelee? If so, why? What was in it for him? He wasn’t going to make any money out of sales if he was giving games away for free and hypnotising people into the bargain.
Maybe that’s it, Zoe thought. Maybe he’s going to use everyone in Cristelee as salespeople, so they can say how good the game is and then he can sell it all over the World.
No, that doesn’t make sense, a second voice in Zoe’s head said. Perhaps he’s going to try to hypnotise the whole world? No… he’d never manage to do that. There’d be more than enough people who hadn’t played the game, so that would scupper his plans.
Zoe had one final thought before drifting off into sleep and she was able to make a firm plan for when she was well enough. Who is Mr Araz? And where has he come from? There was something very familiar about him when I visited his factory, but I can’t for the life of me think what. When I leave here, I’m going to talk to the police. Someone there might be able to come up with some answers, but I’ll need to be wary around DS Benson.
Zoe felt her eyelids growing heavier as she drifted into a welcome sleep.