Prisoner of Fire Read Online Free PDF

discreetly taped. Afterwards he reviewed each session and summarised his findings. After two weeks he confidently predicted that Susan would soon be able to take up a normal existence once more. He thought that she might find some kind of fulfilment, and expiation, working in a hospital.
    One day, Susan asked if the analysis session could take place in her own room. Dr. Badel saw no reason why this should not be so. But when he came to Susan’s room, he was amazed to discover that she was wearing only a shortie nightdress.
    While he was registering the implications, she wedged a chair back under the door handle. Then she advanced upon him, flung her arms round his neck and said: “I love you. I love you. Please make love to me. Please. Please! I’m a woman, you know. I can give you great pleasure.”
    As she kissed him on the lips, he suddenly realised that he had been totally wrong. He was too late.
    “Susan, I think you are a marvellous girl, but—”
    “But I’m not good enough for screwing?” she demanded imperiously, standing back. The transformation from girl into tigress was too fast for Dr. Badel’s reactions.
    “Do you like me?” she demanded in an unnatural voice.
    “Yes, but—”
    “No buts. Do you love me?” Her eyes were wild.
    “Yes, but not in the way you think.”
    “I said no buts.” Her voice had hardened. “If you like me, if you love me, do with me what you do with all those other bloody women!”
    He didn’t even have time to voice an answer. She saw the answer in his eyes.
    And she reached for the water carafe by the bed. Then she hit him with it again and again. Because she was young, and because she was demented, her movements were too fast for him.
    She had hit him several times before the thick glass broke. He fell to his knees, protesting feebly, not knowing what he was saying, because the heavy carafe crashed down again and again. And Susan was screaming.
    Somebody heard the noise, and eventually the door was battered down. They found Susan Stride sitting on the chest of Dr. Roland Badel, senior psychologist. She had a thick, jagged piece of glass in her hand. She had already cut one side of his face to pieces, and she was busy sawing through his throat.
    Susan, having then retreated into catatonia, was sent to an asylum for the incurably insane.
    While he lay in hospital, recovering from injuries that by all known laws ought to have resulted in death, Dr. Roland Badel knew that he had stopped playing God for ever.
    He should have realised that Susan Stride had killed her father not because he assaulted her but because he rejected her. He should have been able to diagnose schizophrenia. He should have prescribed depth sedation at least while he thought it all out. He should have been
competent.
    So now here he was, having himself withdrawn from society, living the life of a recluse in an isolated country cottage with the knowledge that a great part of his life had been wasted.
    Personality-reshaping programmes! He could not even reshape his own personality enough to enable him to make social contacts, to move in the world of people.
    He kept chickens, grew his own vegetables, cooked for himself. He did not have tri-di or even a V-phone. Sometimes he read novels—nineteenth-century novels: Dickens, Thackeray, Jane Austen, the Brontës. Sometimes he listened to music: Tchaikovsky, Beethoven, Chopin, Grieg, Liszt. He drank a great deal and went for long walks in the woods. He tried to abolish the twentieth century, along with the recollections of a failed psychologist. Some nights, he woke up screaming.
    One morning, after a bad night, he got up early and went out to feed the chickens. It was a damp morning with mist on the hills and a fine drizzle drifting down to earth.
    In the chicken run, he found a girl lying on her face, filthy, wet, unconscious. In one of her hands were the crushed remains of two eggs. A hungry chicken was pecking at one of her ears, and had caused blood to