Free Captives by Shaun Hutson Page A

incarceration.
        Insane.
        It was a word he heard nearly every working day. One which he had been hearing for as long as he could remember in connection with the wildly aberrant behaviour and attitudes of some of his wards. What the hell was insanity? And who had the right to define it as such?
        Dexter had come to see, with some individuals he'd treated, that insanity was not a disintegration of the mind but rather a re-building. Madness was sometimes displayed in a startling clarity of thought which apparently 'normal' mortals could never hope to understand. There was a relentless logicality to the way a madman thought. That madness sometimes proved to be so single-minded, so obsessively consuming, that Dexter found himself not fearing or hating these murderers he had charge of but admiring them.
        Ted Bundy, an American mass-murderer convicted of killing more than twenty young women, was once quoted as saying 'What's one less person on the face of the earth, anyway?' When war, usually started and controlled by supposedly sane men, took the lives of millions, Dexter found it easy to subscribe to Bundy's observation. Who was madder, the solitary individual who killed a dozen for his own reasons? Or the soldier, trained to kill hundreds in the name of a cause he could not even understand?
        His philosophical musings were interrupted by a knock on his office door.
        'Come in,' he called.
        Colston practically stumbled in, his face drained of colour.
        'What's wrong?' Dexter asked, noticing his colleague's expression.
        'One of the patients,' Colston said agitatedly. 'You must come now.'
        'Is it that important?'
        'It's in Ward 5.'
        Dexter was on his feet in a second. He and Colston moved with great haste along the corridors, Dexter almost breaking into a run as they drew closer. His mind was in turmoil, ideas and visions flooding through it like a raging torrent through a broken dam. He didn't even think to ask Colston what had happened.
        Ward 5.
        He swallowed hard.
        They turned a corner and came upon two interns standing beside a heavy steel door. It was firmly locked and secured.
        The entrance to Ward 5.
        The ward was in the East Wing of the institution and accessible only to half a dozen interns, Colston and Dexter himself. The two doctors watched as one of the interns, Baker, unlocked the door and stepped back to allow them through. He and another man called Bradley followed.
        'Where?' Dexter said. 'Which cell?'
        Colston led him past four doors, grey-painted and nondescript but for an observation slot and a small square hatch for pushing food through. Colston paused at the fifth and nodded towards Bradley, who unlocked the door and stepped back, allowing Dexter to enter the room.
        The smell of excrement hit him immediately, but he was able to ignore the stench; his attention was rivetted to the body of the man slumped against the far wall of the cell.
        He was in his thirties, Dexter knew, but a stranger would have found it impossible to guess at his age.
        His face looked as though someone had been across it in all directions with a cheese-grater. His skin hung in bloodied ribbons from bones which were visible in places through the crimson mess. The front of the grey overall he wore was soaked with gore and, as Dexter moved closer to kneel beside the man, he noticed a thick, reddish-pink piece of matter lying in the man's lap. A glance at his open mouth revealed that the reddish-pink lump was the end of his tongue. He'd bitten through it, severing it. His teeth, visible because what remained of his shredded lips were stretched back in a rictus, were also coated with crimson. It looked as if he'd been using scarlet mouthwash. One eye, torn from its socket, dangled by the slender thread of the optic nerve. It rested neatly on his mangled cheek, the orb fixing