Free The Deadly Space Between by Patricia Duncker Page A

we went, the long empty spaces hung before us, antiseptic and void. Roehm suddenly turned down a staircase and we began the long descent, one landing, then another. I heard his shoes clicking like dog’s claws on the polished floors. Again, we saw no one. The staircases were deserted. At last we stood before a pair of green double doors. The sign simply said:
     
    UNIVERSITY COLLEGE HOSPITAL
    DEPARTMENT OF BIOLOGY
    EXPERIMENTAL LABORATORIES
    AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY
     
    And underneath, glowing yellow and black, was the radiation-warning symbol. Roehm used two different keys to unlock the doors. Inside, beyond green barriers, I could hear a dense high-pitched hum. There were no obvious overhead lights, but the space, a vibrating echo of endless low ceilings reaching away into the dark, glowed fluorescent green. It was unbearably warm and humid. Great glass walls contained swirling funnels of green. My eyes adjusted to the half-dark. I stumbled against the hot pipes, which ran along the bottoms of the huge glass tanks. The floor was damp. Everything smelt of damp ferns and moss, like a tropical forest. I gazed at each plant as we walked past. They appeared to consist of endless varieties of begonia, some speckled, some semi-succulent, others with a deep, furry green sheen on the surface of the leaves. There were leaves shaped like arrowheads or covered in golden spots, and some were huge with arteries spreading out like fingers on an open hand. Nothing flowered. There was nothing in the giant glass tanks but oozing, seething green.
    Shouldn’t everything be labelled? I looked for labels, but there were none. The smell of wet compost was overpowering. I stripped off my coat, jacket and pullover. There was a humidity gauge in a glass box, running with condensation, the needle tracing a steady purple line across the turning graph paper inside the still, damp world. I heard the timbre of Roehm’s shoes change as they hit the surface of the floor. We were in another part of his underworld. He was walking on concrete. And now I could clearly hear the humming throb of the generators, pushing out slabs of wet heat.
    ‘Tropical temperatures. We keep them constant,’ said Roehm, fingering more keys as we came to another door. All the keys were for Chubb locks. They looked exactly alike. This time there was a red eye winking above the lock. The door was wired against intruders. I gulped down a viscous cloud of damp air and tasted stale water at the back of my throat and in my lungs.
    Inside the second door was a thick dark space. I remained outside in the sweating green while Roehm felt for a light. Before me gleamed a sombre crescent of gold over one desk and the pale blue of a lighted computer swung round to greet us. Something behind glass scuttled and jerked. I couldn’t easily make sense of the objects before me. Here is a desk full of papers and computer printouts. Everything on it is connected with work. There are bound reports and a laser printer. There are no photographs. There is a pile of graphs, which have been amended in red pen. There is a book with a German title and many torn scraps of paper marking the place at intervals. There is another humidity gauge. It is almost as hot as the long glass world of green, but not quite. There is more air and a strange smell. We are being watched. The computer displays rows of different coloured figures. There is a telephone covered in Post-it stickers. Something hums, something ceaselessly hums. Everything is floating in tanks, except for this thing. What is it? It has raw chewed branches on which to clamber and sawdust on the floor. It drinks water. What is it? It has a large cage. It has huge eyes encircled with darkness. It is watching, not me, but Roehm.
    ‘That’s a ring-tailed lemur.’
    Roehm was amused by my startled face. My own imagination had betrayed me. I had assumed that he worked with smoking phials of blood and laser beams, with frightening technology,