Consider Her Ways by John Wyndham Read Free Book Online

fifty, and one sixty, or more.
    ‘Now, Mother Orchis,’ said the doctor, with an air of opening the proceedings, ‘it is quite clear that something highly unusual has taken place. Naturally we are interested to understand just what and, if possible, why. You don’t need to worry about those
police this morning – it was quite improper of them to come here at all. This is simply an inquiry – a scientific inquiry – to establish what has happened.’
    ‘You can’t want to understand more than I do,’ I replied. I looked at them, at the room about me, and finally at my massive prone form. ‘I am aware that all this must be an hallucination, but what is troubling me most is that I have always supposed that any hallucination must be deficient in at least one dimension – must lack reality to some of the senses. But this does not. I have all my senses, and can use them. Nothing is insubstantial: I am trapped in flesh that is very palpably too, too solid. The only striking deficiency, so far as I can see, is reason – even symbolic reason.’
    The four other women stared at me in astonishment. The doctor gave them a sort of now-perhaps-you’ll-believe-me glance, and then turned to me again.
    ‘We’ll start with a few questions,’ she said.
    ‘Before you begin,’ I put in, ‘I have something to add to what I told you last night. It has come back to me.’
    ‘Perhaps the knock when you fell,’ she suggested, looking at my piece of plaster. ‘What were you trying to do?’
    I ignored that. ‘I think I’d better tell you the missing part – it might help – a bit, anyway.’
    ‘Very well,’ she agreed. ‘You told me you were – er – married, and that your – er – husband was killed soon afterwards.’ She glanced at the others; their blankness of expression was somehow studious. ‘It was the part after that that was missing,’ she added.
    ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘He was a test-pilot,’ I explained to them. ‘It happened six months after we were married – only one month before his contract was due to expire.
    ‘After that, an aunt took me away for some weeks. I don’t suppose I’ll ever remember that part very well – I – I wasn’t noticing anything very much …
    ‘But then I remember waking up one morning and suddenly seeing things differently, and telling myself that I couldn’t go on
like that. I knew I must have some work, something that would keep me busy.
    ‘Dr Hellyer, who is in charge of the Wraychester Hospital where I was working before I married, told me he would be glad to have me with them again. So I went back, and worked very hard, so that I did not have much time to think. That would be about eight months ago, now.
    ‘Then one day Dr Hellyer spoke about a drug that a friend of his had succeeded in synthesizing. I don’t think he was really asking for volunteers, but I offered to try it out. From what he said it sounded as if the drug might have some quite important properties. It struck me as a chance to do something useful. Sooner or later, someone would try it, and as I didn’t have any ties and didn’t care very much what happened, anyway, I thought I might as well be the one to try it.’
    The spokesman doctor interrupted to ask:
    ‘What was this drug?’
    ‘It’s called chuinjuatin,’ I told her. ‘Do you know it?’
    She shook her head. One of the others put in:
    ‘I’ve heard the name. What is it?’
    ‘It’s a narcotic,’ I told her. ‘The original form is in the leaves of a tree that grows chiefly in the south of Venezuela. The tribe of Indians who live there discovered it somehow, like others did quinine and mescalin. And in much the same way they use it for orgies. Some of them sit and chew the leaves – they have to chew about six ounces of them – and gradually they go into a zombie-like, trance state. It lasts three or four days during which they are quite helpless and incapable of doing the simplest thing for themselves, so that other