The Creative Sponge Read online

Thomas Wilson is missing. When last seen, he was being taken away by a representative of the mysterious organisation known as TGN, his identity erased.

  Kathy Turner, his best friend, has gone insane searching for him. Or has reality distorted itself around her?

  Gregory Smith, a journalist for a national newspaper, finds his fate inexplicably joined with Thomas’ after he sees his soul reflected back at him from unfamiliar eyes.

  This philosophical thriller brings their three destinies together on a journey deep into the nature of identity, reality and existence itself.

  The Creative Sponge

  By Andy Marlow

  Copyright 2011 Andy Marlow

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Prologue

  About the Author

  Chapter 1

  “There, now, this won’t hurt a bit…”

  Those were the last words he would ever hear as himself. The crushing reality was that they were nothing but a bare-faced lie. It would hurt, of course. It would hurt when the needle penetrated his skin. It would hurt as its lethal contents were unleashed into his bloodstream. And it would no doubt be unbearable to observe the purple liquid’s unrelenting progress through his veins and arteries on its unstoppable mission towards its eventual destination: his brain.

  The needle in question was growing closer by the second. Its bearer, the nefarious Doctor Jones, seemed in no hurry to complete the procedure any time soon. After all, he occupied the position of power. There was no hope of escape for his patient. Every feature on his face exuded ecstasy, as if there were nothing in the world he enjoyed more than watching his victim squirm: his eyes, housed in sunken sockets and hidden behind over-expanded cheeks, shone with gleeful delight as he toyed with his victim’s emotions, waving the needle in the air like a conductor’s baton: now close, now further away, now close again. The game was cruel, for both doctor and patient knew that the needle would find its destination, and not in the all too distant future; yet the doctor gained a callous form of pleasure from seeing his victim writhe in terror when the instrument came close to his skin.

  His victim could not move, of course. He was strapped down onto a surgical table with restraints made from a coarse rope-like material. The effort of struggling against them left his wrists sore and, coupled with the discomfort of the hard, unforgiving surface on which he was bound and the indignity of having been stripped naked in front of his tormentors in order to dress him in a surgical gown, as last moments go he could have wished for better. His distress was compounded by the fact that his head, too, was immobile. There were five people within his field of vision, but he could hear others behind him working on his headset. It was a makeshift affair. Wires and electrodes protruded everywhere from his skull so that his head resembled a hedgehog, albeit a cybernetic one. The wires led haphazardly across the floor to a grey machine in the left-hand corner of the room. This he could not see from his disadvantageous position, but he could recall having glimpsed it earlier. He had not entered the room voluntarily: rather, he had been dragged in, and while his captors had been forcing his reluctant body through the doorway, his eyes had darted about in an effort to understand his surroundings, eventually fixing upon the grey machine in the corner and the Wall to which it was connected. He understood little of its technical workings, but discerned fully what it would do to him. Less than an hour ago he had witnessed the inevitable end of his tragic lot; a tale which would thrust him back through time into another life, and lead inextricably back to this very point in an infinite, torturous loop. The memory was fresh in his mind, seared into his cranium, of the horror he had seen: his own soul, housed in an alien body and only just realising its true identity, robbed of its life before it could escape. Now the heavy burden of that inevitable fate hung unpleasantly around his neck, made all the worse by the fact that he would soon be unaware of it; the poison, when finally released from its glass encasing, would find his brain and free his mind, rob his Self and raze his past, making him forget all that he had learnt and sending him into temporary, blissful ignorance, only to rudely pull him out of it at some indeterminate point in his personal future and bring about his end.

  The doctor soon tired of his game of cat and mouse. With scornful grimace and forceful fist, the needle’s point embedded itself in his subject’s flesh and he turned away, finished. His victim could only lay there and watch as its payload coursed visibly through his blood vessels on its voyage to his brain.