Lode laughed. "Way off, lad, way off. Actually, I'm 149!" He laughed again, throwing his head back. Messinger noticed that his teeth were unusually small, very white and even. Lode's laughter snapped off suddenly as he looked squarely at the doctor. "You think I'm mad?"

Messinger gave a non-committal smile. "That's not within my remit," he said smoothly. "However, I'm a busy man with a lot of patients to see this morning, so can we stop playing around?"

"You ought to show some respect for your elders!" barked Lode.

The bed squeaked as Messinger pushed himself to his feet. He heard a corresponding creak on the landing.

Lode shouted. "It's all right, Eustace; the young man is not going anywhere!"

Messinger heard footsteps retreating down the stairs. Disquieted, he sat down.

"I amone 149 years old. When I was born, Victoria was on the throne and Britain was at war with Russia. Just accept that. I could verify it by telling you loads of historical details but you would dismiss them as mere fancies learned from books. My bones are as full of memories as yours are of marrow jelly, lad.

"When I was in my mid-forties----I forget exactly how old I was----something strange happened. I fell under a carriage. It ran straight over my arm here," Lode indicated a point below his left elbow, "severing it completely. I picked it up and ran home to my wife. Screamed my bloody head off, I did!" Lode chuckled at something he'd said before fixing Messinger with a searching stare. He shook his head. "Regular little doubting Thomas, aren't we, lad?" He rolled the left sleeve of his nightshirt up to reveal a thick, ropey scar that circumscribed his forearm.

Messinger peered closer. "There's no way they could have stitched your arm back on in the 1890s," he said. "They didn't have the know-how."

"Nobody stitched it on. It grew back!"

"Of course," Messinger sighed. "Silly me. It grew back."

"Don't get sarcastic, lad, I'm warning you."

"And what became of the arm? Did that grow into a pet?"

"I buried it in the compost heap."

"Pity, you could have hand-reared it."

Lode's lips tightened.

Messinger sighed. "You were saying, Mr. Lode."

By way of answer, Lode leaned forward and raised the hem of his nightshirt to reveal his knees.

Messinger recoiled. "Jesus Harry... who did that?"

"Eustace."

"The bastard must have used a lump hammer!"

"A sledgehammer, actually. Every other Thursday. He seems to think I might run away." Lode sucked on his teeth. "There are times when he might have been right."

Messinger jumped to his feet, unclipping a cell phone from his belt. He saw again the scratches on the wall behind the bed, and again he thought of a prisoner counting the interminable days of incarceration. The fives were arranged in columns of ten, and there were fourteen completed columns... making over 700. But 700 what? Days, weeks? Surely not months?

"If that's what I think it is, put it away, lad."

Messinger put the phone to his ear.

"If you don't put it away, I shall call in Eustace." Lode let the threat hang in the air.

Messinger shot a nervous glance at the door as a floorboard creaked, and felt the fight in him drain away. "Ah, sorry. Wrong number. Yeah, my mistake. Bye." He broke the connection.

"Now come and sit down." Lode patted the side of the bed. "Come on, lad."

He sat down. "But why----" he began.

Lode held up a hand. "All in good time, lad."

"But this is crazy."

Lode's face softened. "Aye, lad, I know I'm asking a lot of you." He looked at the doctor from under lowered eyelids and chuckled. "The best is yet to come."

"I can't wait."

"I'll ignore that. Anyway, Bessie and me, we kept the arm incident a secret. I lay low, hardly venturing out while the arm and hand were growing back. We nearly starved to death, with me not being able to go to work. Times were different then. That's when we started the vegetable garden, all the way back then."

Lode's eyes clouded over. "Bess died in 1919 of 'flu. Bloody terrible, that was. You young 'uns don't know you're born, I swear. We weren't any more able to cope with grief then as you are now, you know? Just because folks lost babies to disease and brothers and husbands to war, it don't mean we became immune. I was one of twelve children. Only eight of us reached adulthood. My mother used to keep daisies in four little jam jars. 'One for each of my little mites in Heaven,' she used to say.

"But when Bessie died, I don't know, I just couldn't cope with it. I was an old man, what did I have to live for? In the end, I went down to the Cotton End Bridge." Lode indicated behind him with a thumb. Messinger realized the man was referring to a bridge over a railway line that had served the local collieries. The track was long gone. He hadn't even known before now that it had a name.

"And?"

"I threw myself under a goods train. When I came to, I couldn't see. I was blind." He looked at Messinger, obviously checking that he was paying attention. "I staggered for a short distance and then gave up and lay down where I was. I could tell by my sense of touch that I was among those tall weeds, the ones with the pink flowers."

"Rosebay willow herbs," supplied Messinger automatically.

"Right. And I could also tell by touch that my head was missing."

Messinger blinked, then slumped and covered his eyes. "Jesus Christ! You had me sucked into your crazy little world then. For a moment, I actually believed."

"And so you should," said Lode. "It's all true."

Messinger shook his head. "Oh no. You're not catching me out again. I'm off." He started to rise.

Lode grabbed his wrist.

"You're leaving without examining your patient? What sort of doctor are you, eh?"

"A sane one," he retorted.

"You think I'm insane? I've been crippled and bedridden since 1952; what d'yer expect? My only contact with the outside world is through Eustace." Lode's eyes flicked meaningfully at the bedroom door. He sat back, breathing heavily. "Please, lad. Stay a little longer."

Messinger sagged. He hated himself for it, but he wanted to hear the end of the story. He knew that all he had to do was peel back that high collar and examine Lode's neck, but he wouldn't----it would be an admission of gullibility. And on a deeper, more primitive level, he couldn't."Okay, but it's against my better judgment."

"Good boy." Lode patted the side of the bed again.

Messinger sat down obediently.

"My head grew back," Lode continued, "just as my arm had. I had no idea how long I lay there among them pink weed things."

"Rosebay willow herbs."

Lode took the correction graciously. "I recovered enough to find my way here and recuperated over a period of several months."

"Forgetting for the moment the sheer implausibility of you surviving decapitation and any subsequent regeneration," Messinger allowed himself a smile, "if what you are saying is true, you wouldn't have any memories. You had grown a completely new brain from scratch. You would, mentally, have been like a newborn. Your story has a plot hole I could drive a bus through."

"We pondered long and hard on that one, me and Dr. Dimmock. He suggested that as cerebral fluid surrounds the spinal cord, it could act as a repository of memories." Lode shrugged and spread his gnarled hands as if he really didn't care. "Anyway, while my body was growing a new head, my old head had been busy growing a new body. Eustace turned up. Eustace, like all my brothers, is me. A clone. It was Eustace that started to call me Mr. Lode. It's a joke, you see----I wasEustace Orr but now he is and I'm the lode. He keeps me crippled and when he wants another brother----"