by John Saul
All he had to do was find the right files and activate the right programs.…
Far below, in the laboratory, Adam Aldrich spoke, formulating the words in his mind, digitizing them and transmitting them to the Croyden as easily and with as little thought as it had once taken him to turn the pages of a book, or run down a beach while he yelled at Jeff.
“We’re being watched.”
Engersol’s head snapped up from the screen he’d been studying.
“Watched? By whom?”
“Josh,” Adam said. “He’s at your desk, and he’s been watching us.”
Engersol froze. For a moment his rage toward Hildie Kramer threatened to overwhelm him. Had she really been stupid enough to leave his apartment door unlocked? “Go get him, please, Hildie,” he said, forcing himself with each word to keep his voice level, his rage under control. “Bring him down here.” He would deal with Josh now, and with Hildie later.
In the apartment on the fourth floor Josh had finally discovered the program that would allow him to access the sound system in the laboratory, and his blood ran cold as he heard the last words spoken by Adam and Dr. Engersol.
He stared at the screen, paralyzed. What should he do? What could he do? She’d be here in twenty seconds. And even if he could get out of the house, where could he go?
She’d call the security department, and within a minute there would be people looking for him everywhere!
But he had to do something! He reached out to turn off the monitor, but suddenly the image on the screen went blank, replaced a second later by a new image.
Amy.
Josh stared at it in awe. Could it really be her? But she was dead!
No!
Only her body was dead. But she was still alive.
As his eyes remained glued to the screen, he heard a sound in the background.
The elevator.
Hildie was coming.
Josh was about to bolt from the apartment when suddenly Amy grinned at him. And then she spoke, her voice tinny through the small speaker in the computer’s component tower, but nonetheless distinct.
“Don’t worry,” she said.
The screen went blank.
And the elevator drew closer.
28
The car came to a halt at the top of the shaft. Hildie’s A foot, driven by the cold fury that imbued every fiber of her body, tapped impatiently as she waited for the door to slide open.
Nothing happened.
The angry scowl on her face deepening, Hildie jabbed impatiently at the Open Door button.
Still the doors refused to open, but she heard a voice coming over the small emergency public address speaker mounted in the car’s roof.
Amy’s voice.
“Have you ever been trapped in an elevator?” she asked.
Hildie gasped, partly from the surprise of hearing Amy’s voice, partly from a sudden chill at the words she spoke.
“Amy?” she said. There was no response.
Hildie jabbed once more at the Open Door button. Again nothing happened. Her brief chill of fear driven back by her fury, she jabbed at it yet again.
Amy’s voice filled the car once more. “If you want to talk to me, use the phone.”
Hildie fumbled with a small metal door set into the wall of the car just below the control panel. Inside she found a telephone receiver, which she jerked off the hook and pressed to her ear. “Amy?” she demanded, her voice grating. “What do you think you’re doing?”
Amy spoke again, her voice coming not through the speakers this time, but through the phone itself. “Do you like being trapped in the elevator?” she asked.
Hildie thought quickly. She’s a little girl, she reminded herself. This is her idea of a joke. “I don’t suffer from claustrophobia, Amy,” she said. “Small places don’t bother me at all.”
“Really?” Amy asked. “What about falling? I’ve always been terrified of falling.”
Suddenly the floor dropped out from under Hildie as the car fell a few inches, then came to a sudden stop. She staggered, lurching against the wall, catching herself with one hand before she fell. “Amy, what are you doing?” she demanded. “This isn’t funny!”
“It’s not supposed to be funny,” Amy replied, the teasing tone disappearing from her voice. “It’s not supposed to be any funnier than what you and Dr. Engersol did to me!”
The elevator dropped again, nearly two feet this time. Hildie screamed as she hit the floor, her knees buckling under her. She dropped the phone, which dangled against the wall as she scrambled back to her feet.
The elevator slowly rose back to its position at the fourth floor level.
“Ten feet,” Amy’s voice said, coming once more over the speaker system. “I used to be afraid to jump ten feet. Are you?”
Once again the elevator dropped, and Hildie screamed again, falling through the air until the car stopped abruptly and she crashed to the floor.
Inexorably, the car began to rise again. All at once Hildie realized exactly what was going to happen to her.
“No!” she screamed. “Amy, don’t do—”
The car dropped again, twenty feet this time. Hildie’s legs hit the floor and she felt a searing pain shoot up her leg as her right ankle broke. She collapsed to the floor, screaming partly with pain, partly with utter terror.
The elevator began its slow rise once again, and Hildie, leaning against its wall, her injured leg stretched out in front of her, began pounding on the metal doors. “Help me! Someone help me!”
The elevator jerked to a stop. Hildie braced herself, waiting.
It dropped, and Hildie screamed, but cut her own scream short as the elevator stopped after only an inch or two.
Fury rose in her once more, wiping out the pain from her broken ankle. Amy was playing with her! Toying with her as if she were some kind of rat in one of the cages in the labs! “Stop this!” she shouted. “Stop this right—”
The elevator dropped again. Hildie’s words dissolved into a scream of terror as she plunged downward. She tried to twist in the air, tried to prepare herself for the impact, but when it came, she only slammed into the floor once more, one of her hips shattering as it bore the impact of her weight, her face smashing into the wall, blood gushing from her nose.
“No,” she whimpered as the elevator once more began its slow rise to the top. “Oh, God, please, don’t let this happen to me.…”
But it happened again. And again. Some of the drops short, some of them longer.
One by one Hildie Kramer’s bones collapsed, until both her legs and both her arms were broken. Wave after wave of pain shot through her body as she tumbled around the car.
Finally, when she thought she could bear the torture no more, the car rose steadily to the top.
It stopped there, and once more Amy’s voice came over the speakers. The little girl’s voice was trembling now, and she sounded almost sad. “How does it feel?” she asked. “Does it hurt? Does it hurt as much as I do?”
“Don’t, Amy,” Hildie moaned. “Why—”
“I know what you’re going to do to Josh,” Amy broke in. “He’s my friend. I won’t let you hurt him. I won’t let anyone hurt him.”
The elevator dropped once more—only a foot this time—but the impact on Hildie’s body sent searing arrows of pain through her as each of her broken bones shifted position.
An anguished scream erupted from her throat.
In George Engersol’s office Josh listened in terror to the muffled screams coming from within the elevator shaft. What was happening? What was Amy doing?
And who else was hearing Hildie’s screams?
He moved to the door, edging close enough to the stairwell so he could peer down. Though he saw no one, he could hear a babble of voices drifting up from the first floor.
Should he go down?
But what would happen to Amy?
As soon as the question came into his mind, he was certain he knew the answer. Dr. E
ngersol would try to kill her. Just as he would have killed him, Josh thought, if Amy hadn’t stopped Hildie.
Or would Dr. Engersol try to put him into the computer, too?
In a flash last night’s nightmares came back to him. He tried to imagine being trapped in that endless maze forever, without ever waking up.
Part of him wanted to run away, to call his mother and beg her to come and get him.
But another part of him couldn’t abandon Amy, couldn’t leave her alone after what she’d done for him.
Slipping back into Engersol’s office, he closed and locked the door.
“Stop her, Adam!” George Engersol demanded. “Kill her if you have to, but stop her!”
There was no answer from Adam, but his image on the monitor suddenly dropped away, to be replaced by a grotesque vision such as Engersol had never seen before.
Inhuman, with a face that projected pure evil, the being on the screen glared down at them with an almost palpable hatred.
Next to Engersol, Jeff Aldrich gasped. “What is it?” he breathed. “What’s happening?”
Engersol’s jaw clenched. “I don’t know,” he replied, his voice grating. “I don’t have any idea at all.” Before his eyes, his experiment was spinning out of his own control.
Demons surrounded her.
Creatures far beyond her own imagination encircled Amy, and when the first one appeared out of nowhere, flapping great bat wings, its forked tail whipping behind it, her first instinct was to duck away, to let it fly over her.
As she automatically obeyed her instincts, Amy suddenly lost control of the elevator. A final scream of fear and agony burst from Hildie Kramer’s throat as the car plunged to the bottom of the shaft, a scream that was abruptly cut off as her body slammed against the floor one last time, her neck breaking as she landed head first.
For Amy, her instinctive mental dodge was useless, for there was nowhere to escape from the terrifying creature that had assaulted her.
She twisted her mind then, refocusing her concentration, but no sooner had the creature disappeared, its ephemeral form dropping out of her consciousness as she refused to think about it, than another one appeared.
Its green skin covered with scales, its blood red eyes gleaming at her out of the darkness that surrounded it, it crept toward her, taloned hands reaching out, groping for her—
No!
It’s not real!
Amy screamed the words in her own mind, but repeating to herself what she knew to be true did nothing to alleviate the horror that filled her mind.
She knew the creatures didn’t exist—couldn’t exist!— for the world she lived in now held no such beings. Except for herself, and Adam Aldrich, it held no living beings at all.
Only stimuli, abstract stimuli, that excited the cells in her mind and created the visions her brain beheld.
Adam!
It was Adam who was imagining these things, translating the visions he created in his own mind into the stimuli that would duplicate them in her own.
But understanding what was happening made no difference, for all that was real in her world was what she beheld in the eye of her mind, and the fiends and monsters Adam had loosed on her were more real than anything she had ever experienced before.
She cowered away from them, seeking someplace to hide, but in her shelterless world they were everywhere.
One of them came at her, darting toward her, its great jaws gaping, yellowed fangs dripping saliva, forked tongue flicking toward her.
The tongue lashed at her, and in her mind she felt as if its slimy surface had touched her skin.
Instinctively she tried to wipe the phantom creature’s spittle from her cheek.
She had no cheek, nor any hand to wipe it with.
Still, the sensation of the beast’s saliva burning into her nonexistent skin stayed with her.
The demons were everywhere now. She could feel them surrounding her, closing in on her, drawing ever closer.
Her mind uttered a silent scream of terror, a burst of energy that exploded out of her mind.
Incredibly, the demons drew back.…
George Engersol and Jeff Aldrich rushed from the laboratory into the tile-lined corridor where the closed elevator doors hid whatever might be inside. Engersol pressed the button next to the doors, and they obediently slid open, revealing the grisly scene within. Hildie’s broken body, crumpled in a grotesquely unnatural position, lay in the corner of the blood-smeared elevator.
For a moment neither man nor boy moved at all, simply staring in stupefied horror at the carnage in the elevator car. Then, without uttering a word, Jeff Aldrich turned away, his face pale, his legs trembling. Numbly, he started back toward the laboratory, while George Engersol stepped into the elevator to check Hildie Kramer’s body for signs of life.
Finding none, he picked her up, carried her into the operating room, and laid her bloodied corpse on the table he had last used to remove Amy Carlson’s brain from her body.
As he stared down at Hildie’s dead eyes, he slowly realized what he had to do.
His tread heavy, he started back toward the room that contained the crown jewel of his career.
Jeff Aldrich stared uncomprehendingly at the monitor above Amy’s tank. “What’s going on?” he whispered. “What’s happening?”
Colors exploded on the monitor, swirling pinwheels shot through with jagged bolts of lightning, followed by dark cloudlike masses rolling out of nowhere, only to dissipate as bursts of purple and magenta roiled up from within them.
“I’m not sure,” George Engersol replied, his eyes, too, fixed on the screen. “It’s like when she woke up and realized where she was. She was furious then, and the energy her brain produced did this kind of thing. But this is different. It looks like fear, or pain.” He switched on the microphone.
“Adam? Adam, can you hear me?”
The monitor above Adam’s tank came alive, and the outlines of an image began to form, then faded away.
Alarmed, Engersol spoke again. “Adam, what’s wrong? Is Amy doing something to you?”
From the speaker in the ceiling, he heard Adam’s voice; weak, faint, but his. “Punishing her …” he said “… helped Josh …”
Jeff’s eyes widened. “Josh?” he whispered. “What’s he doing?”
Engersol ignored Jeff, his mind racing.
It was all over! The secret was going to get out, long before he was ready.
They’d find out! And not just about Adam and Amy and the brilliant success he’d finally achieved.
They’d find out about the others, too. The children he’d worked with over the years, developing the technique.
The children who had given their lives for the technology he had finally perfected!
The children they would say he had killed.
And in the glare of publicity, the pontificating of the hysterical media, his achievement would be forgotten.
All they would remember would be the children who had died, the “suicides” that they would claim were cold-blooded murders.
The plans had been in place, the plans to keep the project secret even for years after this success, the plans to slowly bring it to the attention of the public.
By the time the campaign was completed and the world understood what he had done, the past would be barely remembered, the children who had died in those early years all but forgotten.
And no questions would have been asked in the face of his success.
But not yet!
It was still far too soon.
And the proof was right there on the screens above the twin tanks containing the brains of Adam Aldrich and Amy Carlson.
A fleeting thought crossed his mind.
Eve,
Amy’s name should have been Eve.
Then it would indeed have been perfect. Adam and Eve, the first two of a new breed of being, part human, part computer.
And Josh would have fit perfectly, too.
Josh,
from Eden.
But now he had to destroy it.
Destroy it all, and dispose of it before any of it was discovered.
29
Pain slashed through Amy’s mind, a pain as real as if the jaws of one of the demons had closed on her right leg, its teeth slashing at her flesh, ripping it from the bones, then crushing the bones themselves.
For they’d come back, held at bay only for a second by her silent scream of terror before Adam attacked again, projecting the monstrous beings once more from his mind, hurling them at her like spears, each of them plunging deeper into her mind than the one before, twisting inside her, stimulating the pain centers deep within her brain, causing her mind to twist and writhe as she tried to overcome her agony.
She felt her mind weakening, felt the beginnings of cracks in the structured order that was her sanity. If it kept up, if she couldn’t find a way to fight back, her mind would collapse.
Her mind would collapse, but the nightmare would go on, for as long as Adam wanted to keep it up.
Run!
The idea burst into her mind. For a moment she didn’t understand it, but then it became clearer.
None of it is real!
Don’t fight what isn’t real!
Turn away!
Following her instincts, Amy began to withdraw from the nightmare that swirled around her, began to draw her mind back within itself, closing herself down so that she would no longer be aware of the terrors surrounding her.
She made an image for herself.
An image of a well, a deep, black shaft.
A shaft into which she could disappear, and into which Adam and his demons could not follow.
She felt herself begin to drop into that strange endless hole that existed only within her mind, begin to slide away into the welcome darkness.
The snarls of the beasts began to fade away, and then the beings themselves seemed to draw back, to become indistinct.
She willed herself downward, forced herself to confront her terrible fear of falling, to use it instead to save herself.
