The gravedigger began to lower the casket into the ground.
***
Despite its affiliation with the prestigious University of Virginia, the architecture of the Nilbog Institute of Science had all the charm of the ass end of a shopping center. Blocky white buildings devoid of all ornamentation save exterior ductwork gave the place a sterile, industrial feel. Thankfully, the portion of campus devoted to higher learning at least sported some flower planters and outdoor fountains, but Lucy’s reaction upon visiting the place for her job interview had been laughter.
Today, she was used to its ugliness as she got out of a cab and walked, head down, toward Dr. Robertson’s laboratory. And she no longer worried that moving here might have been a mistake, that a sojourn in Nilbog would look bad on her resume. After all, that funny business involving the psychotic medical students happened way back in the Nineties—ancient history—and the faculty involved were long gone. Sure, students still derisively called this school the Institute of Science “and Animacology,” but, as folks said back home, flapping your gums had precisely jack shit to do with the price of tea in China.
It might not look like much from the outside, but NIS had an especially kickass human anatomy lab. The one back at her old school—which she’d frequented for her pre-med degree—had half a dozen cadavers, tops. They were so used up by students that by the time Lucy could dissect them, their gizzards looked like ground chuck. At the lab here, however, cadavers remained fresh and plentiful. It seemed the funeral expenses were zero for a needy family who donated a loved one’s remains to science.
The physics department was a mind-blower, too, not so much because of the tuitions and alumni donations it brought in, but because NIS at one time had been a genuine University Affiliated Research Center, doing work for the Department of Defense. It wasn’t one anymore—the “and Animacology” scandals of the Nineties did a fine job of torpedoing that relationship—but it still benefited from the exotic equipment left behind. Grants from places like the National Science Foundation still fell from the sky on occasion. So, no, the government hadn’t abandoned them completely. In any case, its laboratories made NIS a favorite locale for researchers like Lucy’s boss.
The man himself was hanging out by the entrance to the applied physics laboratory when Lucy walked up. There weren’t low walls to sit on or nice tree stumps or benches. The parking lot ran right the hell up to the building, like at a loading dock. So as he smoked his pipe, Dr. Robertson was obliged to lean against the exterior wall. He bent a leg and propped a foot on the bricks behind him like a Fifties greaser.
“Lucy?” He slid his glasses down his bald head and put them on. “What are you doing here?”
“Coming to work.”
“But wasn’t your grandmother’s funeral today?”
She shrugged and looked away.
“The loss of anyone’s kin is more than enough of an excuse to take some time off. Go home.”
She shook her head. “I’d rather work through it. Plus I’ve always loved the graveyard shift.”
Dr. Robertson frowned as he beat his pipe against his knee to knock the tobacco out. “Well, it’s your call, love. I’m headed home. The missus wants me to give out Halloween candy so she can watch a Hugh Grant movie.” He rolled his eyes. “Don’t work too hard. If for whatever reason you change your mind, just lock up and power down. The night is yours.”
“Thank you, sir.”
Dr. Robertson pulled a key ring out of his brown sports jacket as he headed for his car. Lucy was about to go inside when he called to her. “Lucy?”
“Yes?”
“The next experiment is Saturday. There’s a cadaver in your office that needs to be prepped, if you’d be so kind. I hate to leave you alone for that sort of work, under the circumstances. But as long as you’re here.…”
“Oh, not a problem.” Lucy hoped her smile looked real. “If he wakes up, he can help.”
Dr. Robertson chuckled and walked away. “Good night.”
“See you in the morn.”
***
Every profession had its jokes it didn’t share with outsiders. Lucy’s last boyfriend, a lawyer, revealed this one: what’s the difference between a guilty and not-guilty plea?
A not-guilty plea is a “slow guilty.”
And while she was a pre-med student, back when she thought she wanted to be a medical doctor, she heard this one: three senior citizens, called gomers (that stood for Get Out Of My Emergency Room), were comparing who had the worst mornings. The first complained he took a big piss every morning at six. The second complained he took huge dump every morning at seven. But the third said, “I have you all beat. I piss big at six, shit big at seven, and I don’t get out of bed till eight.”
Professional in-jokes always rang with a note of mean-spirited truth. So when NIS students called their school the Nilbog Institute of Science “and Animacology” in reference to those scandals in the Nineties, it reminded the world of how callous reality could be. The slur referred to the period when med student Ella Monteleone and her professor, Dr. Rodrigo Emanuel Adalberto Nochas, serially kidnapped teenagers and tried to join their bodies with those of animals, a la H.G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau.
It wasn’t only that such evil was possible, but that society permitted it to continue. The court threw out the charges against Dr. Nochas and Ella Monteleone—called “Dr. Ella Mental” by the press—because of investigative errors. The couple’s whereabouts were presently unknown.
On a smaller scale, the whispered nickname for Lucy’s boss, Dr. Theodore Robertson, expert in the fields of cryobiology, nanotechnology, and applied physics, fit squarely into this realm of humor. That’s because it was mean-spirited, but it also contained a kernel of truth.
They called him Dr. Frankenstein.
Lucy contemplated the nickname as she attached electrodes to the exposed brain of the cadaver in her office. It lay in a shallow tub of formaldehyde, the mildly nauseating odor like soured pickles.
Well, how else could you explain what Dr. Robertson was doing? His NSF grant was for him to research the energetic stimulation of cadaveric brain tissue. Possible applications included “data recovery” and safe-thawing from long-term cryonic suspension, such as at the conclusion of interstellar space flight in a futuristic sleeper ship. When word leaked out about this research to the so-called “life extension” industry—meaning, the people whom celebrities paid to freeze their severed heads after death in the hopes of one day being revived—NIS had been flooded with inquires and unannounced visits from all manner of whack jobs, to the point that they’d had to temporarily beef up security.
Still, the whack jobs weren’t entirely off the mark. Lucy sometimes called herself Igor. She and Dr. Robertson were actually getting paid to figure out how to bring things back to life. It was ludicrous, but in a way, she loved it.
Saturday’s guinea pig was a heavyset young man with a Y-shaped autopsy incision down his torso. But it really didn’t matter what the corpse looked like. Like all the others she’d teed up, it would be referred to as the Monster—or sometimes, Mr. Monster. The name was Dr. Robertson’s idea. He said if one embraces an insult, then it loses its power.
Mr. Monster would be loaded into a modified MRI doughnut and bombarded with different types of radiation in varying intensities and durations. Lucy landed her job with Dr. Robertson because of her knowledge of particle physics and spectroscopy. She was supposed to help him understand the properties of the types of energies being applied. It didn’t hurt that she also had a medical background.
It was Lucy’s suggestion to measure the effects of energy emissions on other parts of the body and not just the brain. Could they design a better type of defibrillator, for instance? So each Mr. Monster was also outfitted with sensors to organs like the heart, lungs, liver, and bladder. Within an hour, the cadaver currently in her office had so many wires trailing out of its abdominal cavity that it looked like a robot.
What an apropos way to spend Halloween night. But it made her sad. She normally loved giving out candy to kids.
Then again, she hadn’t thought of Grandma and Grandpa for a whole hour. Wasn’t that why she was here?
Grandpa was alone right now, probably wearing his Dracula cape and looking at himself in the mirror. Talking to the ceiling and imagining he heard his dead wife’s voice in answer. She’d already caught him doing that over the past couple days, sans the cape.
Lucy draped a white sheet over the body and rolled the gurney into a corner.
You inhuman bitch. You should be home with him.
She picked up the phone. She’d at least see how he was doing.
But that was when the Skype program running on her desktop chimed that Alice was calling. She went to answer.
“Luce, you’re there! Holy shit!”
They activated their webcams, and Alice’s face filled her computer screen. Her unkempt hair had its own personality, sticking out at odd angles, but Lucy resisted the usual impulse to tell her so. It was just nice to see a friend.
“Hi, Alice. How ya doing?”
Alice reeled back from the screen, honking a laugh. Her hair momentarily obscured her face. “How am I? How are you? Holy shit!”
Lucy suppressed a sudden urge to cry. “I’m good. You got the figures?”
“Do I have the…? Are you kidding? Holy shit! Just a minute.”
A soft laugh replaced her urge to cry, and that was good. She was glad Alice was there. At least somebody was where she was supposed to be today.
And that location was just outside Yellowstone National Park, Montana, at an NIS sister facility designed to study new applications of geothermal energy. Like Lucy, however, Alice used her employer’s resources to conduct what they both euphemistically called independent research.
It was actually more like “off the books” research.
Or more like “if your boss finds out what you’re doing, you will get shit-canned faster than an electron can orbit an atom” research.
It wasn’t like she’d set out to hide her activities, not at first. She’d gone to Dr. Robertson one day in his office. She surprised him in the act of lighting his pipe in contravention of the lab’s strict no-smoking-indoors policy.
“Lucy!” Slamming the still-smoldering pipe into a desk drawer, he folded his hands on his blotter and flashed an embarrassed smile. “I didn’t hear you come in.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. I should have knocked.” She sat down and brought out a file folder containing her proposal. “I’m here to ask a favor.”
“Anything, love, as long as you…”
Dr. Robertson glanced down at the drawer containing his pipe. Smoke curled from the cracks. Grimacing, he opened the desk to beat out the flames taking hold.
With that done, he coughed smoke and regarded her over his glasses. “As long you keep this incident under your hat.”
“Oh, you can trust me, sir. My lips are sealed.”
“Good.” He briskly rubbed his hands together. “Then what can I do for you?”
“I’d like to conduct a series of experiments with our equipment. I have a theory about alternative fuel sources, and if I can produce a certain chemical reaction in isotopes that—”
“Which equipment? The photon emitter? The gamma camera?”
“Actually, all our machines, sir. In succession.”
“Oh, I can’t sanction that without Board approval. After those incidents in the Nineties, you know—that was before your time—”
“Yes, I’m aware of them.”
“Well then, you know that independent experimentation is highly frowned upon. It’s the kind of thing that got us in trouble.”
“Yes, sir.”
“So I don’t want to see whatever’s in that folder.”
Lucy tucked the manila file under her arm and bowed her head. “Yes, sir.”
“In fact, love, it’s best that whatever you do in your off hours, you keep to yourself, such as in the middle of the night, when our equipment is quite idle, you see, such a shame. I never work at night, you know. I have no idea what happens here when I’m home. The equipment could dance the cha-cha, for all I care, just so long as it’s perfectly clean and operational the next day.”
She raised her head, feeling a glimmer of hope. “Sir?”
“Yes, well, off with you.” Dr. Robertson made a show of rummaging through his papers. “I’m quite busy, you know.”
“Yes. Thank you, sir.” And with a smile, Lucy left his office. She returned to her work station and sent an email to her friend Alice. It said, only, It’s on.
From that day onward, they worked in secret. Alice would ship her various odd metals and compounds, which arrived by FedEx at Lucy’s grandparents’ house. By night, Lucy brought them here, shot them full of radiation, took measurements, and emailed the results to Alice for analysis.
Lately, they’d been getting closer to their goal. If they could prove this new type of fission was possible, then the world would open to them. They would publish their results, partner with particle accelerator labs for further research, and go down in history with people like Oppenheimer and Einstein as the ones who solved the worldwide energy crisis. The planet could leave fossil fuels behind and reverse global warming. They both felt it, swapping excited emails and Skype chats long into the night as they plowed onward like two mad scientists. The last time they worked—that was the night before Grandma died—Alice had even joked, “Holy shit! Whaddaya say we cure cancer next?”
So it felt good to hear Alice’s voice as the woman wheeled back to the camera. “Okay. Holy shit, I just sent you the latest. You’re not gonna believe it.”
Lucy opened her email in a separate window. And Alice was right: she couldn’t believe what she was reading. So she read it again. “Are these numbers right?”
“That they are.”
“This is astounding.”
“Yeah, we’re really onto something. But we still have to keep it secret.”
“No shit. But that’ll change soon. You gonna run a test there?”
It was their agreement, going back to the beginning. If they produced a promising result using Lucy’s equipment, then the next step was to see if they could replicate it somewhere else, at a completely different lab. Being able to repeat something, anywhere and independently, was basic science. It was the least they could do for the scientific method given they were already out on a limb. Alice had volunteered to find a venue near her if that day came to pass.
“Yeah, in a couple days,” Alice said. “Montana is pretty scarce.”
“Don’t forget to tape it.”
“What? Have you no faith in me?”
“None whatsoever.”
Alice looked over her shoulder. “Holy shit. Head honcho is coming. Gotta go.”
She hung up without another word.
Grinning, Lucy switched back to her email and re-read the results. Maybe she’d pay off those student loans faster than expected. A whole lot faster.
Her smile faded when she again imagined Grandpa, alone at home. Hopefully he was handing out Halloween candy and scaring the little kids with his Dracula cape. But the truth was that he’d probably turned off the porch light and was sitting there in his rocker, in the darkness.
With an effort, Lucy refocused on her computer screen. There was a lot of work to do tonight. She vowed to use her future fortune to set up Grandpa in a mansion, with hot and cold running maids, as he sometimes joked. That would make it up to him. She set to entering the latest figures into her database.
Grandpa would be okay for one night alone. Really, what could go wrong?
Chapter 4
GRANDPA
He didn’t remember much after hugging Lucy goodbye. But that didn’t surprise him. He hardly remembered his own name much anymore, having been called “Grandpa” for so long by so many. His granddaughter called him that, of course, but so did the grocer and the neighbors and the min
ister. His wife had even called him Grandpa in a half-teasing way. That or “darling.” Before that, Elizabeth had addressed him as “Daddy,” because he’d been a proud papa, hadn’t he, right up until their son permanently landed himself in prison.
Grandpa. How he’d long to hear her say the word now. But his dear wife was suddenly, unbelievably dead. It didn’t seem possible.
He must have driven himself home from the funeral, because the next thing he was aware of, he stepped out of the car and stared up at the small, two-story Colonial where he and Elizabeth lived.
Had lived. In the past. Because that was all over now. Although his heart still beat and he still drew air into his lungs, the house felt so empty he could hardly bear to walk through its front door. It didn’t matter that Lucy now lived in the guest bedroom. He didn’t belong there anymore.
He entered anyway. The fragrance of wilting roses wafted in from from the dining room on his left, where Elizabeth had placed them on the credenza the day before she died. She was always doing that, using roses to spread life and happiness wherever she walked. Fresh flowers always graced their home. Lilies and carnations stood in small vases in each bathroom and bedroom, watered daily by Elizabeth’s loving hands, unlined in her old age. They were all dead now.
He turned into the dining room and avoided looking at the roses as he placed his hat on the table. He picked up the Dracula cape hanging over the back of a chair and put it on. The trick-or-treaters would be here soon. He wanted to give them a show, as he’d always done.
That old cape again? he imagined Elizabeth teasing—again, as she’d always done. You should be a zombie this year instead.
Or was he really imagining her voice? He’d been hearing her so clearly in the back of his thoughts. Maybe this was how the idea of ghosts began, out of the extremities of grief.
He adjusted the cape’s tall collar behind his head and gave Elizabeth the answer he always did. “I’d rather kill myself than be a zombie. Now you go on.”
Imagined or not, he expected to hear her voice again, for real, very soon, somewhere in the afterlife. He’d been telling her that as well. He was aware he’d said something like this in Lucy’s presence and might have tipped his granddaughter off, but she probably thought he was referring to his old age. “Soon” might be ten or twenty years from now, as far as she was concerned.
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