I unplugged from the scan unit and used my comm “Captain?”
No response.
I repeated the call. “Narcisse?”
Nothing.
“Computer: what is the location of Captain Renault?” The response, when it came, seemed to freeze my blood. “How the hell can it be unknown?” I touched my suit’s environmental controls and raised the temperature a couple of degrees and hoped it would take care of the chill I felt.
I went to internal scan and after frantic jumping from camera to camera, finally found two suited figures lying on the deck just outside of Medical. I watched for a long time before I was convinced that neither was moving at all. Then I dropped the pressure door outside the bridge.
A quick check showed I was halfway through my suit’s air, and there was no way I’d make it to Ceres without more. The bridge’s emergency supply was intact, and theoretically should have been completely sealed from the rest of the Pat Hand. I aired up the compartment, then compared the projected time to reach our destination with oxygen consumption rates and liked what I saw.
I unsealed my suit, breathed deeply, and leaned back in the chair. “Just get me to Ceres, baby,” I told the ship. “Just that far, please.”
About twenty minutes later I got her answer when I felt the first seizure hit.
THE PSYCHIC BATTERY
E. DANE ANDERSON
“Imagine the spiritual possibilities if the psychic power of multiple human minds could be linked and harnessed. That could very well open the last barriers to the other realm.”
Conversation of students overheard at an unidentified British medical college, 1866.
I AM ALWAYS RELUCTANT TO converse about the strange and frightful things that I witnessed during my professional life. Other individuals who experienced the same terrible events with me seemed to be of like mind. In the end, we never spoke of such things with each other. When the mind is less than merciful and insists on retaining all such memories, we put on the mask of false forgetfulness. Further discussion serves no useful purpose.
That is why very few saw the similarities between the otherwise disconnected events from the years 1894, 1897 and 1903. It was only because I was witness to all three of those terrible happenings did I unfortunately fathom the diabolical strings that tied them all together.
It all began unexpectedly, with a rather annoying man who called himself Grimsby. But without his determined insistence, we would have never discovered the terrible things that were happening around us. Whether or not that was a positive outcome, is a matter that I still debate in my mind to this day.
It was during that terrible summer of 1894, when the temperature in Ludenburg was recorded well above 100° for several days running. As a result, people all around the city were dying from all manner of heat-related ailments. This was only a few weeks after I had given up the field of surgery and decided on a career of pathology. It was a choice I quickly regretted after having been assigned to the Charles County Morgue. As a consequence, I spent the whole summer there, dealing with each and every one of those unfortunate souls who’d succumbed to the merciless heat.
Believing I was someone of authority, this man who introduced himself as Frederick Grimsby from the Nautilus Insurance Company, walked right up to me and demanded that I immediately stop what I was doing and produce the body of one Alexander Seward. While being dumbfounded by this man’s seemingly callous attitude toward his surroundings, meaning the cold room stacked full of corpses, I managed to get the attention of the Assistant County Coroner, Dr. MacNeice, who was busy at the other side of the room filling out a seemingly endless stack of death certificates.
Because of Grimsby’s very presence, I immediately assumed that he was referring to the one and only Alexander Seward, the Boston railroad magnate. Dr. MacNeice in his usual reaction to obviously self-important people, told Mr. Grimsby that he was more than welcome to help himself and hand inspect each body until he found the one that he was looking for. There were forty-seven on that day if I remember correctly.
Grimsby reacted just as one might have predicted. “I am talking about Mr. Alexander Seward, one of the richest men in this country! He has been missing from the Boston area for the past ten days. And I believe that his mortal remains may be here!”
“And what makes you believe that?” asked Dr. MacNeice in an incredibly dismissive tone, without looking up from the form he was filling out.
“Do you recall a man by the name of Thursby? You should. His body came through here not more than a week ago, sir!”
“And he is significant because?”
“This is a bit of delicate matter.”
As Mr. Grimsby described it, the situation was indeed quite delicate. Unbeknownst to the public, and especially not revealed to the company shareholders, Alexander Seward had been secretly committed to the Danvers Asylum several months before. Two weeks prior, he had escaped with, and probably at the insistence of, this man by the name of Thursby. Grimsby was acting on information that a man fitting Seward’s description had been brought to the morgue the night before. It was his job to determine, if indeed Seward was dead and the general cause of death as to fulfill the terms of his life insurance. It was only then that Dr. MacNeice agreed to make the search of the bodies presently being held by the morgue, and within a few minutes, he and Mr. Grimsby discovered who they were looking for.
Dr. MacNeice and I made an initial examination of Mr. Seward and quickly discovered two holes drilled though the left parietal of his skull, obviously having been made with a trepanning drill and by someone with skill in using such an instrument. They were just small enough, and covered by the man’s long and unkempt hair, that they may have easily escaped a cursory examination. In our haste, we easily could have diagnosed heat stroke as the cause of death due to the conditions at hand.
All the stuffing in Grimsby’s attitude quickly vanished upon this revelation. In a distinctly meek voice he asked, “I don’t suppose this could have been a suicide? You see, a suicide would of course invalidate the policy.”
Dr. MacNeice rolled his eyes in silent disgust. “Not a chance. I’m afraid Mr. Seward was murdered.”
“Oh dear,” said Grimsby with a huge sigh in his voice. “Now we’ll have to pay double.”
With an obvious murder on our hands, Dr. MacNeice and I had to immediately perform a postmortem, leaving the orderlies to deal with the rest of the death that surrounded us. Mr. Seward’s body was quite curious. Not only were there two neatly drilled holes in the man’s skull, but the brain tissue inside had been scorched by what appeared to be a form of electrical burning. There were also puncture marks in several places on both arms as well as his neck. Both the punctures and the intrusions upon his brain had been made recently, only within the last week at the most. Despite the medical-like characteristics of his injuries, we thought it was quite unlikely that he could have received them as part of his treatment at Danvers.
After turning over our results to the police, both Dr. MacNeice and I quickly forgot about the case as the number of dead due to the heat once again began to fill the cold room at the county morgue. Most of them were either indigent or unidentified and therefore destined for burial out on Pell’s Island. Within a few weeks, the police were forced to drop the Seward case simply because of lack of evidence despite the pleas of the man’s family and the ridicule in the press. The gruesome death of Alexander Seward remained unsolved.
Working in pathology, one sees a plethora of variations of the human body, either the oddly natural or the frighteningly man-made varieties. It takes very little time before the details become blurry in one’s mind. Years had passed since the Seward murder, and I had thought very little of it. Then in January of 1897 I was unfortunately reminded of the whole affair.
In sharp contrast to that terrible summer of 1894, the winter of 1897 was incredibly bitter and cold, with the portions of Ludenberg Bay actually freezing over. I’d moved from the Charles County Coroner’s
office to a position in the new pathology lab at Eastgrove Hospital. It was late in the afternoon and I’d received a hand-delivered note asking me to come over to the County Morgue. Upon arrival, I was greeted by Dr. Richmond, the newly appointed County Coroner. It seemed that he’d been handed something well out of his experience. It was only because one of the orderlies had also been on duty that summer night in 1894 that I’d been called at all. Dr. MacNeice had since passed and I was the only person whom they thought had witnessed something similar.
The body in question was of an unidentified male approximately 40 to 45 years of age. He’d been dead 48 hours at the very least. But that was mere conjecture as his body had been partially frozen when it was pulled out of the bay earlier that morning. There was no way of determining how long he’d been in the water as the city had been suffering through subfreezing temperatures for over a fortnight.
The first things noticeable were the three large holes that had been cut through the skull and exposing parts of the brain, again, obviously by a trepanning saw held by experienced hands. It was then that I saw why Dr. Richmond had considered me as something of an authority on the subject.
This time the holes were about two inches in diameter, nearly three times the size of that which had been drilled into the head of Alexander Seward. The exposed brain tissue had been rather well preserved by the freezing process. Each area also had similar electrical burn marks. But this time there were four in each exposed part of the brain, set in a regular pattern. Dr. Richmond had already made a close examination and each one accompanied a puncture that reached in the brain some four inches in depth. To make matters even more macabre and bizarre. Traces of burnt copper had been recovered from several of the punctures. As again as with Seward’s body, there were recent needle marks on both the left arm and neck.
To my horror, I started to reach the same conclusion that I dared not to in the case of Mr. Seward. But it was now obvious that someone had been sticking live electrodes into people’s brains, probably drugged in the process. For what completely insane purpose my wildest imagination could not fathom.
I slept very little over the next several days, contemplating the implications of what I’d witnessed. Matters were only made worse when I received a note from Dr. Richmond less than a week later that two more bodies with very similar conditions had also been recovered, washed up on Swinburne Island out in the bay.
Once again, the police were brought in on the investigation, and once again they concluded very little. This time the story was kept out of the press. All three of bodies remained unidentified and were quietly buried in the potter’s field out on Pell’s Island. This time, in the intervening months and years that followed, I found it more difficult to erase those horrific images from my memory. Hardly a day went by that I did not, at least in some way, think of those poor unfortunate souls.
Nine years had passed since that awful summer night of 1894. I’d recently been made Assistant County Medical Examiner in addition to my more research-based work at Eastgrove Hospital. It was late Friday afternoon. I was at the hospital trying to finish some paperwork and leave the office early. There was a reception planned for a distinguished guest of the hospital, Dr. Joseph Sloan, a notable professor of anatomy at Edinburgh University. Sloan was a bit of a celebrity to some of us, not just due to his widely used textbooks on cardiovascular anatomy, but also due to his work exposing fake mediums and spiritualists all over Europe throughout the 1880s and 1890s. It was an evening we were all looking very forward to.
But just as I was about to leave, and to my great annoyance, one of my colleagues walked into my office, and without uttering a single word, unceremoniously plopped a medium sized box on my desk. The dour expression on his face immediately roused my curiosity.
I opened the box to discover, laying on its side, a human skull apparently found by a couple of boys who were beachcombing out on Waldron Spit that morning. At first glance, it looked exactly like it purported to be: a skull that had been in the water for long enough to have been completely de-fleshed by every little hungry creature in the sea. It was when I reached into the box that I noticed what was wrong. The fingers on my left hand, instead of resting on top of the skull, found a substantial void. I pulled out the skull and discovered that a good portion of the top was missing, and not in the normal manner as though it had been prepared as a medical specimen. But it was obviously removed by an expert. I tried not to imagine that this had been the work of the same madmen that I had been encountering for the last decade.
It was just then that two more people came in through my door. The first was Dr. Davidson, our lead surgeon, and with him was none other than Dr. Sloan himself. After the customary introductions, Dr. Sloan seemed to take a great interest in our odd specimen. He took the skull in his hands and made the most intense examination of the missing skullcap. He asked me quite directly if I had ever seen anything similar. I told him of our grotesque discoveries back in ‘94 and ‘97 in great detail. The further I progressed in my narrative, the whiter his face became, the blood slowly draining away. As I was finishing my story, he began to slowly shake his head back and forth; his expression was one of obvious distress.
“Moresby,” he said in a quiet, almost frightened, voice. “Michael Moresby.”
Michael Moresby, as Dr. Sloan informed us, had been a fellow student with him at Edinburgh. Along with his anatomical studies, primarily focusing on the brain, he had also taken a keen interest in Spiritualism, having joined a local society. He often discussed with his fellow students, the possibility of connecting multiple, living human brains like a series of batteries in order to harness their collective psychic power. No one took him seriously, or had any idea what he had been up to away from the classroom.
Being of independent means, he had been conducting his own private, secret research. It was only in spring of 1867, when the building that housed his hidden laboratory caught fire, that the nature of his “un-orthodox” research was discovered. As Dr. Sloan related in his story, he and his student colleagues noticed several things strange about the man that only became more frequent in the weeks leading up to the fire. He thought that they should have seen the clues indicating that there was something very seriously wrong. Moresby was frequently late to lectures, looking more and more disheveled in the weeks before the fire. There was more than one occasion when Dr Sloan noticed small patches of fresh blood on the man’s clothes. And several times Moresby was heard to be muttering just under his breath the most incomprehensible and arcane sounding speech.
Inside the charred ruins of his laboratory, the police discovered various bits of what appeared to be electrical equipment, mostly small dynamos and a few electrical piles. Buried in the charred rubble the police also found the remains of three people, all of them with small holes drilled in their skulls in identical places. None of them were ever identified. Moresby disappeared and the entire affair was kept quiet in order to keep the reputation of the college intact. There was no press and all relevant police records were sealed. Now that the Ludenburg police had a name and a rough description, all we could do was hope that Moresby was found soon.
Less than a week later, a young policeman by the name of Fitzpatrick burst into my lab at Eastgrove while I was removing a diseased heart from a recently deceased coal man.
“Are you Doctor Warren, Doctor Richard Warren?” he asked with a slight sense of panic in his voice.
“Yes,” I replied with a tone of voice that questioned his tone of urgency. After all, I did have both hands well inside the chest of a corpse.
When I got into the awaiting police van, I was surprised to find Dr. Benjamin Whittaker, the assistant chief surgeon of the hospital inside. “What’s going on, Benjamin?” I asked.
“Looks like they found that Moresby fellow.”
We were taken to a warehouse on Dock Street, just two blocks north of Pier 12 out in Westbay. Most of the block was empty, save for a few storage facilities used by the Army and
Navy. When we arrived, it looked like half the Ludenberg police force was on hand. We were told that a “rather disheveled man with a thick Scottish accent” had been apprehended on the premises while continuously screaming, “They’re coming! They’re coming I tell you!”
Neither Dr. Whittaker nor I were quite prepared for what we saw inside. An upper floor of the warehouse had been transformed into a macabre laboratory of some sort. The smell was something terrible as the floorboards were variously stained with blood and other fluids not readily identifiable. Luckily, the odor was being overpowered by the chemical smell of the police photographer’s flash powder. All around us were tables filled with various medical instruments, including the trepanning drills and bone saws that I had expected to be found. At the back of the room sat seven people.
They were all in a terrible state, stripped naked with their heads shaved. Each of them had been strapped down to crudely built chairs, looking somewhat like medieval torture devices. Our cursory examination found that each victim had five neatly drilled holes in their skulls, two in the frontal, one in each parietal, and one at the back just above the lambda suture. Out of each was protruding a series of wires, perhaps a half-dozen or more. Each of the poor souls seemed to be totally unaware of our presence, staring mindlessly off into the darkness. At first glance, I couldn’t readily tell who was alive or dead.
While Dr. Whitaker was assessing the condition of each victim, my eyes followed each jumbled mass of wires coming from their heads. They all came together in a massive bundle, leading to what could only have been described as the largest voltaic pile I had ever seen, being at least seven feet high. It wasn’t until I looked at it for a few seconds that I realized that it was eerily glowing, not at all normal for such a device.
Dr. Whitaker’s initial examination discovered that five of the victims were already dead and the remaining two were only clinging to life. Several puncture marks on both of their arms and necks as well as the contents of several hypodermics that we later we found, indicated to us that they had been kept subdued with near constant injections of high levels of morphine. One case of that drug we found had been recently stolen from City Hospital.
Dark Horizons Page 24
