The Home

by Scott Nicholson

  "You know something, Freeman? You're a selfish bastard. You had people looking up to you, kids like Isaac and that boy Dipes."

  "He's okay for a little brat."

  "See what I mean? Even Cynthia said she thought you were cool. You give other people hope, Freeman. But all you're worried about is your own damned neck. All you want to do is run away."

  "You're one to talk."

  "I only run away for a little while. I don't know if I can handle the world outside these walls."

  "All the more reason to take off." Freeman's anger had left him, his soul a deflated tire.

  Vicky stood. "I wonder if the old guy in the lake is coming back."

  "He said we couldn't go this way. But I think he's as bad as the rest, just trying to keep us boxed in. Even the dead people are against us."

  Vicky laughed, a sound that was out of place in the still night. "You've got a hell of a chip on your shoulder, don't you?"

  "You can stay here if you want. I've had enough."

  Freeman turned and jogged down the trail. He tried to tell himself it was the mist off the lake that blurred his vision, but the truth stung like salt. Clint Eastwood never cried. Clint Eastwood never looked back, either.

  He gained speed, hoping the cold air in his lungs would shock him into numbness. The path thinned and branches slapped at his face. Soon he was among the tall stands of oak and hickory that bordered the rear of the property. The foliage blocked the moonlight, so he crept forward in the silent dark, the fishy smell of the lake now mingling with the odor of rotting leaves.

  He reached the fence as the moon broke through a gap in the branches overhead. The light caught the curled razor wire atop the fence. Insulators hung on poles, and several lines of bare wire ran along the top of the stone wall. The air tingled with ozone.

  They had electrified the rear fence.

  The dead man had tried to warn them. Somebody didn't want them to leave. A low growl came from the dark woods beyond the fence. It sounded to Freeman like what a troll might sound like, a monstrous creature whose claws could shred skin, whose teeth could grind bones, whose tongue could lick a skull clean.

  Freeman hadn't felt this afraid since He held his scarred wrist to the moonlight. There was more than one means of escape. Except, if he died here, he might become one of those people underneath, the squirrel-shit nutty, the scared the obsessed, the forgotten.

  Eternal losers.

  The ones even God couldn't heal, the ones who had never been defended or protected. Doomed to seek peace in a charnel house of the insane run by the insane. Freeman suspected this was one fight that would even have Clint holstering his six-shooters.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Bondurant pressed close behind Starlene. God sent along these tests once in a while, and God had so far given Bondurant plenty of latitude. God forgave the drinking, smiled down upon his punishing of the children, and looked the other way when Bondurant falsified state reports. God forgave, just like the Good Book promised God loved the sinners perhaps even more than He did the saints.

  Sometimes He let the sinners crawl up from hell just to be reminded of what they had lost. This basement was close enough to hell for Bondurant to feel the cold spiteful breath of the dead things.

  "What does it mean?" Starlene said not understanding the scope of this new reality.

  As if everything had to have a meaning. When you gave it all over to the Lord everything fit the plan. A season for this and that, after all, whatever it was that the Book of Ecclesiastes said. For every season and all that happy bullshit.

  But that was for later. Right now, he just needed to keep these ghost voices out of his head long enough to set Starlene on the straight and narrow.

  "Don't mind her," Bondurant said.

  "Who was that? What was that?" Starlene peered into the darkness as if she could will the visions free of the walls into which they had evaporated.

  "Nothing. Just one of Kracowski's tricks of the light."

  "Kracowski? Is that what all this machinery is for? His treatments?"

  "The Lord's work."

  Sounds came from the dark corridor. This wasn't a ghost. This was something larger, something real, something not used to the dark. The ghosts were always silent. Even when they "spoke," you could still have heard a candle burning.

  The glow cast by Kracowski's machines outlined Starlene's hair and gave her an aura. Bondurant reached a trembling hand to punish her. Those two brats, Freeman and Vicky, knew he was down here with Starlene. They'd probably tell Randy or one of the other counselors. He'd have to hurry and make her pay for her sins while he had the chance.

  "Who's there?" Starlene called into the yawning black corridor.

  He wished she'd shut up. Her mouth was good for only one thing, and that was apologizing to God for her wayward and wanton soul. Why did she waste her lips on asking questions?

  Bondurant touched her hair, sought to clutch it, but she moved away. The bitch was ignoring him.

  Me! Francis Bondurant, Director of Wendover, a member of the state's Board of Social Services, a man who crushes careers like yours with one rubber stamp. I'll give you a goddamned lesson in placement, all right. Let me get my paddle and I'll teach you to mind your own business.

  Bondurant followed her into the circle of blue light. He staggered a little and fell against one of the tanks. It was cool to the touch. He drew away and went for her. She kept walking down the corridor.

  Perfect. If he could corner her in one of the old cells, he could lock her in, accomplish his mission and be absolved in time for his after-dinner meeting. The cells were nasty, and he'd leave her in there until she begged forgiveness in front of God. Kracowski's ghosts could watch if they wanted as long as they didn't put their crazy words in his head again. He had enough crazy words in there already.

  Words that the Good Lord might not approve of, but as long as Bondurant didn't utter them aloud all would be forgiven. All would be forgiven anyway, because that's just what kind of guy Jesus was.

  Starlene had entered the cell block now, and the stench of rot and mildew made Bondurant's stomach roil. He fought down the tangy whiskey bile and felt his way along the coarse stucco wall.

  "Are you scared of the dark?" he said.

  Dark don't walk, dark don't talk, dark don't do nothing but smarty smarty smarty.

  At first Bondurant thought Starlene had spoken, because she'd paused near the door to the first cell. But that wasn't her voice. This was one of Kracowski's ghosts.

  "Did you hear that?" Starlene whispered.

  "God speaks in many tongues," Bondurant said.

  She didn't know enough to ignore the voices. Bondurant had nearly wet himself the first time he'd seen that ragged stooped old woman with me forehead scar. And when the ghosts started talking to him, putting words right in his head he nearly signed himself up for a skull session with one of the counselors. Now he'd been exposed to enough of them that he could almost tune them out, as if they were an irritating rock music station on the heathen radio.

  He could ignore them, but he couldn't shut them up. So he accepted them as they came. They were harmless. Like pets you didn't have to feed.

  You can't keep me here. Don't you know who I am? I'm Eleanor Roosevelt, you fools. Can't you tell by my hat?

  "Eleanor Roosevelt," Starlene said.

  "Don't listen to them," Bondurant said. "They're trying to drive you mad."

  "What's going on here? I don't believe any of this."

  Unbeliever. She had stopped moving and that gave Bondurant his opening. Take advantage of weakness, that was the way of the world. The black rectangle of a doorway stood out against the dim blue light of the hallway. He would shove her in there.

  Shuffle, shuffle.

  That sound again. Almost swallowed by the black throat of the corridor. Something bigger than a ghost.

  Maybe it was more than one. A dead parade, communion time for the criminally insane, in lockstep search for their sc
attered reason. Whispering in the walls like mutant rats. Marching in aimless uprising against the agitators of their sorry souls.

  But they had no right.

  They were the imprisoned, and he was the jailkeep.

  Wendover was his, damn it. Bad enough when Kracowski moved in with his machines and his theories and his secret funding. Now these restless idiot spirits had invaded, crowding his domain and changing the rules. Playing with his head. Making him think their weird thoughts, lending their pain, forcing him to empathize.

  A white, white room in which to write.

  Not that one again. The same voice, the same sentence over and over. This one was male, cracked the sentence always taking a different rhythm but the words and their order always the same. An eternal revision that always yielded the same outcome. Crazy as a fucking bugbed.

  Crazy as a fucking bugbed.

  Whoa. Wait a second. Did he think that, or had one of the ghosty things echoed it back into his head?

  "Did you hear that?" he asked Starlene, and he was ashamed that his throat caught. No weakness allowed. He was the one who took advantage of weakness. Wendover was his.

  "Crazy as a bad-word bugbed," Starlene said. "Yeah, I heard it."

  Starlene moved away from the doorway, spoiling Bondurant's opportunity to seal her in a temporary tomb. He was too drunk, and in the darkness he'd lost track of her. He brushed his knuckles along the walls, scouring the flesh on the rough masonry. He sucked at his bloody wound.

  Shuffle, shuffle.

  Recreation hour in the ward of the damned.

  "What's going on, Mr. Bondurant?"

  What's going on was the whole world was turning upside down, and Starlene couldn't see it because she was blinded by purity. This was Ground Zero for Armageddon, the first testing ground of faith.

  The blackness was a solid thing, pressing like a suit of wet clothes, forcing itself against his eyeballs and his eardrums and winding through his mouth and wiggling into his lungs and I've half a mind.

  Her.

  The one with the scar.

  She was with them, somewhere in this darkness, making words go into his head even when he DID NOT GODDAMN WANT THEM IN THERE.

  Bondurant had lost track of Starlene. He reached an intersection of corridors and listened for her footsteps. All he heard was the soft shuffling. He was having a hard time concentrating with all those voices in his head. The rows of cells were invisible mouths that whispered feverish, foul things.

  White, white room — my wife is a hat — tin foil gods and metal scarecrows — artcrimesexpill — seven nine eleven thirteen He tried to steady his breathing so he could locate Starlene in the dark, but he was panting too hard from anger and fright and confusion and things going in and out of the walls. The blank canvas before him became a softer gray, then a fuzzy suggestion of shape.

  Then she appeared.

  She glowed softly, naked her face shadowed the rest of her suffused in a yellow light. She was the Whore of Babylon and the mother of all creation. A promiscuous virgin with a hell of a stage show.

  "It's a miracle," Starlene said from somewhere to his left.

  In the light cast by the woman, Bondurant saw Starlene leaning against the wall in the doorway of a cell. He gave her only a glance; this nude, see-through woman demanded all his attention.

  This woman's beauty made even the wholesome Starlene pale in comparison. Bondurant took a step toward the woman. Her mouth opened, and looking into her throat was like looking down the corridor, a long blackness stretching to a deeper dark. The woman was smiling, but her smile had far too many teeth in it.

  A time to sow and a time to reap.

  The words oscillated around the bone of his skull like a ringing alarm clock dropped down a well.

  Crazy as a bugbed bugbed bugbed.

  The woman held out her arms as if she wanted to embrace him, and despite his fear and awe, Bondurant felt a stirring in his groin.

  Now Bondurant realized what was odd about the woman. His eyes had traveled all over her figure, he'd played with her curves in his mind licked his lips as he imagined his hands on her, his palm stinging her softest flesh as he meted out the punishment every woman deserved. Last of all, he looked at her eyes.

  Eyes that saw nothing, because the sockets were empty. The makeshift skin around them bore runnels carved by fingernails.

  Her voice came like icy rain: The better to see you with, my dear, precious, sweet Little Red Riding Hood.

  She opened her palms and revealed her loose eyes, red strings of flesh dangling from them.

  Starlene screamed. Bondurant choked on a prayer, sprayed a geyser of vomit on his shoes, and stumbled backward in the dark.

  The Miracle Woman smiled, too many teeth and not enough eyes.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Kracowski glanced at the computer screen, then checked his meter. "A hundred-and-twelve milliGuass," he said.

  Paula, standing behind his chair, rubbed his shoulders. "It's only numbers, honey."

  Kracowski knew he might as well be talking to the wall as talking to Paula, but he'd talked to walls too often lately. "These anomalies are not what I expected. Synaptic Synergy Therapy is designed to heal my patients, not cause them to have subjective experiences."

  "Well, the ESP data is strong enough to convince even the biggest skeptics. And everything's subjective, honey."

  "Except the truth."

  He cleared the meter, changed its coordinates so that it detected another area of the basement. "Look at these spikes. The electromagnetic fields created by my equipment should be consistent. These are all over the place."

  "So? If it bothers you, just ignore it."

  "I can't ignore it. These readings aren't consistent with my theory."

  "Change your theory, then."

  Kracowski pushed away from his desk. "I was so sure I was right."

  "You are right, Richard. You just found more than you bargained for."

  He went to the two-way mirror and looked into the darkened space of Room Thirteen. He had helped those children. He had aligned their minds into harmonious states. He had restored them, made mem whole, healed what the religious-minded such as Bondurant called their "souls."

  But souls didn't exist. The human body was a complex bag of chemicals, mostly water. The brain was nothing but a series of electromagnetic impulses. Thoughts and dreams were merely a random alignment of those impulses. Things like wishes and hopes and love and fear were specific patterns of neural activity, a battery of switches thrown on or off. Never mind that the number of possibilities were nearly limitless. "Nearly" was the key word. Everything had its limits.

  Money.

  It didn't buy happiness, and Kracowski knew this truth better than most.

  Love.

  That heralded and holy set of specific mental disorders, praised by poets throughout human history, chased by the weak who expected a miracle cure for their individual shortcomings, embraced by the masses as something worthy of sacrifice. If only they knew that Kracowski could create a series of electromagnetic wavelengths that aligned the synapses so that the subject experienced all those physical and emotional sensations: quickening of pulse, widening of pupils, flushing of skin, racing of blood to erogenous zones.

  Fools fall in love, indeed. Research had already shown that those newly in love displayed the same synaptic patterns as those diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder. A rose by any other name.

  Faith.

  Faith had its own built-in limit. Faith was the answer to its own question, a circular logic that satisfied simpletons around the world. No matter whether they called it God or Buddha or Allah or Moon or Krishna. No matter whether you met it on your knees or from the heights of a Himalayan monastery or in any of the modern brainwashing facilities they called temples, churches, and synagogues. All religious faith was selfish because all believers ultimately sought to save themselves, not others.

  Science.

  Ah, that was the o
ne that might not have limits. Or the one discipline that might impose them. Truth. Knowledge. Facts. Hard evidence and data. That was almost something worthy of worship.

  Except when the facts suggested that the entire truth would never be understood. Which was happening right now.

  Telepathy and clairvoyance were theoretically possible, if one believed that the brain's electrical impulses weren't confined to the flesh. He could accept a world of mind intersecting with the world of space and time. But the existence of a soul separate from the body smacked far too much of metaphysical idiocy.

  He'd been given a starting point, the abstracts and data that McDonald's people had compiled over the previous decade, the backlog of Dr. Kenneth Mills' experiments. ESP was producible as an innate ability that could be induced with a balance of force fields and systemic shock. But these latest experiments had skewed toward the spiritual, the unprovable, the unbelievable. That bothered him. That scrambled the harmony of his own synapses. It misaligned his neural patterns and disturbed his sure vision of the universe. It pissed him off.

  "What are you thinking about?" Paula said.

  He tapped his forehead against the mirror a couple of times. "I'm thinking of you, dear. What else?"

  "I love it when you talk that way."

  Her perfume cloyed the air. If only she knew that the natural pheromones in her perspiration were far more sexually alluring to the human male than perfume's scent. Still, she satisfied a need, and she was only temporary. He could always air out his office after she left.

  "Hey, what's this?" she said.

  She pointed to one of the video screens that monitored the equipment in the basement. The picture was greenish and fuzzy. The Trust had coughed up a fortune for the remote electromagnetic resonance system, spending millions on superconducting magnets and advanced circuitry, but the infrared video system was low budget. All Kracowski made out on me screen was a soft blur of movement.