The Home

by Scott Nicholson

Mills cracked a grin that resembled that of a sadistic clown's. "Sure, step right on in. Let's see what the treatment does to you." Mills's eyes were closed, and he leaned back from the computer keyboard like Captain Nemo playing a demented organ melody.

  "Ah, I can see it," Mills said. "I knew I could do it. See, McDonald you and your Trust thought I was wrong, that 1 was used up and broken. You were ready to throw me away, but you need me. I'm the only one who can make it happen."

  "Don't keep me in the dark on this thing," McDonald said. "Kracowski made tons of notes. Why do we have to keep guessing with you?"

  "Kracowski wants other people to know what a genius he is. All I want is to find out for myself."

  Mills opened his eyes as if finishing a prayer, then altered the programming. "See, Kracowski, you don't need to shock them if you want to kill them. Kill them and let their hearts keep beating. That's the way to get inside the dead."

  Kracowski had administered death in doses that lasted for fractions of seconds. Mills appeared capable of killing millions without hesitation. After what he'd done to his own wife and son, Kracowski wouldn't be surprised if the man would wipe out the entire human race just to prove himself right. Mills would even kill God if he had the means and opportunity. He already had the motive.

  "Take a look for yourself," Mills said. "It's beautiful. Dead is beautiful."

  Kracowski looked at the readings on the computer screen. The amplitude was erratic, scrambled into a wave pattern he'd never seen before. Not even the radical physicists, those who linked electromagnetism with UFOs and world war and brain cancer and killer viruses, had directly connected the silent radiation with the human spirit. Mills was pushing it with no idea what the result would be, playing a guessing game that might be far more tragic than the splitting of an atom.

  Even nuclear reactions obeyed the laws of nature, and Mills was playing in the field beyond nature.

  Kracowski cursed himself for not being able to look away. He was just as curious as Mills.

  "Open the door," he heard himself saying.

  McDonald put a hand on the thick handle of the slide lock. He eased the lock free and winced, as if expecting the walls to fly loose from the floor. When nothing happened, he took hold of the door handle. He paused, then knelt to the slot in the door, pulling the rusty mechanism where food had long ago been shoved to the cell's inhabitants.

  Vicky's voice came from the slot, louder than before. "They're eating the light," she said, the words made even more haunting by her calmness.

  Mills laughed. "Dark tastes better. Less filling. Don't have to make yourself vomit after."

  McDonald said "What the hell's going on in there?"

  Mills traced a strange pattern in the air with the tip of his finger. Painting an invisible Picasso, or maybe conducting a frenzied Phillip Glass piece for full orchestra. Communing with fleshless things. Or stroking the molecules of heaven.

  "Damn you," McDonald said to Mills. "Talk to me, or I'll have your ass stuck back in the loony bin."

  The agent worked the lever on the food slot and peered inside the cell. Kracowski wondered if McDonald would be able to see anything because of the darkness. McDonald shook his head as if trying to clear his vision, then pressed his head closer to the slot. He squealed in sudden pain, as if acid had been dashed in his eyes, and rolled to the floor.

  McDonald huddled with his knees against his chest and moaned unintelligible syllables. He shuddered, eyes fixed open, staring past Mills and Kracowski. Mills hurried around the computer table and grabbed the man by the jacket, shaking him. "Help me get him away from the fields," he said to Kracowski.

  Kracowski glanced at the computer screen, where the resonance image of Vicky's brain flashed in bright purple, green, and gold, the colors one saw when pressing fingers against closed eyelids. An infrared video camera depicted an aurora surrounding her body. Other cloudlike shapes flickered against the darkness, clusters of energy that weren't connected to the girl's physical form.

  "What did you see?" Mills shouted at McDonald spittle flying into the dazed man's face.

  "Nuh-nuh-nuh," he grunted in reply.

  Mills pushed McDonald to the floor. He shouted at Kracowski, "Don't touch anything. I'm going in."

  Mills yanked the cell door open. But he didn't go in. He couldn't. -

  The room was gone.

  Kracowski forgot the computer, the straining machinery, the burning fear in his stomach, the hopeless sense that everything was too far out of his control, because none of that mattered. In the face of a miracle, even the extraordinary was meaningless.

  FORTY-THREE

  Freeman was with Vicky, bridged, as the floor disappeared beneath her feet in the cell. The darkness of the small room gave way to gray as the writhing shapes appeared like an invading army on the horizon. Faces stood out among the coalescence, sets of eyes that had seen as much horror in death as in life. Faint fingers clawed the air, tongues and teeth gnashed in silent anger.

  Ghost bedlam. These spirits had shouted their broken words against the cell walls, painted their pain in the stone and steel and concrete of the basement, bounced their mad thoughts against the unyielding fences of reality. These were the patients who had been damned and doomed to live out their confused lives in the narrow basement rooms. Now they were forever committed to Wendover's regiments of the dead.

  Freeman couldn't blame them for being angry at those who had disturbed their slumbering escape from this vicious world.

  "They're eating the light," Vicky said.

  "I know," Freeman said. He felt the vibration as she pounded on the cell door.

  "Kracowski's machines brought them back. Here where they hurt the most."

  "They're still lost, though. Listen…"

  Outside Vicky's cell came a roar like a metallic tidal wave. The other cell doors in the basement had yanked themselves open and slammed against the walls. Either the magnetic force had pulled the doors from their locks or the rooms' former inhabitants were staging a massive jail-break.

  Disconnected and mad thoughts spilled into the open line that existed between him and Vicky, a triptrap with the spirits that froze the inside of Freeman's skull like a hundred hits of ice cream. He recognized some of the voices from his earlier journey into the deadscape, but familiarity didn't make them any less insane. He tried to block them, but they came regardless:

  Notes in the television, doctor.

  I am a tree and I leave.

  Crazy as a bugbed.

  A white, white room in which to write.

  Freeman focused on Vicky again as the shapes drew closer. "What do they want?" she thought at him, inside him.

  "Maybe they're just coming back because they don't have anywhere else to go. Maybe these cells were all they ever had, the closest thing to home. Sad as it sounds, maybe they belong here."

  "Don't be scared."

  "I'm not scared," Freeman thought.

  "Look, I told you, you can't lie to somebody who's reading your mind."

  The spirits closed in, drawn by the invisible field, their eyes glittering, mouths gasping for air they couldn't breathe. Freeman thought about breaking the bridge, pulling away from Vicky, and shutting off those crazy dead voices. Then he felt ashamed for his selfishness, and linked to her again with all his concentration.

  The ghosts were so close that their cold mist shrouded Vicky, the impossible flesh giving off a faint effervescent light. The endless darkness around them and behind them grew even blacker, as if drawing energy from the stray photons in the basement.

  "They don't know who to blame," Freeman thought. He felt a hand on his shoulder. Afraid it was one of the deranged ghosts, he turned. Isaac stood behind him, with Starlene and Dipes. In reality, the one with hard walls, not the just-as-real but less-solid deadscape. He crouched and closed his eyes, found Vicky again.

  "Where did you go?" she asked.

  "Not very far. This is weird."

  "Clint in High Plains Drifter,
huh?"

  "That'll do."

  She pounded on the door again. Freeman heard Dad's muffled ranting on the other side of the door, then the door cracked open and a wedge of light sliced into the cell. Dad's face appeared his grin like a gash, eyes bright and watery.

  "Vicky, meet my Dad," Freeman triptrapped.

  Freeman felt a little of his carefully hidden secrets slip out, heard Vicky gasp as she caught a glimpse of the tortures inflicted upon him, the dark days in the closet, the ESP tests, the brainwashing experiments, the needles and cattle prods and shock treatments, the infamous incident with the blowtorch and Luckily, Freeman shut down before she walked the halls of his memory with him, blade in hand, to visit Mom in the bathtub.

  Vaporous hands reached for Vicky, passing through her. Freeman felt the contact on his own skin, then realized it was Starlene, tugging him into the basement from the stairwell door. She pulled again and Freeman lost contact with Vicky.

  "What's going on?" she asked, as Freeman shook himself back to the physical world. Dipes and Isaac looked at him as if he'd returned from Mars and they were awaiting tales of green aliens.

  "Vicky," Freeman said. "She's in trouble."

  They could hear Freeman's dad at the far end of the basement, laughing like the world was ending. Freeman tried to triptrap back to Vicky, but something had changed. Either Kracowski or Dad had screwed with the field again, or else Vicky had gone under.

  He remembered the icy touch of that dead hand passing through her skin, and imagined it squeezing her heart. Did this mean he was down, depressed, out of the loop? He couldn't afford that now.

  "Come on," he yelled at the others, running down the dim corridor. The glow of the machinery beckoned him, and he tried to recall the layout of the basement using Vicky's memory. Dad had obviously renovated the setup a little, taken control, put a new spin on Kracowski's treatment.

  The others followed him. He tried to put on his Clint Eastwood face, twisted his mouth a little and squinted through one eye, but the act felt stupid. De Niro in Good-fellas or Pacino in Carlito's Way didn't work. Not even Nicholson in The Postman Always Rings Twice would fly in this situation. No time to pretend to be a flawed hero. Besides, heroes weren't supposed to be this scared.

  He rounded the corner just as Dad threw the cell door open. A sick light leaked from the room where Vicky had been trapped, the results of Dad's and Kracowski's experimental solution now free from the flask, the genie out of the bottle, Pandora's box unsealed.

  The tortured souls of the insane fell through the door into the real world, a world they had never understood. A world that had shocked and strapped and chained them, a world that denied them and jailed mem and forgot mem. This time, they had someone to blame for their pain.

  They swarmed over Dad, a dozen milky hands grabbing at him, touching, investigating, trying to make sense of this fleshly invader of their hidden land. They rode the electromagnetic fields into the basement, drawn to the machines, staring at the curved panels, the tanks, wires, and circuitry as if they were tricks in some new psychological assessment test.

  Dad put out tentative hands against the ghosts, white Rorschachs, testing their solidity, no doubt making mental notes on this new species. It was a species he'd love to claim for his own. Freeman knew the agony written on the faces of the dead had no effect on Dad. The suffering of others meant nothing. Pain was a means to an end, and if some poor pathetic souls were wrenched from eternal rest, that was the price of understanding.

  Not human understanding, Dad's understanding.

  Dad had to know every goddamned thing in the world; he had to know why people lived and why they hurt and why they dreamed and what made them tick and what made them break. Freeman knew all mat very well. Dad had broken him plenty.

  A rage filled him as he crept down the hall. The equipment throbbed and hummed, and Dad's voice rose over the electronic chaos. Dad was talking to the ghosts, shrinking them, pushing them to the edge. Even the dead had to endure his scorn.

  "Come on, you crazy dead fuckers," Dad screamed. "You're supposed to hate me. You know why? Because I'm the one who brought you back. Hahahahaha."

  Freeman ducked behind a row of metal cylinders and peeked around, unsure what to do next. Starlene caught up with him, Dipes and Isaac close behind, all of them panting.

  "Don't look at him," Dad shouted, as the ghosts drifted toward Kracowski. "I'm the one who did all the work. It was my idea. You belong to me."

  Kracowski pressed back against the wall, face blanched and blank, hands in his lab coat.

  Dad chopped at the air like a stunt man in a kung fu movie. His arms passed through the ghosts, the ether barely stirred by the motion.

  "Damn, Kracowski," Dad said. "The field is cooking with gas now. Just think, if we can make one big enough, we might fill up the whole fucking world with ghosts."

  Kracowski, his words nearly without air, said, "What have we done? Good God what are we doing?"

  Dad laughed blew a breath at the nearest ghost, a wiry figure who made a drawing motion in response. Freeman guessed it was the writer, the one who was forever fixed on that phrase, "A white, white room in which to write." Beside The Writer stood an old woman with a large iridescent scar across her forehead.

  "The dead and the living, walking side by side," Dad said to the stunned Kracowski. "Who knows where it will end? What do you think, McDonald? Think your little secret society will find a way to take over the world using these tilings?"

  McDonald said nothing in response. Drool leaked from one corner of his mouth, his pupils of different sizes. He crawled on his belly as if he'd lost the use of his legs. And his mind.

  "The Mills Effect," Dad said turning his attention back to Kracowski. "What do you think? Catchy, huh?"

  Dad slapped at the ghost of an old woman, who was hunched and wrinkled and ragged whose translucent face registered a sneer of suspicion. "How about it, bitch? The Mills Effect. Do you like being the byproduct of my out-of-this-world genius?"

  Starlene, leaning over Freeman's shoulder, whispered "He's gone over the edge."

  "He was born over the edge," Freeman said. "Trouble is, he wants to drag everybody else over with him."

  "How do we get Vicky?" Isaac said.

  "McDonald's down for the count, and I don't see any guards. I guess McDonald didn't want any witnesses."

  "Then we go for it?" Starlene asked.

  "What about it, Dipes? What kind of future are you seeing?"

  "I see four," Dipes said.

  "Four. Choices, choices. Do any of them have happy endings?"

  In the silence, they heard Freeman's dad shouting at the ghosts.

  "What about it, Dipes?" Freeman asked.

  "I think we better leave now. I don't see the future where we leave, but it's got to be better than the ones I do see."

  Freeman watched as a shape appeared on the basement wall beyond the bright metal of the holding tanks. The shape flickered like a magic lantern, grew nebulous flesh, peered blindly at Dad and Kracowski and the machinery and the other ghosts.

  Then the Miracle Woman came up from her cold and faraway land, drifted from the stones where she slept, stepped into the dim and restless reality that Freeman had never before so strongly doubted.

  At that moment, Freeman understood the real world was nothing more than the collective nightmares of the sleeping dead.

  FORTY-FOUR

  Francis Bondurant sat on the cot in Thirteen, staring at his reflection in the two-way mirror. What had these kids seen, lying here blasted by Dr. Kracowski's forbidden fields? Had they come face-to-face with the Devil himself? The way they shook and whined and gurgled Bondurant wouldn't be surprised. After all, the troubled little sinners deserved that sort of punishment.

  He fumbled with the restraint straps and the cold buckles. Then he picked up the wires ending in the padded electrodes that Randy and Paula stuck to the kids' heads. Kracowski's torture was complex, his tools of inflicted salvation full o
f arcane symbols and machines and invisible waves. But wasn't science the realm of Satan? Didn't lust for knowledge cause that first bite into Eden's apple?

  Bondurant looked at his own image again, at the man staring back at him. That was a righteous man, a true servant of God. If his flask weren't empty, Bondurant would have toasted the man. The world needed more like him. Fair, stern, and charitable, but if the Lord so willed he knew how to deliver a Joshuan trumpet blast.

  As he watched, the face shifted the image rippling against the glass as if the mirror were under moving water. The eyes staring back at him became dark and hollow, his thin red cheeks swelling into wrinkled puffs of gray flesh. The image finished its transition and Bondurant found himself looking at the old man from the lake, the worn and weathered creature who had long ago left his skin and bones behind. The man's cracked lips moved, and though no sound came from his mouth, Bondurant heard his words.

  "Instrument of the Devil, eh? Isn't that a little bit melodramatic, Francis?"

  Bondurant started to speak, then found he didn't have to, at least not aloud. For the man knew what he was about to say before the thought reached Bondurant's tongue. "How do you know my name?"

  "Your office used to be my office."

  "Y-you don't belong here."

  The man's silent laughter crept through Bondurant's forehead. "I belong here more than you do, Francis. I was at Wendover before it was Wendover. I was head of the ward."

  "You drowned in the lake."

  "You can't very well drown when you're already dead."

  Bondurant's chest grew cold. "Are you… Satan?"

  "Not quite." Again the inaudible laugh came, a soft sound that held as much sorrow as joy. "Though some of my patients thought so. Then again, other patients thought I was God."

  "Our blessed Father in Heaven."

  "Yeah, Kingdom Come and all that. Well, Francis, take it from one who's been there, it's all a crock of shit."

  Bondurant shook his head.

  The wisps of the old man's features faded a little, then sewed themselves more solidly together on the mirror's surface. "If there was a God, then I would have looked Him in the eye when I died. Because there's one thing I've always wanted to ask Him. And I'll bet you've wondered the same thing. You know what that is?"