A young woman walked boldly down the deserted street, oblivious to the grim atmosphere. She was tall, nearly six feet in her bare feet, with the lithe, willowy body of a ballerina. She wore her long hair down; the color appeared to be black, but when she passed beneath the streetlamp, the light reflecting up off the wet pavement revealed the deep purple highlights. Her face was narrow and intelligent, with classic high cheekbones and a noble forehead above her large, luminous eyes. Her skin was pale, as if the only natural light that ever touched it came from the moon and stars.
The girl’s manner of dress was eccentric, as if part of her wardrobe was from the closet of a Victorian lady, the rest from a gypsy’s caravan. Her black ankle-length skirt nearly concealed the high-heeled boots, which served only to accentuate her height and angularity. The long-sleeved blouse, also black, was held closed at the throat by an antique cameo. Her fringed silk shawl was decorated in reds, purples, and blues, an elaborate Oriental pattern. As cold rain began to fall again from the night sky, she clasped the wrap more tightly around her, the finger tendons standing out more sharply against the soft flesh on the back of her hand. She wore silver rings on all her fingers and both thumbs, and her nails were painted with black lacquer. The ankh pendant around her neck was silver, as were the half-dozen smaller Celtic and traditional crosses. The dozens of bangles and bracelets on her wrists were silver, too. She wore only silver jewelry. Black, silver, and bloodred—those were Ophelia’s colors.
The girl stopped to open her umbrella as the rain began to pelt harder. A rat stuck its head out of a hole gnawed in a corner of disintegrating plywood over a doorway. The rodent squeaked at her. That made her smile, because it reminded her of the line of poetry about dead men who lost their bones in the rats’ alley.
The black rain came down hard enough to wash some of the trash from the street and sidewalks, the runoff flowing filthy in the gutters. Ophelia stepped over a foul rivulet and entered a narrow alley that dead-ended in a brick wall. Halfway to the end, just past a reeking Dumpster overflowing with beer cans, wine bottles, and fast-food garbage, was a steel door that slid open sideways along an overhead track. The handwritten sign on the door decorated with a skull and crossbones warned trespassers that survivors would be prosecuted.
The door opened with a shriek of rusty metal.
Ophelia stepped inside.
The door slammed closed behind her.
The only light inside came from a ten-watt bulb on the other side of a grate, making the light splay out in bars across the floor. A deep pulse came up through the concrete floor, like a leviathan’s heartbeat or the sound of a sinister machine at work deep in the bowels of the earth. Ophelia felt it through the soles of her boots as she went to the freight elevator and bent for the greasy rope to raise the gate of vertical wooden slats.
She was going down. She stabbed the button marked basement. The elevator, its ancient electric motor long in need of service, shuddered to life with a loud hum and the smell of ozone, and began its descent.
The cavernous cellar stretched out into a vast darkness interrupted by bits of red glow shining through the holes in the brick walls near the ceiling where the water pipes and heating and electrical conduits ran. The building had once been the warehouse for a downtown department store that had gone out of business when Eisenhower was president. Beyond the first few rooms, which were filled with boxes and bales of crumbling business documents, the cellar expanded into a large room that had been divided into a series of cages where merchandise was once organized. Some were filled with old store display cases or broken office furniture, others with battered mannequins posed in ways that were intended to represent various sex acts.
The music became progressively louder as the elevator carried Ophelia to the lower level. It was the metallic sound of synthesizers programmed to suggest music made by machines untouched by human emotion, except perhaps for angst and rage—industrial Goth music.
Ophelia exited the elevator and strode through the dark passageways, knowing the way as well as any. Some of the cages she passed were strewn with garbage, others outfitted for ritual purposes. There was the Initiation Cage, the Transformation Cage, the Judgment Cage. Some of the cages were purely for fun and games and equipped with chains, shackles, cables, transformers, and wires for electrical sex play, restraints, whips, clips, ropes, and nooses. Some of the cages had mattresses on the floor where the fledglings—but usually only the females—had to submit to the pleasure of master vampires. Ophelia had put an end to that, once she took over the Brood. The mattresses still got their share of use, especially on weekend nights when there was X in the Cage Club and dancing sometimes degenerated into spontaneous orgies. Ophelia remained aloof from such activities. She didn’t care for drugs and was mostly indifferent to sex. But mainly, being Brood Mistress required her to maintain a certain distance from the other vampires.
The Brood was gathered in the Great Hall, an open area at the back of the basement from which the cages had been ripped out. The room was bathed in red and green light. A powerful strobe light was trained on the platform along the rear wall that held the speakers and music gear. Zeke was running sound, a spectral form in a floor-length black trench coat looking even more sinister than usual in the flickering light. Next to the sound platform, pressed into the corner was the boiler, a hulking contraption sprouting ductwork that made it look like a giant spider lurking in the shadows.
The way the other vampires whispered to one another when Ophelia strode into the middle of the room made her immediately suspicious. She was always on the lookout for treachery. If there was one thing you could always count on in a Ravening Brood, it was that somebody ambitious and evil was always ready to overthrow the Brood Master or Mistress and seize power. Broods were governed according to a strict hierarchy, like the Jesuit brotherhood on which they were patterned with a consciously perverse irony. Though others held authority commensurate with their rank, with the fledgling vampires at the very bottom of the pecking order, ultimately the individual Brood members were scarcely more than slaves relegated to serving the Master’s or Mistress’s desires.
Ophelia looked at Zeke through narrowing eyes, which was the only thing she needed to do to get him to turn down the music so that she could hear herself think. Her own taste in music ran toward classical, but she would never have expected the Ravening crowd, by and large a rough, crude group, to appreciate true beauty.
Her eyes went from one vampire to the next as she joined them in the middle of the room. Conspiracy was definitely afoot. She could smell it on them. In mortal life, she had been born with Chiron conjunct with Pluto, which made her unusually psychic. Ophelia slipped her hand into her antique beaded purse, reaching for the death talisman. Whoever was planning to depose her would pay dearly for the mistake.
“Surprise!”
Ophelia had to stare at the grinning idiots for a few moments before seeing the cake on the table. It was shaped like the ankh Ophelia always wore around her neck, the black icing decorated with bloodred candles.
“Happy birthday, Mistress!”
A fledgling named Letitia, who imagined herself a favorite of the Mistress, put her arms around Ophelia. Ophelia stood there stiff, barely tolerating the expression of affection.
“I told you she wouldn’t like it.”
Blade was grinning at her, enjoying her discomfiture. He knew her better than the others. They had once been lovers, when he was Brood Master, before Ophelia deposed him. He was lucky she hadn’t made the Brood shun him—or worse—she thought, not for the first time regretting the mercy she’d shown him.
“There is nothing happy about me,” Ophelia said. “Not today. Not ever.”
“I told them vampires don’t celebrate birthdays,” said Damien, a fledgling who obviously regretted that he had been pulled into this embarrassing charade by Letitia and her lover, Pendragon.
“The undead have no need for sentimental gestures,” Ophelia said.
Letit
ia and Pendragon edged back away from her, unable to look at the others after their blunder. But Damien was the one Ophelia wanted to eviscerate most. He had been part of their silly plot to ingratiate themselves with the Mistress, but now he thought he could turn on his fellow conspirators and escape her wrath. Ophelia would make the others pay in time, but Damien would pay the dearest price. He would never gain admission into the Brood when his apprenticeship in vampirey was over.
“Come on, Ophelia, lighten up,” Blade said in a condescending voice. “It’s your eighteenth birthday. You’re legal now.”
Ophelia’s hand clenched around the death talisman, but something told her to let the insult go. She would deal with Blade, too, but in her own time. She didn’t like to use her power in showy, indiscriminate ways. That led to resentment, and resentment led to cabals and combinations and plots. Ophelia could never forget that Blade’s high-handedness with the Brood had led to his own downfall—as well as to her own elevation to Mistress of the Ravening Brood.
“I appreciate the gesture.” She smiled at Letitia. “The black icing is lovely.”
“It’s chocolate heavily dosed with food coloring,” Pendragon said.
“But nothing else,” Letitia said.
“Thank you, Letitia and Pendragon,” Ophelia said, pointedly ignoring Damien. She could feel the third fledgling’s psychic withdrawal from her presence. He knew he was dead meat to her. If there was anything Ophelia despised more than treachery aimed against her rule over the Brood, it was someone who thought he could get away with manipulating her.
“It would be a shame to let the cake go to waste,” Ophelia said with carefully contrived good humor. “It will go well with a nice glass of blood.”
28
Dr. Glass
THE AIR IN the ECT room smelled of disinfectant and alcohol. The room was unusually chilly even for the hospital, which tended to be over-air-conditioned in summer and overheated in winter.
There were three people in the room. Standing and looking over a clipboard with a Montblanc pen was Dr. Lucian Glass. A Filipino nurse named Emerlinda Vicenceo stood beside the ECT machine. She was there to assist Dr. Glass, if need be, though the psychiatrist generally preferred to do things for himself. The last member of the trio was the twenty-two-year-old woman strapped to the treatment table. Candy Priddle wore only a hospital smock. There were goose bumps on her bare legs and arms, and Dr. Glass wondered if they were from cold, from fear, or a combination of the two.
“We’re going to give you an IV that will make you more comfortable. You’re not afraid of needles are you?”
The young woman shook her head. She was skinny and had an overbite. Dr. Glass had first seen the tattoo above her breast when she put on the smock in the emergency room, where she’d been brought in for swallowing a bottle of aspirin. Then she was wearing a dirty “wife-beater” T-shirt and cutoff jeans that rode so high on her legs that her underwear was all that kept her decent as she lolled on the examination table. Dr. Glass had taken one look at the way she was dressed, and her limp, dishwater-blond hair, and guessed that the girl was pure trailer trash. Candy’s manner of speaking—she could barely get a sentence out without using a double negative or committing some other grammatical travesty—proved the case. The psychiatrist thought he had an uncanny ability in a quick glance to judge a patient’s socioeconomic niche. He was a real-life Henry Higgins, he was.
“We’re going to start off with something to make you relaxed,” Dr. Glass said, speaking in his smooth, sonorous voice while he introduced the liquid Valium into the IV drip. “You’re going to like this, Candy. You’re going to say, ‘I want some more of this, Dr. Glass.’ If you’re a good girl, we’ll see what we can do.”
The tranquilizing effect was instantaneous. The frightened-rabbit look went out of Candy’s eyes, replaced with the stupefied expression of compliance. If Nurse Emerlinda hadn’t been present, Dr. Glass could have done whatever he wanted to the girl, even if she wasn’t strapped securely to a rubber-wheeled body cart. Candy Priddle had been hospitalized for the suicide attempt, but Dr. Glass’s larger diagnosis was that she suffered from bipolar disorder. After nearly six months of treating the young woman, he knew that in her manic phases she was prone to aggressive nymphomania. She had undergone more abortions than any patient Dr. Glass had ever treated. He had had her tested several times for AIDS, but to his amazement she had avoided it, though she’d fallen prey to several other sexually transmitted diseases in the time she’d been his patient.
“Some doctors would give you a general anesthetic for this procedure, Candy, but I find the treatments are much more effective if you are in what we call twilight sleep. You’re awake but you’re not awake. Do you understand?”
The girl on the gurney tried to smile.
The door opened and in came a brisk-looking middle-aged woman wearing a crisp navy blue suit.
“Ah, Margeaux.”
“I just want to put you on formal notice, Dr. Glass. I am opposed to this course of treatment for Candy.”
Candy’s head—he hadn’t put on the head restraint yet—fell drunkly to the side so that she could grin up at Margeaux Lloyd.
“I am well aware of your feelings, Margeaux,” Dr. Glass went on in his unctuous voice. He was not in the least threatened by Candy Priddle’s caseworker. “With all due respect, I am the one with an M.D. after my name. As much as I hate to pull rank, I am the psychiatrist, you are the psychiatric social worker.”
“We should discuss this in the hall.”
“She won’t remember a thing, Margeaux. Trust me.”
“My point exactly.”
“Such hostility. It’s not really your style, is it?”
“No.” He noted his antagonist’s inner collapse with secret triumph. He could have her job for this kind of effrontery. He even had a witness: Emerlinda Vicenceo.
It was easy to be magnanimous. Dr. Glass held all the cards, the physician’s authority sacrosanct. “The management of Candy’s case is my responsibility. Once I get her stabilized, you can go back to trying to keep her on a steady keel with weekly counseling sessions.”
“The FDA classifies an ECT as a Type-Three device—the highest-risk category.”
“Electroconvulsive therapy is safe and effective,” Dr. Glass said. “I have been administering these treatments for years.”
“The Benedict and Saks study found that ninety percent of the patients getting ETC received inappropriate treatments,” Margeaux said. “Death, brain damage, seizures, epilepsy, and memory loss are all possible side effects.”
Emerlinda Vicenceo’s wary eyes went back and forth between them both. She didn’t want to be a part of this. As much as Dr. Glass wanted to put the mere M.S.W. in her place, he knew the better strategy was to remain aloof. Perhaps it had been her intention all along to provoke him into losing his temper in front of the nurse, hoping to use it against him.
“If the surgeon general certifies the treatment as safe and effective, that’s good enough for me,” he said with the same patience. “Now unless you intend to interfere with Miss Priddle’s physician of record—which I don’t have to tell you would be a very serious disciplinary matter for the licensing board to consider—I suggest you disengage. You’re quite welcome to stay if you want. If you observed a few of these procedures, you’d see how harmless they really are.”
But Margeaux was already on her way out of the room.
“I’m going to give you a little succinylcholine chloride,” Dr. Glass said, turning his attention back to his patient. “It will relax your muscles. Back in the days before we learned to give muscle-paralyzing drugs, ECT patients sometimes convulsed so violently that they broke their bones. Some even broke their backs.”
Dr. Glass looked up to see the nurse frowning at him.
“I’m always completely frank with my patients,” he said. “I treat them like adults. Not that Candy has any idea what I’m talking about. How are you doing, my dear? Are you doing oka
y?”
The young woman blinked, but she probably wasn’t paying any attention to what he was saying.
“I’m going to put a strap over your forehead to keep you from hurting your neck.” Dr. Glass slipped the heavy leather strap through the buckle and cinched it snug. “You can put the salve on now, Nurse.”
Emerlinda applied the conductive graphite compound to both temples of the girl’s head.
“Some doctors only use one electrode, but I prefer the bilateral approach. That way we treat both hemispheres of the brain equally.”
“How many volts, Dr. Glass?”
“Let’s start Candy out with three hundred volts for two-point-five seconds.”
The nurse repeated the formulary as she set the dials, and Dr. Glass nodded confirmation.
“Bite down on this rubber, my dear. It will keep you from swallowing your tongue.” Dr. Glass worked the bit into Candy’s mouth. She resisted a little but was conscious enough to know that she had no choice but to do what he commanded.
Dr. Glass went over to the control and put his finger over the button. “We’re going to give you three treatments today, Candy. There will be about five minutes between treatments, but after the first one, you probably won’t be aware of what’s happening. Are you ready?”
Dr. Glass activated the electrical current without waiting for a sign of readiness from the woman. It was only a rhetorical question, after all. Whether or not she was ready to have a jolt of electricity sent through her brain was of no consequence whatsoever to the psychiatrist. Candy Priddle’s body lurched violently upward against the restraints, her eyes bulging from the fire consuming her brain from within until it seemed they would pop out of their orbits. The shock lasted only a brief moment—far too brief to suit Dr. Glass’s personal tastes. She fell back, limp, unconscious, a heavy sweat soaking her face and making the cotton hospital smock cling to the erect nipples on her breasts. She wouldn’t move again until he turned the electricity back on.
American Gothic Page 18
