by J. Thorn
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 that 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 dead losers,” 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 damned 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 things?”
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.
CHAPTER 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 of 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 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.”
“I saw you. 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, let me tell you, it’s all a crock of sauerkraut.”
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?”
“No,” Bondurant thought, staring at the floor. He couldn’t endure the black nothingness of the old man’s eyes anymore.
“I’d ask him, ‘Why do bad things happen to innocent people?’”
Bondurant thought of the children who’d been entrusted to his care, the abused, the orphaned, the lame, the unrepentant. He’d allowed the children to talk about their problems, submitted them to group therapy and individual counseling, let them speak their worries in confidential rooms. And the sorry little sinners should have spilled their guts
on their knees in Wendover’s chapel instead. Just them and the Lord, heart to heart. The wicked could burn and those who saw the light would be saved. That was the way of God’s Earth, and all else was smoke.
The old man’s image shimmered again, drifted from the surface of the mirror and became whole. He stood in his dirty gown and bare feet like a wandering monk. A beggar. Or was this man sent by God Himself to deliver a message to Bondurant?
The room was quiet except for the faint hum of the machinery beneath the floor. Kracowski was playing games in the basement, him and McDonald and that new one, Dr. Mills. Wendover had been given over to dark forces. Bondurant’s only hope now was for personal salvation. All the rest was lost.
The old man shuffled over to Bondurant, his feet making no sound. With each step, he became more solid, until Bondurant could smell the soiled gown and the toothless breath. He put an icy hand on Bondurant’s chest and gently pushed him back onto the cot.
“Rest, Mr. Bondurant.”
Bondurant wanted to struggle, to jump up and run screaming from the room, but the hand was insistent. Was this the hand of God? Bondurant grew dizzy and weak, confused. If only he had a bottle.
“I want to help you,” the man said, raising one of the restraint straps. “With this problem of yours.”
Bondurant lay helpless as the old man folded the straps over Bondurant’s legs and chest. His wrists and ankles were then locked in padded cuffs. The old man applied the blue gel to the electrodes and attached them to Bondurant’s head.
“Will it hurt?” Bondurant asked.
“Suffering is the way to healing,” the old man said, his eyes like dark seeds under the thick eyebrows.
“Who are you?” Bondurant wasn’t sure he wanted to know the answer. But he was on the edge of something important, some connection between himself and Wendover’s past. Or maybe he was sobering up. An uneasiness rippled through him, the gel tickling his skin.
The old man knelt so close to Bondurant’s face that his words made a breeze on his cheeks. “I’m the doctor. I make people better.”
He gave a grin that looked far too much like a tray of scalpels. Then he turned and shuffled toward the mirror. He met the surface, shimmered, then melded into the glass and disappeared. The ceiling microphone came on with a hiss. “I prefer the old-fashioned techniques,” the old man said, “but I suppose one must change with the times.”
A thread of juice stitched across Bondurant’s skin. A hum arose in the walls, soft and sinister, as if a nest of winged things had been disturbed. The cot vibrated slightly, and Bondurant clenched his fists. The first shock pierced his skull and he bit his tongue, tasting blood.
And riding that jolt of electricity were scattered thoughts, nightmare glimpses, visions that Bondurant immediately knew had been witnessed by the old man’s living eyes:
A needle, pushed into a woman’s frail arm, dosing her with enough insulin to knock her into a coma.
More electroshock, an assembly line of frightened patients in white, all led from the treatment room like drooling sheep.
A scene from the basement, the inside of a cell, orderlies carrying the corpse of a woman with bloody sockets where her eyes had been.
An ice pick, slid up a nostril and turned inside the upper curve of skull, severing the frontal lobe.
Another operation, this time a saw rasping through the skull to take the lobe via the forehead.
Bondurant screamed for mercy, but the dead doctor only turned up the juice. Then the force field radiated from the walls and slapped him into darkness.
The old man’s voice followed him. “See? A doctor’s work is never done. Even death can’t ease their troubled minds.”
Bondurant wasn’t listening, even though the words reverberated inside his head. Because amid the black, suffocating stillness that surrounded him, pale shapes slithered through the cracks of nothingness. He closed his eyes and wept like a baby until the doctor came to comfort him and remove the straps.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
The Miracle Woman called to Freeman, drifted past the other spirits toward where he crouched at the mouth of the hallway. The glow from the machinery swirled around her and through her, as if her impossible flesh were lit by a cold fire.
“Do you see her?” Freeman asked the others.
“Who?” Starlene asked.
“Her.” He pointed at the naked woman, whose long, dark hair flowed over her shoulders. She looked like one of those Venus on the Half-shell drawings done by some acid burnout from the Sixties. Except for the part about the bloody eye sockets. Not even a drug overdose victim could have imagined those.
“I don’t see nothing,” Dipes said.
“Not even the future?” Isaac asked. “Well, I see Kracowski and that new guy, the crazy one. And the weird guy flopping around on his stomach like a beached fish.”
“You don’t see the ghosts?” Freeman asked. The Miracle Woman floated closer, her hands closed. Freeman hoped she wouldn’t open her palms and look at him. Because he couldn’t handle that right now.
All he wanted was to reach Vicky.
“We can save her,” the Miracle Woman said. “Follow me.”
Freeman froze. She drifted closer, skin fluttering like psychedelic rags, her torn face wearing a faint smile. “Trust me,” she said.
Freeman clamped his hands over his ears. “No. Get out. You’re not here. You’re not real.”
“Trust me, Freeman.”
“No. You can’t triptrap a dead person. That wasn’t part of the experiment. That wasn’t what he turned me into.”
“Your father hurt you. But he also made you. See, he gave you a gift. It doesn’t matter what his intentions were. Because now it’s yours, and you’re the one who has to use it.”
“I don’t want it.”
“Do you want to save Vicky?”
Damn her. Why couldn’t she just stay dead? Why couldn’t she leave him alone? She was just like all the others.
“Trust me,” she said, and a soft tickle caressed his cheek. He thought it was her finger, and he opened his eyes.
It wasn’t her finger, it was his tears.
“Trust me,” she repeated. “Starlene said God doesn’t send you anything you can’t handle.”
“Why do you want to help?” he said, this time aloud instead of through his thoughts.
And she flashed a triptrap of her own, and he saw the past through her eyes, the old man from the lake standing over her, she was strapped in Thirteen, helpless, and the old man applied the electrodes and Freeman twisted in agony as the electricity sliced through their mutual nerve endings, the old man wearing a lab coat now, a tie, taking notes, serious, concerned, injecting her with something that made Freeman’s brain cloud, the old man and an orderly leading her into the basement, only it was cleaner back then, though still dark. She was put in a cell, the same one in which Vicky was now trapped, and at last Freeman knew.
The Miracle Woman had died in the cell. She had torn her own eyes out, not wanting to witness any more of the doctor’s treatments. She bled to death in silence, able to weep only blood. And as Freeman felt her blood pour down his own face, as the hot pain smothered like a molten mask, as she bit her tongue to keep from crying out and drawing the attention of the orderlies, who might save her for yet more misery, Freeman understood that he didn’t have an exclusive hold on suffering.
She freed him from her memories and Freeman clutched his head, dazed.
“Are you okay?” Starlene asked.
“Yeah.” He wiped his cheek before the others noticed. “But I’ve got to do this alone. She told me so.”
“He’s right,” Dipes said. “That’s the way I saw it happen. We’re supposed to go over there, into that room. Freeman goes on alone.”
Starlene paused a moment, squeezed Freeman’s shoulder, then said, “Okay. But we won’t be far away.”
Freeman waited while the three hid in the nearby cell. The triptrap with the Miracle Woman seemed
to have taken hours, but the milieu before him in the basement had not changed. Dad stood by the open door to Vicky’s cell, mumbling in his crazed voice about validity and breakthroughs and control. Kracowski hung back near the large holding tanks as if wanting to hide in their shadows.
The Miracle Woman had disappeared, and Freeman knew she was in Vicky’s cell. Keeping her company, or driving her insane. Because, when you triptrapped a crazy person, then you got crazy, too. Freeman couldn’t reach Vicky, at least with his mind. So he would have to reach her the normal, old-fashioned way.
He swallowed hard and stepped out into the open area of the basement. “Hey, Dad!” he shouted.
Dad turned, his eyes growing even wider, the grin changing into something sharp and sinister. “Well, this is just perfect. A family reunion, right when I’m about to become the most brilliant person in the universe.”
“What do want a stupid girl for? She doesn’t know anything about the power of the brain.”
“She was available,” Dad said. “Didn’t I teach you about test runs?”
“You taught me plenty, Dad. No pain, no gain, right?” He pointed toward Kracowski. “He had the crazy idea that you need to control things, put limits on it. But we know better, don’t we, Dad?”
“That’s the old Trooper. Pedal to the metal, wide open, full speed ahead. What do you think of this one?” Dad passed his hand through the soft skull of one of the ghosts. “Can you see his thoughts? He put tin foil in his ears to block out the radio signals being broadcast by secret government agencies. Seems like that’s the kind of message you’d want to receive, isn’t that right, McDonald?”
McDonald groaned from the floor, and tried unsuccessfully to rise.
Kracowski emerged from the shadows, bolted to the computer, and tapped some keys. Dad screamed at him. “Leave it alone, you idiot. Don’t you want to be part of the breakthrough?”
“Not your breakthrough,” Kracowski said. “This isn’t the experiment.”
