“You’re infected.”
Ian blinked, once, twice, a few times.
Then he nodded.
Then he ran.
Every inch of sterilised floor felt like a marathon. He was uncomfortably aware of the buttons around his throat. Behind him, Gemma screamed something intelligible.
The mousy-haired intern who usually sat at the main desk was there again today, but he wasn’t doing a crossword, or reading a medical textbook. He was watching Ian.
The reception flooded with people as he moved through it. Two extra security guards put down their newspapers as he entered, male nurses appeared from behind doors. The patients shrank into their seats.
Ian heard a faint giggling and looked around him. No one was laughing. He felt he recognised that noise, and then he realised that the sound was coming from his own mouth but it sounded feminine and did not belong.
‘Claire,’ he thought, just as something solid collided with the back of his knees.
“Get him back to the room.” He could hear Gemma’s voice behind him.
Ian’s hands were forced together behind his back, fingers digging into his arms, sure to leave a bruise. He squirmed in their grip, and they tied his hands with a plastic cable. “Damn,” he spat. “Damn you.”
They buckled him to the waiting chair, and stood around him.
The room quickly became hot, but no one moved. No one opened a window. No one answered his questions, and eventually he stopped talking and listened to the thoughts and fears moving around his head.
“Where is he?” Gemma sighed, checking her watch for the third time.
The clock hands moved lazily through the hours, and they waited. At eight o’clock, the door opened.
A small man with owlish glasses, flanked by two nurses, peered around the edge of the door. “Gemma. Is it time?” Dr Hallam looked tired, like a man struggling to keep himself together. His clothes had been washed so many times the fabric was thin and blotchy, buttons had fallen off and were replaced with safety pins. His hair was a wispy nest around his ears, his skin pale and transparent. Even his shadow was faint.
“Good to see you, Charles,” said a female voice, but it wasn’t Gemma.
Ian and Charles turned their heads to follow the sound. Claire was there, sitting on a chair that hadn’t been there a moment ago.
“You can see her too,” he said. “Anyone else?”
“I can,” Gemma said. She took the arm of one of the nurses. “Can you?” The nurse shook her head, but didn’t look surprised.
“You look... great.” Ian’s eyes hadn’t moved away from Claire.
She grinned at him. “Flatterer.”
Gemma offered Charles a seat. “It’s beginning to get a little crowded in here. Doctor, would you mind taking a chair? Let’s get this done.”
For a while the room was a circus of activity. Furniture was moved in and out, and security guards kept sticking their heads around the door.
“Sorry, Grandpa. Got to do it,” said one as he tied Charles to a chair.
He just shrugged. “Not too tight – these old bones can’t take it.”
“It will be as tight as it needs to be. Sorry sir.”
When Mark arrived, out of breath and with his shirt flapping around his middle, he flew into the room. “Sorry I’m late everyone, I-“, and he saw Claire hovering around Ian’s chair. “So. This is where you’ve been.”
She just smiled and smoothed down the fabric of her dress. “I don’t have to stick to you any more. It’s a nice change.”
“Please sit down, Mark,” Gemma nodded him towards the final chair. “Today, the patient will be Ian.”
“No it bloody wont,” Ian spat.
“Mark’s mind is becoming whole again. Yours is not.” She cleared her throat. “Today’s task is to take the thought fragments from Ian and Charles and put them where they belong.”
Gently, like he were handling a wounded bird, a security guard helped strap Mark into his seat and tied cable-ties around his wrists and ankles. As he did so he leant slightly forwards. “Good luck, mate. Sometimes I think the doctors are the mad ones around here.” The security guard stood up straight, and announced to the room, “I’ll be outside.”
Then he placed the metronome on the table and set it swinging. As he left, he glanced once more at Mark, and turned off the lights.
“Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five...” Gemma began the countdown, but before Mark could drift away to the sound of her voice, Gemma fell into dreams. He waited to fall into unconsciousness, and as he waited, he glared at Claire. Feeling the pull of dreams, he whispered, “I hate you.”
* * * *
There was shouting from a vast crowd, “You never practise. You’re wasting my money. That’s it. No more. No more,” and the theatre crumbled, the floorboards rattling, and blowing away as though caught in a wind. There was a race of pictures, memories that did not belong to Mark. They could have been anyone’s, they might not have belonged to any of us.
When the chaos faded, we were sitting in a booth in a filthy bar. Charles, Mark, Gemma, Ian and Claire were squashed into a ring of seats. The table was full of empty glasses, stained with a dark brown liquid.
Ian grinned, “So, are you going to interfere, Gemma? Are you going to make a meadow with daisies and little birds?”
Something dropped from the ceiling, onto the table. The glasses shattered. It was a dead bird, fat with maggots.
Gemma brushed it off the table. “My turn.”
The shadows lengthened, the bar became dark and their ears were filled with the sounds of a child crying softly. The crying grew worse. Ian raised his eyebrows.
“Did I teach you both to show off?” asked Charles and waved a hand at their surroundings. His gesture reminded them all of street magicians, or perhaps an orchestral conductor. The lights of the bar became dim and simple again. “Well, what next?”
She squirmed in her seat. “I was concentrating so hard on getting everyone here...”
Mark rolled his eyes, “I’m not convinced you did fix me and Claire.”
“She’s back isn’t she?”
“Not exactly, and she’s changed.”
Claire scowled. “I grew up, you on the other hand-” Claire stuck out her tongue over a lurid cocktail she plucked from thin air, and sipped. “- did not.”
Charles pushed his glasses up his nose, and sat up straight. He seemed to grow in size, he changed, and became a perfect copy of Claire, right down to the creases in her dress. “I was always interested in your case, Claire.”
The real Claire’s mouth dropped. Ian looked between the women, unable to tell them apart.
“Mark was never the one with the problem. He always knew who he was. But you didn’t.”
“I know who I am, it doesn’t matter whose skin I’m in.” She tried to smile her usual smile, but there was fear in the corner of her eyes.
“And you force yourself on your prey. So much so that Mark doesn’t feel complete any more. without you. So completely that Ian wants to know you better. It’s just the men though. Gemma doesn’t seem to be attracted to the idea of you.”
Claire shrugged, “I don’t like her either. Or her life.”
“And I don’t like you any more.,” Mark said, looking down into his glass. “I don’t want to share my head again.”
Three pairs of eyebrows rose over their glasses.
“What?” Claire asked, flecks of spit escaping from between her teeth.
Mark didn’t meet her gaze. “I’m lonely without you. And unhappy. But I’m not miserable.” He drew a hand through his hair. “I don’t know.”
“But you’ve been looking for me. And I’ve been trying to find you.” Claire’s voice became high, painful notes. “Charlie took me in, and Ian. And hundreds of their other patients. I left hints of myself in all of them, and all the time looking for you.” Her hand moved across the table towards Mark. He did not reach to touch her questing fingers, and he flinched wh
en she got too close. “I’ve been haunting all of them for years, trying to find you.”
Charles nodded. His impersonation of Claire was wearing off. The wrinkles on his face and the slight curve of his back became more pronounced, and seemed worse than they had before. “We are all ghosts here.”
Mark lent against his chair, breathing deeply. He felt different – and it was wonderful.
But Ian was struggling, “I’ll take her.” His voice was louder than he intended, but he repeated himself again, as though talking himself into something, “I’ll take her. All of the fragments. I’ll find them.”
Charles bent his head as though about to say a prayer. “I both dreaded and hoped you’d say that.”
Claire squirmed, “Don’t I get a say in this?” She stood up from the table, and made as if to walk away.
“Will he be enough of a cage?” Gemma asked.
Charles pursed his lips. “I don’t know. I’d offer myself, but I’m old, and I’ve been compromised. She fooled me for a while.” He smiled kindly at Claire as she retreated from their table. “It’s been fun, Claire.”
She vanished.
* * * *
As soon as he was unbuckled from his chair, Ian fled. Mark followed him and left the institute, the bodyguards and his demons behind him.
Gemma moved to her office chair and spun herself around to face her desk. She pulled a folder towards her and wrote on the upper most page.
Anomaly: Claire.
Contained.
***
Interlude 4
Up on the moors is a grim behemoth of soaring concrete; a brutalist masterpiece to hide the spoils of institutional brutalism. For miles around there is nothing but the cold, grey isolation of the heath. For all their cunning, the Institute could find no better way than distance to isolate the screams. The doctors and nurses refer to this place by the delightfully parochial moniker of “The House on the Hill.”
A man sat in a reception hall, on a chair which had been bolted to the floor. It was a grey place devoid of the crispness and delineation that blackness or whiteness affords.
A waifish nurse entered from the strange and unseen places beyond the grey ironclad doors. She was also dressed in grey.
“Dr Matthews?” she asked.
“Yes?” the man replied.
“I am Nurse de Gris.” She handed him a grey clipboard and a grey plastic biro. “Please fill in this form with your details and sign the attached waiver.”
Matthews took the forms and began to study them.
“I am required to inform you that the following items are not allowed on the wards: Knives, scissors, screwdrivers, razor blades, knitting needles, hammer, pliers, pencils, pens, glass of any kind, matches, lighters, combustible liquids or aerosols, batteries, rocks, stones, and no spoons.”
“No spoons?” asked Matthews.
“No spoons,” de Gris replied. “There is also a blanket ban on coffee, pastries, colours above forty percent total saturation and whistling or humming of any sort.”
“A stimulants thing I take it?” Matthews asked.
“No, the sight of them has noted to cause severe psychotic reactions in some of the patients,” said de Gris.
Matthews handed the clipboard back to de Gris and stood up. She led him to the ironclad doors and into the wards of The House on the Hill.
The air was thick and heavy with a deafening thrum; a sound like tortured steel, grinding bearings and thrashing machinery. It took Matthews a moment to realise that there was no machinery in the ward. This was the sound of an entire house screaming in unison. It was a melody of despair and anguish.
***
Side Effects
Amy Maidment
He looked at his coffee, but didn’t make any move to drink it. It would start going cold if he didn’t drink it soon, but he just sat there on the cold metal chair outside the cafe, staring. The chair opposite him was empty. If a passer-by were to walk past and pay any attention to him, they might have thought that he was waiting for somebody to join him. A friend, maybe, or a lover. But he was all but invisible to the shoppers and commuters, and he didn’t stop looking at his coffee. It would be hard for somebody who knew him well to read the expression on his face, let alone a stranger. One of the baristas took the dirty cups from the tables next to him on the patio, and didn’t pay him any attention.
For all intents and purposes, Scott was transparent. And that was the way that he liked it.
Fifteen minutes later, he stood up and walked away, his pace fast, his face blank. He hadn’t even sipped at his coffee. It took him a further fifteen minutes to walk back to the apartment block, a towering mass that blended in with the ever growing skyline of San Francisco. He swiped his key-card against a small black dot on the wall and the doors opened, quietly and smoothly. One glance at the stairs and he triggered the same debate he had with himself every time he came home: to walk up four flights of stairs or to take the elevator? As always, the elevator won, beating the concept of walking up the stairs into a bloody pulp. A twinge of guilt nested in his stomach throughout the ride to the fourth floor, but he tried to ignore it, the way he ignored many things.
Pete was, for once, home before him, sitting on the couch when he walked through the door. He was watching reruns of a forty year old sit com, and it looked like an early episode, where a girl in a wedding dress had just run, flustered, into a coffee shop. Scott had read somewhere that one of the actresses had died recently.
Pete turned around to see him enter, and smiled. He had the sort of face that lit up when he smiled, like a Christmas tree. “Good day, honey?”
“Not a bad day,” he said. “Not a good day, but not a bad one.”
His smile turned sympathetic. “And are you okay?”
He paused before replying, “Yeah. Yeah, I’m okay.”
“There was a message on the phone for you, by the way.”
“Anything interesting?”
“Theresa, she said she knew you from college? Something about a reunion.”
Something in Pete’s stomach fell when he saw Scott flinch whilst opening the fridge. This happened occasionally, when somebody mentioned USF, or when it cropped up on the news, or when he saw an old friend on the street.
“A reunion?” he said, speaking quickly. “Why’d there be a reunion now? We only graduated two years ago.”
“I don’t know, hon, it sounded pretty informal… Would you go? Or at least think about going?”
He closed the door of the fridge, which blipped at him, and walked away, carrying the carton of juice towards the couch. “Maybe. I don’t know. Maybe.”
“Scott, it might help with the-”
“I said maybe, okay?” he said, his tone close to defensive as he sat down on the couch, cuddling into him.
“Okay,” Pete said. He wanted to say that he thought Scott should go anyway, that he thought it might help him get better, that he thought there might be somebody there who knew how to make him better. But he knew better than to start an argument with him over something so sensitive, so he just put his arm around his shoulder and pulled him a little closer, and they watched the sitcom for a while. Scott had seen the episode before, but he still laughed at the jokes, unable to tell whether he still found them funny or if it was just habit. As the credits rolled, he looked down at the carton of juice that was cold in his hands, and tried to remember how it got there.
He couldn’t.
* * * *
Participant #729001
Project DOME
USF Branch
Date – 6/15/2029
Sessions completed – 12
Objective – COFFEE MACHINE
Comments – Results support the hypothesis. Participant appears stable. Nothing anomalous discovered. Nothing exceptional discovered. Participant is very average. Participant responded very positively to stimuli. If experiment is 100% successful, then the participant will suffer no long term effects. Follow up will occur through ob
servation in two years’ time.
* * * *
Lena read the case notes for the fifteenth time, not understanding them any more. She’d only really been introduced to Project DOME in her Orientation a week ago, and she was aware that she was going to begin as some sort of field agent rather than a scientist, developing this strange technology, but she hadn’t expected such obvious stalking. Well, she had, but not like this. She’d thought, judging on the Orientation, as a field agent, she’d be able to read minds, X Men style. But no, there was yet another test. Like there hadn’t already been enough tests, enough mental and physical challenges, enough doctors poking and probing at her, enough secrecy and liability documents signed. No, oh no, Project DOME could never just leave it at that. On top of everything else, she now had to prove her abilities as a stalker.
It would have been easier if the whole thing wasn’t so cryptic. Even now, after countless tests and interviews and three days of Orientation, she wasn’t entirely sure what this whole project was about, or what her role in it was. Maybe nobody knew what was going on.
Sighing, she put the document back down on the table. A recently graduated Psychology major from Claremont McKenna College, Lena had been head-hunted by this initiative, and had blindly agreed to join them on the premise of advancing science. The fact that an advance of a rather sizeable pay check had been given to her along with this premise had also helped sway her decision. CMC had given her not only a pretty good degree and two trips to Europe with the basketball team, but a loan large enough to blot out the sun. She knew that she should be thankful to even have a job, let alone one that paid this well, even if it meant not really knowing what she was thankful for.
It sort of made sense, though, she thought to herself as she turned the kettle on. From what she understood, if she’d managed to grab the right end of the stick after all, she was going to be some sort of field agent. And field agents were, for all intents and purposes, spies. Maybe checking up on Participant #729001 was yet another test. Why would this Institute need field agents? She’d seen a movie a few years ago, a cult classic, where it was possible to enter somebody else’s mind whilst they were dreaming. It seemed to Lena that this was essentially what the Institute did. Maybe they’d been inspired by the movie somewhat. But then, if she was recalling the movie properly, everybody was a bad guy. Incepting information from dreams was, she remembered arguing, immoral, and even in the movie it seemed to be illegal. It crossed her mind that maybe she was now working for some sort of criminal movement, but she scoffed the idea off. Criminality could never be this organised.
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