by P. W. Child
“I suppose,” Nina said. “But perhaps, like me, they just thought it would be less stressful to be away from distractions and better for academic focus to have a more personalized education out here.”
“Perhaps. I just think their families have some sort of influence over them to get them to study in avenues they normally wouldn’t care much for,” Gertrud answered.
“Are these families rooted in politics, then?” Nina asked.
“Most, yes. I could be way off, but I think it could be the reason your students are more politically orientated, you know? Just rapping it off here. I’m not an expert or anything,” she chuckled. “Let me leave you to your work. I have some research to finish for Prof. Hartley, anyway.”
“Alright,” Nina smiled. “Thanks for the lovely coffee!”
Gertrud walked into the brighter light of the landing that led to the stairwell and gave Nina a jovial wave as she vanished around the doorway. Suddenly Nina felt utterly lonely. She chalked it up to the illness spreading through her body, influencing her psyche. She tilted the green mug where her coffee barely filled the bottom.
“Shit,” she murmured. A break would be welcome, but she felt reluctant to brave the light and the obligatory greetings and small talk on her way to the kitchen. The thought of fake-smiling and clenching her fists to get through trivialities she was not in the mood for was too much to bear to leave the secluded tomb of her students’ clumsy efforts. The dark, once her enemy in the subterranean tunnels of the Ukraine, had now become her ally and she did not want to leave it – not even for coffee.
Eventually her lack of concentration won the joust and Nina stood up to refill her cup. Her chest itched and she scratched, involuntarily igniting a coughing fit that had her rib cage constricting so intensely that she collapsed to her knees. With every expulsion, her back stung as if punctured by a railroad spike and her throat burned from the effort. Much as she tried to keep it down, her coughing came out loudly in the dead silence of the basement area.
When she eventually regained her composure, Nina’s eyes were watering profusely. The stabbing pain in back persisted and her chest was still heaving in an effort to catch her breath. The pounding headache that ensued was only worsening and she thought to take a headache pill with her fresh cup.
“Fuck me,” she panted, clearing her throat to get her voice back. Her body ached, but she perked up to look as normal as possible when she left the dark, tiny office. Along the steps ran an old wooden balustrade, winding along upward to the ground floor where the stained glass windows shed a plethora of colors at her feet.
Muttering voices came within earshot as Nina tiptoed to the kitchen at the end of the passage. As she drew nearer to where the kettle beckoned, the voices became clearer. Two women were speaking in hushed tones, but Nina’s hearing had become exceedingly better since her sight had begun to wane and she could hear the words, though she could not place the subject.
“He’s out of his mind if he thinks I’m going run those records for him again,” the older lady argued.
“You have to. It’s your duty as department head, Christa, to do research for the Dean. This is something important. It was the saving grace of so many children over the years and you owe it to…” the other woman tried to reason, but the first snapped her to silence.
“I owe nothing to the legacy of a bloody Kraut and his twisted regime, Clara! My allegiance is to my husband, not his mother.”
Nina had to come in for her coffee, so she pretended to be oblivious to the conversation. Even so, upon sight of her both women fell silent and nodded to her in mock tolerance.
Aye. There it is, that lovely fake amity I’ve come to love around here, Nina thought to herself as the two women smiled kindly at her.
“Good day, Dr. Gould,” Mrs. Clara Rutherford greeted, prompting her colleague with her eyes.
“How are you getting on here at our little establishment, dear Nina?” Dr. Christa Smith asked, dunking her tea bag into her cup.
“Good afternoon, ladies,” Nina said mildly, trying to urge the kettle to boil the water faster than what science allowed. “So far it is very pleasant, thank you.”
“I trust you don’t find our curriculum too primitive, what with your extensive travels and, well let’s just say it, celebrity,” Christa said in questionable jest.
Clara lightly slapped her on the hand. “I’m sure Dr. Gould does not appreciate all the unwanted attention, Christa. Am I right, Nina? I’m sure I would loathe all that public attention myself, even if I was responsible for so many successful explorations of historical value.”
“Hardly a celebrity, Dr. Smith,” Nina said softly. Having done her homework on the establishment before accepting the invitation from Smith as a visiting lecturer, she knew that Clara was Smith’s lapdog. She’d never finished her doctorate and thus deemed herself lesser than the charismatic chairperson of St. Vincent’s Academy of History and Science.
A warm sensation tickled Nina’s upper lip. Both the women in her company gasped. Nina’s index finger explored the bottom bend of her nose. When she checked her finger, it yielded a bloody tip.
“Oh, it’s just a nosebleed,” Clara said.
“Aye,” Nina said, wincing as her headache increased to a skull-splitting level, “just a nosebleed.”
Chapter 2
In Edinburgh, Dave Purdue was having a stiff drink on one of his balconies. It was his third in the past ten minutes. He’d been sleeping well enough of late, but the incomplete treatment he’d abandoned when Sam had broken him out of the Sinclair Medical Research Facility was catching up to him. He knew it would be imperative for him to return to the institution eventually, but he was reluctant because of the ambiguous circumstances of his so-called release. Yet his persistent problems with discerning reality prompted him to give institutionalization some serious thought.
“Shall I dish up, sir?” his cook asked from the study doorway.
“Yes, thank you. Just give me a few more minutes,” he called back to her. He felt the electric tension of a brewing rainstorm over his mansion and could smell the wondrous mossy scent of dead leaves and moist soil under the giant oaks that cradled Wrichtishousis. It had been his home for what seemed like an eternity, and yet he felt only like a visitor these days. His mind left him sometimes, not in an insane way, but rather it would neglect whatever he’d been trying to quantify or comprehend at that moment and wander off to something else. And that something else would usually constitute something reckless, almost as if it had been implanted by an external force. It had been months since he’d been tortured by the Order of the Black Sun, and his mind still suffered from the onslaught of their brainwashing methods.
“No wonder Nina hates me,” he glowered as he emptied the contents of the glass. “But I’m not one to lose my ego over women, am I?”
“Excuse me, sir?” the cook asked.
“Oh, uh, I’m just musing by myself,” Purdue chuckled as he skipped over the threshold of his balcony doors and locked them behind him. “Better to keep the storm out.”
“Indeed, Mr. Purdue. I hear they are expecting a right Biblical flood for the next two days,” she babbled, dishcloth in hand. “But not to fear, the week’s groceries have been bought and delivered, so you should be fine cloistered up in here.”
“I understand your concern, my dear,” Purdue told her as they approached the dining room at the bottom of the stairs, “but I assure you, my sense of adventure is far from doused. I shall be my old self as soon as I finish my research into the stone spheres of New Zealand. Who knows? I might even drag my personal chef with me.”
“No, thank you, sir,” she protested with a superstitious tone. “I’d rather leave all the chasing after spooky artifacts and strange places to your capable hands. No, thank you.”
Purdue grinned in amusement at her repudiation. Sometimes he forgot just how dangerous and unusual his excursions were. He sat down in his large dining room where he liked throwing cocktail pa
rties and private fundraisers, and where he held meetings for the planning of expeditions with his vast array of experts. Only now their voices were absent, their educated speculation lacking, and Purdue felt the overwhelming pressure of the emptiness around him.
The food was exquisite, as usual, but his tongue refused him the pleasure. Loud and persistent, he used his utensils on the fragile plate to keep his mind from realizing that he was alone. Cheer seeped out of him like a draining wine vat as he gradually slipped from control.
“Agatha,” he whispered to his deceased sister. “Are you even dead? Am I just a shard of Edgar Alan Poe’s Roderick, the modern day, stinking rich, super-smart twin brother who buried his sister when she was still alive?”
His stomach contracted, expelling his recently swallowed morsels. Purdue felt his mind fall to shadow, to a place where Klaus Kemper wanted him. Fully aware of the imminent darkness and loss of composure, Purdue jumped up, grabbed a bottle of Jim Beam from his liquor cabinet, and ran for his laboratory. He deposited himself in the second section of his lab, where he kept his audio-visual gadgets and monitors for entertainment and editing purposes when shooting documentaries.
Quickly he placed his headphones over his ears and opened the drive to choose an album to listen to. His blue eyes swam in tears as Klaus Kemper’s evil coursed through his brain, still programmed to obey the late tyrant through a numeric-hypnotic method.
“Oh God, no! Not The Doors! Not now. Jesus, that’s all I need while trying to get out of a mindbender!” he told himself. Quivering over his lips, his breath flowed hot and smelly from the neat gulps of bourbon he’d forced down to keep the commands from holding sway. He’d discovered that Kemper’s brainwashing was impeded by alcohol. Every time his mind locked into a sequence of numbers and he felt an urge beyond his control, drinking hard liquor would subdue his reasoning and numb his motor skills, fooling his mind into being too dumbed down to follow the subliminal orders.
“Here we go. Here we go!” Purdue smiled as tears streaked over his face. “That’ll do it.” His cursor fell on Lightnin’ Hopkins and Johnny Cash. Another swig burned right through the tears as the blues took the first turn. Purdue pulled up a chair, adamant to apologize to his cook for the waste of good food. But for now he felt the need to discard anything scientific or sober, trying to save his brain as much as his very soul. He sank back in the chair and relished the sensation of inebriated stupidity while the music closed off his calculative cognition.
“Who is Agatha again?” a man’s voice asked outside his mind.
“Don’t be stupid. Everyone knows who she is – was,” Purdue strained to speak the words while the alcohol infused his body. “She was my sister, but I left her buried under a library full of forbidden information.” He chuckled weakly, tears streaming over the edge of his face in droplets. “You know, she’d always wanted to be a librarian.”
“Where is this library?” the voice asked once more. “Can you show me on a map?”
“I don’t have to,” Purdue smiled with his eyes shut tight. The easy melodies of the music meandered over his mind and calmed his body like the bourbon. “I know the coordinates.”
“Can you give them to me?” the man asked from the dark that Purdue was reluctant to desert just yet. After all, it was just an alcohol-induced daydream.
“But of course,” he told the disembodied voice, unaware of his crumbling consciousness. “It is 45.4408° N…wait….12.31 and then, um, 55° E,” Purdue said. A scowl formed. “Or was it South?”
“Let me read that back to you,” the man said. “45-44-8,” he paused for a moment as if correcting the rest before continuing with, “2-2-58.”
Purdue’s eyes opened and he found that he was not in the sanctuary of his mansion and was grasping a rolled hand towel where his glass of Jim Beam had been a moment ago. Strapped into a comfortable chair, he noticed a familiar face in front of him.
“Dr. Helberg? We thought you were dead,” Purdue marveled.
“No, David. Still kicking,” the short man replied, although he’d visibly lost weight since the last time he’d been playing host to Sam, Nina, and a particularly nasty brain-manipulator.
“Good to see you,” Purdue nodded.
“David, do you remember what we were just discussing?” the doctor asked him.
“No, I was having a drink in…” Purdue realized that he had never been home in the first place and that familiar sinking feeling hit him again. “Oh, no. No! What did I do this time?”
“Nothing, yet. You were telling me about your sister; that you’d buried her in a library,” Dr. Helberg pressed the point of his pen upon the blank line of the notes he kept on his lap, waiting to jot down Purdue’s response. He wanted to examine Purdue’s recognition patterns after the number sequence. It was all part, literally, of deciphering the numerical structures that activated the subconscious commands in Purdue’s brain.
“Oh,” Purdue shrugged carelessly, covering up the ugly truth with good acting. “Maybe believing I was inebriated actually transpired in my ramblings. A kind of psychological placebo effect, if you will.”
“That’s a good hypothesis, David,” the doctor smiled, impressed at the notion.
Much as the thought of a contemporary Nazi organization brainwashing powerful financiers appalled him, Dr. Helberg could not help but yield some admiration for the genius behind Klaus Kemper’s mental safe lock. The combinations alone were almost impossible to record, let alone how they were programmed into Dave Purdue’s head to make him believe that he had, in fact, buried his sister alive. Of course, the good doctor could never admit to it out loud, but Dr. Helberg wished that he could have memorized such a treasury of number combinations to control the minds of others.
What Purdue also hid was the disturbing twinge he felt at the thought of what had just transpired. Now that he had awoken inside being awake, it dawned on him that he could very well be experiencing yet another dimension of reality and not even be aware of it. For all he knew, he was probably still under Reactor 4, running in the dark with Kemper’s numbers reprogramming his brain. On the other hand, it had been some time since he’d experienced that familiar involuntary servitude, so maybe this was the real reality after all.
“You are doing exceptionally well, David,” Dr. Helberg remarked as he ticked off some check boxes on the clipboard he’d retrieved from his case. “I’d venture to say that your problem might well be resolved by next session. The fact that you have exhibited signs of articulate reasoning during these so-called commands says it all. I think the reversal should be completed by Thursday.” The jovial doctor smiled as he signed off on the session and released Purdue from his mild restraints to the chair.
“Dr. Helberg, would you do me a favor and drop a line to Albert for me?” Purdue implored, rubbing his wrists to alleviate the chafing.
“Sure,” he replied. “Albert…”
“Albert Ashton, a friend of mine. I need him to bring me my Halifax 552, but not the 4788. Okay?” Purdue impressed on the doctor.
“Okay, I’ll tell him,” he told Purdue somewhat absent-mindedly and packed up his stuff.
“You don’t know Albert, do you, doctor?” Purdue said victoriously. “Because, with the number sequence I just gave you, you’d have been compelled to run to the window and check who was following you.”
Perplexed, Dr. Helberg stared at Purdue. “What on earth do you mean? Of course I know Albert Ashton. He was…a patient.”
“And, oddly enough, you already have the means to override numeric mind control after you investigated the files on Sam Cleave’s previous malady, proving that you are not only a charlatan, but one with a dangerous agenda at that,” Purdue revealed, taking careful note of the man’s facial expression.
The man was trying too hard to appear indifferent, and Purdue noticed that he was dipping his right hand into the case while maintaining eye contact, a blatant betrayal of attempted misdirection. Purdue knew what that meant. He leapt forward to
grab the gun that emerged in the fake doctor’s hand. Moments later the tall patient and the impostor clashed, falling to the ground in a struggle for the Colt six shooter between their bodies.
The doctor’s case tipped over and spilled its contents onto the polished floor where the men were grappling wildly. Pastel folders with various names and notes were strewn in disarray next to Purdue and his assailant. Moments later, two thundering shots clapped and blood spattered brightly on the pale colors of the medical files.
Ch apter 3
Orderlies came rushing into David Purdue’s room at the Sinclair Medical Facility, examining the corners of the room to check for more attackers. But they soon found that it had been just the one. His body was limp and heavy, smothering the barely conscious Purdue underneath.
“Get him off! Get him off!” the head nurse shouted to the men. “Mr. Purdue? Mr. Purdue, can you hear me?” He sank to his knees beside Purdue to check his vitals, knees in the blood on the floor.
“Mr. Mills, aren’t you disturbing a crime scene or something?” a fresh employee asked from the vicinity of the cupboard where the impostor’s case had been sitting before the scuffle.
“Why don’t you just do as you’re told until I’ve determined if there even is a crime scene? By the looks of these two unconscious, but breathing individuals, it is safe to assume there has been no murder committed, Harold,” the veteran medical technician sneered at the rookie. “Yet.”
“Yes, sir. What about the weapon, sir?” he dared ask Mr. Mills after his reprimand.
Mills winced irately, but kept his cool. “I’ll take care of it, Harold. You just help Jimmy lift Dr. Helberg onto the gurney so that we can get them both to Hopkins Memorial as quickly as possible.”
“Yes, sir.”
