Bleedover

by Curtis Hox

  A man in the front seat wanted answers about Eliot’s colleague Hattie Sterling, especially about her promise to fund a multimillion-dollar endowment. Of course, Eliot knew nothing about any of this.

  * * *

  Bernard Corrigan needed to find a way into Riodola University, now that Hexcom had picked up Dr. Eliot Brandeis. Lateral information had landed on his desk about the kidnapping, and an outside agency was investigating an anonymous gift to Dr. Sterling’s institute: an uncut diamond. So far, no reported thefts or descriptions matched the item, which in itself was odd. And yet the stone appeared legitimate. The university was already having it appraised to be cut. Suggested worth: thirty-two million dollars.

  The very scenarios Corrigan’s analysts had examined threatened to materialize: for starters, an officially announced F.G.O. This was something potentially far more dangerous than the arcane research of Hexcom, or Corbin Lyell’s absurd attempts to make his fantasies flesh and bone. Following the Lyells’ challenge to the established order, Corrigan now had a clear case of a massive capital infusion. And that had made his bosses take notice. Riodola, especially the Cultural Studies Department—soon to be the Department of Culture Science—had just become their top priority, and Corrigan’s team had increased from three to fifteen.

  He had planted several employees at the university, and three students (none of whom Dr. Sterling would accept) into other departments. All of them added eyes and ears to his surveillance. During the day, any student could walk into the old Landash Library and wander into the basement, where classes met. Dr. Sterling’s office, her private apartment, and the institute had better security. That was where the real answers lay.

  In the guise of the actual lawyer he once had been, Corrigan dressed the part and visited the institute. He had called and made an appointment a few days ago. Dr. Sterling couldn’t promise him a meeting, though. She was “busy.”

  He sent a message saying he could wait. She relented and said she would meet him under a few bushy dogwoods, full of green but just out of bloom, in the quad. He waited by a wishing pool, where three students tossed coins. The wide lawns formed patterns of green wedges and rectangles separated by converging pathways. A few students lounged in the sun, one or two appearing to study, although the artfully crafted spaces were mostly empty.

  Corrigan saw Dr. Sterling leave the antiquated library. She walked with her head down, as if lost in thought, without a care in the world. He knew better—at least, he was pretty sure he did.

  The photos he had seen of her from the past few weeks depicted a woman plowing headlong into disaster. Today, though, she appeared in a fashionable, well-cut, long-sleeved blouse with high collar and matching slacks. Not the way most academics dressed.

  “Mr. Corrigan,” she said, and offered her hand.

  Smiling, he stood and gave it a firm shake. “Hello, Professor.”

  Dr. Sterling sat next to him on the edge of the bench, far enough away to maintain decorum. “Why is your firm so interested in my department?”

  “We represent an interested party.”

  “Go on …”

  “You’ve made important people notice you recently. I attended your demonstration. Impressive.” She acknowledged the compliment with a half smile. “Now, this anonymous donation to your institute …” He pretended to forget the sum, and she pretended along with him. “Thirty-two million, I think the university press release said.”

  “Yes, give or take.”

  They gazed at each other, neither willing to display an ounce of vulnerability.

  Corrigan retrieved a manila folder from his briefcase.

  “A student—or rather I should say, potential student—Ernest Packer.” He handed her a black-and-white of Mr. Packer with a stranger. “He’s made some interesting new friends. This one, Max Siegen, works for Hexcom.” More photos—these at Hexcom: all of them exterior shots of Mr. Packer lounging on the deck of his new apartment. “They appear to be treating him well.”

  The last time Hattie had seen photos of Hexcom had been a news exposé by Dateline, about its archive of pulp fiction. The company had grown. She didn’t want to know where they got their funding, though Dreya Lyell’s worldwide network certainly was strong. Dreya peddled power and influence, and the thought of her discovering Hattie’s method of funding the institute gave her a chill.

  But happily, she hadn’t told anyone how she got the funds—not a single soul. A momentary doubt assailed her: first you use the N.P.B. to generate wealth, now more secrecy to hide it.

  “What’s he doing there?” she asked.

  “Letting himself get recruited into an organization that will use him and discard him.” Corrigan handed her a photo of the Lyells walking down a busy street in Manhattan. “You know them?”

  Hattie nodded.

  “Do you know what they want?” he asked.

  “Of course I do. I wonder if you know.”

  “Mr. Packer hasn’t been seen in a few days, Dr. Sterling. He was last seen entering one of their secure facilities at headquarters—we think to engage in controversial tele-projection activities. None of that is out of the ordinary—except that Corbin Lyell arrived. We believe he plans to use Towns for something a bit more sinister than recording sympathetic responses to fancy images flashing on walls.”

  She knew what Lucid Media Projection was: Hexcom claimed to use legal drugs as a form of counseling for disturbed individuals, and media therapy as a cure-all. When the artists and psychics started arriving and signing up to project their visions, the media began to look around. But other than a vague suggestion to place Hexcom in the same box with all the oddities of the N.P.B., nothing much came of it. She had always assumed Corbin’s fantasies were harmless, but his focus on Towns meant trouble.

  Hattie started to hand back the last photo of Towns, then paused.

  Corbin had been known to call her sporadically over the years, leaving cryptic messages. After grad school, she’d never paid much attention to them, but a few days ago, that changed after the intruder broke in.

  She had been waiting for a formal apology. All she got from Corbin was a simple message: “An apple, Hattie. Really? How unimaginative.” Then the dial tone.

  “What do you want?” she asked Corrigan.

  “We’d like to know what Mr. Packer is doing at Hexcom. You have personal connections with the owners. Maybe a phone call …”

  Hattie bristled. “Why would I help you, or your employer?”

  “Because we can help you.” He handed her a picture. “Arnold Perniskie broke into your library—we aren’t sure why.” Another photo of Perniskie talking to a man. “Max Siegen. Same guy who recruited Mr. Packer. Arnold was killed the night he broke into the library and attempted to get to you.”

  Being faced with the image of her potential attacker forced her to relent a bit. Maybe Corrigan could help. “I’ll call and inquire and let you know, Mr. Corrigan,” she said. “Thank you for your consideration.”

  “One more thing …” He handed her another photo of Eliot getting into a car. “Our investigative team ran across this.”

  “Oh, no!” Hattie gasped before she could catch herself. “Eliot, what’re you doing?”

  “Have you heard from him?”

  “No,” she barely managed.

  Corrigan retrieved the photo, said he would be in touch and hoped she would as well. He left his business card on the bench.

  * * *

  Corrigan cherished the feeling of triumph as he walked across the quad. These moments rarely came. Leaving her speechless was the calculated result of a veteran’s precise maneuvering. He could sense that this odd academic was someone of real interest. Hexcom was paying attention. If she really had produced that apple out of thin air—and he could see no reason to doubt it, other than the obvious—he needed to know whether she was a friend or not. Hexcom had the worst intentions; he still needed to learn Dr. Sterling’s.

  * * *

  Towns lay in bed,
trying not to vomit. His stomach ached with a dry emptiness that reached into his bowels, which then seemed to fill with wet, hot sludge. The diarrhea lasted only an hour, thankfully. But then came the cramps. His handlers had kept him projecting for almost two days before they’d let him sleep; then they’d begun ratcheting back the fun drugs. He remembered very little until the high disappeared.

  The unpleasantness always started on waking. His first time in the cocoon, he had felt empowered. But this last time, with the pleasant hum of drugs flowing through his body, they had shifted from a film about bicarium production to something different: a small town, a little college, a book, séances, the attempt to contact strange beings. He sensed that it was a low-budget indie film blending sci-fi and horror. Then they focused on a specific scene in which an amorphous, gelatinous mass of writhing limbs and teeth-filled orifices erupts over a pentagram.

  Even stoned on the cocktail, Towns noted the clichés. The computer-generated imagery sucked, and the premise was both hokey and preposterous, but his state of mind filled in the details that more rigorous creative work should have handled. When he realized that Hexcom wanted him to project the beast in the film, he almost felt relieved.

  Sure, he thought, as long as it stayed in the big chamber.

  They mixed the opioids and hallucinogens so that he didn’t have a bad trip. But after twelve hours, his brain’s natural ability to produce dopamine and serotonin ran dry, and the marathon session of speedy, herky-jerky mania ensued.

  The trip turned bad—really bad. Waking up in his apartment, with a stone-faced nurse standing over him and a troll with a gong mallet beating on the inside of his head, he didn’t remember much. The runs punctuated by vomiting started soon after. And all he could think was, I’ll never do this again. But by his second day of recovery, the fear of the bad trip faded, and the latent urge for the rush clawed its way to the surface.

  Towns remembered trying to see outside the cocoon. He had sat up once and peeked before a technician told him over the audio system to “get back in.”

  Mr. Corbin Lyell even popped his head under at one point. He was short, lean, and old, with an expensive shirt open at the neck. His clean-shaven face was tan, and everything about him appeared highly groomed. He smelled like aftershave.

  “Well, well, well, there you are, Mr. Packer! Good to see you again.”

  Towns’s anxiety disappeared in an enveloping sense of warmth, thanks to a small dose of the good stuff.

  “Now,” Mr. Lyell said, “do tell us how you made that apple appear …”

  Towns had little sense of his location or even his identity as he tried to remember the conversation. His awareness had dissipated with uncontrollable ease during the questioning.

  Mr. Lyell asked about Dr. Sterling and Riodola, and Towns told him everything. He didn’t mean to, but all the compartments in his mind had dissolved into one big, irresistible lovefest. When a moment of lucidity stirred in him, he found Mr. Lyell sitting on the bed like a gargoyle, listening to him describe Dr. Sterling’s doorway. Mr. Lyell nearly salivated at the news.

  Towns tried to stop when he realized what he was saying, but the old man grabbed his leg and nodded to the nurse, who fiddled with his IV drip. He barely saw the syringe, though he did feel an instant wave of disorientation. The words “Go ahead, continue” slowed and echoed in his ears.

  And continue he did.

  * * *

  They left him alone then. Towns spent the day and night drifting in and out of consciousness. By morning, the nurse had weaned him off the drugs. The sickness began again as his body tried to right itself. It took him another two days to get his strength back. The nurse brought him food. When he finally felt strong enough to go for a walk, he encountered a locked front door.

  In fact, he realized he’d been moved to a smaller apartment. No sliding glass doors, no windows; just a bedroom and a bathroom. He couldn’t get out. The next evening, two laconic security guards came for him. They refused to answer his questions.

  “This is kidnapping,” Towns said, as one of them gently grasped his arm and ushered him into a hallway.

  “Sue me, kid. Now, come on.”

  They didn’t have to push.

  Towns realized he was being taken back to a cocoon. He felt his bowels go slack, and the familiar roiling. He wanted to follow these guards now, especially if it meant getting hooked in and jacked up. He licked his lips at the thought of the coming rush.

  Towns shuffled down the hall in his blue hospital gown and slippers, bare ass hanging out. Perhaps they would be extra generous with the substances because of what he’d told Mr. Lyell. Towns could think of nothing else.

  * * *

  Corbin was on the top floor of Hexcom, with Max Siegen, discussing Riodola University. They stood in a long office with wide windows overlooking Hexcom’s parking lot. Corbin had inquired about Towns’s projecting, and Siegen had told him Towns was close, very close.

  Only Siegen knew what Corbin planned for the evening. Only he and a few technicians understood what happened below whenever Corbin took an interest in a projector. It had happened a few times over the past ten years. Dreya had put a stop to it, but Corbin had returned with commands.

  He’d told Siegen to temporarily shut down all the other projections, except for Towns Packer. For several hours, they had looked through the glass at an actual Elder God. Corbin had named it “Dagon” in the film he’d shot five years ago in hopes he would summon it one day. He felt no fear as it thrashed in its prison, its tentacles slapping with sickening force against the titanium walls. He and Siegen heard the deafening roar of a beast the size of a giant, with no proper lungs. Its existence shuddered in and out of reality—one moment fully corporeal, the next tinged in flashes of azure luminescence that rippled along it like angry electric scales. Before it finally disappeared, it settled into itself, as if preparing to hibernate. Then nothing, as if time and space had simply corrected for the momentary aberration.

  Corbin paced in Siegen’s office. “God damn!” he growled. “I want someone in Riodola!”

  “I’m working on it. Trust me.”

  Corbin liked what he was hearing, but he felt frustrated. Hattie had called and told him to call her back. He’d been stalling.

  Fuck it!

  He finally dialed his old enemy, while Siegen watched.

  She answered on the second ring.

  “Hattie, tell me about this portal of yours.”

  A long silence. Corbin had little patience, but he held himself to a face-splitting smile.

  “What’re you doing with Towns?” she asked.

  He ignored her. “I’ve also heard about your good luck with a large donation—how the hell did you do that?” He paused. “Hattie, I’ve ignored you, let you do your thing in that dreary, little university of yours. That fucking F.G.O. was uncalled for. You could have kept that under wraps. An apple? Fuck you, old friend! How many times have we generated instantiations here at Hexcom? Do you even know?” She didn’t answer—stunned, he imagined. “Too many to count, that’s how many.” He calmed himself with a deep breath. “You’ve gone too far.”

  He hung up before she could respond.

  * * *

  Later that evening, Corbin waited in the observation booth as Towns’s induction began again. This would take a few hours at minimum; then they would begin the neural washing, followed by the flooding. In six hours, Towns could start. Corbin had him watching the feed again and again, the special one he had had written and filmed years ago with the special interpolation added of the horrible beast from the pit. He titled it Dagon Awakes: The Death of Hattie Sterling.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Hattie spent that Friday afternoon ignoring Corbin Lyell’s mind games, even though he had already sent someone to harm her. She had called Eliot a dozen times.

  Even though he wasn’t responding, she felt safe in her warded haven. Outside, though, it wasn’t so safe. There were sinister strangers in vehicles
who might pick you up … Oh, Eliot where are you?

  She, Alice, and Masumi met in the atrium as the last of the week’s Cultural Studies students filtered out of the building. A handful of grad students had already begun grumbling loudly enough to be heard.

  Hattie had held a meeting with them today to promise a return to normalcy. She would also begin advising again; she just needed everyone’s patience. She had eleven grad students, fully funded, who primarily did research in other departments, but Alice was her only official charge now that Towns had left. The university also unofficially recognized her as Masumi’s adviser, until the graduate school determined what to do with Masumi’s empty committee.

  Hattie had planned to speak to Eliot about this.

  She checked her phone … still no message from him.

  Her two young protégés sat silently with her in the atrium, awaiting instruction.

  Last week had been a flurry of activity. First Masumi had gone through the portal, then Alice. Both women had turned to putty in her hands after their experiences. Hattie had gone back herself, to her unpublished novel again, and generated the interpolation for the precious stone. After the successful incantation, seeing the uncut diamond appear on the floor of her apartment, she withstood the onslaught of chemicals in her brain that suggested she dance like a primitive human under a blood-red moon.

  Her keening beats still echoed in her ears—a primordial sound that triggered a deep-seated desire to shed her clothes, paint her skin, and give herself over to primal urges. After seeing the prize, she took a deep breath, even arching her back and spreading her arms, feeling the warmth run down her neck as her spine pulsed with energy. At that moment, she felt god-like.

  Hattie could still taste the metallic saliva in her mouth, a residue from the transition. The diamond meant power, the kind Dreya Lyell wanted so desperately. Hattie knew she could bend to this greedy temptation—return for more valuable artifacts, bring them back, display them, challenge the world to stop her. The audacity shook her to her core.