by Riley, R. Thomas; Zoot, Campbell; Chandler, Randy; Kauwe, Faith
I ordered coffee and a tuna melt, and went on observing. After a couple minutes, the girl got up and went to the ladies’ room. While gone, Lane craned his neck to observe his Mercedes in the lot and waved, some sort of signal for his driver it seemed. Frowning, I watched as Lane next pulled a small vile out of the inside pocket of his jacket and poured some kind of liquid into his lady friend’s bubbling glass of diet coke.
The blonde returned, smiling, looking happy to be with Lane. I resisted the urge to come to her aid and stop her from drinking the coke. Lane intended to drug her, and then what, I had no idea.
After several sips of the coke, the drug had the desired effect. The girl appeared drowsy at first, before slumping over sideways on her side of the booth, just as my waitress delivered a tuna melt and freshened my coffee. I took a bite and watched as Lane’s chauffeur entered the restaurant and strode up to his booth. He sat next to the girl, pulled her toward him so her head rested on his shoulder while Lane got up and went over to the cashier. As he paid his check, he gestured back to the booth, apparently informing the clerk that his girlfriend had taken ill and therefore, they had to leave.
After returning to his booth, Lane and the chauffeur immediately lifted the girl out and unsteadily onto her feet. Though dazed, she was able to walk with them out of the restaurant to the Mercedes. I watched as they unceremoniously dumped her into the back seat. I quickly got up and paid my bill.
I followed the Mercedes back to the Rostow mansion and waited for a time in my observation nook, deciding what to do. The drugged blonde girl was now an unwilling guest of in the Rostow/Lane mansion. I could report this to the police, and they might even believe me and pay a visit, but what would that solve?
Finally, I decided to take matters into my own hands by going across to the mansion and breaking in if need be.
First, I opened the glove compartment and pulled out a small silver 8 millimeter revolver which, in my twenty years as a private investigator, I had never once used. With the revolver safely tucked in the inside pocket of my jacket, I got out of the car and trotted across the street to the mansion to a line of brush before the small open lawn at the side of the house. Crouching there, I spotted a light on from a basement window and the movement of shadows. The rest of the mansion was dark, eerily still.
I sprinted to the basement window and got down on all fours to get a look. Craning my neck, I was finally able to make out a room and confirm the shadows from within. Then, I heard a woman’s voice. I thought it posed the question with some alarm: “What are you doing?”
Then there was a thump, followed by a humming sound coming from the room, the start of an electric motor. The girl’s voice became muffled, as if she had just been gagged. Nothing much happened for the next minute or so. There was only the hum of the motor. I patted the outside of my jacket, felt the revolver, and broke into action.
I hugged the thick, granite wall of the mansion until I came upon a small, innocuous window that looked easy enough to break into, security system be damned. I took off my jacket, rolled it around my right arm and hand and threw a punch. To my relief, the window smashed easily. After clearing the shards from the wood frame, I pulled myself up and rolled around through the window landing feet first into the room.
I found myself in some kind of sitting room, furnished with an antique couch and several high-backed chairs, tables, and a rather imposing grandfather clock. I quickly exited the dimly lit room and negotiated a hallway in the silent, apparently deserted upper part of the mansion. Finally, I came upon a portico attached to the back kitchen and found a door. As I cracked it open, I realized it led to the basement.
There was a light on down there, and I could hear the hum of the motor I had heard from outside. Taking the revolver out of the pocket of my jacket, I started a slow, careful descent down the narrow stairway.
It did not take me long to find the room where the blonde girl was imprisoned. My concern about the security system had apparently been misplaced because Lane and the chauffeur were standing with their backs to me, staring at a gurney upon which laid the blonde. The room was glaringly lit, and there was an odd, squat contraption filling up almost the entire far wall beyond the gurney. Several wires streamed from it, attached to a crown-like gadget which itself was set like a hat on the head of the girl. The annoying electric hum had been coming from that contraption.
Lifting the revolver, I shouted, “Hey!”
Both Lane and his driver swung around with surprised looks.
“Stay put, fellas,” I told them and nodded to the pistol. “It works, and I know how to use it.”
I directed them to move away from the girl, away from the gurney, to the far wall of the room. They quickly obeyed, expressionless. Once they had moved and seemed well out of reach, I stepped toward the gurney. The girl seemed asleep, her head propped uncomfortably on a pillow to accommodate the ridiculous metal device that had been strapped to the top of it, like something out of a “B” science fiction movie.
Turning back to Lane and his driver, I asked, “What the hell is going—” I never got the chance to finish the question. The girl suddenly sat up and, removing the metal contraption from her head, used it to knock me out cold.
***
The next hours were a blur. I was placed on a bed somewhere in the mansion, strapped down, drugged. I drifted in and out of consciousness. There were shadows, forms hovering about, inaudible, echoing voices as if from a dream. My arm was lifted, pricked, and off I went again into a dreamless sleep for an unknown time.
The next thing I remember is waking up in my car, parked along the gravel shoulder of some park. After a time, I sat up. My head ached, and there was a metallic taste in my mouth. I checked my watch. It was one o’clock. What day, I didn’t have a clue. It took some moments for the cobwebs to clear – and for me to realize that I was not alone.
Paul Lane and the blonde girl were in the back seat.
Seeing them, I gave a start. Finally, each of them began stirring, awakening, no doubt, from the same drug that had been administered to me. Once they came to, all we could do was stare at each other for a time.
“What the hell is going on?” Lane finally mumbled. “Who are you?” Then he turned to the blonde. “And who are you?”
“You drugged me,” the blonde accused Lane.
“I—I think we need to report this to the police,” I suggested.
We were out in the country somewhere so it took some minutes to find a local police station. The girl was growing increasingly agitated, alleging that Lane had kidnapped her, then drugged her, and then maybe even did things she didn’t care to mention.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about lady,” he said. “I was the one who was kidnapped.”
“Who kidnapped you?” I asked.
“Some old man, and some young guy. They approached me in a bar where I had stopped after work. The old guy and me started talking. He said he was rich and didn’t have an heir. At some point, I went to take a leak. When I returned, I took a sip of the beer they’d bought me. Then, I got dizzy. Sleepy. After that, I can’t remember much. A mansion near the lake. Then, just a funny dream. Voices and images. Not, not sure.”
The girl had calmed down. “That’s what it was like for me, too,” she said. “Funny dreams I couldn’t wake up from.”
I found a police station in a small town. We walked and made our collective, somewhat incoherent report to a lonely, skeptical desk cop. One thing I learned was that two days had passed since I had tried to rescue the blonde girl in the Rostow/Lane mansion.
“Kidnapped?” he kept saying. “We don’t get any kidnappings around here.”
In light of the serious allegations, the matter was referred to the state police and, after an hour wait, we were separately interviewed by two state police investigators. At first they seemed interested, concerned, but the more they heard the fantastical nature of our respective stories, the more skeptical they became. I got a downright
smirk from one of the investigators when I told them about the goofy metal device that had been attached to the blonde girl’s head and used to knock me out.
When it was over, I asked, “So now what?”
One of the investigators promised to check out the mansion, see who was there, what corroborating evidence they could turn up. He wasn’t enthusiastic.
“What about Lane? He going to be arrested.”
“For what?” the other investigator said. “We’re treating him as a victim himself for the time being, until we check out that mansion you told us about.”
I nodded, seeing where this was going. It all sounded so goofy, so strange, that it was only fair to check it out before drafting and filing what could turn out to be frivolous charges.
They let us go, and we each went our separate ways.
***
When I got back to the office late that afternoon, I laid down on the black leather couch at the far wall that was about as old as my career and tried to take a nap. I was awakened fifteen minutes later by a call from Tom Bridge.
“Congratulations,” he said. “Not only are you a top notch investigator, but I think you’ve got a career in marriage counseling.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked, still groggy and ornery from the ordeal of the last couple of days. I had been knocked unconscious and drugged for two straight days, hardly good for my health.
“Paul and Nancy Lane,” he said. “He showed up at the ex-marital residence this afternoon. Just about an hour ago. They reconciled. It was as if nothing had ever happened. She called me wanting to know how I could undo the divorce. I told her they just had to get re-married. You may be the best man.”
I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t laugh. I didn’t even smile. I had no idea what was going on. I told Tom the same crazy story I had told the cops. My surveillance of Lane and his youthful chauffeur; their meeting with the blonde girl; what I saw in the basement; the contraption strapped to the blonde girl’s head with wires leading to the mysterious humming apparatus against the wall in a brightly lit room, like a laboratory or something down there; and, finally, me getting bopped on the head; floating in and out of consciousness after that, and waking up some time later in my car in some park in the middle of nowhere, with Lane and the blonde girl unconscious in the backseat. It sounded ridiculous and made no sense. Tom didn’t seem to have an answer either.
In the next few days, I learned some additional facts that didn’t make much sense. For instance, during the two days I had been kept against my will at the Rostow mansion, it had been conveyed for $1.00 from Paul Lane to one Hector Jarvis. I dug around various sources and learned enough about Jarvis to decide that he had been the youthful chauffeur. The day after the property was conveyed, Jarvis sold it to an Arabian businessman in a cash deal for a rock bottom price. Not only that, but the bank accounts and stock certificates that had been put in Lane’s name after Rostow’s death had been transferred by Lane to none other than the mysterious Hector Jarvis. For his part, Jarvis had cashed out both the accounts and stock certificates.
Not surprisingly, after these transactions, Jarvis was nowhere to be found.
But one thing I did know, Nancy Lane had been right in her conviction that the Paul Lane who had divorced her was not the same Paul Lane who had now returned home.
**
The mystery of the experience would not stop bothering me. I started digging on the Internet again, thinking that the solution might lie somewhere in Desmond Rostow’s past. His last position, before escaping into obscurity in 1971, was on the faculty of the applied electronics department at the University of Buffalo. I located an old directory on microfiche at the school library and learned the name of his contemporaries from back then, thinking they might lead somewhere. Call it instinct or something that made me a decent enough private investigator, but that research eventually led me to Dr. Frank Addington, now a doddering old man squirreled away in a fairly decent nursing home in the far suburbs. And it was Professor Addington who helped me solve the mystery, at least partially, though nobody except Lane, the blonde girl, and perhaps Mrs. Lane and Tom Bridge would ever believe it.
Addington was pushed in a wheelchair into the day room to meet me by one of the nursing home orderlies. I had asked to see him on the pretext that I was writing a book about Rostow. Addington was old, but still sharp, probably something like a 160 IQ. He’d had his share of academic success, important papers, awards, though nothing like Rostow.
He regarded me with a smack of suspicion as I started asking him about Rostow’s years at the university, roughly dating from 1968-71. What was he working on for instance?
“What was he working on?” Addington said with a smirk. “It was something Tesla came up with but never perfected.”
Addington stared off, perhaps remembering those days as if they were only yesterday, with Rostow in the some cramped lab in some inaccessible dark corner of the science building, perhaps marveling at the man’s genius, and envying it, too.
“What was it?” I asked.
“He called it, Apparatus for the Transfer of Brain Electricity,” said Addington with a complete poker-face.
“Apparatus for the …” I tried to repeat it but got lost somewhere.
“Apparatus for the Transfer of Brain Electricity,” the old man repeated with an impatient snarl. “All the brain is, young man, is a soft-tissue electrical machine, if you will, part hard-drive, part transmitter. The electricity it generates constitutes the mind, the thought of a man, his soul. What if you could find a way to transfer that electricity from a dying brain to another hard-ware? Some mechanical housing, for instance. Or better yet, to another brain.”
Addington asked me to get him a pen and paper so that he could draw me the apparatus. I pulled out the small notepad I always carried in my jacket pocket, a pen, and handed them to the professor. In the next few minutes, he drew something and handed the pad, and pen, back to me.
“There’s the electric impulse generator,” he said, pointing to the squat machine that looked something like the mysterious humming device I had seen in the basement of the Rostow mansion. “It attaches to the brain activator.” Addington was pointing to the odd, metal head gear, with wires running to the generator.
“Finally,” he went on, pointing to a small box, a container of some kind, “there is the brain energy storage unit.”
There it was, the solution to the mystery. In the years following his departure from the university and into hermitage, Desmond Rostow had perfected an actual Apparatus for the Transfer of Brain Electricity. As he and Mrs. Rostow grew older, and faced the prospect of death, they decided to use that device to gain immortality. But first they had to find suitable, young, strong and attractive bodies from whose brains would be extracted the electricity, or souls of the owners, and replaced by their own. Paul Lane had been the body selected for the transfer of Desmond Rostow’s brain electricity, or soul, and the blonde girl’s brain was to house Mrs. Rostow’s mind. Thus, it had not been the blonde girl who had struck me on the head with the curious looking head gear, but Mrs. Rostow.
“I hear Rostow’s gone and died,” said Addington.
“Yes,” I said with some distraction. “Died three months or so ago. Stroke, I think.”
Addington frowned.
“Pity he never finished it,” he said. “That machine. Or perhaps it was a pity he got so consumed with it.”
**
I have not been able to solve the mystery of Hector Jarvis’ present whereabouts, or his relationship with the Desmond and Judith Rostow that had convinced them to entrust him with their souls. They had no children, and there was no family that I could find. I did discover that a Hector Jarvis had been an engineering student at MIT but had dropped out after his junior year. Somewhere along the way, I surmised, he had run into Desmond Rostow and become his protégé and perhaps his surrogate son.
In any event, what I did know was that Jarvis had left town not
only with Rostow’s fortune—but with the Apparatus for the Transfer of Brain Electricity. And he had most certainly also left with the brain electricity—the souls, of both Desmond and Judith Rostow, entrapped and stored in the small silver rectangular containers like the ones Addington had drawn in my journal. The same containers which had, for a time, held the stolen souls of Lane and the blonde girl.
I also surmised that wherever Jarvis had run off to, he was checking the locals for suitable hosts for the souls of Desmond and Judith Rostow to inhabit. And the day would come of course when Jarvis himself would need a body, and a soul to steal, so that he, too, could live forever.
And on and on it would continue, I suppose, eternally.
