The Experiment

by John Darnton

  Also by John Darnton

  Neanderthal

  THE

  EXPERIMENT

  John Darnton

  A DUTTON BOOK

  DUTTON

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Books Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane, London W8 5TZ, England

  Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia

  Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2

  Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, 182-190 Wairau Road, Auckland 10, New Zealand

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England

  First published by Dutton, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc.

  First Printing, September 1999

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Copyright © Talespin, Inc., 1999

  All rights reserved

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Darnton, John.

  The Experiment/John Darnton.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-525-94517-2

  I. Title.

  PS3554.A727E97 1999

  813'.54—dc21 99-28860

  CIP

  Printed in the United States of America

  Set in Bembo

  Designed by Julian Hamer

  PUBLISHER'S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This book is printed on acid-free paper.

  For Kyra, Liza and James, made the old-fashioned way,

  with memories of Jingo and the House of 1,000 Rooms

  And for Nina, with unstoppable love

  Surely some revelation is at hand;

  Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

  The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

  When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

  Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert

  A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

  A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

  Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

  Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

  The darkness drops again; but now I know

  That twenty centuries of stony sleep

  Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

  And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

  Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

  —W.B. YEATS

  Chapter 1

  Skyler and Julia crept to the basement door of the Big House and looked around to make sure they weren't being watched. A breeze stirred the humid air, rustling the Spanish moss that hung from the old oaks that arched over what used to be the approach road. It made a dry, whispering sound.

  It was dusk, at least, which meant they would be hard to spot in the shadows of the old manor—but not that hard if someone walked around back.

  Skyler felt the fear as a tingling in his groin; from there it spread upward to his belly and reached his arms and legs.

  This is crazy, he thought.

  If they were caught—he couldn't even imagine the punishment. Nothing like this had ever happened at the Lab.

  They weren't sure what they were going to do. They had no plan, really, other than to break into the Records Room and search for clues to explain what had happened to Patrick. They had to do something, try to find something, or else the reason for his disappearance would never be known. It would remain forever mysterious, like those of the others on the island, who had been taken away and never returned.

  That morning Patrick had appeared fine. He had eaten breakfast with the others in the Age Group and then gone off to calisthenics and chores. But by the early afternoon they had heard the rumors: he had been summoned for a physical—not the routine weekly examination but a special physical. That was a signal that something was wrong, that perhaps a dreadful illness had been discovered, and sure enough, the Elder Physicians had convened a meeting before dinner to inform them that Patrick had been "called away." The phrase had been uttered ambivalently, as it always was: in sadness certainly, for the Physicians had loved him as they loved them all, but also with a hint of reverence—as if he had made some sort of noble sacrifice.

  At the doorway Skyler moved closer to Julia. He smelled the familiar scent of her hair, and it plucked up his courage. He grasped the doorknob and turned it slowly, and pushed. Nothing happened. He held the knob firmly, lifting it while he rocked the door gently with his other hand, and it suddenly gave way. So, it was not locked. That made sense: the leaders of the Lab would not have worried about security.

  Who, after all, would be foolish enough to open it?

  He slipped inside and heard her light tread behind him. She was breathing in long spurts. When he closed the door, darkness engulfed them. Above their heads, they could hear footsteps creaking along the old floorboards and the indistinct murmur of voices. Skyler listened; he couldn't identify them. One was high-pitched and sounded a bit like Baptiste when he was excited or angry. Skyler felt a rush of complicated emotions and a strange sense of longing. What would happen if they just marched upstairs and demanded to know everything? He darted a quick glance outside. The wind was up and the moss was waving on the branches of the old oaks. Twilight was upon the island.

  What are we looking for?

  Julia had already moved across the room. He hurried to a bank of filing cabinets and began tugging at a drawer, but it would not open. He saw that it was locked in place by an iron bar that ran across the front, secured by a padlock on one side. He looked at her quizzically. She knew this place, the Records Room, from her afternoon career chore. She would come in to dust and straighten up, although of course she was not permitted to touch the machines or files or even any of the thick textbooks that lined the shelves. But while refilling printers and stacking paper and washing the floors, she had observed a lot. She had made a game of carefully watching the computer operators, and once, left alone, she had even tried to work the machine.

  Before Skyler knew it, she was seated at the computer. She clicked it on, and instantly a greenish glow filled the room. Damn! They hadn't anticipated that! Julia took off her shirt—what is she doing?—and then Skyler understood as she draped it over the screen and poked her head under it. The glow shrank within her little tent, and it shivered with her movements.

  Skyler moved away and stood guard, his back to a wall. His eyes were now accustomed to the dark, and he scanned the room. The interior walls were hewn from rock and whitewashed, the exterior ones constructed with cinder blocks. The floor was linoleum, and the ceiling was covered in acoustical tiles marked in one corner with a widening pool of brown water stains. There was not much furniture: the computer Julia was sitting at and one other on a plain wooden desk, metal file cabinets, a bookshelf, a standing lamp and a green Naugahyde chair with a rip down one arm.

  He looked at Julia, who seemed oddly at ease now that she had something to do, and he admired her coolness. He had never before set foot in the Records Room, and he felt he was trespassing upon forbidden ground.

  He watched the windows for movement outside, but he knew
that the real danger was closer at hand—the staircase. If they were discovered, it would most likely happen because one of those voices above decided to come downstairs. What if an Orderly needed to fetch something? He tried to push the thought away. Julia's head was still hidden; he could almost hear her thinking as she pecked at the keys, trying different combinations. Then she removed the blouse from the screen and looked at him, a ghostly radiation upon her cheeks.

  "Sky, come," she whispered.

  He raced over and peered across her bared shoulder at a blank screen.

  "I can't get anything," she said, distraught. "I don't know how to work this thing. It's hopeless."

  She turned the machine off, and the green glow shrank to a dot and disappeared. She stood and put on her shirt. Skyler glanced outside one last time and approached the only other door in the room. From the moment he had seen it, he knew he would have to open it. He suspected that it led to a place about which he had heard rumors for as long as he could remember. As children, it had loomed large in the dark corners of their fearful fantasies.

  He turned the brass doorknob and pulled.

  There was a white metal table in the center, and domed lights above, shining brightly. The floor was graded slightly and led to a drain. Cabinets lined the walls, stocked with medical equipment. Tanks of gas with rubber tubing and a mask stood next to a bed in one corner. The room was scrubbed more painstakingly than any he had ever seen.

  Slowly, he stepped inside, and Julia came behind. The room was warm and stuffy. There was yet another door, thick and heavy like the vault of a meat locker. He crossed the floor and pushed the door lever, and it moved swiftly inward, opening onto a black void. He found a switch and flipped it, and a blaze of light blinded him momentarily—mercifully—until finally he focused upon the terrible sight before him. For there, stretched out upon a slab, was a body.

  At first it looked like a small statue, pale and strangely shrunken. It was lying upon its back. The feet lay pointing outward, as in repose. There was a yellowish-green hue under the neck and spreading in half circles around the armpits. Male genitals slumped to one side, swollen with fluid. Skyler tried to avoid looking at the chest, but found his eyes drawn inexorably to it. The chest was gone. In its place was a cavity, sliced open, neat as a gutted fish. Flaps of squared-off skin hung down on either side like shutters on a window, and the rib cage had collapsed inward around a dark hole that was ringed in dark red—dried blood.

  It was Patrick.

  Skyler jumped as Julia slipped up behind him and touched him lightly on the arm. He felt her stiffen as she saw the body, and he heard her next to his ear, a quick intake of breath.

  "Look," he exclaimed in a voice gone small. "His heart's gone."

  He heard her resume breathing. They stared for some seconds.

  "But why?" she said.

  He had no answer.

  They backed out and turned off the light and closed the vault. In the Records Room, Skyler stood watch while Julia examined the desk and computer with trembling hands, making sure there were no traces of their presence. When they got outside and shut the door behind them, they looked around quickly to make sure the coast was clear.

  They ran as fast as they could and didn't stop until they were deep inside the now darkening woods. Even there, the only sanctuary on the island left to them, Skyler and Julia no longer felt safe.

  They stopped, gasping for breath. She sat on the ground, and he leaned against a tree. When she spoke, her voice was so low that he could also hear the stirrings of small animals in the underbrush, and he tried to listen to both. He kept watch.

  "I don't understand," she said. "Why did they have to take everything out of him? What did he have?"

  "I don't know, but it must have been deadly. Fast-acting and deadly."

  "How do we know?"

  "Why else would they cut him up like that?"

  "Do you think it was some horrible disease?"

  "Maybe that's what they're trying to find out."

  "Do you think it's contagious? Maybe we got it."

  "We were only there a couple of seconds."

  "His heart was missing—you saw that. Where was it? Why would they take it out?"

  "I don't know—unless, maybe, they're analyzing it or something."

  His tone didn't sound convincing, he realized, when he heard himself.

  "I don't know," she said, standing up and walking around. "I hate this—it's frightening. There's so much we don't know. Something is going on."

  Skyler knew what that meant, where she was headed. For months her doubts and suspicions had been growing, faster even than his. And when they got together for their secret meetings, which seemed to both of them more and more risky, sooner or later she broached the subject. She was becoming obsessive.

  "Patrick's not the first to die"—Skyler noted that she did not mention Raisin by name, and he was at least grateful for that—"and he's not the first to be called in for a special physical. Why don't they ever discover something during the regular physical?"

  "I don't know. Sometimes they do."

  "But not always. And that makes it seem like they know something's wrong beforehand—don't you see?"

  He did. And as so often happened, he knew without knowing; on some level he had had the same thought, but he hadn't cared to examine it until she held it right in front of him. She was always like that; her mind was swift, unrelenting. She could brave things that he preferred to look away from.

  He nodded and glanced at her in the fading quarter-light, her long dark hair hanging in strands against her cheek, the paleness of her underarms as she reached out.

  "It's horrible," she said. "Just horrible."

  She put her arms around his back, and they held each other tightly. They had done that hundreds of times, but still, at the first touch, there was always that flash—the forbidden. The Lab did not allow boys and girls to mingle, and now that they were older, the prohibition was backed by a punishment so severe that no one even knew what it would be. No one had ever violated the rule. Until them.

  He realized, as he began to calm a little, that he had been trembling since he had seen the body.

  "We have to go back," she said, pulling back at arm's length and looking into his eyes. "They'll miss us in the dorms. What if somebody comes?"

  Skyler knew she was right—what they were doing was dangerous—but he did not want to let her go. He was reluctant to be alone with his thoughts.

  They held hands as long as they dared, until they reached the outskirts of the Campus. Then they separated and moved toward their separate barracks, passing the Big House in the distance. A full moon was on the rise, and Skyler could see the mansion through the shadows of the oak trees that surrounded it. The moss hanging from the branches obscured part of the facade, but the moonlight reflected off the upper windows like a glow from within.

  At one point, Skyler looked back and saw Julia slipping from behind a tree to the pedestal of a statue of a Greek goddess, and as the moonlight caught her, it froze her in his mind forever, so graceful and vulnerable.

  In bed, lying upon the thin mattress that covered his wooden bunk, Skyler listened to the sounds of the others breathing in their sleep, sounds that he had heard his entire life, and tried not to think about Patrick. He almost thought the sounds were a little altered, that he could detect one missing.

  There would be, he knew, a funeral service, and Baptiste would speak, as he had at the other services. Skyler didn't want to think about those either.

  Instead he tried thinking about the past, when he'd been young and everything had been different. The island had been his universe to explore. How he had loved the scientific excursions into the forest, the mad search for bugs and plants. How happy he had been on those occasions—like Baptiste's birthday—when the doors of the Big House were thrown open to them. How he used to relish those nights sleeping out of doors to learn about the stars, scanning the skies with telescopes; in the morning
s he would awaken early and lie still, identifying the birds by their calls and watching the first thin rays of the sun shimmer over the water.

  Jimminies, the children were called, though where the word came from or what it signified, they were never told. They were all about the same age, a year or two different, no more. So they were especially close.

  Growing up in the Lab, they had felt secure and content. Neither Skyler nor any of the others had ever really questioned not having parents, even though they knew that children on the mainland—"the other side," it was called—possessed them. In reality, all the Elder Physicians were their parents, they were told, and they were lucky to have "not two, but twenty" figures of respect who raised the children according to scientific principles and treated them all with an equal hand.

  And, anyway, Skyler and the other Jimminies were special. They were "pioneers of science," participants in a noble experiment. On their island paradise, they would live long and fruitful lives through a regime of mental purity and bodily health. If they were lucky, they would never experience "the other side," that cesspool of pollution and violence. They would never get any closer to it than the movies and TV programs they were allowed to watch on special occasions.

  But it didn't always feel like paradise: the endless medical examinations, the pills and vaccinations, the blood and urine samples, the calisthenics and rules against running games that might be harmful. And then, too, there were the Orderlies, three of them, so much alike and each with that peculiar slash of white in his hair, who ruled over them like stern older brothers. It was hard not to dislike them.

  Skyler had a distinct recollection of the time long ago—more than ten years now—when he'd first become restless. He'd been fourteen years old at the time. Like so many of his memories, this one was bound up with his best friend, Johnny Ray, or Raisin, as Skyler himself had named him.