by Watts, Peter
In the banquet hall, a tidy arrangement of circular tables dominated the center of the room, banishing the typical clutter to the edges, except for an empty patch of floor near the fireplace. Once Lucy and I found seats, I watched the other guests more closely. Their faces seemed flushed despite the fatigue in their eyes. The glow from the fire and the lights masked the effects of blood loss and long days under fluorescent lighting.
Dr. Patrescu stood in front of the fireplace as the crowd quieted. He had shoulder-length brown hair and a thin, youthful face. For a moment, he watched the crowd with a fragile smile, as if they were the event and he the sole spectator.
“Good evening,” said Dr. Patrescu. “Every three months we gather here so that I can thank you for the spirit that has kept Woodcross alive for so many years. In particular, I wish to thank Dr. Miller and her team, whose excavations have unearthed the latest addition to our collection. Her efforts will revolutionize our understanding of alchemy and medicine in 12th century Europe.”
Patrescu gestured to glassware and bits of metal on the mantle behind him. They could have been crude surgical tools, weapons or ancient sculptures. A few of them had grotesquely serrated edges, and it was hard to picture them without seeing them cutting though flesh.
“I knew it,” said Lucy. “Miller’s team has been so irritatingly sure of themselves since they came back from the dig.”
“Our luck will change soon,” I said. “Hey, is there a bathroom here? I should wash my hands before Patrescu’s people come around with the food.”
I half listened to her directions and headed off on a series of wrong turns. The rooms and hallways that I passed were paradoxes of preservation and neglect, of carefully arranged treasures, dust and decay. I saw either austerity or clutter in the darkness. Empty hallways led to bare hardwood floors or the silhouettes of haphazard furniture, overloaded shelves, and the occasional sculpture or candelabra.
In my wandering, I passed a narrow staircase. A sterile light and an electric hum emanated from the top. I stood for a minute with one foot hovering over the bottom step before turning away. What if the boards creaked? I could explain a wrong turn, but not accidentally climbing a staircase.
Instead, I followed the light at the end of a dark and empty hallway until I wound up in a torch-lit room with a half-dozen paintings in ornate frames. Years of heat from the open flame had discolored the wall behind it. The paintings were all village scenes, each vivid and full of movement in contrast to the somber, dusty walls. Two of them were framed pages from illuminated manuscripts. I leaned forward in search of any decipherable writing, but found only a faded MCC, ending in a smudge.
Before I could read more, I heard footsteps in the long hallway. The floor groaned under each unhurried footfall. I took a breath and stepped into the doorway.
“I lost my way,” I said. The words sounded like a confession.
“So it seems,” said Patrescu, from halfway down the hallway. “You are one of the new members, yes?”
“I joined two months ago.”
Patrescu stepped forward. I read a mix of wariness and nostalgia on his face, as if one emotion entailed the other.
“I saw the art on the wall. Are these pictures of places you’ve been to?” I asked.
“Yes. A long time ago.”
Patrescu kept walking in silence, and I stepped aside to let him in. He walked from painting to painting, taking each one in.
“They aren’t the same by electric light, but by torchlight, I can remember.”
“But surely you must go and visit?” I asked, pausing to see if I had been too inquisitive. Patrescu’s emotions seemed tied up in the paintings. “Or do you mean that it has been a long time since you’ve seen them in the sunlight?”
Perhaps, I thought to myself, you made them yourself, to keep the memories alive and pass the decades. Perhaps you saw the oxcart and the man in plate armor with your own eyes.
Patrescu scowled at me. I had pushed too far.
“Wait,” I said. “I have to ask you something. Dr. Carroll and I have been working on a blood substitute. I think it could be on the verge of a breakthrough, maybe even in the next few days. I heard that Dr. Miller’s work didn’t get published anywhere. She just shipped her finds back here to the Manor. I think if this blood substitute works out, we could be on the cover of Nature, or at least Time Magazine.”
“People put such faith in the written word,” said Patrescu, using the tone that my father used when he explained how life was in the days before computers. “It’s all just stories people tell. Real history is what’s around you. You reach out to it and become part of it as it passes you by. Don’t worry, you’ll have your chance soon enough. Now, I’ll show you the way back. Take care not to lose your way again. Not all the old pictures here are pretty.”
I left that evening with an empty stomach. Every time I lifted my fork to my mouth, I thought of the mysterious implements on the mantel and the dead rats back at the lab. Visions of ancient vivisection ruined my appetite.
~
“That place was amazing,” I said to Lucy the next morning, trying to get the conversation off on an upbeat note before treading on dangerous ground. “Those antiques must be worth a fortune. I swear I saw a candelabra that must have been pure silver. It was like the set of a movie.” I hesitated. “A vampire movie.”
“I told you to quit it,” said Lucy.
“I’ve got to ask about him. It’s been two months and nobody’s told me what’s really going on. What am I supposed to think?”
“Fine,” said Lucy. “Dr. Patrescu has a rare form of porphyria. He can’t go out in the sun, and fluorescent lights bother him.” As she spoke, she looked down at a sheaf of articles on her lap.
“Doesn’t it worry you,” I said, “that none of us get published, but he always thanks us for our contribution, right after the blood drive? Don’t you feel that the research is just a cover, and that we’re being… used?”
I was going to say ‘bled dry’ but I toned it down at the last moment.
Lucy’s spine stiffened, straightening her shoulders. She pulled the articles toward her with her left hand and pointed at me with her right.
“You should be grateful for the chance he’s giving you. If giving a little back to help people who need it bothers you so much, why come here in the first place?”
“I didn’t mean it like that. I just meant… maybe he is supporting us for personal reasons and not because of the work. I just want to feel like I earned my place here.”
I wasn’t sure if I had said the right thing, but Lucy relaxed and set the articles down on a bench beside her.
“I grew up near here,” said Lucy. “Back in high school, I was driving from a party with two of my friends—we’d all gotten our licenses a few months before—and a deer ran out in front of us. If Woodcross hadn’t been just a few miles away, and if Woodcross security hadn’t seen us and sent out an ambulance, one of my friends might have died that night. So I do my best to return the favor, and I don’t feel used at all.”
“I didn’t mean to say that he hasn’t helped, but what about the people who we could help if more people knew about your work?”
“I know for a fact that our donations have helped the local blood bank. I set up the database for the donation tracking system myself last year. I’m not going to let anyone say that he’s using us, especially the only sacrifice we’ve made this week has been a pint of blood each and a few dead rats.”
“You’re right. I shouldn’t have… wait—how many dead rats, exactly?” I looked for my dark horse and saw an empty cage.
“I forgot to update the board,” said Lucy. “I found Subject 23 dead when I got in this morning. I saved the body in case you wanted to look. I meant to tell you, but with the dinner and everything… 23 was your project, right?”
“Yes,” I said. “but…”
“What is it?”
“Subject 23 only got saline. I entered it as an experim
ental condition in the log.”
“But why would you falsify the logs? I know we don’t do peer review here, but we have to have some standards.”
“It really was an experiment,” I said, “and it taught us something new. The deciding factor on whether those rats live or die wasn’t what we injected them with but what we wrote in the log.”
“But that can’t happen unless… you think someone is reading the logs and killing the rats that have the substitute? But why?”
“Maybe someone doesn’t want our blood substitute to succeed.”
Someone who didn’t want to be on the cover of Nature or Time Magazine.
~
Over the following week, we had found the toxin: a cleaning solution used in the lab. Lucy had half-convinced me we had contaminated the samples or the equipment. Despite our heightened vigilance—which meant an extra hour or two of checklists and grunt work each day—Lucy had more energy than I had seen in weeks. Although we were out of rats at that moment, we looked forward to new trials and slowly let down our guard. The contamination at least gave us reason to think that the blood substitute had not been to blame for three months of failure.
“I'll whip up more of your latest blood substitute,” I said. “We still need to re-run everything to be sure. Even when we get new rats in, we still have to figure out how the toxin had been introduced.”
Lucy looked past me, pensively, at the empty cages by the wall.
“Not necessarily.”
“What do you mean?”
“The other night, I pulled an all-nighter making a new batch. I thought about running more tests, but I knew it would be another week before the new rats came in. By then, whoever was sabotaging the lab might find a way to ruin the whole project. I was thinking about how tired I’d been since the blood drive, and then I figured out a way to solve both problems at once.” She unrolled her sleeve to reveal a cotton ball taped to her arm near the elbow.
“You replaced your own blood? That’s crazy.”
“I couldn’t guard the rats all night.” Lucy beamed like a teenager, a sight I hadn’t seen before. “I called Dr. Patrescu. He’s flying in tomorrow. He’s going to meet with us personally!”
“So what do we do now?”
“Make a new batch for the follow-up tests, of course. I used up my supply.”
I joined in, if only because someone had to be there to call the paramedics if she went into shock or something. By the time we finished, it was nearly midnight. Lucy locked the doors, and we set out across the quad toward the Woodcross residence complex. Seeing Woodcross Manor at night made me think of sabotage again.
“Dammit,” I said. “I left my notes in the lab. Stay here. I’ll go get them and be right back.” I didn’t want anyone to read them and find out that Lucy was a test subject, not after what had happened to the others. Lucy nodded. I had walked back to the front door and was looking through my pockets for my access card when I heard her scream.
I ran back and saw Lucy grappling with a figure in a long coat. He stood behind her with one arm around her waist and tried to get the other arm over her mouth.
“Hey!” I called. The assailant let go of Lucy and bolted from the path. I thought about chasing after him, but I knew I would most likely get myself lost. Better, I thought, to let him run off while I stayed with Lucy. “Are you all right?” I asked. “It looks like you’re bleeding.”
Lucy looked down at her hands.
“I don’t think so,” said Lucy. “It looks like I got whoever-it-was pretty good with my nails, though.” I lent her a tissue to clean it off.
“Did you see who it was?”
“No. He was behind me.”
“I’ll call the police,” I said. “Whatever you remember might be enough to catch this guy.”
“No,” said Lucy. “Dr. Patrescu insists that we take care of things ourselves. ‘No police,’ he always says. It would take them forever to get all the way up to the campus anyway. I just need to get to the infirmary. There are guards there, and I’m good friends with the night nurse. They can keep an eye on me.”
“Are you sure?”
“Absolutely.”
“We can always find more rats, but you’re indispensable.”
Lucy smiled, but I still didn’t sleep that night. Foyle didn’t help much either.
~
“Foyle? Is that you?” I said after digging my phone out of my lab coat pocket. The clock display read 3:36 AM.
“Sorry. Forgot the time difference.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said. I told him what had happened to Lucy.
“I keep telling both of you not to work so late. It might have been one of the locals. Some of the people out in those woods aren’t right in the head.”
“But what if it has something to do with the rats that were poisoned?”
“I don’t know,” said Foyle. “Listen. Dr. P. told me to clear his schedule. He said something about your lab. Do you know what’s going on?”
“Unless it’s about the attack, I don’t have a clue. Oh, wait. Of course. Lucy told him about the blood substitute. We had a breakthrough.”
“Well, the last time Dr. P. was this worried we had hazmat teams crawling over Woodcross for a week, so be careful.”
“Look. About Woodcross, I’m starting to think there’s more going on…” I began, but when I realized that I was talking to dead air, I hung up. After three hours of fitful sleep, I rolled out of bed, threw my lab coat on over my pajamas and set out for the quad, hoping to catch Lucy at the infirmary and offer to walk her to the lab. Before I could get there, I saw flashing lights by the entrance, and I knew something was wrong.
~
“Don’t come any closer,” said one of the guards. He wore a leather jacket and a gray wool cap, and he stood on the concrete steps that led to our building. The lights from an ambulance reflected off the windows.
“But what happened?” I asked.
“Not sure yet,” he said, exhaling a mix of cigarette smoke and water vapor. “You go back to your room now. It is not safe out here.”
The doors to the lab opened, and four men in white coats hustled a gurney down the stairs. The guard deftly sidestepped them, but I, in my stupor, scrambled out of the way in the last instant. I saw just enough of Lucy’s face to recognize her before the doors slammed shut. Her skin was the color of gristle, and her lips like chalk.
The guard loitered by the front steps for another fifteen minutes before he padlocked the front door and left. I climbed in through a first floor window and looked around. The first thought in my mind was that she shouldn’t have been there at all, especially that night.
The lab didn’t look much different than I remembered. The rat cages were empty, and the dry-erase board was blank, but petri dishes, flasks and micropipettes still cluttered the desks. The log books were gone. As I walked around the central island toward the sinks and fume hoods, I saw blood spatter on the wall. Beneath it, blood dripped from the countertop by the sink. I stepped over two congealing pools, avoiding a crimson boot print, and picked up an envelope that was white except for a few red speckles. The writing on the letter inside matched dozens of Post-its and labels all over the lab.
The work we have done has meant more to me than anything else. I wanted to believe I had a chance to make a difference, Through all the setbacks, I never lost hope. But hope is gone now, gone so quickly that I can’t find anything to replace it. There is an evil in Woodcross, one I have been blind to for years, I cannot allow my work to feed that evil, so I have destroyed everything: the logs, the blood substitutes, and every last one of the subjects. It was the only way to be sure.
Lucy.
I tried to imagine the scene: Distraught at realizing some grievous error, she… what… destroyed the notebooks and slit her wrists? Out of habit, I tidied the stacks of Petri dishes, piled the used glassware in the sink and returned her microscope back to the cabinet. I stopped when I noticed a slide with a clum
p of reddish brown material. When I brought the microscope back out and had a look, I saw what looked like leukocytes and erythrocytes tangled up in cellulose. The cells I could identify were distorted and misshapen in ways that couldn’t be the result of contact with the elements. It was stranger than any porphyria I could imagine.
I knew it wasn’t Lucy’s blood on that slide. I looked through the samples in the cold room and found a crumpled-up tissue streaked with red. The precise rectangular hole in the middle matched the size of the sample on the slide. Now I knew why Lucy could not have rested in safety when the chance to identify her attacker was right there on the tips of her fingernails. It must have been a blow to find Dr. Patrescu’s blood, after all she had done for him.
The futility of everything I’d done at Woodcross sank in. I went to grad school in the first place because I thought it meant more than washing out test tubes, filling out forms and prepping samples for some computer to analyze. Lucy’s blood substitute had real meaning, and with her gone there was nothing I could do to keep it from slipping away. I had visions of tracking down Dr. Patrescu and forcing him to admit what he had done. I imagined SWAT teams breaking through those shutters at Woodcross. I imagined the helicopter, the helipad and the whole damned manor crumbling to the ground, but in the end what good would it do? I had folders with sketchy notes on Lucy’s last project, but who would believe me, without any published data? Who would fund a study when the only human trial wound up dead?
My plan was less ambitious and more immediate: to hop the fence, walk to the next town and phone in an anonymous tip on the way to the bus station. From there, I would head back home and forget Woodcross existed. I gathered some clothes, my notes, my passport, and a hundred dollars in cash. As I stuffed them into a suitcase, someone knocked on the door.
~
“It’s Foyle,” said a voice outside.
