Even though the machine was powering down, the shocks continued to zap Nellie. With each convulsion that wracked her body with pain and caused her back to arch against her will, she felt as through something like wings flapped beneath her back. She did not even begin to understand what this feeling was, but it filled her with primal terror. Nellie looked to the orderlies, to Nurse Ball, and to Dr. Braun. Each was looking right past what was happening. Her belly twisted and rolled, jutting this way and that to the sound of a deafening roar.
Nellie watched in horror, certain that something would push its way out of her stomach at any second, as the corporeal form of a little girl continued to float above her in amid the array of lights.
“MOMMY, NO! HELP ME! ALICE WANTS TO HURT ME!” the little girl screamed.
Dr. Braun glanced up, over the top of his spectacles. “Did you hear something?”
Each staff member in the room shook his or her head in reply.
“Hmm …” The doctor returned to finishing his record of the successful results in his notebook, dotting the period of his last sentence with solid stab at the paper. “She’s stable. Good. Let’s wrap this up for tonight. Take the patients to their rooms.”
“We can still end this …” Nurse Ball’s lowered tone was barely audible, but her glare spoke volumes.
“Why nurse, there is but one more phase to go and their treatment will be complete.” He turned, and with a click of his heels, exited the room and left the staff to clean up.
With one final jolt, the Dynamo gave in and powered down completely. Nellie arched, with a final spasm, and collapsed into sweet unconsciousness.
CHAPTER 19
Nellie’s mind drifted back to consciousness, yet she kept her eyes closed. If she opened them, she might be standing on a yellow brick road or in a long dark corridor, or perhaps floating in a watery tank or sitting on the cold wet floor of a cement wash room. Maybe this time it would be a gurney with leather straps aside a terrifying mechanical device or, best case scenario, the cold rock-hard cot in her room in the middle of a sanitarium.
She peeked through the slit of one eye — none of the above. This looked like the Seclusion Room in the very early morning. And, to her great surprise, she was no longer restrained. She slowly brought herself to a sitting position and took a general assessment of her being: bandaged leg to cover the cuts on her calf, freshly re-stitched cut over her eyebrow. Every muscle in her body ached, particularly in her back. Her skin was sore all over and covered in random purple and green bruises. And, most of all, she was so hungry and weak that she didn’t know if she could pull herself off the bed to stand up and move.
Nellie groggily surveyed the room. There was another pleasant surprise to accompany her freedom. A white plate sat on the side table next to the bed with a simple but generous meal consisting of a peanut butter and jam sandwich, a big red apple, and a cup of milk. She nearly wept, such was her relief. The sandwich didn’t even last a full five minutes, and the apple and milk were consumed so completely, that all that remained were the seeds and an empty cup.
Weariness flooded through her. With a full stomach, she slid her legs back under the thin blanket and gratefully, for the first time since her arrival at Bedlam, fell soundly and comfortably asleep before her head even touched the mattress.
Hours later, Nellie awoke to the sound of rustling paper. Nurse Ball was moving about the room, setting down some medication on a tin tray, along with more crayons and paper. “Time to take your next dose, Nellie.”
“What am I doing here? What happened to my room?” Nellie asked, sitting up and stretching.
“Right now, you’re susceptible to the slightest suggestion. We cannot have you mingling with the other patients until you’ve finished the final phase of your treatments.”
“Nurse, where’s Dorothy?”
“Instead of worrying about her, why don’t you focus on your own recovery? Here.” Nurse Ball tipped the small, white paper cup into the palm of Nellie’s hand and two round, blue pills fell out. Nellie obligingly dropped them into her mouth and swallowed.
“Let me see.” The nurse held Nellie’s chin up and checked her mouth. Nellie lifted her tongue.
“Good girl.” Nurse Ball nodded. “I noticed you lost your crayons and paper. Here’re more for you.” She glided over to the door and stopped. Turning back toward Nellie, she added, “I took the liberty of checking your records. Nellie Bly … reporter for the New York Tribune.”
Nellie’s eyes popped open wide. The jig was up — but how?
In a soft voice, Nurse Ball looked directly into Nellie’s eyes and said, “To find Alice, look under ‘L’ for ‘Liddell.’”
CLANK!
The nurse’s keys fell to the floor of the room as she stepped out the door and shut it behind her.
Dorothy lay on her hard cot in her locked room, her body completely inert from the latest round of drugs that the doctor had ordered. At the sound of a key scraping in the lock, she forced one eye open.
Dr. Braun propped her door open. She watched him through blurry, medicated eyes as he stood up, disappeared around the corner for a moment, and then reappeared, pushing a squeaky utility cart that contained an unfamiliar device.
“What are you doing?” she heard herself ask out loud, but, with her tongue feeling three feet thick, her voice sounded like that of a stranger.
“This, my dear, is what I like to call the Cognome Machine.” He positioned the cart next to her cot and picked up a strange headset fashioned of leather straps and metal wires. He connected it to her head and pulled up a stool so he could sit in front of her.
“Now, Dorothy. I want you to help me test this out. I want you to focus. Focus your thoughts and your dreams into this screen.”
He flipped a metal switch, and the screen sprang to life, glowing with black and white specks that jumped about like a salt-and-pepper snowstorm. Dorothy stared into the luminous display, unable to look at anything else.
“Share your thoughts with me. So I can share them with you … .”
As Dorothy stared groggily at the glowing screen, as if by magic, the black and white specks jumped frenetically until an image began to form.
Dr. Braun smiled as the familiar picture took shape — a sunlit farm surrounded by swaying grass and flocks of animals. Under a tree, fuzzy ducklings waddled unsteadily after their mother. “Fascinating!” he breathed, reaching out to touch the images moving across the screen. “Is there anything out beyond the farm? A forest, perhaps?” Just as his fingertips made contact with the glass, the images disappeared and the monitor displayed the jumping white and black specks once more. Dorothy was too mesmerized by the light of the screen to do anything but stare slack-jawed at it.
He gently removed the headset from Dorothy’s head and shut off the machine with the silver toggle. “You are making remarkable progress, Dorothy.” He roughly patted her shoulder. He packed up his odd machine and smiled, talking to Dorothy regardless of her ability to comprehend him. “Not even Alice made it this far!”
He stood and rolled the cart out of the room, shutting the door behind him. The lock engaged, and Dorothy heard the doctor’s soft chuckling grow more distant as he wheeled the cart away down the hall.
“I am not Alice…” she whispered.
In the depths of Bedlam, the vault door loomed in the flickering light of the old light bulb.
“Dorothy …” a gravelly voice whispered.
The door shook, dislodging small showers of dirt that rained from the ceiling and clouded the corridor.
After a quiet dinner and some time spent writing with her crayons and paper, Nellie got up and pulled the nurse’s keys out from under the mattress. The familiar sounds of lockdown echoed in the halls as Bedlam’s staff noisily secured the many doors and snapped the main switches to douse banks of lights.
She waited patiently. Tonight, thanks to Nurse Ball, getting out of her room would be much easier than it had been when she had employed the ha
irpins. When the staff had been safely out of the halls for a while, and the sounds of snoring filled the asylum, Nellie got out and tiptoed to Dr. Braun’s office. His office was dark and locked. Checking to make sure that no one approached, she slid each key into the office door’s lock. After several tries, the lock clicked, and she turned the doorknob.
Dr. Braun’s office was odd at best, even during daylight hours. Now she beheld it at night, when the creatures in the jars and the photographs of the doctor’s inventions were at their most unsettling. This time, however, she knew where she needed to go. With keys in hand, in no time at all Nellie had unlocked the doctor’s file cabinet and was thumbing through his files. “‘L’ for ‘Liddell’,” she mumbled, flipping through the hanging manila folders one by one.
GHBEISH. MOORE. TEO. JOHNSTON. LOPEZ. WHITE. HUPMAN.She flipped frantically back and forth through the files until …
LIDDELL.
This was it.
She pulled the folder out, locked the cabinet, and scurried over to sit in a patch of moonlight that shone through the window. She flopped the file open.
Here was a photograph of Alice. It was the same photograph that hung on the wall of the Teahouse in Oz. A petite, beautiful young girl, innocent and happy, sitting under a tree and petting the pleased, gray tabby cat that curled up on the white apron of her dress. She was still too far away for Nellie to see her face clearly, but this child differed markedly from the horror that now bore her visage.
The first of Dr. Braun’s notes was clipped to the right side of the folder:
I first met Alice in 1911. She was a severely troubled child, but gifted with tremendous psychic powers.
CHAPTER 20
The pale young girl sat in a dark corner of the room, unmoving.
“Yes, Dr. Braun,” a young woman in dress similar to the young girl’s spoke in hushed tones with one of Bedlam Asylum’s newer doctors. “I am her legal guardian. Sister, to be exact. My name is Edith Liddell.”
“Miss Liddell, if I may enquire,” Dr. Braun smoothed back his wavy black hair. “What is it about her imaginary friends that bother you so? A friendly rabbit in a waistcoat seems like a perfectly acceptable imaginary companion that she will most likely outgrow when the time is right.”
Edith’s face flushed. She cast a quick sideways glance toward the girl in the shadows and leaned toward the doctor.
“Em … it’s, well … em … they’re not normal imaginary friends, you see. She describes these … these creatures that … well, they just sound absolutely … mad. There’s a cat with glowing eyes that speaks utter nonsense and then just disappears. Well, all of it except its smile disappears. There are things to eat that make things grow big and small, and bottles of medicine that one can swallow to grow a snake-like neck. And there’s a man who has gone insane, the Mad Hatter I think he is. And, worst of all, there’s a Queen of Hearts who wants nothing more than to …” she leaned toward the doctor to whisper in his ear.
“Cut off your head!” the little girl in the corner finished, in a hushed tone.
Edith raised her eyebrows and nodded.
Dr. Braun nodded and jotted some notes on Alice’s file.
She was born in Oxford. Origins of her parents were unknown. She had one sister, named Edith, who committed her.
Alice was brought here because of night terrors — of a place she called Wonderland. But nightmares were not what made her special.
Alice sat in the common room with her favorite red and white chess set, a piece of drawing charcoal, and a small stack of paper. The picture in front of her depicted a tabby cat with an ear-to-ear grin and rolling, yellow eyes, floating in a tree at a fork in the road.
Behind Alice’s chair, a group of patients gathered and whispered. Their words were unkind, and their plans were to be cruel to her.
Alice spun around in her chair and glared at them. They instantly dispersed without another word. Only one inmate remained and stood her ground, returning Alice’s glare.
She was attuned to the negative emotions of other people. She could read thoughts. The inmates were all terrified of her.
Alice stood and approached the woman. She walked directly over to stand toe-to-toe with her, never breaking the stare, never blinking. The woman’s lip curled into a smirk as she looked down at the girl’s lanky, pale, blond hair hanging in her face. She put her fingers on Alice’s shoulders and gave her a rough shove. Alice stumbled back a few steps, but she recovered and stood her ground and clenched her fists at her sides.
Suddenly, the woman fell to her knees, grasping at her ears and wailing for help. Blood dribbled from her ears and spattered her gray gown as she scratched at her eyes.
Dr. Braun and a nurse entered the room as Alice padded quietly away from the woman, who was writhing on the ground in anguish. The nurse ran to the bleeding patient, but the doctor stood motionless, trying to assess what had happened.
When I first witnessed a psychic attack on an inmate by Alice, I did not understand what was before my very eyes. Yet the strange coincidences became too many to be written off as pure imagination. The staff began to talk. The patients took great pains to stay as far away from Alice as they could manage. It was not long before I reached the conclusion that this girl had a special gift, and the responsibility to explore the science and source of it rested solely upon my shoulders. This was the genesis of Project: Alice.
I designed and developed three special programs to control Alice's hypnotic powers. The first induction room was the Sensory Deprivation Tank. I experimented with sound, light, sleep, drugs, and every method of therapeutic treatment within my power to address mental instability. Having to explore unheard of abilities, this was all I could grasp at to try to determine the cause of her gifts. It took many weeks of careful scrutiny, but eventually it became evident that Alice’s greatest potential could be achieved when the conditions were set in low lighting.
Alice lay in the saline solution, floating peacefully in the dark as she dreamt. Dr. Braun and Nurse Ball stood in the Observation room, monitoring the young girl’s vital signs and making notes regarding the conditions of the treatment.
Alice twitched, her long blond hair floating out around her in the eerie quiet of the tank.
“Nooooo… ”the little girl moaned, her eyes moving rapidly left and right beneath her eyelids. “I won’t! I won’t!” she cried from another place in her dreams.
Nurse Ball gripped Dr. Braun’s wrist tightly. He looked up at her to exclaim his dissatisfaction at having his penmanship ruined unnecessarily, but the sight of a stool, which was rising up off the cement floor, took the words out of his mouth. Light bulbs all around the room popped and shattered one by one as the doctor and the nurse ran to the tank to free Alice from her nightmare.
We started by recreating the conditions of the first hypnotic induction. For this new experiment I created a machine. A mechanical tube was constructed housing a hard vacuum.
Alice lay strapped to a metal bed. Her rosy cheeks had turned chalky; her eyes had become sunken and tired. She wore a leather strap over her head, and a bite guard kept her mouth immobile.
Dr. Braun flipped a switch on the early version of his electrolysis machine, and instantly Alice’s face contorted with pain. She did not cry out, but instead made efforts to give as little feedback from the shocking volts as possible.
In this next experiment I introduce electricity into the brain, to eliminate any neurological inconsistencies. I also created a device capable of capturing brain wave patterns and interpreting them into light. This I labeled the Cognome Machine.
The Cognome Machine built from the vacuum tube device housed a phosphor-coated screen. This screen is bombarded with electrons creating an image of the patients thoughts, similar to the way in which Alice uses her powers to project her thoughts into the minds of the other inmates..
Dr. Braun tapped his pen against the paper and looked hard at the now sickly girl in the chair before him. She wore the headset t
hat connected her, by metal wires, to the screen filled with white light. All she could do is blink and squint in her best efforts not to see the light.
Dr. Braun yanked the headset from young Alice, tossed it to the machine, and stormed from the room.
After testing her thoroughly, I had to admit that Alice had made little to no progress. What I came to find out later was that Alice was purposely failing the tests.
Alice stood in her room with her back to the door. She held her arms out from her sides, her treasured caterpillar locket in one hand and her teddy bear in the other. Dr. Braun watched through the observation window as the teddy bear and the locket lifted from her hands and began to rotate around her in midair. The locket revolved in a gradual orbit about her until it reached the space in front of her eyes, where the lid flipped open and allowed Alice to see Dr. Braun studying her through the window. The doctor shuddered; Alice glared at him in the reflection of the locket, those sickly, yellow eyes focused on him with concentrated hatred.
He stepped backward into the shadows and left. With each step he took, his strides became longer and faster.
“Dr. Braun? Is everything alright?” Nurse Ball called out to the man she saw bolting down the hall.
She was playing me for the fool. Mocking me. Project: Alice was a success, but she had misled me into believing I was a failure. I took matters into my own hands.
The wan young girl pulled and fought against the doctor’s grip on her wrist as he strode toward a door marked “Hypnotic Induction 3.” She braced her bare heels on the floor to keep from passing the threshold, but Dr. Braun’s impatience won the match; he yanked her arm cruelly, pulling her so hard that she flew headfirst through the doorway and pitched forward into a metal door.
Bedlam Stories Page 13
