by Jeremy Bates
“I hear what you’re saying, Brook. Loud and clear. So let me explain. Less than twenty-four hours ago, Chad and Sharon were in fine health. They were experiencing hallucinations and such, but they were in fine physical health. Sharon took her life only this morning. I was sleeping. Guru woke me. I was too late to save her. And calling the police would not have saved Chad either. He had already done what he’d done to himself. I wasn’t aware of this at the time because he had his hoodie on. But he’d already done it.”
“You knew what you were going to find, didn’t you, Roy?” she said. “You knew about the so-called shadow consciousness?”
“Yes.”
“Was it present in your mice?”
“Yes.”
“And that wasn’t good enough for you? You had to trial the gas on humans?”
“We’re getting off topic here, Brook,” he said tersely. “What I’m trying to say is that if I’d shut down the experiment after Sharon’s death, and called the police, we wouldn’t be discussing this legal gray area right now. Sharon had signed a consent form. She knew there would be risks participating in the experiment. Unfortunately, she succumbed to one of those risks.”
“But she didn’t know the extent of the risks, did she? She didn’t know what happened to the mice, did she?”
“Just finish hearing me out, Brook. If I’d shut down the experiment, if I’d called the police, I wouldn’t have recorded Chad’s brainwaves, and the experiment would have been for nothing. Chad and Sharon would have died for nothing. So, really, all I’m guilty of, if I’m guilty of anything, is not reporting Sharon’s death right away. I’m not even sure that’s a crime. But why wade through murky legal waters at all?” He held up a hand. “Imagine this scenario. Chad and Sharon are still alive. They’ve…crossed over, for lack of a better expression…but they’re still alive and haven’t harmed themselves. I conduct the EEG on Chad, the experiment concludes, I turn off the gas, and we all go out and celebrate, you, me, Guru. When I return in the morning, I find the Australians in their current states. They reacted badly to coming off the gas when I wasn’t present. They tripped out and performed these horrific acts of self-harm when I wasn’t present. I can’t be held accountable for that. Nobody gets fucked over. End of story.”
Brook was silent.
Guru was looking at his shoes.
“All we’d really be doing, Brook,” Dr. Wallis pressed, “is postponing calling the police. Considering the implications of the Sleep Experiment, don’t you think postponing calling the police for a few hours is justifiable? I mean, I’ve just fucking proven that a second, repressed consciousness resides within every member of humankind—”
“Did you hear that?” Brook said.
Dr. Wallis looked at Chad.
“I swear,” she added, “I heard him say something.”
“I heard him too, professor,” Guru said.
“Impossible!” Wallis crossed the room and stopped before Chad. The Australian looked just as dead as ever. True, Wallis had never checked his pulse after injecting the paralytic drug into his heart, but there was no way anybody could have survived that.
There was no way anybody could have survived the paralytic drug injected in their spine either.
A cold ball of unease forming in his gut, Dr. Wallis checked Chad’s wrist for a pulse. He couldn’t find one—
“Ache.”
Wallis sprang back in surprise.
“See!” Brook said.
“How?” Wallis hissed.
“What did he say, professor?” Guru asked.
“I—I don’t know. ‘Ache,’ I think.”
“Ache?” Brook said. “Oh God, he’s in pain!”
Heart pounding, Dr. Wallis crept closer to Chad’s body. “Chad?” he said. “Buddy?”
“Aaaaaaaache…” He spoke the word without moving the lipless, crusty hole that had once been his mouth.
“This is impossible,” Wallis said. “It’s simply impossible.”
“Aaaaaaaaache…”
“Help him, Roy!” Brook cried.
Wallis realized Chad was still wearing the electrode headband. He slapped the keyboard to wake the monitor. Chad’s brainwaves appeared on the screen, only now…
“My God,” he breathed.
Guru appeared next to him. “What is it, professor?”
“It can’t be…”
“What is it?”
“It appears his shadow consciousness isn’t a shadow anymore. It’s his only consciousness.”
Abruptly Chad began convulsing, as if suffering a major seizure.
“Help him!” Brook cried.
“Don’t touch him!” Wallis ordered.
Abruptly, Chad let loose a scream so loud and shrill it sounded utterly inhuman. His head flailed back and forth. The cords in his neck stood out like knotted ropes. His hands clenched and unclenched while his body spasmed. Thick, sludgy blood oozed from his eye sockets and nose cavity.
Then the seizure, if that’s what it was, ceased. The Australian went still.
“Look!” Guru said, pointing to the monitor.
The fast scribbling patterns of Chad’s shadow beta brainwaves, indicative of an active cortex and an intense state of attention, had transitioned to slower, low-frequency shadow theta waves.
In the next moment, the brainwaves flat-lined.
◆◆◆
“He died!” Guru said.
“At the very moment he fell asleep,” Dr. Wallis marveled. “Fascinating!”
“Is he dead for certain this time?”
Dr. Wallis toed Chad’s body. “Seems like it.”
“What did you mean, professor, when you said his shadow consciousness was his only consciousness?”
“Exactly that, Guru. The person Chad had once been had died, and all that remained was the demon within him.”
“Could that be why the drugs did not have the anticipated effects on him?”
“I’d bet the farm on it. And I’d also bet he—or it—wasn’t saying ‘ache.’ It was saying ‘wake.’” It somehow knew we’d turned off the gas, and it knew it had to remain awake or else…”
They both looked at Chad’s body again.
“So the demon took him over,” Guru said, appearing appalled at this possibility. “It possessed him.”
Wallis nodded. “It makes one wonder whether all those cases of demon possessions and exorcisms over the centuries weren’t total bullshit. Perhaps the victims were in fact suffering from severe cases of total sleep deprivation…”
“Oh my, professor,” Guru said, shaking his head. “This is not good. This is not good at all. We have opened Pandora’s Box! When others learn of this discovery, when they too begin to play God…what if these demons get loose and take over? Not only a few individuals, but the entire human race?”
Dr. Wallis grinned. “Sort of sums up the Book of Revelations pretty nicely, doesn’t it?”
“I do not joke, professor! What have we done?”
“Calm down, man! What are you freaking out about? We haven’t opened the gates of hell. We’ve simply located where they are. Can you grasp that? We’re not villains! We’re heroes!”
The door connecting the sleep laboratory and observation room banged closed.
Brook had fled.
◆◆◆
Dr. Roy Wallis gave chase, stopping when the narrow hallway opened up before the inoperable elevator and the bathrooms. The primary staircase was tucked away out of sight to the left of the elevator, easy to miss. Conversely, the secondary staircase was around the corner to the right. The layout was disorienting, and during the early days of the Sleep Experiment, he had mistakenly taken the emergency staircase on a number of occasions—mistakenly because it brought you to the loading dock on the ground floor rather than the building’s main entrance.
Dr. Wallis had no way of knowing which way Brook had gone, and so he randomly chose the primary staircase. He emerged in the peach- and avocado-colored lobby. It was deserted.
A glance through one of the four glass entrance doors that gave to the breezeway didn’t reveal Brook fleeing into the night, which meant she had likely become disoriented herself and had taken the secondary staircase.
Wallis went west down the dark hallways, and much to his relief, he discovered the silhouetted shape of Brook in one branching corridor, coming his way.
Spotting him, she cried out in surprise, put on the brakes, and reversed, slipping out of sight through a doorway that led back to the secondary staircase.
Wallis followed hot on her heels, ascending the steps two at a time, his eyes already adjusting to the gloom. Although he couldn’t see her, he could hear her shoes slapping the cement steps above him, indicating she had bypassed the first floor. When he reached the second floor, he paused to listen. He made out her footsteps fleeing down a distant hallway. Knowing he could lose her amongst the maze of corridors, he resumed his pursuit, sprinting full speed, and he soon had her in his sights once more. She was fifty feet ahead of him, racing east down the long hallway that spanned the breezeway and connected the psychology and education departments.
She swung left and out of sight. He reached the same spot five seconds later and followed her into the library. Although the wooden cubicles and tables and chairs had all been removed, for whatever reason the demolition contractors had left behind the steel bookstacks.
Through the empty shelving—the books had long-ago been transferred to the Gardner Stacks and the Social Research Library—Dr. Wallis glimpsed Brook climbing the staircase to the mezzanine.
And he knew he had her, as those stairs were the only way up or down.
Slowing to catch his breath, he said, “Stop this, Brook! What the hell are you doing? I thought you understood? I thought you were going to play ball?”
“Leave me alone!” she shouted from above him. “Go away!”
He ascended the stairs. “I haven’t given up on you, Brook,” he lied. “We can still work this out. Just come back to the basement with me.”
“Go away, Roy! I’ve called the police! They’re on their way!”
A jolt of fear shot through him before he told himself she was bluffing. Her phone hadn’t been on her when he’d transferred her, unconscious, from the air mattress to Sharon’s bed. Which meant it had likely been in her handbag on the table in the observation room. And unless she’d had the presence of mind to grab it when she’d fled the sleep laboratory—which he doubted, because why not simply take her entire handbag, which would have been easier and faster—he had nothing to worry about.
When he reached the top of the staircase, Wallis spotted Brook at the far end of the aisle dividing seven or eight rows of stacks, swinging her head left and right, knowing she had nowhere left to go.
He started down the aisle toward her.
“Why are you doing this, Roy?”
“Doing what, Brook? You’re the one running around like a chicken with its head chopped off.”
“Please let me go.”
“Come back to the basement with me.”
She dashed to her right, and by the time he reached where she had been standing, she had put the full length of the steel shelf between them.
He started down the row; she started up the parallel one.
They met in the middle of the stack with only the steel shelving separating them.
They were so close to one another he could see the perspiration beading her shadowed face and the fear swimming in her eyes.
“Where’s your phone, Brook?”
She didn’t say anything.
“Didn’t you say you called the police?”
She stepped left. He stepped left also.
She stepped right. He stepped right.
“Nowhere to go, Brook.”
“I loved you, Roy.”
“Did you?”
“Why are you doing this?”
“All I’m doing, Brook, is preventing you from sabotaging my life’s work.”
“I haven’t done anything!”
“It’s not what you’ve done. It’s what you’re going to do. You’re going to betray me.”
“I’m not, Roy. I just want to go home.”
“If I let you leave, you’re going to go back to your little boathouse, snuggle up in bed, and forget you ever stopped by here this evening?”
“Yes!”
“Bullshit!”
He feinted left, as if to sprint around the bookstack. She stumbled right, yet when she realized he wasn’t coming for her, she went no further.
Slowly, confidently, he walked back down his row so he stood opposite her once more.
“How long are you going to keep this up, Brook?”
“I was wrong, Roy. I shouldn’t have questioned you. You couldn’t have saved Chad. I understand that now. I’m on your side.”
“Good,” he said. “Come back to the basement with me then.”
“Why?”
“So I can keep an eye on you.”
“For how long?”
Dr. Wallis clenched his jaw. The charade was up. They both knew the other’s real intentions. They were simply wasting time.
Wallis dashed to the left, deciding the only way to end this would be to chase her down, even it if took him a dozen loops around the shelving.
Brook ran right, but instead of rounding the end of the stack and coming up the other side, she scissor-stepped over the stanchion handrail that ran along the edge of the mezzanine.
“Brook!” he shouted, believing she would jump.
She didn’t. She lowered herself so she hung from her hands from the edge of the balcony, reducing the distance between her feet and the floor below.
She let go as he lunged for her.
She landed with a pained grunt, and even as he was deciding whether to do as she had done, or return to the staircase, she was scrambling to her feet and fleeing once more.
“Shit!” he said, and ran to the stairs.
◆◆◆
Guru Rampal knew he had made a grave mistake.
He should have done the right thing after Sharon had killed herself and called the police. By going along with Dr. Wallis’ plan to keep her death under wraps until the experiment concluded, he had committed himself to a path that, at every unexpected turn, had proved very difficult to leave no matter how much he’d wanted to.
And, ultimately, look where it had led him.
Sharon dead.
Chad dead.
Brook…
Yes, what of the pretty woman Brook?
If Dr. Wallis caught her, he wasn’t going to sit her down for a stern talking to. He had punched her in the face. He had imprisoned her against her will.
If he caught her…he wasn’t going to sit her down for a stern talking to, no…and he wasn’t going to let her go either.
He was going to kill her.
Guru couldn’t believe he was entertaining such a thought, but after everything that had happened over the last few hours, he knew it to be the truth.
You can’t let him do this!
No, he couldn’t.
Guru began racking his brain for options.
◆◆◆
When Brook reached the hallway spanning the breezeway, she knew she had two options: run or hide.
Her instinct was to run, but reason insisted Roy would catch her. He was faster than her; he knew the building better.
Besides, even if she managed to find her way outside, where would she go? Her car was parked a block away. Nobody was around to help her.
Her mind had processed all these thoughts in less than a second, and it offered up its counsel just as quickly:
Hide then.
She ducked into the second room on the left of the hallway.
It was empty but dark.
She went to the corner to the left of the door where the shadows seemed thickest.
She waited.
◆◆◆
When Dr. Roy Wallis emerged from the library, he expected to see Brook
sprinting down the long hallway, backtracking to the building’s entrance.
Yet it was empty.
He listened. Didn’t hear her footsteps.
Which wasn’t right.
Sound carried in the old cement structure, almost as though it were a giant echo chamber. Given she hadn’t gotten that much of a head start on him, he should still be able to hear her, whichever way she’d gone.
Unless she’d decided to go to ground.
Dr. Wallis started down the hallway, slowly, to mask his approach. Six classrooms lined each side of the corridor. He entered the first one on the left. Rain pelted the large windows that faced Hearst Avenue. Although his eyes had adjusted to the lack of light, they couldn’t probe the thick shadows that had pooled in the far corners of the room. Only when he’d moved all the way to the center of the room was he satisfied it was empty. He returned to the hallway and entered the first room on the right.
Empty too.
A greasy sensation built in his gut as he worried that Brook may have somehow given him the slip, that she was already outside, on her way to the police to blow the lid off the Sleep Experiment before he could tie up all the loose ends and hammer out a plausible story.
Bitch! he thought, spangles of red creeping into his vision. Should have finished her off when I had the chance!
He returned to the hallway and entered the second room on the left. A deafening clap of thunder shook the sky, and had Wallis not instinctively flinched and turned his head, he might not have seen Brook slinking out the door behind him.
He hurried quickly yet quietly after her, and he managed to close the distance between them to less than five feet before she either heard or sensed him.
Glancing over her shoulder, her eyes flashed wide and she issued a high-pitched yelp. She picked up her speed, no longer concerned about stealth—but it was too late.
His right hand snagged the back of her blouse, dragging her to a halt. She spun, swinging her arms. He got his own arms around her. She yelled and twisted and kicked her feet so ferociously he could barely hold on to her.
