by Krystle Able
“Kill him then or leave him down there to rot. We don’t need him anymore anyway,” Barb replied.
“No!” I shouted. “No, you will not kill him!”
Barb and Dr. Neumann both snickered.
“Let me guess; you’re the only one who is allowed to kill him, right Ivy?” Barb spat at me with contempt.
“Lucky!” I insisted again.
“Look, girl; I don’t give two shits what your name is. This fucking experiment has been taken up my entire goddamn life, and I’m ready to conclude the fucking thing, so shut your mouth and let’s go. Leave Carter to Dr. Neumann,” Barb insisted and tried to grab me.
“Never!” I shouted and backed up right into Dr. Neumann who was now on the steps behind me.
“You need to come with us Lucky,” the doctor said with a gentle prod to my back with the metal rod I had dropped earlier.
“No,” I said again.
The doctor prodded me, harder this time with the metal rod.
“Go!” He snapped as I winced and took a step forward.
“Lucky?”
A groan came from the bloodied heap on the floor. I looked over my shoulder to see Carter trying to sit up. Blood dripped down his temple, and he held the back of his head. He groaned again and fell to the floor. His eyes were rolling back in his head, and I knew he would lose consciousness again.
Dr. Neumann turned around and stepped off the bottom staircase. He rose his foot and positioned his boot over Carter’s head. Carter’s eyes fluttered open, and recognition struck him.
His eyes were wide, and he gasped, “Robert?” right before Dr. Neumann stomped hard on his face.
I watched the action and felt nothing. I wasn’t angry or sad. The blood poured from his face and caused the puddle that was already under his body to grow. I watched as a large wet spot grew at his crotch. He had lost his faculties. My brother was dead.
“Let’s go!” Barb snapped and grabbed my arm again.
I let her pull me off the stairs this time and back into the kitchen. A Hispanic woman with long dark hair pulled up into a tight bun stood next to the breakfast bar with a syringe in her hands. Barb shoved me towards her, and I stumbled forward. The woman, Dr. Santiago I knew, pushed the needle into my shoulder and I collapsed into her arms as everything went black.
***
“Lucky? Are you awake now? Ivy?”
Dr. Santiago’s voice drew me out of my sleep.
My eyelids fluttered open, and as the scenery became less hazy, I realized I was still in McCourt Manor, in Dr. John’s study. The fireplace was turned on and crackling. I was tied to Dr. John’s leather desk chair, and all three of my captors sat on the couch in front of me. Cloth was tied around my mouth, stopping me from speaking or screaming.
“Ivy?” Dr. Santiago asked me.
I shook my head “no.”
“Lucky then?”
I nodded.
“I’ve convinced my colleagues to explain to you what is going on. I feel like you deserve to know before the next steps are taken,” she explained.
The other two—Dr. Neumann and Barb, both sat on the couch with the arms folded and eyes narrowed. I knew Barb never liked me, but I still had no idea what their involvement was in all of this and why Dr. Neumann would want to hurt me. Fuck me maybe, like he did the other patients, but not hurt me.
“Lucky when you were brought to the McCourt’s it was because you were exhibiting signs that, well, I’ll be frank and to the point, I guess. Lucky, at eight years old you were already showing the warning signs of becoming a serial killer. You did very, very bad things as you well know.”
She paused as though she wanted a reaction from me even though I couldn’t very well give her one. She sighed and continued.
“Dr. McCourt, Dr. Neumann, Dr. Fields—you know her as Barb, and I was part of a group that was studying personality disorders in children. Ester McCourt was a registered foster parent and was able to work with social services in Minnesota, Missouri, Iowa, and Illinois, to find troubled young women and bring them to the manor. The girls Ester found were ones that would never be missed if they disappeared. They were hard to place because of their behavior issues, and the states readily gave them up, transferred them between agencies, and eventually, they would end up here at the manor.”
Dr. Santiago took a deep breath and stood up from the couch. She squatted beside my chair and tucked the hair in my face behind my ear.
“Dr. John didn’t want you at first, but Ester convinced him, and the rest of us, that you were special even though you were so young. None of the other patients had shown such extraordinary darkness and contempt at such as young age, and we would have years to fix you, she told us. I am so glad we believed her,” she said with a smile.
Dr. Neumann stood up then.
“Santiago is leaving out the most important things,” Dr. Neumann interjected. “Lucky, you were a prodigy. Your mind is unlike anything we have ever worked with before. If number 20 hadn’t made it out of the woods, the case study would’ve been done years ago.”
I remembered hearing on the news after I was in a new foster family that one of the girls that had just aged out of the program had fled the manor through the woods and was picked up by a truck driver on the highway. She died a few hours later in the hospital, but her error in judgment was the thing that had gotten me ripped away from my parents and Carter.
“Yeah, that one still chaps your ass doesn’t Robert?” Barb teased. “Letting that girl go is what got Dr. John convicted and killed.”
“Don’t you fucking talk to me like that!” Dr. Neumann shouted at Barb.
Both were standing and facing each other. Their rivalry was clear, and Dr. Santiago just rolled her eyes at her colleagues before she turned her attention back to me.
“Lucky, the research you were a part of was not just on serial killers and personality disorders in childhood. As you grew up and the project evolved our objective changed. We had successfully diagnosed your borderline personality disorder and possible schizophrenia with antisocial personality disorder. We had never had a patient so young with so many different mental health issues, and we were excited to work on you, but Dr. McCourt had a theory he had been working on in graduate school that involved triggering dissociative identity disorder. Do you know what that is?” Dr. Santiago asked me.
I shook my head no again. The towel they had tied around my head made my mouth dry, and my throat was parched. All I could think about was getting something to drink, but I tried to concentrate on my Dr. Santiago was telling me. She had the answers I needed.
“Dissociative Identity Disorder is characterized by at least two distinct personalities within the same person often accompanied with massive gaps in time and memory for the separate personalities. People with dissociative identity disorder have problems with detachment, identity, emotion, and perception. Dr. McCourt believed that D.I.D. was not something people were born with, rather something that everyone’s mind is capable of as a coping mechanism for trauma. He wanted to prove his theory, using you, our special, remarkable little patient whose mind was strong enough to endure all the different mental illnesses you had.”
Dr. Santiago pulled the towel down from my mouth, and I drew in a deep breath before I started coughing.
“Where’s Carter?” I asked.
Barb laughed, “That’s what you’re worried about? That bastard tried to kill you; you know that right?” she laughed again.
“Yeah well I tried to kill him back, so I guess we are even now,” I sneered at her.
“That’s enough ladies!” Dr. Neumann barked.
“He’s dead,” Dr. Santiago said quietly.
I felt nothing at this realization. My brother was dead, and I felt nothing.
“So, what’s next?” I asked knowing that I would probably die soon.
Dr. Neumann untied my hands, and I grabbed my wrists and rubbed them.
“What’s next is we continue the experiment,” he s
tated.
“Who are you?” I asked him, remembering how Carter and Barb had both referred to him as Robert. “Did Carter know all of you?”
“When John died, and Ester disappeared, Carter came to live with me. Myself, Barb, and Elena had never met Carter before he came to live with me, but we knew you very well. I’m surprised you don’t remember us,” he said coyly.
“Is that what you were trying to do with my memory regression therapy? It was never about remembering my birth mom and childhood; it was all to see if I could remember you, Barb, and Dr. Santiago?”
The pieces were starting to fit together. I had been a part of an experiment as a child, and the doctors that were behind the scenes had come out of the shadows once Dr. John was dead.
“Yes, we wanted to see if you could remember us, but we also wanted to continue John’s research. He believed that he could condition your mind before the triggering event to create two separate entities. One personality would be sweet, the other devious. His theory was that he could use pain to construct a personality that was, for lack of a better word, evil, and he believed he could use love and mindfulness to push the darkness down and cause someone sweet to emerge. Just before he was arrested, he was able to trigger Ivy. She was supposed to be the sweet one, and the goal was always to integrate all three personalities to become a reasonable person, but the longer we worked with you, the more it seemed like Lucky and Ivy were integrating, but the other personality was not.
John thought that by triggering D.I.D. in patients, he could cure other mental illnesses by creating a whole person. The entire time you were in Lochnar, our therapies were tailored towards integrating you with Lucky and Ivy.”
“I am Lucky,” I told him as more confusion swirled around in my head.
“You are Lucky right now, just like you were Ivy for nearly a decade, but you weren’t born as either of those people,” Dr. Santiago interjected.
My eyes widened as I realized what I was being told. I wasn’t real. Ivy wasn’t real. Who was I then?
Barb stepped forward then and shoved a piece of paper in my hands. I looked down and saw it was a birth certificate.
The name of the child was Victoria Lane McCourt, and the mother was Ester Elizabeth McCourt, father unknown. How could this be? Mama Ester had another child after Carter? Why didn’t he know about this? Where was the girl?
“Lucky, your real name is Victoria. Ester had an affair when Carter was a toddler and John was doing research with a team overseas. When John came home and found her pregnant and past the point of abortion, he kicked her out of their home, and she and Carter went to live with Ester’s sister. Ester had the baby and her sister, Anne, kept it. Ester told John the baby had died during birth and he allowed her and Carter to come back home. Six years later Anne was murdered during a drug store robbery and you were placed with social services. Your mother, Ester, she secretly kept tabs on you through the years, and when she found out that you were exactly the type of patient her husband was looking for, she decided it was finally time to bring you home.”
Her words sank in, and all I felt was numbness. Mama Ester was my mother; Carter was my half-brother. I had fucked my brother. My real brother, not my foster brother. I felt the bile rise in my throat, and I bent over and heaved all over the carpet.
“I know it’s a lot,” Dr. Santiago placed a hand on my shoulder.
“Wait…wait a minute,” I said coughing. “Mama Ester and the social workers told me that my mother abandoned me while I was at Catholic school. Why wouldn’t she tell me she was my real mother?”
“We didn’t find out that Ester and Anne were sisters, well, they were half-sisters, until you were well into the program. Once we were able to bring Lucky out, telling her that her birth mother was dead was part of the program,” Dr. Santiago explained.
“At Lochnar House, you, you made me run. Was that part of the program too?”
I knew the answer before Barb spoke up.
“The experiment never really ended. Everything that has happened in your life, including the time you spent in jail, it was all orchestrated by us,” she said with an evil grin plastered across her smug face. She enjoyed her job in a different way than two doctors. She was sadistic.
Dr. Santiago stepped in front of Barb and began talking again.
“Lucky, that experiment is over, but we have another one we are going to begin today,” she explained. “We want to bring out Victoria, but we think there’s only one way to do that. Lucky, it’s time to find your mother. We are going to get Mama Ester.”
The End
About the Author
Krystle Able is a multi-genre author who grew up and still lives in Central Illinois. She is married with three children and attends the University of Illinois in Springfield where, as of 2019, she was finishing a degree in English Literature. When Krystle isn't writing she can be found at one of her children's sports events or in her home office where she also works as the senior writer for TypedIt, a content creation company owned by her husband, Andrew. To keep up with all of Krystle's news and releases, follow her social media links:
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www.facebook.com/krystleableauthor
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Table of Contents
Lucky Number 23
Dedication
A Letter to the Reader
Part I
Chapter One
Chapter Two
(Untitled)
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Part III
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Ninteen
