Before I Wake (9 page)

“I saw a body in one of the float tanks.”

Her voice sounded certain. She knew from experience that you had to sound certain, if you wanted results. Even if you weren’t certain you had to fake it. And Fury wasn’t telling her anything new. In fact, she was afraid her mental state was worse than he could possibly guess.

“Dead?” Fury asked.

“I don’t know.”

Fury pulled out a cell phone, punched in a number, and lifted the phone to his ear. “I need somebody to check the basement of Cottage 25. The float tank room,” he told the person on the other end. “I have someone here who claims to have seen something, maybe a person, in one of the tanks. Check it out and get back to me.”

He pocketed the phone. “What were you doing in Cottage 25?”

Something stupid
. “Hanging out with the cool kids.”

He gave her a pained look.

“I don’t know. What am I doing in Madeline? What am I doing here, talking to you? Does everything have to have a reason?”

“It was a simple question.”

“Your patronizing attitude is annoying.”

“I don’t mean to be patronizing.” His expression was blank, his voice calm. FBI. He was so good at that. She used to be good at that, too.

Things changed.

“We were trying to find Noah,” she told him. “He’d gotten lost inside Cottage 25. Typical kids’ stuff. I went along to keep an eye on them.” She shrugged. “It didn’t work out very well.”

Fury’s phone rang.

He answered it.

A brief conversation, followed by, “Thanks.” He disconnected and gave Arden a satisfied look. “All three tanks are empty.”

Of course they were—
now
.

“It was probably Noah in the tank,” Fury said. “The whole thing was a prank meant to scare the hell out of his girlfriend. You found him instead.”

He could be right.

“Talk to Noah,” Fury said. “Maybe you can get him to come clean.”

“I’ll do that.”

Paper crinkled as she slipped off the exam table and stood up. A wave of dizziness hit her, and she had to wait a moment for it to fade.

Nothing seemed real. She felt like a bystander in her own life. Someone watching the show. But then, life was a series of parts. Some you played better than others. “Maybe I should look at the tanks myself.”

She didn’t want to. The thought of going back there made her feel queasy all over again. She wasn’t sure she could do it, and she found herself hoping Fury would talk her out of it.

“Arden. Listen to me. You heard the doctor. You need to rest.”

The mask he wore slipped a little, and his expression seemed to show real concern. Part of the act.

She imagined herself as an Olympic judge, holding up her number. She gave him a ten.

“Let it go,” he said. “You’ve had a head injury. You’re confused. It was dark. You’re looking for things that aren’t there. Looking for things that don’t exist.”

She would forget it. The choice seemed both right and wrong. It brought relief, but also a nagging unease.

The air around them smelled like the disinfectant the young doctor had used to scrub her scalp. Her arm felt tingly and hot from the tetanus shot. It would be sore as hell tomorrow.

Fury was watching her. Very closely.

Blue, blue windows behind the stars.

Who had said that? Neil Young?

Yes
. Along with other things she could no longer remember.

She had the sudden, strange notion that Fury wanted to touch her. She stepped back.

She had to be careful. She had to watch what she said. And who she said it to. She even had to watch what she was thinking. Especially around Fury. He was reading her mind right now. He was in her brain, strolling around, whistling.

I should leave. I should get my stuff and get the hell out of here.

She smiled at him.

He smiled back.

Don’t trust anybody.

Not even herself. Especially herself. • “Give this a little time,” Fury said. “You just got here. What do you have to go back to?”

“Why do you keep saying that? I had a life.”

“You were running.”

“I wasn’t running. I was trying to
endure
. There’s a big difference.” She examined his face closely. “You’re afraid of them.”

His brows drew together in puzzlement. “What are you talking about?”

“The tanks. I saw it in your face when I said I wanted to see them.”

“That’s nonsense.”

But he was suddenly nervous. It wasn’t blatantly obvious, but she was still good at reading people, and Fury was nervous. “You’ve been in one, haven’t you?” she probed.

He rubbed a hand across the back of his neck. He stared down at his feet.

After a few moments his head came up and he looked directly at her. It suddenly seemed as if the doors between them had blown wide open. She could see all the way to his soul. And what she saw was fear. Raw fear.

She suddenly knew where he’d gotten the gray hair. Not from a cadaver’s hand, but from an isolation tank. He’d done time just like she had.

The doors slammed shut.

“The tanks are relics of the past,” he said with conviction. “They don’t use them anymore. Nobody uses them.”

Framed covers of
Time
and
Newsweek
hung on the wall of Dr. Harris’s office.

Dr. Phillip Harris, Ph.D. and Head of Psychiatric Research at the Webber Institute, Wins Nobel Prize for Medicine.

Arden leaned close to check the dates on the magazines. Three years ago. The recognition had been for his studies in isolation therapy. Which was why the FBI had looked him up in the first place. They’d wanted the best.

But then, the guy who’d invented the lobotomy had also won a Nobel Prize.

It was a widespread belief that psychiatrists became psychiatrists because they themselves had wounded psyches in need of repair. Arden believed that to be true, but there were also the researchers, the doctors whose egos told them they were the sanest people on the planet. Those guys were after something other than an answer to their own phobias and anxieties. That’s where Harris fit in. He was looking for acclaim from his peers and the world.

She’d been waiting fifteen minutes.

She sat back down in the leather chair across from a massive mahogany desk. Two minutes later she got up again to examine a photo on the wall.

The photo was of Harris’s research team, dwarfed by the old hospital behind them. Most of them wore white lab coats. What looked to be Harris’s wife and two daughters stood nearby.

The office door opened.

Arden’s heart pounded and she swung around.

Harris entered the room in a hurry, closing the door behind him. “Arden.” His voice was full of warmth, sounding like a favorite relative. “It’s so nice to see you.” He walked to her, pulled her into his arms, and hugged her firmly. He smelled the same—like some kind of woodsy aftershave.

He released her and motioned to the chair she’d just vacated while he took a seat behind the desk and placed a manila file in front of him.

She hadn’t forgotten him.

Tall and thin, about forty-five, the hair at his temples turning gray. Not a handsome man, but a man with presence and energy.

People said he never slept. It had always been a big rumor, anyway. That and the infatuations his patients developed over him. But she’d never held it against him. Patients developed infatuations for their doctors all the time.

Her own feelings about Harris were mixed. At first she hadn’t liked him. He’d seemed too cold, and much too tidy. But he’d grown on her. He still seemed too in-control and in-charge, which she found annoying, but there was also something comforting about stepping back and letting somebody else take care of things for a change.

And he probably knew her better than she knew herself. After all, he’d been in control of her very thoughts.

“How’s the head? I heard you had some trouble.”

“I’m fine.” Had Fury blabbed to everybody?

“Running around Cottage 25 in the middle of the night. What was that all about?”

“Kids’ stuff. Foolish stuff.” She didn’t want to talk about it. It had been a stupid thing to do.

“I’m glad to see you, but I’m going to tell you outright that I’m against your being here,” he announced. “I told Agent Fury that. I want you to know it, too. You’ve been pushed as far as you should be pushed.”

“I’ll sign a waiver absolving you of all responsibility,” she told him.

“It’s not just myself and the project I’m concerned about, Arden. It’s you. I care about my test subjects. I care about my patients.”

“Don’t worry about me. I’ll be okay.”

He shook his head and mumbled something about, “Damn FBI,” then asked, “Any return of memory?”

The bleaching process had been similar to the original indoctrination, except that a recorded voice repeatedly instructed her to forget the horror she’d witnessed the day of her parents’ death, while also telling her to let go of everything she’d previously learned in the tank. A post-hypnotic suggestion taken to the extreme and amplified with drugs, sensory deprivation, and isolation.

“A few flashes here and there, but nothing significant.”

“Which is what you wanted.”

Arden leaned forward. “Dr. Harris. Did any of the previous subjects ever talk about—” She stopped. If she told him she sometimes heard Albert French in her head, he might not allow her to return.

“About what?”

She sidestepped. “The tanks… How much they hated the tanks.”

“All of them. But we don’t use the tanks anymore. Don’t worry about them. Everything has been modified and streamlined.”

“I don’t care. I just want to catch whoever killed my parents.”

He looked worried. “
You
are my main concern,” he said.

She waved a hand—an air-erase of his words. “You know what I mean. Don’t hold back. That’s all I’m saying.”

He clasped his hands over her file. “You know what I want? I want you to leave here. I want you to go back to New Mexico, where you’ve started a new life.”

She gave him a small smile. Apparently he and Fury weren’t working from the same page. That was good.

“You aren’t going to go back, are you?” Harris asked.

“No.”

“I can refuse to let you return to the program.”

“I have to do this.”

He let out a resigned sigh. “I knew I couldn’t talk you out of it. We’ll start slowly. Monitor you closely. I’ll try not to push you harder than you should be pushed, but we’ve had to accelerate the pace. FBI request.”

“Since I’ve been here before, the shorter time frame may not matter.”

“I hope not, but I have reservations about it, too.”

“I just want to start. I just want to get going.”

“Which you’ll be doing. When you leave my office today, you’ll meet with my assistant. She’ll give you a schedule and fill you in on the details. You’ll complete some paperwork. Tomorrow you’ll have routine preliminary tests. If everything checks out, we’ll start you day after tomorrow. In the meantime and during the indoctrination, we want you to exercise. Eat right. Get a good eight hours of sleep each night.”

“No problem,” she said, even though she couldn’t promise eight hours.

“We’ll begin with the de-patterning phase. Empty you out before we feed you new information. After that, we’ll give you a refresher on French.”

She swallowed.

“If someone is copying French, then it makes sense to reintroduce him to your conscious and subconscious mind,” Harris continued. “After that, you’ll view a videotape of the most recent copycat crime. The FBI hopes you’ll be able to tie the two together and come up with a solid profile.”

She nodded. She knew the drill.

He opened a desk drawer and pulled out a transparent plastic jewel case containing a DVD.

The case had her name on it.

“Your final interview.” He handed it to her. “Before the bleaching.”

Her mouth went dry and her heart began to slam all over again.

“It’s not an assignment. Not a part of what we’ll be doing here. You don’t need to watch it. I just thought it was your right to have it. Never watch it if you don’t want to.”

Could she make herself pick it up? She wanted to knock the interview off the desk as if it were a spider. Instead, she grabbed the DVD and got to her feet.

When the alarm went off the next morning, Arden dragged herself out of bed. She dressed in gray jogging pants and a T-shirt and sweatshirt, topping them off with a soft, black stocking cap.

As if she could go more than a mile, she thought wryly.

She shuffled to the elevator.

There was a time when she would have sprinted down the stairs, bounced out the door, and hit the jogging trails. That seemed like another life. It
was
another life.

Her eyes weren’t awake; she had trouble seeing the elevator buttons. She poked and the door creaked open.

The alarm had been set for six a.m., meaning she’d gotten three hours of sleep.

Once outside, she took a few tentative steps. From old habit she brought her hands up, elbows at her side. One foot here, one foot there.

Oh yeah. Almost as natural as walking.

She could see her breath. She liked that.

The increase in oxygen cleared her head. Suddenly she was enjoying herself, enjoying the strength of her body, the movement that was
better
than walking.

Why had she quit doing this? It felt so good.

A footfall sounded behind her and Noah appeared wearing a sweat-soaked gray sweatshirt and black wind pants.

“I forgot how good this feels,” she said once he was even with her. “If a person could fly, I think it might feel like this.”

“Don’t push yourself too much the first time.”

Good advice.

Her lungs burned and sweat poured down her spine. She was tempted to keep going, to do another mile. And maybe another. Instead she slowed her pace.

Approaching the main building, they decelerated to a brisk walk.

Arden’s body suddenly felt stiff and awkward, as if it were meant only to run and not walk. The sun was higher in the sky, burning off the dampness in the air. Sunlight fell on cold surfaces, causing small curls of steam to rise.

“I wanted to tell you I’m sorry about the other night,” Noah said. “I don’t know why I did it. It was stupid. Franny just makes me mad sometimes, talking about how I have it so easy. It drives me a little crazy.”

They stopped a few yards from a set of heavy double doors.

“I have to ask you something,” she said. Standing next to him, Arden realized how small and rather frail he seemed. “Were you in one of the float tanks?”

He tugged off his striped stocking cap. Dark, damp hair stuck up in every direction. Steam rose from the top of his head. “I heard you saw something in one of them.” He pulled up the hem of his gray shirt to wipe his face, then let it drop. “It wasn’t me. I swear. Why would I do something like that?”

“To scare us. To scare Franny.”

He grinned, then shook his head. “I was too scared myself.”

“Did you see anything unusual? Hear anything?”

“Nothing. Not until you fell and made a buncha noise. That’s how I caught up with everybody.”

Had she imagined it? Imagined that she saw someone in the tank? The more time that passed, the more she was beginning to think Fury was right. She’d been confused. Or maybe it had been a crisis apparition. It was a documented fact that under high levels of stress or agitation, people sometimes saw things that weren’t there.

“We’re having a picnic this afternoon,” Noah said.

“Tomorrow we start on a new study, and this might be our last chance to have fun for a while. Plus, the weather’s supposed to be nice for a change. You should come.”

“Thanks.” She gave him a smile, feeling somewhat relaxed for the first time since arriving on the Hill. “I might do that.”

Arden spent the next several hours being screened for TAKE. When they were done drawing blood and testing her reflexes and mental skills, she walked across the grass toward Building 50 and her room.