From Darkness Comes: The Horror Box Set (145 page)

“Crazy as a bad-word bugbed,” Starlene said. “Yeah, I heard it.”

Starlene moved away from the doorway, spoiling Bondurant’s opportunity to seal her in a temporary tomb. He was too drunk, and in the darkness he’d lost track of her. He brushed his knuckles along the walls, scouring the flesh on the rough masonry. He sucked at his bloody wound.

Shuffle, shuffle.

Recreation hour in the ward of the damned.

“What’s going on, Mr. Bondurant?”

What’s going on was the whole world was turning upside down, and Starlene couldn’t see it because she was blinded by purity. This was Ground Zero for Armageddon, the first testing ground of faith.

The blackness was a solid thing, pressing like a suit of wet clothes, forcing itself against his eyeballs and his eardrums and winding through his mouth and wiggling into his lungs and—

I’ve half a mind.

Her.

The one with the scar.

She was with them, somewhere in this darkness, making words go into his head even when he
DID NOT GODDAMN WANT THEM IN THERE.

Bondurant had lost track of Starlene. He reached an intersection of corridors and listened for her footsteps. All he heard was the soft shuffling. He was having a hard time concentrating with all those voices in his head. The rows of cells were invisible mouths that whispered feverish, foul things.

White, white room
—

—my wife is a hat—

—tin foil gods and metal scarecrows
—

—artcrimesexpill—

—seven nine eleven thirteen—

He tried to steady his breathing so he could locate Starlene in the dark, but he was panting too hard from anger and fright and confusion and things going in and out of the walls.

The blank canvas before him became a softer gray, then a fuzzy suggestion of shape.

Then she appeared.

She glowed softly, naked, her face shadowed, the rest of her suffused in a yellow light. She was the whore of Babylon and the mother of all creation. A promiscuous virgin with a hell of a stage show.

“It’s a miracle,” Starlene said from somewhere to his left.

In the light cast by the woman, Bondurant saw Starlene leaning against the wall in the doorway of a cell. But he gave her only a glance, because this nude, see-through woman demanded all his attention.

This woman’s beauty made even the wholesome Starlene pale in comparison. Bondurant took a step toward the woman. His mouth opened, and looking into her throat was like looking down the corridor, a long blackness stretching to a deeper dark. The woman was smiling, but her smile had far too many teeth in it.

A time to sow and a time to reap.

The words oscillated around the bone of his skull like a ringing alarm clock dropped down a well.

Crazy as a bugbed bugbed bugbed
.

The woman held out her arms as if she wanted to embrace him, and despite his fear and awe, Bondurant felt a stirring in his groin.

And now Bondurant realized what was odd about the woman, because his eyes had traveled all over her figure, he’d played with her curves in his mind, licked his lips as he imagined his hands on her, his palm stinging her softest flesh as he meted out the punishment every woman deserved. Last of all, he looked at her eyes.

Eyes that saw nothing.

Because the sockets were empty. The makeshift skin around them bore runnels carved by fingernails.

Her voice came like icy rain:
The better to see you with, my dear, precious, sweet Little Red Riding Hood
.

She opened her palms and revealed her loose eyes, red strings of flesh dangling from them.

Starlene screamed.

Bondurant choked on a prayer, sprayed a geyser of vomit on his shoes, and stumbled backward in the dark.

The Miracle Woman smiled, too many teeth and not enough eyes.

Kracowski glanced at the computer screen and checked his meter. “A hundred-and-twelve milliGuass,” he said.

Paula, standing behind his chair, rubbed his shoulders. “It’s only numbers, honey.”

Kracowski knew he might as well be talking to the wall as talking to Paula, but he’d talked to walls too often lately. “These anomalies are not what I expected. Synaptic synergy therapy is designed to heal my patients, not cause them to have subjective experiences.”

“Well, the ESP data is strong enough to convince even the biggest skeptics. And everything’s subjective, honey.”

“Except the truth.”

He cleared the meter, changed its coordinates so that it detected another area of the basement. “Look at these spikes. The electromagnetic fields created by my equipment should be consistent. These are all over the place.”

“So? If it bothers you, just ignore it.”

“I can’t ignore it. These readings aren’t consistent with my theory.”

“Change your theory, then.”

Kracowski pushed away from his desk. “I was so sure I was right.”

“You
are
right, Richard. You just found more than you bargained for.”

He went to the two-way mirror and looked into the darkened space of Room Thirteen. He had helped those children. He had aligned their minds into harmonious states. He had restored them, made them whole, healed what the religious-minded such as Bondurant called their “souls.”

But souls didn’t exist. The human body was a complex bag of chemicals, mostly water. The brain was nothing but a series of electromagnetic impulses. Thoughts and dreams were merely a random alignment of those impulses. Things like wishes and hopes and love and fear were specific patterns of neural activity, a battery of switches thrown on or off. Never mind that the number of possibilities were nearly limitless. “Nearly” was the key word. Everything had its limits.

Money.

It didn’t buy happiness, and Kracowski knew this truth better than most.

Love.

That heralded and holy set of specific mental disorders, praised by poets throughout human history, chased by the weak who expected a miracle cure for their individual shortcomings, embraced by the masses as something worthy of sacrifice. If only they knew that Kracowski could create a series of electromagnetic wavelengths that aligned the synapses so that the subject experienced all those physical and emotional sensations: quickening of pulse, widening of pupils, flushing of skin, racing of blood to erogenous zones.

Fools fall in love, indeed. Research had already shown that those newly in love displayed the same synaptic patterns as those diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder. A rose by any other name.

Faith.

Faith had its own built-in limit. Faith was the answer to its own question, a circular logic that satisfied simpletons around the world. No matter whether they called it God or Buddha or Allah or Moon or Krishna. No matter whether you met it on your knees or from the heights of a Himalayan monastery or in any of the modern brainwashing facilities they called temples, churches, and synagogues. All religious faith was selfish because all believers ultimately sought to save themselves, not others.

Science.

Ah, that was the one that might not have limits. Or the one discipline that might impose them. Truth. Knowledge. Facts. Hard evidence and data.

That was almost something worthy of worship.

Except when the facts suggested that the entire truth would never be understood.

Which was happening right now.

Telepathy and clairvoyance were theoretically possible, if one believed that the brain’s electrical impulses weren’t confined to the flesh. He could accept a world of mind intersecting with the world of space and time. But the existence of a soul separate from the body smacked far too much of metaphysical idiocy.

He’d been given a starting point, the abstracts and data that McDonald’s people had compiled over the previous decade, the backlog of Dr. Kenneth Mills’ experiments. ESP was producible as an innate ability that could be induced with a balance of force fields and systemic shock. But these latest experiments had skewed toward the spiritual, the unprovable, the unbelievable. And that bothered him. That scrambled the harmony of his own synapses. It misaligned his neural patterns and disturbed his sure vision of the universe. It pissed him off.

“What are you thinking about?” Paula said.

He tapped his forehead against the mirror a couple of times. “I’m thinking of you, dear. What else?”

“I love it when you talk that way.”

Her perfume cloyed the air. If only she knew that the natural pheromones in her perspiration were far more sexually alluring to the human male than perfume’s scent. Still, she satisfied a need, and she was only temporary. And he could always air out his office after she left.

“Hey, what’s this?” she said.

She pointed to one of the video screens that monitored the equipment in the basement. The picture was greenish and fuzzy. The Trust had coughed up a fortune for the remote electromagnetic resonance system, spending millions on superconducting magnets and advanced circuitry, but the infrared video system was low-budget. All Kracowski made out on the screen was a soft blur of movement.

“No one’s supposed to have access to the basement,” Kracowski said. “That equipment is delicate.”

“I thought McDonald had some guards down there.”

“They’re under orders to stay away from the equipment.” Even as he spoke, he remembered McDonald’s words as the equipment was being installed.
Orders change
, McDonald had said, the ex-Army bastard that he was.

Kracowski peered at the screen. One of the figures separated from the green dimness and backed away.

“Bondurant.”

“What’s he doing down there?” Paula asked.

“He’s the only one on staff with a key.”

“Look. There’s somebody else down there.”

Kracowski cursed a god he didn’t believe in. The magnetic pull of a regular MRI scanner was about 20,000 times the force of the earth’s magnetic fields. It was strong enough to rip a pacemaker right out of a patient’s chest, which was why MRI patients got a thorough going-over before being slid into the tube.

And the equipment in the basement generated a field a hundred times stronger than that, at least in certain localized points. The magnetic field was strong enough to hum and created static electricity and microshocks. If the anomalous fluctuations continued, they could create a serious danger by pulling hardware from the walls. A loose piece of metal might fly across the room and pierce one of the tanks of liquid helium. The helium wasn’t explosive, but an accident could set Kracowski’s work back by several months, not to mention drawing the interest of a lot of busy bodies in the state Social Services Department and the county planning department.

And Bondurant’s playing around down there, probably half-drunk or worse, was a disaster waiting to happen. He was already disrupting the careful alignment of the fields. The man might have iron or steel items in his pockets which could destroy valuable equipment. If the liquid helium or liquid nitrogen tanks were pierced, the basement would go into an instantaneous, though brief, deep freeze.

Kracowski opened his desk drawer and got a key and his flashlight. There were three ways to access the basement from inside the building. One was from Bondurant’s office, another via a locked door in the main hallway labeled
Custodial Staff Only
.

Kracowski went to his bookshelf and removed his copy of H.G. Wells’s
A Short History of the World
. He reached into the space on the shelf and fumbled for the hidden button. What had seemed clever when McDonald’s people were installing it now seemed like a spy movie trick, unnecessary and overdone. He pressed the button and an adjacent bookshelf swung forward, revealing the metal door and the third way downstairs.

“Hey, that’s cool, Richard.”

Leave it to Paula to be impressed by largesse. He unlocked the door and switched on the flashlight, playing its beam down the dark stairwell. Cobwebs draped the doorway, and he brushed them aside as he headed into the gloom. The stench of must and mildew rose from the dank basement. He glanced back once and saw Paula waiting at the door, her silhouette stooped with tension and excitement.

Kracowski slipped down the stairs to the narrow hallway that branched off from the main basement corridor. He splashed his beam into one of the cramped cells. The cells were a hellish testament to the mental health field of the 1940’s, when terror and pain were more common psychiatric tools than nurturing and synergizing. Frontal lobotomies, pharmaceuticals, insulin-induced comas and electroshock were the glorious toys of those spearheading the charge into a brave new world of the mind. Too bad the psychiatrists hadn’t recognized and dealt with their own delusions of grandeur.

Too bad they weren’t as flawless as Kracowski.

He heard shuffling in the darkness of the main corridor. He switched off his light and listened.

He recognized Starlene’s voice immediately.

“Hello? Who’s there?” she called from the darkness.

He should have figured Starlene would start snooping around. She’d already asked far too many questions about his experimental treatments. With her simple religious faith, she automatically assumed that all cures that weren’t divine in origin were the result of unspeakable dark powers. That’s why he wanted her to submit to the treatments herself, so she might understand what he was trying to accomplish.

And perhaps she could be “cured” of the need to submit to an invisible authority and beg forgiveness for imagined sins. If not cured, perhaps she’d be frightened enough to keep her mouth shut.

And, if worse came to worse, her memory could be erased.

“Come out where I can see you,” Starlene said. Her voice echoed down the corridor. Bondurant must have fled the basement, because Starlene’s footsteps were the only sound besides the hum of the equipment.

Kracowski eased down the hallway and waited. The air was thick with the stirring of ancient dust, and he fought back a sneeze. That’s when he saw her.

At first he thought it was Starlene coming down the hall toward him. Then he realized the woman wore no clothes.