From Darkness Comes: The Horror Box Set (153 page)

Kracowski’s voice descended from the hidden speaker in the ceiling. “We would never do anything to hurt you, Freeman.”

He flipped a bird at the mirror. “Hitler was sincere, too. And those guys who dumped the tea in the harbor. And God. And all the other bastards back through history who messed with innocent people.”

“I’m sorry you feel that way. I thought the last treatment would have helped you overcome your anger.”

“Oh, I’m not angry. I’ve never been better.”

Randy rubbed Vaseline on Freeman’s temples and attached the electrodes. Then he tapped the flesh on the inside of Freeman’s elbow, drew out a syringe, and injected an iridescent, syrupy substance.

“Seriously,” Freeman said. “You don’t have to sell me on the idea. I
believe
I’m better.”

“No, you don’t.” Kracowski took on that familiar tone of all the shrinks who had ever subjected Freeman to their utter sincerity. The tone of smugness, rightness, absolute certainty. A tone that God Himself might use if He ever bothered to speak.

“Do we need the straps?” Randy asked the mirror.

“How about it, Freeman?” Kracowski asked.

“I promise to behave.”

“We only want you to be better.”

“I know. You and all the other brain police. Did it ever occur to you that I’m happy being a suicidal manic depressive? And if you just want to help me, why do you make me take ESP tests?”

Randy put a hand on Freeman’s chest and forced him onto his back, then unreeled the canvas straps from beneath the bed. Freeman stared at the ceiling tiles, trying to picture the strange gizmos and wires of Kracowski’s machines. The walls must be filled with them, too, the electronic bloodstream of the SST equipment. All connected to those big tanks and computers in the basement, which was the heart of the mad doctor’s monster maker.

While the brain lay behind that mirror.

Freeman craned his neck to stare at the cold glass as Randy attached padded cuffs to his ankles and wrists. Clint Eastwood would never let them see a flinch. Clint would think of something clever to say, as if living or dying were pretty much the same to him.

“What do you have in mind this time, Doc?” Freeman said. “Want me to bring back a little souvenir from the deadscape? Maybe your Momma?”

“Freeman, you need to relax in order for the treatment to be effective. This is important.”

Randy made a final check on the restraints. He pulled a hard rubber mouthpiece from a drawer and pressed it into Freeman’s mouth. That meant a major shock was coming. Freeman waited until Randy was gone and the door had closed, then pushed the mouthpiece out with his tongue.

“Who you got over there with you, Doc?”

“Just a few . . . friends.”

Freeman tried to think of something wise-assed to say, like “With friends like yours, who needs enemies?”, but that was too corny, and besides, the Vaseline made his skin itch and his chest ached and he realized he’d never been this scared in all his life.

Not even when Dad had locked him in the closet for two days.

Not even when Dad cornered him with the blowtorch.

Not even when he came out of one of Dad’s treatments and carried the razor into the bathroom where Mom—

No, that never happened.

Then his thoughts turned to broken bits of alphabet as the juice hit and the lights dimmed and his ears crackled and buzzed. The scream didn’t come from inside his throat. Instead, it clawed its way from the center of his brain, writhing like a fanged worm, chewing up his hippocampus and thalamus and vomiting pain against the curved plates of his skull.

His bones turned to air and his eyes clamped shut but still he saw the blackness beyond color, a black that had never existed in nature, a dark solid mass that crawled into his lungs and smothered his heart and seeped into his bloodstream.

Then the darkness eased, giving way to a mottled gray, and people walked toward him across the land of smoke and sorrow.

The Miracle Woman led them, a Moses of the damned, naked and blind and beautiful. All those shuffling behind her, the stooped, the wild-eyed, the scarred, were just as lifeless, impossible things, spirits which clung to bodies that by rights should have long been abandoned.

Freeman tried to yell at the doctor to shut off the goddamned machines and get him the hell out of there. But he knew, through some instinct older than consciousness, that this world was connected to the other,
real
world only by the human bridges that were subjected to SST. Those who could read minds beckoned the ones brought from the dead by Kracowski’s weird machines. Freeman was cut off from the real world until Kracowski pushed his little God buttons and made everything normal again. He was all alone now, as alone as Clint in the Italian desert scrapping for a fistful of dollars.

He shifted himself, the straps gone, the mirror gone, Thirteen gone. He found he could move as if swimming in thick water, though he could see through his own skin and he weighed a thousand pounds. His feet were lost in the strange mist that covered the deadscape like an ever-shifting skin. He tried to run but the Miracle Woman raised a hand, and though her eye sockets were torn and empty, the mouth wasn’t scary at all now. The mouth was sad.

Freeman looked past her at the pale and aimless legion. He saw the old man in the gown, the one who had shuffled past him on Freeman’s first day at Wendover and had recently walked on water. A stooped woman nodded constantly, as if her head were on a spring, gaunt fingers yanking her long hair. A thin, ebony-skinned man in coveralls bit his fingertips. One of the ghosts, a man with a broad and blank face, did a dervish dance, clumsy despite his lack of substance. He, too, wore an institutional gown.

Freeman backed away, trying to figure out the laws of this new universe, commanding his transparent flesh to run. He wasn’t breathing, but still the air tasted of ash. Behind him the smoke stretched as far as he could see, and layers of gray clouds marked the seams of the sky. He reached up and the threads of his hand mingled with the deadscape.

He was part of the deadscape.

He was one of them.

Dead.

A member of that sick and shuffling crowd, those who wore masks of pain and hopelessness and confusion. Chained to their humanity, though being human must have been the most horrible punishment ever inflicted upon them. Not even death had released them from their agony. They might have walked the deadscape for centuries, but time had no meaning here, which would make it the cruelest death sentence of all.

Could God be that cruel?

The ebony man bit off his pinky and spat it into the mist.

The dervish spun and his lips parted in a silent chant.

The Miracle Woman came nearer, her palm lifted in supplication, the torn eyeball in it staring at Freeman as if he owed her an explanation.

Freeman wanted to disappear, wanted to jump back into the real world with its ordinary despair. But his feet were part of the mist, his skin sewn into the fabric of this ethereal tapestry.

The Miracle Woman stood inches away from him, the silent ghosts looking on. She moved her hands to her face. Freeman tried not to stare at her white breasts and curves and the mysterious dark patch between her legs, and then she moved her hands away and her eyes were in her head and she blinked and smiled.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” she said. Except her lips didn’t move. This was a triptrap from the dead, and as creepy as hearing the thoughts of another human being was, it was nothing compared to the cold and sharp words that came from the Miracle Woman.

A triptrap from the dead.

And then more thoughts gushed through him,
into
him, a multitude of voices drove spikes through his soul. He felt their pain, he absorbed their bleak pity, he ate their psychic sickness:

“A white, white room in which to write.”

“The answers are hidden in the television.”

“I am a tree I am a tree I am a tree and I leave.”

“The voices in my head are telling me to listen.”

“Yes, doctor, I AM feeling much better, thank you.”

More voices, other phrases, scraps of broken sorrow.

And the Miracle Woman:
“You don’t belong here yet.”

Freeman wanted to shout that he’d never asked to be here, he’d never volunteered to have ESP in the first place, he’d never wanted any special gifts, he just wanted to be a normal boy with a Mom and a Dad and a dog and a house that didn’t hurt and no weird games with Daddy and no experiments and no Department of Social Services and no Wendover and no Kracowski and no Trust and no more people trying to heal him when he’d never been broken in the first place, but then the voices all ran together and he knew what it was like to be insane, because the deadscape was nothing if not a land of the insane, and it certainly wasn’t nothing because he was here now and it was real and this was everything and forever and God made a place like this for people who couldn’t help themselves or maybe insane people made God and the voices in his head and the triptrap dead and yes doctor daddy daddy daddy had a white, white room in which to write I’m feeling much better now television in my tree God is an antenna is a computer is a doctor I’m feeling much better now blade in my brain and cut out the bad part and shock me doctor I’m feeling much better now leave me alone daddy daddy daddy and why are you dead Mommy—

“You don’t belong here yet.”

The Miracle Woman’s words were softer now, caressing, and the other voices faded like a radio dropped down a hole and the smoke shifted, became more solid, and the ghosts dissolved, and the Miracle Woman smiled, and the gray gave way to the darkness.

And Freeman was alone in the darkness.

How long was forever?

But just as he reached for his chest, to see if his heart was still beating, another voice reached him like a golden shaft of light.

It was Vicky, and she said, “Told you you’re not alone.”

“My, how you’ve grown,” Dr. Kenneth Mills whispered to the dark-tinted window.

In the room on the other side of the glass, Freeman stared blankly at the ceiling, lips forming nonsense syllables as he struggled against the restraints. Kracowski watched Dr. Mills’s face. No protective parental instinct flickered on those intense features. The only resemblance between father and son was the wild panic in their eyes. At least Freeman had the excuse of an electric shock jarring his flesh against his skeleton.

Dr. Mills had no excuse. Unless madness was an excuse. Mills’s defense attorney had certainly used madness as a motive. So Mills had only served six years in a state psychiatric hospital, and McDonald’s people had enough pull to have him pronounced “cured” and fit for society. Even spouse mutilators were redeemable in the modern mental health care system. Kracowski wondered how Mills would fare undergoing an SST treatment.

Kracowski pulled a sheet of data from the printer and matched it against the graphs on the computer screen. Freeman’s EKG was strong, with a few aberrant spikes but nothing that would indicate serious damage. The magnetic signatures of the middle frequency ranges showed decreased amplitude, and the PET scan painted Freeman’s brain in warm colors.

“You’ve expanded my theory in dramatic fashion,” Mills said.

McDonald frowned from the corner of the lab. Kracowski pretended to study the data. Mills bent forward, his breath making a mist on the glass. The walls vibrated slightly from the machinery that created the calibrated array of electromagnetic waves.

“But your data is still unreliable,” Mills said. “You should have stuck to my ratios of magnetism to electricity. And you’ve totally ignored the subjective elements of my theory. Focus on the hippocampus, where you can scramble memories before they’re even made.”

“This wasn’t part of the deal,” Kracowski said to McDonald. “I thought you were going to give me more time, not bring in somebody to meddle.”

“I didn’t hear you object when we opened our files and gave you all the research,” the agent said. “Who else would have funded you and given you access to our brave little volunteers? Unloved children don’t exactly grow on trees, you know.”

“That was the hardest part for me,” Mills said. “Finding subjects. In the end, I found it was easier to grow my own.”

In Thirteen, Freeman writhed against the canvas straps, back arched, face contorted.

“Ooh, that must have been a good one,” Mills said. “I like the way you’ve increased the voltage in your version. And that risky bilateral shock is bound to wipe out some short-term memory.”

Kracowski’s hands tightened on the sheet of paper. Synaptic Synergy Therapy was
his
idea. Mills had made some advances in the ESP theory, adding classic brainwashing techniques to the delight of his backers, but Kracowski saw the mistakes Mills had made. Mills counted on subjective influence, human interaction, the power of suggestion. All smoke and mirrors.

Kracowski had reduced the process to pure science. Cold numbers and waveforms and logic. Quantum thought. Truth. He’d accomplished in only two years what Mills had fumbled around with for nearly a decade.

“Dr. Mills, I’m afraid I have to disagree with you,” Kracowski said.

Mills turned from the window as if reluctant to miss Freeman’s agony but compelled to win any argument, no matter its nature. “How can you disagree with
results
?”

“Your work was impure. Your adherence to traditional psychiatric techniques affected your outcomes.”

“Wrong, Dr. Kracowski. The Trust wanted ESP, and I gave it to them. Freeman. The first human in the history of the world to have the gift induced through scientific means.”

“But you were only able to generate it in one patient.” Kracowski looked over Mills’s shoulder at Freeman, then glanced at the clock. “I have a dozen case histories that prove my therapy has widespread applications. For improving the overall operation of the brain, not just focusing on a single power.
I’m
the one who is discovering scientific proof of life after death.”

McDonald watched as if the doctors were two bugs battling in a Mason jar. He finally spoke. “You forget who your boss is. That’s a mistake you can’t afford to keep making. We decide what is proof, and
we
decide who is alive and who is dead.”