From Darkness Comes: The Horror Box Set (154 page)

Mills grinned at Kracowski like a fanged jack-o’-lantern. “He’s right. He’s always been right.”

McDonald took the paper from Kracowski’s hand and scanned the data. “Nothing too unusual here.”

“How long?” Mills asked.

Kracowski checked the computer. “Ten minutes, fourteen seconds.”

“I have to confess, Dr. Kracowski, maybe you have made some advances. Under my formula, Freeman would be dead by now.”

Freeman had been lucky to survive in the first place. Mills’s experiments went too far. All because Mills relied on emotional turmoil in the subject. All because Mills needed that final shock to push Freeman over the edge. Mills’s case files on his son were filled with enough trauma to fill a dozen mental wards. And those sessions in which he force-fed his own sick thoughts into Freeman’s brain—

“Stop at eleven minutes,” McDonald said.

Kracowski rankled at the agent’s self-righteous tone. As if McDonald had even the vaguest understanding of the work. At least Mills understood that discovery was more important than the resulting effects of that discovery. McDonald only wanted something he could show his superiors, a weapon so abstract that it could never be applied toward military objectives. Knowledge had never served a positive political purpose, and wisdom had rarely intersected with knowledge, at least where political power was concerned.

“Why do you want to stop at eleven?” Mills turned back to the window, savoring the torture etched into his son’s face.

“Supposed to be a mystical number,” McDonald said.

Kracowski pressed his lips together to keep from speaking and watched the digits blink upward.

“What do you suppose he’s seeing?” Mills said.

“For his sake, I hope it’s the future and not the past,” Kracowski said.

Not alone. Not alone. Not alone.

Freeman peered into the dwindling gloom. Vicky was in here somewhere, trapped in this same gray deadscape. Her voice came to him again.

“Triptrap, Freeman. Reach out to me.”

How could he reach with arms that were heavy as mud? The ghosts had dissolved and the darkness pressed in on all sides. He wanted to speak but his throat was clogged with black oxygen. Then he remembered he didn’t have to speak. Not out loud, anyway.

“Where are you?” he thought.

“The Green Room,” came Vicky’s voice. “They made us go to our beds.”

“I saw them. The dead people. The Miracle Woman—”

“I know. I was with you the whole time.”

“How did you do that?”

“My brain works better now. Even when I’m not in Thirteen. They must have really juiced up the machines and maybe it’s spilling over or something.”

“How am I supposed to get out of here?”

Freeman turned his head, looking for any sort of dismal sunrise in this land of midnight. He hoped he wasn’t dead. He didn’t want to spend another second in this place, much less an eternity. A hum drifted from the unseen distance, growing louder, as if a monstrous swarm of insects was approaching.

“Vicky?”

The sky broke apart and became part of the swarm. The darkness spun, the horizons narrowed, a frozen wind arose from somewhere below. Freeman shouted, but his words were lost in the surreal tornado. As he felt his body being lifted, he grabbed for the darkness that had seemed so solid only moments before.

He found himself on the cot in Thirteen. His stomach fluttered and his head throbbed. He opened his eyes to a blurred world of soft light and moving shadows. People stood around the bed, and for a moment, Freeman thought they were ghosts, and he closed his eyes again, but then someone loosened the restraints.

He heard a voice that sent an icy stake through his heart, a voice that was worse than dead, a voice that sent him shivering and made the memories spill from that dark space under the bridge.

“Hey, Trooper.”

Dad
.

Freeman’s eyes snapped open as if awakening to escape a nightmare, only to find the nightmare was there in the flesh, standing at the foot of the bed.

Dad.

The goddamned troll.

Out of the loony bin.

How had he found Freeman?

No, the question wasn’t
how
he had found Freeman. The question was, what had taken him so long? Because Dad had promised to finish the job. After Freeman had testified in the judge’s private chambers, Dad had stood up in court and screamed at his son, frothing at the mouth as if to verify a self-diagnosis of sociopathic schizophrenia. And Freeman had known, even as a six-year-old, that Dad never lied, at least not about enjoying his only son’s pain.

“I’m going to triptrap you to death,” Dad had shouted that day six years ago, and now Dad repeated it so softly that only Freeman heard. He added, “Because we both know what really happened to your mother, don’t we?”

“What was that?” Kracowski said.

“A secret joke between Freeman and me,” Dad said. “Right, Trooper?”

“Trooper” had been Dad’s pet name for Freeman, usually used in public when Dad was pretending to be affectionate. But Freeman knew the real meaning behind the name, because Dad loved to torment him with it. Like the time he’d hooked Freeman to the machines in the closet and said, “I’m melting your brain like I melted your toy soldiers. Because you’re a trooper. You’re going to be a soldier in a different kind of war.”

Freeman rubbed his wrists where they’d chafed against the restraints. Kracowski checked Freeman’s pulse, then shined a penlight into each of his pupils. Freeman stared back at the light, hoping it would burn him blind so he wouldn’t have to look at his father.

“No outward sign of neurological damage,” Kracowski said.

Dad pushed the doctor away. “Well, we’ve got plenty of time yet, don’t we?” He stared down at Freeman, his chin sharp, his teeth too white and narrow, his eyes bulging.

And then Dad triptrapped him, just like the old days, only Freeman was smarter now and Dad was a little out of practice, and Dad’s strange broken thoughts bounced off the shield that Freeman had thrown up, and Freeman felt a surge of triumph.

I can knock down the troll. He’s not going to eat me for his dinner.

But the euphoria died as Dad cracked the blockade and roared into his mind like a hurricane of knives. To the bystanders, Kracowski and Randy and McDonald, it probably looked like Dad was leaning down to kiss Freeman on the forehead. But Dad was really getting close so that his frontal lobe could spew its poison through the bone of Freeman’s skull. And Dad let loose as if he’d been storing up his anger for years while locked behind bars in a Dorothea Dix psychiatric unit, pretending to slowly get better, acting as if the medication was working and believing that, yes, Kenneth Mills had committed a terrible wrong, but now Kenneth was all better, and with the benevolent blessings of the government shrinks who’d pronounced him sound and sane, Kenneth Mills was now ready to pick up where he’d left off.

And ready to see just how much damage Freeman could withstand.

Dad’s words tumbled forth in fractured phrases. “How dare you . . . thought you’d escaped me, didn’t you, you little bastard? Kracowski’s trying to steal my thunder . . . but we both know
I’m
the only one who can control minds around here. The crazy idiots . . . babbling about spirits and the deadscape . . . hey, you really
do
think you saw ghosts . . . you’re a chip off the old block, aren’t you, Trooper? Madder than a headless hatter.”

This was just like the old days, when Dad hadn’t been afraid to juice himself in the interest of science, with Freeman as the star pupil. Kracowski called it SST, but Dad hadn’t needed a fancy acronym. Dad had simply called it “triptrap.”

“How is he?” McDonald said.

“He’s perfect,” Kracowski replied.

“No, I mean, did we learn anything?”

Dad turned his attention from Freeman to Kracowski. Kracowski shook his head at McDonald. “I can’t tell yet. My treatment is designed to work in an emotional vacuum. I’ll have to see how the subject responds to this disturbance.”

“Disturbance?” Dad screamed at Kracowski. “You’re the one that’s disturbing. I was right on the threshold of a breakthrough. All you’ve done is come in and stir the stew, but it’s my recipe.”

Freeman sighed with relief because Dad was out of his head for the moment and he could breathe and think again.

Dad pointed a finger at McDonald. “And your guys could have freed me a lot sooner. But, no, I guess I was disposable because you found Kracowski and figured one scientist was as good as another. Only you found out that you needed me because Kracowski here has these little moral qualms and will only push the buttons so far—”

McDonald crossed the room and backhanded Dad across the cheek. The blow was so intense that even Freeman felt it, the raw pain flickering across his mind like a lightning strike.

Dad fell to his knees, rubbing his cheek where he’d been struck. Dad smiled. “Not bad. With a goon like you in charge of this operation, maybe the Trust will take over the world yet.”

McDonald stared at the mirror, expressionless. “We tried to protect you, Mills. But murdering your wife was something even the Trust couldn’t bury, not the way you did it.” His eyes darted to Freeman. “Right there in front of witnesses.”

“It was in the interest of science,” Dad said. “I had to keep pushing him. And you have to admit, even though Kracowski’s had a little success, Freeman still outshines them all. He’s a regular triptrapper from hell, the world’s first workable spirit spy.”

“Results will speak for themselves.”

Freeman tried his tongue. “Sorry. I don’t know what your game is, but I’m not playing anymore. You can shock me until my brain fries, like those eggs in the anti-drug commercials. But you’re never going to break me.”

Freeman sat up and glanced at Dad, then looked back at McDonald. “
He
couldn’t burn me out, and Kracowski doesn’t have the slightest idea what it’s all about.”

“Synergy,” Kracowski said. “Tapping the brain’s potential.”

“Wrong,” Freeman said. “It’s about control.”

McDonald’s lips tightened in a movement that would have passed for a smile on someone else’s face. “Control. The boy’s not so dumb after all.”

“Except you got it wrong, too. You can build bigger bombs and faster planes and deadlier chemicals, but there’s one thing you’ll never control.”

Dad had risen and leaned over Freeman again. Freeman turned away but Dad was already up from his troll hole and standing on the bridge, eating Freeman’s thoughts.

Dad straightened and laughed. “The little trooper thinks you’re not after ESP at all, McDonald. He thinks you’re wanting the
ghosts.
Is that why they call you secret government types ‘spooks’?”

McDonald said nothing. Randy waited by the door, arms crossed. Kracowski looked down at the floor as if trying to picture the strange spirits that swirled in the mists of the deadscape.

Freeman waited until the shock of Dad’s invasion faded, then reached out for Vicky. Anything was possible. The mind was an incredible machine, so incredible it could even be a weapon. But right now, all he wanted was one slim bridge between himself and somebody he could trust.

He triptrapped, but his thoughts couldn’t reach beyond the room.

Vicky had abandoned him. Despite her promises. But, then, hadn’t he learned a long time ago that you couldn’t count on anybody?

He was alone again, except for the mad, dead voices that still whispered from the corners of his soul.

Starlene wanted a shower to blast the creepy feeling from her skin. But she couldn’t face the bathroom. No matter what Randy said she hadn’t seen. No matter that ghosts didn’t exist and that only God had the ability to inspire visions. God’s visions were fire and thunder, not feverish thugs and bloody corpses.

She went into the little bedroom she shared with Marie. Due to their rotating shifts, the two of them rarely stayed here at the same time. They both had places offsite, so the room was only sparsely decorated, and didn’t reflect their true personalities.

Starlene picked up a book, something thick and dull by the Southern novelist Jefferson Spence. She couldn’t concentrate on the meandering sentences, and after the author’s second clumsy allusion to snowy fields of cotton, she closed the book and looked out the window.

A soft mist hung over the lake. She half-expected to see the old man in the gown drift up from the water. Clouds had begun to gather over the mountains, pushed by a slow wind. The shadows of clouds crawled across the slopes, resembling great black beasts. The air was heavy with moisture.

A knock at the door caused her to drop the novel. It barely missed crushing her toe. She paused in the hall, making sure the knock hadn’t come from the bathroom. No, it was at the front door.

Bondurant nodded at her when she opened the door, then staggered into the room before she could ask what he wanted. His face was blanched and his hands trembled. He adjusted his glasses on his long nose and licked his lips.

“You look terrible,” she said.

“Like I’ve seen a ghost?”

“Worse. Like maybe a mirror.”

“Can I sit down?”

“That depends. Are you ready to tell me what’s going on?”

He shrugged and looked behind him, then peered at the corners of the ceiling. “Have to be careful. You never know who’s listening.”

“Are you looking for invisible people?”

“Bugs.”

“We sprayed for those last month, remember?”

“I’m not talking about those kind of bugs. I’m talking electronic bugs.” Bondurant coughed, and the odor of liquor filled the room. Purple welts beneath his eyes gave him the appearance of a punch-drunk insomniac. Starlene didn’t know how much faith she could put in anything he said.

“Got anything to drink?” he asked, checking out the countertops in the kitchenette.

“Aren’t you on duty?”

Bondurant sighed and sat on the edge of an armchair. He didn’t remove his coat. “What happened when Kracowski zapped you this morning?”

“You know. You were there.”

He waved one hand in the air. “I saw him press some buttons and flip switches. I saw you in Thirteen. I saw you gasp and scream and stop breathing. And then it was over. But I want to know what
happened
.”