by Joe Mahoney
“You told me before you don’t expect to find any fantasy worlds beyond the gate.”
“That’s right. I just meant I don’t expect to find anything contradicting the laws of nature.” She smiled. “Of course, it’s always possible there are a few laws we don’t know about yet.”
I returned the smile—for about two seconds, after which it dawned on me that I didn’t feel very well.
Sarah peered at me closely. “You look a little peaked. Are you all right?”
“Oh, nothing. It’s just that—just that —”
Just that I needed to lie down before I fell down.
I muttered an apology to Sarah—something about breakfast having gone down the wrong way—and retreated to the den, where I dimmed the lights and collapsed on the couch. My mumbled excuse was of course just a polite falsehood: breakfast hadn’t gone down the wrong way, since I hadn’t, in fact, had any breakfast or lunch at all, apart from two sips of coffee and a slurp of cola.
A knock sounded on the den door. Sarah, come to check on me? I struggled to sit up. “Come in.”
To my disappointment not Sarah but Rainer strolled in to hover over me. “Not feeling well?”
“I’m afraid not.”
“Dizziness? Nausea? Bit of a dry mouth?”
“All of the above, as a matter of fact.” I looked up at him. “Why do you ask?”
Rainer settled in my easy chair. “I’m afraid you’ve been drugged.”
“Drugged?”
Rainer scrutinized first one, then two of his exquisitely manicured fingernails. “You are being prepared for a procedure called Mind Snoop. I would have preferred to avoid such an unpleasant, invasive procedure, but sadly I do not have the luxury of time. Please do not take it personally. You are simply a victim of circumstances.”
“But I haven’t been administered any drugs.”
“She put it in the cola.”
“I beg your pardon?”
Rainer cleared his throat. “When you wouldn’t take the drug from Mr. Schmitz, I had Sarah put it in the cola.” He leaned back in his easy chair. “We will begin the procedure shortly.”
I sat stunned at the knowledge that Sarah had been my Judas.
V
Ignominious Procedures
Schmitz stalked into the den with the poise of an unusually ugly panther and slid gracefully onto the couch beside me. A whiff of his breath almost pushed my stomach over the edge. When I glared at him and moved over, he grinned.
“Thought you could fool me with that bit about the antidote,” I grumbled.
His grin evolved into a sneer. “And yet here you are.”
I let the matter drop.
“Could I have your attention please, Sebastian?” Rainer said.
Silence.
“Sebastian,” Rainer repeated.
“Perhaps we need headphones in here, sir,” Schmitz said finally.
“I had imaging installed just today. Sebastian!”
“I’m here, gentlemen,” a male voice said, from just to the left of where Rainer was sitting.
The voice had come from out of thin air. My interest piqued, I sat up, my nausea momentarily forgotten. Did Casa Terra have an invisible man in their ranks? Unlikely. Someone named Sebastian had turned on the holographic display for Sarah, I remembered. More than likely Sebastian was just an ordinary man in a control booth somewhere.
“What took you so long?” Rainer asked.
“What do you expect, asking me to multi-task with the pitiful bandwidth you’ve given me?”
“You’re a field unit, that’s all the DSP you get. Still, you should be concentrating as many resources on this session as possible.”
“You’re getting forty-seven percent of me, which is all I can spare. I wouldn’t complain. Downstairs in the lab, Giorgio is only getting twelve. All his samples are taking twice as long. He’s fit to be tied.”
“Serves him right, always monopolizing the network,” Schmitz said. “Okay, Sebastian. Record these proceedings under the filename ‘Wildebear interrogation,’ please.”
“Certainly, Mr. Schmitz.”
What was this about a lab in my basement? I slumped back on the couch. Ordinarily, I might have been impressed by all this technology, but just then all I felt was ill, and ill-used.
Rainer turned to me. “Mr. Wildebear, please tell me your full name and your age.”
I had already decided not to comply with anything the two men asked of me. I intended to resist with every fibre of my being, every ounce of my strength. In the end what I wanted did not enter into it. My mouth opened of its own accord, and I spoke. It resembled regurgitation, this manner of speaking, except that instead of the contents of my stomach, out of my mouth tumbled words.
“Barnabus Jehosophys Wildebear,” I retched, doubling over as the words muscled their way out of me. “Thirty-nine years old— oh God in Heaven—.” So much for just words tumbling out.
Afterward, spittle clung to my chin and I could not stop my hands from shaking.
Rainer swore. “Good Lord, is that typical? Seems a bit much, don’t you think?”
“Oh, I’ve seen lots worse than that,” Schmitz said. “Sebastian?”
“So far so good. Tell you what—I’ll display Mr. Wildebear’s charts so you can monitor his rate of physical deterioration as the questioning progresses.”
It was Rainer’s turn to frown. Two holographic charts appeared in the air, one each before Schmitz and Rainer. I was having trouble focussing properly and could not quite make out any of the information on the charts.
Rainer shifted in the easy chair to face me better. “All right, Mr. Wildebear. What is your relationship with the boy named Ridley Doucette?”
“I’m his uncle,” a voice from within me intoned, a voice only barely recognisable as my own. “I became his sole GUARDIAN following the death of his MOTHER just over… oh dear God… just over… TWO YEARS AGO.”
“What do you do for a living?”
“I teach junior high school ENGLISH. I— I—”
“Thank you. What’s your mother’s name?”
“Julia Rosalie Wildebear. She passed AWAY seven years ago.”
“He’s starting to volunteer information,” Schmitz said. “That’s usually a sign he’s ready.”
“But is what he’s saying the truth?” Rainer asked.
“How about a couple more questions just to be sure.”
Rainer nodded. “Be my guest.”
Schmitz turned to me. “Mr. Wildebear, sir. Do you have a favourite password that you like to use?”
“Xavier,” I gasped. “My—favourite—password—is Xavier3891.”
“Excellent. Have you ever been in a long-term romantic relationship, sir?”
Despite all efforts not to say anything—profound, superhuman efforts, I might add—I found myself saying, “Noooo....”
“It is not my intention to humiliate the man,” Rainer said.
“He’s thirty-nine years old, sir. Myself, I wouldn’t admit to something like that unless I absolutely had to.”
“Sebastian?”
“Mr. Wildebear’s responses correspond to what we have on file. However, that alone does not prove that Mind Snoop is working.”
Schmitz regarded me scornfully. “It’s obvious to me it’s working.”
“However, the physiological data I’m accumulating confirms that Mind Snoop is indeed operating effectively,” Sebastian added. “So I concur.”
Rainer nodded. “Good. Mr. Wildebear, from here on in you will not consciously know how to answer many of my questions. Don’t worry about that. We’re relying on your unconscious to supply the answers. Now—and this is the thing—please don’t fight your unconscious. Allow it to answer as it sees fit. It will be a lot better for you if you do.”
>
I levelled an unsteady gaze at him, filling it with as much loathing as I could. If he felt the slightest bit intimidated by the cross-eyed man doing all he could not to whimper sitting across from him, he concealed it well.
“Mr. Wildebear, it’s our perception that yesterday evening at precisely nine forty-two pm an alien entity assumed control over your mind and body for a span of forty-seven seconds. Did this in fact occur?”
A deep and guttural “YEEESSS!” dislodged itself from the very core of my being.
“What does that blinking red light on the chart mean, Sebastian?” Rainer asked.
“The subject has burst a blood vessel in his left eye.”
Rainer peered into my left eye. “So he has.”
“It’s to be expected, sir,” Schmitz said.
Rainer thought about this for a moment, then continued. “Mr. Wildebear, the entity brought into this world a book, a rather special book. It was purchased this past Christmas by your friend Doctor Humphrey as a present for his wife Joyce, and subsequently fell into your nephew’s hands. This is where you come in. While you were under the entity’s control, we believe you acquired information derived from this book. Tell me. What did you learn?”
As far as I could recall, I remembered nothing of those forty-seven seconds, and certainly nothing about Iugurtha’s book, and even if I did remember something I would not have wanted to share it. But, of course, Mind Snoop yanked the memories out of me anyway, and what my unconscious revealed astonished me as much as anyone else in the room.
I spoke of fantastic realms, conjuring up visions of worlds I could not have dreamt up on my own. I related mathematical data I could not begin to comprehend, and gibbered poetry in languages I did not speak, languages I had never heard spoken. I laughed maniacally at jokes I didn’t understand, weeping as I laughed, each utterance out of my mouth more unbearable than the last. Discomfort segued into pain, pain into torture. My voice grew hoarse, dwindling to but a whisper and finally to nothing at all.
A pen appeared between my fingers. So armed, I drew maps and scribbled computations, writing first one hand and then the other into a tangled knot of fingers. When at long last my tortured digits twitched forth one final, damnable doodle, that single jot, bled out of me, seemed to bleed forever.
I opened my eyes. I was staring straight up at the ceiling. At a greying expanse of popcorn stucco, with yellow water stains creeping about the edges where the ceiling met the walls. I could see patterns in the water stains. It amused me to pick them out—here a cat, there an octopus. Until the very fact of the water stains began to bother me. They were unseemly. The entire ceiling of my bedroom needed to be replaced.
Out of the room’s sole window I glimpsed wisps of dark cloud scudding across the bright face of the moon. Sounds entered my awareness, gentle, beeping sounds that had no business being in this place. I angled my head to see where they were coming from, and was puzzled to discover medical equipment stacked beside my bed, hooked up to me. Alarmed, I tried to get out of bed, but I was so weak that I could barely lift my sheets.
A newspaper rattled near the entrance to the room. Using all my might, I lifted my head. Beyond the linen-swaddled lumps constituting my feet I spied a matronly woman sitting in an overstuffed wingback chair. The woman’s upper torso was partially concealed behind an edition of the Summerside Journal-Pioneer. It was all I could do to hold my head up—within seconds it returned to the pillow as if yanked there by a team of oxen.
Time seemed oddly dilated. I blinked, and a man stood at the side of my bed, gazing down at me benignly. “Hello, Wildebear,” he said.
It all came back to me at the sound of his voice.
Ridley, Humphrey.
Iugurtha.
Casa Terra.
Mind Snoop.
Vertigo gripped me. The room spun wildly about me. I clawed at the bed with both hands, grasping the sheets, grunting with the sheer effort of holding on.
“How do you feel?” Rainer asked.
“Make it stop,” I croaked. My voice was like sandpaper in my throat.
“What stop?”
“The bed. Spinning…”
“Don’t worry, your bed’s not going anywhere. Neither are you. Not for some time, I’m afraid.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’ve been sick, Wildebear. But you’re getting better. We’re looking after you. Doing our best to make you well again.”
“Sick? How long —?”
“Three days.”
Three days! “Mind Snoop did this to me. You. You did it to me!”
“Yes. I did it to you.”
“Why?”
“What choice did I have?”
Time must have shifted again because suddenly his face was inches in front of mine, silhouetted before the room’s single light source. The wash of brilliant white light spilling off his round head lent him the air of a prophet.
“Chaos,” he hissed. “Unfathomable creatures from unimaginable realms inflicting terror for no reason other than to amuse themselves. Death with but the flick of a… of a tentacle, Wildebear.”
An image flashed through my mind of the monstrous creature Rainer’s people had carried out of my house. Just what the heck were we dealing with here?
“Madness!” Rainer continued. “Insanity the likes of which civilised men like us can’t even imagine, let alone endure. Versus sanctuary from all that. Tell me, Wildebear. Where is the choice in that?”
I taught junior high school. Mere insanity I could endure. The spittle Rainer was projecting into my face was another story. Something was amiss with the man. Even in the midst of my suffering I could see it. Subtle nuances of manner—his delicate enunciation, for instance—laid bare the truth. The warm, musky scent of Lagavulin wafting into my nostrils confirmed it. My choler began to rise. Was it not enough that this man had incapacitated me that he must add insult to injury by plundering my scotch? And yet despite his condition—or perhaps because of it— I did not doubt for an instant that what he was telling me was nothing other than the cold, hard truth.
“There’s an idea I’ve been toying with.” He moved out of the path of the light and became mortal once again. “More of a suspicion, really. The idea that… well, that there are no choices. Not really. Because I’ve tried to make my own choices, Wildebear, really I have. But the consequences of my choices have always been so terrible that I… that… well.” He stopped, cleared his throat, and lowered his gaze to the floor.
When he looked up again, he said briskly, “You’ll feel better in a day or two. I could let you go then. Sooner or later despite our best efforts the gate will break free and become a book once again. We’ll take it and lock it away, you’ll go back and teach your classes, and everything will be fine for a few weeks, maybe even months. But then, even though we have it locked up, the book will show up again. Some damned fool will find it, open it, God only knows what will come out of it and lay waste to Summerside or Charlottetown, and I’ll be right back at square one.
“Or....” He canted his head to one side and narrowed his eyes, regarding me as if I had sprouted a second head. “We do things a little differently. And do you know why?”
I made no attempt to answer.
“Because you know things now, Wildebear. Things you didn’t know before.”
He had as much of my attention as I could muster given my condition. Nevertheless, I understood he was talking about the bizarre information I had revealed while under the influence of Mind Snoop. Information that had no business being in my brain, and that might as well not have been there for all the conscious knowledge I had of it.
“What things?” I asked, thinking it would be nice to know what I was supposed to know.
“Why the chicken crossed the road,” Rainer said. “How to get the caramel in the Caramilk bar.” Something tugged
at the corner of Rainer’s lips. “How the gate works. Among other things. We extracted what we could, enough to give us a good idea what’s in that head of yours, but we couldn’t get it all. Not even close. Not without killing you.”
“Thanks for that,” I muttered, not feeling particularly grateful.
“You’ve become an asset of tremendous importance, Wildebear. I had hoped Mind Snoop would relieve you of that burden, but it wasn’t to be. I’m sorry about that.”
“What now?” I whispered, unable to speak any louder.
“Now we see about making you better.”
“And then?”
“Then we have no choice.” Whatever was tugging at Rainer’s lips successfully yanked them into something resembling a smile. “We implement Plan B.”
VI
Plan B
The brutal means Rainer and his malodorous associate Schmitz had employed to rip the information they wanted from my brain had two unfortunate consequences.
That Mind Snoop hadn’t entirely worked meant that I would likely remain in Rainer’s custody for some time. More distressing was the toll that Mind Snoop appeared to have taken on my health. I couldn’t sit up without experiencing severe dizziness and nausea. My throat felt as if someone had taken a cheese-grater to it, and I was plagued by an annoying twitch in my right eyelid.
As I lay in bed bemoaning these symptoms, I discovered that I couldn’t feel anything in my left leg, from my thigh to the tips of my toes. How Mind Snoop could have affected my leg in such a way was difficult to understand, and more than a little alarming.
In fact, I was terrified. Just what had these people done to me?
Rainer provided a thick stack of aged Reader’s Digests to help ease my anxiety. The gesture did nothing of the sort. Nor did it reduce the animosity I felt toward the man. For one thing, they were my own Reader’s Digests—I had read them all already. Also, beyond the magazines (and an overwhelming urge to punch him right in the nose), Rainer had given me a lot to think about.
Iugurtha had done something to my brain. Filled it with knowledge that I myself, though it existed right there in my own head, couldn’t get at. Rainer wanted it so badly that he was willing to hurt me to get it. Whatever his “Plan B” consisted of, it almost certainly didn’t bode well for me.