James Quinn steepled his fingers, a strange gesture for one so young, then leaned back. The sound his high backed chair made told me the black upholstery was leather, not vinyl. This company had money—or credit—to spare.
His eyes lingered over my scuffed brogues, my crumpled—and outdated—double breasted, beige suit. The trace of a sneer played at his lips.
“Mutual decision,” he murmured. “You disappoint me, Mr. Hughes. We do read the papers here. And we read the report made to the Mental Health Commission. We know exactly why you left your last job.”
I groaned and closed my eyes. Quinn’s continuing words seemed muffled and distant.
“You lost your title. You were dismissed from the position you held for twenty-six years. And yet, oddly, you escaped criminal prosecution—much to the anger of those related to the six young patients who expired in your care. I believe a certain tabloid waged a protracted but ultimately unsuccessful campaign to bring civil prosecution against you. They succeeded in ruining your personal life, though. Hate mail, death threats, and so on. Not long after, your wife left you.”
I choked back a sob and slumped in my seat.
Rachel.
The door on thirty years of marriage closed. It hadn’t been the malicious letters and suspect packages, the obscene graffiti sprayed on our walls, the smashed windows…it had been the moment I sat her down and told her everything I’d done at Fairlight. What I had to do, to ease the suffering of those poor youngsters. She couldn’t understand. I’ll never forget the way she screamed at me, her fists pummeling my chest, her tears…so many tears. The ring I’d all but moved heaven and earth to pay for in the lean, early years of our relationship, torn from her finger, thrown at me. The door slamming and rattling in its frame, the Volvo screaming out of the garage…
She lived in Australia now, with our daughter and her parents. After the divorce proceedings I heard nothing more from them. I was truly alone.
“You’ve had a rough time, Mr. Hughes,” Quinn said with some sympathy. He glanced down at my resume again. “And I see you’ve been out of work ever since Fairlight. I think it would be safe to say that our company is the sole entity interested in retaining your medical expertise.”
I couldn’t speak. His words had opened the last twelve nightmarish months of my life like a wound. But his last sentence offered a crumb of comfort.
...interested…
I held onto that morsel, a bandage for the wound.
“Your methods of psychotherapy were…unorthodox—”
“But effective.”
Quinn smiled knowingly. “‘Drastic’ was the how the Fairlight board of inquiry colored it. ‘Murderous’ was the media’s adjective of choice.”
I sighed. “As you know, Mr. Quinn, I made it quite clear to the board that drastic measures were needed. Those six teenagers suffered from a disorder never before seen in the history of clinical psychiatry.”
“So you say. A unique form of paranoid schizophrenia.” He flicked open a square cut folder next to my resume and scanned the first page. “The usual symptoms were there, disorganised speech and behaviour, social withdrawal, hallucinations…but it was the hallucinations that marked this disorder as something new. According to your reports, they shared identical visions. Visions that drove each of them to quite horrifying acts of violence and self-mutilation.”
Quinn turned a page, then another.
“They each felt they were being tormented, possessed almost, by…well, demons is the word they all used. A shared hallucination?”
“Understand,” I said firmly, “None of them had met each other before admittance. And none of them met once inside. They were completely isolated.”
“And traditional psychotherapy proved useless. Drugs merely aggravated their condition, and ECT only had a short lived calming effect on their rage. That’s when you applied your new therapy. That’s when the deaths began.”
I cleared my throat. “I came to the conclusion that the only way to cure them was to make them part of the solution. In their more lucid moments they each spoke clearly to me. They insisted that the only way to rid their minds of demons was to cut their bodies. ‘Hurt myself to get the pain out,’ was how one girl described it to me. And it made sense…in her eyes…in their eyes. Hurt the vessel, the host, and force the demon out.”
“So you supplied them—or rather, granted them—unofficial access to the necessary surgical equipment. The inquest grudgingly accepted that since your patients were prone to self-harm, they were ultimately responsible for their own deaths, which is why you were only charged with gross negligence.” Quinn closed the folder and rested a hand on it. He fixed me with a knowing smile. “That wasn’t all though, was it, Mr. Hughes?”
I didn’t answer.
“Rumours circulated. Ward assistants and nurses fed stories to the press about how they witnessed you cutting patients yourself. Stories denied by the hospital board and the Trust. Stories you and I both know to be true.”
For a moment I wondered if this was a trap, set up by one of the damned tabloids. Silent cameras and hidden microphones waiting for me to incriminate myself. But the look in Quinn’s eyes told me otherwise.
“Direct intervention, Mr. Quinn. Some of my patients couldn’t cure themselves. Their demons had too firm a hold. Increased pain and bodily destruction were the only answers—that which no human could possibly administer without assistance. I was only too happy to be their…savior.”
“And the treatment was effective?”
I spread my hands. “Their suffering ended. And their demons—if you believe such things—are gone forever.”
“Demons…” Quinn smiled thinly and gazed out of the window. I followed his gaze. A bank of heavy cloud rolled in from the east. Sunlight began to fade.
Quinn turned his attention back to me. “Mr. Hughes, Nemeton Mental Healthcare is a rather unique institution. We are privately funded and have no official association with the NHS or any of its Trusts. We specialise in the more extreme maladies that those Trusts are unable to remedy. We have been contracted to take on these cases and apply our own methods, with priority given to the disorder that you so correctly diagnosed.
“This disorder is more widespread than first realised, and cases are becoming more common every day, which will keep us quite busy. Provided we meet all government targets, ours shall be a very lucrative contract. Unfortunately, we are thin on staff with experience vital to our success.” He took a clipboard from the desk and stood up.
“Would you follow me, please?”
I stood up shakily, my nerves beginning to return. I felt very uneasy as I followed him out of the interview room and through the spacious reception area. We passed the young blonde with the painted smile behind the reception desk and went through a door behind her labeled Staff Only.
Before us lay a short corridor and a staircase that led downward. As we descended, our heels ringing loudly on metal steps, Quinn spoke in hushed tones.
“As you can understand, these special cases must be kept from view. Our contract with the government is dependant on our discretion. We are in the unfortunate situation of being…deniable.”
We came to another corridor that was longer but not as well lit or clean as what I’d seen of the rest of the facility. Shadows took on added depth, thanks to dirty walls. A strong scent of disinfectant lingered in the air, almost, but not completely, masking the stench of bodily waste. The corridor terminated at a heavy steel door. Secure locks and deadbolts, with a mesh grill at eye level instead of a window, told me this portal led to a secure room. Just like the secret rooms of Fairlight.
Quinn unlocked the door, released the bolts, and pushed our way into a small cell. The sloping tiled floor was bisected by a large drainage channel. Secured with rubber straps to a bare cot on the far side of the tight space was a young man in his late teens. He twisted his head to stare at us as the door slammed shut. His hazel eyes were glazed and unfocussed from whatever tranq
uilisers he had been given, but possessed that singular look I had seen in the eyes of the poor souls at Fairlight.
Quinn knelt down and reached under the cot. He withdrew a pair of stained, white overalls and a small vinyl briefcase. He passed the overalls to me. The stains were red and recent. Who else had been interviewed?
“Welcome to the practical assessment.” Quinn waited for me to put on the overalls before opening the briefcase. “I would like you to demonstrate your direct intervention technique. Use any instrument you require, but I must inform you that you will be timed. You have one hour.”
I stared at the glittering array of surgical instruments nestled within the briefcase’s packing foam, their sharp edges glinting seductively. One hour? How could I perform my therapy with such a limited supply of time? I previously took days with patients.
I selected a scalpel and a bone saw, turned to my patient who was unaware of the events unfolding around him, and went to work.
I was nervous and it showed. Several times I fumbled with the scalpel, so the removal of the nose and ears wasn’t up to my usual standards, and the bone saw slipped out of my hands while I was cutting into a kneecap. I heard Quinn scribbling something on his clipboard. I knew it wasn’t complimentary.
But as the hour progressed, my nerves faded and my former expertise returned. I managed to cut, saw, and slice into areas that brought about the most pain possible within a short space of time.
As I removed the overalls, Quinn complimented me on my decision to cut out the boy’s tongue at the end of the operation, rather than at the beginning, to ensure a constant flow of screams.
“We may go to a second interview, though,” he warned me as he led me back to the reception area. “And a second practical assessment.”
I smiled. I wouldn’t be as nervous next time. I possess that special quality that a young company like Nemeton Mental Healthcare needs.
There’s no substitute for experience.
Adrian Chamberlin’s works have appeared in Guy N Smith’s Graveyard Rendezvous and the websites Spine- tinglers, Great Scribblers, the British Horror Novels Forum, and the DF Underground, and most recently in the March issue of Lovecraft Ezine. Published and forthcoming works can be found in several anthologies. He’s a founding member of Dark Continents Publishing and his first novel The Caretakers was released at the World Horror Convention in April 2011.
The Tenure Track Lottery
Ellen Herbert
1. Type each tenured faculty name in 14-point Times New Roman font.
2. Cut the names into one-half inch strips, standard letter paper width.
3. Fold each strip five times in one inch sections.
4. Place in the urn.
My dear mentor Mac, author of the list, was nothing if not precise.
On this the eve of my third lottery here at St. Peter’s, a small Catholic college perched on Maryland’s Calvert Cliffs overlooking the Chesapeake Bay, I complete these steps and remember Mac, Dr. McKinnon, once chair of the English Department. Tonight as I celebrate my first lottery without Mac, I feel his presence in all that I do.
Mac was always straight with me, a rare quality in academia. Yet on that afternoon in late August eleven years ago when he offered me the job here at St. Peter’s, he was intentionally vague about my special lottery duties. Pressing his trembling finger to a line on the academic calendar, he’d said, “Note the third Saturday in May, three years hence, Ned.”
I scanned the dates.
With doddering effort, Mac came to stand, leaned over the desk, and brought his gnarled, spotty hand to the paper again. “This event occurs every four years.”
“Like graduation,” I said, naive as a newborn.
“You’ll have special duties that night, Ned, duties you will learn about in due time,” Mac told me, each word as slow as a Georgia porch swing
If Mac had handed me a syllabus outlining my possible lottery duties, I still would have accepted the position here. I was desperate. By the time I interviewed at St. Pete’s, I had been looking for a university job for over a year, ever since I finished my doctoral thesis in poetry of the Pacific Rim. I longed to stop delivering pizza and start being called Doctor.
And as the young always believe: I was certain St. Pete’s was a stepping stone to a bigger, brighter university. I wouldn’t be here long, I told myself after Mac assured me that I could never get tenure at St. Peter’s. “All your degrees are from state colleges, Ned, and not even name state colleges. Alas, our faculty must have degrees from the Ivies, Stanford, Duke or Hopkins.”
And once I taught my first class, I began to understand why I could not be tenured. You see, St. Pete’s, like many small colleges today, struggles to stay afloat financially and must accept almost any student who can rustle up our substantial tuition. Not that our students aren’t sweet kids and the few intelligent ones masquerade as supernovas in our very “milky” way. Only our faculty’s credentials and the fresh blood that comes from a steady turnover of tenure-track faculty members keeps us from being completely mediocre.
Tenure means a professor has a job for life, but at St. Pete’s there's a catch to it. Of course if our tenured faculty retired when normal people do, there would be no need for a lottery. But alas none of us, including the great tenured ones, can afford retirement. If not for the lottery, our entire faculty would soldier on into their eighties or nineties, wearing Depends, shuffling to class on walkers, where they would wind themselves up, cut off their hearing aides, and lecture for whole class periods.
***
As I emerge from the brightly lit stairwell onto the shadowy Columbus Center’s roof, lit only in fairy lights, a hush falls over the crowd gathered here, faculty and deans of the School of Arts and Sciences.
Never do I, a lowly term appointment, enjoy such deference from these dignitaries, so I slow my movements in order to savor the moment. At the same time, I listen to the slosh of the mighty Chesapeake abusing the rocks a thousand feet below. A portion of the Columbus Center’s roof hangs over the cliff like a diving tower over a pool.
In the fading dusk, all eyes remain on me or rather on the thing I carry, the urn, as in “Ode on a Grecian…” Except ours is faux, made of Styrofoam, painted gray in order to appear stone-like.
“Couldn't we get a new one?” I asked Mac before the last lottery when I discovered a hunk of Styrofoam had fallen off.
But he just shook his shaggy gray mane. “The funny old thing was here before me and will be after.”
And he was right about that.
The evening is cool for late spring and as the light seeps away, an almost full yellow moon hangs low like a watchful eye over the roof, large and flat as a dance floor. It was probably built as an observatory for the astronomy classes we offer, which combined with geology form the freshman science requirement students dubbed “rocks and stars,” slightly less objectionable than their nickname for abnormal psych, “nuts and sluts.”
“Stir those names very, very thoroughly, Ned,” Riley, tenured in history, jests as he pats me on the back and moves off, his girth rolling side-to-side, into the crowd forming a semi-circle around me.
I have an evil thought: I would not want to have to scrape Riley off the side of the cliff, something I had to do when Dr. Sam Adler was chosen at my first lottery. Instead of making a brave leap, Sam had to be forced off the roof by a faculty stampede.
At my interview, Mac had shown intense interest in my hobby, rock-climbing, and had questioned me on my rappelling skills. I understood why when I spent the evening after my first lottery, scaling the cliffs below to find Dr. Adler’s body parts and send them into the Bay to feed the fishes.
Although Riley is a friend, I give him a solemn nod. Some of the faculty, especially the men, act light-hearted, but it’s all bravado.
I take my lottery duties seriously and never joke about what we’re about to do.
Amber in a snug white shimmering dress, so unlike the black tents most faculty wo
men wear, comes to my side. “Neddie,” she whispers in my ear and looks up at me big-eyed, teetering in high heels like a fawn, all eyes and legs.
“Don’t stand too near the edge, darling,” I say, for I love her and am glad neither of our names is in the urn. Tonight I rejoice that I am not an Ivy Leaguer or a Dukie, for only the names of tenure-track faculty are in the urn. We lower echelon folks, adjuncts, term appointments, such as myself, and graduate teaching assistants like my Amber, are safe.
Stroking the hair of my knuckle, Amber whispers, “You think Snyde will be okay, right?”
I shrug and tell her, “There are no guarantees except for us.”
I secretly despise her boss, Dr. Snyder Carrboro, who I believe is trying to sleep with her. She’s often at his condo late at night, helping him edit his latest opus, a pop historical account of the Battle of Little Bighorn. I wouldn’t be surprised if it isn’t mostly plagiarized, a practice in vogue with historians nowadays. Nevertheless, like his other books, this one will probably be made into a PBS special.
I’ve suggested to Amber that the way he treats her verges on sexual harassment, but she is not the type to make waves, nor is St. Pete’s the kind of place where that sort of charge would go far.
Still I seethe inside after walking into his office last week and finding Amber with her hand up Snyder’s shirt. “His back itched,” she explained later. “He asked me to scratch it.”
Funny, I thought, I too have an itch I’m about to scratch.
I check my watch. Five of eight. Almost show time. All the tenured have become silent and pale. Only the adjuncts are chatting now, exchanging reviews of the latest book or restaurant. “I’ve discovered a delightful little Cambodian place,” says Reese, the most senior adjunct, a wealthy retiree, a wicked twinkle in his eye when he meets mine.
HELP! WANTED: Tales of On-the-Job Terror Page 8