The 13th

by John Everson

  A room at the end of the hall was open—Christy could see light pouring out onto the carpet. She stayed still and listened, praying that nobody was down there who would discover her here. But after waiting a minute with no sign of movement, she crept down the hall and pressed herself to the edge of the door frame. The lights were on in the room, but the room was empty. Not even the bed was there. Christy stepped inside, and noticed spots of something dark on the carpeting. She bent down and rubbed a finger across it, and blanched when her suspicions were met. The tip of her index finger was smeared a bright, warm red.

  “Shit,” she whispered. The screams earlier…they must have come from here. What was the doctor doing to this poor woman? And why?

  The spots led out of the room, and then she lost them, but after searching around for a couple seconds, she found another drop of blood. And a few feet farther, yet another. They led to the end of the hallway, to a small service-elevator door.

  She thought about it for a minute, but didn’t touch the button. No, she was here to try to figure out what was going on, and walking right into the O.R. in the midst of an operation probably wasn’t the best way to surreptitiously manage that.

  Instead, she doubled back to the stairway she’d passed and decided to slip downstairs and see if anyone was about on the main floor. She wasn’t sure where the operating suite was, but she guessed from the freshness of the blood, that the doctor was otherwise occupied. She looked down the main stairway and saw no one; it opened to a broad lobby area, so she hurried down the stairs and pressed herself to a wall on the close side, trying in vain to see who was running the floor. She was glad it was in vain, but she had no doubt that someone was close by.

  Christy moved down the lobby to a hall, and when she reached the end, recognized the evaluation room she’d been in with David just the other day. She stepped inside again, although this time, the room was a little different.

  Oh it still had a stainless-steel sink and an adjustable bed covered with paper “body Kleenex.” But this time, as Christy looked around, she realized there were other things of interest in the room. Clues, if you will.

  Like the photo of Barry Rockford shaking hands with President Bill Clinton. She looked closer and noted the caption: AT THE NATIONAL SCIENCE COUNCIL 1998 GENETIC RESEARCH AWARDS CEREMONY. And framed on the wall beside it, a plaque from the event, which below Rockford’s name read IN RECOGNITION OF YOUR PIONEERING WORK IN EMBRYONIC STEM CELL RESEARCH.

  On the opposite wall, an article hung in a black wooden frame. It had a picture of Rockford, but the headline said this particular mention wasn’t laudatory. As Christy read the first few paragraphs, the hair began to stand up on the back of her neck.

  GENETIC DOC DEFROCKED IN ETHICS SCANDAL

  Barry Rockford, PhD, once considered one of the nation’s preeminent genetic researchers, was dismissed yesterday from the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology after it was revealed that for the past seven months, he had been engaged in forbidden experiments on the unborn children of more than three dozen women.

  It’s a shocking turn of events to members of the MIT Board of Regents, who were under the impression that Dr. Rockford’s lab was currently being used to test the potential uses for adult stem cells. A $1.5 million grant from the National Institute of Health to the university was allocated to Dr. Rockford and his team for the purpose of developing a system whereby adults could bank their own stem cells for a future time when they needed the cells’ recuperative powers.

  For the past two decades, stem cells have been looked to by the science community as the fountain of youth; all that was necessary was the right key to unlock the fountain. Stem cells exist in all living creatures, and are the body’s building blocks for the creation of new structures, whether skin, muscle or bone. Stanley Kooper, chair of the board of regents, explains, “The theory is that if a person banked their healthy stem cells, in later life when the body is diseased and decaying, those youthful stem cells could be utilized to regrow vital tissues and return the body to a healthier state. Some speculate that stem cells could replace surgery, essentially regrowing an old body to a youthful form from the inside out. Ailing hearts and wrinkled skin could be a thing of the past if the power of stems could be harnessed by medicine.”

  But the most powerful stem cells exist in unborn babies. Scientists discovered years ago that prior to birth, an unborn fetus can heal from in-uterine operations without scarring. However, when stem-cell research began to focus on this specialized genetic fountain of youth, ethicists from around the world demanded that such experimentation be banned.

  When it was discovered that Dr. Rockford had provided a false plan for his federally funded research program and was, in fact, conducting stem-cell research on a parade of women who came to the MIT campus with the promise of a paycheck if Dr. Rockford could be allowed to extract stem-cell material from their unborn children, the university board stated that it had no recourse but to demand the researcher’s resignation.

  Christy felt a chill across the back of her neck and flipped around, but the shadows outside of the exam room didn’t move. As she looked out at the empty hallway, however, she realized that the Dr. Rockford depicted on the walls of this exam room was not at all the psychiatrist she had met a few days earlier. He set up this asylum in the middle of nowhere to help “troubled women.”

  Troubled pregnant women.

  Women who happen to have recently all been reported missing.

  “He isn’t a psychiatrist at all,” Christy whispered to herself. “And he sure as hell hasn’t stopped doing whatever the hell he was up to at MIT.”

  Somewhere far away, someone screamed.

  “What the fuck are they doing here?” Christy whispered and crept out of the exam room and into the hall. She turned a corner and saw the room with the red X across the door, and carefully, looking from side to side every two seconds, approached it. As she put her hand on the doorknob, she heard the scream again, and this time, she knew with certainty that it was definitely coming from downstairs.

  Carefully, she began to turn the knob, not really sure what she was going to do if the door opened.

  “Hey, Rockford, you around?” someone yelled from the hallway she’d just left. Christy let go of the door as if it were a hot coal and darted around the corner, ducking behind one of the couches in the darkened open lounge.

  A man in blue jeans and a dark button-down shirt stepped into view. He was whistling…“Summertime Blues” she recognized.

  He passed the door with the red X, the whistle receding. Christy stood and started toward the hallway she and the man had both come from, but before she got to the door downstairs, she heard the whistle returning.

  “Shit,” she said under her breath, and ducked back to the couch.

  “Hey, Rockford man, where are you!” the man shouted again. A few seconds later, the door Christy had been about to open, opened. Dr. Rockford’s chiseled features poked through the frame looking around.

  “There you are,” the whistler proclaimed, stopping from his ambling pace in the outer hall and heading toward the door with the red X.

  “Not now, Carl,” Dr. Rockford said. His voice was hard, and the hand he held out to stop Carl was stained red. “We’ve got an emergency situation right here.”

  “Yikes, Doc, what’s going on?”

  “Birth,” Rockford said simply. “The samples are in the fridge. They’re marked with today’s date. Please just take them, and leave the payment in the office. I’ll talk to you Tuesday night.”

  “No problem,” Carl said. “Good luck.”

  “Thanks.” Rockford nodded, and pulled the door closed with a bloody hand, leaving a smear on the outer edge. Christy watched Carl disappear down the hall, counted to ten, and then followed.

  She tiptoed down the hall, hanging tight to the wall, and saw the man step into a room at the far end. She ducked into the main exam room again, and waited until she saw him come back out, now
holding a small plastic box. He didn’t look back, just walked straight back out, the way they had both (she assumed anyway) come in. Again she counted, this time to twenty, and followed.

  As Christy opened the door to the back drive of the asylum, she saw a flash of red lights, and then the side panel of a van as it spun around and headed toward the front of the old hotel. The insignia on the side was the same as the one she’d seen just a couple nights before.

  INNOVATIVE INDUSTRIES.

  “What exactly is he running here?” she mumbled under her breath, while she carefully opened and quietly pulled the back door closed behind her. She ran along the back wall of the asylum, stopping just once to peer into a window well where orange light leaked out from the basement. But a shade of some kind blocked her view, and she couldn’t see anything but the glow.

  The red lights of the van were on 190 heading back toward town when she slipped inside the tree line at the edge of the asylum’s entryway. The air was hauntingly silent, as Christy opened the driver’s door and slipped back into the Olds. The noise of it slamming felt like a gunshot, but she didn’t turn the key right away to start the car and get away. Instead, she stared at the wavering lights of the hotel turned asylum below. What was she going to tell the chief? He’d kill her if she admitted to what could get her slammed with a breaking-and-entering charge. But she had to let him know that there were missing persons inside. All of her suspicions had been true.

  Still stumped on how to approach it, Christy shook her head and started the engine, easing the car out onto the highway. She didn’t notice the ghostly white figure behind her, stepping slowly up the gravel path from the asylum toward the road.

  But the figure didn’t care. The woman held the pain in her middle and put one foot in front of the other. She only knew that she had to keep walking. Something warm and wet coated her thighs. She had to keep moving.

  Walk, Walk, Walk, was all her mind said.

  And soon she was on the gravel shoulder of 190, staring at the red taillights of Christy’s Olds, cotton gown flapping in the slight breeze behind her, and showing the ghostly white of her thighs and back as she plodded forward.

  The ride would have been nice, a distant part of her cried. But the rest of her just focused on walking. And singing a little song to keep her going. She didn’t really know the words so she just hummed until she got to the chorus. “Because hell, hell is for children,” she whispered in a voice that disappeared like smoke on a bitter wind.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Sometimes the scenery got old. Sometimes being a cyclist felt terminal. In the best of times, the feeling of the summer breeze slipping down the back of his neck to riffle through his shirt, cooling the sweat and pushing him on toward a new track record…or just an enjoyable training sprint, made him feel good to be alive.

  But other times, like today, David cursed himself for ever involving himself in the sport. He gasped with every press of his foot to the pedal, struggling to keep the bike in motion as he pumped his way up the steepest curve on the 190 just a mile or so outside of town. This is what chain gangs feel like, he thought, imagining the whip coming down on his back to force him to one more effort. He wondered if he’d ever really get the feeling back again. When he’d first started out, almost every ride was magic, a secret place where he went in full view. It was him against gravity, and he sometimes felt at one with the machine he rode as he struggled to escape the chains of physics.

  But ever since he’d washed out of the Olympic team, riding had felt different. Truth be told, it had felt different before then, which was maybe why he’d faltered on that last important ride. He hadn’t gotten into riding to win, he’d gotten into it to ride.

  But it didn’t feel like riding right now…it felt like he was being punished. The bike finally reached the top of the ridge, and David stifled the urge to leap from the bike and lie down on the gravel at the side of the road. “C’mon, man,” he prodded himself. “This is the payoff.”

  Because with that, he spurred the pedals a couple more times and then pulled his feet back, letting the wheels have their head. The bike careened down the long, winding road, which thankfully remained empty of traffic. He kicked his feet into it a couple times, increasing the breakneck speed until the air whistled in his ears. The rush almost felt like the old days, and he took a couple of deep breaths as he let the bike go.

  The turnoff for the asylum was just ahead, and David had set that as his training mark point. It was ten miles from here back to town, so a twenty-mile round trip. Not a lot of miles, but when the hills are steep, it was a solid workout; better than any you’d get at the gym.

  He skidded to a stop at the front of the asylum entry road and paused. There was a sign at the front of the drive that hadn’t been there the other day.

  OUTDOOR HANDYMAN WANTED.

  CUT GRASS, TRIM BUSHES, PAINT.

  1-2 DAYS PER WEEK.

  SUMMER ONLY. INQUIRE WITHIN.

  “Hmmm,” David mused aloud. “I could use some pocket cash. And I’m already riding out this way every day. Some more exercise could only help the training…”

  He punched foot to pedal and rode in toward the asylum.

  “Chief, we need to get a warrant for the asylum.”

  Christy shook her head, paced across the room and tried it another way.

  “Chief, you were right. That Dr. Rockford is dirty. We need to do a bust on the asylum.”

  No, that isn’t right either, she thought.

  “You know, whatever you’ve got to tell him, it’ll be easier if you just go in and get it over with. He doesn’t bite, not usually. And anyway, you’re making me dizzy pacing back and forth like that.”

  “Sorry, Matt. I know I’m being ridiculous, but after the screwup last time…I just want to do this right.”

  “Go in and just say what’s on your mind,” Captain Ryan suggested. “I find that always works best.”

  “You’re right,” she agreed, and took a deep breath.

  Chief Maitlin was hidden behind a tall newspaper front page, and Christy stood in the doorway for several seconds waiting to gain his attention. Finally she cleared her throat and he jumped, just a hair. Well, really the newspaper jumped…Chief wasn’t the type to move much. The newspaper slowly lowered to the desk and two scowling eyes met her own.

  “Aren’t you supposed to be on the street?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” she said. “But Chief, I’ve gotta talk to you about the asylum. I think that you were…”

  Just then the phone rang and he put up a hand as he answered it. “Castle Point PD. Yeah. Yeah. When? Okay. Yes, yes we’ll send somebody. Don’t do anything until we get there.”

  With a groan he eased his bulk from the chair as he dropped the phone back in its cradle. He stepped right past Christy but motioned for her to follow.

  “C’mon, you can tell me on the way. There’s a nutcase from your mental hospital walking around on Main,” he said.

  “Chief, that’s what I wanted to talk to you about,” she said. “They’re not nut jobs.”

  “Well, this one’s wandering around wearing nothing but a robe and a bandage on her head in the middle of the day. I’d call that a little left of center, wouldn’t you?”

  “Not if you’ve been kidnapped by a Dr. Frankenstein,” Christy shot back. “Chief, we have to help her. We have to help all of them.”

  He opened the door to the back parking lot to let her through and pointed to his cruiser. “Get in. And let’s hear it. Let’s hear it quickly.”

  As he eased the car out of the lot, she told him about staking out the asylum the night before. He flinched when she talked about using her key to gain entrance to the back of the old hotel, but didn’t say anything. When she was done, he still stayed silent. Christy felt her stomach turning to ice as she awaited his verdict. But then he was pulling over just outside of Smythe’s Grocery, and as he put the car in park, said only, “We’ll talk back at the station.”

&nb
sp; Then he was pulling himself out of the car, and Christy followed, noting the small crowd of people standing just a few yards away. She saw a white-clad figure in the middle of the throng, and groaned as they reached the people. She knew who it was. She’d stared at the woman’s sleeping face the night before. Hell, she’d used finger snaps to try to wake her. It was Carrie Sanddanz. And she looked awful. The bandage around her head was stained a brownish red in back, and her eyes looked wild and unfocused. The group of people contained her as the woman walked back and forth, trying in vain to find an exit. She was barefoot, and Christy could see the stains of dried blood between her toes.

  “Chief,” she whispered. “I saw her last night. She walked all this way barefoot?”

  “And wounded,” he said. “Help me get her into the squad.”

  “All right,” he called and broke into the circle. “Let us get this woman some help.”

  An older man clapped the chief on the shoulder. “Thanks for coming so quick, Chief. I saw her walking down the side of the road out here when I pulled into the lot to open the store, and knew something was wrong.”

  The chief nodded. “I’m guessing she’s from the new asylum outside of town.”

  “Well, something for sure’s not right with her.” The man shook his head so fast his jowls wagged. “She ain’t said a word since the bunch of us came over here to try to talk to her. We thought we should try to keep her from walking anymore, but she wouldn’t go inside the store.”

  Christy took the woman’s arm near the elbow. It felt thin and cold. The pale, naked skin of Carrie’s back and butt was exposed for all to see through the loosely tied gown, but the poor woman didn’t seem to notice her indecency. “C’mon, hon,” Christy said softly. “We’re going to get you some help.”

  Just then, a black car pulled up in the supermarket parking lot and came to a stop right next to the group. Two doors popped open instantly, and a man and woman got out and ran to the woman. “There you are, Carrie,” Dr. Rockford said, pushing his way into the mob of people to take the woman’s arm as Christy still held the other. “We’ve been looking all over for you.”