The Reaper Within

by Stephanie Jackson

  “You feel better now?”

  “Little bit.”

  “Stay here and I’ll go check the circuit breaker. I saw the one for the main house in the kitchen. Maybe we just got lucky and the storm threw a switch.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  She stood in the basement waiting for Jack to come back, but he never did. The battery charger on the floor kicked in, and the bed he was in started humming. Whatever was happening inside of the box had pulled him away from her again.

  She waited another fifteen minutes hoping that the power would return on its own, but it didn’t. When her phone started to go dim from the dying battery, she picked it up and headed to the stairs. Maybe Jack just hadn’t made it to the breaker box before he’d disappeared.

  She had just put her foot on the bottom stair when something crashed down on her head.

  Chapter Nine

  She was still in the hidden room when she woke up. The lights were back on in the house, and there was a man standing across the room by Jack’s body. He had the lid open and seemed to be examining the corpse inside. He was writing notes in the file.

  He looked over at her. “Good, you’re awake. I was afraid I’d hit you harder than I thought.”

  It was Abbott Harlowe. He was older, heavier, and a little balder than he’d been in his college picture, but she was sure it was him.

  “What are you doing in my house, young lady?” Abbott asked.

  “The question is, what are you doing in this house Abbott?” she asked, trying to pull her wrists apart. “Shouldn’t you be in hiding somewhere?”

  “How do you know my name?”

  “Oh, I know a lot more than your name, Abbott. Including what you’re keeping in these canisters.”

  “You’ve been snooping,” he said, but he didn’t really sound upset. “How did you find my little room here anyway?”

  “Beginner’s luck,” she said. “How did you find it?”

  “Actually, by accident. My mom got sick after I graduated for college, so I came home to take care of her. I was lighting a few fires in the first floor fire places. These old houses are hard to keep warm, and I didn’t want my mother’s condition to worsen due to the cold. When I went to open the flue in the library, my hand slipped, and I felt something above it.

  “I was surprised to find this old room. I don’t know why anyone would have gone to the trouble to hide it, but later on it proved to be quite useful to me.”

  “You mean it was a good place to hide the bodies of your victims, right?”

  He shook his head. “The people down here are not victims. They’re part of an ongoing experiment to prove that Cryogenics is a viable field of study. One day they’re going to wake up to find themselves in a brand new world. A world that is void of the diseases that made them so ill.”

  “Did Rosie, or Anna Mai, or any of the others ask to be part of your experiment?” she asked Abbott. “What about James? He was your friend, wasn’t he? Did you ask him what he wanted before you dumped him into a vat of liquid nitrogen?”

  He twitched but ignored her question and went back to examining Jack.

  Her hands were duct taped behind her back, and her ankles had been bound together. Abbott had sat her at the end of the concrete floor between two of the canisters that held the bodies of his victims. From where she sat, she could see a piece of pipe under the desk.

  It looked like a piece of the same piping that had been welded into place to serve as legs on the bed/box Jack was in. She could see it but just being able to see it wasn’t doing her a damn bit of good.

  From where she sat she could also see the far wall of the room next to the foot of the stairs. She could see that the bricks in the wall were just a bit off, not quite as straight as the other stone walls that incased that half of the room.

  You wouldn’t be able to tell the difference if you were standing, but from her position on the floor, she could see the slight variations in how the stones were set. If she got out of this alive she was fairly confident that she could tell Angie where old Curtis had hidden his gold.

  “You’re a murderer, Abbott, It’s as simple as that,” she said, bringing herself back to the situation at hand. She knew she shouldn’t taunt him, but now that he was here in front of her, and she was actually looking at him, she was mad as hell. “You killed all these people for your own amusement.”

  “I haven’t killed anyone,” he denied. “And besides, all those people were sick anyway, they were eventually going to succumb to their illnesses. I prevented that from happening.”

  “That’s how you justify what you’ve done? That you didn’t do anything wrong because those people were going to die anyway? Using that logic, you could kill anybody, anytime you wanted. We’re all going to die of something, Abbott? But a person’s eventuality of death doesn’t give you the right to shorten there lives.”

  “When they wake up…”

  “They’re not going to wake up, Abbott,” she snapped. “They’re never waking up. Your experiment has failed. They’re all dead, because you killed them.”

  Abbott shook his head in denial. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I do know, because I’ve talked to them. I crossed them over into the tunnel that will take them to the light.”

  Abbott laughed at her. “That’s crazy. There is no afterlife, and there is no light waiting for us on the other side of death.”

  “I doubt the light is waiting for you on the other side, Abbott, not after what you’ve done in this room, but for most people there is. I’ve seen it for myself.”

  “No, that’s not true,” he said and turned his back on her.

  “What about Michelle Brighton? Why did you stop freezing people in 1993 just to start again thirteen years later? What reason did you have to kill her?”

  “I didn’t do anything to Michelle. I met her on a cancer website, and we started dating. After a few months I told her what I did, and she was interested; so I brought her here to show her how it works.

  “We were coming down the stairs when she tripped and hit her head. She was dead instantly, so I went ahead and put her into a cryogenic state. Maybe someday someone will be able to treat her head injury and save her too.”

  “She didn’t remember why she was here. She just knew that her feet were killing her from the wedge high heels she was wearing. The heels were probably what made her trip on the steps.”

  He turned back to look at her. “You can’t possible know what she was wearing. The picture in the file only shows her face.”

  “She was wearing a short black dress and those stupid wedge heels. I know this, because I saw her here. I talked to her, and then I crossed her over into the tunnel that will take her to the light.”

  He stared at her in amazement. “You can’t be telling the truth.”

  “Then stop me when I lie,” she said and told him about all the souls she’d crossed over from the house.

  She told him who they were and what they were wearing at the time of their death. She told him everything she could remember about each and every one of them.

  “Oh my God,” Abbott muttered and ran his hands through his rapidly thinning hair. “I killed them?”

  “You most certainly did.”

  “Shit,” he whispered in distress. “Okay…uh, alright. I’ll just take them out of the stasis pods and bury them back in the woods. No one is looking for them anymore anyway.”

  She looked at him in disgust. He was a pitiful excuse for a human being.

  “What about the police detective?” Abbott asked her. “You didn’t say anything about seeing the cop’s ghost here.”

  “What cop?” she asked, not letting on that she knew anything about Jack.

  “The cop,” he said coming towards her.

  “I know you read the file, so I know you know who I’m talking about. Have you seen his spirit here?”

  “No,” she lied. “Is he the one you killed for the crime of
being, how did you put it, oh yeah, meddlesome?”

  “He came poking around and asking questions about my patients. I couldn’t allow him to take me away from here right when I was about to have a breakthrough; so I hit him on the head when he entered the parlor and brought him down here. I decided to try my new process on him.

  “He was healthy except for the bump on his head. He had a better chance of surviving the stasis than someone who had already suffered from a long terminal illness. If he lives, then the process can be adjusted for patients in a weakened condition.”

  “What new process?” Mel asked. “What breakthrough?”

  Abbott pulled the chair away from the desk and sat down in front of her. “I figured out how to put someone in cryostasis in a way that will allow them to be brought back around with little to no damage.”

  “Have you?” she asked skeptically. “I only asked because we’re surrounded by dead bodies. It’s kind of a testament on how the shit you’re doing down here doesn’t work.”

  He waved his hand dismissively. “The first of my patients, and Michelle, of course, were put in cryopreservation using the old methods.”

  “And what were the old methods? Just dump their dead bodies into a vat of liquid nitrogen?”

  “Of course not,” he said shaking his head at her obvious ignorance. “You can’t do that. The liquid nitrogen would freeze the skin and cause it to expand and rupture. The damage would be severe enough to cause gangrene and possible amputation upon revival.

  It would be like having frostbite all the way to the bone.

  “No, patients were first injected with a glycerol-based cryoprotectant to protect the cells in the body from the effect of freezing. Think of it as a form of human anti-freeze.

  “After that, the body is placed on a bed of dry ice to start the cooling process. Once the body reaches minus two hundred degrees Fahrenheit, it’s placed head first into an individual container, and then that container is inserted into a large container of liquid nitrogen. The skin never actually touches the liquid itself.”

  “Outstanding,” Mel said looking around the room at the metal containers. “And that’s what you did to all these people.”

  “Not exactly,” he smiled. “You see I knew the process that cryogenicists are forced to use would never work. The law prohibits the freezing of a person’s body before they’re pronounced dead; i.e. the heart stops beating. And then it can take minutes, or even hours, to start the cryostasis process after the person has legally died.

  “The problem with that is that the body starts to decompose at the moment of death. The cells start to rapidly decay, and the brain is dead in a matter of minutes. What would be the point of trying to revive a body when their brain would be useless? So I did what had to be done to prove that Cryopreservation can work.”

  Mel suddenly felt sick to her stomach. It now made since to her why some of the spirits remembered their death as being so cold.

  “Please tell me that you didn’t freeze eleven people alive.”

  “I had to,” Abbott said. “Don’t you see? I have a chance to take Cryonics and give it an actual, proven, medical application.”

  “No, you don’t. You’re process didn’t work. All you did is kill eleven people. You took away any chance they had of surviving. And barring survival, you took away their chance to say goodbye to their families or to die with any kind of dignity.”

  “It was necessary.”

  “Was it? Was it really necessary to kill eleven people?”

  “According to you, I only killed ten,” he countered. “You said you haven’t seen the cop’s spirit; so that means my new process may have actually worked.”

  “What new process?” she asked again. “What did you do to him?”

  “I used my own special blend of blood thinners and nucleating proteins on him.”

  “What in the hell does that even mean?” she asked in frustration. She wanted to understand what had happened to Jack, but she’d never been an honor student in high school, and science had always been her worst subject. “What are nucleating proteins?”

  “They’re proteins that promote higher temperature freezing. You see, extensive freezing solidifies tissues, arrests vascular circulation, and deprives cells of oxygen. Because humans don’t naturally produce these proteins, it is impossible to freeze them without causing irreparable…”

  He stopped when he saw her blank stare and sighed. “Do you know what a wood frog is?”

  “A wood frog?” she asked in confusion. “Going solely on the name alone, I’m going to guess that it’s a frog.”

  “Yes, it’s a frog, but this is about what the wood frog does. Wood frogs live in the northwestern parts of the U.S. and Canada. But unlike other animals, they don’t hibernate or migrate to warmer climates in the winter. Instead, they crawl under a leaf and allow themselves to freeze.

  “When the cold weather passes, they thaw out and hop away no harm done. They’re able to do this because, unlike humans, they naturally produce nucleating proteins.

  “When the nucleating proteins are activated by a drop in temperature, the frogs liver amps up the production of sugar in the body,” he explained. “Do you see where I’m going with this?”

  “Dude, I couldn’t see where you’re going with this if I had a pair of fucking binoculars in my hand,” she said sarcastically. “What do frozen frogs and sugar production have to do with any of this?”

  He sighed again, she assumed at her stupidity. “Water freezes when it expands; sugar doesn’t. When the nucleating proteins in wood frogs are activated, the excess sugar from the liver floods the cells pushing out the water. The sugar freezes without expanding and causing no damage to the cells. The water that was in the cells can now freeze outside of the cells also causing no harm.

  “When warmer temperatures return, the frog starts to thaw, the heart starts to beat, and blood starts to pump through the body again. The pancreas filters out the excess sugar from the body, and the now thawed water returns to the cells. The frogs systems return to normal, and it hops away.”

  Mel was a bit disturbed to find herself actually interested in what Abbott was saying. “Great, but you said that humans don’t produce these nucleating proteins, so how does a wood frog help you?”

  “Humans don’t produce them, but the proteins can be harvested from the blood and intestines of the wood frogs.”

  “Oh, sweet baby Jesus,” she groaned feeling bile rise into her throat when she realized what was in the unlabeled bottles she’d found. “Please tell me you haven’t been injecting people with frog guts.”

  He frowned at her. “Just Det. Roday. First I sedated him with Acepromazine Maleate to keep him from waking up during the procedure, and then I injected my own special blend of Heparin, the glycerol-based cryoprotectant, and the nucleating proteins.

  “Heparin is a blood thinner that would keep his blood from clotting during the cooling process with the added bonus of a quicker delivery of the cryoprotectant and the nucleating protein to all the body’s cells.

  “The only problem is that a wood frog, which can freeze many times over, can only stay frozen for four to six weeks at a time. They need to partially thaw on occasion to sustain normal body function.

  “That meant that a human would have to go through this process as well. I made a special horizontal container for that process,” he said, waving his hand at the bed that Jack was in. “It alternates between sub-zero temperatures and heated air.

  “I originally made it to use on a sick patient, but after I struck Det. Roday, I figured…”

  “You figured you’d just freeze him,” she finished for him. “And then you panicked when his disappearance was all over the news. You didn’t know if he’d told anyone about his suspicions about you, so you decided the best thing would be to disappear yourself.”

  He nodded. “I couldn’t come back here to live after that. My reappearance would have brought a lot of questions, and someone might ha
ve made the same connection between me and my patients as Det. Roday had.

  “So I used a new name and took a job at a grocery store in the next county over. I’ve been there every since. I come back here every now and then to check on Roday, and I come back here when there’s a possibility that the electricity could be knocked out. Like tonight during the thunderstorms. I have a generator that kicks in whenever the power goes out, but you can never be too careful.”

  “Didn’t you notice that the house had been sold?”

  “I did, but there’s no one living here yet, and even if they were, the chances of anyone finding this room are slim.”

  “So how did you plan to unfreeze the cop’s body?”

  “There’s a switch on the side of the container. You just flip it, and the heat will come on and stay on. He’ll thaw out in five hours, and his heart will start beating again.”

  His eyes glowed for a brief moment, and Mel knew the light had just told her what to do. “How messed up will he be if you ever do manage to wake him up?”

  Abbott shrugged. “It shouldn’t be too bad. If my cryo blend worked, then any brain damage should be minimal. He may need a few weeks of physical therapy to get his muscles moving properly again, but he shouldn’t have much, if any, atrophy.”

  “Will he remember being frozen?”

  “Not at all. If he comes out of it with no brain damage, then he should think it’s still 1993. He won’t remember a thing from the moment he was knocked out.”

  “Why are you bothering to explain all of this to me?”

  “Because you’re the first patient I’ve had that I was able to explain the process to. I’m hoping it will make you less afraid of it. It’ll be a tight squeeze, but I’m sure I can fit you in the container with the cop”

  “What? Me? Oh no, no, no, no, hell no. No frog guts and anti-freeze for me, thanks. You just go on ahead and kill me and bury me in the backyard.”

  “You’d rather die than have the chance to continue your life at a later time?”

  “I’d prefer death to being frozen like a human Push Pop, yes.”