Well, that was sensible enough. Just like a séance…. Now the doctor began to motion with his hands. Sophie waited for his questions and prepared herself to make some illegible scrawls on the paper in front of her. Really it couldn’t be too hard to fake….
“Very good,” said Braid, rubbing his hands together. “Remarkably good, for your first time. How very glad I am, Miss Hunter, that you telephoned my office!”
Sophie looked at him with amazement, slowly realizing that her right hand ached where she’d been clutching the pencil. A heap of pages of semilegible writing lay on the table between herself and Braid, pages he now swept up and out of her view before she could decode a single line.
But he’d only just begun! Surely she couldn’t have fallen into a mesmeric trance without even realizing it?
She looked at her watch and saw that almost thirty minutes had passed since she’d last checked. But that had only been a few minutes ago!
Braid refrained from laughing at Sophie’s incredulity.
“Everyone’s taken aback the first few times,” he said in a kindly manner. “Disconcerting, isn’t it?”
“What did I say, though?” Sophie said, leaning forward and gripping the edge of the table, her knuckles white. “Did I say anything…bad?”
“Miss Hunter, I assure you that you need never worry about the confidentiality of what passes in this room,” said the doctor. “All communications between us are privileged—and when I say ‘us,’ I include your other self, the self that emerges under hypnosis.”
“So I do have another self? A self that wrote things down in answer to your questions?” Sophie asked, hardly able to believe it.
“Yes, and the nature of that self’s responses has already suggested to me some further avenues of inquiry,” Braid said.
“Can’t you tell me what I wrote?” Sophie begged.
“No, I’m afraid I can’t,” said Braid, “for that might jeopardize the force of the therapeutic intervention later on. But we have some interesting weeks ahead of us, Miss Hunter, and I look forward very much to our collaboration.”
He stood and shook hands with Sophie. It was strange to think that just half an hour earlier, she’d been eager to rush in and out of Braid’s office at top speed so as to get on with her real mission.
Well, she would learn no more of her history today. She made an appointment for the following Thursday and asked the receptionist if she could use the washroom in the hall.
“Of course,” said the young woman. “It’s the first door on the left, toward the back.”
“Thank you.”
“Will you be all right letting yourself out?” the secretary asked.
Sophie looked and saw she was poised to go, scarf tied over her hair, handbag packed up, keys in hand ready to lock up.
“You see, usually I leave just at five,” the girl continued apologetically, “and I’ve still got the shopping to do before I go home.”
“I’ll be fine,” Sophie said, inwardly thanking the god of illicit investigations for this lucky break.
They left the office together, the receptionist locking the hall door after them (“Mr. Braid will be there hours longer,” she explained) and rushing out the front door while Sophie let herself into the lavatory. She was so nervous by now that she thought she might be sick, but the sight of the toilet fixture calmed her stomach, and in the end she simply washed her hands and splashed cold water over her face.
She peered out into the hallway. Seeing nobody, she raced down the hall and out the garden door. Thankfully it hadn’t an alarm system, just a dead bolt that opened quite easily from the inside. She entered the garden and pulled the door closed behind her. As it closed, she realized she might have stuck a bit of cardboard in the jamb to prevent it from shutting all the way.
Oh well, perhaps it wasn’t locked.
She tried it.
Locked.
So that bridge was burned. She’d have to find another way out when she was finished.
She located a series of footholds on the sturdy wooden fence that separated the Braid Institute’s garden from that of IRYLNS next door. Very cautiously, she lifted herself just high enough up to see over into the garden.
It was completely empty. Taking a deep breath, she pulled herself up and over the fence, then gracelessly dropped down to the ground on the other side, twisting her ankle, and stumbled forward. It felt like enemy territory, and the movement of a tabby cat on the other side of the garden almost made her scream.
THIRTY-SEVEN
SOPHIE’S OBJECTIVE ALL along had been to get into the locked ward. Even just a few pictures of girls like the ones she’d seen that day in the garden would surely make Priscilla and Jean take Sophie seriously. The windows at the back of the building were tiny and high off the ground and opened barely wide enough to allow a very small person to pass through, but there was no hope of getting by the guards at the front.
Some gardening equipment lay abandoned near the fence, and Sophie, feeling like a criminal (she supposed she was a criminal), dragged a wheelbarrow over to beneath the window, climbed up onto it, and peered inside.
The scene might have come straight from one of the famous photographs of the alienist Flaubert’s patients at the Salpêtrière in Paris. A host of young women in white hospital gowns wandered up and down a narrow central ward; others were visible through the doorways leading to the secondary wards.
About a third of the patients were in bed, a handful more in wheelchairs. Those lucky enough to remain ambulatory looked dazed and unhappy and somehow damaged in a way Sophie couldn’t explain. She took Nan’s camera out of her pocket and snapped a picture, but she would have to get nearer for the photographs to really be any good.
There were no nurses or other authority figures in sight, so far as Sophie could tell. She’d take the chance and go in.
Crossing her fingers for luck, Sophie hissed a few words through the window: “Hey! You, there!” Then, when a girl slowly turned her head toward Sophie: “Yes, you! Look, I need to get inside. Can you help me through the window?”
The girl’s face showed an utter lack of understanding. Another girl, though, had stopped pacing up and down and come near.
“What is it?” she said, her speech slurred.
“I need to get in. And the window’s got one of those security things; the screw’s keeping me from pushing it up from the outside.”
Some expression flitted across the girl’s face, but Sophie couldn’t read it.
At that point the wheelbarrow tilted beneath her, tipping her to the ground. After remounting, bruised and rather dirtier than before—thank goodness the camera wasn’t broken—she found the other girl’s face only inches from her own, her fingers fumbling with the screw over the sill.
Sophie tried another friendly overture. “What’s your name?”
The girl looked up and opened her mouth, then closed it again, her face puzzled and pained.
“Don’t remember,” she mumbled finally, finding words with difficulty. “Been here for ages. No name. Don’t remember coming here.”
Despite the uncertainty of her fingers, she managed to loosen both screws and raise the window. She placed her hands on Sophie’s wrists as Sophie fought to lift herself up onto the sill. It was a struggle, but she made it in an awful scrambly way that left her shaky and out of breath. It wasn’t hard after that to swing her legs over the sill and slide in through the window.
Inside, Sophie found herself in the midst of a small mob. The girls thronged around her, congregating from all over the ward, and for a moment Sophie almost panicked.
Then one of the girls—it was hard to tell them apart with their identical gowns and cropped hair, here and there a bandage covering the downy tufts—stepped forward and leaned over her, as if to confide something important.
Sophie froze.
“They. Watch. Us,” said the girl, using the pauses to tell Sophie something important. “Watch. Us. From. Off. Ward.”
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She looked inquiringly at Sophie, who caught on and said, “You have to block me from view?”
The girl gave a slow nod.
She must be heavily dosed with tranquilizers, Sophie thought. Or else—much worse—could it be massive neurological damage from the surgical procedure?
Sophie wanted to ask them all what had happened, to listen to each and every story so as to go out and bear witness. But she had, she thought, at most half an hour before the odds of being discovered would become disastrously high, and all she could sensibly do in that time was to gather enough evidence to persuade Jean and Priscilla to change their minds.
“I need to see the very worst,” she said now to the girls pressed around her, speaking softly in case the authorities were monitoring the ward for sound. “I can’t stay long—I mustn’t be found here—but I’ve got two friends at school, and I need to tell them exactly why they shouldn’t come to IRYLNS. I’ll take pictures of whatever you show me, if you don’t mind.”
The girls consulted briefly with one another in garbled sentences she couldn’t understand. Then three of them took Sophie between them and moved her down the ward in a formation like fighter planes escorting a bomber, weaving in and out to mislead the watchers.
They stopped short next to a bed whose occupant seemed little more than a narrow, bolster-shaped lump under the covers. Maneuvering Sophie into position, the girl who’d first helped her climb through the window drew a set of curtains around the bed and made a series of gestures (easier for her than speech, Sophie guessed) to tell Sophie she now stood out of the watchers’ sight.
Movements tentative, Sophie knelt by the bed and put a hand out to the place where she thought the girl’s shoulder must be.
The girl in the bed groaned and rolled toward Sophie. One of the other occupants of the ward pulled down the covers so that Sophie could see the girl’s face.
The girl in the bed was unmistakably Sophie’s former idol Sheena Henshawe.
Her body was thin to the point of emaciation, and her arms and neck were covered with sores and rough discolored patches. Most of her hair was shaved down to uneven stubble, the remaining strands thin and colorless. A shunt taped to Sheena’s head drained through a tube into a basin full of pus by the side of the bed (the smell was almost intolerable). An IV delivered fluids into her arm, and the bed was surrounded with a frightening amount of medical equipment.
This emptied-out shell of Sheena grunted and tried to pull herself up into a sitting position. Lacking the strength, she had to let the other girls prop her up.
Though it might have been more a function of her own desire than of anything really there, Sophie believed she saw a glimmer of recognition in Sheena’s face.
“Sheena!” she cried out. “Whatever happened to you?”
Sheena shook her head. “Can’t…tell,” she said, her blistered lips hardly moving as she spoke. “Why…here?”
“I’m not here to undergo the training,” Sophie said quickly. “I’m trying to stop my friends Jean and Priscilla from joining IRYLNS, and I thought if I could tell them about what really happens here, I’d be able to persuade them not to. Oh, Sheena, it must be stopped! Look at you….”
The girl shook her head, too weak to answer.
“What happened to you, Sheena?” Sophie cried out.
She didn’t know which transformation disturbed her more: the real Sheena into the gleaming, perfect secretary that day on the bridge, or that beautiful, well-groomed mannequin into the degraded wreck lying before her.
“Emotion…overload,” Sheena mumbled. “Seizure. Surgery.”
Her eyes appealed to Sophie for something Sophie couldn’t identify. She tried and failed to come up with a tactful way of asking about Sheena’s prognosis. Would Sheena ever get back to anything like normal health?
As a compromise, she said, “What will you do when you’re well again?”
She was horrified to see the tears spill out of Sheena’s eyes and down her rough, chapped cheeks.
“Only thing in the world I ever wanted,” Sheena said, her words suddenly much clearer. “Best thing in the world. Serving my country. Can’t do it now. Don’t want to live.”
Sophie stroked her arm and felt a furious surge of hatred for the people who had done this to Sheena.
“Sophie,” Sheena said, clutching her hand so hard that Sophie jumped. “This place…all for good. Good of others. Greater good. Good of country. Highest good, IRYLNS. Friends…”
“But don’t you think it should be stopped?” Sophie asked. “Sheena, look what they’ve done to you!”
Sheena shook her head, pulling herself up a little and digging her nails into Sophie’s arm.
“More important, Sophie. You and the others…must come to IRYLNS. The country needs…Serve. You must.”
Then she fell back onto the bed, shattered by the short conversation.
Sophie’s horror exceeded anything she had ever felt before. She’d been so sure about this venture, so sure that the girls who’d been destroyed—destroyed not once but twice over—would welcome any chance to get the word out and save a few others. And here was the worst thing imaginable, Sheena Henshawe—Sophie’s hero Sheena—reduced to this wreck of skin and bone, and yet still rehearsing the most coherent version she could manage of the message about duty and service and self-sacrifice.
It was the last thing in the world Sophie had expected, that she would find IRYLNS’s most pitiful victim and be told that nothing was more important than giving oneself up for the cause.
She stared at Sheena and didn’t know what to say.
“I won’t tell the others,” she said finally. It was the least she could do. She didn’t have the right to go against Sheena’s wishes, not really. “I won’t say anything at all, if that’s what you want.”
As a faint smile came to Sheena’s lips, the other girls who’d clustered around them suddenly froze.
Sophie looked up. “What is it?” she said.
Before she got an answer, though, she heard two familiar voices approaching the bed.
There was no way to escape discovery.
“Let’s have a look at Sheena Henshawe,” said one of the new arrivals.
“There’s no chance she’ll be of any further use,” said the other. “Will you send her to the asylum at Rothersay?”
“I think so,” said the first speaker, “assuming she recovers from the infection. The worst-case scenario is that we’ll have to place her in a nursing home. They’re not really equipped at Rothersay for the level of care that girls like Sheena are liable to require.”
A hand swept back the curtain around the bed, and Sophie found herself under the eyes of Great-aunt Tabitha and her friend Dr. Ferrier, the Institute’s director and its most fanatical supporter.
THIRTY-EIGHT
AFTER A HUMILIATING and painful interlude in which two burly male nurses hauled Sophie out of the ward and down the corridors to the director’s office, Sophie found herself at the receiving end of a tirade from Great-aunt Tabitha.
The guards had confiscated Sophie’s film and returned the camera to her with contempt.
As phrases like “I’ll never trust you again” and “criminal trespass” rolled off Great-aunt Tabitha’s tongue, Sophie had a sudden horrifying revelation, something to do with Mr. Braid’s words about multiple selves.
“The J and H procedure—J and H don’t just stand for joy and happiness, do they?” she said, breaking in on Great-aunt Tabitha’s speech. “The letters mean Jekyll and Hyde as well…. You split the girls off, into a good self and a bad one.”
Silence followed Sophie’s naming of the two selves in Robert Louis Stevenson’s tale.
“I suppose Sophie might as well hear the real explanation,” said Great-aunt Tabitha, exchanging a glance with Dr. Ferrier.
“Oh, yes, she might as well,” said Dr. Ferrier. “I don’t see how it can hurt now.”
They had dismissed the guards. Sophie wasn’t sure wha
t her punishment would be, but she no longer thought she’d be thrown into prison.
“It began when I invented the machinery,” Great-aunt Tabitha said. “The machine is the Emotional Battery, its logical complement is the J and H procedure, and as you’ve guessed, the abbreviation stands for something more—something other than ‘joy and happiness.’ Jekyll and Hyde…it has often been said that men are more rational creatures than women. I believe that men and women alike suffer from having emotions, but IRYLNS trains women to become repositories for all of the destructive emotions experienced by the men they work for, many of whom are politicians and diplomats who quite simply cannot afford to have a bad day. Wives have always known that part of their job is to bear the things their husbands cannot. We have simply taken the process one step further, fully modernized it, and put it on a technologically sound basis.”
Sophie was speechless. Aside from everything else, it seemed so terribly unfair that the women should pay such a high price for what was after all the men’s problem! Almost without knowing it, she put her hand up to her open mouth.
Now Dr. Ferrier took over. “Girls who undergo the surgical procedure must be regularly hooked up thereafter to the Emotional Battery,” she told Sophie, “or else they will be less than supremely fit to do their jobs. We install a conduit in the brain that works like the electrical equivalent of the tap one inserts into a maple tree to drain off the sap to make sugar. Purged regularly in this manner, all their emotions stored in the battery, the girls soon become quite incapable of experiencing negative feelings. They make perfect empty vessels, then, for the rage of the men they work for. To sustain their peace of mind, we hook them up to the battery twice a week at a local service center, where the treatment can be administered in a modern and fully hygienic setting.”
The Explosionist Page 26