Father Webber would have to wait. It was possible many of the answers we sought were detailed in the pages of my father’s notes.
“I guess I’m going back to the station after all,” I said.
Chapter Eighteen
It was late into the evening. Hollingsworth arranged to have the journals brought to an unused office in the police station, where I could read them undisturbed.
I told him it would most likely take me a long while to go through them.
“I’ll leave you to it,” he said.
“Where are you going?” I asked.
The expression on his face was miserable. “I’m going to visit Vanderburgh’s family, give them the news.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, both for the loss of his partner, and that he was the one who had to undertake the unpleasant task of informing next of kin. I’d had to deliver such news in the past, and it always left me feeling bad for the family.
Hollingsworth pulled at his shirt. “After that, I’m going to go home, take a shower, drink a fifth of scotch, and maybe get a little sleep. I’ll be back in the morning.”
Pointing at a long couch pressed up against the wall opposite the desk, he said, “If you need to crash, no one will bother you. You can use the locker room to shower, and there’s a small kitchen down the hall where you can get something to eat.”
“Thanks,” I said.
Once he left, I turned to the last journal and cracked it open. Even before reading the first entry, I closed it. Though I was certain my father had written clues to the nature of OrganKnit in the last journal, there was something I needed to know first.
In Tim’s note, he’d stated that he hadn’t included the introductory entry, which my father would have written right after my mother’s death. What possible reason would the intern have to hold off transcribing it?
One assumption was that the journal entry in question was of a personal nature, unlike all the other entries he’d made over the years. Perhaps my father had detailed his grief in those pages.
If that was true, then it was a complete reversal of how he’d been throughout his life. My father and I had never had the kind of relationship where we shared our feelings with each other. In fact, he wasn’t likely to share his feelings with anyone. I often wondered what my mother had seen in him. Many times in my life I’d overhead people talk about my father, calling him such things as ‘robot’, ‘cold fish’, and ‘stone heart’.
There had never been a time when he’d been anything but cool and distant toward everyone. It had been a hard way for me to grow up.
Even after my mother had died, I’d never seen him succumb to grief or anger. He’d seemed to take her death in stride.
A part of me was angry that he hadn’t shared his feelings with me then. It had been a wretched period in my life, and I’d needed him to be there for me emotionally. Instead, he’d buried himself in his work and had left me to climb out of the pit of my despair and grief by myself.
Andrea had told me she thought he’d been just as overcome with loss as I had and didn’t know how to relate his feelings to me. He’d been distant because the pain of it was too much for him to bear.
I needed to read what my father had written and see if that was the case. Perhaps then I could finally begin to forgive him.
If I could forgive him, maybe I could forgive myself.
I opened the first journal, dated the year my mother died, and read the introductory entry.
It wasn’t what I was expecting. My father did not talk about his feelings, and he did not talk about science.
That day was the first time I was unable to contain the tremors. It has been close to ten years since the last attack. In the end, it took medication to suppress them.
The first paragraph caught me off guard. Did my father have some kind of neurological disorder? If he had Parkinson’s or multiple sclerosis, there would be no way for him to hide it. There weren’t any drugs out there that could treat tremors. Did he suffer from a physiological tremor? Was he susceptible to hypoglycemia or hyperthyroidism?
I read on:
I only chronicle the events of that day because it was the first time since the beginning of my affliction that I attempted to utilize the process on someone else.
When Doctor Spilner informed me my wife was deceased, I requested a few minutes of privacy. He understandably assumed it was so that I could grieve for my loss. That was the farthest thing from my mind.
I felt a swelling of anger at the callousness of my father’s words. Even at the moment of my mother’s death, he felt no grief?
Alone with Rebecca, I hesitated only a moment before I laid my hands on her. I could not sense the life in her. I concentrated, but I could do nothing that way. There was one possibility. I pulled back her hospital gown and, with the scalpel I had brought with me, created an incision in her chest.
I inserted my forefinger into the opening, pushing past her ribs to touch her heart.
The horror of what he wrote struck me. A part of me wanted to stop reading, but I had to continue.
I had only used the ability once before in my life, and what I saw within myself terrified me to my core. Though I’d suppressed the power up until that day, I finally overcame my fear. I willed the power to come forth and heal the damage in my wife’s heart.
Heal…?
I couldn’t believe what I was reading. It was at this point I started to think my father had broken from reality due to the stress of my mother’s death.
Rebecca did not return to life, though. She’d been gone too long. I was too late. If only I had been willing to do what was necessary earlier, I could have saved her.
I knew then that all hope was lost. I had failed her.
At that point, I almost closed the journal. I didn’t want to read it anymore. The ravings of a grief-stricken man, even if he was my father, would do nothing except make me feel pity for him.
Then it happened. I felt her heart beat once, twice, three times. It worked!
I shook my head. What he wrote couldn’t be true. It had to be a product of his imagination.
Her heart continued to beat, and I thought a miracle had occurred. Rebecca would come back to me.
She had been dead too long, however. Though blood coursed through her veins, it did not return the spark of life to her.
Soon, her heart ceased beating, and no matter how much I willed the power in me to return life to her, she did not recover.
When I realized my efforts were in vain, my rage overwhelmed me.
I lost control. The tremors began, and shook the hospital room and the entire wing of the building.
The walls cracked, the medical equipment fell over, and the ceiling shattered above us. When the staff found me, I was still vibrating from the power, but they must have assumed I was having some kind of seizure, and gave me a heavy sedative.
Afterwards, as I recovered in an undamaged section of the hospital, I realized that the destruction I had wrought had effectively covered up the illicit surgery I had performed on my wife. No one ever suspected what had happened.
It would have been easy for me to succumb to my despair, but that would have dishonored the memory of my Rebecca. So, instead, I vowed, in her honor, to find a way to harness the power in me that I had suppressed for so long. It had taken Rebecca’s death for me to use it.
There was a reason I had this affliction. Now, it was time to think of it as a blessing. I have decided to examine every aspect of it, and discover how to use the healing properties of the power, however long that course may take.
If I had read the entry a week ago, I would have thought it was either a joke, or that my father had suffered a delusion brought on by the death of my mother.
Today, however, after everything I had witnessed, I was ready to believe in the impossible.
The tremors he wrote about were not a neurological condition. He had caused physical damage to his environment.
…As had Lawrence
Bukowski.
My father had been able to heal himself.
…As had Lawrence Bukowski.
Somehow, my father had transferred the power to his subject. How?
My mind made another connection: Father Webber was under the impression that Lawrence was possessed by a Watcher, a fallen angel, which had imbued him with these powers.
Did that mean that before it had possessed Lawrence, it had possessed my father?
I read the next entry, but there was no reference to his attempt to resurrect my mother. From that point forward, his efforts revolved around identifying what he initially called ‘elementum curationum’—the healing element. My father had never been a religious man. It followed that he was determined to find a scientific explanation for his powers.
When I had discovered the digitized version of the journals at his home office, I’d only had time to skim the pages, looking for references to OrganKnit or Lawrence. Now, I had as much time as I needed.
Long into the night, I read every one of the journals in order, even though I wanted to skip forward to the last few.
It was important that I followed my father’s progression in a chronological manner; it was the best way to make sure I didn’t miss anything.
There were times I had to read between the lines. For example, when he talked about harvesting samples from the source, he meant he was biopsying samples of himself—blood, skin, bone marrow.
His early experiments revolved around resurrection.
Although many organs in the human body can survive for hours after clinical death, except in rare circumstances, brain death occurs in about five minutes. All experiments my father undertook in reviving dead cells were unsuccessful.
In the concluding paragraph of his final experiment in that area, he wrote:
I take bitter comfort in my failure. At the very least, I now know without a doubt that there was no way to bring her back.
His next series of experiments involved trying to isolate where the healing properties were contained within him, as if it were a genetic mutation, or virus.
He discovered that there was no distinct region of his physiology that contained the mysterious element.
Over the course of several nights, he visited the university hospital and visited patients while they slept. By the simple act of touching them and focusing, he found he was able to heal them.
It was through my own cowardice that Rebecca was taken from me. If I had not been so frightened of the power, I could have saved her.
With experimentation, he discovered he was able to initiate the healing process in the patients no matter what part of his body made contact. This prevented him from identifying the element within him that stimulated the effect.
The problem, he soon found, was that he could only heal one person at a time. That wasn’t good enough; in order to make up for letting his wife die, he needed to be able to heal as many people as possible.
That’s when he came up with the idea of transplanting his own cells into others. Once the cells were removed from his body, however, they ceased to have any efficacy in the healing process when he applied them to organ samples.
Even if he figured out a way to heal without physical contact, my father had another problem.
Though the host retains the properties required for the regrowth of damaged subject cells, there is only one source, and that severely limits the volume of effect. Without the ability to mass-produce the elementum curationum, this discovery will never be more than an anomalous incident. Should the host cease to exist, there may never be another occurrence of this miraculous ability.
Finally, I opened the last journal, the one Tim Bellows had not fully digitized. I took a deep breath and read.
It was three months ago when my father made his first significant breakthrough. As I began to understand the sequence of events, I felt a cold chill run through me.
Using somatic-cell nuclear transfer techniques, my father cultivated stem cells from his liver.
Stem cell therapy wasn’t new, though the research still had a long way to go. It was by no means a miracle treatment. The results of my father’s experiment were nothing short of miraculous.
Although he tested the cells on a lab rat to no discernible effect, when he treated a skin sample he’d harvested from a human donor, the skin cells began to replicate at an alarming rate. Within a few hours, the culture had doubled in size, each new cell as viable as the original.
The cells continued to replicate until my father destroyed the sample.
He surmised that if he could infuse a subject with his own DNA, the patient could heal on their own. All he needed to do was to continue to harvest his own stem cells. Since he could heal himself, he could continue to produce the required cells for the rest of his life.
Of course, if anyone found out what he was really doing, not only would he never get FDA approval, he’d become the subject of someone else’s research study.
He needed volunteers in a controlled environment, but he couldn’t tell the truth about what he was doing. To mask the true nature of his work, he created a compound out of his stem cells and plasma and called it OrganKnit.
It was around that time that he’d run out of savings and couldn’t conduct his own trials. He approached Phil Bellows for help.
After creating computer simulations based on the results, they went to Enoch Enterprises for funding.
The entries for the past month detailed all the preparations my father undertook, with Tim’s assistance, leading up to the first the experiment with Lawrence, which Enoch Enterprises required before agreeing to underwrite the project.
A few days before the unauthorized trial, my father wrote:
The computer simulations suggest complete success. All that will remain is to obtain FDA approval. Sam Lancaster has the complete facilities for the harvesting and distribution of OrganKnit.
I sat back in the office chair, my mind spinning. Of course, he’d been denied FDA approval but had gone on with the experiment anyway.
Furthermore, there was no chemical compound able to stimulate regeneration.
OrganKnit was nothing more than my father’s own stem cells.
Chapter Nineteen
OrganKnit was a fraud, as far as scientific developments were concerned. There was no compound that stimulated cells and caused them to regrow; it was my father’s own stem cells, infused with the power of a Watcher, a fallen angel.
What did he hope to accomplish? Did he think Enoch Enterprises would harvest his cells for the rest of his life?
Tens of thousands of people in the U.S. needed transplants every year. Worldwide, the numbers were in the hundreds of thousands. Even if he spent every moment in a lab, my father couldn’t hope to provide enough stem cells for even a fraction of those who needed them.
Or, was my father just buying time until he could isolate the property in his physiology that caused the rapid healing?
Surely, he had not anticipated the side effect of infusing his stem cells in Lawrence. Was he hoping to spread the power that way, like a virus? Or, was that an unexpected result?
Something had gone terribly wrong when he’d injected them into a live human subject for the first time. Father Webber had said that the Watcher would transfer itself to a new host if the previous host died. Was it possible that the Watcher’s spirit had been split between my father and Lawrence?
I thought back to the meeting in my father’s office just before the incident in the lab. My father had seemed sickly, pale.
He’d always been the epitome of health, as long as I’d known him. He’d never taken a sick day, and in my memory he’d never so much as had a sore throat. Yet, in the moments before Lawrence murdered him, I would’ve sworn he was showing advanced signs of liver disease.
If I believed that my father had been possessed by a Watcher, then—allowing myself a moment of wild conjecture—I wondered if, by transferring his stem cells to Lawrence, he’d created a link to the
other man; a conduit through which the entity could travel.
Having been deprived of the Watcher’s power, my father had not been able to heal the damage he’d caused to his own liver.
Was it possible the Watcher had sensed Lawrence was the stronger of the two and gravitated toward him.
Lawrence, once possessed by the Watcher, had reaped the powers of that entity. He could heal himself—and others, though he had done the opposite of that—and he was able to produce tremors strong enough to shake the ground or any structure in his vicinity.
Lawrence had killed my father… Then, shouldn’t the entire spirit of the Watcher have entered Lawrence at that time? The killer had raged that the experiment—the transfer—had not been completely successful. He was still looking for a way to finish the process.
When Lawrence killed someone—such as the man near the university, Tim and Phil Bellows, and Vanderburgh and the police officers—his victims had developed tendrils of skin as their bodies tried to repair the damage inflicted. Though he had killed my father and had tried to absorb his healthy cells, I had stopped him before he completed the absorption. Now, my father was safely locked away in the city morgue, surrounded by too many doctors and officials to chance breaking in.
Was that what Lawrence needed? More of my father’s DNA?
I shared the same DNA as my father. According to Father Webber, I would have been the next likely host for the Watcher, who would transfer its spirit to me upon my father’s death, as if it were something I would genetically inherit. I could only conclude that the entity followed bloodlines, and since Lawrence was not related to me, it was possible he didn’t carry the requisite gene for hosting duties—that is, until he was infused with my father’s DNA.
Would killing me and absorbing my cells complete the process in Lawrence?
Another thought struck me, and I recalled some of the things Lawrence had said. Had he known all along that he would become possessed? How?
My thoughts had led me in the complete opposite direction from any scientific conclusions. I had gone so far into the mystical and religious that I felt I was quickly becoming lost.
The Complete Book Of Fallen Angels Page 52