Forest (The Afterlife Investigations Book 2)
Page 2
Had Corvine been a graduate of Moorlake University?
It's a damn small world, I thought, cracking the cover. The spine gave a little snap, like it hadn't been opened since Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was released, and it took me only a few minutes of page-flipping to pin down the database listing for Corvine and its attendant picture.
Half-way into the book was a list of those who'd graduated from the school's then-new medical program in the year 1967. Listed among them, and pictured in the second row, looking incredibly severe for a man of 28 years, was one William Reynholm Corvine.
I sat down on the floor and had a good, long look at the picture.
He'd been an intense-looking man in his youth, and as I studied his dark, deep-set eyes, his sharp nose and strong jaw, I fancied I could hear the stern voice from his dictation drifting through the air. He looked like a big guy—no height was given, but judging solely by the width of his shoulders and the thickness of his neck, I wagered he'd been quite the specimen. I'd read some things about Corvine, had heard his voice, recorded almost thirty years ago, but this was my first time seeing the man.
I took the yearbook to the nearest copier and printed off the entire page. Then, returning the book to the shelf, I walked back to the computer lab to look it over more closely.
So, Corvine's alma mater was my very own Moorlake U, eh? It was a surprising tidbit, but it didn't exactly further my understanding of the case at hand in any significant way. In order to make something of this find, I'd have to look elsewhere on that page—to the other medical graduates pictured alongside him.
I set about the work of Googling Corvine's fellow graduates. One of them, I hoped, had been a friend of his—if a man so severe and deranged as Corvine could possibly have been interested in such trifles as friendship—and would be able to tell me more.
The trouble with looking up guys who graduated from medical school in the 60's was that there weren't a whole lot of them left.
Of the ten names I searched, six came back with obituary listings.
That left four names.
The odds of any of these four men having been close friends of Corvine—or better, associates of his—were slim, but I pulled up what I could of them and got reading. Three, if they were still alive, lived out of State. Colorado, New Jersey... one looked to have packed it up and done charity work in the Philippines. The last one, though, caught my eye.
His name was Dr. Nicholas Smallwood, and he still happened to be in the area. In fact, unless my eyes were deceiving me, he was still practicing, even at almost eighty years old. A search of his name yielded a few details, which I jumped on. He was a general practitioner who worked out of a small clinic in Toledo. He was soon to retire, after 50 years of practice. An address and phone number for the Arrowpointe Family Clinic on Dorr St. in Toledo was offered on a barebones website, and on that same website, under the “About us” section, I found a group photo of the clinic's staff.
In the front, grinning from beneath a wiry white mustache, was a man whose general physiognomy matched that of the fresh-faced graduate listed as Nicholas Smallwood in the yearbook.
I took down the clinic address and decided to pay him a visit.
5
I paid the Arrowpointe Family Clinic a visit on the next afternoon, March 31st. After a forty minute drive that took me through the suburbs, into Toledo, and down several backroads whose desolate businesses and ramshackle neighborhoods echoed eras of prosperity now long-passed, I arrived at the little roadside clinic at the intersection of Dorr and Blanc, with its plastic OPEN sign in the front window and its narrow parking lot shared with a boarded-up hotdog joint.
The area was rough. Of the businesses that were still open, none except the clinic had escaped getting tagged by gang graffiti. This street “art”, mostly in faded hues of black, blue and white, didn't do much to liven up the crumbling neighborhood and instead called to mind the walls of a truck stop men's room. From some adjacent street there was a loud pop—whether it was a car backfiring or a gunshot, I didn't stick around to find out.
Worst of all? Not a Starbucks in sight.
I did something that I usually never bother with as I started for the front door of the clinic. I actually locked the doors of my shitty Cavalier. As I entered the place—dim, dust-scented—a little bell over the door rang, heralding my entrance. The clinic itself was about the size of your average fast food restaurant. A small, glassed-off counter sat at the center of the room. There were folding chairs scattered around the waiting area—they'd been in rows, once, but were no longer—and no one to sit in them. Not so much as a kid crying over an earache.
The woman behind the counter slid away the glass and eyed me with annoyance. Either that or she'd suffered some kind of facial injury that left her incapable of smiling. She wore way too much eye shadow—a bright purple hue that looked better suited to a Lisa Frank lunchbox—and apparently maintained the same liberal attitude with her perfume. A gust of Red Door or something similarly tedious hit me as I approached. “Can I help you?” she asked, tugging at the neckline of her floral blouse.
I'd rehearsed this bit in front of the mirror a few times, admittedly. I approached the counter with a bit of a limp, smiling weakly. “Hi, I was hoping I might be able to see Dr. Smallwood?”
She looked me over from the other side of the counter. “Sure, and what brings you in today?”
I considered having some fun with her, answering with some obscure—and lewd—malady, but decided against it. “Not feeling too well,” I coughed out. “Having trouble sleeping, bad cough... aches and pains.” The circles under my eyes, left by too much poor sleep in recent days, made my appeal all the more convincing.
“OK,” she replied. She unearthed a clipboard and fastened a few sheets of paper to it. “Fill these out.”
I took a seat in one of the folding chairs and had a look at the forms. I wasn't actually interested in being treated. Except for the occasional pain caused by my wisdom teeth—which I was too stubborn to have removed—I was in reasonable health. But I couldn't just ask to speak to Dr. Smallwood about his old—and notorious—college pal. There was no telling how he'd react. I needed to get him alone in the clinic, one on one, before springing the true reason for my visit on him. For that, I'd have to fill in the forms. I did so semi-truthfully, pencilling in my real name, but using the university's address as my own. I also put down a fake phone number. When I was done, I limped back up to the front and rubbed at my chest, stifling a fake cough with the crook of my arm. “Is it a long wait?” I asked despite the complete lack of other patients.
The clerk shook her head. “No. Come through this door and have a seat in exam room one. The doctor will be in shortly.” There was a door to the right of her hovel which opened up into a short hallway lined in examination rooms. I hobbled down the hall till I was out of her sight and then slipped into the first room as instructed, sitting down at the edge of the examination table.
From the hallway I heard the shrill clerk's voice. “Ya got a patient, doc! Room one!”
How quaint, I thought.
The room was done up in white, and was rather bare. It reminded me somewhat of the patient rooms at Chaythe Asylum in that it was windowless, though things here seemed reasonably clean and inviting by comparison. There was a sink, beside which were a number of glass containers stocked with cotton swabs, bandages and tongue depressors. Hanging on the wall beside a generic anatomy poster outlining the circulatory system, were a steel otoscope and digital thermometer. Beneath them was a device that looked to be a combination scale and blood pressure machine, replete with three bluish cuffs of different sizes.
The examination table was made of cracked pleather and topped in a white paper liner that crinkled as I shifted on it. I fidgeted for a short while, wondering how long I was going to have to wait, when I heard shuffling footsteps outside the door. Moments later, a small, stooped man in a white lab coat—the very same one I'd seen with the w
hite mustache online—entered the room and shut the door softly behind him. He smiled warmly, then looked down at the clipboard in his hands. “Hello, Mr. Barlow,” he began in a quiet, tired voice, setting down the clipboard and taking the stethoscope from around his neck, “what seems to be the problem?”
I'm a pretty short guy, but even in his prime Dr. Smallwood must have been miniscule. He was swimming in his white coat, and as he placed the stethoscope into his tiny ears, he gave the impression of a wizened child playing doctor.
Banishing my feigned weariness, I smiled and extended a hand to shake, which he accepted with evident confusion. “Suddenly, I'm feeling a whole lot better, doc. My name's Stephen Barlow. I'm a professor over at Moorlake University.”
At this, his confusion was supplanted by delight. “Oh, Moorlake U? You don't say. It just so happens that I'm a graduate of that school. How is the old campus nowadays? I'm sure it's changed a great deal since I was a student there,” he said with a laugh.
I might have responded honestly by letting him know how badly I was getting screwed by the administration—how poorly they paid me and how they only allowed me to teach a single class so that they wouldn't have to afford me the pay and benefits of a full-time instructor—but I held my tongue and stayed on topic. “No kidding? What year did you graduate?”
He shook his head, his gaze growing distant for a time. “Oh, back in 1967,” he said with a toothy grin. “It's been fifty years since I graduated. Mine was one of the first graduating classes of their medical program, if you can believe it.”
“Wow, class of '67, huh? So, I take it you were a classmate of Dr. W. R. Corvine then, eh?”
His reverie was cut short and his mustache twitched curiously as he was brought back to the present. “Erm... excuse me?”
I'd thrown him for a big loop.
“Listen,” I began. “I apologize for doing this to you, but I'm not actually here to get checked out. I came here today because I was hoping you might be willing to reminisce a little about this old schoolmate of yours—W. R. Corvine. I take it you did know him, yes?”
Dr. Smallwood took a step back, returning the stethoscope to its perch around his neck and teasing the edge of his mustache with his finger in a gesture probably meant to convey veiled anger. “Well, yes...”
“I don't want to take up much of your time, but it would mean the world to me if I could pick your brain. You see, I've found myself in a bit of a pickle, and it just so happens that it all leads back to Corvine and his work.” I paused. “Everything is off the record, of course.”
He squinted at me with suspicion and then looked to the door like he was going to ask me to leave. “Are you a reporter?” he asked.
“No, I'm a professor of English at Moorlake,” I replied.
He gave a small, uneasy laugh. “Oh, well, at least you weren't lying about that part. What is it you want to know about the man?”
“Everything,” was my rejoinder. “Though, I'll settle for whatever you can remember.”
With a sigh, Dr. Smallwood wandered over to the sink, beneath which had been hidden a small stool. Sitting down on it, he crossed his arms and leaned forward. “You're lucky it's a slow day today. There's enough time to talk, I suppose.”
“Corvine and I were schoolmates, it's true. But we were not close,” began Dr. Smallwood. “I don't know that William ever had a close friend. He was not the kind to go out on weekends and have fun like the rest of us. He was different—studious, if you will. And, of course, he was a genius. His intelligence was well-established and I don't doubt he was the best of us that graduated that year. He should have gone on to do great things, and perhaps he would've if not for what happened.”
I arched a brow. “Sorry, what are you talking about?”
Dr. Smallwood glanced up at me, frowning. “Just how much do you know about him?” he asked. “Surely you've heard about what happened after he graduated?”
“No, I haven't.”
“He graduated with honors, did very well in school, but his career hit a roadblock a year or so after graduation when his wife and daughter died. It was a house fire. He'd been working a residency at the Cleveland Clinic then. It ruined him. He was never the same after that, as you can well imagine.”
“Wait, he was married?” This new piece of information was difficult for me to process. “He was married and had a child? I wasn't aware.”
The doctor nodded. “Like I said, they perished in a house fire. It must have been in '68 or '69, not long after we graduated. It aged him terribly, and in the years after, he seemed a changed man. He'd always been very straight-laced and scholarly, but after the fire he took on an almost maniacal interest in his work. As I said, we were not close, but over the years I bumped into him at State conferences and he was always involved in some new project or another. As the years passed he seemed to become interested in behavioral medicine and neurology... and then, in the 80's, when the asylum was closed...”
“Right,” I replied. “He lost his license for carrying out unsanctioned experiments on his patients, correct?”
“Yes.” He then added, “But 'experiments' are a euphemism. If even half of what I heard from those in the know is true, then Corvine had gone completely unhinged—had thrown ethics to the wind. What he did there was tantamount to torture. He experimented on those whose minds were already fragile with illness. He administered experimental drugs without any regard for their side effects, and all for his own personal amusement. His curiosities led him to use human beings like lab rats.”
“I see... And why do you think he carried out these experiments? What could have been the reason?” I asked.
Dr. Smallwood considered the question for only a moment before shrugging it away. “It's impossible to say. I never asked him—he was never heard from again after the closure of the asylum. And it's a miracle he wasn't jailed for what he did; I've known men to hang for less. I can only guess that his personal trauma left him a damaged person.”
The doctor's guess as to Corvine's motives was as good as mine. I didn't broach the supernatural aspect of the situation for fear of sounding insane, and instead asked Smallwood about something else. Something I hoped he could provide some insight on. “Are you familiar with a substance called Scotophobin?” I asked.
He muttered the word to himself a few times, pawing at his cheeks. “Scotophobin? It rings a bell. Unless I'm mistaken, it's a neuropeptide. Used in animals—mice—it's been shown to trigger nyctophobia.”
“Nyctophobia?”
Smallwood smirked. “I thought you were an English teacher. Aren't big words supposed to be your specialty?” He cleared his throat. “An intense fear of the dark.”
I pressed the doctor for more information, hoping to glean some understanding of how these experiments might have worked. “Suppose you put someone—a psych patient—into a situation where their senses are cut-off. A Ganzfeld Effect... sensory deprivation-style scenario, right? If you gave such a peptide to a person, what effect would it have under those conditions?”
Dr. Smallwood eyed me narrowly. Standing up from the stool and easing it back under the sink, he walked over to the door and opened it, standing aside and all but telling me to leave. “I have to assume that it would provoke an intense—perhaps life-threatening—terror in such a person. Good afternoon, Mr. Barlow.”
I thanked him for his time and showed myself out. Giving the painted front-desk clerk a wave, I left through the front door and, when I was sure no one had tried to break into my beater, hopped into the front seat with some food for thought.
6
I was sitting in the parking lot outside of Dorchester Hall, the dorm where both Jake and Elizabeth lived, looking at the two of them in my back seat. I'd given Elizabeth a call and she'd agreed to meet me, eager to find out what I'd learned during my visit to Dr. Smallwood's despite her obvious apprehension regarding further inquiry into the strange and frightful history of the thing we'd encountered at the asylum.
Leaning against Jake, staring between the front seats and fixing her gaze through the rainy windshield, Elizabeth shuddered. “I remember sitting in that darkness. I hadn't taken any drug, but the terror was very real. And I didn't need to take any pills to sense what was in there.”
I thought back to the thing we'd met within the walls of Chaythe Asylum, the misshapen monstrosity that Elizabeth had called an “imitation” of a human being. Where eyes should have been it was possessed only of inky pits. A gash, resembling the cut along the belly of a gutted fish, had answered for a mouth. “I remember it, too.”
Jake was staring down at the car floor, hands pressed between his knees. His hair was still wet from a shower, and the scent of some obnoxiously spicy body wash—probably the kind promoted by an equally obnoxious ad campaign—clung to him, fouling the already stifling air.
“And I heard them, too,” continued Elizabeth. She had a hole on the leg of her jeans, which she probed with her index finger. It'd widened considerably since she'd gotten into the car. “The voices. Of the dead.”