The Curse of M

by Stevie Barry

  ----

  Ratiri was almost happier to be outside than Lorna. Never in his life had he appreciated fresh air so much, even if it was cold and extremely damp. The overcast sky was hardly cheering, but he was outside, among scents and sounds a world better than anything in the Institute.

  He wandered on his own for a while, letting the tension of his confinement drain away. When Lorna emerged -- indeed in one piece -- she stayed near Katje, Geezer, and Hansen, allowing him to get everything out of his system in peace. Her aura was no more perturbed than when she left; there couldn't have been much fighting between her and Von Ratched. He'd ask about it later, when their freedom was over.

  Meanwhile, these new senses remained fascinating. He'd given up being surreptitious about sniffing Lorna's hair a week ago: fortunately, she tolerated it with a certain amount of amusement. The change in his hearing, however, was much more noticeable out here. The sigh of the breeze through the low, stunted bushes; the click and chitter of what few insects braved this harsh climate; even the scurry of rodents too far and fast to be seen. If they ever got out of here, he'd have to test these senses in all kinds of settings. What would Scotland be like to him, now? How much sweeter would the moors be?

  He'd like to go to India, too; he'd never been to his mother's homeland. It was a trip he'd planned to make with Katherine before she died, and when he'd lost her, he'd lost interest in traveling -- and in pretty much everything else but his work. And now he might never get the chance. Unless Von Ratched died, none of them were going anywhere.

  He was beginning to wonder if Lorna might really be able to kill the bastard. She was set on it to a degree that was downright scary. The question was how far she'd be willing to go to do it, how many other people she'd be willing to sacrifice. He wasn't sure he wanted to know the answer.

  There was darkness in her aura. It was nothing like Von Ratched's horrible black, but it was there, a shadow in the middle of all that rainbow. He'd tried to pull it out, as he could do with negative things like fear and pain, but it held fast. Whatever Von Ratched had done to her had been bad enough to…twist her, to add that darkness. And it always grew worse when her expression closed off, and that chilly, serpentine calculation took over her gaze. That only happened when the doctor was mentioned, and quite honestly it scared Ratiri. It was fear not of her, but for her. He'd become rather fond of the odd little woman, and he was afraid this change in her would eventually become permanent. Von Ratched might have already destroyed her, without either of them realizing it.

  He wanted Lorna back, the Lorna he'd first met. He wanted to take her to Scotland with him, introduce her to his mother, if she’d have him -- they were both small, domineering women, so they'd either get along famously or fight like cats and dogs. He didn’t love her – he hadn’t known her anywhere near long enough for that – but he was fond of her, and didn’t want to leave her if they managed to escape. But this new her sometimes terrified him.

  She looked at him across the courtyard, and a little of the shadow left her aura. It always did, when she was near him, but it came back later. And he didn't know what to do.

  That odd inner animal did, though. It had latched onto her in a way much simpler and more primitive than anything his human mind could have come up with. As far as it was concerned, she was his -- something he could never tell her, for it would only piss her off. She was not the kind of person who would appreciate being claimed by anyone or anything, and he really couldn't blame her. The part of him that was still Ratiri was pretty disturbed by the idea, too.

  If she was going to seriously try to kill Von Ratched, he couldn't let her do it alone. The inner animal wouldn't let him hang back even if he wanted to, but he didn't want to. He wouldn't let her do anything that could break her further.

  Communal murder, he thought. That probably counts as commitment in some cultures.

  ----

  Geezer sat a little away from Katje, Hansen, and Lorna, smoking a cigarette from a pack Katje had given him. The damp cold ached in his bones, but he savored it anyway, not knowing when he'd get to feel it again. Come winter, going outside might not be an option.

  Hansen was looking very askance at Lorna, while trying not to let her or Katje know. Geezer wasn't a hundred percent certain what the kid's curse was, but it had to be something that let him look past people's facades. She was turning into the thing Geezer had seen in his vision, but Hansen couldn't know that, and he didn't know her well enough to spot the difference. She ought to just look like some cranky, belligerent little woman, but he saw more. And that wasn't good. None of this was good, because come winter, they'd be trapped here. Really trapped.

  They were far enough north that the snow would come soon enough, too. When the wild weather set in, odds were good nothing would be getting in or out by air for weeks on end. However smart a man Von Ratched was, Geezer wasn't sure he'd have any real idea what he was dealing with when it came to an Alaskan winter. He might not like being stuck here as thoroughly as everyone else.

  There had been no more visions since the first, but it had been long enough that the bastard would probably call him back any day now. He was as physically recovered as he was going to get, and he didn't want to know what lengths Von Ratched would go to, to try and artificially induce a prophetic seizure. He couldn't even hope it would kill him, because somebody had to look after all these goddamn kids, and it looked like he was it.

  Shit, look at Ratiri out there. He was like a dog -- no, like a wolf, predatory in a way he didn’t seem to be aware of. He ought to be the stable one right now, the one looking after the others. Katje was just a kid, and doctor though he was, Hansen was little more. Lorna had her own troubles, and in any event he had a feeling she'd never been a paragon of responsibility. He recognized those tiny broken capillaries along her cheeks -- she'd been a hard drinker for years.

  No, he was it, and that worried him. Von Ratched wasn't going to kill him any time soon, but if he was too incapacitated, he'd be just as useless as if he was dead.

  A sudden gust of wind blew the cherry off the end of his cigarette, and he grumbled as he tried to relight it. Katje better stock up on these before the snow it, and the Institute better stock up on everything. Those big windows in the cafeteria were gone, but the corridors had too many to be heat-efficient. What even powered this place? It couldn't all be generators, or they'd go through enough gas to fuel a small country every week. Maybe they had wind turbines somewhere, but those wouldn't last long in a full-on sub-arctic storm.

  Von Ratched's no moron, he thought. All his damned experiments were too precious for him to want to risk losing power, but that didn't mean he wouldn't shut down all nonessential areas. The inmates might wind up crowded into cells underground, and that would be even more of a nightmare. The rooms they were in were bad enough, but at least they got natural daylight.

  He stubbed out his cigarette and immediately lit another. Odds were good they were all going to hell, anyway.

  ----

  Next morning Von Ratched decided to start his day with Geezer. He didn't want another confrontation with Lorna so early.

  He hadn't slept last night. That wasn't at all unusual -- often, even the morphine wasn't enough. By now he was too used to his insomnia to be unduly irritated by it, but he did drink more coffee than usual.

  At least he waited until six to summon Geezer. He spent the early hours of the morning sketching -- it was the only true hobby he had that wasn't somehow related to his work. Nobody else knew about it, for it didn't do to appear too human to the underlings.

  It was warm in his apartment now, and calm. The soft glow of a pair of floor lamps illuminated the cream-colored paper, and the only sound was the faint scratching of his fountain pen. He drew Berlin as it had been when he was a young man, occasionally pausing to sip his coffee. He'd had plenty of artistic talent to begin with, and years of practice had honed it into something any professional would have been proud of. His favorites he hung abo
ut the apartment, but the rest occupied a dozen folders in a desk drawer. Drawing gave him the closest thing to catharsis he could find.

  Eventually he set it aside and opened his blinds, letting the daylight in. At this time of year, the sun only properly set for an hour or two, something that was beginning to bother many of the staff. It bothered a lot of the inmates, too, but he hardly cared about them. He showered and shaved on auto-pilot, his mind turning over today's proposed experiment.

  He was quite certain it was possible to induce an artificial seizure in Geezer -- the only question was how long it would take. And he thought what he meant to try would do it. He'd concocted a set of drugs that, with the aid of telepathy, ought to trick the man's mind into believing it should seize. Never had he known anyone whose ability took such a violent toll on them, and he suspected hard living was not the only thing that had turned Geezer into the wreck he'd become.

  The room he'd set up in F wing was quite different from the rest of the labs. He knew better than to restrain someone having a seizure, so he'd cleared the floor and laid out a mat from the staff gymnasium. Only the counter along one wall remained, the vials containing his assorted drugs neatly lined up in a test tube rack. The lighting was kept dim, to relax Geezer's brain as much as possible.

  Geezer himself arrived groggy, and Von Ratched thought that he had not slept well, either. His faded eyes were red-rimmed, his face haggard -- perhaps he needed to be sedated at night, along with the more dangerous inmates. Tired or not, he was rightfully wary, try though he might to hide it.

  "Good morning," Von Ratched said, as close to pleasantly as he was capable of. "If you would please sit on that mat, we will begin."

  Amusingly, his politeness made Geezer more wary than ever, but the man did as he was asked. It really was a pity Von Ratched hadn't got his hands on him when he was a younger man; healthy though Geezer was in spite of his condition, he was also a fifty-odd-year-old former drunk. Hardly a physically optimal specimen, and the last thing Von Ratched needed was him dying of a heart attack in the middle of an experiment.

  He filled a needle with the first of his sera, and knelt on the mat to administer it. At times his height was a disadvantage; even seated, he towered over Geezer. "Give me your arm, and please do not waste both our time by fighting."

  Fortunately, Geezer listened, though he eyed Von Ratched like a rabbit the entire time. "This will relax you, and then I will administer the stimulants."

  "This won't work." He still genuinely believed it, too.

  "We will see about that. Cooperate and you will get a bottle of bourbon. Fight this and you will get nothing but a headache." Even Von Ratched was capable of positive reinforcement at times. He'd never offer this to Lorna, though; Geezer had merely been a drunk, whereas she had been a legitimate alcoholic.

  That bribe seemed to do the trick. The man willingly lay back on the mat, staring up at the ceiling, and his tension drained as the drug did its work. This was a mixture of Dilaudid and a few things of Von Ratched's own concoction; normally he didn't worry about any pain his tests inflicted on the subject, but in this case, outright agony might prove detrimental.

  It took only ten minutes for those faded eyes to glaze over, and then came the rest of the drugs, methodical and at precise intervals. A skimming of his mind proved he was as relaxed as he looked, and Von Ratched took it as his cue for further exploration.

  Interestingly, Geezer had become attached to Katje in a distinctly fatherly way, and Von Ratched wished he hadn't promise her safety in exchange for Hansen's cooperation. Whatever else he might be, he was a man of his word; unless Hansen screwed up, DaVries was indeed safe. Of course, Geezer didn't need to know that.

  It took surprisingly little time to find it: the switch, the part of Geezer's mind that controlled -- and was controlled by -- his ability. Flipping it took rather longer, but he was nothing if not patient, and eventually it worked.

  He stepped back as soon as the seizure started, clicking a stopwatch and watching curiously as the man flopped like a fish. It did indeed resemble a grand mal seizure, so much so that even he might have been initially fooled by it, had he not known what Geezer was. It went on for almost ten minutes, too; if they were all like this, he had no idea how Geezer was still alive. That would warrant more testing later.

  He stood still a full minute after it ended, and when he knelt again he took the man's vitals before administering the final injection. Interesting -- according to all the results, Geezer was clinically dead, yet he still breathed. Yes, that definitely required more testing.

  "All right, Mister Geezer. You will now tell me what you saw."

  His voice was so slurred that at first Von Ratched had a difficult time understanding him. "Winter," he mumbled. "Snow. Death. You don't. All survive. Mountain and Garden, they live, we live, not all."

  He trailed off a while, his breathing ragged, and Von Ratched waited patiently. "Trapped. Here, there. Freezing and burning and bullets. Knife in your chest, but you don't die. Not yet. She is your death, but not yet. Not until. It comes."

  "Until what comes?"

  Geezer moaned, a sound not of pain, but of terror. "It. Angel, but not. Thing. Snow and death. Before that, war, too much. Storm across the world. Your fault."

  His words faltered again, this time because he'd lapsed into total unconsciousness. Well, that was cryptic and rather unhelpful -- it seemed Geezer was telling the truth when he said his visions made little sense. Still, this was promising: it could be done again, perhaps with better results.

  He let Geezer sleep it off while he tidied up, pensive. Doubtless the 'she' was Lorna, if only because she was the only one who had even a theoretical capability of killing him. The rest was of more immediacy and importance: he had indeed thought about how they were to get through the winter, now that he no longer had the backing of the government. From the sound of that bizarre prophecy, he would have to go a step or two further in his preparations. Geezer was right -- he wasn't stupid. He knew that once winter set in, the Institute would be a prison for everyone. It would be fun for no one, but that hardly mattered.

  Once Geezer had been bundled off to a recovery room, Von Ratched went to inspect his own office. The new carpeting had been put in two days ago -- he could return to his own space, and give Grieggs hers. This was where he would meet with Lorna; he wanted to see how she would react to coming back here. Though he would never admit it even to himself, she'd startled him yesterday, and he wanted to keep her too off-kilter to try it again.

  Whose mind had she read to discover his first name? Even few of the staff knew it. It could not have been his own, whatever she said -- he was telling the truth when he told her she wouldn't be flippant with him, had she truly seen his mind. Were she to know what really went on in there, she'd bolt again, suicide or not.

  He made some coffee before sending for her, curious to see what she would be like today. The change in her he'd observed on their last meeting was…worrisome. His scare tactic had indeed backfired -- horribly -- and now that he couldn't get into her mind, he genuinely wondered what he was to do about it. It was certainly going to be a challenge; fortunately, he loved challenges.

  He was amused, though not surprised, to find she'd tightly braided her hair. She scowled at him, and if his office unnerved her, she hid it well. Interesting. Until now her body language had been easy to read, even without consulting her thoughts, but now she gave nothing away. It was impressive, if also annoying. And, if he were to admit it, a little unsettling.

  Once again she didn't say anything, though when he poured her coffee, she looked at it like he was trying to poison her, even after he poured himself some from the same pot. "What's your angle now?" she asked suspiciously, when he set the cup on the end-table nearest her.

  "I am trying to be polite," he said. "A concept with which you seem to be unfamiliar."

  Lorna gave him a level stare that wasn't quite a glare. Her eyes were still like green ice, he noticed, and that
troubled him. "I know," she said flatly, "and it's even creepier than when you're being an arsehole. What is it you want now? If you're after dissecting me, I'd like to finish digesting my breakfast first."

  No, he definitely hadn't broken her belligerence, and he was oddly pleased by that. She wouldn't be Lorna without it. "Drink your coffee," he ordered, and of course she didn't. He folded his hands, and tried not to sigh. "I am going to begin a series of tests on Duncan soon. As I do not want a repeat of the last procedure I performed on him, I will allow you to be there. These tests will doubtless be painful, but they will do him no permanent harm." He didn't mention that he planned to drug her as well as Duncan. Let that be a surprise.

  The look she gave him was both suspicious and faintly, almost disturbingly predatory. "Why?" she demanded. "You just want to use it as a threat, don't you? Show me what you can do worse if I step out'v line?"

  "Grammatically mangled a sentence though that is, the answer is yes -- in part. I believe your presence will calm the beast in Duncan, so to speak. I will not harm him, but it might."

  Von Ratched watcher her closely, intrigued. Her carefully-cultivated blankness was fracturing ever so slightly, the harsh lines of her face softening almost imperceptibly. He wondered just how far she would be willing to compromise. Doubtless her first instinct was outright refusal, but Lorna was stubborn, not stupid. She couldn't fully protect Duncan, but if she cooperated, she could aid him. Her automatic defiance and rational practicality warred in those uncanny green eyes, along with a healthy dose of doubt. However, in the end it was the predator that won.

  "Fine," she said, and the threat in the word had to be purely unconscious. How very curious. Had she deliberately threatened him he would have thought it bravado, but as it was -- she truly did mean to kill him, didn't she? It wasn't just idle fantasy. He wondered how patient she was capable of being, before she finally snapped and tried. It would be unfortunate when she did, because he'd have to punish her for it, and frankly, he didn't know how. And as creative as he could be in that area, he found he didn't want to have to think about it. Not with her.