by Martin Rose
“Finish it out, Polly. The hour grows late.”
*
One of Atroxipine’s active ingredients is nightshade. You ever hear stories about witches? I see you have. There’s more than enough folklore out there. Nightshade, or wolf’s bane. Can I tell you how many times I’ve gone to the movies or flipped on the television to watch something with werewolves or witches or creepy crawlies that go bump in the night, and suffered through a mangled dissertation on wolf ’s bane’s “magical” properties? You’d think people would be smoking it through a glass pipe with a reputation like that. Now it’s been living on as a myth in ancient recipes for “Flying Ointments”—turned into an ointment meant to be smeared into the skin. Sit back and enjoy the hallucinatory effect with broom in hand. Or so the rumor goes. In fact, nightshade would never have found its way into our own witch’s brew if not for Blake’s unconventional ideas. He gave permission to explore every wild avenue and urge—and nightshade was it.
I don’t know who discovered that it could be put to use. Jamie and the Inspector came to Blake, whispering in his ear that there were limits to this drug that had not yet been plumbed. They were conducting trials on prisoners—prisoners! People they’d packed off to black sites. Who knows what their crimes were, if they had committed any wrong. They were experimenting with them and out-of-body experience.
Jamie, and the Inspector, insinuated that if Blake didn’t want to end up beside all these nameless men and women that had been scooped out of their ordinary and banal lives and gone missing into unnameable spaces scattered all over the world, he’d better listen and do what they said.
You know how prisoners are. They’re recalcitrant. They don’t appreciate being held in a place against their will for no crime and then ask to be drafted into an experimental program, because that’s what it amounts to, right? Paranormal phenomena. It’s like the books I used to read from the supermarket shelf with the gutsy heroines and the alpha male heroes. Paranormal, as in things you didn’t think were real and now you have to account for. Things like leaving your body while you sleep and directing yourself into limitless space.
They wanted Blake to demonstrate the drug’s effectiveness. That with practice, he could do it invisibly with no one the wiser.
Blake couldn’t say no; once they’d gotten us in deep with making Atroxipine, you couldn’t just extricate yourself. We talked about leaving. Packing our stuff and disappearing into the wilderness. It was nice to dream about, but our hearts weren’t in it. We weren’t made for that lifestyle. What if we wanted children? What if we got hurt? The second we popped back up on the grid, that would be it. All life would be reduced to a waiting game in which Goliath need only shift his boot and crush us the second we ran out from the rock we chose to hide under.
We had to stay. But Blake was under pressure to perform. They wanted him to engage in the out-of-body program. The Inspector and Jamie would teach him the rudiments and monitor his sleep. When enough time elapsed and Blake passed out of the initial phase, they would give him targets—people they wanted him to “incapacitate” while out-of-body.
“Then what happens?” he’d asked them. “What do I do when I face them in this dream state?”
“Cut the cord,” they said.
I had yet to know, to experience, or to see it for myself, but they were talking about the life line that connects the dreamer to the body.
“Won’t that kill them?” Blake asked.
They answered in half-truths and vague statements. They passed it off as though nobody knew for certain what the outcome was and surely it would be no worse than momentary paralysis. The Inspector and Jamie were not the kind of people you probed with penetrating questions. There’s something in their stare that refuses to give ground or even understand your concerns. Attempts to do so are tinged with fear and paranoia. If you question them, is that enough to be dismissed, to be marked for suspicion, for investigation?
We could not simply ask why they wanted it done. At this point, Sisemen Pharma, Inc. was the financial loser in the deal, and their last hope at recouping the loss was to work in tandem with the military for exclusive drug contracts. Or so we thought. Asking Jamie flat out if that were the case would have been overstepping our bounds, but it was clear if they could utilize Atroxipine for other purposes, there was a lot of money to be made. The government had been pouring money and effort into Remote Viewing operations for years with little success. This was the chance to turn it all around. Sisemen would produce the pills, the military would eat them up. But first, they needed to prove it out.
Why Blake was being asked to “incapacitate” specific people, though, that was another pickle entirely. They were young professionals. They weren’t criminals or thugs or people on the FBI’s Most Wanted list. And we were pretty sure that the consequences of “incapacitation,” no matter Jamie’s assurances, were dire.
They were really asking Blake to kill them.
You ever read Slaughterhouse Five? That Kurt Vonnegut book? My English professor made us read it. It was never my thing, books. But I remember very clearly reading about Vonnegut recall the bombing of Dresden in World War II, and how he researched the event afterward, trying to understand what business the Allies had in obliterating a whole city, what the reason was.
In the end, there was no reason. It was because they could. Because they had all this firepower and wanted to see what would happen if they used it. They leveled a whole city, and all the people in it. You spend all this time asking big-picture questions about the why of things, looking for sane and rational answers because you’re a sane and rational person that can’t conceive of any other answer but a sane and rational one. In the end, it doesn’t matter. There is no sane and rational answer. It’s because they can.
They wanted Blake to go after these people, just because.
Blake began in earnest. He collapsed into bed after spending most of the day sleeping in the basement under the gaze of the Inspector and Jamie, taking doses of Atroxipine and increasing them steadily. They believed Atroxipine was the key. We heard they might still be able to use it to mitigate the effects of the disease it had originally been intended for, even while not a complete cure. For everyone else not afflicted by disease, the effects were substantially different, radically changing the relationship of the drug to the body. Most ordinary people would either need a predisposition or endless training to achieve an out-of-body state, but Atroxipine would halve the effort and allow immediate results. The intense euphoria and increased sensation and activity in the cerebral cortex and other areas—they indicated exciting results. An unexpected side effect of the drug.
Blake even got me to try one. The experience was memorable. Everything was clearer. My thoughts came organized and fast. I felt like I could do quantum physics from the Marianas Trench, refurbish the dining room and then maybe have time left over to bake cookies. It was exhilarating.
Blake didn’t want it. The effects were fascinating, but even I could see the potential for Atroxipine to have an unexpected domino effect. If this ever escaped into the public, the black market would make it the new cocaine, but better and more intense than any previous drug. And, it keeps you young. But none of us knew what the long-term cost would be. Would organs become stressed and inflamed and then ultimately fail? They were toying with Blake’s life and threatening to take it away if he didn’t act on their orders. The threat was implied if Blake didn’t kill these people: they would spirit him away. Jamie would wave his hand, like he had over his box of lo mein. Take him away. And he would be gone.
All that training, and Blake said he didn’t know what the hell they were talking about. Sometimes he felt something bigger shaking on the inside of him and, a few times, he floated up and out before he said he felt snapped back in by his own terror. He was petrified of what would happen if he strayed too far. Could he lose himself? He told me a thin, silver cord unspooled out of him and connected back to the body, but what frightened him was the In
spector. He could picture him, scything through that cord just to see what would happen.
Haggard and wasted, they dragged him back down to that basement. While the boys played with their drugs and machines, I began to take Atroxipine. Not all the time. Just now and again. I’d be bored and time lost all structure and meaning with the blackout curtains over every window and Blake sleeping all hours of the day. I’d swallow a dose and fall asleep.
And then, my dreams, usually mundane and trivial stress dreams, morphed into another level of intensity. I should have understood then, great changes were at work within me and that innocuous-seeming pill lay at the heart of it. The dreams took me into a world that was the mirror image of the one I was already in. In fact, it ceased to be a dream at all. I blinked and I would be in my house but not awake. And the first time it happened, I was frightened and would not move, stayed on the couch where I fell asleep and waited until the world shifted and I was dreaming again. And then it was all at peace again. I could take another pill and forget about the whole ordeal.
It happened again, repeatedly. I remained fixed wherever I found myself, refusing to move. Until it came to pass that the next instant I opened my eyes, a man sat across from me in the deepest shadow against the wall. He drew the darkness to him, like a black hole swallowing light until all I could see were his glittering eyes. And he spoke to me.
Aren’t you a surprising one, he said.
I wanted to answer, but above all I wanted to wake up. I could do neither, as though a grand piano sat on top of my chest and pinned me there, left me blinking at him, and I realized he was floating in the air, a foot above the floor where he should have feet.
Do you like to dream, Polly?
Not like this, I thought, and he nodded. He’d heard me, even though I hadn’t been able to speak.
I suppose that makes this a nightmare, and that means you’re trapped inside it. I know that feeling well, my dear. Of course, that’s nothing compared to what your dear husband is going through.
What about Blake? Where is he?
Oh, he’s trying very hard, but he doesn’t have the knack for this kind of thing. In fact, I think he’s about outlived his usefulness. That could be very bad for Blake, you know. You, on the other hand. You might be able to save him.
Why? What’s wrong? Hasn’t he done what’s been asked of him?
Oh, it’s really not his fault. He just seems to lack the talent, is all. But you, unexpectedly—quite pleasingly!—make up for all his flaws. Who would have realized? I’m afraid in our foolishness, we men overlooked you. That should not have happened. Let me correct my egregious error now and recognize you, Polly.
But I did not like being recognized by him at all. More than this, would prefer to have continued going on unnoticed by him forever. Having his glittering eyes fall upon me was like being dipped in grease, squirming on the end of a hook as a feral, snarling vermin sniffed me and licked its chops.
You see, Polly. If he can’t be useful, then he will have to be disposed of.
He disappeared. I woke up in a fever-sweat. The place where the man had floated in the air was several shades darker than the rest of the atmosphere around it, as though he’d left a stain.
After that, this thing, this shadow, this shade, this—specter, visited me with greater ferocity than before. Every time I closed my eyes, I feared to open them again and find the shadow around every corner, staring and awaiting me with his glittering eyes and his grin curling a semi-circle out of the smoke. He wanted me to do what Blake would not, or Blake would be “expendable.” I broke down. He told me if I agreed to take Blake’s place instead, Blake might have a chance at survival.
The specter showed me how to leave my body. Under different circumstances, I might have found the experience wondrous, astonishing. Pressed the bounds of dreams and imagination alike. He showed me how to go through walls and come out on the other side, and then, he led me out into the world. It was exhilarating to be able to walk through the world and never have to fear it. Or so I thought. On the other side of dreaming, I was younger, somehow. Vital. Unburdened by my heavy body. But I wasn’t ready for the emotional consequences later.
The specter gave me an artifact from Dietrich. He was the first subject—or target. The shadow stole a swatch of fabric from his suit, gave it to me and instructed me to hold it, imagine myself there and I would be. It’s as simple as that. And when I reached the other side, to take the silver cord that bound his sleeping self and sever it.
Travel in this realm is ethereal, faster than the speed of light. Dietrich was just a young kid. I found him in his apartment in the middle of the night. He was sprawled out naked on his bed with a woman sleeping beside him and their figures were fuzzy—as though their souls were hovering just an inch above their bodies. Floating gently like buoys in an ocean current. I could see the compressed silver line and I reached in. I touched it. It purred and hummed like a cat, but I hadn’t thought it through and the specter hadn’t showed me what to do. How to split the line? So I made my fingers into a pair of scissors, as a young kid does when they play games, and I snipped!
The line fell apart.
Dietrich lurched out of bed immediately. Shot up out of the darkness with his eyes rolling, his mouth open, choking on the air. The cords in his neck like shoestrings held taut. Shocked, I looked on. While I looked on, the light in his eyes came apart. Like a line of Christmas light strings when you take one bulb out and the whole thing goes dark.
I heard they took him to the hospital and he died there. But there were inconsistencies in the reports. I don’t think he died right away. I think he was paralyzed, in some fashion. During the investigation, the police tried to talk to the EMTs on the scene that night. They couldn’t find any of them. There were no records of those emergency personnel who reported there. Somewhere between the ambulance and the hospital, Dietrich went missing for an hour, from the time the call was logged in with dispatch to the time the mystery ambulance arrived and then disappeared forever. When he finally arrived at his destination, he was dead.
In the end, missing hour or no, it ends the same: I killed him.
I took no pleasure in it. I didn’t dare tell Blake. They kept testing him out and noting Blake’s experiences. If they couldn’t coerce him to successfully engage with the drug, then they would squeeze him for every drop of research and development they could get out of him. I cried for days. Everything came out of me and broke apart. I saw Dietrich’s face in my mind. Carried him with me, in my heart. Saw it in the faces of his widowed wife and his forlorn children. And saw it all over again when the loathsome Inspector came trudging into our house with Jamie in his shadow and kidnapped my sick and strung-out husband to stretch him on the torture rack that doubled as his bed again.
PART 6
VITUS TAKES HIS MEDICINE
As a child, I used to study the stars. I camped in the backyard and opened myself to the endless void above me, stippled with distant points of light. It was Jamie, in his pretentious desire to show off his high-end education, who pointed out that if I stopped looking at each individual star and pulled back my limits of perception, I would perceive millions of stars even more distant, all together forming a light wash in the sky called the Milky Way. All that time, I’d been staring at the brightest stars and missed the galactic tide right in front of my face. But Jamie had been right in the end.
Listening to Polly, I had come full circle, pulling back to see the universe entire. I understood now, Atroxipine had allowed me to leave my own body under Lionel’s tutelage, and I understood that Lionel, too, was taking the drug. Was it not his name on the prescription bottle when I had found it, the bottle he had dangled in front of me to hook me, to draw me in? To prime me for an out-of-body experience of my own?
To what purpose? But I needed no intense soul-searching to understand why. They wanted a tool, whether they sent me on investigations or decided to move me into assassinations, either way, they could hold me in reser
ve like a knife in their government arsenal.
Blake and Polly would have served that purpose; but some knives, if not formed well, shatter on impact. Blades break all the time.
Lionel had told me many things. But now all his words were suspect. His paternal confession that I was supposed to be terminated if I could not function like a normal human being with a heart no longer had value; if they were setting me up to commit heartless deeds and conduct dirty missions then, if anything, the possession of a conscience was a liability.
Lionel lied, I realized. Maybe it was the other way around. Maybe he was assigned to kill me if I didn’t fall into step with their program, if I didn’t have the nerve to do their bidding and conduct every dubious request thrown at me.
Now that had the ring of truth to it. If all Lionel had told me wasn’t true, then it cast Elvedina in a different light. Could I be so sure her purpose was malevolent? Everything was thrown upside down once more and I looked down the hall to Elvedina’s form, crumpled and curled in on itself. There would be a reckoning between us yet, as soon as I had laid Polly’s case to rest.
“This entity fed you the targets,” I whispered, “and you delivered them.”
She laughed with her hand forming a claw over her mouth as though she could stopper it in.
“Passed it off as Blake’s handiwork. They even promoted him. Said he was the best they’d ever seen.”
“How did it end?”
“I refused to do it anymore. I thought I was saving Blake’s life, but how many lives are worth one, even when that one is a beloved husband? I couldn’t justify it any longer. All I could picture was an endless future where the targets got bigger and bigger and harder to kill. How many would they ask me to kill in secret? I was already at my breaking point. I envisioned that terrible future of endless killing. He confessed so easily, so readily. I don’t know if he ever realized it was me. Sometimes, I think he did.”
“And the prisoner who tussled with Blake in the prison? The prison guard who we hired to be an informant? Was that your handiwork as well?”