They were out of the room soon enough. Kline saw the TMS device lying at Gooding’s feet, and he snatched it up without breaking stride. He steered Melissa and Jason carefully around the security officer’s body, then through the door that led to the examination room.
Melissa said, “Could you close that door tightly behind us, please?”
Kline looked at her, saw how her nostrils were flaring. She looked ready to burst.
Of course, he thought, feeling selfish. The smell.
He took his hand from Jason’s shoulder and leaned heavily on the lab door, sealing off Carlisle’s office. Melissa exhaled with relief, then took a deep, shoulder-rolling breath. “Thank you.”
“Don’t mention it. Let’s get you set up.”
Dr. Kline worked quickly, moving with the efficiency of experience. The TMS device was wired, powered up, and fitted securely behind Melissa’s head in less than five minutes. She didn’t ask him if he knew what he was doing. Or whether it was safe. Her nose seemed to be getting more sensitive every minute, and she could smell his competence. It was in the way he breathed, in the cool smell of his skin. He reminded her then of Miss Cooper, and the resemblance calmed her.
She did ask one question: “Will it hurt?”
Dr. Kline smiled. “It’s already on.”
“Oh.” She almost giggled with relief. “And how long will it take?”
Kline checked an oscilloscope readout. “Another minute ought to cover it.”
“Nothing feels any different yet.”
“It’s not going to. Not for about ten minutes after you’re done.”
“Why?”
Kline shrugged. “We’re ‘waking up’ the rest of your brain. I’m doing the first part with this machine, but you’re essentially coming out of a partial coma. It’s a gradual process.”
“And then? When everything’s up and working? Back to normal?”
“Yes, normal,” Kline said, and paused. “But it won’t seem that way.”
“What do you mean?”
“Just wait.”
In another minute he had the device off her and onto Jason. The former hockey player allowed himself to be led to one of the examination chairs. Then Kline and Melissa stood and watched. They waited.
Melissa turned to Kline suddenly, a curious look on her face. “What will you do after this?”
The question seemed to catch him off-guard. “After? I’m not sure.” He grinned, and the expression briefly made him look less intense. More human. “I’m good at appearing sane now. I suppose I could – ”
But Melissa never got to hear what Kline supposed he might do. Because at that moment the door to Carlisle’s office swung open. Melissa was momentarily floored by the death-stench that came flooding into the room – her nose had not yet lost any of its power – and Kline stared at the man in the doorway as if he were having another hallucination.
The man had a tweed coat. And glasses.
“It can’t…” Kline began. “You can’t be here.”
Melissa could see that the man was real enough, but she didn’t much like the smell of him. Even with the reek of dead bodies still flowing through the doorway, she could pick out the undercurrents coming off this person in waves. He stank of treachery. Of manipulation.
“I am here, Nathan,” said the man. And he smiled warmly.
Melissa shuddered.
20
Dr. Levoir took a step into the examination room, and Dr. Kline took a step back.
“How…” Kline began, fear in his voice.
“I just thought I’d drop by and check on you,” Levoir said smoothly. “To make sure everything was moving along.” He smiled like a proud father. “And you’ve been doing well, Nathan. So well. I couldn’t be happier.”
Melissa glanced at Dr. Kline. He didn’t seem to be sharing in the good cheer. In fact, he was looking more bewildered every minute. “But you shouldn’t be here,” Kline said. “I never told you… it doesn’t make any sense.”
Levoir waved dismissively. “You were always such a worrier, Nathan. You could have gotten yourself released much earlier from Clancy Hall if you had only learned to relax. You worried about your unpredictable phases, and about others’ perception of you, and of course about your daughter. You never stopped obsessing over Alexandra, even after I had explained that your ex-wife would never allow her to see you. Not after what you had done.”
This last declaration seemed to hit Kline in the stomach. His head dropped, and his eyes clouded over. “Alexandra,” he said softly, almost to himself. “But I never talked to you about her…”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Levoir said cheerily. “You’re becoming hysterical, Nathan. Try to remain calm.”
Meanwhile, Melissa was aware of something unsettling going on inside her head. It felt as if a cool wind had suddenly gone blowing into one of her ears. And then, all at once, the world began to seem… bland. She felt as though someone were stuffing cotton up her nose. She couldn’t smell the air anymore, or the floor of the room, or the leather of the examination chairs. And the people around her had gone gray. They seemed lifeless, colorless. She could barely smell any –
It’s happening, she realized. I’m losing the smell.
As her nose grew steadily less powerful, Melissa found herself wondering whether she had made the right decision.
This is normal? It’s like going blind, but worse. How do people live like this?
The man speaking to Dr. Kline, meanwhile, seemed to have transformed right in front of her. His threatening demeanor had vanished, and Melissa struggled to remember how she could have perceived him as manipulative. He was smiling so warmly. He was kind. Supportive.
He’s obviously just here to help. I was only imagining things.
“You’ve done everything right,” Levoir was saying to Kline now. “Exactly as we discussed. Wonderful.”
Dr. Kline stared back at him, flabbergasted. “As we discussed?” He looked wildly around the room, as if to reassure himself that he had not somehow sleepwalked all the way back to Clancy Hall. “But I didn’t… we didn’t…”
Dr. Levoir nodded slowly. He seemed satisfied. “You’re worrying again, Nathan. Try not to do that. Everything will be fine.” He stared seriously at Kline for a moment, holding his gaze. And then his voice changed, dropping a notch.
“I believe in you, Nathan.”
Hearing these words, Dr. Kline straightened up like a cadet coming to attention. He seemed to take in his surroundings for the first time, and his air of uncertainty sloughed off of him like an old skin. Without looking away from Levoir, he removed Martin’s gun from his waistband. Then he turned, aimed, and fired three quick shots into Jason Bell. Two in the heart, one in the head.
Jason never saw anything coming, and he didn’t flinch. He was dead in seconds.
Melissa did not scream, but this was only because her breath had deserted her. She stood, frozen to the spot, and looked at Kline with eyes that were wide with shock. With an immense effort, she convinced herself to stay still. Running now would be useless. All she could do now, she told herself, was wait. And hope.
Dr. Kline turned to face Melissa, and he studied her as one might study an oil painting. He cocked his head to one side, watching. She was calm, this girl. Calm and beautiful. With strong, strong eyes.
Like Alexandra’s.
Kline made his decision, and he brought Martin’s gun back up quickly. He kept his eyes open, and this was something that Melissa would always remember afterward.
That man shot himself in the head, she would think to herself, and he never even closed his eyes.
The sound of the shot was muffled by the silencer, and the only noise in the room after Kline crumpled to the ground was Melissa’s rapid breathing. Dr. Levoir assessed her critically, looking her over with an expression of murderous calm. Then he seemed to dismiss her, and he glanced down at Dr. Kline, lying motionless on the floor.
“I tried to stop him,” Lev
oir said, very clearly, as if reciting a pre-written speech. “What a tragedy.” He shook his head sadly.
Begin Again
Dr. Levoir took his time returning to Clancy Hall. He remained in Hanover longer than the police needed him, answering every question until they were bored with his jokes, tired of his easy, perfectly consistent story.
A violent patient. An overly optimistic release. A tragic relapse into psychosis.
“I’d like to stay as long as possible,” Dr. Levoir said, playing the eager detective wannabe. “To help out in any way I can.”
The police smiled solicitously at him. Tried to avoid patting him on the head. And then sent him away. They simply had no use for the friendly doctor; it was an open-and-shut case. Gory, yes. And bizarre. But once you sifted through the details, the same old characters turned up. A homicidal maniac with a penchant for appliance-style killings. A pissed-off, wife-beater dad with a gun.
Yawn.
On his way back to Massachusetts, Levoir kept a small bag next to him, in the passenger seat of the little Ford Escort. When he stopped once for gas and a soda, he took the bag with him out of the car. There was a device in there, one that looked like a little silver-and-copper television antenna. He had been trying to get his hands on it for almost a year now, ever since Dr. Kline had told him about it in their interview sessions. Not that Nathan had ever known he was revealing such things; during most of those interviews, Levoir had kept him under the influence of sodium amytal.
And Nathan, bless him, had never suspected a thing.
Dr. Levoir had always been a methodical man, and he was not going to rush now. He had proceeded carefully with Nathan – convincing him, over the course of nine interminable months, that all traces of the original experiment should be erased, no matter what the cost – and he would proceed carefully this time, too.
Nathan and Professor Carlisle had not been careful enough, and they had failed massively. Gruesomely. But they had been hasty with their experiments. Hasty and greedy. They had been consumed by the potential of the thing.
Dr. Levoir would not let himself be hasty. He would study his notes from his sessions with Nathan, study them until he knew the theory behind the Kline-Carlisle procedure better than he knew his own name. He would not make any mistakes.
He would figure everything out.
First he would tackle the machine’s basic mechanism. He knew that it was little more than a carefully arranged series of capacitors and electromagnetic coils, but that special arrangement obviously made all the difference.
Eventually he would understand it. All of it.
And then, after a series of closely monitored tests – using patients at Clancy Hall, naturally – he would make his announcement to the world. That the solution to Charcot’s Postulate had finally been found.
Found by him, Dr. John Levoir.
The greatest, most legendary figure in the history of psychiatry.
A genius.
Melissa
From Growing Up Fast, by Melissa Hartman. Reprinted with permission.
My last three years at Dartmouth were easier than the first. More normal, some would say. No, I never had the sort of all-American, frats-and-football-games experience that Ms. Cooper had envisioned for me, but I did make progress. I learned how to open myself up to people, for one thing. To make friends more easily.
Lea was the one who helped me with that, I think.
I still miss my friends from that first month at school. Jason for his easy kindness, and of course Lea, for her infinite understanding. And yes, Garrett. Because even if he was a player, he was a sincere player. He was up-front with his objectives; he wanted what he wanted. And for a while there – brain tumor or not – he wanted me. He made me feel, for the first time in my life, that I was someone to be desired.
You say I didn’t really need such an experience. You think that tall, long-haired girls have enough going for them already. But every girl deserves her own version of Garrett Lemke. We all need someone to be crazy about us, even if it’s just for a little while. Garrett filled that role with distinction.
And so, with a whole lot of serious therapy, and with my new sense of self-worth held tightly to my chest, it was easier to jump into the college social scene. I took risks. I started friendships that seemed destined to fail. And sometimes they did fail. But sometimes I was surprised.
Not everything was so easy. I never did get used to having an “ordinary” nose, for one thing. Even to this day, I feel that some essential part of me has been ripped out, as if through rough surgery. People still tell me that I have a freakish sense of smell, but they don’t know. They can’t imagine what it’s like to absorb someone’s entire personality with a single breath. To be able to identify every smudge on a person’s hands from a hundred yards away. To smell a man’s fear in his sweat.
Always the sweat.
Thankfully, however, that particular skill – spotting a dangerous man by the stink coming from his pores – has become unnecessary. Because in my junior year I met a boy. A nice one. He reminded me of Charlie Lane back home.
And he still does.
Kline
The attending emergency room doctor had seen only two gunshot wounds to the head in his tenure at Hitchcock Medical Center, and both were DOA. But when the tall, thin man was brought in that night, he clearly wasn’t dead. At least not yet. Blood was still leaking out the back of his skull, and his skin was warm to the touch.
“Time?” said the doctor.
“Less than a minute.”
Dr. Hall looked quickly at the EMTs who had carried the man in, and then he noticed that they were not EMTs. Their uniforms were the standard-issue orderly gear from the psychiatric ward next door. “What – ?”
“He was in Carlisle’s lab,” one of them explained.
Dr. Hall raised an eyebrow. Too much excitement in that lab, he thought.
There was no debridement to speak of; the bullet had removed a small section of the man’s skull at the back, but it was an amazingly clean wound, as if whoever had done the shooting had been holding the gun at just the perfect angle for the job. Surgery would still be necessary to cover the area, of course. Survival would depend on the extent of any brain trauma.
Out of the corner of one eye, Dr. Hall saw several officers standing at the door. They looked particularly interested in his patient.
“Come back in twelve hours,” the doctor said, without looking up from his work. “I wouldn’t hold your breath,” he added. “There’s a good chance this guy’s never walking out of here.”
The patient opened his eyes shortly after surgery, but this alone indicated nothing. Dr. Hall began administering the standard tests for the Glasgow Coma Scale. He checked for verbal responses, an ability to follow commands, and visual tracking.
The results were not good.
The officers were back the next day, still looking very interested. They pointed at the man, whose head was now wrapped in a gigantic white turban of post-operative bandages.
Dr. Hall frowned. “No,” he said sternly. “Even if I were to let you talk to him, it wouldn’t do you any good. You’re free to come back in another twelve hours, but I doubt anything will change. He’s essentially vegetative.”
The officers nodded slowly, and turned to go. A few hours later, one of them spoke to that friendly, harmless doctor from Massachusetts, Dr. Levoir. The officer told Levoir, incorrectly, that the patient had died. A “vegetative” patient was no better than a dead patient if you were trying to conduct an investigation. From the officer’s point of view, the two conditions were different only in name.
Vegetative. Dead. Whatever.
But Dr. Kline was not dead. He was not vegetative, either. Not remotely. He was thinking. And, as always, he had planned ahead.
He had given the Glasgow Coma Scale test himself many times, of course. Long ago, before all of this. And so he had known that it would be easy to fake the responses for a low GCS score. Foo
ling a general practitioner – an E.R. doctor, for example – would be simple.
He had known, also, that a bullet aimed just so – grazing the back of his skull – would bleed impressively without doing any real damage. Like most head injuries, it bled in great, scary pools of dark redness, spilling out onto the smooth floor of Carlisle’s pristine lab and giving the impression of imminent death. But Kline knew help would arrive in time. He was already in a hospital, after all.
The one serious risk had been hitting the occipital lobes. He was not an expert with a gun. But this was an acceptable risk. Worst case, he would wreck his vision, and he had decided that he could live with vision problems. He could live with them easily. Compared to what he had been through over the past year, the prospect of bad eyesight was nothing.
Anyway, he hadn’t hit the occipital lobes.
In fact, he hadn’t hit anything but skull. And now that part of him was neatly patched up. He would probably need at least one more surgery, but there was no reason to have that surgery here.
When Dr. Hall sent the officers away for the second time, Kline saw his opening.
He rose once in the middle of the night, to remove some of the extra layers on his head bandage. Then, the next morning at 6 AM, during the shift change, he simply stepped out of his room, walked down the hall, and headed out the front door.
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