Night Terror

by Chandler McGrew

  “Why?”

  “I think maybe her methods weren’t all that nice.”

  “What kind of mind control?”

  “How many kinds are there? Hypnosis, I suppose. That’s her specialty.”

  “Everybody I talk to tells me you can’t control someone with hypnosis. At least you can’t make them do anything they wouldn’t do when they were awake.”

  “Yeah, well I think Beals got around that by using drugs. Apparently there was something fishy about her treatment of some of the patients at Perkins. It was hushed up, but she lost her license. Whatever she was working on, my buddy got real nervous talking about it. I kind of got the idea her system might have worked too good.”

  “How could it do that?”

  “Maybe they were afraid she’d get so good at it she’d start using it on them.”

  “Mmm. So what we have here is a doctor who knows how to control people using drugs and hypnosis.”

  “Yeah. And she likes to play around with ESP.”

  “Why would she do that at a hospital for mentally disturbed patients?”

  “Got me. Maybe crazy people are easier to work with. And mind control there might be a good thing. Who’s going to talk? And if they do, who’s going to believe them?”

  Virgil thought of Cooder and shuddered.

  “Anything new on your end?” asked Charlie.

  “Mac Douglass killed a woman in town a little while ago. Killed himself at the same time.”

  “Shit. Mac?”

  “Yeah.”

  There was a short pause and another sip. “You thinking Beals had something to do with it?”

  “Maybe. I’d like to see the autopsy after they’re checked for drugs.”

  If they got enough out of the blaze to autopsy.

  “Might not be any evidence. I got enough out of my buddy to get the idea that the drugs were only required in the beginning to break down the patient’s will. After that, it was all just hypnosis.”

  “Great.”

  “I’ll keep digging, but I think I might have hit rock bottom on the info well.”

  “Thanks, Charlie. I appreciate it.”

  “Say hello to Doris.”

  “Yeah.”

  Virgil hung up and called the station. The dispatcher answered on the third ring. “Are you all right, Sheriff? Birch said you looked a little shaken.”

  “I’m fine. Who’s on call?”

  “Birch is still at the fire. Bob’s investigating a possible firearm discharge in South Eden. That’s probably just a night hunter. I could call Mike at home. What’s up?”

  “Call out all the deputies and make the search for Doctor Tara Beals top priority.”

  “Are we charging her?”

  “Just bring her in. I’ll make it up as I go along if I have to.”

  “Okay, Sheriff.”

  Tara Beals hypnotized Audrey to make her forget. What else did she do to her while she was under? Did she use drugs on her and Mac and Babs, something to strengthen the hypnotic suggestions? And what was so terrible in Audrey’s past that it had to be forgotten?

  The sound of the coffee hissing into the pot reminded him of Mac and Babs’s skin, singing under the flames. Instead of the aroma of French roast, his nose was assaulted by the stench of burning flesh and he flinched. What did this all have to do with Zach Bock? Tara had been working on a lot of weird shit at Perkins. Messing with people’s minds. But Perkins closed before Zach Bock was born.

  And what about Audrey’s mother? Where was she? The state had granted Tara custody of Audrey, after all. Maybe he was making this too complicated.

  He poured himself a cup of coffee, holding it under his nose and sniffing deeply to rid himself of the hateful odor in his mind. He sipped it black, relishing the sting on his tongue and the bitter flavor.

  “I don’t believe in coincidences,” he muttered.

  “Neither do I,” said Marg through the screen door.

  He glanced over his shoulder. “Come on in.”

  She waddled through and plunked herself across a kitchen chair, accepting the coffee he handed her.

  “Doris all right now?” asked Marg.

  “She’s conscious, if that’s what you mean.”

  “She didn’t break anything?”

  “Doesn’t seem hurt. Just more run-down than I’ve ever seen her.”

  Marg made certain she had eye contact before she spoke. “It won’t be long now, Virg. You know that, right?”

  “Yeah,” he said, turning away.

  She slipped her wide hand over his. “You did everything for Doris a man could do. She could never have wished for a better husband.”

  He nodded, but his brain was seething. Doris was dying. She could go at any minute. He had sensed it in the way she spoke, the weariness in her eyes, the low rasping of her breath. He should be with her right now, not sitting in the kitchen calmly drinking coffee with Marg. But there was something else torturing him as well, something he’d missed about Tara Beals, something simple that he should have grasped immediately. Doris’s health had ruined him as a cop, but his old police instincts wouldn’t be denied.

  “Virgil, you need to get some rest,” said Marg, squeezing his hand. She set her coffee cup down on the table.

  He shook his head. “I’m trying to put it together in my head. It doesn’t make sense, but there’s too many threads that all end up in the same weave for it to be just coincidental. Mac wasn’t a murderer and when I saw him something was wrong with him. And for him and Babs to be at Perkins at the same time, well…”

  “Something doesn’t have to be hypnosis, Virgil. That’s a real longshot. I know Mac was your friend. But people do insane things that they don’t really mean to do. It happens all the time.”

  “There’s a lot that you don’t know.”

  “So tell me. Why would Mac kill Babs and himself?”

  “I don’t know. Unless it has something to do with Tara Beals’ experiments at Perkins.”

  “What kind of experiments?” said Marg, frowning.

  “Tara was working for the government on classified stuff. Mind-control experiments. Babs worked there and Mac was treated there.”

  “And Tara wanted to cover them up? The experiments?”

  “Yeah. I think so.”

  “Perkins has been closed for years.”

  “Maybe Mac and Babs just remembered.”

  “After all this time?”

  “What if Tara made them forget and something just reawakened the memories?”

  “Like what?”

  Virgil poured himself another cup of coffee from the pot on the table and stared into the swirling blackness.

  “Audrey Bock,” said Virgil. “She’s Tara’s niece. Tara Beals took her away from her mother when she was young and then hypnotized her to help her forget her traumatic childhood. Audrey went to Babs for a reading. Maybe she mentioned Tara Beals. Who knows what she mentioned? Maybe something in those dreams she’s been having triggered something in Babs’s head. But I think it got back to Tara and Tara didn’t like it.”

  “But what about Mac? Mac didn’t know anything about Audrey.”

  Virgil frowned. “Not until I asked him to start investigating Audrey’s past.”

  “You asked him to investigate Audrey?”

  Virgil nodded. “And he led me along, aiming me at Audrey’s mother when it was Tara Beals I should have been investigating. I think she was controlling Mac all along.”

  “You make Tara Beals sound like some kind of voodoo witch doctor.”

  “Maybe she is. I think she did something at Perkins that she doesn’t want to be discovered.”

  “But Audrey was never at Perkins. Was she?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  He sipped the bitter coffee; thoughts twisted and merged like dark swirling clouds in the back of his head. Doris. Babs. Mac. Doris. Audrey. Tara. What the hell was it he’d missed? Something Ken had said. Mac had come in looking all drugged up an
d bought four gas cans. Ken said a woman who fit Tara Beals’ description had spoken to Mac. But it wasn’t that. It was something else. Ken said when Mac came back he carried three gas cans into Babs’s house.

  Three.

  Not four.

  “Shit!” he said, flinging the coffee cup into the sink, shattering it.

  “What?”

  “Watch Doris!” said Virgil, heading for the door. “I’m such an idiot!”

  “Where are you going?”

  “The Bocks! She’ll go after Audrey next!”

  53

  AS AUDREY INCHED toward the door, her entire body stiff as a board and sheened in cold sweat, she noticed that the ceiling and walls of the small anteroom were all covered in dull gray sheets, nailed in place.

  Lead.

  This room was not the one in Audrey’s memory. For one thing, a heavy metal desk stood to one side of the door and an old wooden chair on castors sat beside it. The room in her memory was empty. But the secret entrance and the sense of being buried were so suggestive of that traumatic night long ago, that she could barely separate her past from her present. There was no little girl crying in the darkness ahead, but she could still hear Zach inside her mind, pleading with her to hurry. She twisted the knob, hating the feel of the icy metal against her palm, opening the heavy door ever so slowly, ready to leap out at whoever might be on the other side, but there was no one there. Instead a long, sloping corridor confronted her and she gasped.

  Like the corridor in my mind. Like the white doors.

  But the more she stared at the corridor, the less the two seemed alike. This hallway was strangely constructed, with an undulating floor and heavy, painted block walls in place of the redbrick in her memory. And these doors were all on one side of the hallway. All except for the one door to her right.

  She didn’t see any lead shielding in the hall, but the paneling on the ceiling overhead was damp with condensation. A single metal conduit ran the length of the hallway and every few yards an exposed bulb lighted the way.

  She sensed Zach so close she could almost smell him. She stared at the first door to her left and she knew he was in that room. She’d found him at last. She began to shake and she had to stop for a moment to catch her breath. The walls closed in around her and her vision seemed off, fuzzy. The terror that gripped her was so strong she wanted to turn and run from the place, just as she had in her youth. She listened intently for the hideous sound of laughter like darkness.

  She reached the door and stood there for a moment, trying to erase the corridor in her memory which kept superimposing itself over the real corridor she was in. She grasped the handle of the door in front of her—praying it was real—and jerked it wide.

  The woman clutching Zach had Tara’s face, but her hair was completely white and her features were worn and weathered like old stone. Her eyes shone with the light of madness as she crouched in the far corner like a wounded animal, her gnarled hands wrapped tightly around Zach’s chest, holding the boy so close against her withered breast that he could not escape to run to Audrey.

  Mother.

  Audrey froze in the doorway, staring at her mother’s Nikes peeking out beneath a worn cotton dress, the wild look on her face resonating in her animal stance, her flitting eyes. But there was no hatred in them, none of the rage that Audrey had remembered, and the hands caressed Zach lovingly, not like the hands of some deadly madwoman. She looked more the way Audrey pictured herself, a woman who had lost everything, clinging to one last ray of hope before going completely over to the other side, into the bottomless pit of insanity.

  Suddenly Audrey could feel her memories falling into place like tumblers in a lock, as door after door flew open in her mind. She collapsed against the wall for support as the foundations of her shattered memory fell apart. It wasn’t Mother that had tortured Paula. It was Tara.

  It was Tara’s basement Audrey had been in. Not the basement of her mother’s house. It was Tara on the floor, wrestling with Paula. Over a period of time, Tara had taken both her brother and sister from Audrey’s mother. It was Tara who tortured and killed them. And it was Tara who superimposed Audrey’s mother’s face over her own in Audrey’s memory. Tara hadn’t only buried memories. She had distorted them! Created new ones!

  “I’m here, baby!” gasped Audrey, stumbling across the floor toward the two of them, never taking her eyes off her mother’s hands, lest she was wrong and they shoot up toward Zach’s throat.

  “All my babies,” said her mother, staring past Audrey, out into the corridor. “She took all my babies.”

  Audrey staggered as more memories hit her.

  It had always been Tara. It was Tara who strapped Paula to the machine in her lab and then she turned the dials on the machine. And Paula’s cries became animal wails of terror and pain so loud Audrey had careened wildly backward, away down the corridor. It was Tara she’d heard laughing, following the sound of Audrey’s telltale running footsteps down that long dark tunnel.

  It was Tara all along.

  Audrey dropped onto her knees beside Zach and wrapped her arms around him, still staring into her mother’s eyes, trying to make contact. Zach pulled free of her mother’s embrace and buried himself in Audrey’s arms, quivering.

  “You’re safe now, sweetheart,” she said, hugging him tightly.

  He shook against her. They both sobbed together, clinging tightly, tears running down their cheeks.

  “Mommy!” he managed, tucking his head against her breast.

  She reveled in the feel of him, the clean soapy smell of his hair, his skin, his solid healthy weight against her. She was never going to let him go again. Never.

  Martha brushed against her and Audrey smelled her as well. She smelled like the past. But it was a sweet past. Jasmine and dust.

  “You can’t stay here,” said Martha, as Audrey glanced up into the dry old eyes that were as sad as death.

  Zach nodded. “She’s coming,” he whispered in Audrey’s ear.

  The words chilled Audrey to the bone, because at that instant, for the first time, she sensed it too. It felt like a million venomous insects crawling up her legs, her back, inside her clothes where she couldn’t reach them. Her entire body was sending out a warning.

  Tara was coming.

  “All my babies. All my babies,” muttered Audrey’s mother.

  “She didn’t get me, Mother,” Audrey whispered. “She didn’t get Zach.”

  “Not yet,” said her mother, still staring toward the door.

  But it was Richard, not Tara, who stepped into the room.

  “Honey!” said Audrey. “Zach’s alive! He’s—”

  Tara strode into the room behind Richard. Audrey’s eyes were drawn instantly to the pistol in her hand.

  “Tara,” said Audrey, swallowing a large lump in her throat. “What are you doing here?” But of course she knew. Tara had come for Zach. Just as she had come for Craig. And Paula. And finally for her. But she wasn’t getting Zach. Not even over her dead body. Audrey clutched him so close against her he shoved her, trying to breathe.

  “So he is alive,” said Tara, staring at Zach.

  She reached into her pocket and removed something small. There was a metallic clicking noise and her lips moved but Audrey didn’t hear her. Instead she felt a sudden dullness within, as though she had taken an entire bottle of Halcion. It was a strange, familiar sensation and a tiny voice within her rebelled. She knew this place. It was where she went when she was under the force of hypnotic suggestion. She had brought herself here often enough, and because of that she realized that she had it within her power to leave. She imagined herself trudging out of some narrow opening inside her mind and back into the light. When her eyes focused once more, she found herself staring directly into Tara’s bewildered face.

  “Exit!” said Tara, snapping the clicker again.

  This time the sensation was far briefer for Audrey, just a momentary sluggishness, and she realized immediately what h
ad happened. Tara had implanted a word and a sound into her subconscious that would put her under, but her recent work with Doctor Cates, and her own practice with self-hypnosis and opening the doors in her mind had freed her of the word’s power.

  “No,” she said, shaking it off. “I know what you did. But you’re not going to hypnotize me again. Why? Why did you murder Paula and Craig?”

  “I didn’t murder anyone,” said Tara. “Paula and Craig were telepathic. I wanted to help them discover the limits of their abilities. To stretch those limits. I wanted to make them gods.”

  “You killed them.”

  “They died as a result of the experiments.”

  “How many people died as results of your experiments?”

  Tara didn’t answer.

  “Did any survive?”

  “A few.”

  “All my babies,” cried her mother, dragging herself out from behind Zach.

  Tara’s eyes widened and when she laughed the sound chilled Audrey. Why had she never realized the laughter in her head was Tara’s? Had Tara made her forget that too? Audrey noticed that Richard was watching Tara over his shoulder, tensing. But the pistol was aimed right at his back.

  “I spotted Richard’s Camry in the drive and I knew I’d find Martha here when I saw Coonts outside,” said Tara, glaring at Audrey’s mother. “What he saw in you I’ll never know. He’s dead, by the way.”

  A low moan escaped Martha’s lips. “All of them,” she muttered darkly. “I’d wake up and another of my babies would be gone and I wouldn’t even remember it for days, months. She killed your father, Audrey.”

  Audrey gasped.

  “I tried to make you forget altogether, Martha,” said Tara. “I’m better at it now, but still the mother-child bond is incredibly strong. I believe that must be what finally broke through the barriers I installed for you too, Audrey.”

  “You took all of them,” muttered Martha. “But you won’t murder Zach. You won’t murder Audrey.”

  Martha stumbled forward. She looked stunned, her eyes barely focused on Tara. Tara shot her at point-blank range. Audrey screamed as the old woman crumpled to the floor, and Tara swung the pistol around quickly to point at Richard before he could move. But he turned slowly to face her anyway, daring her to fire. “Get over beside Audrey,” she said.