“Jane, I’m going to have to—don’t fight me!” He heard his own voice soften to sweet reason, bitter untruth. Somehow lies always sound more deceptive in the dark. “Jane, you said you were tired. Sleepy. So sleepy. I believe you. You must rest, you know what’s best for yourself. You must rest right now.”
He said it, hoping he held a psychological talisman stronger than the Call scribed into her genes. “Jane, you must sleep… ecnalubma.”
In the dimness, he couldn’t tell if she had fallen into hypnotic trance. Her body still tensed against his. They stood frozen in conflicted isometric embrace waiting for what their next breaths would bring—
A sound of soft palms, clapping. It could have come from anywhere; it echoed from everywhere.
Kevin whirled to confront the darkness.
“Nicely done, Doctor,” came an eerily unseen voice. Nordstrom’s voice. “Oh, so nicely done. Quintessential Svengali, yes. Or simply the ultimate Trilby? Who knows —who cares? Not the Three Little Pigs. Not Mary’s little lambsy… they’re all chops by now.”
“I thought they gave you a taste of your own medicine,” Kevin answered, hoping for hidden loudspeakers but knowing the darkness probably concealed only the man himself, just as the man’s mind hid only darkness. It was all out in the open now—madness and method. Kevin tried to anticipate what form they’d take. “I thought you were all tied up.”
“So did they. Interesting place, this… cavern. A veritable university of higher knowledge. My university. You’d never matriculate there—no, no. Only the dead can be said to truly matriculate… If only I’d brought my Brownie and a time machine. I’ve found some fascinating new toys here, though—see!”
Before Nordstrom had finished, Kevin heard a rising metallic hiss. Some instinct made him snatch Jane away from the table rim just as a spinning meat cleaver skidded down the stainless steel, its cutting edge revolving in the faint overhead light.
Kevin grabbed Jane’s hand and she came without resistance. Together they leaped a chasm of darkness, their feet clattering in the silence. They ran until they ran into a wall.
Kevin stopped and looked back. Nothing was brighter but he could see more than he wanted to. A troll in a pale nightshirt had leaped atop the table, eyeglass lenses glittering in a slice of distant lamplight.
“I can see you,” it singsonged into the dimness. “I can find you! You’re It.” Nordstrom’s right hand lifted, the cleaver shining silver. “This little piggy went to Harvard and this little piggie stayed home. And this little piggie made a fine sacrificial lamb. And then there were none.”
While Kevin watched, Nordstrom hurled the cleaver toward the ceiling. It somersaulted, glittering with every rotation, then lunged into the downward pull of gravity. Kevin hoped that Nordstrom’s balding skull would be graced with a new Mohawk. Instead, the cleaver plummeted harmlessly to concrete.
Nordstrom leaped down into the darkness after it. Kevin tensed to move, and heard his sole scrape cement. Nordstrom was barefoot. Silent. Kevin felt behind himself. He and Jane were backed against a row of shed-high wooden crates.
“Walk softly,” he instructed her.
“And carry a big stick,” she finished by placid rote, an association she might have dredged up in hypnosis.
“Don’t I wish,” he muttered, still unsure if Jane was under. But when he tugged her hand, she followed.
They edged along the wooden row, their boot soles sanding the floor. Echoes and imagination magnified the sound into the slither of a gigantic snake. Perhaps, Kevin thought, echoes disguised where the rasp originated. He heard no other sound but theirs.
The wooden wall they crept along ended with unseen space yawning behind them. In Kevin’s mind, an invisible and utterly psychotic Nordstrom loomed there, meat cleaver on high. They backed together into the unknown anyway. Danker air breathed heavy across Kevin’s neck. His exploring hand brushed a cold metallic expanse and followed it to a horizontal lever.
The configuration nudged an association in his brain, but the connections refused to dovetail. Kevin pulled the lever anyway. With a sound like a giant’s breaking femur, the door cracked open. Beyond it lay only ultimate darkness and no exit.
Kevin’s impressions finally had assembled into ice-cold certainty. No escape there. He jerked Jane back from the doorway. Maybe, he thought, if they kept quiet enough, Nordstrom would stroll into the trap Kevin had almost tripped himself.
“A mistake, Blake.” Nordstrom’s voice echoed from everywhere, “Blake-ake-ake-ake” rat-a-tatting off the hard Walls like machine-gun fire. “Tom, Tom, the piper’s son. Stole a pig and away he run—” Footsteps. “Fee, fie, fo, fum, I hear the blood of a dead man mum. Shhhhhh, walk softly, yes… death is so quiet. Death comes on little cat feet and leaves bloody paw prints. Someone has to straighten up after, no?
“Jane Doe will go gently into that dark night. She will be still, you know. I’ll see to that. You should have let her languish at the beginning. She had such a head start on perfection when you found her!
“But a fool like you must meddle. You must waste your opportunities, fatten her like a sow, turn a delicate disembodied balance on the very edge of existence into mere gross humanity. Smell the old blood here, Blake, the matted hairs and slack bowels! The essence! A magnificent arena! Lions and Christians—and you’re It!
“Get this right. There is such fever in the bone, the blood, the bright, severed hair. I am fever-breaker. I make all things well—as they should be. Julie saw that, yes, she did.
“Julie smiled at me, you know. In the parlor where she received guests. Even the lipstick they waxed on her lips couldn’t keep her from smiling when she knew that she had achieved perfect… quiet. But don’t you keep too quiet, Blake. No, let me hear you scramble. Too bad Mr. Turner couldn’t be here. We’re all alone. We can play without him.”
Nordstrom’s voice rebounded from concrete and metal, from everywhere and nowhere. Kevin and Jane cowered in a corner formed of wall and crating and so dark Kevin couldn’t see Jane. Her hand—limp—warmed his.
He hoped she was under, then she’d only heed his voice and escape the sick aria of sound reverberating around them. Nordstrom could burst into “La Marseillaise” if he wanted to, and she wouldn’t respond.
Silence held the darkened stage, then Nordstrom’s bare soles were softly brushing step by step over the concrete. Kevin glimpsed a ghostly white blob weaving toward the open metal door.
“Even if you tippy-toed out of this place, there’s only the next one,” Nordstrom was singsonging. “We all live in ticky-tacky boxes inside ourselves. Cells. Brain cells. Brain fever and here comes Dr. Death with a cold compress.” Nordstrom’s laugh was a malicious gnomelike giggle. “You can’t escape forever, Blake. You’ll make another mistake- ake-ake-ake,” he shouted, infuriated again.
Nordstrom’s figure was clarifying as it neared. Kevin held his breath. Beside him, Jane’s breathing suspended, too, perhaps in unconscious imitation. If only Nordstrom didn’t hear them. If only Nordstrom didn’t see them. If only Nordstrom walked right into the meat locker… Then Kevin could jump out and close it. Lock it Bottle Nordstrom like a beetle.
Silver flashed as it sliced the light The cleaver blade. Nordstrom faced the doorway, his free hand clawing the deeper darkness, his pale body fuzzing in and out of focus in Kevin’s strained eyesight.
Now, a few more steps, a second or two more for safety’s sake, then… Kevin poised to rappel off the wall and slam the heavy door shut on Nordstrom’s half-bare backside.
A light high above went supernova—exploded like a Kleig-light flashbulb—then shone hyperbright. Kevin looked up to find his eyes dazzled by the sight of a new sun in his dingy firmament, disbelieving his bad luck.
A light on the area’s opposite side repeated the performance. One by one, each by inevitable each, the distant utility lamps flared into high power. Every exploded light bulb added its amplified candlepower to the overall illumination.
&nb
sp; Tones of gray washed the floor now. Light glared on Nordstrom’s eyewhites and the cleaver blade, on his puckered nightshirt and pale-fleshed limbs. Light even seeped into the corner where Kevin and Jane sheltered.
Kevin pushed Jane farther behind him, wondering how to tackle Nordstrom without encountering his cleaver. Invention came up empty.
But Nordstrom wasn’t watching Kevin. His light-dazed eyes had lingered on the corner only long enough to note Kevin’s presence. Now Nordstrom stared in another direction, admiration and pleasure tightening his expression.
Jane was walking along a center trough in the concrete, hands in her jeans pockets, following the depression foot in front of foot as if balancing on a railroad track.
Jane—dressed, awake, in perfect control.
It was the Jane Turner had found… the Jane Nordstrom had tried to break… the Jane Kevin had been brought here to help. To love, honor and treat.
The Jane he had hoped he would never see again.
Chapter Forty
* * *
Behind him, Kevin felt Jane—the real Jane, as he now thought of her—stir.
Ahead of him, the other Jane stopped to glance around. She hardly noticed Nordstrom, but her eyes fixed when they met Kevin’s. She blinked her surprise.
“Kevin?”
“Yes,” he answered carefully, watching Nordstrom. “You should… be in bed,” she said.
“So should you.”
“No.” Her hand lifted as if to dislodge a veil before her face. “I must come. I heard the Call. I heard the voices. There is an anomaly present—”
“Nordstrom is the anomaly,” Kevin said.
Jane glanced to the psychiatrist, her features finally registering recognition, or at least distaste. “You were to be bound,” she told him. “They promised me.”
“They lied,” Nordstrom jeered back. “I unbound myself. Better than you did. You were helpless. But I might have unbound you later. If you were good. I might have come in with my unbinder”—Nordstrom twisted the cleaver blade until it chimed against the meat locker door—“and let you loose.”
“I don’t care what you might have done, Dr. Nordstrom.” The anger in Jane’s voice ebbed. “I… don’t care about any of that anymore. I am Called and must Recall. I must—”
“Don’t you care about me, Jane?”
She looked at Kevin, confused. “Of course I do. But I heard the voices and there is something I must do.”
“Voices! You hear that, Blake?” Nordstrom grinned and cradled his cleaver. “You think I’m kinko shrinko. But she hears voices. She’s a bloody Joan of Arc, and you know what happened to her! If Turner only knew his precious mind-mover was a schizo!”
Kevin held his peace. Nordstrom was too unhinged, and Jane’s double too disoriented, to spot Jane herself in the dim corner behind Kevin. And Jane herself had certainly kept mum, possibly thanks to “ecnalubma.”
Kevin was still trying to juggle all the pieces of the situation when Nordstrom acted. He sprang into the space between Kevin and the second Jane. There he crouched, cleaver cocked, the back of his hospital gown gaping incongruously.
“Come on, Wonder Woman,” Nordstrom cajoled. “Let’s see your tricks. The lights—oh, impressive, but you’ll have to do better. Better even than razor blades and broken glass. I’m ready for Kevin’s little lamb this time. Oh, yes, Julie, I’m always ready to tend to my best patients.”
“Nordstrom—” Kevin warned. If just seeing her duplicate could harm Jane, as he believed, seeing her duplicate hacked to death would be worse. Somehow, he had to stop Nordstrom.
“Stay out of it, Blake! You fake. This is between me and her. It always was. I have plans for her. Before I’m through with her—and after. Always better after. For them. For me.
Nordstrom hoisted the cleaver and made a pass toward Jane.
She didn’t move, didn’t even take her hands from her pockets.
The wooden handle spun from Nordstrom’s grip so fast he shrieked as it burned his palms. After violent withdrawal, the cleaver paused in mid-swoop, turned its edge toward Nordstrom and poised there.
“How does she do it?” Nordstrom spoke with a momentarily saner awe, rubbing reddened palms on his nightshirted flanks.
“I don’t know.” Kevin was as surprised as Nordstrom.
“Swanson knew. Poor Dr. Swanson, cheated of her best subject. You were always a spoiler, Blake. But Swanson knew. ‘You will believe a woman can make things fly.’ Yes, I believe. Why didn’t you? It’s your job to know why.”
“Swanson didn’t provoke such… spectacular results.” Pleasant as it was to see Nordstrom cowed by his own weapon, the sight of a lethal Jane was far less palatable. “Jane, let the cleaver down,” Kevin instructed.
She did not. But behind Kevin, the hidden Jane murmured her hypnotic confusion at the illogical instruction—a small sound, barely discemable. Somehow, Nordstrom heard.
He twisted to face Kevin, staring right through him. The man’s face shifted through a wardrobe of expressions, all of them more or less mad. The last was an unholy blend of greed and mad cunning.
“Et two, Brute.’ Mengele would have killed for this. Twins!”—he glanced back at Jane and the suspended cleaver—“… a Doppelgänger. And there, behind you, is the one, the one who… I saw it, going through the door, long muskrat hair—”
Jane had tired of upholding the cleaver. It smashed to the concrete. Now Nordstrom elevated in the weapon’s place. He resembled a bizarrely attired magician’s assistant, lacking only the telltale flatness to his body that revealed a board, or the tents in his nightshirt formed by invisible hooks.
Nordstrom simply hung in the air, three feet off the ground. He curled into a fetal ball, his oversized head seeming even more gnomelike, and glowered Rumpelstiltskin-style.
“Let me down, you stupid bitch! You can’t do this! It’s a trick, a trick—”
Kevin involuntarily stepped forward. “Jane… listen to me—”
She didn’t. She listened to Nordstrom, who pointed.
“Look. Look-see. Look what he’s hiding, your precious Kevin. Hide-and-seek and you’ve been It. Another you! Look, look, Jane, look.”
Kevin froze, torn between turning back to safeguard Jane herself and shutting up Nordstrom.
Nordstrom giggled, his lenses flaring like high-beams. “How does your garden grow them, Blake? Is there a magic formula, a secret word? Of course…” A cleaver-bright gleam stewed in Nordstrom’s eyes.
“Nordstrom, my God, no!”
“Ah, wrong word, that’s right. But now I have the right word—I overheard it. You told me yourself!”
“Dammit, Nordstrom, shut up!”
“Ec-na-la… la… la… lub-ma! That’s what I heard. Ec-na-lub-ma-a-a, Jane—” he crooned.
Nordstrom plummeted to the cement, hard, and was still.
Kevin didn’t care. He turned.
Jane was moving from the twilight corner. She almost seemed to be moving out of the wall, or out of herself. As she left the trance state, her eyes clarified with an emotion Kevin had never observed in them before—disbelief. Raw, wholesale disbelief.
Jane had accepted so much—a version of the planet Earth aliens had spoon-fed into her nuclei; Kevin’s newer view of a more fully human world. She had accepted it all—growing, expanding, learning. She had never yet encountered anything that had forced her to shrink. Her identical self would—did.
That mirror image stiffened as Jane neared.
“You… me… you are the Call,” Jane said in wonderment, drawn closer to her selfsame opposite.
“No!” the ersatz Jane commanded as if fearing contact. The wood crating behind Jane herself quivered, then flattened toward the floor.
Kevin lunged for her. A force field stopped him. Jane heard the shattering wood and lifted fur-muffled arms over her head. By a split second she sidestepped an avalanche of boards and rusted nails torn from their moorings.
Splinters frosted Jane’s dar
k hair, but the fur had cushioned her from injury. She stared at Kevin, frozen in his helplessness. He felt like God called to account for the ills of the world. The real injury was in Jane’s eyes.
“This is myself—?” she began, staring at the other Jane.
“No.” The harder Kevin lunged against the force that held him immobile, the stronger it got. “Another self.”
“That’s not possible, Kevin. You said the self is the supreme individual. That I-ness stands alone. That we are all one. How can I be two?”
“You’re not. It’s only… science splitting atoms again, splitting hairs and letting all hell break loose. You’re you. Always. She—” Kevin made himself regard his cap- tor. The other Jane seemed imperiously calm, in control, her expression inflexible. “Jane,” he begged her. “Free me.”
“You are safer held,” she answered like a parent confining a child.
“I don’t want to be safe!”
A vigil light of doubt flickered in her eyes, “/want you to be safe.”
“Yet you want to harm her.”
“Want to? No. I must only… Recall. It is my reason, my purpose. My… I-ness.”
“No. It’s them. Those who made you. They made her, too. They want to unmake her.”
“I want to unmake him!” The other Jane glanced to Nordstrom moaning down private corridors of semiconsciousness on the floor.
“Yes, but you won’t do it.”
She thought about it. “No. It is not my purpose.”
“And I don’t want you to do it.”
She nodded. “It’s easy to do what you want me to, Kevin.” Her expression struggled into a frown. “It’s not! Easy to… not do… what I must.” Her face turned toward its mirror image, sunflower to sun. The two Janes’ utter likeness was striking, awesome even.
“Jane…” Kevin implored, keeping his attention focused on Jane’s clone. Something in his voice arrested her.
She faced him again, confusion fracturing her features. “You call her ‘Jane,’” his Jane noted analytically, no accusation in the tone.
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