Tristan helped Zoey to her feet. He looked like a tiger ready to lunge for the kill. It felt amazing to be held by Tristan. If he hadn’t been there with her, she didn’t think she could go on. Her head felt like it had split in two.
Tristan smiled weakly and whispered. “I got you—”
“No more talking,” hissed the doctor, his scabby face twisted in fury. He pointed his contraption at Tristan menacingly as though it were a gun. “I’m warning you. One more word, Mysterian, and I will fry your brain like fritters!”
Tristan glared at the doctor like a chained animal. If the chains were off, Zoey knew he’d tear the good doctor apart like a piñata.
Doctor One waved his contraption. “Now, I can either make this very painful for you or pain free. It’s up to you. If you speak, I will use the collar on you. If you try to run, I will use the collar on you. Try anything at all—”
I will use the collar on you, mouthed Simon so only Zoey and Tristan could see.
“I will use the collar on you,” finished the doctor. “Now, if you’ll follow me.” Doctor One walked up the steps and through the front door.
Zoey wiped her dripping nose, and when she looked at her hand, her fingers were stained with blood.
Reluctantly, Zoey, Tristan, and Simon followed Doctor One.
If the bones on the exterior were gloomy and foreboding, the interior of the building was much, much worse. Her instincts warned her not to enter.
They stepped into a vast chamber with dirt floors and bone walls. The bone cathedral building was just that—made of bones.
Centipede-like creatures as big as puppies scuttled across the ground and large cockroaches the size of rats scurried at their feet. An enormous chandelier made from bones and tiny skulls hung from the center of the chamber and cast shadows of screaming faces. Garlands of skulls and bones draped the vaulted ceiling like Halloween decorations in a haunted house. Whoever had built this place had to have been mad. It was as though they had dug up an entire cemetery and had used the bones as decoration.
Zoey could see that her friends felt the exact same way—completely flabbergasted and just a little grossed out.
“Keep up, or I’ll press the button!” warned Doctor One. He led them through the main area and then into one of the many corridors.
Zoey ground her teeth but said nothing. She didn’t want to feel that pain ever again.
They passed a display case of skulls and bones that looked as though someone had taken an axe or a sledgehammer to them. Doctor One mumbled to himself as they walked. Where was he leading them? She had no idea how much time had gone by but she knew time was running out. Somehow, they needed to get rid of the collars and chains. They needed a plan, and they needed it fast.
The corridor opened to another chamber with a spiral bone staircase that moved like an escalator. The doctor moved towards a door behind the staircase. Zoey was sickened to see that the door was made of flesh. It was quilted together with thick black leather thread and looked like it was made of human skin. To add to the horror, the handle was a human skull painted black.
“Well that’s reassuring,” grumbled Simon.
The doctor grabbed the skull and pushed.
Zoey knew she needed to get their collars off before they could do anything. And she knew the only way to get them off was with that remote control. She didn’t want to let it out of her sight. They followed the doctor.
The room had the same dirt floor and bone walls. It was about the size of a small shop with a staircase leading up to a second level. There were no windows, and a series of single light bulbs poked out from the jaws of skulls hanging from the ceiling. Shelves stocked with dusty books and jars lined the far wall. Bottles whose contents looked disturbingly like organs in green churning liquid covered the jumble of tables in the room. If it weren’t for the strong sulfur smell and the dissected bodies on the tables, it could have passed for a normal laboratory. A device like a vintage gramophone played dark music in the background.
Zoey passed a table where a human had been cut up and sewn back together badly. She looked away.
They made their way deeper into the room where two creatures in blood-stained lab coats stepped away from one of the tables.
Doctor One greeted them and said, “My colleagues, Doctor Two and Doctor Three.”
They were both Aneraks like Doctor One. Doctor Two looked like he had never eaten. He had crazy spiked hair and looked like a tree in a lab coat, with branches for arms and legs. He had a mouth the size of a button and no visible nose. He regarded Zoey suspiciously with tiny pink eyes.
Doctor Three was short and had no eyes, just two small holes for a nose, and a mouth that stretched all the way back to his ears. And when he smiled, his teeth were tiny little skulls. Zoey suspected they were not his regular teeth.
“I have found us more humans!” Doctor One clapped his hands excitedly like he had just won the lottery.
“We’ll have more live tissue samples—” He held his breath, “We can finally perform the Dream Purge!”
Zoey shared a nervous look with Tristan and Simon.
Doctor Three smiled even more widely and spoke with a lisp.
“We should do it while they’re still alive!” His green tongue rolled over his skull-like teeth. “I want to see the life go out in their eyes. It’s so . . . invigorating!”
Doctor Two nodded, opened his tiny mouth, and said, “Miut, mit, miut, mit.”
Doctor Three smacked him on the back. “What? Speak up? We can’t hear you.”
The tree-like doctor frowned.
Doctor Three shrugged and then smiled happily. “Doctor Two agrees. Strap them into the Dream Purge chair, and we can begin immediately.”
“Yes, of course, Doctor Three,” said Doctor One.
He turned towards Zoey and smiled. “Ladies first.”
He pointed to a dentist-like chair with leather restraints for the feet and arms. A metal ring with tubes and wires like a helmet was mounted just above the headrest. The chair had once been white, but now red marks stained its dirty gray upholstery.
Zoey felt sick.
“Move!” bellowed Doctor One as he threated Zoey with the remote control.
But Zoey couldn’t move. She just stared at the bloody chair.
Doctor One moved to press the remote control, but Tristan charged forward and knocked him down.
“Leave her alone!” yelled Tristan through gritted teeth. “I swear, once this collar is off, I’m going to kill you—”
The rest of his threat died in his throat, and he fell to his knees. He rolled on the ground, twisting and crying out in agonizing pain.
“You shouldn’t have done that.”
Doctor One got to his feet and pointed his remote at Tristan. His expression changed from anger to delight at the sight of blood pouring from Tristan’s nose and ears as he convulsed in pain on the ground.
“STOP!” cried Zoey. She made her way to the chair.
“I’m going—see? Please stop.” She knew she wasn’t allowed to speak, but it worked.
Doctor One released his finger on the trigger and stepped over Tristan’s body.
“Get on the chair,” repeated the doctor as he made his way towards her.
Tristan staggered to his feet and moved next to Simon. His face was swollen, and his nose and ears were still bleeding, but at least he was alive and standing on his own. Their eyes met, and she knew he’d give anything to trade places with her.
Simon’s wet eyes said it all. He was scared. They were all scared.
Zoey stood next to the long chair. Doctor Three was waiting for her. He patted the chair invitingly. His pale, wet, and scabby skin looked like melted cheese up close. Doctor Two sat at a table behind the chair and typed on a keyboard.
Zoey managed to haul herself up onto the chair. Her heart pounded like a machine gun.
“Lie down all the way please,” said Doctor Three.
He moved towards the head of the ch
air.
Zoey did as he asked and rested her head on the headrest. The chair reminded her of her visits to the dreaded dentist, but now she wished it were a dentist appointment.
The doctors didn’t bother tying the restraints around her arms and legs, probably because she already wore the collar and handcuffs. And she could use that to her advantage . . . .
Click!
The heavy cold metal hat dropped around her temples, and a piercing pain that felt like a ring of needles had just punctured her skull blinded her momentarily. She reached up to touch her head, but Doctor Three slapped her hands away.
“Don’t move,” he barked. He moved around the chair so that Zoey could see him clearly.
“Just try to relax. It never works well when the subject is stressed—the dreams turn out to be nightmares. We don’t want nightmares.”
Zoey frowned. What was he talking about?
Doctor One shoved Tristan and Simon forward until they all stood near the edge of her chair. He waved his remote control like it was a gun. He was close now. She could almost reach the remote with the tip of her shoe—
Doctor One moved over and stood next to Doctor Three.
Zoey took a chance and spoke up, enunciating her words very quickly, “What are you going to do to me?”
Doctor Three leaned over Zoey. His face was so close that she could smell his rancid breath and could count the sores and zits on his face. Where his eyes should have been, she could only see blistered and flaky skin.
“We’re going to take your dreams, of course,” said the eyeless doctor eagerly.
Tristan and Simon both shrugged.
“What do you mean take my dreams? You can’t take my dreams. It’s impossible. Dreams happen when you sleep. It’s a state of mind, a consciousness. It’s not tangible.”
She knew she was pushing it by speaking again, but the doctors didn’t seem to mind now that she was already positioned for their experiment.
Doctor Three adjusted wires around Zoey’s head. When he was done he licked his lips and said, “The Dream Purge is a device that extracts dreams.” He knocked the top of Zoey’s head twice, “through these mind wires.”
He moved his hands along the black wires that went from Zoey’s metal helmet to a rectangular basin filled with a blue fluid. “We transfer the dreams to this reservoir tank until they are ready to be extracted.”
Zoey stared at the thick blue fluid. It looked more like mucus than water.
“But why do you want to do that?”
Doctor Three lost his smile. “Because the one thing we desire above all else in the world we Aneraks cannot have.”
“And what’s that?” asked Zoey.
“We cannot dream.” Doctor Three hesitated for a moment.
“When we sleep, we experience only emptiness, a vacuum, nothing. Imagine our surprise when we experimented on our very first human—”
“We discovered dreams,” interjected Doctor One. His bulbous eyes rolled around in their sockets like little whirlwinds. “Thousands of wonderful dreams.”
Doctor Three picked at one of his front skull teeth, yanked it out, and tossed it on the ground.
“Why should you humans dream and not us? What makes you so special that your mind produces wonderful projections while you sleep?”
Zoey wasn’t sure if she should answer, so she didn’t.
“We purged our first human dreams centuries ago,” continued the eyeless doctor. “It was the most glorious feeling, finally to dream! A door of endless possibilities opened to us. Once we’d glimpsed what it was to dream, we needed to have it. We needed to dream again.”
He shuffled over to Zoey’s dream-helmet and began adjusting latches and wires.
“And now we’re going to take your dreams, agent girl. We’re going to take all your dreams. Yours and your friends.”
These doctors were completely and utterly mad. Whatever this thing was, this dream purge, Zoey knew she wouldn’t survive. These mad scientists were going to lobotomize her if they started rummaging around in her brain.
“With three new brains, we’ll have enough dreams to last us for years,” said Doctor One, leering at Tristan and Simon.
“The dreams of children are much more potent, innocent, and filled with ingenuity, imagination, and creativity. They are the source of dreams. This is a dream come true.”
He laughed at his own joke. Even Doctor Two joined in with a mousy kind of laugh that made Zoey want to punch him in the face.
“What happens after you take our dreams?” Zoey tried to pull her head away as Doctor Three’s stained lab coat brushed her face.
“You die, of course,” answered Doctor One. “But don’t worry, we don’t waste any parts. You’ll be glad to know that your skin and bones will be added to our wall collection. Your organs, and especially your brain, will be used to test our new meta-creation theory.”
Zoey didn’t want to know about their new psychotic theories, she just wanted out of the chair. If only Doctor One could move a little closer, she could reach the remote with her foot and maybe kick it over to Tristan. But he was too far away. She couldn’t reach him . . . .
“Power it up!” Doctor Three backed away. Even though he didn’t have eyes, Zoey could tell he was thoroughly excited. He licked his lips eagerly like a snake smelling the air.
Doctor Two reached over to a large metal box and flicked a switch.
“Ut, wut, vit!” he called.
The lights flickered and a loud humming resonated through the chamber like the droning of a giant refrigerator.
“NO!” screamed Zoey. “STOP! Please, don’t do this!”
She bucked like a wild horse, but Doctor Three pressed her legs down hard. His smile made her want to scream even louder. She tried to move her legs but she couldn’t. The doctor had the strength of five men.
“Our worlds are collapsing,” she cried desperately. “Haven’t you noticed? They can’t survive a permanent portal. We have to shut the portals down, or we’ll all die!”
Doctor Three laughed. “Shut the portals down? Now why would we want to do that, silly agent girl? We are grateful to Mrs. Dupont for being clever enough to generate the Great Junction. Because of her, we now have an endless supply of humans. An endless supply of dreams!”
Zoey blinked the sweat from her eyes. “You can’t dream if you’re dead. I’ll telling you the truth. It’s why we’re here. We need to shut the portals! Both our worlds will be destroyed if we don’t.”
“Fiddles and sticks.” Doctor One dismissed her with a wave of his hand.
“It’s not like we haven’t heard that one before—the end of the world, blah, blah, blah . . . .”
He laughed a sick wet laugh.
“The True Eye cult have been preaching the end of the world for years. But they just try to scare us so that we will obey them,” continued Doctor One.
He looked at Tristan and Simon with a sinister smile on his scabby face. “Fear can make us do anything.”
Zoey caught Tristan’s eye. He looked green. Simon was more of a purple shade. He looked like he was about to have a heart attack. She was not persuasive enough. The doctors didn’t believe her.
Doctor One and Doctor Three exchanged a dark look, and then Doctor One yelled, “Activate the Dream Purge sequence!”
Zoey stopped breathing.
“Tat, sot, ich!” called Doctor Two. He leaned over his keyboard, and with a long, spindly finger he pressed down on a single key.
The lights flicked. The skulls in the lighting fixture seemed to move. The humming got louder and louder. From the corner of her eye Zoey saw small blue and red flashes of electricity move slowly from the tank to her head.
She tried to move her head, but the metal helmet dug into her skull. What would happen when the energy reached her?
Flashes of Tristan appeared in her mind’s eye.
She thought of her mother.
She had failed everyone . . . .
The terror of
what was about to happen overwhelmed her. She watched helplessly as a surge of electricity danced around her head like a ring of blue and red light.
It was over.
Just as she was about to close her eyes, Tristan charged forward.
Doctor One raised the remote—
CRACK!
The power went off.
Chapter 17
Locked Up
Darkness.
Zoey let out a shaky breath. Had she only just imagined it, or did their precious machine malfunction?
She blinked repeatedly, trying to adjust her eyes to the new darkness. She could hear sizzling and smell burnt rubber. It was just like the smell when one of the computers back at the Hive had overheated and then fried. Then she heard the click, click, click of boney fingers hitting a keyboard.
She smiled.
“You idiot! What did you do?” bellowed Doctor Three.
He let go of Zoey’s legs. She could hear his feet shuffle across the ground, and then the sound of a fist hitting something hard.
“Did you connect the wires properly? Did you check the trans-cranial direct current stimulation before plugging it into the tank? Why is this always happening? Do I have to do everything myself!”
“Miet, nut, tah tah,” the voice of Doctor Two growled in the dark. Even though Zoey couldn’t understand him, she knew just by his tone that he was angry, too. He clearly didn’t appreciate being blamed for whatever had happened.
Someone snorted, and she recognized Simon.
There was some more banging, and then something fell to the floor.
“There was a surcharge of energy from the fuse box,” said Doctor One. “It’s fixable, but it’ll take some time, a few hours at least.”
As her eyes finally adjusted, Zoey could make out the moving silhouettes of three white lab coats fidgeting with the tank to her right. She could see Simon’s white teeth smiling, as though he had used a glow-in-the-dark toothpaste. Although Tristan’s face was lost in shadow, the whites of his eyes were on her, and they were smiling, too.
“Losers,” whispered Simon. Zoey stifled a laugh.
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