The Never List

by Zan, Koethi

  “But why is it all in his handwriting?” Tracy didn’t sound convinced.

  “His contact wouldn’t allow him to photocopy anything, so he wrote out everything by hand. He wanted to publish a study, the definitive truth about mind control. This is what I was working on with him, but he wouldn’t let me see any of his actual notes.”

  “Adele, I hate to break it to you, but I don’t think this work was based on secret CIA records,” Tracy said. She patted the box of photographs beside her. “Looks like this was original research. And I certainly don’t think he planned to publish it, considering it’s evidence of his crimes.”

  Adele shook her head. She looked confused, panicked. “I don’t know what you’re—”

  Christine interrupted. “Brainwashing? Adele, don’t forget I was a psych major too. I know about those CIA experiments using Chinese and Korean persuasion techniques. They’ve been discredited. The CIA gave up. Brainwashing does not work.”

  “Jack disagreed,” Adele replied. “He thought the CIA only discontinued their studies because they got caught. Their methods were unethical, so they got shut down. But Jack said the documents he obtained proved the CIA was successful. And that his discovery would change the field.”

  Tracy interrupted her, “I see. And you figured if you were his coauthor, you’d surely be invited to join the Harvard faculty.”

  Adele turned pale but said nothing.

  I remembered the books Adele had been reading in the library, and it started to make sense. But then I had another, even more horrible thought.

  “Adele, how does this research connect back to your little secret society? I know it existed. You and Jack were in it together, weren’t you? Does that have anything to do with torturing these girls? Tell us the truth, Adele. Were these girls part of this project?”

  Adele shook her head, her face as white as the pages of the open notebook in her hand.

  “No, no, I had no idea about any of this.” She pointed to the photographs. “That’s separate. That’s Jack’s madness. There was another side to him, though. He was a serious scholar.”

  “Then what was the secret society for, Adele? We know you were in it. Scott Weber told us.” It wasn’t exactly true, but I thought I’d take a chance.

  “You spoke to Scott?” Her tone changed in an instant, and her eyes flashed with anger. She looked like a trapped animal. She was used to being in control, keeping her secrets. Yet here she was, cornered.

  “Tell us, Adele,” Christine said, her eyes rimmed with red from crying but her voice steely.

  “The ‘secret society,’ as you call it, has nothing to do with any of this,” Adele began, looking away from Christine’s disturbing aspect. “It was just a … school project.”

  “Explain.”

  The word must have echoed painfully in Adele’s head. In her mind, as we all knew, she got to ask the questions. She looked at each one of us in turn, perhaps trying to weigh the situation she was in, figuring out who had the power here. We sat in silence for a full minute, waiting while she struggled with what she would say next. Finally, she must have decided she had run out of choices, and she began.

  “David and I were seeing each other that first semester. He introduced me to the BDSM movement when we met. At first I was interested in it intellectually, you know, as a topic for study, but then I was … let’s just say I was drawn into it. We started experimenting, and it escalated.”

  She paused and took a deep breath. She seemed to be gradually resigning herself to telling her story.

  “Then Jack walked in on us in the back stacks of the social sciences library when we were engaging in some … imaginative role play. His curiosity was, needless to say, piqued. At first we were horrified that our professor had found us out. Then we were flattered when he was so intrigued. Jack was so impressive, and I had just started working for him as a research assistant, so we were thrilled really to have something to offer up to him.

  “Soon enough we were all going to The Vault together. And then, I guess when Jack trusted us enough, he invited us to join his … private study group, I think is a better term. He’d set up an exclusive little cadre to analyze this subculture in a way a state-funded university might not necessarily sanction. More hands-on, so to speak.”

  “It had something to do with that Bataille group, didn’t it?” I asked.

  Adele looked surprised.

  “Yes, Acephale, but how did you—”

  “The brand. It’s the symbol for it,” Tracy responded.

  “I see,” Adele said, looking stunned. She gathered her composure and went on. “Well, yes, Jack was obsessed with the literature of transgression: Bataille, De Sade, Mirbeau. He thought it would help us understand the psychological origins of perversions, fetishes, sadistic impulses—all of it.” The words rushed out of her, like those of a proselytizer. “But he believed transgressive behavior couldn’t be studied through mere observation. It wasn’t like depression or schizophrenia or sleep disorders. We had to experience it for ourselves.

  “So that’s what we did. We altered our entire lives to get to the core of this work. We created our own rituals and incorporated these texts to, you know, get into the spirit of things, to help us to break free from societal norms and uncover our true selves. And from there we could reach an understanding beyond—” She stopped abruptly, seeing our expressions. She’d lost us.

  Adele cleared her throat.

  “So yes,” she said, “as part of all that, we talked about human sacrifice, mutilation, bondage, and all kinds of other debased acts. But it was a game. It wasn’t real. It was just like what we did at the club.” She stopped and looked over at the box of photographs. Tears sprang to her eyes.

  “At least, I thought it was,” she continued. “I don’t know. Maybe Jack was grooming us for something more, but it didn’t get that far before his arrest. I swear.”

  We were all staring at her. None of us even dared to move for fear she would stop telling her story.

  As she paused, I glanced quickly around the room, checking the doors, the windows, listening. It was silent, all was still. Jack was making us wait. I held my knife in my lap, squeezing the handle tightly, clenching and unclenching it in my fist.

  Adele inhaled deeply and went on.

  “Jack had also brought in his old friend—Joe Myers, he’d called him at the time—to join us. He was something else altogether. The most hardcore of us all, cruel and violent. He made me wonder sometimes if I knew what I was getting into. But I was too deeply involved by then. And Jack was still the one in absolute control of it all. At the time I stupidly trusted him to keep everything safe.”

  She paused and looked up at us, then said meaningfully, “It turns out I didn’t know Joe Myers’s real name until he made it onto the Most Wanted List yesterday.” She saw the shock in our eyes as we registered her meaning. “Yes. Noah Philben.” She let this sink in for a moment before continuing.

  “On the day Jack was taken away, the news broke and then spread around the campus like wildfire. But at the very beginning, the FBI was focusing on the house. Before they got to his office on campus, I sneaked in. I knew I only had one shot. I took everything I could carry so I could continue this project, but I also knew he had kept crucial materials hidden at the house, and there was no way for me to get in there.

  “Noah Philben—still Joe Myers to me then—also wanted to get Jack’s things, though I didn’t know why. And I was afraid he’d already taken something. I wanted to confront him, but he disappeared. I couldn’t find him again after Jack’s arrest because I didn’t know his real name. I swear I only found out yesterday when they showed his picture on the news.”

  She turned to me. “When I saw his face and heard that Sylvia belonged to his church, I suspected that your search had somehow led back to him. And I was right.”

  “And you wanted to know exactly what we found, isn’t that right, Adele? That’s why you called us, why you wanted to come to the ho
tel,” interrupted Tracy.

  “But, Adele, Scott Weber said the secret society was still meeting after Jack’s arrest,” I said, challenging her.

  “Sort of.” She thought a minute and then said, “We met, but at that point it was just me and David and two others we knew from The Vault. We were regrouping, trying to make sure we didn’t have any ties to Jack that could be traced back to us, that everything we’d done would be kept from the police.

  “And yes, I was still seeing David. I was … I was only seeing Scott to keep him out of Jack’s research. I didn’t want him to find the notes before I did. He is a damn good reporter, so I had to keep him away. I know that doesn’t exactly sound ethical, but you have to understand—this work has become my life.”

  “No kidding,” muttered Tracy.

  I turned to Adele. “Didn’t you—weren’t you at all … moved or disgusted or horrified or something about what you had just learned about your professor and—let’s just say it, friend?”

  She looked ashamed. “Well, I was. I was. Oh yes, definitely. I just also told myself I needed to be strong, because this was really an … opportunity for me.”

  “You are one revolting piece of work, Adele,” said Tracy, looking away in disgust.

  At this Adele turned on her heel and walked back to her spot by the window. She faced away from us, so I couldn’t tell whether she was regretting her revelation or not. We left her alone.

  As the rest of us sat there recovering from Adele’s story, Ray began picking through the box of photographs. Suddenly, he jumped up and turned to me, looking panicked, “What were those ‘subjects’ called again? From the notebooks?”

  I lifted one up. “Let’s see, here’s a Subject L-39, and here’s an M-50 …”

  “That’s enough. Look.” He handed me a photograph, flipped over to the back. I could just make out the words “Subject M-19” scratched in the lower-left-hand corner. I took the pile from Ray. Sure enough, the photos were carefully labeled with tiny letters, each using the same formulation, “Subject P-9, L-25, Z-03.”

  And then I found H-29 the subject I’d read about in the notebook. She was a blonde, wearing a tattered nightgown, her eyes closed, a swollen purple bruise on her left cheek, a chain around her neck. Her teeth were bared, her lips dripping red around them.

  Tracy had been right the first time. These girls were Jack’s study.

  CHAPTER 37

  Tracy stood up abruptly and wrenched the photos from my hands. She crossed the room in two strides and waved the images an inch from Adele’s face.

  “Can’t you see what this means?” she screamed. “Do I have to spell it out for you? There weren’t any CIA documents, Adele. This wasn’t noble academic work. Jack was running his own mind control experiments. Using torture. On these girls.” She paused. “And on us.”

  In disgust, Tracy threw the photos onto the floor in front of Adele. No one spoke—we only listened to the sound of their sliding across the wood. Then Tracy stepped back and looked hard at Adele, her voice calmer now. “It looks like Jack wanted to turn you into a very different kind of protégé than you thought.”

  Adele stared at the photos scattered at her feet. She bent down, picked one up, and examined the writing on the back. Here it was, her life’s work, based on a maniac’s experiments on abducted girls. And worse, this maniac might have been slowly making her party to his machinations. Grooming her to be one of them, to engage in some horrific study, a magnum opus of torture and degradation.

  “I think I … I think I need to be alone for a few minutes,” Adele said. She turned slowly and walked like a zombie out of the room, staring straight ahead.

  “Should we let her go?” Tracy said after it became clear Adele wasn’t coming right back.

  “Yes, she’s in shock. And she knows she was duped. She thought she was the great manipulator, but it turns out she was the manipulated one. She is another victim of Jack’s. A different kind, but still.” I paused, taking a breath. “So I think, for now, we should let her have some alone time.”

  Tracy looked back down at the notebooks. “Well, I could probably use some alone time myself. Or ten more years of therapy. Or a giant slug of vodka.”

  She bent over the photos spread on the floor, picking one up here and there, tracing the images with her finger. “So,” she began, her voice barely audible, “were we just part of these … these experiments too?”

  I sat down next to her, picking up a photo, this one of a brunette with the frizzy curls of a cheap home permanent, her eyes staring warily into the camera lens. Subject S-5. From the nineteen eighties I guessed.

  Christine had returned to the window seat. Ray was pacing back and forth, wringing his hands. We were all shaken to the core.

  “Are these the other fifty-four girls from Jim’s list? Could any of them still be alive? If so, are they on the run with Noah Philben right this very second?” I asked.

  Tracy shook her head slowly. “I wonder if Noah is a ‘serious scholar,’ too.”

  “Somehow I don’t think so,” I replied, absently stacking the photos back into piles. “Seems to me that Jack liked torture and Noah liked making money. They figured out a way to do both. And now that Jack can’t be hands-on, I’m sure he loves hearing the stories of this sick world he set in motion. And probably still controls.

  “Or maybe Sylvia is in control,” I said, thinking about our situation. “After all, she set this trap for us. Maybe she’s his proxy now.”

  “Like you were, Sarah?” Tracy said quietly.

  I jerked my head around to face her, “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, look at how you betrayed us. You were practically in Sylvia’s shoes. There but for the grace of God—”

  “I was nothing like Sylvia. How dare you say that?”

  Tracy stood up and walked over to me. She was close enough to know I would be uncomfortable. I hated my body at that moment for shrinking back from her. “Sarah, have you been brainwashed to forget? Do you not remember what it was like those last months in the cellar? When you … when you … went to the other side.”

  I shook my head. “I didn’t. I didn’t.”

  “Really? You didn’t? Well, then how do you explain the fact that you’d moved upstairs at that point? How do you explain that when one of us would be tied down on the rack, you stayed right there, in the room, helping him, handing him his tools and instruments, smiling? I guess his techniques worked on you, after all.” Tracy was shouting at me now.

  My thoughts began racing, fragments of memories, disjointed scenes, reappearing in my mind. I shook my head, as if that might wipe away the images her words had put there. I shook harder and closed my eyes. I bit my lip hard to try to stop the tears I felt forming in my eyes. I didn’t want to lose control right now. I wanted to be strong.

  I pulled myself together and sat up. The first face I saw was Ray’s. I could see his shock and horror at what Tracy was saying, as he looked from her to me, and me to her.

  “I don’t remember that. That didn’t happen,” I finally said, exhausted from the effort of struggling with my memories.

  Christine had risen from her perch and was approaching me slowly. “It did happen, Sarah. It did.”

  “And that’s not even the worst of it, Sarah,” Tracy started up again. “I could almost forgive you for that. We were underfed, our heads were screwed up. But there was a certain code I thought we had down there. A certain commitment to one another. And you violated that in a way that was so much more profoundly damaging than anything Jack could ever do to us.”

  I shook my head, still repeating, “I didn’t. I didn’t.”

  “You did, Sarah.”

  The room was quiet for a moment, and then Tracy said, very softly and deliberately, enunciating each syllable clearly, “You told him about my brother. You told him about Ben’s suicide.”

  At that something unbelievable happened. Tracy started to cry. Actual tears. I stared at her in shock. I had never seen
this before. All those years in the cellar, she had been so strong, she never let us see her like this, and now, here, not because of Jack, but because of something I did …

  “Why?” she pressed. “He didn’t need to know that. I understood what you had to gain by helping him with the instruments. I know you were trying to get in his good graces so he might trust you enough to let you go outside. I understand that.

  “But to tell him about Ben. When you knew he would use it against me. I could take anything else. Being bound, gagged, electrocuted, beaten—whatever. But I didn’t want to hear him use Ben’s name. Once he knew about Ben, he was able to manipulate my mind, make me believe Ben’s death was my fault, my fault entirely.”

  She stopped talking suddenly, wiping her face with her sleeve. Then she stared at me, her eyes narrowing.

  “Well, I have another secret for you, Sarah. I know you think you’re the only one who suffered here. But let me tell you, those first years out were difficult for me too. Much harder than they needed to be. Thanks to you, I couldn’t stop thinking about the things Jack said to me in there.”

  She was quiet for a moment, then closed her eyes as she began again. “It was so hard, in fact, that I tried to join Ben at the bottom of that lake. Twice. And clearly I’d be better off right now if I’d just stayed down there.”

  None of us spoke. I stared at the floor, unable to meet her eyes. I couldn’t believe it. Tracy seemed so tough, so powerful. The strongest one of us all. Had this experience nearly destroyed her as well?

  Or maybe I had nearly destroyed her?

  They were right. I hadn’t needed to tell her secret to Jack. Why did I? My memories from that time were so convoluted, so painful yet indistinct. Maybe there was a moment, a few fleeting seconds, where my mind had gotten turned inside out, and I thought that being with Jack, helping Jack, was somehow where my whole life had been leading. I had believed in his twisted vision of the world. Some small part of me had been resigned to be with him for the rest of my life, furthering his sadistic goals, satisfying his perverse needs. I had needed to believe so that I could carry out my plan. Believe just a little to convince him. But had I gone too far? Had I crossed the line? Had I been a success story in his sick study after all?