A Monster Escapes

by Lewis Wolfe

  Yet her dark eyes and almost golden hair gave her an angelic beauty. No matter how hard he tried, Dr. Greer wasn’t entirely immune to that. When the girl’s thin lips curled into the smiles he knew she practiced, there was always a part of him that was, almost, inclined to treat her like a human being.

  She wasn’t a human being. She was a tool. His tool.

  Dr. Greer took the other plastic chair that stood at the table and sat on it.

  “I have big news,” he said.

  The girl stopped reading and put her book down.

  Dr. Greer knew that he didn’t actually have to talk. He could think all his thoughts and the girl would know effortlessly which ones were meant for her. Still, using his words gave him a feeling of agency, of power over the situation he was in. The situation he had created.

  “It’s happening. It’s really happening,” he continued.

  The girl nodded before she said, “Outplacement? I didn’t think they’d let that happen.”

  “It’s the only way forward with you. It’s no good keeping you here where you can’t develop fully. The studies we do here with you are limited to this controlled environment. You have to be out there, living and experiencing. It’s the logical next step.”

  “People aren’t logical animals,” the girl said as she threw one of her practiced smiles his way.

  “I made them understand. There are conditions, of course.”

  “What conditions?”

  “The first three years you will be completely supervised. You don’t go anywhere without your escorts. The chip we implanted in your spine serves as a tracker, so the supervisors will know where you are. And you keep working for us. If there’s a case for you to investigate, you go to it and solve it. You will come in for monthly checkups and further research.”

  The girl said nothing. She simply waited for the doctor to say the words she had already heard bounce around inside his head.

  “This is a huge next step. You know that, right?” he asked.

  She nodded. “I know that. How will you legitimize me?”

  Dr. Greer smiled at her question and said, “You will become a citizen, of course. Have you given any thought as to what name you’d like?”

  “When women don’t have an identity they call them Jane Doe, right?”

  “We can’t call you Jane Doe. It’s too obvious.”

  “Elring, then. Jane Elring.”

  She had said the name with a strange sense of determination in her voice and Dr. Greer wondered where it came from. Had she read the name in one of her books? Did it have some kind of meaning to the girl that had no experience to draw meaning from?

  “It just sounds nice,” she explained in answer to his thoughts. “I think so, anyway.”

  Dr. Greer nodded. It didn’t really matter what she wanted to call herself, as long as it was a logical name for a Caucasian female her age.

  He reached inside his pocket and took out a small black box. Carefully he placed it on the table, where it stood in plain sight. On top of the box stood a small button, just big enough for a thumb to press it.

  “Do you know what this is?” he asked.

  “That’s the button.”

  “That’s right. That’s the button. Do you know what it does?”

  The girl nodded. “I know what it does.”

  Dr. Greer leaned closer toward the girl, making sure that she understood his meaning perfectly. There was no escaping his control. There was always his reach, his grasp on her.

  “This button is your leash. The leash I contain you with. I can extend it, or I can keep it nice and short. Either way, you will listen. You will perform exactly as I want you to perform. If you don’t….”

  The girl finished the sentence for him. “… Then my supervisors push the button.”

  Satisfied, Dr. Greer leaned back against the shabby plastic chair. He smiled as he folded his arms and looked at her.

  “What happens when somebody pushes the button?” he asked.

  “The chip you inserted in my spine will send its electrical impulses to my brain. It will be extremely painful, and it will knock me out cold.”

  Dr. Greer said, “It’s your leash.”

  The girl confirmed, “It’s my leash.”

  “If you behave, you can lead a good life.”

  “If I behave, I can lead a good life.”

  “And if you don’t, we will kill you, cut out your brain, and use what we learn for the next specimen.”

  “And if I don’t, you will kill me, cut out my brain, and use what you learn for the next specimen.”

  If Dr. Greer had heard these words repeated to him by his own daughter, it would have killed him to know she was experiencing such cruelty. Coming from Specimen #8, however, those words meant nothing other than the confirmation of his control over her.

  His control over the tool he had created.

  DAY 2

  October 25, 2019 – Part 2

  1

  Jane pulled her hand away from Caleb’s forehead and got up from the bed. She took a few steps back just to give him the room she knew he needed.

  She had shown him a lot, maybe even too much, but when she had started it became almost impossible to stop herself. It was the first time, ever, that she’d revealed the intimate details of her past to someone. Jane would have preferred to have done it with somebody more stable, or perhaps with nobody at all, but Caleb was who she had.

  He was a good man. She had known that the moment he stepped into her office for that job interview. Troubled, beaten, but with a moral compass and a determination that was clouded only by his inabilities, not his lack of willpower.

  She had thought then that she might be able to help him heal from the events in Iraq he tried to hide from her and that, in return, he might help her when she finally needed it.

  Jane looked into Caleb’s big, confused eyes and saw everything. The fatherless childhood that featured a strong mother figure. The dyslexia that had crushed what little hope a black child living in the projects had at an academic career. The many fights on the streets, where he had developed his instincts. The army. The black ops. John C. Reilly. Iraq…. His mind always returned to Iraq.

  “Are you doing it right now? Are you reading my mind right now?” Caleb’s voice was panicked.

  “I can’t turn it off. It always happens all the time.”

  She watched as Caleb jumped from his bed. He took a few steps back, toward the door. There was fear in his eyes and Jane didn’t blame him. She had accepted the possibility that he would walk out on her after she showed him the truth of her past.

  At the door Caleb stopped, his hand already on the handle.

  “So… I have no privacy with you. You know everything about me. Everything I think? Everything I’m about to say?”

  “Technically, you don’t have to talk at all, no.”

  She watched as Caleb pulled the door handle downward and she heard the door open behind him. There were things she could say now that would get him to reconsider. Words that she could use to manipulate him, to bind him to her and her purpose.

  “I showed you what I showed you because I wanted you to understand. I should have done so sooner, maybe. Or perhaps I shouldn’t have involved you at all. Maybe what I did wasn’t fair to begin with. There is a danger here and, like I said, it is really old and really strong and really angry. You’re in danger, I’m in danger, and this town is in danger.

  “But I need you. Not right now, but very soon I will. I will need your skills, I will need your strength and whatever courage you can still muster. I will understand if you leave and I won’t stop you… but I’d very much like you to stay.”

  With a deep sigh Caleb took his hand off the handle and shoved the door shut again. He shook his head as he walked back to the bed and sat down.

  “I have a pretty fucked-up head, you know?”

  Jane knew. “Yeah, I noticed. I can help you with that, if you want. It doesn’t have to stay like th
at.”

  She watched as Caleb raised his head to meet her gaze. She saw a pride in him that was both noble and foolish. The kind of pride that could move a man to great deeds, while setting him up for a certain and painful death. She saw that Caleb didn’t fear death, and that he believed himself to have gone so numb that pain could no longer touch him. Jane knew he was wrong.

  “Why are you staying, Caleb?”

  “Don’t you already know?”

  “Tell me anyway.”

  Caleb shrugged. “We got a contract. It’s not done, clearly.”

  Jane’s mind raced as it looked for the right smile to give him. Smiling was a difficult thing that came so naturally to most people. Most people, of course, had had years of immersion in normal communication with others. They would learn, at the earliest age, what kinds of faces to make and when. Later in life, those faces became easy and almost instinctive. But if you had to learn, theoretically with only a mirror to aid you, what a smile looked like and how to use it, it got very tricky. And it wasn’t just the lips—your eyes had to be involved too or the whole expression looked fake.

  Jane decided on a slight curl of the right corner of her thin lips while she allowed her eyes to settle slightly. Appreciative and understanding, that was what she was aiming for.

  “Thank you, Caleb. But I want you to know that if, in the future, you decide to leave, I will understand. I won’t ever stop you.”

  “Could you… technically… force me to stay?” Caleb asked.

  Jane considered how to answer that question. To be truthful would perhaps scare him, but to lie might do more damage still. If he felt, even for a moment, that he couldn’t trust her, then he’d be on guard with her too. Very soon their interactions would devolve into understated hostilities and it would only go downhill from there. Not unlike her relationship with Agent Bradford.

  “I could say things based on what I know about you. Things that would make you question your actions and motives. Manipulating people is easy when you know exactly what and how they think.”

  “And mind control,” Caleb said. “You showed me mind control.”

  “My abilities in that area are not well developed at all. I could… make you move your hand, or raise your shoulders, but I’d only have control for a very short moment.”

  Caleb asked, “So, would you prefer I just stay quiet from now on? It could have some tactical advantages and if you know what I’m thinking anyway….”

  “No. That’s the last thing I want. I want you to have agency in our interactions. I will respond to what you say, not to what you think, unless there is some kind of emergency. Whatever strange thoughts you come up with that you don’t say out loud, I will try my hardest to ignore.”

  Then Caleb’s mind, like not thinking about a pink elephant, involuntarily associated a wide series of dirty and inappropriate thoughts.

  “Yes, I’ll ignore those especially,” Jane said with a smile that was almost genuine. Then she winked at him as she said, only half-jokingly, “I have those too, you know.”

  2

  Caleb’s head had been spinning ever since John C. Reilly, who wasn’t there, had cracked his skull with the machine gun that didn’t exist. Now he sat on his hotel bed with that same head cocked as he listened to everything his client told him.

  Why had he stayed? That was what she had asked him and he had told her it was because of the contract. It was a half-truth, Caleb knew, and he imagined that Jane knew it too. The truth? In its entirety? Caleb wasn’t so sure himself.

  Caleb hated bullies. He had hated them on the playground when James Sullivan pushed little Rachel Meadows around. He had hated them when he was sixteen and a bunch of thugs thought they could terrorize his neighborhood.

  Caleb’s response to bullies was always the same. Swift and violent. He had broken James Sullivan’s nose on the pavement in front of his building and had taken a bat to the kneecaps of the two thugs that bothered his mother.

  At eighteen he had joined the army because he believed they would allow him to fight the biggest bullies out there. The terrorists and the undemocratic regimes would learn to fear him.

  Not all bullies could be beaten. He had learned that when he faced the brunt of John C. Reilly’s uncontrollable bloodlust.

  After returning home from Iraq he had met yet another bully that he had no chance of ever defeating. The monstrous cancer that tore his mother up from the inside.

  Perhaps he saw a bully now in the shape of Agent Bradford. Or perhaps the strange Dr. Greer that Jane had shown him triggered his long-dormant instinct. The experiments done on Jane; the brutality of seven dead children in the name of science; the cruelty with which they tried to control his client’s movements.

  Caleb had spotted a bully and he was tired of them winning all the time. He would protect Jane Elring to the best of his abilities. In due time he would master the fear she caused in him, he believed.

  But what did he fear exactly? What was it in the girl that scared him? It wasn’t really her unique and strange abilities that bothered him. No, it was the fact that he now saw the inadequacies and weaknesses of his mind reflected in her dark gaze. She knew everything about him, apparently, including all the things he was ashamed of. All the things he hated about himself.

  Yet, even now when he was at his weakest, Jane smiled at him warmly as she sat on the edge of his bed. She needed him, she had said, and Caleb believed her. He just hoped that he could come through for her.

  “So this thing that attacked me? Showed me the stuff that wasn’t really there. What is that?” he asked.

  Jane shrugged. “I’m not quite sure yet. That’s what I was hoping to find out before, well, its attack on you.”

  “But you can interact with it. You kicked it out of my mind.”

  “Pretty much. You have to let me know if you feel it sneaking up on you again. It doesn’t have to get that bad.”

  Caleb thought back to the brutal itch that had struck the inside of his body and burned inside his skull.

  “That’s easy to do. You can’t miss it. I thought I was having allergies or something.”

  “Itchy, huh? Ethan Walker’s mind registered the same thing. Then it started burning.”

  The mention of Ethan Walker gave Caleb pause. He thought back to earlier in the day when Jane had fought to have him transferred out of town. She was convinced he was going to die.

  “You said Ethan Walker was dying?”

  “This thing attacks the mind and leaves a cerebral print. That’s why the patients show signs of brain damage, or stroke. But what the doctors can’t see is what lies underneath that.”

  “What?”

  “This thing consumes life. It tortures people until they can no longer stand it, and then, offers them a deal.”

  “What deal?”

  “No more suffering—death—in exchange for their energy, or their souls, if you like.”

  Caleb leaned back against his pillow as he considered Jane’s words. So it was, regardless of whatever else it was, basically a predator. Putting it in those terms gave him some peace of mind because now he understood it. After all, he too could be a predator, if he had to be.

  “So what now? We heading out to see whatever you needed to see?” he asked.

  Jane looked at the digital alarm clock that came with the hotel room and saw that the late afternoon had arrived.

  “First thing tomorrow. You need rest; I do too. We’ll eat in a couple of hours and get an early night’s rest. It’ll be plenty exhausting tomorrow, I do believe.”

  3

  Darkness wandered into town like an awkward stranger looking for a place to rest his head. It pierced through the hours of twilight and colored the sky a deep purple as it made room for the stars to appear. The moon, shrouded by a black cloud that refused to move, was not allowed to shine its fickle light to aid the town. Before long Brettville was caught underneath the unforgiving blackness that held the town in its ever-tightening grip.

>   A stormy wind blew through the streets. Without purpose or meaning its considerable force clashed against the houses and rustled through the pines. Roaring and howling as it made its way ever forward. Forward, toward nowhere in particular.

  The wind’s primal growl desecrated many dreams and twisted them into the kind of bizarre nightmares that could sometimes haunt you in your waking hours. Minds tainted by the unforgiving force of a raging Mother Nature.

  Jane was incapable of dreaming in the way normal people did. Where normal people were swept away by their dreams, caught in a whirlwind of chaos blowing inside their minds, Jane retained complete control. When she slept, her brain, altered by years of unnatural chemicals forced into her system, allowed her to traverse the insides of her mind, completely aware of all that existed there.

  Her mind was a dark house during her sleeping hours and, though she could turn on the light, she often preferred to walk through it with just a flashlight. That way, she chose what thoughts and feelings to focus on, rather than become overwhelmed by the everything of all there was to her.

  Tonight she was accompanied by the seven little girls that had come before her. They tried to keep up with her as their little bodies got dragged down by the weight of the cancerous lumps on their necks and shoulders.

  Jane had met these girls when she was but a child, back in the laboratory. They had scared her to tears as they bounced around her bed, begging for the attention others could no longer give them.

  It had been several more years before Jane realized what the girls really were now. Spirits, in a sense; the ghosts of what Dr. Greer had considered the failures leading to his success. His horrible pride had come with the deaths of seven young children.

  They wanted attention. They wanted to connect. As Jane had grown older and less afraid, she indulged them until they became part of the depths of her mind.

  Now they walked with her through her house. They played awkward games of tag with each other, occasionally tumbling over when their lumps caused them to lose their balance. Laughter filled Jane’s mental house when she slept and for that she was grateful.