“Get ready — we’re about to begin. How’s Ms. Gale?”
“Stable, doctor. I’m getting some currents on the lateralization. Right hemisphere dominant … I think she’s asleep.”
“Good. Let’s set up the meta link.”
“But Ms. Bly is still fluctuating,” Nurse Ball interjected.
Dr. Braun pushed and held the green button again. “Miss Bly … can you hear me? I need you to relax.” Dr. Braun released the button, waiting for a response.
But no response came.
“Miss Bly?”
His query was met with a death-defying screech from somewhere near Nellie’s tank. Dr. Braun jumped, and Nurse Ball took a step back, her hand lightly resting over her heart.
“What the hell was that?” she rushed toward the tank window.
Nellie had begun to speak to someone. She was no longer panicked, but now seemed to be peacefully floating in her liquid solution.
“Dorothy … I can see you …” she whispered.
Dr. Braun raised his hand to stop Nurse Ball from leaving. They both leaned in, listening intently.
“Dorothy, you’re in a place … it looks like …” Nellie murmured.
Dr. Braun held up his hand and whispered to the nurses, “She’s in. It’s working.” He began to furiously scribble the words that were spoken between Nellie and Dorothy.
“Finally …” he breathed, “progress!”
CHAPTER 16
Nellie found herself standing alone on a brick road in an utterly foreign countryside. She seemed to be somewhere outdoors, beneath a gray sky filled with dark clouds that threatened an oncoming storm, each intermittently illuminated from within by flashes of blue light.
The brick path beneath her feet twisted and turned to oddly meander through unkempt, wild grass as tall as corn stalks. The grimy, faded, yellowish-brown bricks weren’t even placed in rows, but rather had been dropped into the ground at odd angles. Patches of bricks were simply gone, having been broken and worn away with time. Nellie squinted and knelt down to touch the bricks. Was this another dream?
Each remaining brick contained the imprint of a human face that was contorted in agony. She touched the ridge of one face’s cheek, traced over the grimacing eyes of another. Here was a face frozen mid-scream. Next there was a half-broken brick, its eyes rolled up and back in horror to see the crack running through its forehead.
Hearing a rustling noise just ahead, she realized that she was not alone. Nellie shot to her feet and peered through the darkness past gnarled, overgrown tree branches just in time to see a familiar figure dart over a hill.
“Dorothy!” Nellie called, but she was not heard. She couldn’t see Dorothy anymore. The anguish in the girl’s voice floated over the eerie, broken, brick road and the wild growth.
“Oh, my! No, No! What has happened to my dear Oz?”
“Dorothy, wait!” Nellie called and dashed up the road after Dorothy as fast as she could manage. “Wait, it’s me! It’s Nell!”
She came to the top of the hill and skidded to a stop. Before her, the landscape opened up into a terrifying array of labyrinthine passages that stretched as far as the eye could see. They were illuminated in red and shadowed in black, the walls lined with murky display cases.
Dorothy’s tiny figure, far ahead in the distance, disappeared into an opening in the massive labyrinth. Nellie charged down the path after her, struggling to keep that opening in sight.
Dr. Braun pulled a long and trailing piece of paper through a feed in his machine and peered over the top of his spectacles at the results being transmitted in beeps and scratches.
“Excellent! We have established a Meta Link between Nellie and Dorothy. Nellie is experiencing Dorothy’s world now, as we speak!”
“All vitals are stable,” Nurse Alissabeth confirmed, reading over the row of lights on her side of the control room.
“This is amazing!” Braun grinned and turned around to share his excitement with Nurse Ball. She flipped a piece of paper over on the medical chart in her hands and gave no response.
Dr. Braun cleared his throat and turned his attention back to his writing pad and pen.
Nurse Ball flipped her clipboard over for another look. Yes, this was her clipboard. Yet, somehow, the page in front of her was not a form for tracking the vital signs of a patient during therapeutic procedures. This was a bizarre sketch of a girl marching steadfast toward something unseen, surrounded by an army of what appeared to be … demons?
Nurse Ball ripped the drawing from the clipboard, crumpled it up, and tossed it into the wastebin.
Storm of Alice
Nellie dashed through the opening of the labyrinth and quickly checked the halls left, right and center. No sign of Dorothy … except for a blue ribbon that was lying on the path to her right. She took a deep breath and searched for any sign of movement down the branching passageways, which stretched on and on into darkness.
She had to be careful to find a way to differentiate one hall from the next, and to trace where she had already been. Nellie picked up a broken yellow brick from the entrance to the labyrinth and found the first of the display cases that lined the wall on her right. Inside its smudged, glass doors were antiquated china dolls in checkered blue dresses and perfect brown braids. They sat askew, leaning on one another, each with a crack running through its fragile, chipped head. Some dolls were completely missing the tops of their heads, with only their red, shiny lips and a bone-white chins remaining above their necks.
Nellie took the heavy brick and smashed it against the glass case. The glass cracked in a spider-web pattern.
Satisfied, Nellie picked up the blue ribbon, dropped it in her pocket, and charged down the hallway until she felt the need to catch her breath. Panting heavily, she stopped in front of another display case that was filled with china pigs that had been burnt and blackened. She drew back the brick.
WHIRRRR, WHIRRRR, WHIRRRR, CLANK!
Nellie spun about and came face to face with the manufacturer of the mechanical clattering.
“Did … you … do … this … to … us?” the dreadful vision before her struggled to speak, its voice imprisoned by the timing of its mechanized whirring gears and ticking sprockets.
Nellie clapped her hand to her mouth to keep from crying out. The thing’s human skin intertwined with its rusted tin panels and lengths of chain, and angry, red flesh bubbled over the edges of its twisted, black pipes and metallic skeletal armatures. Large, pointed hooks jutted out from under its rib cage and seeped a pungent, yellow secretion. The inner workings of its abdomen were completely exposed by a large, plastic bubble, inside which a robotic fetus squirmed.
Nellie stepped back and turned to run, but the automaton grabbed her with a metal hand and pitched her into the display case with such force that the glass shattered on contact. Nellie slid to the ground like a rag doll, crying out as pain exploded from her back and surged throughout her body. Before she could move out of the way, the metal monster picked her up and hoisted her over its head.
“This —" it spun her roughly around, high in the air" — this … is … your … fault!”
CLANK, CLANK, CLANK!
“What is my fault?” she cried.
It gave no answer. With each heavy, mechanical footfall, it carried Nellie deeper into the red labyrinth. Tears streamed down her hot cheeks, as, once again, she found herself utterly helpless against the horrors of Bedlam. Not knowing where she was or how she had arrived, she had no earthly idea how she could possibly escape.
The monstrosity turned a corner, and the hall opened up into a chamber that contained several entryways. The further in they went, the more the labyrinth looked like a mausoleum. The thing clanked forward, into the center of the chamber, retaining the limp Nellie in its elevated grasp.
In each doorway, a fresh horror appeared to join the tin man who held her prisoner. In one doorway stood a thing that looked vaguely like a scarecrow. It towered fifteen feet tall and wore a floppy, black hat t
hat shaded a dead face whose skin was decayed and stretched over long and broken teeth. Its arms swung at absurd lengths, the hands grasping human body parts which it was stuffing in the gaping hole of its abdomen, straight into its bulging intestines.
The next doorway revealed a mangled lion. Hooks and chains embedded in its flesh pilled its skin apart in places. The lion walked, with some difficulty, on two legs, one of which was latched tightly inside the big black iron teeth of a bear trap.
It used its giant claws to pull in vain at other wicked hunters’ traps that latched to its torso and dripped rivulets of bright, red blood. Around its neck was a thick, black, spiked, leather collar whose edges cut into its neck, leaving raw, infected welts. It pulled at the collar and tossed its head angrily, eyes flashing green. It glared at Nellie and growled, causing the long scar that crossed its face to wrinkle as it spoke.
“You. You’ve tainted us,” the lion’s deep rumbling voice resounded throughout the chamber. It swung its head and lifted its lip to reveal huge, deadly teeth. “You’ve tainted Oz.”
In the next doorway appeared a witch who was brandishing a riding crop in one hand and a whip in the other. Her hands were adorned by long, sharp claws that were painted a shiny, blood red. She stood upon impossibly high-heeled boots, so wickedly pointed at the toes that they surely could be used to eviscerate any enemy. Her black, buttoned dress had been torn to shreds and hung limply about her green frame like black tissue paper.
She hissed at Nellie and snapped the whip in the dirt next to her, causing a cloud of dust to rise at her feet.
“You NEVER should have come here, girlie.”
An obscenely wide, evil, red grin spread across her green face and caused her already pointed nose to extend even further downward. With unnaturally long strides, she quickly closed the distance between them, flicking her whip back and forth with every step. An unearthly screech filled the air, causing every creature to hunker down. The lion clapped its giant paws over its ragged ears, and the witch froze in her tracks.
Nellie was dumped unceremoniously to the ground. She lifted her head, trying to find the source of the awful sound.
There, shrouded in the darkness of the far corner of the chamber, stood the small, yet terrifying figure that she knew would soon glide forth from the blackest of shadows. Nellie’s stomach turned and writhed with nausea. The off-key singing began once more:
“You are scared, Nellie Bly," young Alice said,
"And your hair is turning quite white;
The Scarecrow bent and lifted his head in the small figure’s direction in a fluid snakelike motion. Its papery voice rattled like dry dead leaves lifted by a hot breeze. "Another one?”
The eerie song floated through the chamber around them from the dark shadows:
Yet you worry and fret you’re not right in the head—
Do you think you might perish from fright?”
The mechanical man clunked backward one heavy step at a time, gears whirring and head cocking to the left and to the right. “Unclean.”
"In this place," Nellie Bly replied to the girl,
"I feared I might have a bad brain;
He halted and shook violently, then collapsed to the floor — nuts, screws and pieces of tin clattering to the ground around him. He pulled himself along, dragging his body, and continued his shaky, measured retreat, all the time repeating, “Unclean, unclean, unclean … .”
“We must warn Dorothy,” the witch hissed, taking another unnaturally long step backward to the doorway and out of the chamber.
The earth beneath Nellie’s hands and feet began to rumble and shake. Saliva dripping from the corner of her slack mouth, Nellie lifted her chin from the dust to find Alice gliding toward her from the corner.
The earth shook, the walls crumbled, plaster fell in chunks, and bricks toppled to the floor. The labyrinth and everything within this land was falling to pieces.
But, now that I'm perfectly sure I have none,
Why worry that I’ve gone quite insane."
Alice was close enough now that Nellie could see her dark-red lips part and spread into a smile. That was all it took.
Nellie screamed at the top of her lungs with all of the power she could muster.
“ALLLIIICCCCCEEEE! STAY BACK!”
The liquid surrounding Nellie churned and bubbled with her wild thrashing. Her mask slipped off in the tumult and left her choking on the briny fluid in place of the air she so badly needed. She inhaled and gagged, hiccupping and clawing at the tank walls in her desperation to snatch just one breath of air.
“Get her out of there! Get her out before she drowns!” Nurse Ball shrieked, running toward the tank.
Dr. Braun and Nurse Alissabeth followed fast on her heels and tugged frantically at the rattling chains, trying to lift Nellie out of the fluid. Her thrashing, and the sheer effort of pulling a body from a viscous liquid, left the three struggling with every ounce of strength to free Nellie. Bubbles frothed and churned around her metal prison, as Nellie became hopelessly tangled in the mass of rubber tubing.
With one heave that lifted her briefly from the floor, Nurse Ball threw her full weight onto the chain, enabling the three to finally hoist Nellie from the vacuum of the liquid in the tank. They dropped her, like a wet fish, onto the nearby gurney, where she flailed and gasped for air.
Nurse Ball put her hands on Nellie’s shoulders and spoke in a soothing tone.
“It’s alright now Nellie, you’re back. Shhhhhhh … .” She held Nellie down gently until the thrashing slowed.
Nurse Alissabeth administered a sedative into Nellie’s arm, and the familiar wave of warmth carried Nellie off into unconsciousness.
Still trying to catch his breath, Dr. Braun nodded and waved a hand at the gurney. Nurse Alissabeth returned the gesture, nodded her understanding, and, with a sturdy shove, wheeled Nellie to the door.
Nurse Ball spun around with her hands on her hips, eyes flashing. “What the hell was that?!”
Dr. Braun pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and dabbed at his forehead. He waited for the other nurse to unlock the door and wheel the gurney out before he spoke.
“The Meta Link was established. Nellie made it into Dorothy’s world and saw it all firsthand.”
“I see!” Nurse Ball nodded, thrusting her hand into the air. “And do you have some creative explanation for why Alice was there too?”
Dr. Braun glanced up at Nurse Ball and then back down into his handkerchief as if the answer might be hidden therein.
“Perhaps Nellie’s child shares the same ‘gifts’ as Dorothy and Alice. Perhaps that is how Alice is able to communicate with her?”
“Well perhaps you should get your facts in order before pushing on ahead with any more half-cocked theories! These patients are people, doctor, not dolls to play with. I was under the impression that the point was to try to cure them of their ills!”
Nurse Ball snatched the handkerchief from the doctor’s fumbling hands and threw it in his face before storming from the room.
He frowned at the handkerchief again. He did not like the way Nurse Ball had emphasized the word “doctor” in such a mocking tone.
CHAPTER 17
Dr. Braun stepped into his office, shut his door, and locked it behind him. He crossed to the open window, slammed it shut, slapped the shutters closed, and fell into his rolling office chair to bury his head in his hands. He was so close to bringing all of the pieces together. He had, slowly but surely, learned what would work and what would not. But now past mistakes returned to haunt him with a vengeance. Things were in such a precarious state, and if something went wrong with Nellie or Dorothy right now —
RING! RING!
Dr. Braun jumped, causing a multitude of papers to fly from his desk to flutter to the floor. He fumbled with the receiver on his candlestick telephone and brought it to his ear.
“Yes! Hello!” he leaned in toward the mouthpiece while adjusting his spectacles.
“Y
es, Dr. Braun. This is the operator. You have a call from a Dr. Fred Griffith. Shall I put it through?”
“Ah, yes, put him through,” he sat up straight and tugged his jacket smartly into place, smoothing the lapel.
After a series of clicks, Dr. Griffith’s voice came over the line.
“Good evening, Dr. Braun.”
“Good evening, Dr. Griffith. What news do you have for me?”
“Henry, I have been working on the blood samples you have given me. The results are just not possible!”
“Go on, Fred.”
“The chromosomes are completely mixed up. There is a freak anomaly in the XY pairs. You were right, these patients … they have no fathers. In my lifetime, I never thought to see one virgin birth, much less four. I must meet them!”
Dr. Braun rose and stepped away from the desk, carrying the telephone as far as the cord would allow. Rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet, he finally said, “I’m sorry, Fred. My patients are in a very delicate part of their treatment.”
There was a moment of silence before Dr. Griffith spoke, “You’re not experimenting on Project: Alice again are you?”
Dr. Braun scowled. “That’s confidential.”
“Henry, you can’t possibly think of continuing those …” he paused, searching for the best light to put on the forthcoming negative phrase, “… highly unethical experiments.”
Dr. Braun set the telephone back down and fell into his chair. He pulled off his spectacles and rubbed his eyes. “Don’t worry. This time, I have everything under control.”
Nellie awoke in her cot, her head positively swimming. She sniffed at her wrist and confirmed that her skin smelled salty, like the liquid in the tank. Her memory was intact. Her stomach twisted and growled. When was the last time she had eaten? And where was Dorothy now?
Bedlam Stories Page 10