Alice moaned and fell to her knees, holding her mouth, with tears spilling down her cheeks. She pulled her hand away and found it stained pink and red from the blood that poured from her lacerated lip and tongue. Her front teeth were chipped and broken.
Dr. Braun locked the door. “Get up.” He opened the metal door, which Alice’s fall had dented slightly. It was the door to a capsule-shaped apparatus in the center of the room.
“Please …” she cried from the floor, hiccupping, as blood ran down her chin. “Please, no more … .”
“Get up, I said.” He pulled her up by the wrist and pushed her into the seat in the capsule.
I decided to push the experiment forward. Alice was taken to the third and final hypnotic induction room. After this test, I would have what I needed to finish my machine.
Dr. Braun circled the capsule, flipping toggles on the control panel, which brought power to the machine. Inside the capsule, Alice looked up at a circle of pulsing light. The circle spun faster and faster, the light flickering more and more. Her eyes grew wide.
Once the subject is broken down and the neural patterns reset, he or she becomes highly susceptible to outside suggestion. The Cognome Machine operates in much the same way as the Saturation Chambers. By beaming images back at the subject, we can achieve total mind control. Total obedience.
Decades of research on hypnosis now can come together into one little machine: the Cognome Machine.
Alice sat on her cot in her room, holding her teddy bear in her weak, thin, pale arms. Dr. Braun’s Cognome Machine rested on the cart in front of her, and a headset connected her to the device.
“Alice, I know you can do this.” Dr. Braun insisted, with an edge in his voice. “Look at the light. You can show me Wonderland — you’ve done it before.”
Alice stared blankly into the light, with glassy eyes. But nothing on the screen changed; no pictures took shape.
But with Alice, the connection was incomplete. She fought the experiments, and measures had to be taken. The only method left to stimulate the patient to reach her maximum potential had to be to release the pressure on her brain. Methods for achieving this are well documented, but these unorthodox treatments were not prescribed by Western medicine.
Alice sat strapped to a medical chair, this time in a surgical room. The only other person in the sterile, white room was Dr. Braun, who was busy laying out tools and an anesthetic on a metal tray. He wore a surgical beanie and gloves.
“Don’t you worry about a thing, Alice.” He patted the shoulder of the wide-eyed girl, ignoring the tears that rolled down both cheeks and the muffled protests that were lost behind the cloth tied around her head between her broken teeth. He leaned over her to make minor adjustments to the long screws of the metal restraint which, like a cage, held her head completely immobile. With a black pen, he made precise measurements and marks in the center of the top of her forehead.
“This will be over before you know it.” He picked up a syringe and held it in front of him, pushing the air out of the glass so that only the liquid remained in the receptacle.
Alice squeezed her eyes shut and concentrated as hard as she possibly could on the lights above her, the terror flowing through her like never before.
The light began to flicker. Dr. Braun paid no attention and went about his work as, for him, this had become par for the course.
The light went out, and Alice had it —she had the darkness she needed. She drew the picture in her mind’s eye: beneath a vast willow tree sat the long table with all of her friends. Here was the Mad Hatter, with his velvet coat and tall top hat. Come to me, friend. Here was the Cheshire Cat, with his rolling, yellow eyes and broad, white grin. He will save me. Come to me, my mad March Hare and my sweet Dormouse! Oh, White Rabbit! Oh, Queen of Hearts!
The remaining lights in the room began to flicker on and off. Dr. Braun moved the tray closer to Alice’s chair and brought the syringe to her arm. “You’re going to fall asleep now…”
“Hatter! Cheshire Cat!” her muffled screams pushed through the cloth gag.
“… and when you wake up, you’ll feel so much better.”
The wall behind Dr. Braun warped. He touched the syringe to Alice’s arm.
In a blinding flash of light, the Mad Hatter stepped into the room, wearing his purple, velvet coat and top hat and swinging his walking stick. Fast on his heels jumped the Cheshire Cat, a giant long lean silky tabby with golden eyes and a playful grin.
Dr. Braun pushed the needle into Alice’s small arm, and instantly the room began to swim before her eyes.
“What-what, my dear girl?” The colorful Mad Hatter skipped to her side.
The Cheshire Cat put his white-tipped paws up on the edge of the chair arm and folded them over each other. “Which way did you mean for us to go? This way or that?” he purred, and grinned.
Dr. Braun could not see or hear the visitors in the room with them. He picked up a hand-operated drill.
“Stop him … .” Alice whispered, as the room began to shrink to a pinpoint.
The doctor inserted the drill into an aperture of the metal restraint cage, and gently placed the point on the black mark he had etched on her forehead. The aperture held the conical point perfectly perpendicular to her skull.
“What did you say?” the Mad Hatter leaned his ear down to her moving lips.
Dr. Braun cranked the hand drill with speed and precision. The drill bit entered Alice’s forehead and carved a hole the size of a dime into her skull, the drill point slowing as the tip met with bone. Sweat trickled from his brow, his efforts doubling with the difficulty of turning the drill tip through solid bone.
POP!
With the sickening sound of release, Alice felt a rushing, a gushing, and a warm wetness pouring from her forehead onto her neck and shoulders. Dr. Braun grabbed several sterile cloths to keep the blood that spurted, fountain-like, from her cranium to a minimum.
The world was changing before her dazed eyes. She began to sink. As she sank, the colors disappeared. Reality seeped into her dear Wonderland. Before her eyes, her childhood seeped away and the Mad Hatter grew dark. His clothes turned to black; his apron changed to leather. His face disappeared into shadow, and his eyes turned from bright green and brown to blood red.
The Cheshire Cat at her side stopped grinning. His eyes filled with black liquid, his fur fell out in clumps, and his perfect, white teeth dripped with molten metal that began to form perfect, deadly points.
“There, now. You should feel so much better. Your mind is now open.” Dr. Braun patted her shoulder. “I believe we’ve exorcized your demons.”
Alice struggled to stay awake, but lost the fight. As she slipped into unconsciousness, the Mad Hatter and the Cheshire Cat vanished.
In a room somewhere on the sixth floor, Dr. Braun unlocked Alice’s hidden room and wheeled the Cognome Machine in. This time, the headset had been removed and in its place was a small, yellow plug, about the size of a dime.
Alice sat on her bed, staring at the wall. The teddy bear on her pillow and her favorite red and white chess set remained untouched. Her eyes were yellow, her teeth broken, her lips split from dehydration and stained with blood. Her hair hung in her face, unwashed and un-brushed.
“And how are we today, Alice?” Dr. Braun rolled his cart in and threw a metal stool down in front of her with a thunk.
Alice did not answer.
“It’s time to try the next phase of your treatment, Alice — time to try the Cognome Machine again. Here we go.”
He grasped the yellow plug, its metal tip now exposed, and gently pushed it into the hole in Alice’s forehead, breaking open the skin that had started to form a healing barrier over the wound.
“Now I want you to think about Wonderland, Alice. Think about the Mad Hatter for me. Show me the Mad Hatter.”
With this simple device, we can make people think anything we want. We can make them feel anything we want.
Dr. Braun watched
the flickering screen expectantly, his pen and paper at hand, ready to record notes. The screen did not change, and Alice did not move. Her glassy eyes wandered toward the shadows in the corner.
“No!” Dr. Braun grabbed her chin and roughly forced her head back toward the bright screen. “I said show me Wonderland!”
She did not answer him, and the screen continued to flicker with white and black specs.
Dr. Braun stood up, no longer able to contain his rage. “We have NOT worked so hard and for so long for you just to give up now, Alice! I said SHOW ME WONDERLAND!”
He slapped her across the face to snap her out of her stupor.
And then … everything fell apart.
Alice’s head snapped toward Dr. Braun and she looked into his eyes with a rage he had never seen before. She flew to her feet, an invisible wind blowing her hair, whipping it above and all around her head and shoulders.
BOOM!
Dr. Braun’s body flew back against the wall, and the door to her chamber blew outward off its hinges. Alice walked out of the room, down the hall, and down the stairs toward the sounds of Bedlam staff member shouting and the patient howling and running in circles.
Alice had had enough.
Dr. Braun came to, sprang to his feet, and raced out the door to the stairs, taking them two by two.
What I saw next chilled me to the bone.
The walls downstairs were charred as if a massive fire ball had just rolled through the halls. Orderlies and inmates raced around, in a state of utter pandemonium, in search of shelter.
Alice walked slowly down the center of the corridor, and, with each step, flames sprang up the walls around her. Any persons who were unfortunate enough to be too close to Alice’s swath of destruction fell to their knees, grabbed at their ears and pulled at their eyes, screaming.
Everywhere she went, she left a path of devastation. She was set on revenge.
Behind Alice, the still struggling bodies of inmates and orderlies burst into flame, quickly transforming into blackened husks. Two nurses, armed with syringes, ran toward Alice, but they were not able to get close enough to subdue her before they fell to the floor with searing pain in their eyes and ears.
At the entryway, Alice stopped. She stood in front of the ornate looking glass, staring at her reflection. Her eyes grew wide and her mouth fell open. She rushed toward the mirror, screaming, and hammered at the glass surface with her small clenched fists. The glass splintered.
For some reason, Alice reacted very strongly when she saw the mirror. It was as if she had never seen the horror of who she was until that moment. But this gave us an advantage …
An orderly saw his opportunity and took it, quickly closing the distance to Alice and stabbing her in the neck with a full dose of sedative. Alice cried out, and the orderly flew backward into a stair railing. She turned around and, with staring, yellow eyes full of hatred, she approached him. He got to his knees but could not move any further, the pressure and pain building in his head with each passing second. He screamed, clutching his head between his palms. And, as Alice stopped in front of him, his eyes rolled up under his eyelids, and his cranium burst. Chunks of bloody brain matter splattered both the walls and Alice.
But his sacrifice was not in vain. Her eyes blurred and her vision swam. She dropped to her knees and weakly yanked the empty syringe from her neck. Struggling to get her feet underneath her and rise to walk, she lost all feeling in her legs and collapsed to the floor.
I was never able to explain what I saw next. It defied all scientific logic. But somehow, the mirror saved us.
The small, badly bruised girl lay sprawled on the floor, eyelids fluttering, and the flames throughout the halls and rooms of Bedlam Asylum immediately abated. A swirling, black mist spiraled up from her body, with solid bits of black matter churning in the center. As if suddenly magnetized, the black smoke shot toward the mirror and seeped into the crack in the glass.
When the last of the smoke had disappeared into the mirror, Alice fell unconscious. The cracks in the mirror sealed up; the glass healed. Within moments, the mirror had become, once again, nothing but an elegant decorative piece there to adorn the wall.
A shaken Dr. Braun stood beside the weeping Nurse Ball amid the carnage, as they numbly surveyed what was left of Bedlam Asylum.
Alice’s heavily medicated body sat strapped in a chair that was connected to a plethora of tubes and wires. The chair was carried into the center of an empty vault by a group of orderlies.
We locked her in a vault deep below the basement of the asylum. Here she would be imprisoned behind steel walls lined with lead to inhibit her psychic abilities.
There she will stay. Along with any hopes of my research ever becoming a success.
CHAPTER 21
Dr. Braun sat in the chair he had pulled up beside a gurney. The woman in the gurney lay inert, covered by a pristine, white blanket. Drip by drip, fluid traveled down rubber tubing and entered her body via the intravenous needle that had been carefully inserted into and taped to the back of her hand.
She was an older woman. Her long, silver hair lay neatly arranged on the pillow; her wrinkled, pale skin and soft pink cheeks were the very picture of peaceful slumber.
A tear rolled down his cheek as he held her papery, weathered hand in his, motionless and limp.
“I have failed you again,” he whispered, and laid his head down on the white blanket.
She smiled and knelt down to be at the same level as the small boy, who laughed and held his pudgy hands and arms out to her. She smoothed his black curls and kissed his forehead, and he ran into her arms to squeeze her as tightly as his small arms could manage.
“Mama,” he whispered, and laid his head on her shoulder.
She turned the oil lamp down, the room dark now except for the dim light from the dying fire. She scooped the child up and moved over to the rocking chair in front of the fireplace’s soft, blue flames. She rocked the small boy back and forth and hummed softly in his ear.
He wrapped her long, silky black hair around his dimpled fingers and then stroked it back down to shiny smoothness again, a sigh upon his pink lips. “Tell me the story again.”
“Oh, you want to hear the story about the queen and her magic mirror?” she laughed.
“Yes, and the cottage in the forest with the little beds and the little dishes.” He smiled, again twirling her hair round and round.
“Oh, Henry, do you never tire of that same old story?”
The little boy sat up in her lap to look into her face. “No, it is my favorite!” he exclaimed.
“Very well, then.” She pulled his head back down to rest on her shoulder, and gently rocked back and forth.
“Once upon a time, there was a beautiful queen. She sat sewing in her favorite chair by the window, and watched the snow fall while she stitched. The queen pricked her fingertip on the sewing needle, and three drops of blood fell onto the white snow that lay on the ebony window ledge. She looked at the red and the white and said, ‘Oh, how I wish that I had a daughter who had skin as white as snow, lips as red as blood, and hair as black as the wood of the window frame!’ And do you know what happened next?”
“She had a little baby girl!” the boy exclaimed, with a triumphant grin. “Snow White!”
“That’s right. She named her baby Snow White.”
She rocked back and forth before the warm fire — swish, swish, swish, swish — and whispered her son’s favorite bedtime tale into his ear.
Swish, swish — the warmth of the fire felt so lovely. Swish, swish.
“Tell me of their little dishes,” the boy said through his fingertips, which he sucked on as he drowsed on her shoulder.
“Why don’t I just show you instead?” she smiled, smoothing his hair down and resting her head on his. She reached out and slid a small, gold hand mirror into his fingers. He looked into its surface, but instead of the reflection of their faces, the mirror showed a scene of a cottage in a forest.
He stared at the image, sleepy and cozy in his mother’s arms.
Suddenly, in the mirror, the little boy saw his mommy on the dirt path in the midst of the great, green forest filled with towering trees. His eyes grew wide with wonder. Blue birds flitted between the tree tops. Leaves fluttered and spun to the forest floor through rays of sunshine that passed through the shadow to light the woodland path.
“Come, Henry,” she grinned and held her fingertips out to him. “Let’s go see their little beds!”
He squealed with delight, holding his hands over his mouth lest he burst with joy. Henry dashed forward to grab his mother’s hand, and together they ran toward the small thatched cottage at the end of the path.
Both the path and the cottage walls were lined with colorful flowers as well as minuscule benches that were hand carved from logs. The short, white door to the cottage was only slightly larger than Henry himself. He held his breath and reached out to touch the doorknob.
“No, Henry. Always knock first.” His mother grasped the tiny door knocker between her thumb and forefinger, and gently sounded a tap-tap-tap on the front door.
They listened and waited for an answer, but none came. He looked up at her questioningly.
“Very well,” she nodded.
He carefully turned the knob, and the small door swung open. The cottage was everything Henry had dreamt it could be. The kitchen in the corner had a wooden sink stacked with clean, drying dishes and cups that were just Henry’s size. In front of the sink was a long wooden table with benches and, oddly, eight place settings. Henry looked up to his mother, with the question upon his lips, but he could see, by the way that her eyes softened and her lips quivered, that the eighth place setting remained ready for her infrequent visits.
Bedlam Stories Page 14