Doorway to Your Dreams, page 19
He reached between his legs and rubbed the length of his cock that was now at full attention.
Another pool of blood dripped and landed on her hair.
His breathing quickened. He bent over her face, nuzzled her neck again, then licked the blood from her cheek. DeCarlo relished the copper taste as it spread across his tongue. He groaned as he felt a thick warmth ooze on his thigh. A wet spot the size of a silver dollar formed on his pants.
“You bitch,” he hissed as he slapped her prone, bloodied face. “Look at the mess.”
Linda’s head twisted against her pillow leaving a red smear against its white case.
DeCarlo looked at his soiled pants and slapped her again.
“Filthy bitch.”
He stood up, wrapped his lab coat closer around his body ensuring the stain on his pant leg was covered, wiped the blade clean, then folded it within its case and returned it to his pocket. DeCarlo headed back to his office. He’d need the water in his shower to be scalding in order to cleanse her filth.
*
It was a space-like void, soundless and almost totally black. When NASA spoke about space, Spooncake had always understood that it was unmoving and frozen. But he was neither cold nor warm.
Nor did he seem entirely motionless.
There were moments where intense, vivid spikes of color sped past. The light spikes would separate then blend and fold in upon themselves, curve, then fly back towards him. At times they formed a single, kaleidoscopic shard. At other times the colors spread out flat like a windowpane and danced together like paint in a glass of water. He didn’t know if he was flying through the color field or if it was flying past him, as there was no breeze pressing against his face or humming of air in his ears to define any motion.
Spooncake thought his eyes were open, but he wasn’t quite sure.
He couldn’t tell.
They felt open.
The typical light-to-dark-to-light flash that happened when he blinked wasn’t there.
At least he thought he blinked.
He willed his brain to rub his fingers together, but the command was seemingly ignored, as he could neither perceive his hands move nor sense the pressure of his fingers touching one another.
He couldn’t even feel his hands.
He couldn’t feel anything.
His heart felt as if it were about to explode when he realized he couldn’t feel his lemniscate against his chest. He remembered the promise he’d made to his grandfather. The one he’d made to never take it from around his neck.
He had returned to the void, the horrific prison his grandfather had once rescued him from.
He heard the voice again. Its bass rippling the ebony atmosphere.
“I knew you would come back.”
The lights stopped, and the colors faded to black.
Spooncake’s thoughts ceased as abruptly as they’d started.
*
“Looks like he’s waking up!” said the panicked, white lab-coated tech standing next to the chamber. He was holding a clipboard and vigorously writing notes as fast as the EEG was spitting out the data, like a seismograph. “Alphas are peaking.”
DeCarlo grabbed the EEG tape from the tech’s hands and read the peaks and valleys scribbled on the paper.
His thoroughbred was waking.
“What the fuck is going on?”
McAllister’s theta waves, the waves that identify true sleep, were slowly diminishing and being replaced by alphas, the waves that the brain produces when awake but relaxed.
This shouldn’t be happening.
Yet.
“We can’t let these evolve any further. Send him back down. We can’t let him transition to beta.”
Another lab tech began preparing a chemical cocktail to inject into the clear plastic tube leading into the chamber from the glass bottle of saline hanging on the IV pole.
“Preparing 10cc morphine block.”
“Wait. Look,” said the tech as he watched the paper streaming from the machine. He put his hand up to stop the injection. “The thetas are coming back. Alphas are diminishing.”
DeCarlo waited for a few more inches of paper to stream out of the machine and then finally relaxed. He didn’t realize he’d been holding his breath.
“Good. His subconscious taking control. It believes he’s dead.” He turned to the lab tech. “You let me know if this happens again. Put him back down if needed. Don’t wait. Just do it. Do not let him transition to REM either, no dreaming for now. That comes later.”
DeCarlo walked to the opposite site of the chamber and reviewed the display:
Body Temp: 98.5
Water Temp: 98.5
Specific Gravity: 1.29
pH: 7.5
“The specific gravity is climbing. I don’t want it any higher than 1.25. Get it down,” ordered DeCarlo.
He then looked at the depth gage, “Why are we losing water volume? It’s reading eight and a half inches. We’ve lost a half-inch this week. I want this at 9. What are you men doing? Aren’t you monitoring this?”
“Yes, sir, but…”
The echo created when the pen DeCarlo was holding snapped in two, bounced between the laboratory walls and caused all other activity in the laboratory to cease. A dozen pair of eyes were all now focused in DeCarlo’s direction.
No one breathed.
DeCarlo clenched his hand into a tight fist that made the blue-ink smear across the top of his hand appear purple.
“What’s your name?”
“Chambers, sir. Anthony Chambers.”
“What time is it?”
Chambers looked at his watch. “It’s fourteen thirty-five, sir.”
“I want you off of my island by fourteen forty-five.”
“But…”
The tech stopped talking the second he met DeCarlo’s stare.
“And you?” asked DeCarlo as he turned to another tech.
“James Gordon.”
“Manage this tank. Understand?”
“Yes, sir.”
DeCarlo snapped his finger at the security guard and pointed to Chambers. “Get this man off of my island. Now. If I see him after two forty-five, you can join him.”
DeCarlo looked at his clipboard and the calendar he kept at the top of the spring-loaded clamp, flipped it forward six months, and then slowly flipped back one page at a time as he counted the days.
“How were his wounds before we put him in?” he growled as he scanned the month of January, 1968.
“His leg is healing. Took three pins. He’ll walk with a limp the rest of his life. The bullet wounds were tough. Infected, so the surgeons had to remove a lot of surrounding tissue and muscle. He will likely not have the full range of motion in his shoulder. The worst, though, was the cut on his face. Sixty stiches,” said the tech named Gordon as he drew a line from his left ear, across his jawline, then down to his collar bone. “The man practically had the side of his face sliced off. Missed the carotid by an inch. He’ll be scared for life.”
DeCarlo thought back to the night Tran made that slice. He dropped the pages of his calendar, and August 1967 reappeared at the top.
He looked at his watch.
“Keep him in the tank for five more hours then bring him out. Dry him off. Above all, keep him down. Keep the thetas high. No alphas or betas. Understood?”
“Yes, sir,” said the tech as he wrote down the orders.
“Meds.”
“Morphine for pain. Ampicillin for antibiotic. Fluoxetine to regulate his sleeping patterns.”
DeCarlo shook his head.
“No. Take him off of Ampicillin. Use Carbenicillin. It’s more effective at the pH we need him at. Double the Triazolam to fifty mg. I want to suppress his memory as long as I can. Increase the fluoxetine by twenty mg and begin weaning him off the morphine.
“But sir, there will still be considerable pain for a while. He could wake up.”
“I know. That’s not a concern. Do you want this job or do you want to follow your friend out the door?”
“No, sir. You can count on me.”
“Fuck that. Just do your job. You understand what that is, right?”
“Manage the lab, sir.”
“No it’s not. Your job is to follow my direction. Without question.”
DeCarlo shook his head and noted the pH level of McAllister’s coffin on his notes. Finally, he looked at the calendar again and circled the date for the following Monday: August 21, 1967.
It was just four days away.
“Traumland 2 is ready. We’ll start next Monday,” said DeCarlo as his eyes pierced into the technician’s soul. “He’ll go back in the tank, then, and I will need to use the pain as a trigger. So wean him off of the fucking morphine. Do you understand?”
“Yes, sir,” said the tech in an apparent retreat. “What will the schedule be?”
“Six treatments. Twenty-four week rotation. Four days in. Three days out.”
DeCarlo noticed the tech raise his eyebrows.
“You have a problem with that?”
“No, sir. It’s just that we lost all but one of the others after just three series of Traumland 1. And they only spent a day in the tank, not four. The Traumland 2 protocol is fifty times stronger.”
DeCarlo remembered the others all too well. Two suffered cranial aneurysms that burst after a few hours in the tank once Traumland 1 began flowing through their veins. One became psychotic and had to be put down after trying to rip his own face off with shards he grabbed from a shattered IV bottle. One was damaged, but remained somewhat viable. But in the end, he was disposed of.
But that was last year.
Before he’d seen McAllister in action.
McAllister and Fisher were what he needed for Traumland. Each hour McAllister spent in the sensory deprivation chamber, and each injection of the Traumland Protocol, brought him closer to becoming the weapon he knew the man could be: the Traumland Dream Traveler. He’d be able to kill without leaving the laboratory, not that McAllister ever would leave.
At least not alive.
DeCarlo tightened the talons of his tie and pushed the door open.
“McAllister is not like the others,” he said as he left the lab. “Remember that. I’ll be in my office. Call me if things change.”
*
The second DeCarlo opened the door to his office, his nostrils flared both with anger and revulsion. The foot-thick gray haze swirling around the ceiling made the cause obvious.
Baxter Hammond.
Baxter Hammond’s cigar.
Hammond was leaning back in the leather lounger that no one but DeCarlo ever sat in.
No one dared.
Now Hammond was balancing on its back legs with his feet on DeCarlo’s mahogany desk. The man’s short legs could barely touch its edge, and if it weren’t for the soles of his thick boots, he wouldn’t have been able to. His wet, smoldering cigar was balanced on the desk’s corner, and a smattering of gray ash had already speckled the white and brown pony-skin rug.
DeCarlo walked over to his desk, picked the cigar up with his thumb and index finger, opened the sliding door, and flicked it into the flower bed two stories below him.
“Get your fucking feet off of my desk.”
“I wasn’t done with that!”
“I told you not to smoke those vile things inside my building. You’re lucky I let you smoke them on my island,” DeCarlo looked at the pile of papers on his desk. “Who let you in here?”
“The busty beauty on the other side of that door. Gonna tap that. What’s her name? Camilla? Carrie?”
“Beth,” said DeCarlo as he made a mental note to fire the woman.
Hammond still had not removed his feet. He scratched his nose and began digging the grime from under his fingernails.
“Feet,” DeCarlo growled. “Off. Now.”
Hammond moved his feet, and the chair bounced back on all four legs with a loud thump.
DeCarlo felt the ripples of tension grow in his jaw.
“Well, you called me here. What do you want?”
“How are you feeling?”
“You care. I’m touched,” said Hammond as he flicked the ball of fingernail grease onto the desk.
“Not quite.”
“That hurts.”
“I want to know when I can get you off of my island. You’ve outlived your welcome.”
“Admit it, you like me around. Don’t you?”
DeCarlo watched Hammond take a glass from his desk, pull the decanter towards him, and remove the crystal stopper.
“What do you think you are doing?”
“Whiskey,” he said as he held up a glass. “Want some?”
“That’s not for the help,” said DeCarlo as he reached across his desk, took the decanter from Hammond, and put it on the shelf behind the desk. “I’d just as soon have you shot, but that wasn’t our deal.”
“But you’ve already done that. Thanks.”
“Done what?”
“That gook of yours. Tran. He shot me. Twice. You hired him. So if you think about it, you shot me.”
“Don’t try thinking. You’re not very good at it.”
Hammond got up, walked over the shelf with the whiskey and took it back to where he was sitting.
“You don’t want me off of this island.”
“I don’t?”
“No. I know too much. The way I see it, you owe me for taking two bullets. For serving McAllister to you on a silver platter. And all sorts of other fun stuff.”
DeCarlo pushed a piece of paper towards Hammond.
“Sign it. Should cover things,” DeCarlo looked at the calendar on the wall. “I want you off of my island. State-side by the end of the year.”
Hammond looked at the piece of paper and chuckled. He pushed it back towards DeCarlo.
“I don’t think a hundred grand is going to take me to 1970, let alone retirement.”
“I will make it last ‘til tomorrow if you push me.”
“Half-a-mill, and I’m out of your hair.”
DeCarlo leaned forward on his chair. He could smell Hammond’s foul breath.
“Remember that Saigon jail cell? The one where you were swimming in your puke, piss, and shit? You agreed to one hundred grand. As a matter of fact, I recall you saying you’d do it for half that.”
“That was before I took two bullets. Before I saw what was going on here.”
“And what is that?”
“What is what?”
DeCarlo shook his head, amazed at the brazen stupidity of the man in front of him.
“Tell me. What do you think is going on here?”
Hammond pursed his lips, tilted back in the chair again, and put his hands behind his head. Slowly, one foot at a time, he put each heel on the edge of the desktop and balanced himself on the chair’s two legs.
“Oh. The way I see it. A little human engineering. Or should I say re-engineering.”
DeCarlo tried to maintain his composure, but Hammond had stoked the fire too hot.
“Get your mother fucking feet off of my mother fucking desk!” yelled DeCarlo as he pulled his desk backwards with a sudden jerk. Hammond’s feet flew vertical as he lost his balance and the chair’s wooden legs splintered. He fell backwards to the floor with a thunderous crash that rattled the bookshelves. The decanter of whiskey flew out of Hammond’s hands, sprayed the walls, then shattered on the hardwood floor.
DeCarlo rolled his chair back and walked over to where Hammond was lying.
“Look. You broke your chair!”
DeCarlo put his foot across the Hammond’s throat and pressed down. He stopped when he heard a faint click, hoping that it was Hammond’s spinal cord snapping in two.
He was disappointed when he realized it was the latch of his office door.
The door slowly opened and DeCarlo’s assistant poked her head through. “Sir? Are you alright?”
DeCarlo looked up, unfazed as to what she might witness.
“Sir?” she said surveying the carnage.
DeCarlo’s gaze didn’t falter. His piercing black eyes remained focused on the woman. He remained silent, his mouth clenched in fury, willing her to say another word so he had an excuse to kill someone.
Slowly, she retreated and the door clicked shut. He pressed harder on Hammond’s throat as he realized the bastard was still breathing.
DeCarlo looked down.
Hammond had his hands wrapped around his ankle. He could feel Hammond’s fingernails digging into the skin attempting to inflict pain, but to DeCarlo, it was no more annoying than a mosquito bite. Hammond’s face began to turn red. It swelled from the lack of oxygen.
“You don’t know shit. Do you understand?”
DeCarlo twisted his heel.
Hammond didn’t respond, but DeCarlo felt the fingernails dig deeper.
DeCarlo pressed harder.
“Do you understand?”
He saw Hammond nod and close his eyes.
DeCarlo slowly eased the pressure on Hammond’s throat then released his pent-up fury with a kick to his stomach with his free foot.
He felt a bit of wrath remaining in the pit of his stomach.
He kicked Hammond in the balls.
DeCarlo felt cleansed.
Hammond rolled over, at one moment retching and the other trying to catch his breath. His hands flailed between his throat and stomach apparently unsure as to which required the most attention.
“Now get the hell out of my office,” said DeCarlo as he pressed the intercom’s call button.
He didn’t wait for the woman to acknowledge his call.
“Get security up here,” he barked. “Have them take this son of a bitch to his room. Lock it until I say otherwise.”
