this the hand of God? Bondurant grew dizzy and weak, confused. If only he had a bottle.
'I want to help you,' the man said, raising one of the restraint straps. 'With this problem of yours.'
Bondurant lay helpless as the old man folded the straps over Bondurant's legs and chest. His wrists and ankles were then locked in padded cuffs. The old man applied the blue gel to the electrodes and attached them to Bondurant's head.
'Will it hurt?' Bondurant asked.
'Suffering is the way to healing,' the old man said his eyes like dark seeds under the thick eyebrows.
'Who are you?' Bondurant wasn't sure he wanted to know the answer. But he was on the edge of something important, some connection between himself and Wendover's past. Or maybe he was sobering up. An uneasiness rippled through him, the gel tickling his skin.
The old man knelt so close to Bondurant's face that his words made a breeze on his cheeks. 'I'm the doctor. I make people better.'
He gave a grin that looked far too much like a tray of scalpels. Then he turned and shuffled toward the mirror. He met the surface, shimmered then melded into the glass and disappeared. The ceiling microphone came on with a hiss. 'I prefer the old-fashioned techniques,' the old man said 'but I suppose one must change with the times.'
A thread of juice stitched across Bondurant's skin. A hum arose in the walls, soft and sinister, as if a nest of winged things had been disturbed. The cot vibrated slightly, and Bondurant clenched his fists. The first shock pierced his skull and he bit his tongue, tasting blood.
Riding that jolt of electricity were scattered thoughts, nightmare glimpses, visions that Bondurant immediately knew had been witnessed by the old man's living eyes:
A needle, pushed into a woman's frail arm, dosing her with enough insulin to knock her into a coma.
More electroshock, an assembly line of frightened patients in white, all led from the treatment room like drooling sheep.
A scene from the basement, the inside of a cell, orderlies carrying the corpse of a woman with bloody sockets where her eyes had been.
An ice pick, slid up a nostril and turned inside the upper curve of skull, severing the frontal lobe.
Another operation, this time a saw rasping through the skull to take the lobe via the forehead.
Bondurant screamed for mercy, but the dead doctor only turned up the juice. Then the force field radiated from the walls and slapped him into darkness.
The old man's voice followed him. 'See? A doctor's work is never done. Even death can't ease their troubled minds.'
Bondurant wasn't listening, even though the words reverberated inside his head. Amid the black, suffocating stillness that surrounded him, pale shapes slithered through the cracks of nothingness. He closed his eyes and wept like a baby until the doctor came to comfort him and remove the straps.
FORTY-FIVE
The Miracle Woman called to Freeman, drifted past the other spirits toward where he crouched at the mouth of the hallway. The glow from the machinery swirled around her and through her, as if her impossible flesh were lit by a cold fire.
'Do you see her?' Freeman asked the others.
'Who?' Starlene asked.
'Her.' He pointed at the naked woman, whose long, dark hair flowed over her shoulders. She looked like one of those Venus on the Half-shell drawings done by some acid burnout from the Sixties. Except for the part about the bloody eye sockets. Not even a drug overdose victim could have imagined those.
'I don't see nothing,' Dipes said.
'Not even the future?' Isaac asked. 'Well, I see Kracowski and that new guy, the crazy one. And the weird guy flopping around on his stomach like a beached fish.'
'You don't see the ghosts?' Freeman asked. The Miracle Woman floated closer, her hands closed. Freeman hoped she wouldn't open her palms and look at him. He couldn't handle that right now. All he wanted was to reach Vicky.
'We can save her,' the Miracle Woman said. 'Follow me.'
Freeman froze. She drifted closer, skin fluttering like psychedelic rags, her torn face wearing a faint smile. 'Trust me,' she said.
Freeman clamped his hands over his ears. 'No. Get out. You're not here. You're not real.'
'Trust me, Freeman.'
'No. You can't triptrap a dead person. That wasn't part of the experiment. That wasn't what he turned me into.'
'Your father hurt you. But he also made you. See, he gave you a gift. It doesn't matter what his intentions were. Now it's yours, and you're the one who has to use it.'
'I don't want it.'
'Do you want to save Vicky?'
Damn her. Why couldn't she just stay dead? Why couldn't she leave him alone? She was just like all the others.
'Trust me,' she said, and a soft tickle caressed his cheek. He thought it was her finger, and he opened his eyes.
It wasn't her finger, it was his tears.
'Trust me,' she repeated. 'Starlene said God doesn't send you anything you can't handle.'
'Why do you want to help?' he said, this time aloud instead of through his thoughts.
She flashed a triptrap of her own, and he saw the past through her eyes, the old man from the lake standing over her, she was strapped in Thirteen, helpless, and the old man applied the electrodes and Freeman twisted in agony as the electricity sliced through their mutual nerve endings, the old man wearing a lab coat now, a tie, taking notes, serious, concerned injecting her with something that made Freeman's brain cloud, the old man and an orderly leading her into the basement, only it was cleaner back then, though still dark. She was put in a cell, the same one in which Vicky was now trapped, and at last Freeman knew.
The Miracle Woman had died in the cell. She had torn her own eyes out, not wanting to witness any more of the doctor's treatments. She bled to death in silence, able to weep only blood. As Freeman felt her blood pour down his own face, as the hot pain smothered like a molten mask, as she bit her tongue to keep from crying out and drawing the attention of the orderlies, who might save her for yet more misery, Freeman understood that he didn't have an exclusive hold on suffering.
She freed him from her memories and Freeman clutched his head dazed.
'Are you okay?' Starlene asked.
'Yeah.' He wiped his cheek before the others noticed. 'But I've got to do this alone. She told me so.'
'He's right,' Dipes said. 'That's the way I saw it happen. We're supposed to go over there, into that room. Freeman goes on alone.'
Starlene paused a moment, squeezed Freeman's shoulder, then said, 'Okay. But we won't be far away.'
Freeman waited while the three hid in the nearby cell. The triptrap with the Miracle Woman seemed to have taken hours, but the milieu before him in the basement had not changed. Dad stood by the open door to Vicky's cell, mumbling in his crazed voice about validity and breakthroughs and control. Kracowski hung back near the large holding tanks as if wanting to hide in their shadows.
The Miracle Woman had disappeared, and Freeman knew she was in Vicky's cell, keeping her company, or driving her insane. Because, when you triptrapped a crazy person, then you got crazy, too. Freeman couldn't reach Vicky, at least with his mind. So he would have to reach her the normal, old-fashioned way.
He swallowed hard and stepped out into the open area of the basement. 'Hey, Dad!' he shouted.
Dad turned, his eyes growing even wider, the grin changing into something sharp and sinister. 'Well, this is just perfect. A family reunion, right when I'm about to become the most brilliant person in the universe.'
