Still, the sensation of the beast’s saliva burning into her nonexistent skin stayed with her.
The demons were everywhere now. She could feel them surrounding her, closing in on her, drawing ever closer.
Her mind uttered a silent scream of terror, a burst of energy that exploded out of her mind.
Incredibly, the demons drew back.…
George Engersol and Jeff Aldrich rushed from the laboratory into the tile-lined corridor where the closed elevator doors hid whatever might be inside. Engersol pressed the button next to the doors, and they obediently slid open, revealing the grisly scene within. Hildie’s broken body, crumpled in a grotesquely unnatural position, lay in the corner of the blood-smeared elevator.
For a moment neither man nor boy moved at all, simply staring in stupefied horror at the carnage in the elevator car. Then, without uttering a word, Jeff Aldrich turned away, his face pale, his legs trembling. Numbly, he started back toward the laboratory, while George Engersol stepped into the elevator to check Hildie Kramer’s body for signs of life.
Finding none, he picked her up, carried her into the operating room, and laid her bloodied corpse on the table he had last used to remove Amy Carlson’s brain from her body.
As he stared down at Hildie’s dead eyes, he slowly realized what he had to do.
His tread heavy, he started back toward the room that contained the crown jewel of his career.
Jeff Aldrich stared uncomprehendingly at the monitor above Amy’s tank. “What’s going on?” he whispered. “What’s happening?”
Colors exploded on the monitor, swirling pinwheels shot through with jagged bolts of lightning, followed by dark cloudlike masses rolling out of nowhere, only to dissipate as bursts of purple and magenta roiled up from within them.
“I’m not sure,” George Engersol replied, his eyes, too, fixed on the screen. “It’s like when she woke up and realized where she was. She was furious then, and the energy her brain produced did this kind of thing. But this is different. It looks like fear, or pain.” He switched on the microphone.
“Adam? Adam, can you hear me?”
The monitor above Adam’s tank came alive, and the outlines of an image began to form, then faded away.
Alarmed, Engersol spoke again. “Adam, what’s wrong? Is Amy doing something to you?”
From the speaker in the ceiling, he heard Adam’s voice; weak, faint, but his. “Punishing her …” he said “… helped Josh …”
Jeff’s eyes widened. “Josh?” he whispered. “What’s he doing?”
Engersol ignored Jeff, his mind racing.
It was all over! The secret was going to get out, long before he was ready.
They’d find out! And not just about Adam and Amy and the brilliant success he’d finally achieved.
They’d find out about the others, too. The children he’d worked with over the years, developing the technique.
The children who had given their lives for the technology he had finally perfected!
The children they would say he had killed.
And in the glare of publicity, the pontificating of the hysterical media, his achievement would be forgotten.
All they would remember would be the children who had died, the “suicides” that they would claim were cold-blooded murders.
The plans had been in place, the plans to keep the project secret even for years after this success, the plans to slowly bring it to the attention of the public.
By the time the campaign was completed and the world understood what he had done, the past would be barely remembered, the children who had died in those early years all but forgotten.
And no questions would have been asked in the face of his success.
But not yet!
It was still far too soon.
And the proof was right there on the screens above the twin tanks containing the brains of Adam Aldrich and Amy Carlson.
A fleeting thought crossed his mind.
Eve,
Amy’s name should have been Eve.
Then it would indeed have been perfect. Adam and Eve, the first two of a new breed of being, part human, part computer.
And Josh would have fit perfectly, too.
Josh, from Eden.
But now he had to destroy it.
Destroy it all, and dispose of it before any of it was discovered.
29
Pain slashed through Amy’s mind, a pain as real as if the jaws of one of the demons had closed on her right leg, its teeth slashing at her flesh, ripping it from the bones, then crushing the bones themselves.
For they’d come back, held at bay only for a second by her silent scream of terror before Adam attacked again, projecting the monstrous beings once more from his mind, hurling them at her like spears, each of them plunging deeper into her mind than the one before, twisting inside her, stimulating the pain centers deep within her brain, causing her mind to twist and writhe as she tried to overcome her agony.
She felt her mind weakening, felt the beginnings of cracks in the structured order that was her sanity. If it kept up, if she couldn’t find a way to fight back, her mind would collapse.
Her mind would collapse, but the nightmare would go on, for as long as Adam wanted to keep it up.
Run!
The idea burst into her mind. For a moment she didn’t understand it, but then it became clearer.
None of it is real!
Don’t fight what isn’t real!
Turn away!
Following her instincts, Amy began to withdraw from the nightmare that swirled around her, began to draw her mind back within itself, closing herself down so that she would no longer be aware of the terrors surrounding her.
She made an image for herself.
An image of a well, a deep, black shaft.
A shaft into which she could disappear, and into which Adam and his demons could not follow.
She felt herself begin to drop into that strange endless hole that existed only within her mind, begin to slide away into the welcome darkness.
The snarls of the beasts began to fade away, and then the beings themselves seemed to draw back, to become indistinct.
She willed herself downward, forced herself to confront her terrible fear of falling, to use it instead to save herself.
She let herself go, plummeting into the blackness of the shaft, falling into the empty silence below, welcoming it as the pain began to ease, and the fear of the creatures began to ebb away.
