Ann Marie's Asylum (Master and Apprentice Book 1) (7 page)

Lori raised an eyebrow as she studied every aspect of her daughter’s expression. It looked as though she was inspecting a cargo hold for signs of contraband. “Working with anyone in particular?” She asked. In that mere moment of Ann Marie’s hesitation, her mother managed to glean volumes of information. “It’s that handsome boss. Isn’t it?”

“So?”

“So nothing. I was just curious.”

“We’re performing an experiment and it works better at night,” explained Ann Marie.

“I bet,” chuckled her mom. “That’s a nice new car you have out there too. I thought we were broke.”

“Stop it, mom.”

“Don’t tell me that’s what you’re wearing. It’s Friday night for God’s sake, girl.”

“I’m not dressing like some slut! Besides, I told you I’m just working. That’s it.”

Lori raised her palms in her own defense, saying, “Whoah. I was only kidding around with you. Can’t I joke around with my own daughter?” Then she seemed to answer her own rhetorical question, saying, “Oops. I forgot. Never make any jokes about your important scientific work.”

“I don’t mind giving you a ride,” said Ann Marie as she calmed herself down from the outburst. “I can pick you up from the bar when I’m done.”

“Wow! Door to bar service,” said Lori. “I got the best daughter in the world.”

...

Later that evening, Ann Marie arrived to the main gate of The Asylum. The place felt more alive than it did during the day. Caroling insects and the sounds of wind in the tropical trees reminded her that she was very far away from Philadelphia. The building’s metal shell was lit with white light up to the pinnacle, where Dade Harkenrider’s lab glared red.

When she found him up there, he was taping sensors to his chest while the tank warmed to body temperature. The room was bathed in red light. Except for the sensors and the wiring harness that covered most of his pelvis like tight underwear, her boss was naked.

Under the fume hood across the room, he was performing a complex chemical synthesis with a mess of glass tubing. The whole thing looked like an interchange of a superhighway.

“Is this stuff only stable in red light?” she asked, trying not to stare directly at his nearly naked body.

“You got it,” he said. “It’s very sensitive stuff. The blues will rip it apart.”

Ann Marie looked at the sculpture of glass and metal, which ended in one Erlenmeyer flask. This is where the end product, the strange hallucinogenic chemicals, collected. Needlelike crystals, like quills on a porcupine, glowed inside the flask. She put her face up to the fume hood to get a better look. The crystals started to flicker like lightning bugs.

“I thought I knew about chemistry,” she said, looking at the stuff like a zoologist admiring a bizarre new species. “This stuff is really weird. Where did you get the recipe?”

Dade glanced over to the tank and told her, “Same place I get most of them. In there.”

“How do you test it before you take it?”

“I don’t.”

His answer shocked her more than the strange chemicals in front of her. “What!” she said. “How do you know it won’t kill you?”

“I don’t.”

“You’re telling me that you’re just gonna inject yourself with a completely untested psychotropic drug? You don’t even have a clue what it will do.”

“That’s one of the reasons why I have the tank.”

“What? So you can drown if something goes wrong?”

“Exactly,” answered Dade. “The acrylic is seven inches thick. When it goes dark, it gives me full sensory deprivation and, if something happens and I become dangerous for some reason, the tank should be able to hold me.”

The monstrous cylinder stood close to eleven feet tall from floor to ceiling. Dade climbed to the top of the ladder and unsealed the lid.

He stopped for a minute. There seemed to be something he wanted to bring up to her. “The other day,” he said. “The Sheriff told me that you saw something strange by the road. You OK?”

“Fine,” she answered quite unconvincingly. “It was just weird. Nobody tried to hurt me or anything.”

“You told The Sheriff it was a woman.” He asked, “You did say she was wearing a robe, right?”

“I saw a whole bunch of women out there. It looked like some group of weirdos.” She remembered the writing on her window. “What’s MoneySexPower?” She asked. “I had to wash that crap off my window.”

Dade seemed bothered by that piece of information but not surprised. “Sick kids abandoned by their parents, abandoned by everyone,” he told her. “It’s easy for something dark to get in.” He added, “They’re no threat to you. They just like the laboratory grounds. They think it gives them magical powers.”

“Does it?” She asked, expecting some sort of snide remark.

“In a manner of speaking,” he told her quite seriously, “it does. What we’re doing, all these experiments in the tank, it
does
something.”

Taking a seat on the edge as he prepared to lower himself in, he remembered that he wasn’t alone. “This should be a short trip,” he said. “Twenty minutes max. All I’ll need is your help out of the tank when I’m finished.”

“What about the compound?” She asked. “How are you going to take it?”

Dade held up a syringe containing the flickering liquid from under the hood. “I always inject myself once the tank is sealed,” he said as he prepared to submerge.

“Wait!” she stopped him. “How will I know if I need to help you or get you out? What if something happens?”

“Under no circumstances can you ever let me out before the experiment is over. No matter what I do. Even if I’m drowning, don’t open that latch until the computer tells you its OK.” He reinforced his point saying, “Don’t trust me. I can be weak. Trust the computer.”

She could tell he was serious. The gravity of the statement told her that perhaps the rule was for her safety.

“Promise me,” he told her. “No matter what I say.”

“OK. Fine.”

Ann Marie heard a splash and suddenly Dade Harkenrider was floating in the middle of the acrylic tube. Electric motors worked to close and seal the lid. A red digital readout announced his pulse and blood pressure. A graph on one of the computer monitors showed the noisy electrical activity in his brain. When the lid was finally sealed, a long beep followed a dull mechanical thud. He was sealed inside.

Across the acrylic, she watched his wisps of black hair toss and float in the fluorocarbon liquid. His expression looked relaxed. Suspended in the liquid, he lifted up his hand in a wave to reassure her. She could tell that his chest was moving and he was breathing the liquid. He nodded to her before sticking the syringe into the muscle of his arm.

With his eyes locked on her, he let the empty syringe go and it floated to the top of the tank. A tiny trickle of blood climbed out of the wound and formed tiny strands in the breathing liquid. It looked as though Dade was starting to have trouble keeping his eyes open. As he started to drift into the trance, the electrochromic walls of the tank began to darken. Eventually, the tank became a monolithic black can in the middle of the lab.

With Dade hidden away in the now black chamber, Ann Marie rolled over a desk chair and sat right in front of the massive apparatus. The biofeedback computer monitored Dade’s vitals and brain activity. It generated a green light above the tank to signal that the experiment was progressing normally.

She rolled herself across the lab, to the fume hood where Dade was growing his hallucinogenic chemicals. Inside the flask of liquid, a transparent shard of crystal flickered like a disco ball. She had never seen any compound with such bizarre optical properties. The material itself seemed to be responding to her very presence at the fume hood. The flashes seemed to contain information somehow, as though the chemicals were flying semaphore flags.

After a couple of minutes of staring at the odd substance, her curiosity got the better of her. She lifted the front lid of the fume hood just enough to get her hands inside. With a kind of mastery from years spent in the chemistry lab, she slid on a pair of latex gloves the way a seasoned boxer climbs into the ring. Then she grabbed a glass pipette and started to draw some of the red liquid out of the beaker. The fluid seemed to respond to her and started to blink more vigorously.

“You’re a strange one,” she said. Then she smiled to herself because she was speaking out loud to a glass beaker. “I guess I’m the stranger one,” she went on, “because I’m the one talking to the lab equipment.”

After the timer clicked down to zero, the walls of Dade’s chamber started to go clear. His suspended body was becoming visible. His blood pressure and pulse rate seemed extremely low to Ann Marie, but the computer readout stated that everything was normal. He looked dead, floating behind the acrylic like a bodily organ on a medical school shelf.

His brain activity, displayed as lines on a graph, told a very different story however. Ann Marie didn’t understand the data on the machine, but it seemed to be going crazy like the stock ticker during a frenzy on Wall Street.

As Dade opened his eyes, his brain waves started to calm down and life crept back into his body. For the first time Ann Marie had ever seen, Dade smiled at her. It brought her more comfort than she imagined it should. The feeling had her beaming back at him, even waving like he had just arrived at the airport.

After a few moments, Dade reverted to his usual expression, which wasn’t exactly a scowl but more like the look a master gives a chess opponent. It was Dade Harkenrider’s default look.

His vital signs and brain waves were within the safe limits, so the computer unlocked the latch on the top of the tank. It was strange, she thought, that the only safety feature on the machine trapped Dade inside. She wondered what he was protecting the world from.

He floated up to the top, where Ann Marie climbed the small staircase to meet him. His body was trembling and he mumbled something strange. She couldn’t tell if it was even English.

She draped his soaked right arm over her shoulder. Her legs nearly buckled under the weight of his body. “I got you,” she said as she helped him stumble across the lab to the table. “Don’t worry. I got you.” When he was all the way on the table, she took his grey robe with the corporate logo and laid it over his body to keep him warm.

He closed his eyes and seemed to fall asleep for a few moments. Then he started to mumble again. “I’m bleeding so much,” he whispered. He grabbed at the old scar on his chest over his heart. “Am I dying, Bernard? Did she kill me?”

“Who is Bernard?”

“Did she kill me?” Dade asked in his trance. “What am I, Bernard? Please tell me what I am. What’s happening to me, Bernard?”

“Please be OK, Dade,” she whispered as she reached over to lay her palm on his cheek. “I mean Dr. Harkenrider.” She let her hand rest against his cheek and studied his face. “Is there anything I can do to help you? Just tell me.”

He slowly opened his eyes and saw her standing beside him. “Thank you,” he told her, sounding much more like usual. “It’s nice not to wake up bleeding on the floor for a change.”

“See what good can happen if you just let someone help you,” she said . A beaming smile started to break out on her face. “You were just talking about the strangest things. Do you remember?”

“No. Not at all.”

“You were saying something about bleeding and some guy called ‘Bernard.’ It was really weird.”

“That happens sometimes,” he said, sitting up from the table.

“Now that I’m helping,” she said, as she went across the lab to get him a glass of water, “maybe you can tell me what these experiments are all about.” She sat down in a rolling desk chair across from the table and waited for him to say something.

“Kid, it’s hard to explain.”

“Again, I’m not an idiot. Try.”

“There’s an invisible world around us,” he told her. “In fact, there are many invisible worlds. The drugs are a way to move and communicate between them. These worlds surround us all the time but they’re hidden in the noise. The tank forces your mind to see what the drugs are trying to show you.”

“What’s it like to experience?”

“Depends,” he explained. “Different formulas, different effects and different knowledge. Sometimes it’s exciting and sometimes it’s more horrible than anything you can imagine.”

...

Later that night, when Ann Marie pulled up to the garage of her apartment building, her mom was lugging a bag of trash out to the dumpster. The chore had always belonged to Ann Marie because her mom’s self-diagnosed allergy to trash.

“Taking the trash out for once,” Ann Marie shouted out of the car window. “Is it my birthday again already?”

When the headlights cast a beam over Lori’s face, Ann Marie knew immediately something was wrong. She put the car in park, got out with the engine running and went over to check. Instead of answering, Lori tried even harder to get the trash bag in the dumpster. She attempted to get it swinging and heave it into the bin. Her odd behavior had Ann Marie’s heart beginning to race.

“What the hell is wrong, mom? What are you doing?” She got a good look at her mom’s face in the headlight beams. She didn’t recognize the expression. It looked like tremendous anxiety blended with guilt, like Lori was getting rid of important evidence.

“You worked all day,” She finally answered, almost breathless with her voice quivering. “I thought I would help out a little.” Lori avoided making eye contact with her daughter and told her, “Go ahead in. I’ll take care of this.”

“You’re acting weird.”

“I am not,” said Lori Bandini, sounding more suspicious this time. “I’m just taking the garbage out. You worked all day. Go ahead inside and I’ll take care of it.” She started to swing the trash back to build up some momentum for a big throw into the dumpster.

“I’ll help you.”

“I can handle the damned trash myself,” said Lori Bandini as she released the trash bag into the air. It sailed straight for the rim of the dumpster. The plastic bag burst open, sending all the glass vodka bottles and microwavable dinner boxes all over the apartment complex driveway. “God damn it!” she shouted, throwing her arms straight up in the air in frustration. “I can’t believe this fucking day! Even the fucking garbage is out to get me today!”