Liquid Fear (9 page)

Alexis wound through the clusters of students milling on the commons. It was Friday morning, and most upperclassmen were wise enough to manipulate their schedules for a three-day weekend, so the college was less crowded than usual. Even so, the changing of classes launched a human tidal wave across the well-kept grounds.

Not everyone was worried about the next class, however. Students sat under the ancient oak trees with fat books, iPhones, and laptops, while others enjoyed leisurely games of Frisbee or hacky sack. The aroma of coffee and rancid fryer oil wafted from the student canteen. A golden retriever chased a squirrel across the grass, nearly upending a girl on a bicycle.

Alexis loved the older part of the University of North Carolina. The country’s first public university still had some of the landmarks from its 1700s origin, and care had been taken to preserve the traditional heart of the campus.

She’d been an undergrad here, receiving twin degrees in psychology and chemistry. She still had many fond memories of basketball games, frat parties, late nights in the library, strolling through the arboretum in the fall, smoking pot at the Bell Tower with Mark during the traditional Friday “High Noon,” and barhopping on Franklin Street.

She’d lost her virginity her freshman year in the woods behind the outdoor amphitheater, then wished she had it back when the guy turned out to be a self-absorbed asshole.
Never date a concert violinist, no matter how skilled his fingers.

Despite tradition, expansion had pushed the campus toward the south, where the buildings rose in gleaming towers of glass and steel surrounding the hospital. Most of Alexis’s classes were in the Morton Building, named for a prominent disciple of Carl Jung, with her lab in the Neurosciences Department.

It was the same lab where she had served as a graduate assistant to Dr. Sebastian Briggs, although she only had a few papers of notes from that era. So much of it was lost, but she had a feeling the loss was for the best.

Today, though, she had to pay a visit to the Chancellor’s Office to sort out some matters related to her upcoming leave of absence. She planned to take a year off to write another book.

“Dr. Morgan?”

Alexis turned. Celia Smith fell into step beside her, a freckle-faced young lady in pigtails and a Decemberists sweatshirt. Although Alexis had about fifty students each semester, she made it a point to memorize their names. Celia was one of those unspectacular students who turned in assignments on time but rarely made the leap from rote recitation to genuine insight.

“Hello, Celia. How are you?”

“Great. I didn’t know they let the scientists over on this part of campus. This is liberal-arts turf.”

“Some people would argue that neurobiology isn’t really a science.”

“Well, you’ve got a lab and stuff.”

Alexis smiled at the “stuff.” “As we come to understand more about the brain, the closer psychology edges toward science. Mood, disorder, and emotion are nothing more than various combinations of electrical impulses and chemical compounds.”

“You sound like Dr. Briggs.”

Alexis drew to a halt, spinning to face Celia and grab her forearm. “Briggs?”

Celia looked down at her flesh, where Alexis’s fingers pressed hard enough to create red rings. “Ow.”

“Sorry.” Alexis drew back, appalled. “I didn’t mean…are you talking about Sebastian Briggs?”

Celia nodded, eyes wide with a look Alexis realized was fear. “Yeah. I’m a volunteer in one of his research projects.”

“Briggs is here?” Alexis couldn’t believe it. She would have seen his name on the faculty roster, and he almost certainly would have been assigned to her department. Besides, Briggs had left UNC with a black mark on his record, and in academia, no administrator was willing to risk repeating a mistake. Especially one of the magnitude made by Briggs.

She had shared in that mistake, but her resume was spotless. However, the ledger in her memory bore a few smudges and eraser marks.

“He’s working under contract,” Celia said. “I drive over to RTP once a week. They pay us fifty dollars a session.”

So Briggs is working in private industry
. “What’s the project?”

Celia shook her head, eyes narrowing in suspicion. “We’re not supposed to say. We signed a whatchamacallit, where we have to keep it a secret.”

“A nondisclosure agreement?”

“Yeah. I could get in trouble just saying this much. Plus I could lose the bonus at the end of the trial.”

The crowd around them grew denser, people picking up the pace as the next class loomed minutes away. Alexis felt the urgency in her own bloodstream.

She didn’t know how to fish information from Celia without further frightening the girl. “I won’t tell anybody, Celia. I used to work with him and—well, I didn’t know he was around. I wouldn’t mind saying hello.”

Celia backed away, looking over Alexis’s shoulder. “Sorry, Dr. Morgan. I’m late for chemistry lab.”

Celia turned and hurried into the crowd, which seemed to have thickened in the space of seconds. Alexis was about to shout at Celia, but someone bumped into her, causing her to drop the books she was carrying. As she was flung forward, she bounced against a tall man with the muscular physique of an athlete.

“Hey,” the man yelled in a deep, gruff voice. In the commotion, Alexis felt a sting in the small of her back.

Her first thought was
bee
, even though it was March and bees were still a little sluggish in the cool air. A spider was more likely, since the spindly arachnids were so ubiquitous and would bite if trapped in clothing. She reached to rub the wound as the jock turned and sneered.

“Why don’t you watch where you’re going?” he said, obviously used to inciting fear through a display of force.

Classic case of insecurity and overcompensation
. He probably had performance issues in bed. But, despite Freud’s own suspect logic in linking every problem to sex, maybe this case was simpler. Maybe the guy was just a flaming asshole.

“Sorry,” Alexis said, looking past the gathering crowd in hope of sighting Celia. The student was gone.

The jock kicked at one of the books that had fallen near his foot. “You could have broke my toe,” he said. “Knocked me down a few rounds in the draft.”

Alexis gave her most winning smile, though the spreading pain of the sting tightened her lips. “I advise you to get your degree, then, so you’ll have a fallback position.”

“Fallback? I’m a fullback.”

“I’m sure you are,” she said. Another student, a geeky guy in a ragged knit cap, bent and collected her books as the crowd, now bored and running late, lapsed back into its chaotic stream. The football player trudged forward as if it were second down and goal to go from the three.

Knit Cap Boy handed her the stack of books. “You okay, miss? You don’t look so hot.”

The stung area had begun to swell, and heat radiated across her back and down her buttocks. She looked around, her throat dry, wondering if she might be suffering anaphylactic shock. A campus policeman stood watching from the steps of a nearby student-services building.

“I’m fine,” she said thickly, taking the books. “Thanks.”

Alexis wiped a sudden sweat from her temples, wondering if she’d be able to finish the quarter-mile walk to her office. The student infirmary was across the compound, behind the library. Anaphylaxis could kill in minutes by constricting her throat and cutting off her air supply. The campus cop, evidently noticing her distress, hurried down the steps.

She swayed, dizzy, and Knit Cap Boy reached to steady her.

“Here, let me,” the cop said, taking Alexis by the shoulder. “Are you okay, ma’am?”

The cop’s eyes were hidden behind sunglasses, and the dwindling trickle of pedestrians reflected in the twin black lenses. He slid his arm around her shoulder and guided her toward a concrete bench that was half-surrounded by low shrubbery.

She sat, gazing at the oak canopy above, the new leaves bright green in the sun. The clouds drifted by in a cotton-candy kaleidoscope.

As an undergrad, Alexis had eaten hallucinogenic mushrooms once, and this experience mimicked that trip. Her body felt simultaneously weightless and thick with fluid, as if she were a warm, water-filled balloon.

“Can you talk?” the cop said. His face was pocked with large dark pores, one side of his mouth drooping. The roundness of his shoulders suggested a former weightlifter whose muscles were now making their slow surrender to gravity and age.

Something about his demeanor tugged at her, but her sensory distortion prevented her from focusing. She noticed the books were gone from her hands. The grass of the courtyard buckled like the waves of a turbulent sea, the people crossing it bending and swaying as if made of soft rubber.

Oxygen deprivation. It’s making me hallucinate
.

Yet she could feel air circulating in her lungs. Indeed, she could imagine the oxygen entering her bloodstream, flowing through her limbs, racing back through her system to be exhaled out her nostrils, laden with carbon dioxide. Her skin itched with cellular regeneration, and she was acutely aware of her saliva glands. This was no ordinary spider bite.

Clarity descended, and with it a deep unease, as if something had gone horribly wrong and couldn’t be fixed.

“Listen to me,” the cop said. He bent forward until she could smell his mint toothpaste.

I’m all ears
, she wanted to say, and the image of her naked flesh, covered with aural cavities, made her giggle. If she could make her fingers work, she would get rid of these clothes. The sun was a glorious patch of golden pleasure, melting against her skin. The bright-green odor of spring was as thick as the curling clouds.

“Do you remember talking with Celia Smith?” the cop said, though his tone was not like that of a demanding interrogator working a victim behind a two-way mirror. This was no detective-show copycat, a type she’d found most university cops to be. Though trained and certified, they often had inferiority complexes that sometimes caused them to overstep their authority.

Not that a cop implied menace in her new, vivid world. She licked her lips and found they tasted of mangoes. A phrase, a name, niggled at the back of her mind like a thin wire trying to fish a wedding ring from a drain.
Celia?

“Dr. Briggs wanted me to give you a message,” he said, maintaining his low, melodic voice. She gazed into his sunglasses, saw her own face doubled, both reflections smirking with swollen, leering lips.

Briggs
.

The name stirred something inside her. Briggs had taken something from her, long ago. Was he some frat boy she’d dated? Someone who had treated her badly?

The cop’s head tilted toward the sky. The Bell Tower clock clanged in the distance, the vibrations tickling Alexis’s cochlea, digging into her skull like the fast, silvery bit of an electric drill.

The sudden pain caused her to clamp her teeth down on her tongue and the sensation was that of biting tinfoil. Her hands and feet, which had been so bloated and warm moments ago, now burned with static. The pain allowed her to focus, finally recognizing she was on a campus bench.

“Briggs wanted me to tell you this,” the cop said, leaning close enough that she thought he was going to kiss her cheek. Instead, he whispered, “The Monkey House is open for business.”

The man drew away, the dampness of his breath lingering a moment on her earlobe before evaporating. He stood, looked around, adjusted his sunglasses, and headed for the nearest building, his simian movement a reminder that evolution was an ongoing process.

Monkey House
.

Alexis rocked back and forth, fever sluicing up her spine, the limbs of the nearby oaks swaying as if driven by a frantic, fierce wind. No, the limbs weren’t swaying. They were reaching, scooping down with spindly, cracked hands to claw at her, tangle in her hair, scratch her face and bare skin.

The roots lifted, shaking away dirt and the stiffness of long sleep. The nearest one stepped toward her, quivering with eagerness.

Nothing in her index of diagnostic manuals, textbooks, and clinical observations could explain away these hallucinations. And though her trained mind insisted trees could not walk, the massive oaks couldn’t care less about symptoms of delusion.

Crazy people always believed in the peculiar reality that imprisoned them, and Alexis understood for the first time that a delusion wasn’t just a distorted perception.

For the sufferer, it became reality. And even a delusion could make you bleed.

She wiped her face with the back of her hand. Students sat around the compound, oblivious to the monstrous miracle in their midst. A blackbird lifted from one of the tree branches, fought a waft of wind, and rose into the sky.

Alexis leaned back, shielding her eyes from the grasping limbs, the tannic aroma of green oak burning her nostrils. Her legs were damp sand, her throat a cold pipe, her lungs buckets of dead ash scooped from an ancient burial pyre.

The gathering oaks breathed, their whispered words taunting her in the voices of wood. Lumber creaked, sap spat, leaves rattled.

The Monkey House was real.

“You okay, miss?”

These trees, which had been young when the first English speakers had landed on the Eastern shore with their muskets and axes, had their own language. How could she reply in any way but a scream? She clamped her hands over her ears and wriggled against the unyielding concrete bench.

Nothing like the “brink of madness” existed. She understood now. No soft gray fog created a foreboding borderland between sanity and the land beyond.

The two states existed simultaneously, commingling in the same ether, built of common atoms. The stuff of stars was all the same, only some burned while some bled.

“Miss, you don’t look so hot.”

She blinked. Students crowded the sidewalk around her, moving in twin but opposing streams. The young man in the knit cap held her books, brows scrunched above the plastic frames of his glasses. Across the stretch of lawn, the trees stood majestic and gray, and a whiff of cigarette smoke trailed past as a student grabbed a nicotine fix before class. The sun reflected off the neat rows of windows, the bricks of the buildings as solid as the hands that had stacked them.