Authors: Alan Spencer
The camera pivoted around, and he caught a man for a blink’s duration, who Craig assumed was Dr. Krone.
Craig muttered, “The doctor was using his son as his assistant.”
A man was strapped to the machine, an exact replica of the one Craig was on earlier. But this time a different device was strapped to his head. The crown of needles was fixed on his skull. The crown was suspended in the air by steel prongs attached to the ceiling. The crown was a rough prototype.
Craig studied the man’s eyes, and it took him moments to really see what had been done to them. The eyes themselves had been removed. The sockets were hollow and surrounded by pink orbital tissue, scooped clean. The lens of a camera was inserted into each eye. It was fixed in place by thinly cut swatches of duct tape along the edges of the sockets. The victim’s mouth was also sealed with duct tape. The man’s head had been shaved down to the scalp, the patient sweating in thick beads and moaning in terror, but it was low and defeated, the victim strung out for so long that voicing his survival was futile.
“I have attached a camera’s lens in each eye,” Dr. Krone’s father explained. “I’ll flip on the switch, and I plan for an image to play out onto the wall. Daniel, flip off the light switch and turn on the lens. We’ll see his thoughts. Keep your fingers crossed, boy.”
Steps resounded in the background. The lights went out. Another switch was flicked and sparks issued in the background. The lens brightened inside the man’s eyes. For a split second, Craig could view the inside of his brain through the lens, the gray mass magnified. The piece of meat constricted, glistening and wet.
“The machine opens up ion channels in the brain and increases the electrical impulses delivered to the brain. Memories come alive this way. It’s happened before for the past fifty years. This is nothing new. Now that I’ve fixed it and tweaked the beast, it’ll do more than replicate memories for those who get hooked up to it. It’ll make memories flesh and blood. Flip the switch, Daniel!”
The patient grunted, though his mouth was covered. His face was lit up with intense white light, like bolts of lightning, the golden rays of heaven Craig experienced days ago. Moments later, the man went limp, the machine surging to its fullest potential, but the images Dr. Krone, Sr. promised failed to play on the screen.
“Damn it, this didn’t work! I fixed it. This is the six hundredth time I’ve tried this!”
And then Dr. Krone, Sr. froze, and Dr. Krone turned the camera, gasping, his hands trembling at the sight he captured. There stood the man from the machine. He was wearing a red polo shirt and chino pants. He also had long flowing brown hair and a quickly fading smile. The man had been beaming before he looked around confused. “
W-where am I?
”
Dr. Krone, Sr. shook his head in disbelief. “He’s real.” Stepping closer to him, he said to his child, “You’re recording this, right?”
“Yes, of course.”
The background slowly came into better focus, the camera operator an amateur. Bodies were lined up along the wall side by side dressed in straightjackets, sitting in a position where their legs were spread out on the floor, their backs against the wall. They were wrapped in plastic, see-through body bags. Rotten, fetid faces matched the freshly dead.
Craig thought,
The stink downstairs. Christ, this happened in the basement. No wonder the door was locked.
The man absorbed the room in horror, and he kept turning slowly in place, finding something else new to be disgusted by during each passing moment. “Who are you people?”
Dr. Krone, Sr. touched the man’s face, and the man jerked away, horrified at his presence. “How do you feel?”
The man blasted at him, “I’m fine—other than the fact I’m here! What the fuck is wrong with you people? Who killed these people? It wasn’t you, was it?”
“Take note,” Dr. Krone, Sr. dictated, pointing at the patient. “Patient is flesh and blood. He’s nothing of his former self. This is Gregory Camp before his mental illness. Now, I can dissect his mind for the cause. He can be cured and become a healthy member of society.”
“I’m not mentally ill.” Gregory raised his voice. “I want to leave. Where’s the way out?—and don’t touch me again. I want nothing to do with you sick people.”
Gregory bound across the room, quickly putting it together that they wouldn’t let him leave. He dodged the bodies on the wall, tripping, dodging, and crying out whenever he touched one. Craig counted three dozen corpses, and that was just one corner of the room. The man frantically tried the doors and none of them worked. “You can’t keep me h—!”
Bam!
The gunshot struck the man’s head, his nose caving in the middle, and a fat bloom of gore sprayed the intricate damage against the wall. Thrown back, smacking the wall, and landing over the other dead bodies, the man lay silent and oozing blood.
Dr. Krone, Sr. met the camera with a smoking pistol loosely in his clutches. “Note that the patient still sits in that chair. This other body bleeds on the floor. He’s flesh and blood, but now watch this…”
The camera followed Dr. Krone, Sr. to the actual machine. He punched the keys on the computer monitor on the side compartment of the machine. The device shut down with a gradual diminishing
whuuuuuuuuuuuum
. The lens in the patient’s eyes went dark, and then the room went dark as well. Dr. Krone, Sr. flipped on the overhead lights, and Gregory’s body on the floor was missing, including the blood that spattered the walls.
“This is miraculous.” His face lost its vigor and turned solemn. “I can bring back Mom, Daniel. She can be alive again. I’ll find a way for me to be safely strapped into the machine. All I have to do is perfect the ocular lenses, and it’s a sure win.”
Craig turned away from the screen. He needed a breath. The information was swarming him at once. So much he’d seen, and there wasn’t a soul to properly explain it to him. He stared at the shelf and counted the blank VHS tapes. “There’s no way in hell I’m watching twenty tapes of this twisted shit.”
The VHS tape was stopped, and the screen went blank. Craig whipped around, his body clenching, his legs ready to run, his mouth ready to plead with whoever might attack him next, but the intruder beat him to the punch.
“I’ll explain everything to you, Mr. Horsy.”
Dr. Krone’s father stood behind the video projector.
Dr. Krone,
Sr.
Craig backed up to the other side of the room, creating more space between him and the strange man. He was the same person in the video—lab coat, red fingerprint stains caked along the front, faded beige pants, and a determined and hungry face. Murderously intelligent.
He couldn’t speak. The doctor’s presence robbed him of words. He simply shook his head and mouthed, “No…”
“This is reality, Mr. Horsy, and I am flesh and blood.” Dr. Krone, Sr. raised his arms and took a slow spin around. “I’m a body, and I’ve been dead for many years. Amazing, don’t you think?”
Craig spat it out, “What the fuck are you talking about? This is murder you’ve participated in, not a scientific breakthrough.”
“But it is a scientific breakthrough. Ah, I’ve skipped ahead of the explanation. Forgive me.” He walked to the corner with a metal pushcart stocked with glass bottles of booze. He poured himself one and raised an empty glass at Craig. “You want a drink?”
He shook his head, refusing to believe this conversation was happening, but what choice did he have?
“You're persistent—you and that woman, what’s her name? She broke free of the restraints on her own. She’s the first to escape, besides you.” His face hardened. “You see, the machine turns itself off before it overloads. The power goes out, and the patient usually can’t move or doesn’t move. But that lady, she’s one tough bitch. We only have three machines. I don’t think the house can support anymore electricity use. The rest of the mansion usually sits in the dark to conserve. You’re the first to escape ever for this long.”
“Hurray for me,” Craig snapped. “You realize you’re a murderer, right? I’ve seen you in action. You steal mental patients from the asylum, and now you’re kidnapping innocent people from the streets. I take it nobody walks out of here alive either, or cured.”
Dr. Krone, Sr. poured himself a scotch and drank it straight up. He was more concerned about the drink than Craig's accusations. “This is the first thing I do when I wake. It’s the best way to come out of death. A good stuff drink down the hatch.”
He was confused. “Wake up from death?”
Dr. Krone, Sr. was enjoying the Q&A session. He sipped the scotch contentedly. Patting his belly, he sighed, “Ah, that’s better. Yes, I’m dead—remember? But the brain is a powerful vessel. It doesn’t have to die. It has many abilities the human race has yet to decode. I’ve simply discovered a special feature of the brain. My great, great grandfather located this phenomenon, this special feature. I’ve simply harnessed it. Turned it into something worth exploring. My son discovered the soul is in the brain. The soul itself is the electrical charge that occurs when nerve impulses called ‘action potentials’ command the body to function—to remember, the move, to act, to feel, to hate, to love, and so on. The soul is capable of anything if instructed, including returning to life after death. I am living once again.” He turned his head to the side, trying to read Craig. “I’m not completely alive, but once a week is better than never in eternity, I’ll say.”
Dr. Krone, Sr. poured another drink, determined to catch a buzz. He frowned when speaking, sharing his private pain. “Death is pitch-black. It’s not sleep. There’s nothing in death. Oblivion. Expansive black. I fear going back to it. I woke here after a long stay in death. My soul was commanded back to life by the machine, and I’ve returned once a week since I died of a stroke.” With a creeping smile he said, “My son has seen to that.”
“So you’re essentially a walking corpse. But you’re real now. Why not leave the house and experience the world if you’re real? I’d go out, so why don’t you?”
The doctor closed his eyes and rubbed them. “Ah, that’s one feat we haven’t mastered. The energy field can only reach so far, maybe half a mile from the house, if that. So I’m stuck here, Mr. Horsy. My son is working on fixing that issue. Once he dies, that’s it. Somebody else will have to work the machine to keep me alive. It all hinges on ‘action potentials’. You stimulate the right channels in the brain with electricity, the stronger the reaction you receive. The machine is so powerful, it not only creates these electrical charges, it takes them from you and replicates them on a screen, replicates them in your mind, lets others like my son into others’ minds.”
A malignant smile demurred his face. “The machine also mimics the memories in flesh and blood for a short period of time.”
Unable to one-up the man, Craig turned his creation into a joke. “I bet your electricity bill is insane.”
Dr. Krone, Sr. was disappointed at Craig’s lack of appreciation for the profound. “We don’t get all of our power from the house. Electricity from nerve impulses, the soul itself, channels much of our power in this residence.”
Craig asked, “How did you locate the soul?”
Dr. Krone, Sr. rested on one of the leather swivel chairs, feeling tipsy. “The Krone family used to own ten asylums in the Midwest. My son finally sold off the businesses. Our goal originally was to cure insanity, dementia, and just about every mental disorder. I guess Dr. Larry Krone, the first to try in the late 1800s, already knew of the soul. He had forefathers before him who’d operated on fallen or near-dead soldiers during the Civil War and American Revolution. They discovered the nerve impulses and the electrical charges in the brain, the soul at work. The truth is the machine had already been built for decades. You see, other American asylums were very much interested in getting inside disturbed minds as well.
“The insane are the perfect guinea pigs. The families leave their loved ones behind once they’re deemed incurable. Hundreds of thousands of victims of mental illness suffer this fate. Writing the
DSM
, shock therapy, drugs, none of it added up to shit as far as cures go. Treatments subdued the beast, but it didn’t send the beast packing. We wanted the infirm to live a normal life. This is the price for that privilege. The machines were banned from use and destroyed, after, let’s say, certain unwanted outcomes.” He furrowed his eyebrows up and down. “But somehow, the Krones got a hold of the last prototypes. Three machines. I’ve had to spend years tweaking the machines to do as I wish. I got them to work again.
“At first, the machine simply projected images onto a screen. Memories. I wanted to physically enter the mind and encounter the mental illness myself. So many patients have been hooked up to the machine over the years, thousands, and it’s added up to something miraculous. The databanks alone are so prolific. The electricity, the souls were collected in mass numbers up to the point the machine gained abilities of its own.”
His booming voice shook Craig to the core, the news shouted from a confident maniac. “
How else do you think I’m flesh and blood after death?
This machine made it happen on its own. I’m real again. I was taken from death and put here. My soul was copied and is exactly as the original—it looks the same, thinks the same, deduces and reasons the same, but I’m not real. I am real, though.” He waved his hand at Craig not to ask. “It’s confusing. The living soul is not aware of itself, but the dead soul is free to venture into other places if it can be awakened and brought back to reality. The soul, the brain, it has so much potential yet to be discovered.