The Cold Beneath (30 page)

“They were human beings, not results!”

“They were dangerous.”

“But to just kill them outright—”

Geraldine screamed over me, “It wasn’t like they were just going to let me tie them down and wait it out!” She clutched her notepad to her breast, heaving in exasperated gulps as she stared at me with wide eyes. “You must understand that I did what I had to do to preserve the results. Otherwise all of our work would have been for naught. I couldn’t allow that. You must understand. Philip, tell me you understand.”

I snorted in disgust. “Is this what you kept me alive for, then? So you could have someone exonerate you of your sins?” I pulled at my restraints, testing their fastness. She had bound me just loose enough to allow some comfort, but tight enough to keep me in place. “I bear my own sins, Geraldine. I don’t have the right to forgive yours, nor do I plan to. As far as I’m concerned, you can go to Hell, where you belong.”

“I see,” she said, her voice sharp with disappointment.

“How long then?”

She furrowed her brow, unsure of my question.

I smiled, weak but righteous. “How long have we been your little experiments? What first clued you in that the compound changed us in such a terrible way? When Morrow returned? Or did it take a bit longer for you to work out what caused it?”

“Oh Pip,” she said. “You were always so naïve.” Then she laughed. Actually laughed. It was high-pitched and horrifying considering our mutual situation. When her laughter stopped, she looked me dead in the eye and said, “I knew long before Morrow’s death.”

My skin crept at that laugh. “How long?”

“I’ve known since Elijah died.”

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Thirty

Doctor Goode’s Experiment

She could have hit me with another dose of pentothal and not left me any more stunned than I was at her words. I slumped against the wall, all of the life dragged from me by her admission. She knew the whole time. While we were in Kentucky. While Lightbridge was pitching his voyage to me. While she was confessing Elijah’s deeds against me. The whole time, she knew what the compound was capable of.

As if hearing my thoughts, she whispered, “I admit I wasn’t sure what precise effect the compound would have on human subjects. But I did know what it was capable of, because it turned out to do almost exactly what I created it to do. It keeps the body alive, even after apparent death.”

“You knew Morrow would return?” I asked.

“I hoped he would. Yes. I’ll admit it was a bit more gruesome than I planned on, but those are all just minor details.”

I stammered, “You … you meant for this to happen?”

“The wreck? No, of course not. The accident, the unfortunate wreck was just that. Unfortunate. No, I never meant for any of this to happen.”

She proceeded then to tell me exactly how the accident came about.

When Morrow’s body was returned to the medical bay, Geraldine and her students set upon it like a pack of vultures. Each was hungry to know why the man got back to his feet when the four of them were so sure he was dead. They prepared the body for examination, removing the knife from its resting place and stripping the corpse.

Within moments of their dislodging the weapon, Morrow returned to apparent life again, leapt from the table top and attacked the medical staff. The men wrestled with him, trying to keep him quiet while Geraldine prepared a sedative injection. As she attempted to administer it, Morrow knocked her away, and she burst through the closed door and into the hallway. Before she could regain her feet, she watched in horror through the open door as Morrow grabbed one rack of chemicals from its bolted spot in the floor and threw it
 
into the cabinet against the far wall. The resulting mix caused the explosion, sucking her medical students and Morrow out of the now-gaping hole.

“Which is why you were in the hallway when we found you,” I said.

She nodded. “Yes.”

“But you said you were on the pedometrics,” I said.

“I said what I had to. I didn’t want to tamper with the results by revealing too much.”

“What in the world were you thinking? What possessed you?”

“I was thinking of my future. Of mankind’s future. Of longevity. Of godhood.”

“Godhood? This is blasphemy!”

“This is the philosopher’s stone, Philip. This is distilled immortality. This is what every doctor, every scientist, every human being on the face of the Earth would give his very soul to discover. A way to cheat death. And I found it.” She sat straight again, chin tipped up, nose held high in pride. “Not Elijah. Not you. Me. I did it. Me.”

I saw her for what she was then, an evil conniving bitch hell bent on gaining notoriety for her precious discovery, no matter the cost. She and True North had so much in common. What were the lives of forty men when immortality lay on the line? My nausea returned, pushing my stomach to my throat. I retched with revulsion, heaved with hatred for her and what she had done to the crew.

To Albert.

To Lightbridge.

To me.

“You sacrificed us,” I said.

 
“Don’t be so melodramatic,” she said.

“You want melodrama? How about explaining to the world how you turned the Northern Fancy into a cage for your very own crop of the Modern Prometheus?”

She cut her eyes at me, not amused by my mockery. “Is that absolutely necessary?”

I sneered. “Victor would be proud.”

“Stop it.”

“Stop what? You sacrificed us, and for what? A compound that creates monsters?”

“It wasn’t like that.”

“Then why don’t you tell me what it was like! Because I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around why anyone would do this!”

“I was so close,” she said, ignoring my anger. “I spent years working on this formula. Years and years perfecting it. When Elijah died, I knew I would never get an opportunity to finalize it. I was close, I was so very close …” she paused to frown, swept up by ugly memories. “But he went and ruined it with a heart attack. He always had to be the center of attention, you know. It was hard enough being the wife of a famed scientist, but to be left as his widow? It was worse than being thought of as a whore. I was prepared to spend the rest of my life in his shadow, but to have it foreshortened like that was unbearable.”

I thought I couldn’t be more disgusted by her actions. I was wrong. “You delivered us into the hands of the Devil for the sake of your reputation?”

“No!” Geraldine leapt to her feet in anger. “You don’t understand. You men never do. I lost everything when he died! My research facility, my backing. Everyone abandoned me. Most of the community only supported my research to humor Elijah. With him gone, they pulled up stakes and left me to rot.”

I understood. Her story came into focus then. Her warped version of reality made a sudden mad sense. “Then along came Lightbridge with a floating maze of willing lab rats, all ready for the abusing.”

“Pip, you mustn’t think of it like that.” Geraldine’s anger faded at the man’s name. She returned to her seat with a gentle smile. “Lightbridge rescued me.”

“You mean he outfitted you. How tempting that must have been. One moment you lose your entire base of research, and the next you are presented with a full crew of healthy men. All without families. All without homes. All without recourse. Who would miss them when you were done with them? No one. Not even you.”

“I admit there were some failed subjects, but overall—”

“Subjects? For God’s sake, Geraldine, they were men! Human beings! Not mice!”

“They served a purpose greater than they will ever know. Or understand. Even greater than Lightbridge’s precious True North.”

“Ah yes, back to your savior. How do you thank the man for giving you this golden opportunity? For rescuing you? You kill him.”

Geraldine hung her head at that. So there was some emotion left in her? “I knew you wouldn’t understand.”

“I understand that you used us.”

When she raised her head again to me, that wicked smile had returned. “You know, I wanted to bring you in on it. From the start, I wanted to tell you and have you help me. I needed your help. I needed someone’s help. Not even my students knew what was really going on. But you? You could have known. You could have helped me.”

“What made you change your mind?”

“Simple. I couldn’t spare you. I needed the numbers.”

“Numbers?” I echoed.

She shrugged. “It’s the only reason you were brought aboard to begin with.”

“But … Lightbridge’s legs …”

“His legs? Do you still think that’s why you were invited along?” Geraldine sat amidst the moaning, writhing corpses of our crewmates and laughed as though she hadn’t a care in the world. She looked mad. She
was
mad.

I felt like a disenchanted child, one who had just learned that the real way of the world involved facts and figures and not just his bright imagination or fantasies.

As her laughter wound down, she asked, “Did you really think I could spend ten years married to the foremost expert in bio-mechanics and not be able to manage a pair of silly old clockwork legs?” Geraldine took to her feet and made a round of checking on the bound men as she took notes and continued to talk. “No, after I caught sight of the crew numbers, I knew my research would be incomplete without at least a half dozen more subjects. But Lightbridge was stalwart. The most I could do was squeeze in a few medical students.”

She paused at Albert, prodding his swollen hands with her pen before jotting down a few notes. He struggled to claw at her, but to no avail. We were all bound very tightly. She might have been mad, but she still tied a hell of a knot.

“And how did I come into it?” I asked. “Why me?”

“It’s funny actually,” she said. “I discovered that his penchant for perfection was his greatest weakness. He was always going on about how much he trusted men who had an emotional investment in their work.”

Which was exactly the same thing he said to me that sunny spring morning he begged me to join him. “You were able to squeeze in one more subject by convincing Lightbridge I was invaluable based on my work? Very clever.”

“I have to admit it wasn’t too hard. Once I turned on the waterworks and had a little bit of a breakdown over my guilty conscience, he almost ran to fetch you. It was touching. It took a bit more effort to persuade him to let you bring your manservant along.”

“Bradley?”

“Yes. I was overjoyed to see him on the carriage with you. I spent that whole week convincing Lightbridge you couldn’t function without him. Otherwise he would have stayed behind.”

“Bradley,” I whispered. “I can’t believe he died for the sake of filling out your numbers.”

“Now, Pip, it was more than just that. And besides, it’s not my fault you started shooting them like fish in a barrel once my back was turned.”

“What choice did I have? Why did you run off like that? Certainly you knew they would rise again. Why not stay here and wait and gather your precious information once the dead started to walk?”

“And miss collecting data in the field? The side effect of a lowered core temperature is just fascinating. Don’t you think? I mean immortality is one thing, but you men hardly notice how cold it really is around here.” She stopped to shiver, as if proving her point. “I had to record it in action. And who would give up the chance to see True North? You should have come with us. It was quite unforgettable.”

“You forget. I had to stay here and tend to these … subjects.” I nodded at the men about us.

She flashed me a pert frown. “You don’t have to sound so annoyed about it.”

“I sound annoyed because I am annoyed. What else would you expect me to be? Grateful? Appreciative? You’re responsible for the death of nearly forty men, Geraldine. Forty God-fearing, hard-working, good men. Dead. Because of you.”

Geraldine had little to say to that.

Now, I realize that our conversation up to this point seems like an awful lot of privileged information for someone who was just a mere subject in her experiments. The truth is I was prompting her for it, keeping the conversation flowing because I was trying to buy time. On some level, perhaps Geraldine needed to get it all off of her chest, but while I busied her mind and her mouth, I worked myself free from her bonds. She might have tied a hell of a knot, but I was still a man of dainty constitution, as well as dainty form. The belts and ropes might have been tight enough to keep the larger workmen under wraps, but with a fair bit of wiggling, I was able to slip my hands free. I kept them at my back as I fished for another subject to distract her.