Authors: Koethi Zan
Adele covered her mouth with her hands, her eyes wide. I thought she might throw up.
Tracy methodically stacked the photos, put them back in the box, and replaced the lid.
“I don’t think we need to look at those right now,” she said with almost unnatural calm.
She turned to Christine. “This should give you some comfort. Some of those appear to go back twenty years or more. You certainly weren’t the start of it all.” But Christine looked like the rest of us felt, completely horrified.
What did this mean? Again, I reached for Jennifer’s photo in my pocket. Was there a picture of her in that box as well?
“Let’s see the notebooks,” I said, keeping my voice under control, even though I felt like screaming.
Tracy lifted them out and handed one to each of us. I turned the pages of mine slowly, careful to let only the tips of my fingers touch them, as though a poison might be embedded in the words he had scratched out onto the blank pages.
“What is this?” I finally said. They were filled with notes in Jack Derber’s even scrawl. I read out loud, “‘Subject H-29 withstands pain at 6 count.’”
We turned to Adele as one. Only she could tell us what this meant. She was clearly in shock. She took the notebook from my hands, but unlike me, she caressed the pages like a long-lost love.
“These are his … notes,” she whispered in awe. “The ones I’ve been looking for. For ten years.”
“Would you care to elaborate?” Tracy said, an edge creeping into her voice.
Adele suddenly seemed confused, her bravado evaporating as it dawned on her what this meant to us. What this would mean to any other human being. She tried to explain.
“It’s not what you think. Jack … Jack said he had gotten access to highly classified government documents. CIA research on soldiers
and civilians from the fifties on—on certain coercive techniques. You know, ‘brainwashing,’ ‘mind control.’”
“But why is it all in his handwriting?” Tracy didn’t sound convinced.
“His contact wouldn’t allow him to photocopy anything, so he wrote out everything by hand. He wanted to publish a study, the definitive truth about mind control. This is what I was working on with him, but he wouldn’t let me see any of his actual notes.”
“Adele, I hate to break it to you, but I don’t think this work was based on secret CIA records,” Tracy said. She patted the box of photographs beside her. “Looks like this was original research. And I certainly don’t think he planned to publish it, considering it’s evidence of his crimes.”
Adele shook her head. She looked confused, panicked. “I don’t know what you’re—”
Christine interrupted. “Brainwashing? Adele, don’t forget I was a psych major too. I know about those CIA experiments using Chinese and Korean persuasion techniques. They’ve been discredited. The CIA gave up. Brainwashing does not work.”
“Jack disagreed,” Adele replied. “He thought the CIA only discontinued their studies because they got caught. Their methods were unethical, so they got shut down. But Jack said the documents he obtained proved the CIA was successful. And that his discovery would change the field.”
Tracy interrupted her, “I see. And you figured if you were his coauthor, you’d surely be invited to join the Harvard faculty.”
Adele turned pale but said nothing.
I remembered the books Adele had been reading in the library, and it started to make sense. But then I had another, even more horrible thought.
“Adele, how does this research connect back to your little secret
society? I know it existed. You and Jack were in it together, weren’t you? Does that have anything to do with torturing these girls? Tell us the truth, Adele. Were these girls part of this project?”
Adele shook her head, her face as white as the pages of the open notebook in her hand.
“No, no, I had no idea about any of this.” She pointed to the photographs. “That’s separate. That’s Jack’s madness. There was another side to him, though. He was a serious scholar.”
“Then what
was
the secret society for, Adele? We know you were in it. Scott Weber told us.” It wasn’t exactly true, but I thought I’d take a chance.
“You spoke to Scott?” Her tone changed in an instant, and her eyes flashed with anger. She looked like a trapped animal. She was used to being in control, keeping her secrets. Yet here she was, cornered.
“Tell us, Adele,” Christine said, her eyes rimmed with red from crying but her voice steely.
“The ‘secret society,’ as you call it, has nothing to do with any of this,” Adele began, looking away from Christine’s disturbing aspect. “It was just a … school project.”
“Explain.”
The word must have echoed painfully in Adele’s head. In her mind, as we all knew,
she
got to ask the questions. She looked at each one of us in turn, perhaps trying to weigh the situation she was in, figuring out who had the power here. We sat in silence for a full minute, waiting while she struggled with what she would say next. Finally, she must have decided she had run out of choices, and she began.
“David and I were seeing each other that first semester. He introduced me to the BDSM movement when we met. At first I was interested in it intellectually, you know, as a topic for study, but then I was … let’s just say I was drawn into it. We started experimenting, and it escalated.”
She paused and took a deep breath. She seemed to be gradually resigning herself to telling her story.
“Then Jack walked in on us in the back stacks of the social sciences library when we were engaging in some … imaginative role play. His curiosity was, needless to say, piqued. At first we were horrified that our professor had found us out. Then we were flattered when he was so intrigued. Jack was so impressive, and I had just started working for him as a research assistant, so we were thrilled really to have something to offer up to him.
“Soon enough we were all going to The Vault together. And then, I guess when Jack trusted us enough, he invited us to join his … private study group, I think is a better term. He’d set up an exclusive little cadre to analyze this subculture in a way a state-funded university might not necessarily sanction. More hands-on, so to speak.”
“It had something to do with that Bataille group, didn’t it?” I asked.
Adele looked surprised.
“Yes,
Acephale
, but how did you—”
“The brand. It’s the symbol for it,” Tracy responded.
“I see,” Adele said, looking stunned. She gathered her composure and went on. “Well, yes, Jack was obsessed with the literature of transgression: Bataille, De Sade, Mirbeau. He thought it would help us understand the psychological origins of perversions, fetishes, sadistic impulses—all of it.” The words rushed out of her, like those of a proselytizer. “But he believed transgressive behavior couldn’t be studied through mere observation. It wasn’t like depression or schizophrenia or sleep disorders. We had to experience it for ourselves.
“So that’s what we did. We altered our entire lives to get to the core of this work. We created our own rituals and incorporated these texts to, you know, get into the spirit of things, to help us to break free from societal norms and uncover our true selves. And
from there we could reach an understanding beyond—” She stopped abruptly, seeing our expressions. She’d lost us.
Adele cleared her throat.
“So yes,” she said, “as part of all that, we talked about human sacrifice, mutilation, bondage, and all kinds of other debased acts. But it was a game. It wasn’t real. It was just like what we did at the club.” She stopped and looked over at the box of photographs. Tears sprang to her eyes.
“At least, I thought it was,” she continued. “I don’t know. Maybe Jack was grooming us for something more, but it didn’t get that far before his arrest. I swear.”
We were all staring at her. None of us even dared to move for fear she would stop telling her story.
As she paused, I glanced quickly around the room, checking the doors, the windows, listening. It was silent, all was still. Jack was making us wait. I held my knife in my lap, squeezing the handle tightly, clenching and unclenching it in my fist.
Adele inhaled deeply and went on.
“Jack had also brought in his old friend—Joe Myers, he’d called him at the time—to join us. He was something else altogether. The most hardcore of us all, cruel and violent. He made me wonder sometimes if I knew what I was getting into. But I was too deeply involved by then. And Jack was still the one in absolute control of it all. At the time I stupidly trusted him to keep everything safe.”
She paused and looked up at us, then said meaningfully, “It turns out I didn’t know Joe Myers’s real name until he made it onto the Most Wanted List yesterday.” She saw the shock in our eyes as we registered her meaning. “Yes. Noah Philben.” She let this sink in for a moment before continuing.
“On the day Jack was taken away, the news broke and then spread around the campus like wildfire. But at the very beginning, the FBI was focusing on the house. Before they got to his office on
campus, I sneaked in. I knew I only had one shot. I took everything I could carry so I could continue this project, but I also knew he had kept crucial materials hidden at the house, and there was no way for me to get in there.
“Noah Philben—still Joe Myers to me then—also wanted to get Jack’s things, though I didn’t know why. And I was afraid he’d already taken something. I wanted to confront him, but he disappeared. I couldn’t find him again after Jack’s arrest because I didn’t know his real name. I swear I only found out yesterday when they showed his picture on the news.”
She turned to me. “When I saw his face and heard that Sylvia belonged to his church, I suspected that your search had somehow led back to him. And I was right.”
“And you wanted to know exactly what we found, isn’t that right, Adele? That’s why you called us, why you wanted to come to the hotel,” interrupted Tracy.
“But, Adele, Scott Weber said the secret society was still meeting after Jack’s arrest,” I said, challenging her.
“Sort of.” She thought a minute and then said, “We met, but at that point it was just me and David and two others we knew from The Vault. We were regrouping, trying to make sure we didn’t have any ties to Jack that could be traced back to us, that everything we’d done would be kept from the police.
“And yes, I was still seeing David. I was … I was only seeing Scott to keep him out of Jack’s research. I didn’t want him to find the notes before I did. He is a damn good reporter, so I had to keep him away. I know that doesn’t exactly sound ethical, but you have to understand—this work has become my life.”
“No kidding,” muttered Tracy.
I turned to Adele. “Didn’t you—weren’t you at all … moved or disgusted or horrified or
something
about what you had just learned about your professor and—let’s just say it,
friend
?”
She looked ashamed. “Well, I was. I was. Oh yes, definitely. I just also told myself I needed to be strong, because this was really an … opportunity for me.”
“You are one revolting piece of work, Adele,” said Tracy, looking away in disgust.
At this Adele turned on her heel and walked back to her spot by the window. She faced away from us, so I couldn’t tell whether she was regretting her revelation or not. We left her alone.
As the rest of us sat there recovering from Adele’s story, Ray began picking through the box of photographs. Suddenly, he jumped up and turned to me, looking panicked, “What were those ‘subjects’ called again? From the notebooks?”
I lifted one up. “Let’s see, here’s a Subject L-39, and here’s an M-50 …”
“That’s enough. Look.” He handed me a photograph, flipped over to the back. I could just make out the words “Subject M-19” scratched in the lower-left-hand corner. I took the pile from Ray. Sure enough, the photos were carefully labeled with tiny letters, each using the same formulation, “Subject P-9, L-25, Z-03.”
And then I found H-29 the subject I’d read about in the notebook. She was a blonde, wearing a tattered nightgown, her eyes closed, a swollen purple bruise on her left cheek, a chain around her neck. Her teeth were bared, her lips dripping red around them.
Tracy had been right the first time. These girls
were
Jack’s study.
CHAPTER 37
Tracy stood up abruptly and wrenched the photos from my hands. She crossed the room in two strides and waved the images an inch from Adele’s face.
“Can’t you see what this means?” she screamed. “Do I have to spell it out for you? There weren’t any CIA documents, Adele. This wasn’t noble academic work. Jack was running his
own
mind control experiments. Using torture. On these girls.” She paused. “And on
us
.”
In disgust, Tracy threw the photos onto the floor in front of Adele. No one spoke—we only listened to the sound of their sliding across the wood. Then Tracy stepped back and looked hard at Adele, her voice calmer now. “It looks like Jack wanted to turn you into a very different kind of protégé than you thought.”
Adele stared at the photos scattered at her feet. She bent down,
picked one up, and examined the writing on the back. Here it was, her life’s work, based on a maniac’s experiments on abducted girls. And worse, this maniac might have been slowly making her party to his machinations. Grooming her to be one of them, to engage in some horrific study, a magnum opus of torture and degradation.
“I think I … I think I need to be alone for a few minutes,” Adele said. She turned slowly and walked like a zombie out of the room, staring straight ahead.
“Should we let her go?” Tracy said after it became clear Adele wasn’t coming right back.
“Yes, she’s in shock. And she knows she was duped. She thought she was the great manipulator, but it turns out she was the manipulated one. She is another victim of Jack’s. A different kind, but still.” I paused, taking a breath. “So I think, for now, we should let her have some alone time.”
Tracy looked back down at the notebooks. “Well, I could probably use some alone time myself. Or ten more years of therapy. Or a giant slug of vodka.”