Ann Marie's Asylum (Master and Apprentice Book 1) (25 page)

“You’re scaring me. Are you going to be OK?”

Dade considered the question. “My body will be fine,” he said.

“What about the rest of you?”

Instead of answering her, he looked at her as if to say:
I have no idea
.

“How many times have you done this?”

“Nearly a hundred.”

“A hundred times and you’re still scared! You?” She looked Dade over and noticed that his hands were shaking. “I don’t think you should do it,” she said. “This doesn’t seem right.”

“I have to.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know,” he said before going back to the fume hood. The smoke and sparkles subsided and the flask no longer seemed haunted. The liquid turned clear like water except for a small red stone.

It looked like a pebble resting in the bottom of the flask until Ann Marie got a closer look. The small stone was changing color, going from black to crimson with a kind of heartbeat. Then it started to change shape, turning from an amorphous lump to a shape with an extremely intricate surface like the innards of a pocket watch. The nugget of matter continued to change form in the bottom of the flask. It was as though the little thing was putting on a show for whoever may be watching.

He took the long needle of a syringe and dipped it into the flask. Drawing up mostly clear liquid and just a smidgen of dust from the flashing pebble, Dade’s hands were trembling. He placed the syringe in a set of mounts inside a steel cabinet next to the tank. “This will administer it automatically when I’m in the tank and ready,” he said.

“You’re actually going to inject that stuff?” asked Ann Marie. “It looks alive.”

“In a way, it is alive,” he told her. Dade took off his robe and hung it up next to the tank. Ann Marie noticed the goose pimples on his chest and shoulders. He trembled as he lowered himself into the tank.

Ann Marie followed him up the staircase leading to the top and helped him into the warm liquid. Their eyes met for a second before she shut the lid. Then Dade started to sink. She put her palm up against the acrylic and met Dade’s hand on the other side.

“You can still call this off,” she said to outer wall of the tank.

Dade understood her and shook his head no.

The outside of the tank began to dim and he started to disappear into the blackness. The automated system depressed the plunger on the syringe. This sent a dusting of the strange pebble down the laboratory tubing and into his bloodstream. Just before the huge cylinder went completely black, Ann Marie saw his eyes whip open and a look of terror sweep over his face. His look beamed out such a profound fear that Ann Marie’s body went cold.

“Stop the sequence!” she shouted to an uncaring instrument console. “Something is wrong!” There was a large red button for the emergency shut off. When Ann Marie hit it, the only thing the machine did was bring up a message informing her it was too late. She continued to try different combinations of keystrokes and menus but nothing could stop the sequence.

Dade’s biofeedback data looked strange. His heart was slowing and his body temperature was already dangerously low at ninety-four. Suddenly, his heart went from a slow beat to a dead stop. A warning message, scrawled out in red, filled up the computer monitors:
DANGER! BIOFEEDBACK SIGNAL OUT OF SAFE LIMITS
.

His body temperature started to fall at an alarming and unnatural rate. Ninety-four became ninety-two became ninety degrees in no time. The fluid in the tank was warmed to ninety-eight-point-six, so it made no sense that he was getting colder. Something was very wrong. Eighty-nine degrees sent Ann Marie into a breathless panic.

She nearly tripped on her way up the stairs to the top of the tank. She yanked on the lid so hard that her arms hurt. It didn’t budge. She tried to activate the electrical relay that started the pneumatic lift for the lid but the computer had her locked out. Dade’s heart was stopped completely and his temperature was falling to eighty-five degrees.

It was like something invisible was chilling his body.

Ann Marie heard her heart racing in her ears and struggled to catch her breath against the panic. She was starting to cry. “No!” she screamed. “No! No! No!”

She had an idea. She disconnected the tubing for the pump that opened the lid. From across the room, she quickly rolled over a pressurized nitrogen tank. Her hands were shaking as she connected the pressurized nitrogen to the lid’s lifting mechanism. A turn on the pressure valve and a flood of nitrogen gas made the lid creep up a few inches. The moment she had enough room, Ann Marie climbed into the tank and tried to pull Dade’s body out.

“Wake up!” she shouted when she got his head to the surface. “Dade! The sequence is over! Wake up!” She slapped his cold, lifeless cheek while she hung on to the edge of the tank with the other hand. “Please wake up,” she said quieter, to herself. “I need you. Please.” They both floated quietly for what seemed like a long time to Ann Marie.

Ann Marie was weeping when Dade finally began to cough up breathing fluid on his way back to life. She hung on as tight as she could while they both floated there in silence.

Eventually, Dade whispered to her, “I’m scared.”

...

Ivy knew she was dreaming when she saw Bernard Mengel at the foot of her bed. He was naked and leering at her. “I’m inside you,” he told her. The old man’s withered shoulders looked like dying saplings. However, his skin looked unnaturally youthful and unblemished. His entire body was distorted, like a malnourished skeleton covered in baby skin.

Standing over her, Bernard grunted and flashed his teeth. They were pointed like that of a piranha. She couldn’t move. “I’m getting deeper inside you every day, my love,” the vision told her. As it reached climax, the dream Bernard roared at her until it became a deafening pounding in her ears. Ivy screamed.

She found herself wide awake with the phone ringing on the nightstand.

“Thank you for blowing my mind,” said the breathy, satisfied-sounding voice on the other end of the line. “That was good, my dear. Oh so good.”

Behind Bernard’s voice in the background, there was a distinct sound of a woman crying.

“What is happening to me?” Ivy asked him. “Please, Bernard. Tell me.”

“Everything, my dear. Everything is happening.”

“Why are you doing this to me?” She asked. Bernard was preoccupied with something on his end of the line and didn’t hear the question. Another woman’s voice was in the background. Whoever the woman was, she was crying to Bernard. “Who is that crying?” Ivy asked him.

“One of your sisters,” said Bernard, who found his answer quite amusing. He started laughing to himself.

“Why are you doing this to me?” She asked with more insistence.

A slow humming started in the receiver as Bernard started to sing to her. “I’m in the mood for love...simply because of Ivy,” he started to croon. Keeping his voice locked in the same tune, he continued, “She is the queen of my...babies!” He sung. Then he started singing gibberish or what sounded like gibberish. “Bomm Bomm Inter Eck Sun Stars. Feast Blacker and Blood. Send Pure Flower Death. Inter Stars Ivy!” He ended in a crescendo.

Ivy felt a slight pressure on her face like a warm breeze. Then she experienced a feeling of slow vertigo like the onset of a shot of liquor on a perfectly empty stomach. Somehow, instead of pushing her back into bed, the feeling seemed to be pulling her to her feet. As she stood up, an electricity of pleasure started in her head and conducted down to her toes. Her entire body was tingling.

She went outside. Her nightgown, a long white teeshirt with a cartoon sheep wearing bedroom slippers, was so sheer that she felt every breeze on her skin. The freshly trimmed grass in her gated community felt cold and wet under her feet as she made her way to the guard booth. When the guard came out to meet her, Ivy began to jog toward the gate on her bare feet.

“Hey, Ms. Cavatica! Are you sleepwalking again?” He shouted to her.

Ivy didn’t answer him. Instead, she increased her pace until she was running full speed toward the condo gate. Before the guard could say anything else, she leaped into the air and latched her hands onto the very top of the gate. Then, like a grandstanding gymnast, she swung her legs backwards until they were over the gate. In another smooth gesture, she landed on the other side as delicately as if she weighed six ounces.

She ran with an inexhaustible supply of energy and felt as though she could hear and smell for miles. The neighborhood around her consisted of mostly abandoned and boarded-up factories. Faint lights from battery-powered lamps and small campfires speckled among the empty stories of steel and concrete. She slowed down for a moment as she heard tires screech and people shouting several miles away. Even at that great distance, she could smell the burned rubber.

She continued to walk across the city on her bare feet with every step becoming more enjoyable and sensual. Raising her arms to her side, she started to twirl like a figure skater, jumping into the air and landing as effortlessly as a sparrow. The act got the attention of a few men in a pickup truck that happened to be driving by.

“Damn, bitch, what are you on?” The driver asked through the window as the truck kept pace with her. “You look like you’re having a better time than we are.” The man was in his early thirties and had the tired eyes and bad complexion of a serious drinker. He was accompanied by another man who had a patchy beard, reddish cheeks and wore a trucker’s hat. That man didn’t say anything and seemed content to stare at Ivy like she was a rival gang member.

In the backseat, a little boy was asleep with his head propped up on a bag of laundry. When Ivy looked at them without responding, the man with the bad skin and sunken eyes told her, “We’re being nice to you, bitch. You better return the favor.”

Ivy smirked back at them while the two men’s eyes scanned her body under the nightshirt. She stepped closer to the truck.

“You look like you’re having a good time,” the driver said to her while he stroked the uneven growth of hair on his chin. “My buddy and me are taking my son out for his thirteenth birthday and we’re looking to make some memories.” He asked her, “Why don’t you hop into the back?”

Ivy obliged and took a seat in the back of the pickup truck next to the man’s son, who was still sleeping soundly with his head against the laundry.

“Wake up, you little turd!” The driver shouted to the boy in back. “The party is starting!” He grabbed a small bag of trash from the floor of the passenger seat and threw it at the sleeping child. The kid began to stir and open his eyes. “Look what your daddy found for you,” the man told him.

The boy looked very confused when he saw Ivy. He looked utterly mystified when he noticed that she was wearing only a large teeshirt. “Hello,” he said as he rubbed at his eyes.

Ivy smiled and nodded back without a word.

“That’s it,” the boy’s father smiled. “Get to know each other.”

The other man in the truckers hat started to laugh. “Get to know each other real well,” he added before laughing even harder.

“You see,” the driver said as he made eye contact with Ivy in the rearview mirror. “It’s my boy’s birthday. He’s becoming a man and, as his father, I need to teach him to be one. To be perfectly honest,” he went on, as though some sort of genuine confession was coming, “I’m worried that that this godless city turned him into a queer. Needless to say, my son will not be sucking on any dicks while his father has anything to say about it.”

His son looked very afraid and averted his eyes to the floor of the truck.

“It’s a good thing you have a father that loves you, boy,” the man went on to his son. “Mine would have never helped me this way. That man didn’t give a shit at all.”

The boy’s hands were shaking and he slid even farther away from Ivy. He looked at her nightgown and her bare legs. Then he started to cry.

“Christ I was afraid of this,” the boy’s father said. “Sometimes I wonder if that boy’s mom didn’t fuck around on me. Because I don’t know how I could raise such a pussy. It ain’t in my genes. I find you a gorgeous white girl and you cower like a limp-dick little bitch.” He started to get angrier as he thought about it. He slapped his palm against the dash and his voice got louder. He pulled the car over. “You little shit,” he said as he turned around and slapped his son in the face. “You better man up and turn this shit around. You better be balls deep in a hot minute.”

“Come on, kid,” said the other man in the trucker hat. “Shit or get off the pot.”

Ivy was still perfectly silent as she sat with a comfortable smile. The little boy seemed too afraid to even look at her.

“Come on!” the father shouted to his son. “Grab a titty or two and get started! The bitch isn’t going to be high as a kite forever and I’m not paying for a god damned hooker!”

The little boy grabbed for the door latch and tried to fight his way out of the truck. The man in the trucker hat caught him by the neck of his teeshirt. “We got some performance anxiety on our hands,” the man said.

The boy’s father seemed far less understanding and pulled the boy back to his seat by the hair. “Listen,” his father told him while looking him straight in the eye, “if you dishonor your father right now, he’s going to put a hurting on you. It’s gonna be a much bigger hurting than anything you’re used to. You understand me, boy? So you better get down to some god damned fucking and prove you aren’t a faggot right now.” He turned to Ivy, who still seemed strangely at ease, and pointed his finger at her. “And you, snow white,” he said. “If you can’t get his little dick hard, I’m breaking your jaw!”

The boy tried again for the door latch and his father caught him by the hair. “That’s it,” his father told him, “you’re not coming home tonight. I’m telling your mother you vanished like the other kids!”

Ivy sprang into action and grabbed the boy’s father by both ears. She sent his head into a spin so fast that the features of his face blurred together. By the third or fourth rotation, the skin and tissue that held the man’s head to his body split like an overstretched garbage bag. Blood pumped from his neck onto every surface of the truck.