She snapped her fingers in front of the woman’s face
, click, click,
but there was no response.
Stepping away from the bed, Christy found a string hanging from the ceiling in the closet, and pulled it, flooding the room with yellow light. She closed the closet most of the way, and then pulled
out a folded wad of papers from her back pocket—the fax of missing persons she’d gotten from Oak Falls PD.
It only took a minute for a positive ID.
Carrie Sanddanz, twenty-nine, Oak Falls.
Reported missing just three days ago.
Christy’s stomach contracted into a snowball. Why would this woman have ended up in an asylum supposedly for abused and pushed-over-the-edge women when she was just reported missing this week?
She looked back and forth between the picture and the woman’s sleeping face, confirming again and again that this had to be one and the same person. Christy put her hand on the woman’s forehead, and the woman sighed in her sleep.
Christy pulled back, and then stood over the bed, in conflict over what exactly to do now. She’d found one of the missing persons at a mental institution. An institution she had no warrant to be inside. Absently, her fingers wound together and Christy did what she always did when she was nervous and lost in thought.
She cracked her knuckles.
Oh crap,
she thought as the sound snapped through empty air like a cap gun. The figure on the bed stirred and Christy backed away fast. She was almost out of the room before she remembered the closet light. “Oh come on,” she moaned silently, and then hurriedly retraced her steps to pull the string to douse the light, before slipping back out of the room and into the well-lit hallway.
Christy didn’t notice the hand that rose in the darkness from the bed, or see Carrie’s eyes flicker open, to stare in blurry incomprehension at the shadows of the strange room. She didn’t notice Carrie slowly roll to her side, clutching at her belly, and then roll to the edge of the bed, tentatively feeling
the open black space with her leg for the floor. She didn’t hear the closet light click back on.
After the door shut behind her, Christy’s eyes blinked and teared at the sudden change in light from dark room to electric-lit hall, and nervously she looked back and forth as she wiped her cheeks and began to creep again along the hallway toward the next number, which she guessed—and was right—would be eleven.
Again the knob turned without issue, but as soon as she poked her head in, she realized that she didn’t dare enter. The dark-haired woman on the bed tossed and turned, kicking sheets away and mumbling something in her sleep. Christy pulled the door shut and proceeded to room ten.
This room was again quiet as a crypt, but another young woman lay prone on the bed, hands tucked to her obviously pregnant belly. Using the closet light, again she was able to positively ID the woman as one of the missing persons on the Oak Falls list. Trisha Kacek, thirty-two, reported missing two weeks ago after a night at a bar.
Room nine held another missing Oak Falls woman, Alina Prus. And room eight hosted a former cleaning woman from Oak Falls—Becky Mills.
Christy’s skin was crawling by the time she pulled the door closed on room eight. If she kept going down the rest of the hallway, she had no doubt that she’d find the rest of the names on the list that Oak Falls had sent her; some of them missing for more than six months.
But why were they all here? They certainly all couldn’t be crazy, unless something was going on with the water in Oak Falls. And why hadn’t the asylum been in contact with the families?
A room at the end of the hall was open—Christy
could see light pouring out onto the carpet. She stayed still and listened, praying that nobody was down there who would discover her here. But after waiting a minute with no sign of movement, she crept down the hall and pressed herself to the edge of the door frame. The lights were on in the room, but the room was empty. Not even the bed was there. Christy stepped inside, and noticed spots of something dark on the carpeting. She bent down and rubbed a finger across it, and blanched when her suspicions were met. The tip of her index finger was smeared a bright, warm red.
“Shit,” she whispered. The screams earlier…they must have come from here. What was the doctor doing to this poor woman? And why?
The spots led out of the room, and then she lost them, but after searching around for a couple seconds, she found another drop of blood. And a few feet farther, yet another. They led to the end of the hallway, to a small service-elevator door.
She thought about it for a minute, but didn’t touch the button. No, she was here to try to figure out what was going on, and walking right into the O.R. in the midst of an operation probably wasn’t the best way to surreptitiously manage that.
Instead, she doubled back to the stairway she’d passed and decided to slip downstairs and see if anyone was about on the main floor. She wasn’t sure where the operating suite was, but she guessed from the freshness of the blood, that the doctor was otherwise occupied. She looked down the main stairway and saw no one; it opened to a broad lobby area, so she hurried down the stairs and pressed herself to a wall on the close side, trying in vain to see who was running the floor. She was glad it was in vain, but she had no doubt that someone was close by.
Christy moved down the lobby to a hall, and
when she reached the end, recognized the evaluation room she’d been in with David just the other day. She stepped inside again, although this time, the room was a little different.
Oh it still had a stainless-steel sink and an adjustable bed covered with paper “body Kleenex.” But this time, as Christy looked around, she realized there were other things of interest in the room. Clues, if you will.
Like the photo of Barry Rockford shaking hands with President Bill Clinton. She looked closer and noted the caption:
AT THE NATIONAL SCIENCE COUNCIL
1998
GENETIC RESEARCH AWARDS CEREMONY
. And framed on the wall beside it, a plaque from the event, which below Rockford’s name read
IN RECOGNITION OF YOUR PIONEERING WORK IN EMBRYONIC STEM CELL RESEARCH
.
On the opposite wall, an article hung in a black wooden frame. It had a picture of Rockford, but the headline said this particular mention wasn’t laudatory. As Christy read the first few paragraphs, the hair began to stand up on the back of her neck.
GENETIC DOC DEFROCKED IN ETHICS SCANDAL
Barry Rockford, PhD, once considered one of the nation’s preeminent genetic researchers, was dismissed yesterday from the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology after it was revealed that for the past seven months, he had been engaged in forbidden experiments on the unborn children of more than three dozen women.
It’s a shocking turn of events to members of the MIT Board of Regents, who were under the impression that Dr. Rockford’s lab was currently being used to test the potential uses for adult stem cells. A $1.5 million grant from the National Institute of Health to the university was allocated
to Dr. Rockford and his team for the purpose of developing a system whereby adults could bank their own stem cells for a future time when they needed the cells’ recuperative powers.For the past two decades, stem cells have been looked to by the science community as the fountain of youth; all that was necessary was the right key to unlock the fountain. Stem cells exist in all living creatures, and are the body’s building blocks for the creation of new structures, whether skin, muscle or bone. Stanley Kooper, chair of the board of regents, explains, “The theory is that if a person banked their healthy stem cells, in later life when the body is diseased and decaying, those youthful stem cells could be utilized to regrow vital tissues and return the body to a healthier state. Some speculate that stem cells could replace surgery, essentially regrowing an old body to a youthful form from the inside out. Ailing hearts and wrinkled skin could be a thing of the past if the power of stems could be harnessed by medicine.”
But the most powerful stem cells exist in unborn babies. Scientists discovered years ago that prior to birth, an unborn fetus can heal from in-uterine operations without scarring. However, when stem-cell research began to focus on this specialized genetic fountain of youth, ethicists from around the world demanded that such experimentation be banned.
When it was discovered that Dr. Rockford had provided a false plan for his federally funded research program and was, in fact, conducting stem-cell research on a parade of women who came to the MIT campus with the promise of a paycheck if Dr. Rockford could be allowed to extract stem-cell material from their unborn
children, the university board stated that it had no recourse but to demand the researcher’s resignation.
Christy felt a chill across the back of her neck and flipped around, but the shadows outside of the exam room didn’t move. As she looked out at the empty hallway, however, she realized that the Dr. Rockford depicted on the walls of this exam room was not at all the psychiatrist she had met a few days earlier. He set up this asylum in the middle of nowhere to help “troubled women.”
Troubled
pregnant
women.
Women who happen to have recently all been reported missing.
“He isn’t a psychiatrist at all,” Christy whispered to herself. “And he sure as hell hasn’t stopped doing whatever the hell he was up to at MIT.”
Somewhere far away, someone screamed.
“What the fuck
are
they doing here?” Christy whispered and crept out of the exam room and into the hall. She turned a corner and saw the room with the red
X
across the door, and carefully, looking from side to side every two seconds, approached it. As she put her hand on the doorknob, she heard the scream again, and this time, she knew with certainty that it was definitely coming from downstairs.
Carefully, she began to turn the knob, not really sure what she was going to do if the door opened.
“Hey, Rockford, you around?” someone yelled from the hallway she’d just left. Christy let go of the door as if it were a hot coal and darted around the corner, ducking behind one of the couches in the darkened open lounge.
A man in blue jeans and a dark button-down shirt stepped into view. He was whistling…“Summertime Blues” she recognized.
He passed the door with the red
X,
the whistle receding. Christy stood and started toward the hallway she and the man had both come from, but before she got to the door downstairs, she heard the whistle returning.
“Shit,” she said under her breath, and ducked back to the couch.
“Hey, Rockford man, where are you!” the man shouted again. A few seconds later, the door Christy had been about to open, opened. Dr. Rockford’s chiseled features poked through the frame looking around.
“There you are,” the whistler proclaimed, stopping from his ambling pace in the outer hall and heading toward the door with the red
X.
“Not now, Carl,” Dr. Rockford said. His voice was hard, and the hand he held out to stop Carl was stained red. “We’ve got an emergency situation right here.”
“Yikes, Doc, what’s going on?”
“Birth,” Rockford said simply. “The samples are in the fridge. They’re marked with today’s date. Please just take them, and leave the payment in the office. I’ll talk to you Tuesday night.”
“No problem,” Carl said. “Good luck.”
“Thanks.” Rockford nodded, and pulled the door closed with a bloody hand, leaving a smear on the outer edge. Christy watched Carl disappear down the hall, counted to ten, and then followed.
She tiptoed down the hall, hanging tight to the wall, and saw the man step into a room at the far end. She ducked into the main exam room again, and waited until she saw him come back out, now holding a small plastic box. He didn’t look back, just walked straight back out, the way they had both (she assumed anyway) come in. Again she counted, this time to twenty, and followed.
As Christy opened the door to the back drive of the asylum, she saw a flash of red lights, and then the side panel of a van as it spun around and headed toward the front of the old hotel. The insignia on the side was the same as the one she’d seen just a couple nights before.
INNOVATIVE INDUSTRIES
.
“What exactly is he running here?” she mumbled under her breath, while she carefully opened and quietly pulled the back door closed behind her. She ran along the back wall of the asylum, stopping just once to peer into a window well where orange light leaked out from the basement. But a shade of some kind blocked her view, and she couldn’t see anything but the glow.
The red lights of the van were on 190 heading back toward town when she slipped inside the tree line at the edge of the asylum’s entryway. The air was hauntingly silent, as Christy opened the driver’s door and slipped back into the Olds. The noise of it slamming felt like a gunshot, but she didn’t turn the key right away to start the car and get away. Instead, she stared at the wavering lights of the hotel turned asylum below. What was she going to tell the chief? He’d kill her if she admitted to what could get her slammed with a breaking-and-entering charge. But she had to let him know that there were missing persons inside. All of her suspicions had been true.
Still stumped on how to approach it, Christy shook her head and started the engine, easing the car out onto the highway. She didn’t notice the ghostly white figure behind her, stepping slowly up the gravel path from the asylum toward the road.
But the figure didn’t care. The woman held the pain in her middle and put one foot in front of the other.
She only knew that she had to keep walking. Something warm and wet coated her thighs. She had to keep moving.
Walk, Walk, Walk,
was all her mind said.
And soon she was on the gravel shoulder of 190, staring at the red taillights of Christy’s Olds, cotton gown flapping in the slight breeze behind her, and showing the ghostly white of her thighs and back as she plodded forward.