The elevator dropped once more — only a foot this time — but the impact on Hildie’s body sent searing arrows of pain through her as each of her broken bones shifted position.
An anguished scream erupted from her throat.
In George Engersol’s office Josh listened in terror to the muffled screams coming from within the elevator shaft. What was happening? What was Amy doing?
And who else was hearing Hildie’s screams?
He moved to the door, edging close enough to the stairwell so he could peer down. Though he saw no one, he could hear a babble of voices drifting up from the first floor.
Should he go down?
But what would happen to Amy?
As soon as the question came into his mind, he was certain he knew the answer. Dr. Engersol would try to kill her. Just as he would have killed him, Josh thought, if Amy hadn’t stopped Hildie.
Or would Dr. Engersol try to put him into the computer, too?
In a flash last night’s nightmares came back to him. He tried to imagine being trapped in that endless maze forever, without ever waking up.
Part of him wanted to run away, to call his mother and beg her to come and get him.
But another part of him couldn’t abandon Amy, couldn’t leave her alone after what she’d done for him.
Slipping back into Engersol’s office, he closed and locked the door.
“Stop her, Adam!” George Engersol demanded. “Kill her if you have to, but stop her!”
There was no answer from Adam, but his image on the monitor suddenly dropped away, to be replaced by a grotesque vision such as Engersol had never seen before.
Inhuman, with a face that projected pure evil, the being on the screen glared down at them with an almost palpable hatred.
Next to Engersol, Jeff Aldrich gasped. “What is it?” he breathed. “What’s happening?”
Engersol’s jaw clenched. “I don’t know,” he replied, his voice grating. “I don’t have any idea at all.” Before his eyes, his experiment was spinning out of his own control.
Demons surrounded her.
Creatures far beyond her own imagination encircled Amy, and when the first one appeared out of nowhere, flapping great bat wings, its forked tail whipping behind it, her first instinct was to duck away, to let it fly over her.
As she automatically obeyed her instincts, Amy suddenly lost control of the elevator. A final scream of fear and agony burst from Hildie Kramer’s throat as the car plunged to the bottom of the shaft, a scream that was abruptly cut off as her body slammed against the floor one last time, her neck breaking as she landed head first.
For Amy, her instinctive mental dodge was useless, for there was nowhere to escape from the terrifying creature that had assaulted her.
She twisted her mind then, refocusing her concentration, but no sooner had the creature disappeared, its ephemeral form dropping out of her consciousness as she refused to think about it, than another one appeared.
Its green skin covered with scales, its blood red eyes gleaming at her out of the darkness that surrounded it, it crept toward her, taloned hands reaching out, groping for her—
No!
It’s not real!
Amy screamed the words in her own mind, but repeating to herself what she knew to be true did nothing to alleviate the horror that filled her mind.
She knew the creatures didn’t exist — couldn’t exist! — for the world she lived in now held no such beings. Except for herself, and Adam Aldrich, it held no living beings at all.
Only stimuli, abstract stimuli, that excited the cells in her mind and created the visions her brain beheld.
Adam!
It was Adam who was imagining these things, translating the visions he created in his own mind into the stimuli that would duplicate them in her own.
But understanding what was happening made no difference, for all that was real in her world was what she beheld in the eye of her mind, and the fiends and monsters Adam had loosed on her were more real than anything she had ever experienced before.
She cowered away from them, seeking someplace to hide, but in her shelterless world they were everywhere.
One of them came at her, darting toward her, its great jaws gaping, yellowed fangs dripping saliva, forked tongue flicking toward her.
The tongue lashed at her, and in her mind she felt as if its slimy surface had touched her skin.
Instinctively she tried to wipe the phantom creature’s spittle from her cheek.
She had no cheek, nor any hand to wipe it with.
Still, the sensation of the beast’s saliva burning into her nonexistent skin stayed with her.
The demons were everywhere now. She could feel them surrounding her, closing in on her, drawing ever closer.
Her mind uttered a silent scream of terror, a burst of energy that exploded out of her mind.
Incredibly, the demons drew back.…
George Engersol and Jeff Aldrich rushed from the laboratory into the tile-lined corridor where the closed elevator doors hid whatever might be inside. Engersol pressed the button next to the doors, and they obediently slid open, revealing the grisly scene within. Hildie’s broken body, crumpled in a grotesquely unnatural position, lay in the corner of the blood-smeared elevator.
For a moment neither man nor boy moved at all, simply staring in stupefied horror at the carnage in the elevator car. Then, without uttering a word, Jeff Aldrich turned away, his face pale, his legs trembling. Numbly, he started back toward the laboratory, while George Engersol stepped into the elevator to check Hildie Kramer’s body for signs of life.
Finding none, he picked her up, carried her into the operating room, and laid her bloodied corpse on the table he had last used to remove Amy Carlson’s brain from her body.
As he stared down at Hildie’s dead eyes, he slowly realized what he had to do.
His tread heavy, he started back toward the room that contained the crown jewel of his career.
Jeff Aldrich stared uncomprehendingly at the monitor above Amy’s tank. “What’s going on?” he whispered. “What’s happening?”
Colors exploded on the monitor, swirling pinwheels shot through with jagged bolts of lightning, followed by dark cloudlike masses rolling out of nowhere, only to dissipate as bursts of purple and magenta roiled up from within them.
“I’m not sure,” George Engersol replied, his eyes, too, fixed on the screen. “It’s like when she woke up and realized where she was. She was furious then, and the energy her brain produced did this kind of thing. But this is different. It looks like fear, or pain.” He switched on the microphone.
“Adam? Adam, can you hear me?”
The monitor above Adam’s tank came alive, and the outlines of an image began to form, then faded away.
Alarmed, Engersol spoke again. “Adam, what’s wrong? Is Amy doing something to you?”
From the speaker in the ceiling, he heard Adam’s voice; weak, faint, but his. “Punishing her …” he said “… helped Josh …”
Jeff’s eyes widened. “Josh?” he whispered. “What’s he doing?”
Engersol ignored Jeff, his mind racing.
It was all over! The secret was going to get out, long before he was ready.
They’d find out! And not just about Adam and Amy and the brilliant success he’d finally achieved.
They’d find out about the others, too. The children he’d worked with over the years, developing the technique.
The children who had given their lives for the technology he had finally perfected!
The children they would say he had killed.
And in the glare of publicity, the pontificating of the hysterical media, his achievement would be forgotten.
All they would remember would be the children who had died, the “suicides” that they would claim were cold-blooded murders.