The man rested his small boy’s hands on the table beside her. Sophia had no use of her arms and legs, strapped to the table, she turned her head away, but Alice stepped up and clamped her strong hands on either side of Sophia’s skull. Kaiser forced open her mouth.
He leaned close.
“If you bite me, I’ll cut out your tongue and claim you chewed it off,” Kaiser hissed, staring hard into her eyes. She blinked, refusing to nod, but knowing better than to bite him.
He slipped something into her mouth. She tasted nothing. No pill dissolved on her tongue.
She closed her eyes and tried not to imagine what he had given her. The voices continued to murmur, the men talking of other things.
After a short while their voices transformed into a wave of sound floating up, washing over her, and slipping out to sea. When she opened her eyes, the ceiling yawned into a chasm of shadows. The shadows darted and swam, took shape and vanished. Faces glared at her from the disintegrating forms, angry faces, sad, anguish-filled. Some of them laughed, high insane cackles while others screamed as if someone had pressed a hot poker into their flesh.
Sophia blinked and shook her head from side to side.
“No, no, no, no,” she murmured pulling at her restraints, needing to clamp her hands over her ears and silence the cries of the dead. The voices of the men had all but faded. She had forgotten them until Dr. Kaiser loomed above her huge, as tall as the ceiling, with those pale blue eyes which seemed to stretch into infinity. She followed his eyes down and down past the flesh of his body into the blackness of his soul, a soul of torment and terror.
“What do you see, Sophia? Tell us,” he whispered, licking his lips, his eyes growing large and small in the sallow skin of his face.
A woman appeared behind him, the skin hanging slack from her skeleton. Her jowls hung, and she chomped rotted teeth at Sophia as she tried to claw at the doctor’s back.
“Lilian Hyde,” Sophia cried out when the woman’s name streamed through her mind. “Murdered by her doctor.”
Sophia watched Lillian move away from Kaiser into the crowd of men. Sophia could see the doctors now, they glimmered and changed shape, shrunk tiny and grew tall. Their faces were like wax candles dripping to the floor. Lillian, dead now a decade at least, stopped behind a short doctor with a pointed black mustache and a bowler hat perched on his head. His eyes narrowed toward Sophia. His body trembled, an aura of black surrounded him, and Sophia smelled the sweat of his fear fanning out.
“You!” Sophia hissed at the man, looking into his eyes. “Paul Strine, son of Jack and Carol Stine, husband of the deceased Helena Strine, father of one aborted child, doctor of psychiatry at the Eastern Michigan Asylum for the Insane. You strangled her,” Sophia gasped, trying to catch the words as they floated in light waves across her vision, she watched them, heard them, knew them. “You strangled her because she threatened to tell. Her husband was on to you, Paul. Lillian told him about your sick experiments.”
Paul stood, and Lillian’s corpse clawed and rolled at him. She moved through him and around him, shrieking, wild, a demon more than a spirit, but only Sophia had power in this room, the dead were only wisps of energy drifting by.
“Lies,” he growled, pointing at Sophia with a shaky hand, so shaky it weaved and bobbed.
The man beside Paul, touched his coat and Paul jumped in the air.
“Be still, man,” the other doctor chided. “You’re making a spectacle of yourself.”
Paul dropped his hand, he looked around the room as if remembering where he was. These men were not the law, they were his counterparts, they too experimented, murdered their patients in their quest for what-? Sophia saw images and words jumbled as she put the question into the void of spirits.
“Power, control, to prove that death is the end, to prove life after death, for the sake of science, to see my child again, to rule the world….” The men’s motivations poured over her, and she muttered them out loud. The spherical room sent her words echoing and reverberating. Some men listened, others still watched Paul, and it was not an accusation in their eyes, but fear - fear she would call out the blood on their hands.
Kaiser circled her like a lion toying with his prey, his hands clasped and unclasped, his eyes gleaming with ferocity. His body appeared to grow huge and black filling the entire space. Another figure stepped near him, a young man with a red beard and sad blue eyes. He did not look decayed as the last spirit had. The word fresh rose to Sophia’s mind.
“Fresh,” she whispered. “Andrew Rogan…”
Immediately another doctor in the crowd seemed to shrink away from the name.
“Age seventeen, Andrew saw things, the future. You,” she spat the word and looked at the cowering doctor who likely stood well over six feet tall, his square face red and blotchy in the firelight. “You killed him with insulin, more and more and more. How much can he take? Will he still see what’s to come? No, no. Just this morning,” Sophia continued. “Just this morning Dr. Edward Coleman gave one final injection.”
“Enough,” the man, Edward Coleman, announced, standing and yes he was tall, so very tall, and his patient, his dead patient only stood looking at him, past him, through him with those sad blue eyes. “I too am curious about this patient’s visions and clearly she… knows things. But I suggest a more controlled therapy.”
“This is a break-through,” another doctor chimed in. “She’s speaking names. She’s communing with the other side!”
“I agree,” Kaiser said, putting a hand on Sophia that made her convulse. His skin against hers felt like a thousand pricks from a needle. Her eyes rolled back, and she realized the more she spoke the longer it would go on. That was why they’d brought her here, like a circus monkey she’d performed and now they wanted more.
She pushed her teeth together and clenched her eyes shut and silently begged for the dead to depart.
“How long does the LSD last?”
Sophia had been listening to the voices for hours, or perhaps lifetimes, time ceased to make sense. She had not opened her eyes and remained still, traveling the corridors of her mind as the drug carried her into dimensions of thought previously unexplored.
“Hours, anywhere from four to twenty-four, according to Dr. Fritz,” Kaiser said.
Sophia sensed them standing over her, the energies of their bodies rumbling like dark cold waves. She shivered, and a burst of colored light filled her eyes. The words twenty-four hours made her mouth dry and sticky and her mind panicky. She wanted to scream, open her mouth and scream and scream. The thought almost made her laugh, and she knew the laugh would be high and hysterical, signs of the mad person they believed she was.
“Do you think she’s unconscious?” the same man asked, but his voice sounded doubtful.
Kaiser pressed a finger on her cheek and used another to wrench open her eyelid.
Sophia allowed her eyes to roll up, not sure how else to simulate sleep. He released the tender flesh, and she forced her eyelids not to flutter.
“Or in some hallucination. I read about patients who spent their entire experiences in a kind of catatonia, but it was rare.”
“Was she speaking true things?” the doctor whispered.
“Yes,” Kaiser said, and Sophia heard pride in his voice. “She sees the dead. It’s miraculous, isn’t it?”