Preston Child - The Fountain of Youth

A warm sensation tickled Nina’s upper lip. Both the women in her company gasped. Nina’s index finger explored the bottom bend of her nose. When she checked her finger, it yielded a bloody tip.

“Oh, it’s just a nosebleed,” Clara said.

“Aye,” Nina said, wincing as her headache increased to a skull-splitting level, “just a nosebleed.”

In Edinburgh, Dave Purdue was having a stiff drink on one of his balconies. It was his third in the past ten minutes. He’d been sleeping well enough of late, but the incomplete treatment he’d abandoned when Sam had broken him out of the Sinclair Medical Research Facility was catching up to him. He knew it would be imperative for him to return to the institution eventually, but he was reluctant because of the ambiguous circumstances of his so-called release. Yet his persistent problems with discerning reality prompted him to give institutionalization some serious thought.

“Shall I dish up, sir?” his cook asked from the study doorway.

“Yes, thank you. Just give me a few more minutes,” he called back to her. He felt the electric tension of a brewing rainstorm over his mansion and could smell the wondrous mossy scent of dead leaves and moist soil under the giant oaks that cradled Wrichtishousis. It had been his home for what seemed like an eternity, and yet he felt only like a visitor these days. His mind left him sometimes, not in an insane way, but rather it would neglect whatever he’d been trying to quantify or comprehend at that moment and wander off to something else. And that something else would usually constitute something reckless, almost as if it had been implanted by an external force. It had been months since he’d been tortured by the Order of the Black Sun, and his mind still suffered from the onslaught of their brainwashing methods.

“No wonder Nina hates me,” he glowered as he emptied the contents of the glass. “But I’m not one to lose my ego over women, am I?”

“Excuse me, sir?” the cook asked.

“Oh, uh, I’m just musing by myself,” Purdue chuckled as he skipped over the threshold of his balcony doors and locked them behind him. “Better to keep the storm out.”

“Indeed, Mr. Purdue. I hear they are expecting a right Biblical flood for the next two days,” she babbled, dishcloth in hand. “But not to fear, the week’s groceries have been bought and delivered, so you should be fine cloistered up in here.”

“I understand your concern, my dear,” Purdue told her as they approached the dining room at the bottom of the stairs, “but I assure you, my sense of adventure is far from doused. I shall be my old self as soon as I finish my research into the stone spheres of New Zealand. Who knows? I might even drag my personal chef with me.”

“No, thank you, sir,” she protested with a superstitious tone. “I’d rather leave all the chasing after spooky artifacts and strange places to your capable hands. No, thank you.”

Purdue grinned in amusement at her repudiation. Sometimes he forgot just how dangerous and unusual his excursions were. He sat down in his large dining room where he liked throwing cocktail parties and private fundraisers, and where he held meetings for the planning of expeditions with his vast array of experts. Only now their voices were absent, their educated speculation lacking, and Purdue felt the overwhelming pressure of the emptiness around him.

The food was exquisite, as usual, but his tongue refused him the pleasure. Loud and persistent, he used his utensils on the fragile plate to keep his mind from realizing that he was alone. Cheer seeped out of him like a draining wine vat as he gradually slipped from control.

“Agatha,” he whispered to his deceased sister. “Are you even dead? Am I just a shard of Edgar Alan Poe’s Roderick , the modern day, stinking rich, super-smart twin brother who buried his sister when she was still alive?”

His stomach contracted, expelling his recently swallowed morsels. Purdue felt his mind fall to shadow, to a place where Klaus Kemper wanted him. Fully aware of the imminent darkness and loss of composure, Purdue jumped up, grabbed a bottle of Jim Beam from his liquor cabinet, and ran for his laboratory. He deposited himself in the second section of his lab, where he kept his audio-visual gadgets and monitors for entertainment and editing purposes when shooting documentaries.

Quickly he placed his headphones over his ears and opened the drive to choose an album to listen to. His blue eyes swam in tears as Klaus Kemper’s evil coursed through his brain, still programmed to obey the late tyrant through a numeric-hypnotic method.

“Oh God, no! Not The Doors ! Not now. Jesus, that’s all I need while trying to get out of a mindbender!” he told himself. Quivering over his lips, his breath flowed hot and smelly from the neat gulps of bourbon he’d forced down to keep the commands from holding sway. He’d discovered that Kemper’s brainwashing was impeded by alcohol. Every time his mind locked into a sequence of numbers and he felt an urge beyond his control, drinking hard liquor would subdue his reasoning and numb his motor skills, fooling his mind into being too dumbed down to follow the subliminal orders.

“Here we go. Here we go!” Purdue smiled as tears streaked over his face. “That’ll do it.” His cursor fell on Lightnin’ Hopkins and Johnny Cash. Another swig burned right through the tears as the blues took the first turn. Purdue pulled up a chair, adamant to apologize to his cook for the waste of good food. But for now he felt the need to discard anything scientific or sober, trying to save his brain as much as his very soul. He sank back in the chair and relished the sensation of inebriated stupidity while the music closed off his calculative cognition.

“Who is Agatha again?” a man’s voice asked outside his mind.

“Don’t be stupid. Everyone knows who she is — was,” Purdue strained to speak the words while the alcohol infused his body. “She was my sister, but I left her buried under a library full of forbidden information.” He chuckled weakly, tears streaming over the edge of his face in droplets. “You know, she’d always wanted to be a librarian.”

“Where is this library?” the voice asked once more. “Can you show me on a map?”

“I don’t have to,” Purdue smiled with his eyes shut tight. The easy melodies of the music meandered over his mind and calmed his body like the bourbon. “I know the coordinates.”

“Can you give them to me?” the man asked from the dark that Purdue was reluctant to desert just yet. After all, it was just an alcohol-induced daydream.

“But of course,” he told the disembodied voice, unaware of his crumbling consciousness. “It is 45.4408° N…wait….12.31 and then, um, 55° E,” Purdue said. A scowl formed. “Or was it South?”

“Let me read that back to you,” the man said. “45-44-8,” he paused for a moment as if correcting the rest before continuing with, “2-2-58.”

Purdue’s eyes opened and he found that he was not in the sanctuary of his mansion and was grasping a rolled hand towel where his glass of Jim Beam had been a moment ago. Strapped into a comfortable chair, he noticed a familiar face in front of him.

“Dr. Helberg? We thought you were dead,” Purdue marveled.

“No, David. Still kicking,” the short man replied, although he’d visibly lost weight since the last time he’d been playing host to Sam, Nina, and a particularly nasty brain-manipulator.

“Good to see you,” Purdue nodded.

“David, do you remember what we were just discussing?” the doctor asked him.

“No, I was having a drink in…” Purdue realized that he had never been home in the first place and that familiar sinking feeling hit him again. “Oh, no. No! What did I do this time?”