John Wright - Orphans of Chaos

We all stood motionless, staring at the huge hound.

The dog sat on his haunches, tilted his head to one side, and let his tongue hang out.

Vanity pointed away South. “That way. We’re going that way.”

The dog barked once, and immediately trotted off the other direction.

“Nice doggy…” said Vanity softly. Then she said, “I am beginning to get a good feeling about our chances.”

A few minutes later, and we were under way again. I shouldered one duffel bag, Victor carried one, and Colin and Quentin flipped a coin to see who would take the third.

Because Lelaps was likely to lead any pursuit astray, we shared Vanity’s confidence, and did not set too hard a pace. We talked as we walked, and some of us, envious of Quentin’s walking stick, had asked Colin to cut staves for us from the branches around. Colin used the axe handle as a cane, and leaned on the axe head, in a fashion I thought most unsafe. He had also been running with it in his hands. I thought it was only a matter of time before someone got cut with it.

I said to Quentin, “What was all that ‘Lord make his face to shine upon you’ stuff back there at the grave? You’re not a Christian anymore. You told me so.”

“I’m still English,” he said mildly.

Vanity said, “Are you going to tell us what happened to you last night?”

Colin agreed, “Let’s have the tale, Quentin. Do tell, do!”

We trudged along beneath gray skies as he spoke, in the crisp air beneath the woven white lace canopy of frost-touched trees, and in the highest spirits we had ever known.

“I did not see him in the snow when I stepped out onto the roof, because he was buried in it. He was laying face up under about an inch of powder, and he sat up. All he was wearing was a white lab coat. How he got by without breathing, I don’t know.

“His forehead opened in a vertical split, and behind the split was a third eye, blue as gunmetal, every part of it. He projected his spell from the eye, and it struck me, and I could feel my magic snuffed out in an instant. Do you ever think of your own body as a coffin? That is the way I felt. As if my soul got smaller when his spell struck.

“I walked with him back to his lab. I remember asking him along the way if he was a Cyclops. Amelia and I had seen another man with a third eye earlier that evening.

“He said that his real name was Telemus. ‘You are thinking I am a triclops, aren’t you? But this,’ and he pointed at his own face, ‘is merely an appliance, like the one your fellow inmate Victor Triumph wears… I can see you are curious,’ he said.

“And he leaned down and drew his eyelid wide with his fingertip and asked me to touch his eye. Well, I thought it was my chance to escape, so I took it. I poked him in the eye as hard as I could with my finger, and turned and ran.

“His eye was as hard and as dry as a marble. I had run perhaps twenty yards—a fair distance—and turned to see why he wasn’t following, and I saw him, with a hard little smile on his face, flicking a blood drop from the end of his finger at me. Even though he was too far away to hit me with a little fingerflick, he did.

“It had the shape of a red needle when it hit my pants leg, and it vibrated, like a dentist drill, and sank into my calf. A cold sensation seized my leg. I could feel it spreading through my veins. I fell down and could not get up.

“He walked up and told me the running was to get my heart rate high, so the effect would spread faster. He threw me over his shoulder as if I had no weight at all, and he walked back to his lab. He did not turn on any lights as he walked through the corridors: I think he has perfect night vision.

“He strapped me to a gurney, and—Victor, may I leave out certain details? Well, never mind. We are among friends here. I had dirtied myself when my legs went numb, and he yanked my pants off and wiped my bottom like I was a baby. I was a baby, I suppose, or as good as. He didn’t seem disgusted or anything. I don’t think he noticed I was a person at all. Anyway, that was not the most humiliating thing that happened that night.

“He never did turn on the lights in his office. The only light was a little moonlight coming in through his windows, and shadows of his instrument cases and files were black as pitch.

“He goes over to a cabinet, mixes some things together, and steps up to a table. There was a patch of moonlight there, and I saw what happened. Dr. Fell holds his hand over a beaker, and blood wells up out of his fingers like sweat. He did not cut himself. He stares at his hand and it starts dripping.

“He opens his third eye again and cooks the blood in the light that comes from this eye.

“He says to me, ‘The science of cryptognosis is based on the insight that all structure in the nervous system is based upon previous, cruder structures. The nature of any hierarchy is that different functions are carried out at different levels; for a neural hierarchy, this means that structures in the thalamus and hypothalamus influence the content and priority of sense impressions before they reach the cortex, whereupon other structures in the midbrain organize, file, and recover past impressions according to the coded signals they receive from other areas of the brain. Whole areas of decision-reflexes are coded and carried out without sending any paths through the cortex. Once set in motion, the reflex cycle automatically completes itself. Anything that mimics or masks these signals can alter signal priorities and set the reflex in motion. This includes both muscular reflexes—’ he squinted at me, sent a dot of blue light out from his third eye, and my whole body jumped’—glandular reflexes—‘and he made me wet myself again’—and neural reflexes. One such set of neural reflexes controls what is passed on to long-term memory, and what is dumped.’

“He stabbed me with the hypodermic needle. ‘I have programmed the molecular engines in the serum to seek out the control-ganglia for memory in your nervous system. The effect should take twenty minutes or so to complete. After that, I can induce narcolepsy by activating the sleep-center in your pons, and turn on your delta-wave function by stimulating your medulla oblongata. When you wake, the last twelve hours or so will be gone.’

“I should mention, he did not walk over and push the needle into me. He pointed, and the needle levitated by itself, flew across the room, and stabbed me. He curled his fingers and the empty hypo floated back to his hand.

“I tried to get him to talk. I said that since I wasn’t going to remember anything of what he said, could he please tell me who I was or what was going on?

“He answered the first question, but then got bored with the game, and sat down and began writing notes or something. He sat there in nearly complete darkness reading from one book and making entries in a journal. I could hear the scratching of the pen on the page.

“I heard footsteps then, and the lights came on. They seemed so bright after the gloom. But Dr. Fell did not blink. His eyes are just painted marbles, after all. He just stood up at his desk.

“Here I am strapped to a table with no pants on, and a drunk Japanese woman comes into the room. Very pretty, like a china doll, if she had been sober. She is wearing a kimono of a blue floral pattern with a wide red sash—what are they called? An obi—with silver tracery running through it. But on her, it is all hanging loose and askew, and her cheeks are all bright pink with strong drink, and you can smell the alcohol on her breath. Her hair is done up in one of those elaborate folded masses, with pearl combs and bamboo chopsticks and little ornaments in it, but it is half-undone, and strands are everywhere. She lost her shoes somewhere too, and is walking around in these toe socks.