Sanctum (22 page)

“They’re gone. . . .” Jordan slowed to a stop, bending to rest his hands on his knees and catch his breath. His dark hair was limp, his cheeks sweaty and bright red. “I think we lost them.”

“Where can we go?” Dan asked. They regrouped under a tree across from the chapel. The carnival continued to their left, the academic buildings of the campus clustered behind the church. “We need somewhere private. Safe.”

“We can try one of the library study rooms,” Abby suggested. She leaned heavily against the tree, gasping.

“If someone comes for us there, we’ll be cornered,” Jordan replied. “We need somewhere open.”

Dan was only half listening. He watched the shadows closely, ready for those chanting Scarlets to show up any second. What would they do to him if they caught him? He didn’t want to think about it, not if there was a chance they could avoid that same fate. Jordan and Abby were probably thinking the same thing, judging by how they hung their heads, as if exhausted by the weight of what they had seen.

“What about the computer lab under our dorm?” Abby asked. “There’s one right before the tunnels. I remember seeing it in the orientation map.”

“It’s worth looking at. . . . Dan? Dan, are you listening?”

“Hm? Right. The computer lab. Sure.” He turned to look at Jordan, noticing the rumpled notes clutched to his stomach. “Could I have those back?”

“What, like right now?” Jordan snorted. “Yeah, here. Take them. They give me the creeps.”

Abby was already heading in the direction of the residential side of campus. The two boys scrambled to keep up. “You don’t even know what’s in them yet,” she pointed out.

“Yeah, because manacle chair and creepazoid basement probably means those notes are filled with rainbows and bunny rabbits. Come on . . . Nothing good could come from that place.”

“Jordan’s right. I found all kinds of photographs and charts. . . .” Dan peeled open his coat, his sweater damp underneath.

“Jesus, look at you. Do you have watches and handbags in there, too?”

“No, I just . . . I just . . . took whatever I saw. I didn’t know what was important. Here, look at these.” Dan handed out a few pictures to them but kept the young warden’s diary close to his side.

Abby held one up, squinting. It wasn’t until they passed under a streetlamp that she gasped. “You guys need to look at this.”

“What is it?” Dan crowded next to her. She held up the picture he had already seen, the one with a scratched-out face beside a hook-nosed man in a trim black suit. “Whoa, look at the carpet.”

“That’s the CIA seal,” Jordan said with an incredulous laugh.

“Who do you think is there with him?” Abby asked softly.

“I’ll give you three guesses and the first two don’t count,” Jordan said.

Dan found himself nodding. The coat, the pocket watch . . . He had seen enough old photos of the warden to spot the man’s stance, his style. “Warden Crawford.”

Laughing, Jordan pulled away, putting both gloved palms on his head. “This is crazy-pants. What the hell would that guy be doing meeting with the CIA?”

“I don’t know,” Dan admitted. He held up the pamphlet. “But whatever it is, I bet we’ll find it in here.”

Chapter 23

T
he computer lab was spare and sterile, a long, low room snuggled up under Erickson Dormitory. Dan found himself relieved to see there were two doors, one on each end of the room, so that it felt more like a bunker than a computer lab. It being Halloween night, nobody was there to study or do homework, and the heat seemed to have been turned off. It was freezing.

One of the pale blue lights overhead flickered, buzzing irregularly, just irritating enough to make Dan’s eye twitch.

Abby was on the floor next to Jordan’s computer, using Dan’s phone and the image on it to try to roughly reconstruct the layout of the blackboard. The young warden’s journal still sat heavy against his side. Dan wanted badly to start reading it, but only when he had time to himself.

“Jordan? Do me a favor,” Abby said, pulling off her mittens and hat and piling them haphazardly next to her project. “Take this list of names and see if you get any hits on the college website. Alums will come back to work for the school a lot of times, so maybe we’ll get lucky and find someone who was there for all of this.”

“Brilliant idea,” Jordan said with real admiration in his voice. He took the list from her and started typing furiously. “I think it’s a safe bet that the warden and the Scarlets are connected. That name-chanting . . . Ugh. I don’t even want to think about it.”

Neither did Dan.

He turned his attention to the pamphlet of notes. Sitting on the edge of a table a few feet behind Jordan’s chair, he swung his legs nervously back and forth. While coming inside had brought an initial blast of warmth, the cold seemed to have found its way back into his bones.

The topmost pieces of paper felt brittle, stained with dark, broken rings, as if from coffee cups. Some of the pencil notes in the margins had worn away to obscurity from age. Dan propped the pages on his knees, afraid that handling the pamphlet would only damage the pages more. A note card had been clipped to the front of the stack.

“Kentucky, 1953,’” he read quietly. “He would have been in his prime then.”

“So you’re sure he wrote that?” Jordan asked.

“Yes,” Dan replied, flipping to the first page. “I know his handwriting by now.”

It rained all day yesterday and this morning. I wrongly assumed it would be warm here in the spring, but the days are chill and cloudy, and the rain seems never to stop. Dr. Forester believes that might disrupt the subjects’ concentration and expressed his relief that milder weather persists. I attempted to share my theories regarding a three-pronged approach—physically, sensory, spiritually—but Forester insists on exploring only the physical. This shortsightedness will be his downfall. I’m sure of it.

Perhaps I should not begrudge Forester his purely scientific approach. This is not a privately-funded experiment. Every
I
must be dotted, every
T
crossed. Still, all avenues should be investigated, we seek to unlock the core secrets of the mind and that may not be possible using chemicals and suggestions alone.

Dan flipped to the next page. Half of what he was looking at was incomprehensible, blocked-off charts with shorthand scribbles only a doctor could decipher. No patient names were listed, just numbers, presumably to maintain some kind of anonymity. He wondered if there was a corresponding list somewhere that contained the patients’ identities.

The warden’s writing picked up again on the page after that.

As I expected, when administered the drug, subjects hallucinate and babble, but we are no closer to producing a clean slate. One prostitute—I have forgotten her name—chased her own shadow for four hours. Not the breakthrough any of us were hoping for. Patient 67 has been given lysergic acid diethylamide for eight consecutive days. Forester plans to continue this persistent dosage. For how long he would not say.

Yet all of this remains irrelevant. When I wrested that jewel from Dr. Maudire’s clenched hands, I did so believing I would one day put it to use for the greater good. I might not consider myself a patriot, but the thought of having utter control over a person’s mind in the long term . . . If I must suffer Forester’s fool antics to get closer to the answer, then I can play the docile assistant.

He remains convinced that we will find a way to manufacture the ultimate truth serum, and reprogram the mind. A simpleton could be made a genius, a genius a fool. The implications for espionage, for warfare, are immense. But that is not where my interest lies. To control the now is a simple thing, but to control the future? That is worth striving for.

For a long moment, Dan stared down at the page in his lap. This went way beyond what he had expected to find. If the date on the note card was correct, it meant the warden had been laying the groundwork for his experiments at Brookline for years before he became the warden there. Whatever research he had begun in Kentucky he had continued in even more gruesome ways at the asylum.

Abby spoke up suddenly, craning her neck to look up at Jordan from her place on the floor. “What’s lysergic acid die . . . thyla . . . mide?” She stumbled over the word, then picked up a note card and held it up for Jordan. “This. What is that?”

“It’s in mine, too,” Dan said.

Jordan took the card and opened a new browser window, typing with quick, loud keystrokes. “Huh. That’s weird. It’s LSD.”

“You mean like acid?” Abby asked, snorting. “That can’t be right.”

“Click on that top entry,” Dan said. Over Jordan’s shoulder he could see the Wikipedia entry for the drug. “Skim it.”

“Hey . . . ,” Jordan said softly, reading, then louder. “Whoa. Whoa, hey.” He pointed frantically at the screen, twisting around to give Dan a wide-eyed grimace. “The CIA experimented with this stuff. They thought they could use it for mind control and like drop bombs of it on Russia. Chemical warfare, messed-up stuff. My history teacher used to rant about this. I guess I just assumed he was full of it.” Glancing at the screen, he sat up straighter. “MKUltra. That’s it. That’s what he used to rant about in fifth period.”

“It sounds like the warden wasn’t happy with how the experiments were going,” Dan said. He did some quick mental math. “Nineteen fifty-three . . . Eisenhower was president then.”

“That explains the picture.” Abby took it from where she had placed it on the floor.

“So the warden gets picked to be part of CIA experiments and goes to Kentucky, but he’s unsatisfied with the methods and, what? Leaves to come here and start up his own experiments on mental patients?” It was more information than they’d had before, but Dan couldn’t help feeling they were still missing something. There was the mention of Dr. Maudire and the jewel. And in the young warden’s journal, he called his special rock “the bright burning star.” Could it be the same jewel that was on Lucy’s necklace? What did it have to do with Felix?

His fingers itched to grab that other journal, the one still hidden in his coat. Instead, he looked at the next page of the pamphlet. The entry was short, just a few lines. He hadn’t considered that handwriting could actually look angry, but this did.

Forester is a myopic old fool. He continues to thwart me, and even went so far as to chide me for circumventing the parameters of the experiment. Me! Chide me! When he is the weak link in the chain. Maybe if he were my patient, I could unlock his true potential and then he would not be so limiting or so dull.

The entries became shorter and shorter.

Forester dismissed me permanently today. That is well enough. I’ve had a breakthrough, and as I suspected, it was only possible through the three-pronged approach. The drug, the operation, the stone. It is not yet perfect, but I have found the secret to creating my own true agents. Control. I have it at last.

A few pages later and there was hardly anything written at all.

Sanctum, a holy or sacred place—what could be more sacred than possessing the power of your own true thoughts? Sanctum. It is both lock and key.

When Dan turned to the next set of notes, the paper looked much newer, not nearly as stained or crinkled. Again, they were clipped with a note card, and the date caught his attention—1960. Seven years later. That was quite a gap. He shivered to think what the warden might have gotten up to in those missing years.

I have found him at last. My perfect subject. There will be more perfect ones, I’m sure, but he was the first. An alcoholic, homeless, nobody would miss him. One hundred and seventy-four days with the drugs in his system. A marvel it didn’t permanently damage his mind. It was a simple thing to arrange the surgery and see that his lobotomy was completed without incident.

Now all that remains is the third and final step, reprogramming his mind with hypnosis, and thereby exposing him to Dr. Maudire’s jewel. I have never believed in the power of trinkets. Reasoning, logic, knowledge, science—in these things I believe. But objects? It’s silly even to entertain the thought . . . but my hypnosis is never more potent than when I use the trickster’s stone. There is something unique about this stone, I’m convinced of this. Even a man of science must amend his beliefs when the same result occurs again and again.

Maudire claimed he stole it from a mad spinster’s grave, and the act of robbing a dead woman gave the gem its terrible power. A wild fantasy, I’m certain, meant to capture the imagination of a lonely little boy.

It worked, though perhaps not in the old fool’s favor. Did its power increase, I wonder, when I strangled its owner?

It does not matter. What matters is that I have tracked my perfect subject, my dear Harry Cartwright, and soon he will be my thrall.

So Maudire really was dead. Dan had never met the man himself, just his apparition. How did that work exactly? Did the old magician leave behind some kind of imprint? It was one thing to
see
another person’s memories, it was another thing entirely to have a conversation with them. Shuddering, Dan skimmed back up the page. “Listen to this. . . .”