The Home

FORTY-THREE

Freeman was with Vicky, bridged, as the floor disappeared beneath her feet in the cell. The darkness of the small room gave way to gray as the writhing shapes appeared like an invading army on the horizon. Faces stood out among the coalescence, sets of eyes that had seen as much horror in death as in life. Faint fingers clawed the air, tongues and teeth gnashed in silent anger.

Ghost bedlam. These spirits had shouted their broken words against the cell walls, painted their pain in the stone and steel and concrete of the basement, bounced their mad thoughts against the unyielding fences of reality. These were the patients who had been damned and doomed to live out their confused lives in the narrow basement rooms. Now they were forever committed to Wendover's regiments of the dead.

Freeman couldn't blame them for being angry at those who had disturbed their slumbering escape from this vicious world.

"They're eating the light," Vicky said.

"I know," Freeman said. He felt the vibration as she pounded on the cell door.

"Kracowski's machines brought them back. Here where they hurt the most."

"They're still lost, though. Listen…"

Outside Vicky's cell came a roar like a metallic tidal wave. The other cell doors in the basement had yanked themselves open and slammed against the walls. Either the magnetic force had pulled the doors from their locks or the rooms' former inhabitants were staging a massive jail-break.

Disconnected and mad thoughts spilled into the open line that existed between him and Vicky, a triptrap with the spirits that froze the inside of Freeman's skull like a hundred hits of ice cream. He recognized some of the voices from his earlier journey into the deadscape, but familiarity didn't make them any less insane. He tried to block them, but they came regardless:

Notes in the television, doctor.

I am a tree and I leave.

Crazy as a bugbed.

A white, white room in which to write.

Freeman focused on Vicky again as the shapes drew closer. "What do they want?" she thought at him, inside him.

"Maybe they're just coming back because they don't have anywhere else to go. Maybe these cells were all they ever had, the closest thing to home. Sad as it sounds, maybe they belong here."

"Don't be scared."

"I'm not scared," Freeman thought.

"Look, I told you, you can't lie to somebody who's reading your mind."

The spirits closed in, drawn by the invisible field, their eyes glittering, mouths gasping for air they couldn't breathe. Freeman thought about breaking the bridge, pulling away from Vicky, and shutting off those crazy dead voices. Then he felt ashamed for his selfishness, and linked to her again with all his concentration.

The ghosts were so close that their cold mist shrouded Vicky, the impossible flesh giving off a faint effervescent light. The endless darkness around them and behind them grew even blacker, as if drawing energy from the stray photons in the basement.

"They don't know who to blame," Freeman thought. He felt a hand on his shoulder. Afraid it was one of the deranged ghosts, he turned. Isaac stood behind him, with Starlene and Dipes. In reality, the one with hard walls, not the just-as-real but less-solid deadscape. He crouched and closed his eyes, found Vicky again.

"Where did you go?" she asked.

"Not very far. This is weird."

"Clint in High Plains Drifter, huh?"

"That'll do."

She pounded on the door again. Freeman heard Dad's muffled ranting on the other side of the door, then the door cracked open and a wedge of light sliced into the cell. Dad's face appeared his grin like a gash, eyes bright and watery.

"Vicky, meet my Dad," Freeman triptrapped.

Freeman felt a little of his carefully hidden secrets slip out, heard Vicky gasp as she caught a glimpse of the tortures inflicted upon him, the dark days in the closet, the ESP tests, the brainwashing experiments, the needles and cattle prods and shock treatments, the infamous incident with the blowtorch and Luckily, Freeman shut down before she walked the halls of his memory with him, blade in hand, to visit Mom in the bathtub.

Vaporous hands reached for Vicky, passing through her. Freeman felt the contact on his own skin, then realized it was Starlene, tugging him into the basement from the stairwell door. She pulled again and Freeman lost contact with Vicky.

"What's going on?" she asked, as Freeman shook himself back to the physical world. Dipes and Isaac looked at him as if he'd returned from Mars and they were awaiting tales of green aliens.

"Vicky," Freeman said. "She's in trouble."

They could hear Freeman's dad at the far end of the basement, laughing like the world was ending. Freeman tried to triptrap back to Vicky, but something had changed. Either Kracowski or Dad had screwed with the field again, or else Vicky had gone under.

He remembered the icy touch of that dead hand passing through her skin, and imagined it squeezing her heart. Did this mean he was down, depressed, out of the loop? He couldn't afford that now.

"Come on," he yelled at the others, running down the dim corridor. The glow of the machinery beckoned him, and he tried to recall the layout of the basement using Vicky's memory. Dad had obviously renovated the setup a little, taken control, put a new spin on Kracowski's treatment.

The others followed him. He tried to put on his Clint Eastwood face, twisted his mouth a little and squinted through one eye, but the act felt stupid. De Niro in Good-fellas or Pacino in Carlito's Way didn't work. Not even Nicholson in The Postman Always Rings Twice would fly in this situation. No time to pretend to be a flawed hero. Besides, heroes weren't supposed to be this scared.

He rounded the corner just as Dad threw the cell door open. A sick light leaked from the room where Vicky had been trapped, the results of Dad's and Kracowski's experimental solution now free from the flask, the genie out of the bottle, Pandora's box unsealed.

The tortured souls of the insane fell through the door into the real world, a world they had never understood. A world that had shocked and strapped and chained them, a world that denied them and jailed mem and forgot mem. This time, they had someone to blame for their pain.

They swarmed over Dad, a dozen milky hands grabbing at him, touching, investigating, trying to make sense of this fleshly invader of their hidden land. They rode the electromagnetic fields into the basement, drawn to the machines, staring at the curved panels, the tanks, wires, and circuitry as if they were tricks in some new psychological assessment test.

Dad put out tentative hands against the ghosts, white Rorschachs, testing their solidity, no doubt making mental notes on this new species. It was a species he'd love to claim for his own. Freeman knew the agony written on the faces of the dead had no effect on Dad. The suffering of others meant nothing. Pain was a means to an end, and if some poor pathetic souls were wrenched from eternal rest, that was the price of understanding.

Not human understanding, Dad's understanding.

Dad had to know every goddamned thing in the world; he had to know why people lived and why they hurt and why they dreamed and what made them tick and what made them break. Freeman knew all mat very well. Dad had broken him plenty.

A rage filled him as he crept down the hall. The equipment throbbed and hummed, and Dad's voice rose over the electronic chaos. Dad was talking to the ghosts, shrinking them, pushing them to the edge. Even the dead had to endure his scorn.

"Come on, you crazy dead fuckers," Dad screamed. "You're supposed to hate me. You know why? Because I'm the one who brought you back. Hahahahaha."

Freeman ducked behind a row of metal cylinders and peeked around, unsure what to do next. Starlene caught up with him, Dipes and Isaac close behind, all of them panting.

"Don't look at him," Dad shouted, as the ghosts drifted toward Kracowski. "I'm the one who did all the work. It was my idea. You belong to me."

Kracowski pressed back against the wall, face blanched and blank, hands in his lab coat.

Dad chopped at the air like a stunt man in a kung fu movie. His arms passed through the ghosts, the ether barely stirred by the motion.

"Damn, Kracowski," Dad said. "The field is cooking with gas now. Just think, if we can make one big enough, we might fill up the whole fucking world with ghosts."

Kracowski, his words nearly without air, said, "What have we done? Good God what are we doing?"

Dad laughed blew a breath at the nearest ghost, a wiry figure who made a drawing motion in response. Freeman guessed it was the writer, the one who was forever fixed on that phrase, "A white, white room in which to write." Beside The Writer stood an old woman with a large iridescent scar across her forehead.

"The dead and the living, walking side by side," Dad said to the stunned Kracowski. "Who knows where it will end? What do you think, McDonald? Think your little secret society will find a way to take over the world using these tilings?"

McDonald said nothing in response. Drool leaked from one corner of his mouth, his pupils of different sizes. He crawled on his belly as if he'd lost the use of his legs. And his mind.

"The Mills Effect," Dad said turning his attention back to Kracowski. "What do you think? Catchy, huh?"

Dad slapped at the ghost of an old woman, who was hunched and wrinkled and ragged whose translucent face registered a sneer of suspicion. "How about it, bitch? The Mills Effect. Do you like being the byproduct of my out-of-this-world genius?"

Starlene, leaning over Freeman's shoulder, whispered "He's gone over the edge."

"He was born over the edge," Freeman said. "Trouble is, he wants to drag everybody else over with him."

"How do we get Vicky?" Isaac said.

"McDonald's down for the count, and I don't see any guards. I guess McDonald didn't want any witnesses."

"Then we go for it?" Starlene asked.

"What about it, Dipes? What kind of future are you seeing?"

"I see four," Dipes said.

"Four. Choices, choices. Do any of them have happy endings?"

In the silence, they heard Freeman's dad shouting at the ghosts.

"What about it, Dipes?" Freeman asked.

"I think we better leave now. I don't see the future where we leave, but it's got to be better than the ones I do see."

Freeman watched as a shape appeared on the basement wall beyond the bright metal of the holding tanks. The shape flickered like a magic lantern, grew nebulous flesh, peered blindly at Dad and Kracowski and the machinery and the other ghosts.

Then the Miracle Woman came up from her cold and faraway land, drifted from the stones where she slept, stepped into the dim and restless reality that Freeman had never before so strongly doubted.

At that moment, Freeman understood the real world was nothing more than the collective nightmares of the sleeping dead.