The Home

FORTY-FOUR

Francis Bondurant sat on the cot in Thirteen, staring at his reflection in the two-way mirror. What had these kids seen, lying here blasted by Dr. Kracowski's forbidden fields? Had they come face-to-face with the Devil himself? The way they shook and whined and gurgled Bondurant wouldn't be surprised. After all, the troubled little sinners deserved that sort of punishment.

He fumbled with the restraint straps and the cold buckles. Then he picked up the wires ending in the padded electrodes that Randy and Paula stuck to the kids' heads. Kracowski's torture was complex, his tools of inflicted salvation full of arcane symbols and machines and invisible waves. But wasn't science the realm of Satan? Didn't lust for knowledge cause that first bite into Eden's apple?

Bondurant looked at his own image again, at the man staring back at him. That was a righteous man, a true servant of God. If his flask weren't empty, Bondurant would have toasted the man. The world needed more like him. Fair, stern, and charitable, but if the Lord so willed he knew how to deliver a Joshuan trumpet blast.

As he watched, the face shifted the image rippling against the glass as if the mirror were under moving water. The eyes staring back at him became dark and hollow, his thin red cheeks swelling into wrinkled puffs of gray flesh. The image finished its transition and Bondurant found himself looking at the old man from the lake, the worn and weathered creature who had long ago left his skin and bones behind. The man's cracked lips moved, and though no sound came from his mouth, Bondurant heard his words.

"Instrument of the Devil, eh? Isn't that a little bit melodramatic, Francis?"

Bondurant started to speak, then found he didn't have to, at least not aloud. For the man knew what he was about to say before the thought reached Bondurant's tongue. "How do you know my name?"

"Your office used to be my office."

"Y-you don't belong here."

The man's silent laughter crept through Bondurant's forehead. "I belong here more than you do, Francis. I was at Wendover before it was Wendover. I was head of the ward."

"You drowned in the lake."

"You can't very well drown when you're already dead."

Bondurant's chest grew cold. "Are you… Satan?"

"Not quite." Again the inaudible laugh came, a soft sound that held as much sorrow as joy. "Though some of my patients thought so. Then again, other patients thought I was God."

"Our blessed Father in Heaven."

"Yeah, Kingdom Come and all that. Well, Francis, take it from one who's been there, it's all a crock of shit."

Bondurant shook his head.

The wisps of the old man's features faded a little, then sewed themselves more solidly together on the mirror's surface. "If there was a God, then I would have looked Him in the eye when I died. Because there's one thing I've always wanted to ask Him. And I'll bet you've wondered the same thing. You know what that is?"

"No," Bondurant thought, staring at the floor. He couldn't endure the black nothingness of the old man's eyes anymore.

"I'd ask him, 'Why do bad tilings happen to innocent people?'"

Bondurant thought of the children who'd been entrusted to his care, the abused, the orphaned, the lame, the unrepentant. He'd allowed the children to talk about then-problems, submitted them to group therapy and individual counseling, let them speak their worries in confidential rooms. The sorry little sinners should have spilled their guts on their knees in Wendover's chapel instead. Just them and the Lord, heart to heart. The wicked would burn and those who saw the light would be saved. That was the way of God's Earth, and all else was smoke.

The old man's image shimmered again, drifted from the surface of the mirror and became whole. He stood in his dirty gown and bare feet like a wandering monk. A beggar. Or was this man sent by God Himself to deliver a message to Bondurant?

The room was quiet except for the faint hum of the machinery beneath the floor. Kracowski was playing games in the basement, him and McDonald and that new one, Dr. Mills. Wendover had been given over to dark forces. Bondurant's only hope now was for personal salvation. All the rest was lost.

The old man shuffled over to Bondurant, his feet making no sound. With each step he became more solid, until Bondurant could smell the soiled gown and the toothless breath. He put an icy hand on Bondurant's chest and gently pushed him back onto the cot.

"Rest, Mr. Bondurant."

Bondurant wanted to struggle, to jump up and run screaming from the room, but the hand was insistent. Was this the hand of God? Bondurant grew dizzy and weak, confused. If only he had a bottle.

"I want to help you," the man said, raising one of the restraint straps. "With this problem of yours."

Bondurant lay helpless as the old man folded the straps over Bondurant's legs and chest. His wrists and ankles were then locked in padded cuffs. The old man applied the blue gel to the electrodes and attached them to Bondurant's head.

"Will it hurt?" Bondurant asked.

"Suffering is the way to healing," the old man said his eyes like dark seeds under the thick eyebrows.

"Who are you?" Bondurant wasn't sure he wanted to know the answer. But he was on the edge of something important, some connection between himself and Wendover's past. Or maybe he was sobering up. An uneasiness rippled through him, the gel tickling his skin.

The old man knelt so close to Bondurant's face that his words made a breeze on his cheeks. "I'm the doctor. I make people better."

He gave a grin that looked far too much like a tray of scalpels. Then he turned and shuffled toward the mirror. He met the surface, shimmered then melded into the glass and disappeared. The ceiling microphone came on with a hiss. "I prefer the old-fashioned techniques," the old man said "but I suppose one must change with the times."

A thread of juice stitched across Bondurant's skin. A hum arose in the walls, soft and sinister, as if a nest of winged things had been disturbed. The cot vibrated slightly, and Bondurant clenched his fists. The first shock pierced his skull and he bit his tongue, tasting blood.

Riding that jolt of electricity were scattered thoughts, nightmare glimpses, visions that Bondurant immediately knew had been witnessed by the old man's living eyes:

A needle, pushed into a woman's frail arm, dosing her with enough insulin to knock her into a coma.

More electroshock, an assembly line of frightened patients in white, all led from the treatment room like drooling sheep.

A scene from the basement, the inside of a cell, orderlies carrying the corpse of a woman with bloody sockets where her eyes had been.

An ice pick, slid up a nostril and turned inside the upper curve of skull, severing the frontal lobe.

Another operation, this time a saw rasping through the skull to take the lobe via the forehead.

Bondurant screamed for mercy, but the dead doctor only turned up the juice. Then the force field radiated from the walls and slapped him into darkness.

The old man's voice followed him. "See? A doctor's work is never done. Even death can't ease their troubled minds."

Bondurant wasn't listening, even though the words reverberated inside his head. Amid the black, suffocating stillness that surrounded him, pale shapes slithered through the cracks of nothingness. He closed his eyes and wept like a baby until the doctor came to comfort him and remove the straps.