The Tesla Experiment

Chapter 8

Lydia drew in the marijuana vapor, filling her lungs leisurely.

“Hmm, home grown is best,” she groaned in her hoarse tone, smiling to herself.

Her eyes rolled back in their sockets as she did, and the silence of the house loomed over her like a fast approaching stalker with no good intentions. Her mind raced with ideas, consequential concern, old memories, regrets and somewhere among the rush of her mind, the date of her death. It was an enigma, yes, but she knew it would be soon.

In the privacy of her own bedroom she waited for the men to return with that one elusive component she needed. She would have sent Healy, but the man was a soldier, a mercenary, not a scientist. Purdue, on the other hand, not only possessed the necessary aptitude for what she needed, but he had a passion similar to hers. Truth was that Lydia saw Purdue as her stuntman, her stand-in now that she could not even take a piss by herself without great pain and discomfort.

Healy was her only employee, save for the maids that came in twice a week. To them she was just another well paying client. They pitied the temperamental lady for her terminal condition and that was just the way Lydia wanted it. Only her butler knew what was really going on and he was the only person in Lyon she trusted. Now he was one of only two people she entrusted with her secrets, the other being old friend Dave Purdue.

Her room was quite different from the rest of the house, although it still featured the sheeting. Without these special walls she would perish from even the slightest fluctuation in sound, yet this was not something she could tell Purdue yet. It could spook him into abandoning his loyalty for fear of what could happen — the same thing that happened to her before. Facing her hideous reflection in her dressing table mirror, she slowly removed her head scarf and surveyed the surface of her scalp. Her hands lightly probed at the cotton wool patches of what was left of her hair, drawing a flood of silent tears from Lydia.

Sobbing softly in the deathly silence she reminisced about her fleeting time and her lost beauty.

“Was it all worth it?” she asked her reflection. “Well, was it?”

Lips moved under the tears of her image, but it lent her no answer. Her eyes fell to the pointless hair brush on her dresser and her heart grew taut with rage. Picking it up, Lydia played with the soft brush between her long lean fingers, nails painted to maintain some sort of vanity where the brittle condition had to be hidden. Even if she knew it was there, she need not see it.

“You’ll see, Lydia. You’ll see that it was worth it!” she shouted in her wicked rasp of defeat. “You will die, yes, but you will die having fucked the science world that rejected your genius!” Her watery, pink eyes grew wide and furious as she raised the brush at the impotent image of her crumbling face, “But are you willing to kill your friends for the glory? What if Purdue does not survive it? What if…” she seethed in her indecision, painfully plucking tufts of useless hair from her scalp.

This was Healy never left her alone. He knew of her emotional turmoil, a natural, but dangerous quality of her illness. “Look at you! You stupid glory whore! Are you happy now? Is this what you wanted? You are a dying piece of flesh with a voice, while your brilliant brain is shriveling up like a raisin!” she shrieked so loud that her skull shuddered and ached under the dangerous sound level of her cries.

Lydia caught her breath and held it.

Staring at herself in the mirror, shivering in a vicious rout, brush aloft in an unstable hand. The fading beauty contemplated her next action.

“Will it kill me? Shall we see? It is not like anyone would notice that a has-been bitch is gone. They’ll find the poor little cancer victim on the floor, dead, where she belongs. Pity, pity, pity,” she giggled in a girly voice, a true exhibition of what she had to contain and control in company — the fact that she was already insane.

Without another thought she hurled the hair brush into the large old mirror. It shattered the center of the looking glass, right where her face was. But that was by no means the worst. The crashing sound was too much for the plating on the walls to absorb, and the discs on her ears could only dampen some of the intensity.

Lydia screamed in pain as the sound screeched through her delicate brain matter. Her fragile body fell limply to the side from the numbing agony as she held her ears. But even that hurt.

“Oh Jesus! Jeeezussss!” she squealed, partly disappointed that the sound did not kill her instantly. The contact of her hands on the deteriorating skin of her ears and scalp was excruciating beyond her expectations. Her cellular degeneration had a severe effect on her nerve endings, more than she knew.

“It would be better not to fall out of your wheelchair now! No time to be melodramatic, you stupid, stupid bitch!” she growled inside the little space between her face and her knees, where she had buried her face as she writhed. The decibels still echoed in her ears, the pretty and brutal clinks of the mirror slivers falling one by one to the dresser.

When it all passed and Lydia’s environment was quiet once more, she took a deep breath and sat up. Her image was wonderfully distorted in front of her. Lydia smiled.

“Finally your image becomes your fate,” she smiled. Tears dried just short of her jaw line, but her eyes drowned.