The
old district of Kingsport, Massachusetts provides many fine examples
of colonial architecture. It is not, by any means, the most
extensive 'colonial town' example or the most closely maintained in
original form. Even so, it has a charm unique to itself. With the
city isolated by cliffsides on one side, high hills on another, and
the ocean, it maintains an cloistered feel despite being a city. In
the evenings, when the mists the city is known for begin come in, all
signs of the modern era - apartments, docks, warehouses, all further
downhill than the old district - vanish away. Only the university
hospital betrays the scene as being from the current day.
-
Chunder's Travel Guide To New England, 2010
As
I lay bleeding, listening to Laurent's tribe combing the house so
that they could cave in my skull, I hurried to empty my pockets.
Toys, photographs, a funeral announcement, and other oddments all
sent flying. Never mind trying to find good spots for them, at this
point; I just didn't want them on me when I died.
You
see, when you die in a dream, you just wake up - even when the dream
is lucid, telepathic, and entered into by means of esoteric drugs.
You can get amazing real-life bruises where you had dream injuries;
you can even get things like strokes, heart attacks if it's a brutal
or extended death.
The
thing to really worry about is what you're carrying when you get your
return ticket punched, and I was carrying a crapload of memories of
worst-childhoods-ever, which I didn't want turning into memories of
having my very own worst-childhood-ever.
Let
me go back a bit.
...
Ambrose
Laurent, drug dealer extraordinaire, was trying to blackmail my
little circle of dreamers. Not for the dreaming itself - he didn't
really know what we were up to - just, for misusing University
property, breaking into areas, stealing drugs, and so on. We had
needed money at one point, so we'd offered to take some stuff his
way. He'd had us followed while we stole it. One big yellow
envelope of photographs later, we either had to dig ourselves even
deeper into theft and his pocket, or get him off our back some other
way.
So,
we'd gone dream-diving into the coma ward, hunted down the very worst
childhoods....
Okay,
I'm going to have to go back further.
...
My
cousin Gina arrowed through the hospital cafeteria during my lunch
break one day. She dropped a dented, foul-smelling cardboard filing
box on the table beside me, and set the lid aside.
"I
thought you were in Afghanistan, or Egypt, or Iraq, or something.
Doing translations, robbing tombs, that kind of thing" I
muttered, just before my eyes locked on the PROPERTY OF THE
DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE seal and logo printed on the side of the box.
"I
was. Then I wasn't. Now I'm here." She said, yanking a
fistful of files out and dropping them beside me. Then another
fistful, on top of the first. She dropped into the chair next to me,
tapping the top of the stack with a finger.
While
my grades had been good enough to land me an internship at the
university hospital, Gina had split her time in university between
excelling in lasses and getting kicked out of them. She'd left, two
years ago, but sent me back pictures from all the corners of the
world. Sibera, China, India, the Antarctic, over email. She was
'digging at the mystery', she said, but refused to explain what that
meant in email – or how she was affording her travel.
I
was her closest relative, I think; neither of us had siblings, and my
parents and her mother had put us in the same schools. Our family
resemblance does show - We're both inside an inch of six feet tall,
curly black hair, narrow jaw. It looks better on her. She used to
call me "Bang", just short form of "Benjamin".
These days, though, it's "Coz"".
So,
I stared at that the eagle on that DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE seal, with
this terrible feeling in my gut. I maintained my cool. I continued
to maintain my cool right up until she pulled out a sheaf of papers,
obviously old, obviously torn out of some book, covered over in
hieroglyphs or some other form of strange script, in a plastic
government baggie that someone had labelled, in sharpie, as ORIGINAL
PROJECT HYPNOS DOCUMENTS.
At
that point, I entirely failed to maintain my cool. At work or not,
in public or not, this was too much. We shouted back and forth
across the table for a few moments, with my end revolving around the
general theme of "What the fuck is this?" and her end
around "Chill, coz!". I managed to re-acquire my cool.
The
HYPNOS project had, apparently, been both declassified and sent to
the landfill on the same day, which Gina referred to as the
Nobody-Cares cover-up option. Like, this had been a big secret for a
while, but nobody had been looking into it, or looking for it, so
they made it go away the simplest possible way. And Gina, who was
the only one paying attention, had caught them at it to the extent
that the trunk and the backseat of her crappy jeep were both filled
with the leftovers of the project.
"Okay,
so?"
She
pointed to the tabs on the files she'd pulled out, which were names,
and then pulled another page out of her pocket.
"So.
This one is James Virgil MacIntyre; now a therapist in Maryland.
Charges about a thousand an hour, does dream therapy. This is
Michael Lewis Bowley; got an honorary PhD in psychology from MIT, and
consults in their sleep lab. These next three are dead, various
causes. This one is FBI now, and this one is wanted by INTERPOL for
undisclosed reasons. All the rest are residents in various mental
hospitals, nuthouses, and booby hatches. Some comatose, the rest
with huge complexes of obsessions, delusions, and manias, almost all
with weird fixations of sleep and dreaming."
"And
nobody else cared?"
"Nobody
else noticed. This HYPNOS thing was twenty years back, and
got filed by pretty much all the papers in as a silly-season story.
You know, men who stare at goats kind of stuff, maybe with a little
sleep deprivation thrown in, but nothing novel; not fun enough,
nothing scary."
"But
conspiracy buffs, those kinds of people? Weren't they watching?"
"You'd
think so, wouldn't you? But I drove all night out here, picked a
whole load of stuff right off the top of the landfill. I took a
couple hours to throw some crappy metal lockers on top of my jeep and
strap them down. And that was it."
Apparently
so. She just leaned up against the counter, crossed her arms, and...
"Fuck.
Okay, look, here's my apartment keys; address is on the little brass
tag. I'm off at nine. You can shower, crash, and we can solve the
mystery of the freaky sleepy when I get home."
"Sweet
deal, coz."
Now,
my apartment is basically generic; just one more box in the
overpriced buildings whose only redeeming features are that they're
near campus and their exteriors are old as hell. I've joked a couple
times that I worked very hard to keep the place nice and bland, but
the truth is that faced with an aisle of linens or a cluster of
coffee tables to pick from, my first thought is "What can I grab
that won't clash, and get out of here?". Which has, over time,
a kind of non-effect.
What
I'm mostly saying here is that the contents of Gina's boxes, which
included a huge pile of file folders in cardboard boxes, a few metal
footlockers, a test-tube rack, and what I think was a twenty-year-old
EEG / EKG meter, completely overwhelmed the decor. Gina was playing
around with that last one as I walked in, and had a couple electrodes
stuck to her temples.
"Whaddaya
think, coz?"
"I
think I brought beer."
"Think
we might, maybe, need coffee instead?"
Surveying
the disaster, I agreed, and pulled out my coffee press, put on a
kettle, wandered back over to my kitchen island, and opened the first
file folder to come to hand. Charts and tables, patient information,
dosages and dailies. I sat, and started digging in.
The
files were pretty dry stuff; data tables. On the surface, it was all
about drug trials. This drug, this amount, this long, these results.
Which meant no results (but lots of side effects), then a bunch more
no results (and more side effects), and then the end of the file.
The notes down in the side effects and daily marginalia added a
little more to the story, though. The `no results` were from
readings, andd trials with the mind-reader cards - star, wavy lines,
can you see what I'm picturing? That kind of thing. By the time we
got into the second run at the coffee, it was pretty clear - they'd
been looking for a drug to create, or boost, something like
telepathy.
Instead,
they gave everybody sleep disorders, serious mental health issues,
and sent a bunch of them straight down into endless sleep. But
according to Gina, that was because they'd found what they were
looking for; they just hadn't recognized it. Bowley, one of the
subjects, had written a book a decade later about lucid dreaming
techniques he'd leaned from Yogi masters - and they worked like a hot
damn. Except, Gina said, they didn't have thing one to do with Yoga,
Tantra, Chakras, nothing. His techniques were actually from
traditions about something called Tulpas, and the works of some
historical mystic, Alhazred.
In
Gina-speak, "elder works". Which is to say, translating,
skin-crawlingly horrible stuff. While I'd been looking athrough the
files, she'd pulled out the ORIGINAL DOCUMENTS baggie, and a small
collection of small leather-bound books, and had been hammering away
at her laptop. She was pretty sure that these pages were also part
of some "elder work"; they sure looked elder enough to me.
She
asked me if I wanted to help out with digging through this stuff, for
real. If not, could I just hold onto it for a couple days, while she
found somewhere to stay? I wouldn't think of it. Besides, it would
give me a chance to finally find out what her obsession was all
about, where she'd been for the last four years. I'd always envied
her adventures, as I imagined them – I was the good one, the doctor
in training, bound for a quiet life. My outlaw cousin had been my
proxy explorer, treasure hunter; the chance to lay hands on one of
her troves, join in, was too good.
"Sweet
deal. Okay, if you're in, what I want you to do first is chart those
side effects. Make an intensity scale, right? Think of it like, a
coma is an overdose, like a 10. A report of weird dreams or sleep
trouble on a given drug is a five, or nightmares asre six, whatever.
No report is zero. So, for each drug, box out the results to show
the usual range, and the outlying edges. Keep them in order of
application - chances are, some of the later effects are results of
earlier drugs, or combinations, leading to overdose. You know the
drill. We're not looking for a paper we can defend, coz, we're just
looking for the pattern."
So
I got to work at my own screen, and a couple of nights passed with me
working on that. Gina, meanwhile, was using my student card to grab
books out of the library - botany, languages, hunting for details and
understanding. Gina moved in her toiletries and what other personal
stuff she had while we read and chatted about the stuff we were
doing, she got the couch, and conscientiously made coffee in the
mornings, and life just kept moving, seamlessly. A testament to how
bare my life had been beforehand, I suppose - there was room for a
whole other person to just walk in and set up shop. More than one,
in the end, of course, but I'm getting ahead of myself.
On
the second day, Gina drove out to the landfill again, see if she
couldn't get her hands on some more of the stuff, but they'd been
busy - more dropoffs, plus some kind of packing-down. If the rest of
it was still in there, and hadn't been picked up by someone else on
the ball, it was inaccessible without a backhoe.
On
the third night, I got to make a little presentation, after printing
out my new charts.
"The
doctors were pretty good at recording specific side effects; I
charted from unusually wakeful dreams to serious nightmares to coma,
with differences all along the scale. Now, it looks like either some
of these later drugs combined with ones from the days before, or they
were just plain stronger. But it's not all additive; this one was
pretty much a dud, and everyone that was getting up into the higher
number recovered really fast while they were on it."
We
played with it some more, and Gina had me play around with the data a
few other ways, especially looking at the cases where people had been
given the early trial drugs in different orders, that kind of thing.
"B-3.
That's the one, coz."
"The
one that what?"
"Lucid
dreaming, reports of odd sensations and beliefs in shared dreams with
others, right? B-3, everyone taking it moved towards that set of
side effects."
"Oh.
Yeah, totally, sure. If there was a useful drug in there, that'd be
the one."
"There
is. They were trying to recreate Ianathos, a temple incense they
used way back, in Sarnath."
"I've never heard of either of those."
"Well,
sure. Sarnath got wiped out in a flood before there was such a thing
as countries. We're talking like Sumeria and Akkadia, way way back.
Maybe even before those."
"Okay,
but how would anyone know what the hell they used for incense?"
"The
Sarnathi were a lot like Sumerians in one way - they wrote on clay,
and they did it all the time. Not as much of their stuff has
survived, but some. And a bunch of their religious stuff got piled
in with different magical revivals, you know? Ianathos, the incense,
was one of those things. In the right circles, everyone has a
homemade recipe for Ianothos. But the orginal stuff was a powerhouse
drug, to let people share consciousness."
"Telepathy
again."
"Right.
But, coz, a bunch of the Sarnathi poems talk about waking up in the
temple, after long visits to far places."
"Astral
travel, then? Come on."
"No,
coz, they're talking about the same thing. Shared dreaming.
Telepathy, far places, sleeping in the temple, it's all the one
thing, get it?"
I'd
like to say in my defense, here, that I'm not actually stupid. I
just didn't believe her, so I hadn't been following along closely.
But I got it. "Okay. So, we've got proof - more or less -
that a government expirement was messing people up. So, we're
charting out just how messed up, and what they got messed up with.
We can probably find an Associated Press writer, get it out there,
kind of thing. That's the idea, right?"
I
asked this prompted by the slowly dawning realization that this
almost certainly wasn't the idea. Gina had been chasing this stuff
for years. It wasn't a funny list of amateur occult detective
stories to her; never had been. And it was becoming less and less
distantly funny to me each second. Ancient drugs. Serious mental
traumas. A government cover-up of sorts. All real things; whether
or not there was some magic drug at the end of the rainbow didn't
change that people had chased it in ways that were very real and
dangerous as hell. I stood, waiting for an answer, considering this.
She
cocked her head, examining my face. "Lookit that. Just look
at it."
"What?"
"I
can actually see the smug draining out."
"Hey,
that's not..."
"Oh,
look! There's beer in the fridge!"
There's
a reason Gina is my favorite cousin. Of course, she hadn't actually
answered my question.
...
It
was on the fifth day that we managed to get the footlockers open. We
actually had to go to a hardware store; we bought a prybar, mallet,
chisel, and a few other things, though the mallet and chisel were the
only ones we actually needed. Gina had saved six lockers in all,
out of something like twenty. I don't know how she fit them, and all
the other stuff, in that jeep of hers. I mean, they were fairly
small lockers, as such things go - but still.
We'd
already checked the names on the fronts: Four coma patients, a woman
who'd died in a car crash, and Virgil Ward, currently wanted by
INTERPOL. Who names their kid Virgil, with a last name like Ward?
Ah, well. Naturally, we opened Virgil's first. A rack of disposable
toiletries sat in the tray, over a stack of black slacks, a stack of
shirts, and a folded wad of underwear. Though they were in differing
colours, the shirt were all button-downs of the same cut; the slacks
were identical.
"Civilian
uniforms, something like?"
"Could
be, sure. Or maybe they just bought everyone clothes, and ordered
them in a big lot."
We
dumped the whole pile out on the floor, shaking out the articles
before tossing them back in, and scored a box of matches and cheap
pipe tucked in one sock, and one of those old film canisters, which
had something in it. I was grinning, waiting for the marijuana, but
when Gina dumped the canister out, it was little shavings instead.
Like from sharpening a pencil, but a creamy brown, like coffee with a
hit of milk in it.
Gina
grinned, and I had a moment of Oh Crap, She's Going To Smoke It. But
she just used a piece of paper to scoop it all up, and pour it back
into the canister.
"Know
anyone who works in a lab?"
"Lots
of... Oh, you mean, like, to figure out what's in that, kind of
lab?"
"Right.
Like that."
Well,
there was Ray. But I didn't really want to call him up; I could
imagine his first reaction being to smoke the stuff, right there, just to see what it did.
"Uh.
Maybe? But let's see what else we've got, first."
We
cracked the box for Emma Thorpe, the car crash victim. Same basic
deal, though the shirts were a different cut, toiletries a bit more
extensive, and it looked like she'd taken the underwear and some of
the pants when she'd left. No pipe this time. A couple of pictures,
jammed in the corner of the mirror inside the lid of the footlocker.
Kids, posing with a bearded man, making faces.
We
sped up, then; it seemed pretty likely that the pipe was going to be
our lucky find here. But in the next-to-last locker, belonging to
one Daniel Westing, there was a "Subject Journal" - a
little notebook that he'd been assigned, with instructions to discuss
any altered stats or effects of the drugs. It looked general-issue,
like everyone had been given one, but only the one had been left in
with the personal stuff.
I
flipped it open. Five blank days, and then:
...
DAY
SIX.
Dreamed
about my Nan's house last night. Vivid, and there were doors in it
that went to other places from when I was a kid. Realized that I was
dreaming while I was dreaming, and remembered that I was doing the
tests. When I thought of that, I thought of Marshall and Emma, at
lunch, and a door opened from Nan's sitting room to the cafeteria,
and Marshall and Emma were standing in there, confused. They'd been
having their own dreams, they said.
I'm
not sure what happened, after that. But when I woke up, Emma
remembered the same scene - remembered a door opening in her dream,
and walking in to the cafeteria. Marshall was sure he'd dreamed
about both of us, but culdn't remember what the dream had been.
...
DAY
SEVEN.
Had
the dreams again last night, with Marshall and Emma. Also today:
Something while we were awake.
Fithering
was doing the card test with Marshall when I caught it. For a
moment, in the corner, there was another Fithering slapping another
Marshall, and calling him a shithead, just kind of hanging there in
mid-air. And then it was gone, except that Marshall was suddenly
really twitchy, like he'd seen it, too. But Fithering wasn't; he was
just testy.
We're
supposed to be learning how to read minds. And I think we did.
Just, that's not anything like the way we wanted to.
...
And
then, blank days again. Checking the days against the files, Daniel
had gone comatose on the night after his ninth day as part of the
project. His course of drugs had just started to ramp up - he'd had
B-3 on day five, D-2 on day six, and D-8 on day nine.
"B-3
on day five, and a report of lucid, shared dreams on day six. See,
coz?"
"That
could just mean that B-3 gave them dreams of a sort where you thought
other people were there, and aware, and he justified it after the
fact. Same with the notes on the patient files. It doesn't mean the
drug did that - just that they believed it did."
"Why
would they believe the same thing, though? It's not like the doctors
were pushing them to say that they shared dreams. The doctors
thought it was a weird side effect."
"Because
the doctors were looking for telepathy, right? Even if they were
only looking for the one kind, the patents still knew what they were
looking for, and it got into their dreams."
"Even
if you're right, that's still a hell of drug, innit? Looks like you
better find your chemist." And she shook the little canister at
me.
