The Lake House

  “What happened to Max?” I screamed. “Where is she? Where is Max? Is she hurt?”

  In answer, one of the doctors jabbed a needle into my arm. I saw another doctor stick Kit with a needle in his thigh.

  And then the lights went out again, but not before I whispered or cried, “Max, dear Max.”

  92

  KIT WOKE UP WITH AN UNBEARABLE PRESSURE at the back of his head, such a really bad feeling, like nothing he’d ever experienced before, or even thought possible. An old Doors song was playing over and over in his head, “This is the End . . . the End, my friend.” He’d also been moved to another room in the Hospital. Frannie, the kids, Max, were nowhere to be seen.

  Unreality . . .

  Was . . .

  Taking . . .

  Over.

  Very slowly, tentatively, he tried to look around. He needed to orient himself. He could almost hear his eyes move from side to side.

  It took a few seconds for Kit to realize that he was lashed to a wheelchair and that all he could move was his head. Still, he could see the entire room from this position.

  More than he wanted to see.

  There were corpses all around. Young, naked, very dead. Recently dead. All males. Lying on gurneys parked casually at odd angles, as if nobody cared—and obviously, they didn’t.

  These are murder victims, he thought. This is a slaughterhouse. I’m in a slaughterhouse.

  The bodies had been precisely and thoroughly carved up.

  Why? And why all male victims? What in the name of God was Resurrection? Who was supposed to rise from the dead? Not these poor devils on the gurneys.

  “Jesus God Almighty,” Kit finally whispered. “Help us.”

  The horrors just wouldn’t stop coming, and he had a terrible feeling that he was next on the chopping block.

  Unreality . . .

  Had . . .

  Taken . . .

  Over.

  93

  GOD, IT IS so damn cold in here, Kit was thinking.

  What is this place? A meat freezer? A hospital morgue? What?

  Let it be some kind of high-tech medical morgue. Let the bodies be cadavers for legitimate research.

  But the bodies were all too uniformly young. In their teens and early twenties. Just kids, really.

  Am I next? To be disemboweled?

  Kit’s fear for the kids and Frannie finally overcame his own terror. Horrific guilt swamped him, but he couldn’t even afford the luxury of despair. He had to get out of there. But what a total crock that was! How could he get away?

  But how could he not try?

  He had to find out what had happened to Max. Had she been murdered? And Frannie. Where were they? And why was he the only one in the meat locker?

  He reared back against his tight restraints and the chair finally rocked back. Then it fell over!

  Kit landed on his shoulder, and it hurt like hell. Neat move, swiftie. You’re so sharp sometimes.

  Just then, the door to the room creaked open. Dr. Ethan Kane stepped inside. He seemed to be everywhere, totally hands-on.

  “Hey, hey,” he said to Kit. “Trying to escape? Hope springs eternal, doesn’t it? Looks like you had a little accident here. No problem,” he said. “We’ll fix you right up.”

  Then he kicked Kit hard in the ribs. Jesus, that hurt! That really, really hurt! Who is this guy—Mengele?

  Kit wouldn’t give up. Wanted to. But he wouldn’t surrender. It wasn’t his nature.

  “Dr. Kane. Now that I’m awake, let’s talk. The kids will be missed. I’m going to be missed eventually.”

  “Not as much as you’d think. I’ve taken care of all that. I’m sorry I can’t stop and chat,” Kane said. “I’m sure you have all sorts of fascinating questions and insights, but we’re overbooked at the inn right now.”

  “Listen to me!” Kit raged. He just couldn’t move. Not an inch.

  And Ethan Kane was walking away, not listening at all. Kit felt completely helpless, a bug caught in a spiderweb. No way was Kane going to let them survive.

  He watched the doctor walk to a wall of cabinets over a sink and remove a syringe and a small bottle. What was Dr. Death doing now?

  He screwed the needle onto the syringe, plunged the point into the rubber stopper at the top of the bottle, and retracted it.

  He advanced on Kit again.

  “Just tell me what you want,” Kit said. “I’ll tell you the truth. Everything I know.”

  Ethan Kane laughed softly. “This will pinch,” he said.

  94

  EVERYTHING WAS SO unbelievably confusing. So chaotic. So hopeless.

  I came out of my drugged stupor in Ethan Kane’s office.

  I was carefully, artfully positioned so that I was looking at about a two-gallon jug filled with a solution and dozens of dark floating objects.

  I tried to focus my eyes.

  What are those reddish gobs? Then I knew what the floating shapes were: fetal hearts . . . The hearts of unborn children!

  I whispered, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why now?”

  It got worse. I was bound to a wheelchair. And Dr. Kane was working at his desk, calm as could be. “I want to talk to you about the children,” he said without looking up from whatever he was writing. “You can be of some help. I need to know everything I can about the work that was done on them at the School. I know you examined the children thoroughly.”

  “Where are the kids?” I asked as soon as I could manage a few words.

  “Oh, they’re fine. Fuck the kids, though. I want to spend some quality time with you, Dr. O’Neill. I have a feeling that you may understand my work more than you think you do. You were there at the School. And you certainly have useful information about the bird children, don’t you? You’re a veterinarian. I’m not. You can help me with my work. If you so choose.”

  “I wouldn’t choose to help you if you were choking on a chicken bone,” I spat out.

  Kane’s face turned cold. “Good one. For a trailer-park cretin like yourself. Now listen to me closely, Frannie. Don’t say another word, or I’ll cut out your tongue.

  “Don’t you understand the value of improving and extending human life? You must! Last month, we ‘resurrected’ a mathematical genius from London. The world desperately needs this man’s brilliance. One can only imagine what his mind will produce in the coming decades! Do you comprehend what I’m saying? Maybe a little? Can you get past your own pitifully outmoded system of ethics?

  “You may speak now. Frannie? You did tests on Maximum. Tell me exactly what you found. Strengths and weaknesses.”

  “Absolutely not!” I shouted at him. “What’s going on here? What is Resurrection?”

  Kane rose from behind his desk. “What is Resurrection? Where to start? Okay, I’ll let you in on a little secret. Our secret. I’m one of the first beneficiaries,” he said. “New organs, and in my case, a new body and head!”

  I felt as if the earth had come to a stop as I tried to absorb what I’d just heard. I looked at his smooth pink skin, his bright blue eyes, his full, thick head of hair.

  He showed off his brilliant smile again. He knew that he’d just blown my mind.

  “My name is Dr. Harold Hauer. The Harold Hauer. I didn’t die in a car accident outside Boston eleven years ago. I’ve been resurrected. I look pretty damn good for ninety-four, don’t you think?”

  95

  DR. HAROLD HAUER was alive and he looked as though he were in his mid-forties. I was still reeling with amazement and shock as Ethan Kane began to push my wheelchair out of his office. Fast! We were going somewhere.

  “Ninety-four years old and my current life expectancy is unlimited. I’m smarter than I was, too. Wish I could say the same for you, Dr. O’Neill. You obviously won’t help me, so what good are you? To keep the kids in line? Maybe. So tell me the similarities and differences between Max and the birds she physically resembles. Where does her strength come from? Her intelligence?”

>   “I will not,” I said.

  “Fine then. I can control the little bastards without you. So much for small minds like yours. My wife is smarter—and she’s a robot.”

  My wheelchair was pushed into an eggshell-white-painted ward full of sleeping patients. There must have been a dozen people in there, each with TPN lines dripping from IV poles.

  All the patients wore metal helmets hooked up to monitors positioned over their heads. Each monitor showed a different film. The films seemed to be free-flowing dramas, romances, even nature films.

  “What are these movies?” I asked. “What are they for?”

  Kane-Hauer was standing at the foot of one bed, gazing up at a monitor, no longer paying attention to me.

  “Oh, this is delightful,” he said of underwater cinematography of spectacular fish, the likes of which I’d never seen. He looked over at me. “This is the Dream Room and what you’re seeing is simulated reality—a kind of human-and-machine collaboration. See, there are electrodes in the helmet that stimulate areas of the patient’s brain. We stimulate them, then the patient thinks or imagines or remembers, and the story that’s created is more real to the patient than reality itself,” he said. “You’re looking at the patients’ dreams.”

  I didn’t want to be, but I was dazzled. I turned from one monitor to another, taking in the vivid images: sailboats, passionate kisses, intercourse, ballet, abstract art, raw speed, a bordello, a palace.

  Then something truly obscene caught my eye. My heart began to thump so hard, it caused a pain in my chest.

  I watched a small form in one of the beds, a girl of no more than four or five. A doe and its mother were nuzzling gently on her screen. That was her dream, wasn’t it?

  I strained to see the girl’s face a little better. But I knew I’d seen it before. Photographs in his office.

  “That’s Sissy,” I said. “It’s your own daughter. My God, what have you done to her?”

  There was an embarrassed chuckle from Dr. Ghoul. “Well, yes, it is the child I called Sissy. But she’s not actually my daughter. This little girl has very special organs, and I’m keeping her here for a recipient in Germany.”

  The monster saw my look of horror and disgust. “Don’t judge me, you cow. You’re starting to really piss me off.”

  The Q and A period was apparently over. Dr. Kane-Hauer rolled my wheelchair down to the end of the nearest row of patients.

  Another shock! Honestly, my heart couldn’t take any more of this.

  There, up to his armpits in crisp white sheets was someone I wasn’t sure I would ever see again.

  Kit.

  A simulated-reality helmet was strapped over his head. He had a soft, dreamy look on his face. A doctor was working on him, his back to the door.

  On the screen a baseball game was in progress. It was Kit’s beloved Fenway Park, and I was watching from the vantage point of home plate. A ball was coming in hard and fast. . . .

  “What are you doing to him?” I screamed.

  “Giving him the time of his life,” said Kane-Hauer. “And we’ve saved a bed for you, Frannie. Sweet dreams. Oh, and by the way, Frannie, watch this. Watch closely. Oh, Doctor?” he yelled across the room.

  The physician working on Kit turned to us. I nearly fainted. I don’t know why I didn’t.

  The doctor standing next to Kit was another Dr. Ethan Kane. An exact fricking replica.

  “Don’t be alarmed,” the duplicate Kane spoke to me. “I’m nobody. I’m just a clone.”

  96

  I WAS LOST in wild, dizzying thoughts about what was happening. The Hospital. Kane-Hauer. His robot-clone. Max? Was she alive? And what was Resurrection? Who was being resurrected? What was the meaning of the code word they had chosen to use?

  Suddenly I heard the very loud buzzing of an electric gadget, followed by cold metal raking across my scalp.

  Then something soft and loose was falling on my shoulders. I realized it was my own hair.

  They’d cut off all my hair. I was bald.

  An orderly slashed the duct tape holding me to the wheelchair with a box cutter and I was roughly transferred to a stainless-steel gurney. I punched out at him, but he merely laughed.

  “Relax,” he said. “This is the fun part. Fun for me, anyway.” He jabbed me with another needle.

  Boom. I was out like a light.

  And the bastard had lied to me.

  No simulated-reality trip for me. No helmet, no comfy bed in the Dream Room. The needle went into my arm and that was it: death, down and dirty.

  I rose up from the bed, or at least my “spirit” or “soul” or “astral body” did.

  I floated up to the corner of the room and hung there, facedown while the orderly drew the sheet over my face.

  I’d been done in. Just like that.

  I couldn’t process my shock quickly enough. I had been alive seconds ago. Now I was dead. I hadn’t said good-bye to anyone, hadn’t truly prepared for this moment. I’m only thirty-four, I thought, and tears came into my eyes.

  Before I could carry on like this any longer, I was drawn up through the ceiling. I felt as if there were a hand at the back of my neck, a cord in the middle of my back, attached to some winch high in the sky.

  I passed upward through the floor above, just the way I’d seen it done in the movies about ghosts.

  I was there, but not there.

  No one saw me and nothing obstructed my passing as I materialized up through the reception area, where I’d been with Kit the day before. As I moved through the floors of the Hospital, I felt my anguish evaporate, replaced by a peacefulness I’d never felt before.

  I’m not overly religious, but I do believe in God. Something or someone was pulling me now, taking me away from my earthly life and concerns. I was conscious of a lack of control, and I felt relieved to float away from my responsibilities and grief.

  I still loved Kit, Max, and the kids, but I couldn’t take care of anyone anymore. I realized that now.

  My body cleared the top floor of the Hospital and I was surprised to see that it was daytime. Last night’s thunderstorm had drenched the landscape, and moisture on the treetops sparkled like diamonds.

  I kept moving effortlessly upward, and suddenly I could see the winding country roads Kit and I had driven along so recently. The hills looked gorgeous to me, like a rumpled calico quilt spread out below. I felt the sun gently warming my back, and it was supernaturally calming.

  A flock of birds flew beneath me, and I could see the details of their feathers with astonishing clarity.

  I stretched out my arms and saw the same denim shirt I’d been wearing for days, my torn nails—these were my hands, all right.

  I rubbed my hand over my bald head and liked how that felt.

  I tried to alter my course, but there was no jet propulsion with this astral body. I moved in only one direction, and that was up.

  As I rose I saw the whole of the Liberty Reservoir, and there, the city of Baltimore, its rivers leading to Chesapeake Bay. I guessed I was at ten thousand feet and rising. The landscape was in miniature, the cars teeny, the houses and other buildings dotting the countryside with toylike precision.

  I was bathed in soft mist, and it felt like a blessing.

  I was cleansed.

  Refreshed.

  Redeemed.

  The cloud cover seemed to last for a very long time, and when it cleared, I saw that I was high out over the Atlantic Ocean.

  The water was aquamarine near the coastline, turning to dark navy blue, flecked with white, all of it astonishingly beautiful and real. I could see the eastern coast of the United States! God bless America.

  The only sound was the brush of the wind on my ears.

  I thought about my life, and I could remember it all: a bake sale at a church, my first kiss in Dad’s barn, the deer with a broken back that I’d put to sleep. I put my arms behind my head and looked into Kit’s loving eyes. I saw Max running through the woods as I’d seen her th
e first time. The images came and went, each with newly minted crystal clarity. I could see all the people I’d known and loved and could feel their thoughts as well as mine. It was as if I were standing there with them, and in this way I got to say my good-byes. But I soon tired of Frannie’s life retrospective and said good-bye to myself, to my life as a woman.

  Earth was growing below me. Not like the satellite pictures we’ve all seen—this Earth filled the sky and was in sharp topographical focus. I could see the mountain ridges and the running rivers and the cities and the shifting seas. Dear God, the magnificence of our planet defies description.

  As for me, the former Frances Jane O’Neill, I was a tiny speck of human consciousness. I didn’t know if I was falling out of the sky or going straight to heaven.

  Either way was okay.

  I knew I was going home.

  97

  THESE HAD BEEN the most intoxicating, heady days of his life, even more incredible than the time he’d faked his own death—and also murdered his first wife—in an automobile crash outside Boston.

  Resurrection was almost finished—at least the first stage, and hopefully the first of many to come.

  Thirty “new” beings had been created.

  His creations.

  And now they would go out and run the world properly for the next thirty to fifty years, or possibly even longer.

  His world, in a manner of speaking.

  The chosen ones—all males—had been recuperating for two days, and every one of them was in good shape. Thank God, none had died during surgery. Of course, he could have brought them back to life. He was a miracle maker.

  They were ready to go back to their home cities now and do the specific jobs they had been chosen for. The world needed continuity and stabilization before Third World morons took the whole thing over, or possibly blew it up. These men, all men, were the best hope to maintain order and progress; they were the last hope.

  Dr. Kane-Hauer believed that. Several practical problems would have to be overcome eventually—like explaining how the thirty men were able to live so long—but the masses could be prepared for that, and all the scientific wonders of a brave new world. Those were small problems for small thinkers to worry about.