House of Skin

MEMOIRS OF THE TEMPLAR SOCIETY (3)

The Society had their guinea pig now.

She was a teen-age prostitute named Gina. She came to the house and they all had drinks. Hers was drugged. She fell into a deep sleep and woke naked and chained in an upstairs room. There were no windows, only a single light bulb of low illumination for amusement. It was turned on and off at irregular intervals. The walls of her little prison were adorned with mirrors in which she could study her own descent into darkness. One mirror—a small, unimpressive oval—was a two-way glass through which her destruction could be observed by members of the Society.

It was perfect.

Zero decided it would take some time to break her sufficiently. Months, perhaps. And in that time, she would be alone, completely alone in those intervals of irregular dark.

They had their fear victim now and it was time to move onto new things as solitude softened her a bit. Stadtler wasn’t entirely happy with any of it, but he went along with it. Like a good SS trooper, he told himself he was only following orders, those of the Society… or Zero, because they were basically the same thing.

Although Grimes and Stadtler only came to the House of Mirrors for their weekly meetings, Zero was there much more often. To study his books, he said, or to throw a bit of meat to their captive.

One meeting night, Grimes was late.

“I have an interesting theory I’m playing about with,” Zero told Stadtler. “Want to hear it?”

Stadtler gulped his drink. “Why not?”

Zero began, “Say you take two individuals of the same physical type. Twins of a sort, identical, but not related in blood. You place each in a room like the one our Gina occupies. You break each down. You ask the first to tell his life story in minute detail, leaving nothing out—his life, his loves, his history, his occupation in great detail. At first he refuses, of course. But when you starve him long enough, he’ll comply. Oh yes, he’ll talk, he’ll tell all. And by this time, of course, he’s nearly mad, so he’ll do anything. He spends days telling you his life. And you record it.” Zero paused, lighting a cigarette. His eyes were blazing. “Now, you break down the second man far beyond what the first man endured. You destroy him as we plan with our little Gina. You drag him down to a point where he remembers not who he is or was. You transform him into a psychological infant. Then, over a series of weeks and months, you leave him in complete darkness with nothing to amuse his vacant mind save for the recording of the other man’s life which you play over and over again. Night and day. While he’s awake, while he’s asleep. It’s the only information he receives, the only external stimulus. After months of this, what do you have?”

Stadtler shrugged. “A crazy man with no memories tortured by the recording.”

“Maybe. But maybe you have a duplicate of the first man.”

“That’s impossible.”

“Is it? Remember, your second man has no memories, no knowledge of self, only a burning desire as we all have to be someone, to have an identity. His basal psyche adopts the first man’s life in order to give itself a sense of worth, of identity.”

“But his other life is still there. Regardless of how you fuck his head up, something might trigger him to remember.”

“Possibly. But you forget that his subconscious remembers the terror associated with his former life, it buries it deep, it wants no part of it. It adopts the new life because there’s freedom hanging in the balance and because it has nothing else.”

“I suppose it’s possible.”

“It’s certainly possible, particularly with the added leverage of certain psychotropic drugs.”

“The idea is… well, horrible.”

Zero ignored that, moral and ethical platitudes having no place in his research, as he called it. “And if you were to take it further,” he said, “if you were to place this second man in a prolonged drug-induced hypnotic trance while the recording played and then take him out of it once there was no doubt he had become the first man, he again would remember nothing. But you could plant a suggestion in his mind, a word that would trigger his artificial memory. He would simply be a man coming out of amnesia, his true life buried forever.”

Stadtler finished his drink. “That’s all and fine, but who would you do it to? You’d have to have two men that were nearly twins.”

“What if I knew two such men?”

“Who?”

“Grimes and another.”

“You’d do that to him?” Stadtler asked.

“In a second. He’s perfect. Overflowing with fears to be exploited. Think about it.”

Stadtler did and he didn’t like it one bit. “It’s mad,” he said. Zero smiled. Those were the exact words Grimes had said when Zero suggested they do the same thing to Stadtler. But unlike Grimes, Zero had already found Stadtler’s body double.

There was no more talk of it that night. There were other things to be done. Zero suggested that tonight they explore the nature of death. They had a pimp supply them with the proper girl and in the attic, while the mirrors watched, they set to work on her.

It was the first of many nights they would do this.

Dr. Blood-and-Bones had been born.