Orphans of Chaos

14 I Do Not Like Thee, Dr. Fell

“I did not see him in the snow when I stepped out onto the roof, because he was buried in it. He was laying face up under about an inch of powder, and he sat up. All he was wearing was a white lab coat. How he got by without breathing, I don’t know.

“His forehead opened in a vertical split, and behind the split was a third eye, blue as gunmetal, every part of it. He projected his spell from the eye, and it struck me, and I could feel my magic snuffed out in an instant. Do you ever think of your own body as a coffin? That is the way I felt. As if my soul got smaller when his spell struck.

“I walked with him back to his lab. I remember asking him along the way if he was a Cyclops. Amelia and I had seen another man with a third eye earlier that evening.

“He said that his real name was Telemus. ‘You are thinking I am a triclops, aren’t you? But this,’ and he pointed at his own face, ‘is merely an appliance, like the one your fellow inmate Victor Triumph wears… I can see you are curious,’ he said.

“And he leaned down and drew his eyelid wide with his fingertip and asked me to touch his eye. Well, I thought it was my chance to escape, so I took it. I poked him in the eye as hard as I could with my finger, and turned and ran.

“His eye was as hard and as dry as a marble. I had run perhaps twenty yards—a fair distance—and turned to see why he wasn’t following, and I saw him, with a hard little smile on his face, flicking a blood drop from the end of his finger at me. Even though he was too far away to hit me with a little fingerflick, he did.

“It had the shape of a red needle when it hit my pants leg, and it vibrated, like a dentist drill, and sank into my calf. A cold sensation seized my leg. I could feel it spreading through my veins. I fell down and could not get up.

“He walked up and told me the running was to get my heart rate high, so the effect would spread faster. He threw me over his shoulder as if I had no weight at all, and he walked back to his lab. He did not turn on any lights as he walked through the corridors: I think he has perfect night vision.

“He strapped me to a gurney, and—Victor, may I leave out certain details? Well, never mind. We are among friends here. I had dirtied myself when my legs went numb, and he yanked my pants off and wiped my bottom like I was a baby. I was a baby, I suppose, or as good as. He didn’t seem disgusted or anything. I don’t think he noticed I was a person at all. Anyway, that was not the most humiliating thing that happened that night.

“He never did turn on the lights in his office. The only light was a little moonlight coming in through his windows, and shadows of his instrument cases and files were black as pitch.

“He goes over to a cabinet, mixes some things together, and steps up to a table. There was a patch of moonlight there, and I saw what happened. Dr. Fell holds his hand over a beaker, and blood wells up out of his fingers like sweat. He did not cut himself. He stares at his hand and it starts dripping.

“He opens his third eye again and cooks the blood in the light that comes from this eye.

“He says to me, ‘The science of cryptognosis is based on the insight that all structure in the nervous system is based upon previous, cruder structures. The nature of any hierarchy is that different functions are carried out at different levels; for a neural hierarchy, this means that structures in the thalamus and hypothalamus influence the content and priority of sense impressions before they reach the cortex, whereupon other structures in the midbrain organize, file, and recover past impressions according to the coded signals they receive from other areas of the brain. Whole areas of decision-reflexes are coded and carried out without sending any paths through the cortex. Once set in motion, the reflex cycle automatically completes itself. Anything that mimics or masks these signals can alter signal priorities and set the reflex in motion. This includes both muscular reflexes—’ he squinted at me, sent a dot of blue light out from his third eye, and my whole body jumped’—glandular reflexes—‘and he made me wet myself again’—and neural reflexes. One such set of neural reflexes controls what is passed on to long-term memory, and what is dumped.’

“He stabbed me with the hypodermic needle. ‘I have programmed the molecular engines in the serum to seek out the control-ganglia for memory in your nervous system. The effect should take twenty minutes or so to complete. After that, I can induce narcolepsy by activating the sleep-center in your pons, and turn on your delta-wave function by stimulating your medulla oblongata. When you wake, the last twelve hours or so will be gone.’

“I should mention, he did not walk over and push the needle into me. He pointed, and the needle levitated by itself, flew across the room, and stabbed me. He curled his fingers and the empty hypo floated back to his hand.

“I tried to get him to talk. I said that since I wasn’t going to remember anything of what he said, could he please tell me who I was or what was going on?

“He answered the first question, but then got bored with the game, and sat down and began writing notes or something. He sat there in nearly complete darkness reading from one book and making entries in a journal. I could hear the scratching of the pen on the page.

“I heard footsteps then, and the lights came on. They seemed so bright after the gloom. But Dr. Fell did not blink. His eyes are just painted marbles, after all. He just stood up at his desk.

“Here I am strapped to a table with no pants on, and a drunk Japanese woman comes into the room. Very pretty, like a china doll, if she had been sober. She is wearing a kimono of a blue floral pattern with a wide red sash—what are they called? An obi—with silver tracery running through it. But on her, it is all hanging loose and askew, and her cheeks are all bright pink with strong drink, and you can smell the alcohol on her breath. Her hair is done up in one of those elaborate folded masses, with pearl combs and bamboo chopsticks and little ornaments in it, but it is half-undone, and strands are everywhere. She lost her shoes somewhere too, and is walking around in these toe socks.

“Oh, and she had this thing that looks like a big celery stalk in her hand, a wand about two feet long, twined with ivy and with a pinecone at the top.

“Naturally, the first thing I say is ‘Help me,’ and she drifts over, giggling, and stares down at me. Me, strapped down to this rack, with no pants on.

“She says, ‘This is one of them, isn’t it? I’ve never seen one before. It looks like one of us, doesn’t it? They can do that when they want to.’

“And now she turns and makes a tsk-tsk gesture at Dr. Fell, and she says—well, never mind what she says. She jokes about whether or not he has been molesting me sexually, which didn’t seem very funny to me.

“ ‘You are allowed on the estate under a safe-conduct to attend the meeting, not to go frolicking about. You know the rules,’ he says. She says back in sort of an unsteady giggly singsong voice, ‘Oh I don’t go when Orpheus is there. You know how he feels about us.’

“It was actually funny, but he tells her off in that same dry monotone he uses on us when he tells us off in class. I mean, the same tone of voice he might use on Colin for getting an assignment wrong, the same condescending phrases. ‘I am very disappointed… perhaps had you been thinking, you might have considered…’ like she was a schoolgirl. He was mad because she was supposed to act like a human around us, or where any witnesses might see, and she talks back, and he gets all cold and nasty, and she laughs and sways back and forth. He says to her, ‘Our obligation while we are guests here on the Promethean world is not to interfere with the creatures of Prometheus. Besides, Mulciber has annexed this domain, and we do not want to run afoul of his machines. You know how he feels about killing men.’

“At this point she says Boggin wants to see him right away, something very important, another one of us has gotten away or something. It made me have a moment of hope, because, you know, I thought one of you was coming to save me. But the moment Fell is out of the room, she turned to me with this sly look on her face, and I realize it was just a trick to get him out of the room.

“I ask her again to let me up, and she says, ‘Serve my master and be his man, and I will let you go.’

“I asked her if she could stop Dr. Fell’s potion from erasing my memory. She looks a little puzzled, and then mad, once I explain what’s going on. Her cheeks get even redder than the drink made them, and her eyes get even brighter, her hair more wild.

“She says, ‘Swear, and if you don’t remember tomorrow, all the better. The Master really doesn’t want you to obey him, you know. If you disobey him, that is just as good.’

“At that point I knew that I had better die rather than swear.

“But I say, ‘Tell me something about him, so I can decide. Does Dionysus have any other agents working here? What do you know about the situation at this school?’

“She actually looked a little nervous or flustered at that point. ‘You things are dangerous, even all tied up. How did you know my Master’s name?’

“I tell her I will trade her question for question.

“I am really proud that I had the nerve to say that, and calmly, too, since all I wanted to do was beg her for help and cry like a girl. I was so full of fear that my stomach hurt like someone had kicked it.

“So she says, ‘Sure, why not? You’re not going to remember anything tomorrow anyway.’

“So she tells me what she knows about the school. Lord Terminus sent an expedition to recover certain hostages from the Four Houses of Chaos. He was on the brink of a civil war with his own children at that time, but it hadn’t broken out yet, and so, in order to placate them, four or five of his sons sent different agents along as part of the expedition.

“As it turned out, when Lord Terminus dies suddenly, the expedition has no place to go and no one to report to, and the various people from the various factions are suddenly terrified and suspicious of each other.

“But they find they have to work together, because each of the little orphans from Chaos has a different type of magic, a different version of the universe they draw upon for their power.

“Four types of magic, and each type has one other type it trumps, one it is trumped by, and one to which it is equal and opposite.

“The Athanatoi of Cosmos are descended from the Titans of Chaos. The lesser gods and goddesses, their powers also fall into the same four types. Except for the Phaeacians and the Olympians, who command two new powers created by Saturn and Rhea.

“I am a fallen spirit, a son of Phorcys. My power (Lamia tells me) is theurgy, the study and command of immaterial essences. A very potent power indeed and, in her opinion, the noblest and greatest of the four.

“Just by good fortune, Dr. Fell is here to stop me. He is a cyclopean, an atomist. One who commands matter. Whenever his power and the power of my house come into conflict, his will always prevail.

“I asked her who were the other houses and who stopped who, but she says, oh no, it is her turn now. How did I know she worked for Dionysus?

“I told her I read minds, and she says, ‘You lie to me, little boy, and we had an agreement. You are now in debt to me, and my power can touch you now.’

“She takes one of the combs out of her hair and jabs me in the neck with it. The tines are so sharp I almost don’t even feel anything. She puts her head down and starts licking at the blood dripping from my neck.

“There are bloodstains around her mouth at this point, a little trickle running down her neck. She throws back her head and moans, and strokes her own throat with her fingertips.

“She says, ‘For my first charm, I call upon your blood to tell me the truth of how you knew the name of the Vine God, Anacreon, Lord Vintner. I look into your blood, and I see your soul. I taste it, and I know. You did not read my mind, you read a book. Why has Boggin been teaching you about us? What kind of fool is he?’

“I said, ‘I call upon your oath to gag your spell. If my blood answers a second question without your answer to a second one of mine, then your promise to me is broken, and I am released.’

“She took out one of her hair needles and stabbed me in the arm with it. It was a pipette and she sucked at it like a straw. But the taste of my blood must have annoyed her now, for she spat it into my face. It stung my eyes.

“ ‘Ask your question, boy, little boy, clever little boy.’

“I repeated it. ‘Who were the Houses in Chaos? Whose power stopped whom?’

“She said, ‘The Dark rule the dreams and Nightmares of Old Night; Cimmeria their land, Morpheus their king; the Fallen rage in darkest Dis, weeping for lost Elysium, and the lost virtue, which, forsaken, lost them all and everything. The Lost fall through the Abyss, silent and serene as rain, Typhon is their eldest, but the Lost will suffer no one’s reign; the Telchine are their serfs on Earth, Ialysus their golden isle, rich with treasures wonderful and fine. The Unknown live beyond all things, in a Fortress Incomprehensible of uncountable sides and unimaginable design, and, prelapsarian, still laws recall that Uranus knew before his fall.’

“Now she climbed up atop me on the gurney, and began lapping at the wound in my neck like a dog.

“ ‘Oh, now I see,’ she says, ‘Boggin taught you all what you needed to know. He taught the Telchine boy physics and Newtonian mechanics, and taught you poems and myths and lore, taught music to wild prince of Night and Dreams, showed the Prelapsarian girl the strange secrets of strange Einstein, where math proves nothing is just where or what it seems. He has been forging you as a weapon for his own use, then. Right under everyone’s nose, right in the light where they should be the least blind. So the old puff of cold wind just gave you the paradigms you needed. And maybe he thought no one would mind.’

“She smiled and said, ‘Ask me another question.’

“I said, ‘I have no more.’

“ ‘I do not mind telling you, I am going to kill you and all your friends in any case. I can make it gentle and slow, you feel more warm and heavy, and you fade away to night; or I can start by scooping one eyeball from your face.’

“At that moment, a black vulture, of which, yes, I know, there are none in England, and yes, I know, they do not fly at night, landed on the window behind her.

“I said, ‘We are protected, me and mine. Mavors will avenge us. Look! His bird sits yonder, watching you!’

“ ‘I scoff at him,’ she said. ‘His mother killed my children, one and all. I cried until my eyes dried up like raisins and fell out. My hate keeps me alive. Are you a child? It is given to me to kill children. Under the law, I am allowed.’

“I said, ‘You are not a Bacchant. You do not work for Dionysus. Who do you work for…?’And I bit my tongue, because that was another question.

“She said, ‘I serve one who will rejoice when Chaos sweeps the established Earth away, and pulls the broken arch of Heaven down into the poisoned seas lit up with flame. My death will be small price to pay, if, by my acts, I make all things pass away. My last question is this: Are you a child, or a man? If man, I cannot kill you; but if child, I can.’

“She pressed my neck with her hand and drew a palmful of blood to her lips.

“I said, ‘You did not answer my question perfectly.’

“She spat my blood out again. ‘The answer I tasted was ambiguous. You yourself do not know. But a man can sleep with a woman. A child has not that power, though.’

“She parted her robes, and I saw she was not wearing any underwear.

“ ‘Pleasure me, young pup, young baby boy,’ she said, smiling with her teeth all red, ‘and you survive. But if your manhood remains flaccid, soft, and weak, I will know it is a boy, and not a man, to whom I speak.’

“Well, I am sure Colin would have found it perfectly acceptable to have a drunk, naked, grown-up woman kneeling on top of you, with your own blood dripping down her chin, with the smell of wine and urine and foul chemicals still hanging in the air. He would have performed. God, he would have found it a turn-on.

“But I can’t even imagine anything worse. Being killed is bad enough, being killed in a disgusting way, by a disgusting person, and just being humiliated and embarrassed, and… ugh. I wanted to cry. I wanted my mommy. I sure did not feel like a man in any sense of the word.

“Well, I didn’t cry. She sort of rubbed up and down against my body for a long time, while I lay there, waiting for it to be over, and hoping she would kill me rather than continue.

“I tried to think of something to do or say.

“She climbed off me and, well, she laughed at my dick. She pointed and laughed. I mean, what way is that to treat a child? I would be embarrassed even to talk about it, I would not be talking about it now, even to you, except I think my capacity to be embarrassed is completely burned out of me, and gone forever.

“She said, ‘You are a child, then, aren’t you?’ And she took another hair ornament out of her hair, and it opened into a scalpel.

“It was the last moment, the last second of my life.

“And I had an odd thought.

“How am I going to act, this second? How should I behave…?

“Normally, we do things, we are polite, or we obey laws, because we want to get something out of the situation. We want to win applause and esteem, or escape punishment, or better ourselves, or something. All that went blank in my head. At this point, there was no such thing as better off or worse off. There was no advantage or disadvantage to anything I did.

“So I did what I wanted to do. What I wanted to do was scare her. I mean, I could not hurt her in any other way, so I said, ‘Lamia, I know you. I call you by your true name. I deliver now to you my curse. Hear me! Unlawfully you have drunk my blood and taken it inside you. That blood I call upon now to curse and unmake you. It has the poisons placed in it by Dr. Fell, the poison that will erase your mind. He told me the minute and second that his poisons would begin to act. You told me that my powers and spells are helpless before his powers. But your powers are the same as mine, Lamia, and are bound by the same rules. You believe that Dr. Fell’s little molecular engines are beginning to dissolve your brain, don’t you? You are helpless.’

“She screamed and raised the scalpel, ‘Weep and shriek! Weep and shriek! It is what children do when they are about to die!’

“I laughed in her face. ‘Then part this shell of flesh that encumbers me, Mother of Vampires! The mortal part of me I always knew would die! Strike!’

“The knife came down toward my face, and it… jumped… out of her fingers, hung in the air before her face, unsupported, hovering.

“Then it moved and stabbed her in her eye.

“She flung herself backward, with blood and vitreous humor gushing from her ruined face.

“She screamed again, this time in anger, and started running toward the door, pulling hair ornaments out of her hair with both hands, and flipping them open into little throwing knives and hooks. She was running to the attack.

“I turned my head and saw what she was running at.

“Headmaster Boggin stood in the doorway, with Dr. Fell half a step behind him.

“Boggin had his hands clutching the doorframe, and his face was dark with wrath. His black robes started to billow around him, and his hair flew up out of its ponytail, came entirely unraveled, and started whipping around his face. His mortarboard went flying off. He braced his legs, and his chest swelled up to twice its size. Then (as his shirt was ripped into shreds) three times its size. Then he trembled and swelled up to four times his size.

“Dr. Fell, looking slightly bored, opens his third eye, and the little knives and sharp hair ornaments halt in midair, hang there a moment, and jump up to embed themselves in the ceiling boards, out of reach.

“And the Headmaster blows. Don’t imagine the puff-cheeks and pursed-up lips of a man whistling. Imagine a man opening his mouth as wide as possible, in a scream of utmost rage which is tearing out his lungs and guts and bowels. Now imagine a wind tunnel, one of those big ones that they use to test supersonic jets, with all its air compressed down and forced through an opening the size of the man’s mouth. Also imagine the temperature dropping to below zero in one second.

“That’s what happened. A hurricane exploded out of Boggin’s mouth, one of those tornado things that can pick up a piece of straw and impale it through a solid wood fence. The Lamia was picked up and thrown through the bank of windows on the far side of Dr. Fell’s office, knocking out concrete bricks as she went. Everything else in the room went flying up, too, including the table I was strapped onto, except Fell pointed his finger at the table and the metal bars bent out and grabbed onto the ceiling, and hung there while the hurricane blasted past.

“There’s not that much more to tell. Fell says, ‘Headmaster, that blow won’t kill her, not if that was Lamia.’

“Boggin says, ‘It was Lamia. Our Mr. Nemo would not be mistaken about such a thing. Get him down from there and untie him at once. We will have to organize a search for her. I don’t care if it takes all night; we must find her.’

“ ‘Are you worried that she knows what we are teaching our charges, here?’

“ ‘I take it you did not hear Mr. Nemo’s brilliant analysis of the situation. She’s not going to remember.’

“ ‘Then why worry?’

“ ‘Never mind what I am worried about, my dear Ananias. Just do as I say, there’s a good lad.’

“ ‘Do you think to keep this hidden? Everyone heard the sonic boom.’

“ ‘Not if they are using ears that hear sounds carried by the air. Only my brother, Corus, would hear it. Go! And use your molecular engines to rebuild this wall, while you are at it. As soon as Grendel’s hound finds a scent, I’ll come out and help look. I can see this is going to be a late night.’

“Here’s the epilogue to my story. Headmaster Boggin got me off of that damn gurney, and brought me to the kitchen, and woke up the Cook. He sent Cook out with the search parties, and stood there at the stove in his ripped clothes (even his pants were ripped; he had to borrow some jeans from Cook), and made me some chicken soup himself.

“I started crying in earnest then. And he put his arm around me, and told me what a good boy I was. He said not to worry about what she had done, because trying to humiliate a man’s pride is simply another form of attack, as much as stabbing someone. Unlike a knife wound, this cuts only as deep as you let it.

“And he said he was proud of me, proud of how bravely I had stood up to Lamia, and he only regretted that I would forget all this in the morning. He sat there and comforted me while I cried on his shoulder and ate soup.”