Prison of Souls (Science Fiction Thriller) Read online

  Prison of Souls

  Xander Gray

  Copyright © 2015 Quantology Publishing .

  All rights reserved.

  ID 1.8

  Chapter One

  The seizure raced up my spine. The sound of breathing filled my head. Somewhere in the distance I heard my wife, shouting for help. Just before the seizure swallowed me whole, she called my name: “Joshua.”

  #

  Doctor McSorley leaned toward me, cupping my face. “Can you hear me?”

  I was sitting on an exam table. A jar of Muppet Band-Aids sat on the counter; a painting of Big Bird adorned the wall.

  McSorley smiled and ruffled my hair. “Should I fetch your mother?”

  I caught sight of myself in the mirror above the sink—thin and gaunt, blue eyes and dark hair—and understanding crashed into me. I was a child. Impossible. “I feel strange.”

  “You vagaled down.” McSorley adjusted his glasses.

  “I what?”

  “You passed out.” The last time I had seen him, he had been covered with liver spots, his accusing voice a strained croak. Now his eyes shone blue and his voice rang and he loomed over me like a giant. A breathing mask hissed like a snake in his hand. “If you’re feeling better, we will proceed.”

  I tried to stand.

  He shoved me flat against the table and pointed toward a glass box the size of a small filing cabinet, pulsing with white light. “We’re going to plug you into this machine.” A grin spread over his face, final as the grave. He held the mask over my mouth. “Remember what I told you. Focus on the words end simulation until you hear them in your head. You’ll wake up. Everything will be fine.”

  The breathing mask suctioned onto my face with a pop.

  #

  I was a live wire splayed on a concrete floor, arms flailing. My wife was trying to cradle my thrashing head. “Somebody help!” she called. “He’s having a seizure! He’s going to hurt himself!”

  My body arced in spasm. The florescent lights on the ceiling brightened until they punched holes in the world, and then I was sinking, sinking back into blackness.

  #

  I stood in a drizzling rain, surrounded by three- and four-story buildings with their names engraved into stone archways—Redman Hall, Cory Hall, Fullman Hall. The rain had just started; droplets quickly darkened the walkways. Most of the students sitting at tables stood and hurried beneath the eaves of the library.

  I recognized the campus: Walton University. I remembered it from photos.

  Doctor McSorley—old and haggard—burst through the doors of Redman Hall, squinting into the rain, a stack of books under one arm. When he saw the gun in my hands, he stopped walking and clutched the books to his chest.

  I’d always been blamed for shooting him. Now was my chance to actually do it.

  I pulled the trigger. The gun kicked. The crack of the gunshot echoed between the buildings. A cluster of starlings exploded toward the sky. McSorley's books dropped into the gutter.

  Behind me, someone screamed.

  I turned and saw a middle-aged woman, blood pooling on the pavers beneath her head. Her arm twitched, but her eyes were stone dead.

  How had the bullet hit her? The angle was impossible.

  The campus and the sky swapped places. I stumbled through the rain, toward one of the tables, holding my head, trying to understand.

  #

  “Joshua!” It was my wife’s voice. “Say something!”

  I sat up, clutching her hands, seeing only her face. I wanted to say her name, but I couldn’t remember it. “Crystal?”

  She nodded.

  “My hallucinations were so vivid. I… I shot McSorley. McSorley was experimenting on me when I was a kid and—”

  “McSorley experimented on you?” Crystal’s eyes widened. “Oh my God. I have to show you something.”

  I let go of her hands and looked around. For a moment I didn’t know where I was, but then I saw the concrete walls and steel bars, the long line of convicts in the holding cell, and the corrections officer palming his baton in the corridor, watching me with interest.

  I was in prison.

  This was my home now.

  Chapter Two

  An unfamiliar officer named Slaven pushed me down the hallway toward Medical. “Hurry up.”

  “Hold on. It takes time to recover after I seize.” I touched my forehead, trying to quell the rocking in my skull. “Did you really have to cancel my visit with my wife?”

  “You might still get to see her.” Slaven retrieved a cell phone from his pocket. He pressed the touch screen with his thumb and raised the phone to his ear. “We’ve had an incident. Are you down in my office? Good. Do you have the scanner with you? Leave it on the table. We’ll be there in a minute.” He tucked the phone back into his pocket.

  “I didn’t think you guys were allowed to carry phones,” I said.

  “Shut up and keep moving.” At the end of the corridor, he led me into a small room and ordered me to face the wall.

  I stood with my feet apart, hands on the cinderblock. “I thought you were taking me to Medical.”

  “Close your eyes,” Slaven said.

  “What?”

  He shoved me against the wall.

  My body tensed.

  “You’re shaking,” he barked. “Be still.”

  For one terrible moment, I thought he was going to assault me, but then I heard a click, followed by three faint beeps, and it was over.

  “Face me.”

  I turned around.

  Slaven slid something into his pocket.

  “What did you do?”

  Slaven waved his hand, dismissing me. “Standard procedure.”

  That wasn’t an answer, but I couldn’t risk challenging him, not back here alone with him and his baton.

  I kept my mouth shut until we arrived at Medical, where it took fifteen minutes for the prison doctor to shine a light in my eyes and declare me healthy. I spent most of that time explaining my history of seizures. I have occipital lobe epilepsy, doctor. I suffer vivid hallucinations, doctor. Medication doesn’t help, doctor.

  After sitting in Medical’s holding area for what seemed like forever, Slaven led me back toward Visitation. I felt like I knew him from outside. But how? From where? He didn’t look familiar in the least. It was a feeling, a knot in my stomach. As we walked through the sterile hallways, I kept my distance from him.

  Chapter Three

  The blinds in the consultation room were half-drawn, light streaming onto the table through motes of swirling dust. Crystal sat in her neat blue suit, holding a manila envelope. “Take this.”

  I wanted to relax with my wife—pretend life was normal—but there would be no small-talk today. I upended the envelope, and documents spilled onto the table. A grainy photograph caught my attention. “Oh my God.”

  “This is what I wanted to show you.”

  The 8x10 revealed a faceless humanoid, skin smooth and white as alabaster. A casual observer might have mistaken it for a horror movie prop. “This thing is real?”

  “It would appear so.” She tapped the photo. “This is the thing from your hallucinations? Your blank man?”

  “Yes.” During my teenage years, I had rarely suffered a seizure where it had not made an appearance, its featureless head swimming up through my subconscious in clouds of purple smoke. “I can’t believe this.”

  “What do you make of the rest?” She pointed to the remaining documents.

  A newspaper article announced Professor Maps Human Mind; a magazine article declared The Dawn of Digital Reality; a third article proclaimed CERN Scientists Hunt for God Particle. A
stack of handwritten notes followed, photocopied from loose-leaf. Other than the photograph and the CERN article, none of it meant anything to me. “Where did you get this stuff?”

  “I had my secretary fax it while you were down in Medical.” Crystal set her briefcase on the table. “Originally, some guy calling himself Pyxis sent these documents to my law office.”

  “Pyxis?”

  “I looked it up. It’s a constellation—the compass box.”

  “Why didn’t you show me these documents sooner?”

  “I thought Pyxis was a crackpot, so I didn’t pay a whole lot of attention to them.” Crystal pointed to the largest of the three articles, the one about mapping the human mind, which bore a dot-matrix photo captioned Professor Edward McSorley at Walton University. “I’m sure the reference to McSorley isn’t lost on you.”

  I rapped my fingers on the table as I pictured McSorley at the witness stand, liver-spotted cheeks and squinty eyes, shaking his small fist. Then I remembered the way he had looked in my hallucination of the pediatrician’s office, so young and vibrant.

  Crystal leaned across the table. “I called McSorley’s office to ask if he’d ever seen that photograph of the faceless thing, but the guy’s gone—not retired, just gone. He worked at Walt U for thirty years and suddenly nobody up there knows where he is. And that’s not the strangest part.” She tapped the handwritten notes. “Our anonymous source claims Professor McSorley spent the 1980s hooking people up to electrodes to measure synaptic activity in the brain. Typical research from what I understand, except one detail.”

  “And that would be?”

  “Your name is on the list of test subjects.”

  My fingers stopped rapping.

  “You would have been eight years old,” Crystal said. “And according to this letter, several test subjects were exposed to those things.” She pointed again at the photograph of the faceless humanoid. “I guess you’re not crazy after all.”

  “What is that thing?”

  Crystal shook her head. “It doesn’t say.”

  “You mean this guy writes an anonymous letter saying I was experimented on as a child, exposed to this alien thing, and sends a photo, but doesn’t say what it is?”

  “That’s exactly what I’m telling you.” She shrugged, then sighed.

  I flipped the letter over to find a list of names, social security numbers, and dates. The last name on the page was mine.

  Crystal raised her hand to emphasize a point. “We have McSorley running tests on your brain when you’re eight, which is right around the time you start having seizures and seeing your blank man during blackouts. Thirty years later, you're framed for shooting McSorley.” She paused and studied my face. “What’s wrong?”

  “You believe I was framed?” I felt a wave of profound gratitude. “We discussed it during the trial, but you were so intent on winning.”

  “Of course you were framed. What, I thought you were guilty? You’re my husband. I know you better than anyone. I know damned well you’d never been to Walton University and certainly had no motivation to drive up there and start shooting.”

  If Crystal believed my version of events, she was either loyal to a fault or deluded. Either way, I was thankful. I reached across the table and touched her hand. “You’ve never wondered if I murdered that girl during one of my black outs?”

  “Are you asking if I thought this was another Garfield incident?”

  “He prefers 'Gar' these days.”

  She ignored that. “I’ve lived around your seizures since I was a teenager. You go into some strange head space and act a fool, but you never did anything violent except that one time with Gar in grade school. As far as I’m concerned, that doesn’t count. We don’t even know if that was a seizure, and anyway, a seizure doesn’t account for how you managed to drive to a college campus an hour and a half away, shoot someone, and drive home without any memory of the event. That’s not epilepsy; it’s magic. And it’s a far cry from a five-minute fight on a playground when you were eight.”

  I nodded. “I was just asking if you’d considered it. Not necessarily with regard to the Garfield incident, but just in general.”

  “You did not unwittingly commit murder during an epileptic trance. That’s crazy. The question has always been who framed you and why.”

  I did not respond. I was thinking.

  “But I’m a skeptic,” she said, “so let’s say Pyxis made it up.”

  Crystal was not a skeptic, but challenging her would have been a poor use of time. “If Pyxis made it up, how would he have known what I see during blackouts? What about that photograph?”

  “My thoughts exactly,” Crystal said. “If this is a scam, it’s close to home.”

  “Yeah.” I rose from the table and squinted into the sunlight.

  Crystal joined me near the window, resting a hand on my shoulder. “Think back. Did you undergo any medical tests when you were a kid?”

  “They tested the hell out of me once I started having seizures.”

  “Before the seizures.”

  “My mom had me evaluated after the Garfield incident, but that was so long ago.”

  She chewed her lip, staring into space. “I’m going to ask your parents, if you don’t mind.”

  “Of course. What about the other test subjects on that list?”

  Crystal’s eyes met mine. “They never grew up.”

  My face went slack. “McSorley killed them?”

  She shook her head. “We’re still validating death records, but so far it looks like every kid on that list except you died before age ten, officially natural causes, viral or bacterial.”

  “What? What was McSorley doing?”

  “I don’t know. Pyxis promised another letter next week. Maybe he’ll provide more details.” She walked back to the table, pulled two articles from the collection, and laid them side by side. “Look at this.”

  I spun the CERN article around and scanned it. It was a fluff piece on particle physics—beneath my pay grade. I had once worked at Fermilab, researching dark matter. “This article speculates a particle accelerator might one day reveal hidden extra dimensions coiled up in the subatomic realm.”

  “And what does that have to do with this?” She tapped the article about mapping the human mind, the one with the photograph of McSorley.

  I scanned the text. “This one’s about McSorley’s brain research. Beyond my expertise except where he mentions nanites.”

  “Sometimes you speak Martian.” She shrugged.

  “Nanites are microscopic machines. In this article, McSorley specifically references synthetic cells, speculating they might one day immortalize human consciousness. That kind of talk is common among fringe physicists, but thirty years ago?”

  “You’re saying McSorley was ahead of his time?”

  “I’d say so.” I slid the article back to her. “The Science of Small—the seminal text on nanotechnology—was written in 1986, and McSorley made these comments in 1981.”

  “What’s the connection, Joshua?” She slid the articles into the stack. “If I can prove McSorley experimented on you, I can request a new trial, maybe prove you weren’t at Walt U, didn’t shoot McSorley or accidentally kill that girl, but we have to connect these dots.”

  There was only one apparent connection. “Both articles are about really small things.”

  “That’s your area of expertise.” She looked into my eyes. “Don’t you think that’s strange?”

  “Are you asking me to calculate the odds?”

  “Nope.” She knew better.

  “Good, because I haven’t a clue.” I sighed. “Neither article sheds light on what McSorley did to those children, nor what he might have done to me.”

  “I’ll keep digging.” She put her hands on mine and smiled sympathetically.

  The door clicked open behind me. Slaven entered the room and stood next to the table.

  I glanced up at the clock. “Time’s up.”

&
nbsp; Crystal and I stood. I gave her a quick kiss.

  As Slaven led the way toward GenPop, I glanced back and saw the smile gone from her face.

  She’s trying, but she knows I’m never getting out of here.

  An old emotional wound tore open, like I was being locked away from her for the first time.

  Chapter Four

  When I got back to my cell, Gar was sitting on the lower bunk. A tribal tattoo swirled along his collarbone, up the right side of his neck and onto his face where it branched into a two headed snake.

  I pointed to the bandage on his head. “What happened to you?”

  “Seriously?” He rolled his eyes. “You kicked me while you were seizing.”

  “I what?”

  He shook his head, clearly exasperated. “I was helping your wife hold you still so you wouldn’t hurt yourself, but you’re one slippery mother. The instant they saw the blood, the screws hauled me down to Medical and I missed my visit with my mom.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “It’s just a flesh wound.”

  “I don’t remember any of it.”

  “Sure you don’t. You’ve been waiting twenty years for that.”

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  “Of course I’m kidding.” Gar’s smile was a clear crescent moon in the murky patterns of his tattoo. “But it’s not as if we were childhood friends.”

  Gar had bullied me on the play yard, but defended me on the prison yard. I had forgiven him. “I barely remember grade school.”

  Gar tapped the unwounded side of his head. “You hit me with that branch.”

  “So I’ve been told.”

  “What are the chances I would end up sharing a cell with you after all these years?”

  “You really want me to answer that?” It was an earnest question; he knew damned well I was an expert on probability. “Every violent felon from our town lands here. There are five hundred cells in GenPop, a thousand inmates. Combined with the fact that your previous three cellmates had to move because you beat them—”

  “I was protecting my friends!” He interjected.

  “And the fact that my last cellmate tried to make me his girlfriend—”