The Children on the Hill(57)

Gran?

Vi imagined Iris strapped down to the hospital bed in the middle room. She thought of the scars on Iris’s head and chest.

Across the hall was another door, this one windowless. She tried the knob, and it turned easily.

It was some kind of break room, with a couch, a coffeepot, a small refrigerator. A can of Folgers coffee. She opened the fridge, found a carton of milk, some juice, a plate she recognized from their own kitchen at home. The plate had a liverwurst sandwich on it, Gran’s favorite, all wrapped up in plastic wrap.

There was a large glass ashtray on the coffee table. A couple of magazines: Time and Life, addressed to Dr. Hildreth.

Vi left the break room and moved on to the last door in the hallway.

Locked.

She flipped through the keys, found one marked B-OFF.

Be off with you, she thought.

And she should be off. How long had she been down here? Five minutes? More? She looked at her watch. Nearly ten minutes had passed since she’d met Patty at the back door.

Tick tock. Tick tock.

How long would it take them to put out the fire? How long before Sal hurried back and started making his rounds? How long before Gran went back into the house? Before she looked in her purse and saw the keys missing?

Hurry, hurry, hurry, a voice whispered in her ear, one of the gods, but she wasn’t sure which one.

Tick tock. Tick tock.

She tried the key. It fit. She opened the door, felt for a light switch on the wall inside, and flipped it on.

She stepped in. B-Office smelled like stale cigarette smoke.

There was an old wooden desk and chair, and a large gray metal file cabinet with four drawers.

“Bingo,” she said, heading right for the file cabinet.

She opened the top drawer. Saw file after file marked:

MAYFLOWER

Her heart beat louder; she felt the throbbing pulse in her whole body.

She hesitated a second, suddenly unsure.

Did she want to see?

No.

But she needed to.

She started thumbing through the files.

The earliest records she found were dated more than fifteen years earlier—before she was even born. She pulled out a couple of files and laid them on the desk.

Patients were referred to by letters. Patient A. Patient B. Medical records. Long lists of medications.

Almost all of them had been given some combination of sodium amytal and Metrazol. Vi committed the names to memory, planning to look them up in Gran’s drug book when she got back to the house. There were mentions of experiments with psychoactive plants, lysergic acid diethylamide, things with Latin names Vi didn’t recognize. She thought of the jars of leaves, roots, and berries in the basement at home and wondered if some of those were hallucinogens; if Gran was making her own mixes and experimenting with them.

The notes contained descriptions: Electroconvulsive therapy. Sensory deprivation. Cold water therapy. Hypnosis.

Even surgeries. Vi looked down at carefully sketched diagrams of the brain, of cranial cuts, of areas stimulated, pierced, and cut away.

These were not cures.

These were experiments.

She felt dizzy; things looked blurry. She made herself look away from the notes, all carefully charted in her grandmother’s neat penmanship.

These people had been tortured.

Cut open like the rats in Gran’s basement.

Her stomach flipped, and she thought she might be sick.

Was Iris one of these patients? A subject of Gran’s experiments?

Had she gotten the scars on her head and chest from surgeries done down here in the Inn basement?

Vi continued to scan the charts, read how Gran tested her subjects’ memories, their cognitive abilities and IQs. Again and again, she was disappointed in the results:

Another failure. Memories and sense of personhood are gone, but there are too many deficits. Pt can no longer toilet himself, much less read, write, or have a meaningful conversation.



Vi looked through the first three drawers, frantically searching for something that would help her understand who Iris was. She found a folder on Patient I, but he was a thirty-six-year-old man, a transient with a history of alcohol abuse. At the end of the notes, paper-clipped to the inside back cover of the manila folder, was a photograph. A snapshot of Patient I in a hospital gown, a scar on his shaved head. A scar just like Iris’s.

Vi’s breath was stuck in her throat. Her heart seemed to freeze, to forget to beat for a second. Because she recognized this man, Patient I.

Patient I was Old Mac.

She closed the file, put it back, looked at her watch. Another five minutes had gone by.

Shit, shit, shit.

She had to get out of here. Had to hurry.

But she couldn’t leave quite yet. She was too close. She skimmed through more folders until she got to the last one in the third drawer. There, her eye caught on a line scribbled in her grandmother’s familiar handwriting.

The project has not shown the results we are looking for because of one reason: I have not found the right subject.

Until now.

Patient S is the one. I know she is.

The one who will change everything.



Vi shoved the file back, moved to the final drawer, the one at the bottom.

And there was that funny feeling in her chest again.

Each file folder in the drawer was marked: PATIENT S.

It was stuffed full. There must have been hundreds, thousands of pages of records in there, all on Patient S.