Suspicious Minds (Stranger Things Novels #1)(13)

She tried the knob anyway. It swung open easily.

“Problem?” Dr. Brenner asked. He and the orderly were conferring about something across the hall. Where they’d been waiting to give her privacy.

“No,” Terry said. “Sorry.”

She shut the door.

The gown was of the usual hospital type, thin and scratchy as paper. Terry had always been healthy so she’d never been admitted to a hospital, but her mother had appendicitis when the girls were in middle school. Their father had parked them by her side for the two days she had to stay at the hospital. Her mother had refused to get out of bed until they were leaving, because of the gaping opening at the back of her gown. “Designed by men,” she’d said, a rare comment of the type.

Terry hadn’t asked what she meant. Now, as she slipped out of her slacks and blouse and pulled the gown over her head, she got it. She left her underwear on.

The men weren’t visible through the small window in the door, so she circled the room to see what she could see. The machines’ uses were mysterious to her; the clipboard left on one of the tables had lots of blanks to be filled in with various measurements and readings. There was a small row of cups and an unmarked bottle.

Walking back to the door, she opened it and waved for the men to come in. Her legs and arms were already getting cold, her feet blocks of ice against the floor. She shouldn’t have left her shoes off.

“Would you like some water?” Dr. Brenner asked.

“Sure,” Terry said.

He filled one of the small cups using the bottle. So that’s what had been in it.

She accepted it and took a sip. “Thanks.”

Dr. Brenner motioned to a chair. “As I said, there’s no reason to be nervous. We’ll be with you the whole time. We’re going to take some blood and measure your vital signs now. Then, I’ll ask you to relax on the cot for a bit and talk you through an exercise.”

That seemed straightforward enough…if weird. Terry took a seat.

The orderly drew two tubes’ worth of her blood. Dr. Brenner shone a light into her eyes, bright enough to cause her to wince. He pressed a cold stethoscope against her heart, and it pounded so loud in her chest she imagined they both heard it. He brought over a machine and pressed some buttons, put a monitor on her finger.

Terry watched as a line zigzagged across a screen in red, mesmerizing. Her heart was still beating so hard.

Dr. Brenner stepped back, and Terry tried to follow him with her eyes. But the room around them seemed to go fuzzy. So did he. Everything blurred, shifting, moving…Or was it Terry shifting and moving?

“It’s kicking in,” the orderly said.

Terry tried to make sense of the words, and then she did. Stacey hadn’t exaggerated. “You drugged me?”

“We’ll be right here,” Dr. Brenner said. “We’ve given you a powerful hallucinogenic. We have evidence it can open the mind to suggestibility. Please, lie down, and try to stay calm as it takes effect.”

Easy for him to say. Terry started to laugh. Because it couldn’t be easy for him to say. Not when his face was melting.

He and the orderly stood her up and walked her to the cot. Why did his face melting make her laugh? She didn’t know. She eased down onto the white sheets, flailing a little, still laughing. They backed away once she made it to horizontal, and she searched for and found the monitor and that red line.

I’m okay as long as the line’s steady. She wasn’t laughing anymore. The cot felt soft and hard. How could it be both? She wanted to get up.

“Now, Terry,” Dr. Brenner said, his voice so calm she wanted to hold on to it, “relax. Try to be open. Let your consciousness be free.”

She shook her head no.

“Look at me, Terry.” He held up a small, shiny object between his fingers. “Now I want you to look at the crystal, focus on it alone.”

The doctor stared down into her face like he wouldn’t stop until she did what he said. She found the red line on the monitor one more time, realizing that to follow his directions she’d have to give up her heartbeat. She watched it spike red and then transferred her attention to the pale crystal he held. Bye-bye, heart.

“Now, close your eyes. Let the room fall away.”

Spots bloomed behind her eyelids. Every color, like she was looking through a spray of water droplets from a garden hose as the sunlight turned them into rainbows.

“Pretty,” she whispered.

“That’s better. Stay relaxed,” a man’s voice said, and she couldn’t remember whose it was anymore. Did she know him? She didn’t think so. “Go deeper.”

Terry wanted to resist, but that turned out to be much harder than doing what the stranger told her to.

So Terry kept going.

She went all the way in, as deep as she could get.





4.


Alice had never been in a place with so many machines that was so clean.

She lived in a family where grease under your fingernails became a way of life. Of course, no one minded for the men and the boys. They got to wear comfortable old clothes without a fight, and could hardly be bothered with scrubbing off the worst of the dirt every Sunday for church (which Alice did because that made sense to her, showing respect). Her mother used to harp about it when she first started working at her uncle’s, how even a pretty girl like her would never catch a man with grimy half-moons at the end of her digits…But at some point her mom had given up.