Suspicious Minds (Stranger Things Novels #1)(24)

“What’s that?” Dr. Parks asked, coming through the door. At least Alice thought she’d just come through. And then she knew it, because behind her was Dr. Brenner and that bearded orderly who always came at his side. That bearded orderly who brought the machine she most wanted to take apart and wreck. The one they used to shock her.

“Nothing,” she said, swinging her feet to the floor and sitting up. “Wait, I thought you were going to take my temperature. I don’t feel right today.”

Dr. Parks frowned. “What are your symptoms?”

Besides the fact my eyes see like pinwheels on this junk?

Dr. Brenner stepped forward. “It’s psychosomatic. The treatment will help.”

Alice snorted before she could stop it.

Dr. Brenner’s eyebrows raised so high, they seemed to levitate above his head. “Oh? Because as a medical professional I can tell you that you probably feel poorly because it’s been a week since your last treatment.”

I feel better the minute I’m out of this place.

“You haven’t spoken about this to anyone, correct?” Dr. Brenner moved forward, waving for the machine to be brought, too, and began to fix the electrodes to Alice’s temples.

“I know we’re not supposed to.” She hadn’t. She’d thought she might on the day she went to the diner, and then Terry’s boyfriend said that thing about weapons and she had realized maybe she was beginning to feel more like a weapon than a person with her desire to disassemble everything…

It was silly. She knew it was silly.

“Good.”

Brenner placed a hand on her shoulder and gently shoved her down. “Let’s increase the voltage this week.”

Dr. Parks’ hand went to her throat. “Are you certain that’s a good idea? If she’s not feeling well…”

“It’ll perk her right up,” he said. Then, to Alice, “Won’t it?”

What was there to do but nod? It was the opposite of what he’d told Terry he would do.

Alice closed her eyes and waited. She decided she definitely would not scream or cry out or make any noise, but then the lightning passed through her and she gasped and sparks floated behind her eyelids.

No, not sparks.

Those spores she could never close her fingers around.

She went to the quiet place inside, beneath the reality she longed to escape. Alice felt out of joint here, in the Beneath as she’d begun to think of it, like she didn’t fit. A daydream of decay, filled with shadows.

Today the shadows were motionless, walls and windows cracked, tendrils dead where they lay. Alice moved through the wheel of images in her mind to prove there was life here, that she was still alive.

This week’s drugs were something.

She turned in a circle, closing and opening her eyes. The shadows grew now with each blink. Sunflowers rose up, leached of color. She felt dizzy.

Alice whirled toward new movement.

A monster, glistening and sharp. A dream. A nightmare.

The kind of thing in those comic books her cousins read. The kind of creature that might result if you disassembled a life-form and put it back together wrong. Arms too long. A head like a dark flower.

She wondered if it longed to take apart things the way she did.

“Alice, can you hear me?” Dr. Parks voice. “You can open your eyes, if you like.”

The black-and-white sunflowers swayed, the monster fading into them. Had it been one of them all along? Maybe so….Butterflies burst out of the swaying stalks as the flowers returned to yellow-gold.

When she opened her eyes to the real world, the little room in the lab, Brenner was the first thing she saw.

“Monsters,” she said, “of course my brain has them.”

As long as they stayed in there, everything would be all right. Wouldn’t it?





7.


Terry had gotten lost in the moment, then the next, and the one after that, studying the floor, the walls, the ceiling. The ceiling! As she watched, it moved like a sky. Everything ordinary was made extraordinarily strange through the lens of her acid-soaked brain. By the time she remembered she’d wanted to ask Dr. Brenner about the calls to the university and Alice’s uncle, he’d left the room.

Wherever he’d stepped out to, the orderly had gone with him. This week was in the small exam room, no one else around, talking through times when Terry wished she’d done something different, revisiting regrets.

If she didn’t ask Brenner while this was on her mind, she might forget again. The acid test is remembering anything…

He wouldn’t mind if she went to look for him, would he? She didn’t think so. He’d never told her she had to stay put.

Terry got up, and went to the door where the knob spun. They’d left it unlocked. It was a sign: Go on.

When she stepped into the hallway, she was alone. She started walking.

She took the first hallway she’d never been down before. Maybe Brenner’s office was this way? The tiles on the wall danced around her.

There was the sound of a door opening and footsteps, and she cowered alongside the wall. A man in a lab coat breezed around the corner in front of her and went up the hall, away from Terry. She darted forward, feeling like she was in a game.

The door he’d come through went to a different wing. It had one of those fancy keypads beside it and…it was still partway open. Could she make it?