The Sleep Experiment Read online

  “Fudge some of the facts?”

  “I get what I need from Chad’s head, then you and I go out for dinner to celebrate the conclusion of the experiment. We turn off the gas and leave Chad and Sharon to catch up on some much-needed rest. And when we return in the morning…they’ve done what they’ve done. They’ve done it in our absence. Some side effect of coming off the gas. I don’t know. I’ll spin it in scientific terms. The bottom line is, the experiment was all above board on our watch. We couldn’t have foreseen what was to happen to them, and we weren’t around to prevent it.”

  “You want us to lie,” he stated.

  “Shiva, Krishna, and fucking Christ, Guru! Don’t be like the rest of them, my man. Lie? If you want to call it that. I call it a pretty near representation of what happened, fudged a little to cross the T’s and dot the I’s. And what’s wrong with that? You want to wallow in ethics? How about philosophical consequentialism then? Judging whether something is right by what its consequences are. And I’d say, given what the consequences of the Sleep Experiment will be, we are pretty damn square in the right.”

  “What about her?” Guru looked at Brook.

  Dr. Wallis looked too. Brook was sprawled on the floor where she had fallen. Truth be told, he wasn’t quite sure what he was going to do with her yet. He couldn’t dispose of her as he had Penny. He was her boyfriend. He had met some of her friends. Most of the staff at Café Emporium knew they were dating. He would be the first and perhaps only suspect if she went missing. And two people close to him disappearing within a matter of days? No, offing Brook was out of the question. “I’ll talk to her,” he told Guru. “When she hears everything I have to say, she’ll come around. She might not be happy about Chad and Sharon’s deaths, but she loves me. She’ll—she’ll keep quiet for me,” he added, hoping he’d spoken with more conviction than he’d felt.

  Then, realizing the hypocrisy of his words with Brook lying limp as a noodle on the floor, the right side of her jaw already turning ballet slipper pink, Dr. Wallis knelt next to her body and carefully—lovingly—moved her onto the air mattress, where you could almost imagine she was sleeping peacefully.

  Dr. Wallis turned to Guru expectantly.

  “Let’s finish this, brother.”

  ◆◆◆

  They entered the sleep laboratory together.

  “Chad, how you doing over there?” Wallis asked.

  The Australian didn’t react to his voice.

  “You’ve been pretty quiet, buddy.”

  No response.

  Dr. Wallis stopped when he was directly behind Chad, who reeked of body odor and something else that made Wallis think of rotting wood. He motioned Guru, who was pushing the metal cart with the EEG equipment, to join him. “So this is the deal, Chad,” he said. “We’re going to do one of the tests on you with the computer and the headband, and then we’ll leave you alone after that. You can keep sitting how you are. You don’t even have to turn around. But you’re going to need to pull off the hoody.” He retrieved the electrode gel from the cart. “You might not remember how this works, he continued, “but it doesn’t hurt at all. The gel might be a little cold, but that’s it. Ready?”

  Dr. Wallis pulled back Chad’s hoodie.

  The Australian twisted about with a venomous hiss.

  Wallis gagged and heard Guru retch behind him.

  Chad had no face.

  He'd peeled away every inch of visible skin to reveal the harvest-colored stew of fat, muscle, and connective tissue beneath. In some places along his jaw he’d gouged his flesh so deeply that his mandible, wet and white, peeked through.

  Where his lively blue eyes had been were hollow pools of black and blood. Where his nose had been was a mucus-encrusted hole. Where his lips had been were bleeding gums and a hideous rictus grin.

  None of the missing organs lay discarded on the ground before him, which meant they’d most likely been ingested.

  “My God,” Wallis breathed, and even as he stared in shock at the monster before him, he found himself wondering whether Chad had torn away his face in an effort to rid himself of the hallucinatory mushrooms he’d believed to be growing there, or whether he, like Sharon, had been trying to let whatever was inside of him out.

  Guru was saying something quickly in Hindi, maybe a prayer.

  Ignoring him, Dr. Wallis said, “It’s okay, Chad. You’re okay. We’re not going to hurt you.” He tossed the electrode gel back onto the cart, as there would no longer be a need for a liquid agent given Chad no longer had any skin on his forehead. He picked up the headband. “Remember, pal, this isn’t going to hurt.”

  Bending forward, holding the headband before him with outstretched arms, Wallis lowered it over Chad’s head as if crowning a mutilated monarch.

  With amazing speed, the Australian’s hands gripped Dr. Wallis’ wrists, and in the next instant Wallis found himself corkscrewing through the air. He struck the floor with bone-jarring force and rolled several feet before coming to a rest.

  A dazed assessment of his body confirmed it to be in working order, and he quickly sat up.

  Guru was backing away from Chad the way you would from a German Shepherd foaming at the mouth. “How—how—how did he do that?” he stammered.

  “Just keep moving to the fucking door,” Wallis told him.

  Getting to his feet, and never turning his back to the Australian, he followed.

  ◆◆◆

  “That was impossible!” Guru said. “He would need the strength of five men to throw you the way he did!”

  “Not impossible, my good friend,” Dr. Wallis said, his eyes alight with excitement now that they were safely back in the observation room. “It happened.”

  “But how?”

  “An educated guess? Adrenaline.”

  “Adrenaline? Surely—”

  “Adrenaline, enzymes, proteins, endorphins, our emotions. When the body’s entire stress response is activated, most people are capable of lifting six or seven times their own body weight. The young woman who heaves the car off her father after it slipped off the carjack onto him. The man who tears a caved-in door from his crashed vehicle in order to rescue his wife. Such cases of superhuman strength are not unheard of.”

  “But we were not threatening Chad. He—”

  “He might not have known that. He no longer has eyes to see with.”

  “What are we to do then? He clearly will not let us hook him up to the EEG machine, let alone remain cooperative for the duration of the tests.”

  “No, not in his present state,” Wallis agreed. “But I have an idea.”

  ◆◆◆

  Dr. Roy Wallis explained his plan to Guru Rampal, who reluctantly acquiesced to help him carry it out. Then he transferred Brook to Sharon’s bed in the sleep laboratory, so the Indian could keep her contained if she were to regain consciousness while Wallis was gone. “If she comes around,” he instructed, “don’t let her out of that room, no matter what she says.”

  “Just please hurry, professor,” Guru said.

  Nodding, Dr. Wallis left Tolman Hall. The week-long storm thrashing the Bay Area remained in full swing. Slanting rain fell in icy curtains, while the howling wind whipped the branches of the nearby trees into a frenzy of flapping leaves. Thunder cracked loudly, followed by a burst of forked lightning.

  Wallis’ colleagues in the English Department would call this pathetic fallacy; he called it a pain in the fucking ass.

  Head bowed, he hurried along Bayard Rustin Way to his car, then drove with his windshield-wipers thumping to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, which was nestled high in the hills above the campus.

  At the summit he passed through the main gate and followed the snaking road among the cluster of buildings. On a pleasant day he would have had distant views of the San Francisco Bay, but right then he couldn’t see anything outside the twin tunnels the Audi’s headlights punched in the darkness.

  He parked illegally out front of Building 33 and das
hed through the rain to the entrance. He swiped his keycard and stepped inside the lobby, his presence activating the computer-controlled lighting system.

  Supported by the US Department of Energy, and managed by the University of California, Berkeley Lab conducted unclassified research across a wide range of scientific disciplines. They studied everything from the infinitesimal scale of subatomic particles to the infinite expanse of the universe. Building 33, aka the General Purpose Lab, had been designed to facilitate research between scientists from every walk of life.

  Dr. Wallis took the stairs to the third floor, then passed all sorts of customized wet and dry labs before coming to his own lab. He swiped his keycard and entered the small space. Although he had euthanized all of his mice some time ago, he hadn’t yet returned the vivarium in which he’d kept them, the freestanding biosafety cabinet he’d used while handling them, any of the expensive research equipment cluttering his workstations—or, most significantly, the small pharmacy of drugs he kept in a locked cabinet.

  He went to the cabinet now, unlocked it, and stuffed his jacket pockets with several syringes and vials of Vecuronium, a neuromuscular blocking agent he’d used to keep his mice still during certain experiments or surgery. It was also part of the three-drug cocktail used to execute death-row convicts in Tennessee, Virginia, and other states yet to abolish the death penalty.

  Dr. Wallis locked the cabinet again and was about to leave the lab when someone called out, “Hello?”

  Wallis froze.

  However, remaining put and hoping the person went away seemed like wishful thinking, and so he stepped out of the lab, pulled closed the door, and said, “Hello?”

  He heard the squawk of rubber soles on the polished flooring, and then a middle-aged woman dressed in a tracksuit not unlike his own appeared from around a corner. With her mop of rust-gray hair, doughy face, and rotund physique, you wouldn’t be blamed for mistaking her for a school crossing-guard on the cusp of retirement. However, like many in academia who prioritized mind over body, her eyes were sharp, clear, and inquisitive.

  “Roy!” she said, throwing wide her stubby arms. “I was wondering who might be here at this hour!”

  “I was wondering the same thing, June,” Wallis said, forcing a smile. June Scarborough was a fellow psychologist completing a Ph.D. dissertation on the complexity of squirrel behavior. She and her undergraduate helpers had spent the better part of the last two years armed with nuts and stopwatches and camcorders while they stalked fox squirrels around the campus. Dr. Wallis had run into her often last semester as she’d zeroed in on a population of squirrels living near Berkeley Way West.

  “I forgot my work laptop here yesterday,” she explained, slapping her forehead. “Stupid me! Because I’m heading to Colorado tomorrow with the hubby and kids to spend a week at my brother-in-law’s cabin. It’s a perfect opportunity for me to study tassel-eared squirrels, which are native to the southern Rocky Mountains.”

  “Can’t separate work and pleasure, huh?”

  “My work is pleasure, Roy! I love the furry little critters more than anything else save my kids…and even that comparison is pretty darn close. Have you ever wondered why a squirrel rotates a nut between its front paws the way it does?”

  “Can’t say it’s ever crossed my mind.”

  “It’s considering a number of factors such as the nut’s perishability and nutritional value, as well as the availability of food at that time in the presence or absence of competitors—all of this to make the critical decision of whether it eats the nut right then and there, or buries it for later. Isn’t that just fascinating? Squirrels are solving complex problems right under our noses, and most people are never the wiser.”

  “Guess their behavior isn’t so…nutty…after all.”

  “Oh Roy!” June said, clapping her belly like jolly old St. Nick. “Anywho! Enough about squirrels. What brings you here at close to midnight?”

  “Same reason as you.” He shrugged. “I had to pick up some work notes.”

  “Were they written in invisible ink on invisible paper?”

  Dr. Wallis realized what she meant; he was empty handed. “May as well have been,” he said, “because they weren’t here. Must be over in my office. Guess I’m going a bit senile in my old age.”

  “I’ll let you get to it then. I have to get home to bed myself.”

  “Enjoy Colorado.”

  An earsplitting clap of thunder erupted in the sky almost directly overhead.

  “Oh my, this storm is really something, isn’t it? Don’t catch your death out there, Roy!”

  “Toodles, June,” he said, and headed for the stairs.

  ◆◆◆

  Brook sat up slowly, wondering where she was and why she hurt so much. She wrinkled her nose at a rude stench that reminded her of her septic tank, only she wasn’t on her houseboat. She was in the basement of—

  Roy hit me.

  Brook touched her jaw and found it swollen and numb. A sharper pain needled her gums, and when she probed the location with her tongue, she discovered one of her teeth had been knocked loose.

  “You bastard,” she mumbled. “You hit me.”

  She forced herself to her feet. After a moment of unsteady lightheadedness, she looked around the room. It was like a hodgepodge of Ikea display rooms all merged into one: bedroom, dining room, living room, kitchen, gym.

  At the back, the door to the bathroom was slightly ajar, and she could see part of a tanned leg resting in a whole lot of blood.

  The girl.

  Dead.

  Swallowing tightly, Brook turned toward the front of the room. Next to the big window obscured with crap and paper was the door to the antechamber.

  She went to it, gripped the handle, and pushed.

  It barely moved.

  She pushed again, got it open an inch, but then it slammed shut.

  Someone was leaning against it.

  “Let me out, Roy!” Brook shouted, banging on the door with her open hand.

  “I am sorry! I cannot!” came the reply.

  It wasn’t Roy; it was his assistant, Guru.

  She leaned her shoulder into the door, but the Indian remained firm in his resistance.

  “Guru?” she said. “Is that you?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Why are you blocking the door?”

  “Dr. Wallis told me you cannot leave.”

  “Is Roy there?”

  “Not at the moment.”

  A pocket of hope opened inside her. “You have to let me out, Guru! Please? Before he returns.”

  “I cannot. He told me—”

  “This is kidnapping!”

  “I am sorry, ma’am, but—”

  “There’s a dead girl in here with me, Guru!”

  Suddenly wondering where the other test subject was, she scanned the room and spotted him in a far quadrant behind the weight equipment, seated on the floor, facing the corner.

  What’s he doing?

  And how long until he comes after me?

  Brook banged the door again.

  “Let me out of here, Guru! Please!”

  “I am sorry but Dr. Wallis—”

  “Screw him!” she blurted. “He’s lost it! Can’t you see that? His experiment has warped his mind!”

  Guru didn’t reply, and she shrieked in frustration. Then she paced, cold fear and hot rage warring inside her. Roy had hit her—hit her—and now he was keeping her locked up like an animal. How could this be the same man she’d cared so deeply for? How could she have been so completely fooled by him?

  ◆◆◆

  Dr. Wallis didn’t park in his typical spot along University Drive, because while he usually enjoyed the five-minute walk to Tolman Hall, he was already wet and cold and didn’t look forward to getting any wetter or colder. Instead he drove directly to Tolman Hall and pulled into one of three handicapped spaces directly out front of the suspended breezeway.

  He was about to enter the bui
lding when he noticed a flashlight beam bobbing through the storm toward him.

  “For fuck’s sake,” he mumbled, recognizing who it was.

  “Hiya, Dr. Wallis!” Roger Henn greeted, holding a black umbrella in one hand, the flashlight in the other. He wore a loose black rain poncho over his uniform. POLICE was stenciled across his chest in white letters. His short hair was tousled, his Monopoly Man mustache waxed, and his cheeks as ruddy as ever. “Ain’t this weather something?”

  “It’s not raining under here, Rodge.”

  “Ah, righty-o.” He lowered the umbrella, collapsed the ribs, and stamped the metal ferrule on the ground to shake water from the nylon canopy. His boyish eyes twinkled as they gave Dr. Wallis the up-and-down. “Lookit you, doctor,” he said with a good-natured smile. “I ain’t never seen you dressed so…normal. You’re usually all spiffed up—in a good way. What you doing running around in this weather?”

  “Had to get some notes from my office.”

  Unlike June Scarborough, Roger Henn didn’t notice or question where the notes were. Instead he nodded generously and said, “I hear ya, I hear ya. So how’s that experiment of yours going? I haven’t seen you out and about in must be days now.”

  “I’ve been back and forth,” Wallis said. “And the experiment is going just fine, thanks.” Then, realizing he could make Roger Henn an unwitting witness in the story he and Guru would inevitably have to spin to the police, he added, “Actually, Rodge, the experiment is just about wrapped up, to be honest. We’ve had a major breakthrough tonight. My assistant and I are about to go out to celebrate.”

  Henn grinned. “You and that cute little Chinese thing?”

  “She’s South Korean,” Wallis corrected. “And no. Me and the bald little Indian thing.”

  “Ah, shucks, that’d be too bad, doc. She’s a real hottie, ain’t she? I haven’t seen her around lately either. She always used to say hi to me in that funny accent of hers.”

  “She…ah…parted ways with the experiment a few days ago.”

  Henn frowned. “Is that so? How come?”

  A rumble of thunder climaxed with a resounding explosion, causing both men to duck their heads and eye the heavens warily. Lightning flashed, branching into jagged steps.