I laid in a hospital bed.
It was 1954. This was not a comfortable experience. The back was nothing but an iron bar, and there were long leather straps along the mattress, which dug into my spine. I shifted. Sat up. Rubbed my wrists. Laid down again.
Felt like my brain was liquidating.
It had been about twenty-eight hours since I had first woken up, and, according to what little I could catch between panicking, punching the first person I saw in the face, and suddenly having enough Thorazine in my system to make me drop, about four weeks since one ‘Agent Parks’ had ‘accidently’ killed me.
Now I was in a cramped white room, with no windows, and painted-on green wainscotting.
The door here was locked. Down the hall, I could hear the loud talking of other people. Up until thirty minutes prior, there had been a dozen wires across my chest, leading to a small wooden box on a rolly tray, and a lot of men were shitting themselves over the piece of paper it was spitting out. It had, I learned later, been spitting printouts of my heartbeat. But that was gone now. They’d left me to stew in myself.
There was a double-knock on my door. It opened before I could say anything. A man in a crisp black button down. He wore no tie, or suit jacket. I thought that was extremely strange.
He stared at me for a long time. Then, finally, he crossed his hands behind his back, steadied himself, and in a deep, not quite reassuring voice, spoke.
“Do you think you have brain damage?”
I stared at him.
“…Pardon?”
“Do you remember four weeks ago?”
“Yes.”
“Your name?”
“Yeah.”
“And you know where you are?”
I paused.
I touched the small scar across my nose—the one that’d been continuously two weeks from healing for the past twenty or so years. “I read a lot of really bad pulp fiction.” I said. “I think I’ve got the gist.” I thought about the heart machine. I remembered the wild faces of the doctors looking at it. Crossed my arms.
How long, I wondered, Before that doesn’t get them the data they want, and they decide to cut it out.
And that sharp feeling of expectant pain hung heavy over my head.
Henderson chuckled.
“Right.” He said, suddenly. “The answer then is no. Perfect. Get up. Let’s get you to your place.”
I slunk back a bit. Henderson smiled.
He said, “Oh come on. I don’t want to get someone. It’ll be more comfortable than here. Promise. I’ll tell you a ton of important things.”
So I did. What else was I going to do?
We went out into a long hallway. Turned a corner and passed through a set of hospital doors. UNIT 240 B, someone had stenciled above them. Next to this was a plaque which explained that according to the newly amended classification act, walking through them without a proper security clearance and good reason was a felony.
“I am not going to sugarcoat this.” Henderson said. “You, Ms. Harper, are surely aware you’re in a very…disadvantageous condition currently.”
I thought of worms.
“What are you implying?”
He cleared his throat. “You are, perhaps, in the two decades this facility has been running, if the boys in the lab are to be believed, an unprecedented condition. I suppose…it’s strange. I’ve never seen someone who was so definitely dead not…decay. No brain damage either, that I can see.”
“This is Unit 240. It is the premier institution in the world for the practical study of the physical effects of the supernatural. The sort of things that…” He gestured to me broadly. “…are generally at odds with traditional science.”
I stared.
Henderson paused. His tone changed.
“I’m saying there’s some interest here in doing surgery on you. For the good of the world. But,” he said. “It will be done properly, and with reason. I can promise you that. Because it’s important.”
And I realized at about that point that I was beginning to tremble.
We passed by a common room, an octagonal thing with a few sad couches and a TV on one side. No one was inside.
“Past here. This is yours.” He said.
“Where we can, we will resort to other means. But…not dying.” He ran a hand through his own gray hair. “Not growing injured, not growing sick. That, surely, is the pinnacle of all humanity. The sort of new growth which would change the world for the better.” He pushed his glasses up. “You know we chopped off your foot and it grew back?”
I froze. I mean that literally. I stopped dead in the hall, and felt every nerve in my body stand on its horrid end. And I tried to say what the fuck is wrong with you, but the only thing which occurred was my mouth, drying up so much my lips stuck to my teeth.
And Henderson, who was not good for much in the end, but who had seen a lot of scared, frightened people in his time, did about the worst thing you could do in that situation which would be actually effective.
He reached back, and pinched the thin bit of skin that connected my neck to my spine.
My whole body jolted with raw nerves.
“There. Come on. No use dawdling about it.”
I took one step forward. And then another. And then another.
I turned, and to my left was a cramped bedroom, identical to all the others I had seen, except with a folded set of clothes on the bed, and a distinct lack of graffiti on the walls.
“I don’t normally do this. I am talking to you because these opportunities come around so rarely.” He said. “But I needed to make sure you knew that your compliance will make this easier on yourself. Because, Ms. Harper, I need you to tell me how you did it.”
“What?”
“Oh not now. And maybe not verbally, overtime. Although…” He trailed off and waited.
“Go take your own fist and fuck yourself.”
He sighed. “Not verbally, then. But I needed to see for myself. Immortality.” He smiled. “Thank you.”
And he shut the door to what would be my room for the next 69 years. 0147.
Do you want to know the greatest thing about immortality I’ve discovered? It’s this: He didn’t get it. He died of pancreatic cancer in 1972 and rotted at his desk, and he must have asked me a hundred times how I’d done it. Or tried the other methods he knew.
But I didn’t know that then. And I was living in 1954, and not 1972. So I sat down on the bed. And cried. And I wondered how long it would be before anyone was interested in cutting me open.
The answer was about three days later. They didn’t succeed.
An interlude, here: I did a few things in that time that I find aren’t interesting enough to fully mention, but save to say, that any of you who have ever been to a psych ward, or a hospital, know you spend a long time having boring conversations.
One of these, which I had with a man called Winston, who would die of decapitation in 1987, was on the topic of lunch trays. You see, we had breakfast there. Not anything good, and I, for the first day, didn’t get anything, but even government kidnapees in secret facilities get to enjoy the horrid joy of shitty oatmeal from time to time.
“Don’t worry,” He said. “If they’re taking you back to do anything they won’t let you eat breakfast beforehand, and if you do eat, they won’t let you go back.”
So then, three days later, as I was standing with my hands in the pockets of a sad set of sweatpants, asking one of those cruel assholes of nurses why I hadn’t woken up, as I normally did, to someone setting a tray of oatmeal and a vitamin I would refuse to take on the small desk built into my wall, I realized that I was fucked.
And that cruel, despotic dread rattled over my body.
The nurse looked at me. Confirmed I had told her both the cell number I was in and my name properly. Smiled.
“Oh, Ms. Harper, you’ve got something else going on, I believe.”
“Oh.” I said.
Well fuck that, I thought.
I turned around, marched in the other direction, and thought long and deeply about the process of degloving.
In that state I began to walk down the small strip of hallway we were allowed to be in, from nine o’clock to noon, and from seven to seven-thirty, without getting in trouble. I walked past the bathrooms. And the common room, where a few people I’m sure I’ll mention in later stories sat, trying to play poker and blackjack with incomplete sets of cards.
My mind felt untethered from my body, as if I was watching myself on TV.
That was when I saw the door.
It wasn’t like any of the other rooms in Unit 240. It was at the right side of a hall, tucked into a alcove that had clearly once been a doorway, before it was tiled over.
The entrance was a cramped brass dumbwaiter, with a large handle pull, and I thought, at the time, what was the smallest TV I’d ever seen built into the wall next to it. At the top, stenciled in black paint, someone had written the words INTAKE ONLY: P-0103 NO TRASH NO SHARPS.
I looked down behind me, at the long line of linoleum tile.
Fuck it, I thought. What was I trying to do anyway? Live?
I threw myself in.
I would later see the second half of the movie Goonies on mute, and make a rather large nuisance of myself pointing out they could have slowed their descent by simply going on their knees and trying harder not to slip.
Still, I fell ungracefully downward. I believe at the time I was under the misapprehension it was some sort of laundry chute, and I’d fall into an industrial washing machine. Or a trash compactor. Because, as I know I mentioned in a previous one of these things, I’m extremely stupid at the best of times. Though, honestly, it would have been preferable to the alternative.
My bare foot skidded against the end of the chute.
I slammed forward. The bottom of the chute widened, and then curved, to better allow whatever someone was supposed to be put in there to fly out. My toe broke, jammed back into my foot, and I bit down on my tongue. My fingers gripped the metal fastening.
I looked out in horror. Beneath was another floor of the facility, or it might have been, once. I was about halfway up a tiled white wall.
And slowly, in gradual degrees, my vision bettered, till I could see piles of brick spiraled up at the far edges of the room holding the floor above me up.
Thin shadows in the darkness.
It was not a laundry room. But there were piles of stuff everywhere anyway: old medical equipment and lab coats, chairs, broken tiles, what appeared to be personal drawings. It was as if someone had broken the unit up-chute down into its component parts, and then organized them randomly.
I shifted my position just in time to see a long, bare metal hand, made of broken needles and old paper, darted out quickly from the center of the room. It took a bit of garbage from one of the piles—what I thought might be the pump of an iron lung—inspected it, moved it elseward.
It was a creature. That is the only word I have. A creature. The size of a building, tucked deep into the crevice of this place. It slunk and darted and creepy amongst its own lair, curling, inspecting, moving. And at first I thought it must have had fur of some sort, like a great hairy dog. Except it had six legs.
Then I realized.
Not fur.
Bloodied bandages.
Because it was made of old medical supplies.
And in a soft, grainy voice that rang like broken windchimes in a junkyard, something called out.
“Are you injured?”
My heart was beating out of my chest. I said nothing. I wanted so badly to go home. Or to cry. I wasn’t really partial.
And the thing turned and clicked toward me at an astounding rate. One great eye got right up to the chute, and it set its hand near my foot. Its index finger was about the size of my body.
It blinked.
“You were extremely loud and made the general noises associated with stress.” It added.
“Oh God, fuck. Fuck.” I said, incoherently. “Um. Um. Nope. Definitely not. Um.” I turned back up to look at the cute behind me. “Just got a bit lost, sorry. Although it was so worth it to see this…wonderful place.”
Then I turned and tried to grab the rail behind me, failed to do a pullup, and fell flat on my face. The giant watched me suspiciously.
Then it grabbed the back of my shirt.
Let me tell you, the knowledge that you technically can’t die completely leaves your brain the second you’re hoisted by the back of your shirt eighty feet into the air. I screamed. And then I realized that I was choking on my own blood. My nose had started bleeding. It was a bad time.
…And the creature dropped me into its hand, and shoved a pillowcase in my face. “You will do yourself no good lying about your pain.” The creature said. “There are evil things here which would believe you. Who are you and why have you come?”
And in my panic I told it. I told it about the surgery, and my immortality, and what it felt like to die.
It’s huge eye stared at me.
“Lettie.” It said, and the word rolled out its mouth with strange pleasure. “You are trapped here?” It asked.
“Yep.” I said. “Sure. That’s a very accurate and concise and great explanation of this situation—” And the thing cut me off with a new pillowcase.
“That,” It said. “That is familiar. They trap what they do not understand. Idiots who believe themselves smart. Have you considered eating them?”
“…No?”
“You should. A much more effective strategy than running.” Then it paused. “We should be friends.”
I sat. Held the dirty pillowcase to my face.
“That seems fast.”
“Explain.”
I shifted uncomfortably. “Um. Friendships are sort of a general thing built over a long period of time, when two people share a mutual interest in something.”
“And we do not have a mutual interest in eating things!” It said, like it was solving a puzzle. “I see, yes, Lettie, not-friends, then. This is an fascinating stimulus.”
“Y’know,” I said, trembling, “Well, I dunno, uh, I still think I like you more than those other people, honestly.”
A noise like a car backfiring screamed through the air.
And then I realized it had laughed.
Teeth made of broken glass smiled at me.
“I only misidentify the stimulus at first because I have not had a friend. I was once a unit. And people did not much like me then. Then there was too much in one place, and I realized their dislike, and so I became. What a strange and arbitrary thing, yes, yes. So now I am here. And I am trapped. And the people that made me are now dead. And the people who replaced them have buried me.”
“Oh” I said. I pulled the pillowcase away from my face. My nose had stopped bleeding. “I’m…sorry? Or…Congrats?”
“Neither. You did not make me.” It said. “Nor did you trap me. They will find you missing soon, not-friend Lettie.”
It was a long, strange looking spatula, crafted of old bed rails and a bit of a mattress. The leather straps had been refashioned into a sort of handhold.
“Hold onto those.” It said.
Five minutes later, slightly dustier, I found myself exactly where I started. I was trembling.
And, like a prisoner facing execution, I went back the way I’d come.
But instead of men in white shirts and pants, I saw a familiar schlubby man in a sad beige suit, who intercepted me in the hall. “Ah,” Norman said. “Um. Ms. Harper. Is now a good time to talk?”
***