The tour continued. "Over here is the kitchen and dining area. You may need to pitch in with food preparation now and then, but almost everyone here has to, so it's no big deal. Then-" Gretchen paused and straightened, as if she'd just been stabbed in the back. "Oh shit!" Her businesslike persona faltered. "Could you wait here for one minute? I have to take care of something, I'll be quick." Without waiting for an answer, she sprinted out of the room. A little uneasy, but adjusting to his surroundings with the alacrity of the slightly unhinged, Steve sat down at the end of a long rectangular table that took up most of the dining area. Whoever built it must have designed it for the dinner parties of an evil overlord, it was intimidating enough.
Steve quickly began to notice that the room was tainted by a mildly unpleasant smell. And as the seconds passed, it rose from mildly unpleasant to all-out nausea inducing. As Steve was considering swallowing his pride and covering his nose with his shirt, he got a feeling there was someone else in the room. He turned and saw what might have been the cutest, as well as the weirdest little girl, he'd ever seen. She had thick, almost yarnlike blonde hair, a rounded face with wide, active eyes and a bizarre nose. She wore a long black dress that reached her feet and was topped with an enormous white collar. She dragged something indistinct behind her.
"Hi." She greeted him.
"Hi there! What a cute little girl you are!" Steve replied.
"I know."
"What's your name?"
"Lenore."
"It's nice to meet you, Lenore." Steve said, with the condescending cheerfulness used to talk to children. "What have you got there?" He indicated the thing she was dragging behind her. In the dim lighting, it looked sort of like a stuffed animal. She brought it up for him to inspect, and he choked back a note of horror.
It was a gerbil, or maybe a hamster. One of those indistinctly ratlike pets. It was also most defiantly dead. Steve couldn't be sure what it had died from, but the bulging eyes and thick, purple tongue suggested that it was poisoned. It wasn't freshly dead either. Bloating had set in, sections of skin had grown soft and moist, and small insects buzzed around it.
"Oh... God." Steve bit back revulsion. "Sweetie, you don't want to play with *this...*"
"I wouldn't bother taking it from her." Steve turned at Gretchen's voice. She was watching smugly from the doorway, with an I-know-something-you-don't-know expression on her face. "She'll just find another one eventually."
"Isn't that a little..." Steve searched for a word. "Well, wrong? I mean, unhealthy? Disturbing?"
"What's wrong with him? Doesn't he like hamsters?" Lenore asked, oblivious. She was pointing at Steve.
"I'm sure it's not that, sweetie. But maybe you should take Mr. Hamster outside for a little while." Gretchen returned. Reluctantly, Lenore headed for the front door.
Steve had seen some pretty shocking things in his time, and it wasn't easy to unnerve him. But something about that encounter still rubbed him the wrong way. "How *old* is she?" he asked.
Gretchen shrugged. "Who knows? I wouldn't worry about it. Come on, I'll show you the living quarters."
Steve was beginning to get a distinctly negative outlook as Gretchen led him up the massive wooden staircase. When they reached the top, they were confronted by a hallway with nine rooms. Gretchen walked to the first one and knocked on it. "May as well meet the rest of the people you'll be working with." she explained.
A muffled voice said something that Steve assumed was "Come in," and the two entered. Steve didn't really know what he expected to be in that room, but it certainly wasn't the man he now saw sitting in the corner and cutting shapes into pieces of paper. Perhaps in the dark, from a distance he could have passed for an ordinary man; he was close to average height, he had a pleasant, even handsome face despite his many scars. His outfit was fairly strange, but that wasn't what caused Steve to stare. The fact that he was cutting up paper using only his fingers was. In place of normal hands, he had long, nasty-looking blades. And where the knuckles would normally be, there were loops of metal, giving the overall effect of scissors.
He stood at their approach, either unnoticing of or resigned to Steve's stares. To Steve's relief, the man made no attempt to shake his hand, only nodded a greeting. "Hello." he said. His voice came out slow, flat and uncertain, like he had just gotten it and was still trying it out.
"Edward, this is Steve. Steve, Edward." Gretchen said, "Edward is one of the patients here, and Steve is the new assistant." They each repeated hellos to one another.
Now, Steve was far too tactful to shout, "What the hell is wrong with your hands?" But the temptation to do so was powerful. He tried addressing the subject tangentially.
"What do you mean, 'patients'?" he asked. His mind flitted back to Gretchen's previous words, that institutionalization was the next best thing to working there.
"Because of his hands, of course." Gretchen said. Edward held up one of them, as if there was some question about what was so special about them. Steve needed to draw back as he did so to avoid having his face lacerated.
Gretchen noticed this and gave a smug chuckle. "Did anyone ever tell you that you'll put someone's eye out with those?" she asked.
"Yes. You do." Edward replied. He didn't seem annoyed or sarcastic, just stating a fact.
It occurred to Steve that this might be a good time to press his point. "Seriously, what kind of stuff do the 'patients' here do?"
"I'll show you the rest of them, and that should answer any questions." Gretchen replied in an end-of-discussion tone. Steve very much doubted this was true. He was also beginning to grow annoyed with all this evasive bullshit. He considered demanding information, but checked himself. He really, really needed a job right then, and this one paid better than he could have hoped for. He had joked that he was desperate enough to work at the mouth of Hell, so why not a shadowy, covered-up halfway house for mutants? He did make a mental note to try and talk some information out of Edward later, though. Edward didn't seem like the type to participate in conspiracies, not actively, anyway. Steve was fairly sure he'd at least get *something* out of him.
Gretchen led him a few doors down, knocked, and entered. After the flytrap, the morbid child, and the man with scissors for hands, Steve was nothing short of relieved to see that the occupant of this room seemed completely ordinary. Bland looking, in fact. He wanted to run across the room and kiss him, although that would likely lead to a fistfight, so he settled for a friendly smile.
"Cameron, Steve. Steve, Cameron." Gretchen gave a clipped version of the first greeting. "Steve's the new assistant."
"Nice to meet you." Cameron said, with a detached kind of suspicion.
"Nice to meet you too!" Steve said, extending a welcoming hand. Cameron accepted it, but seemed darkened by Steve's enthusiasm.
"Don't trust appearances, Steve. Even if I am 'bland looking,' that doesn't mean a thing." Cameron said.
Steve raised his eyebrows, and Cameron treated his shock with grim resignation. Gretchen decided it was time to move on. "You and Steve can talk later, he has a lot of work to do." Using more force than before, she once again moved Steve out of the room.
"I'll bet." Cameron said as they left.
"What happened back there?" Steve asked, once they were a few strides away from the door.
Gretchen treated him to an emotionless look. "I assume he read your mind, didn't he? Cameron is a scanner."
Steve was shocked. He'd been involved with a pack of conspiracy theorists in the past, and as a result, had heard about scanners. People with amazing mental powers, whose existence the government had supposedly taken great pains to keep quiet. "But I thought that was just an absurd conspiracy theory," Steve said, "like the Roswell crash."
"Oh?" Gretchen raised one eyebrow. "And what makes you so sure the Roswell crash is just a conspiracy theory?"
Steve decided to change the subject. He noticed a door at the end of the hallway that seemed to radiate come-hither vibes. He gestured to it. "Who's in there?"
Gretchen shot a distasteful look down the hall. "Yes, I suppose you should meet her too." She said, tight lipped.
"Who?"
"The Princess." She sneered. "Little Miss Pampered Perfection, naturally. Though if you're good, she might let you call her Julia." Her voice dripped with acidic sarcasm. Gretchen led him through the door, without knocking this time. "She's expecting us." She explained with irritated certainty.
When the door opened, Steve found himself face to face with an almost ridiculously beautiful woman. She was tall, blonde and pale, and radiated mystery and desire. Gretchen hung back, content to let her- Julia, do the talking.
"Steve, isn't it? I've heard so little about you." Julia smiled at him. She had a faint Teutonic accent.
"Yes, Julia, I've heard absolutely nothing about you." Steve returned.
Julia gave him a probing, analytical glance, and suddenly Steve squirmed, feeling self-conscious and awkward. She then smiled as if to put him at ease. "It's nice to meet you. You're new here, yes?"
Steve nodded. "Working the most ambiguous job I've ever seen."
Julia gave a token laugh. "I hope you're not planning to runs screaming out the door." Steve shook his head and smiled. As if she had suddenly lost interest, Julia nodded. "Okay then." She gestured to Gretchen, indicating she should leave. During their smattering of dialogue, she had leaned in the threshold of the door like a sulking teenager, and now she smiled with deliberate treacle and pulled Steve out.
"The prissy rat must have wanted to see if you were fit to work with her." Gretchen muttered, a few strides down the hall. "She treats everyone around here like nothing, but she knows I have to put up with it. She's too valuable to the project to be driven away, so we have to give her everything she wants."
Julia didn't seem so bad to Steve, frankly. Still, it made sense to him that Gretchen might feel animosity. She seemed to like the idea that she was in control of what happened under this roof, and a challenge to that must be irritating.
Gretchen continued. "Now that's you've seen where everything is, I've got a few jobs for you..." Steve braced himself, energized and ready for anything.
...Later that night, Gretchen was in her office, alternating between paperwork and cheap horror novels. It was dark, being night and all, and the house looked extra ominous and gloomy. Her head turned suddenly at the sound of crashing , as her office door was flung open. She stood immediately as a well dressed, and almost grotesque looking man staggered inside, advancing on her.
She moved to the side and looked at him with disapproval. "Aw, Harry, you told me you were off that junk." She shook her head.
The man only laughed in response and lunged at her. This time she brought her arms up and blocked him. They struggled, scattering papers and files. He soon began to overpower her, and she closed her eyes and adopted a look of concentration. Her arms nearly doubled in muscle mass, and thick red hair began to grow over them. Now she was able to handle the strong man as if he were a doll. She pushed him into the monstrous flytrap and let go.
"Hold him, Audrey." She said, opening a drawer in her desk. "Lucky thing I always keep some on hand."
She pulled out a few bottles, and began mixing them in a vial. The man being held by Audrey struggled a little bit, but mostly seemed resigned. When Gretchen finished, she held a glass of dark, bubbling fluid in her hand. Her arms were already returning to normal. She approached the captive gentleman.
"We can do this the easy way, or the hard way." she said without patience. He grudgingly opened his mouth and she poured the liquid into it. Immediately he began coughing and spasming. "Let him go, Audrey." Gretchen commanded. Audrey did so, and he lurched forward, kneeling on the office floor. Within a few minutes, he calmed, the cough subsided, and the nondescript figure of Doctor Harry stood up, looking sheepish.
Gretchen was not amused. "I told you that you could continue whatever research you wanted here, and I meant that." She folded her arms. "But that doesn't mean I can have Hyde running around, terrorizing the women." She ran her hands along her now-normal arms and added, "A wise man doesn't attempt to terrorize the kind of women we have here."
"I know, I know." Harry replied, "But it wasn't my fault this time. The change has started to happen without the formula."
Gretchen raised a suspicious eyebrow. "Again?" Harry nodded earnestly. "All right. You remember how to fix that, don't you?" Again, he nodded. She grabbed the bottles and placed them roughly in his hands. "Then do it. You shouldn't need to be told."
Weary, Harry didn't argue. He simply took the bottles and moved with exhaustion to the laboratory. He turned to wish Gretchen good night, but had a memory lapse and needed to look at her desk plate to recall her name. "Good night... uh, Gretchen Duncalf."
Gretchen raised her eyebrow once more, curious at his use of her full name. She shrugged. "Goodnight, Harry Jekyll." Lightning crashed in the window behind her.
Steve quickly began to notice that the room was tainted by a mildly unpleasant smell. And as the seconds passed, it rose from mildly unpleasant to all-out nausea inducing. As Steve was considering swallowing his pride and covering his nose with his shirt, he got a feeling there was someone else in the room. He turned and saw what might have been the cutest, as well as the weirdest little girl, he'd ever seen. She had thick, almost yarnlike blonde hair, a rounded face with wide, active eyes and a bizarre nose. She wore a long black dress that reached her feet and was topped with an enormous white collar. She dragged something indistinct behind her.
"Hi." She greeted him.
"Hi there! What a cute little girl you are!" Steve replied.
"I know."
"What's your name?"
"Lenore."
"It's nice to meet you, Lenore." Steve said, with the condescending cheerfulness used to talk to children. "What have you got there?" He indicated the thing she was dragging behind her. In the dim lighting, it looked sort of like a stuffed animal. She brought it up for him to inspect, and he choked back a note of horror.
It was a gerbil, or maybe a hamster. One of those indistinctly ratlike pets. It was also most defiantly dead. Steve couldn't be sure what it had died from, but the bulging eyes and thick, purple tongue suggested that it was poisoned. It wasn't freshly dead either. Bloating had set in, sections of skin had grown soft and moist, and small insects buzzed around it.
"Oh... God." Steve bit back revulsion. "Sweetie, you don't want to play with *this...*"
"I wouldn't bother taking it from her." Steve turned at Gretchen's voice. She was watching smugly from the doorway, with an I-know-something-you-don't-know expression on her face. "She'll just find another one eventually."
"Isn't that a little..." Steve searched for a word. "Well, wrong? I mean, unhealthy? Disturbing?"
"What's wrong with him? Doesn't he like hamsters?" Lenore asked, oblivious. She was pointing at Steve.
"I'm sure it's not that, sweetie. But maybe you should take Mr. Hamster outside for a little while." Gretchen returned. Reluctantly, Lenore headed for the front door.
Steve had seen some pretty shocking things in his time, and it wasn't easy to unnerve him. But something about that encounter still rubbed him the wrong way. "How *old* is she?" he asked.
Gretchen shrugged. "Who knows? I wouldn't worry about it. Come on, I'll show you the living quarters."
Steve was beginning to get a distinctly negative outlook as Gretchen led him up the massive wooden staircase. When they reached the top, they were confronted by a hallway with nine rooms. Gretchen walked to the first one and knocked on it. "May as well meet the rest of the people you'll be working with." she explained.
A muffled voice said something that Steve assumed was "Come in," and the two entered. Steve didn't really know what he expected to be in that room, but it certainly wasn't the man he now saw sitting in the corner and cutting shapes into pieces of paper. Perhaps in the dark, from a distance he could have passed for an ordinary man; he was close to average height, he had a pleasant, even handsome face despite his many scars. His outfit was fairly strange, but that wasn't what caused Steve to stare. The fact that he was cutting up paper using only his fingers was. In place of normal hands, he had long, nasty-looking blades. And where the knuckles would normally be, there were loops of metal, giving the overall effect of scissors.
He stood at their approach, either unnoticing of or resigned to Steve's stares. To Steve's relief, the man made no attempt to shake his hand, only nodded a greeting. "Hello." he said. His voice came out slow, flat and uncertain, like he had just gotten it and was still trying it out.
"Edward, this is Steve. Steve, Edward." Gretchen said, "Edward is one of the patients here, and Steve is the new assistant." They each repeated hellos to one another.
Now, Steve was far too tactful to shout, "What the hell is wrong with your hands?" But the temptation to do so was powerful. He tried addressing the subject tangentially.
"What do you mean, 'patients'?" he asked. His mind flitted back to Gretchen's previous words, that institutionalization was the next best thing to working there.
"Because of his hands, of course." Gretchen said. Edward held up one of them, as if there was some question about what was so special about them. Steve needed to draw back as he did so to avoid having his face lacerated.
Gretchen noticed this and gave a smug chuckle. "Did anyone ever tell you that you'll put someone's eye out with those?" she asked.
"Yes. You do." Edward replied. He didn't seem annoyed or sarcastic, just stating a fact.
It occurred to Steve that this might be a good time to press his point. "Seriously, what kind of stuff do the 'patients' here do?"
"I'll show you the rest of them, and that should answer any questions." Gretchen replied in an end-of-discussion tone. Steve very much doubted this was true. He was also beginning to grow annoyed with all this evasive bullshit. He considered demanding information, but checked himself. He really, really needed a job right then, and this one paid better than he could have hoped for. He had joked that he was desperate enough to work at the mouth of Hell, so why not a shadowy, covered-up halfway house for mutants? He did make a mental note to try and talk some information out of Edward later, though. Edward didn't seem like the type to participate in conspiracies, not actively, anyway. Steve was fairly sure he'd at least get *something* out of him.
Gretchen led him a few doors down, knocked, and entered. After the flytrap, the morbid child, and the man with scissors for hands, Steve was nothing short of relieved to see that the occupant of this room seemed completely ordinary. Bland looking, in fact. He wanted to run across the room and kiss him, although that would likely lead to a fistfight, so he settled for a friendly smile.
"Cameron, Steve. Steve, Cameron." Gretchen gave a clipped version of the first greeting. "Steve's the new assistant."
"Nice to meet you." Cameron said, with a detached kind of suspicion.
"Nice to meet you too!" Steve said, extending a welcoming hand. Cameron accepted it, but seemed darkened by Steve's enthusiasm.
"Don't trust appearances, Steve. Even if I am 'bland looking,' that doesn't mean a thing." Cameron said.
Steve raised his eyebrows, and Cameron treated his shock with grim resignation. Gretchen decided it was time to move on. "You and Steve can talk later, he has a lot of work to do." Using more force than before, she once again moved Steve out of the room.
"I'll bet." Cameron said as they left.
"What happened back there?" Steve asked, once they were a few strides away from the door.
Gretchen treated him to an emotionless look. "I assume he read your mind, didn't he? Cameron is a scanner."
Steve was shocked. He'd been involved with a pack of conspiracy theorists in the past, and as a result, had heard about scanners. People with amazing mental powers, whose existence the government had supposedly taken great pains to keep quiet. "But I thought that was just an absurd conspiracy theory," Steve said, "like the Roswell crash."
"Oh?" Gretchen raised one eyebrow. "And what makes you so sure the Roswell crash is just a conspiracy theory?"
Steve decided to change the subject. He noticed a door at the end of the hallway that seemed to radiate come-hither vibes. He gestured to it. "Who's in there?"
Gretchen shot a distasteful look down the hall. "Yes, I suppose you should meet her too." She said, tight lipped.
"Who?"
"The Princess." She sneered. "Little Miss Pampered Perfection, naturally. Though if you're good, she might let you call her Julia." Her voice dripped with acidic sarcasm. Gretchen led him through the door, without knocking this time. "She's expecting us." She explained with irritated certainty.
When the door opened, Steve found himself face to face with an almost ridiculously beautiful woman. She was tall, blonde and pale, and radiated mystery and desire. Gretchen hung back, content to let her- Julia, do the talking.
"Steve, isn't it? I've heard so little about you." Julia smiled at him. She had a faint Teutonic accent.
"Yes, Julia, I've heard absolutely nothing about you." Steve returned.
Julia gave him a probing, analytical glance, and suddenly Steve squirmed, feeling self-conscious and awkward. She then smiled as if to put him at ease. "It's nice to meet you. You're new here, yes?"
Steve nodded. "Working the most ambiguous job I've ever seen."
Julia gave a token laugh. "I hope you're not planning to runs screaming out the door." Steve shook his head and smiled. As if she had suddenly lost interest, Julia nodded. "Okay then." She gestured to Gretchen, indicating she should leave. During their smattering of dialogue, she had leaned in the threshold of the door like a sulking teenager, and now she smiled with deliberate treacle and pulled Steve out.
"The prissy rat must have wanted to see if you were fit to work with her." Gretchen muttered, a few strides down the hall. "She treats everyone around here like nothing, but she knows I have to put up with it. She's too valuable to the project to be driven away, so we have to give her everything she wants."
Julia didn't seem so bad to Steve, frankly. Still, it made sense to him that Gretchen might feel animosity. She seemed to like the idea that she was in control of what happened under this roof, and a challenge to that must be irritating.
Gretchen continued. "Now that's you've seen where everything is, I've got a few jobs for you..." Steve braced himself, energized and ready for anything.
...Later that night, Gretchen was in her office, alternating between paperwork and cheap horror novels. It was dark, being night and all, and the house looked extra ominous and gloomy. Her head turned suddenly at the sound of crashing , as her office door was flung open. She stood immediately as a well dressed, and almost grotesque looking man staggered inside, advancing on her.
She moved to the side and looked at him with disapproval. "Aw, Harry, you told me you were off that junk." She shook her head.
The man only laughed in response and lunged at her. This time she brought her arms up and blocked him. They struggled, scattering papers and files. He soon began to overpower her, and she closed her eyes and adopted a look of concentration. Her arms nearly doubled in muscle mass, and thick red hair began to grow over them. Now she was able to handle the strong man as if he were a doll. She pushed him into the monstrous flytrap and let go.
"Hold him, Audrey." She said, opening a drawer in her desk. "Lucky thing I always keep some on hand."
She pulled out a few bottles, and began mixing them in a vial. The man being held by Audrey struggled a little bit, but mostly seemed resigned. When Gretchen finished, she held a glass of dark, bubbling fluid in her hand. Her arms were already returning to normal. She approached the captive gentleman.
"We can do this the easy way, or the hard way." she said without patience. He grudgingly opened his mouth and she poured the liquid into it. Immediately he began coughing and spasming. "Let him go, Audrey." Gretchen commanded. Audrey did so, and he lurched forward, kneeling on the office floor. Within a few minutes, he calmed, the cough subsided, and the nondescript figure of Doctor Harry stood up, looking sheepish.
Gretchen was not amused. "I told you that you could continue whatever research you wanted here, and I meant that." She folded her arms. "But that doesn't mean I can have Hyde running around, terrorizing the women." She ran her hands along her now-normal arms and added, "A wise man doesn't attempt to terrorize the kind of women we have here."
"I know, I know." Harry replied, "But it wasn't my fault this time. The change has started to happen without the formula."
Gretchen raised a suspicious eyebrow. "Again?" Harry nodded earnestly. "All right. You remember how to fix that, don't you?" Again, he nodded. She grabbed the bottles and placed them roughly in his hands. "Then do it. You shouldn't need to be told."
Weary, Harry didn't argue. He simply took the bottles and moved with exhaustion to the laboratory. He turned to wish Gretchen good night, but had a memory lapse and needed to look at her desk plate to recall her name. "Good night... uh, Gretchen Duncalf."
Gretchen raised her eyebrow once more, curious at his use of her full name. She shrugged. "Goodnight, Harry Jekyll." Lightning crashed in the window behind her.