The phone clamped between her shoulder and ear, Escher Griffin let the loaded brush continue to spatter the board, moving her right hand slightly to try and aim the drips. She was going for spontaneous', but she seemed to be getting messy'. There was ink on the painting, sure, but there was more on the papers that covered the floor, the wall around the canvas, and, inexplicably, on the ceiling directly above it.
And then there was Escher herself, whose clothes and hands looked like she had managed to survive the Texas Chainsaw Massacre and then checked into the Bates Motel. A particularly large patch on the neck of her grey Eagles shirt gave the impression that someone had cut her jugular without her noticing. Given the circumstances, it was lucky that the colour of the ink blended quite pleasingly with the colour of her hair, which, salvaged from a disastrous dreadlock operation of the year before, was shoulder-length, spikily layered, and aubergine. This style gave her a vaguely Shetland pony-esque look, especially since she hadn't quite outgrown her teenage build (or lack of) ending up at a slight, speedway-metabolism'd 5 foot 2. Her freckles had faded, her braces were history, but her wordiness remained. Mouthy kids had a tendency to become cautious, soft-spoken adults. With Escher, the system seemed to have slipped a little.
She was an art student, and she was currentlydoing art. Absorbed in her painting, she had heard maybe a third of the words that had crackled down the line.
"Yeah...this is Escher Griffin speaking..." she said, vaguely, flicking the brush a little too hard and feeling a sudden series of tiny cold tickles across her face. The surprise of this snapped her out of it, bringing the missing details of what she had just heard falling into her head like a bag of bricks.
"Uh, I'm sorry...what?" she said, slowly, picking up the bottle of ink and reaching out with her free hand to excavate the phone from under a stack of sketches on the desk. It had been acting up since she'd managed to spill a half-bottle of turpentine on it a couple of weeks ago. With this in mind, she shook her head and continued. "It's a bad lineI, hah, thought you just said more than two arms'."
"Yeah." the voice on the other end was female, terse in nature, and very, very unexpected in content, "Try six."
The bottle of ink made a rather pretty pattern as it hit the floor, a spreading flower of red across the newspaper. The young woman hardly noticed it, her mouth gaping in a silent yawp like a landed fish.
Six
About four year and a half years had passed since Escher Griffin had last had any contact with Doctor Otto Octavius, the man who had once saved her life. Their first meeting, now nearly six years ago, had led her into what had turned out to be the strangest, most dangerous, most exhilarating few days she had ever experienced. Her memories of them were vivid, no less so now, when she hadn't heard from him in a little over five years. Some things were difficult to forget.
Like Kat, she had grown used to the fact that, for a large proportion of people in the city, her tentacled friend existed solely to be maligned. She had also learned, very quickly, that once the combined might of New York journalism found out to what extent she had been involved with "Doc Ock", their No.1 paper-selling punch bag, they weren't about to leave her in peace in a hurry. A few times she'd grown so sick of the media frenzy aftermath that she had caught herself wishing that she'd never met him at all. A very, very, very few times, however- Escher was easily aggravated, especially when reporters followed her home or grilled her friends or, once, in a splendid violation of her constitutional rights, tapped her phonebut she was also loyal as hell.
In any case, she had dealt with enough phone calls from strangers alluding to the doctor in some way to be suspicious by default, right off the bat. "Who did you say you worked for?" she said, warily, her inky finger hovering over the disconnect button.
"Uh...I work in the asylum off 28th. Under one Doctor John Mereii." The voice sounded slightly wrong-footed, and genuine enough. However, it wasn't the tone that grabbed Escher's attention this time.
"An asylum?" she repeated, incomprehension switch-backing her voice. What the hell would he have to do withShe rubbed her nose with her free hand, somehow getting both inkier in the process, "...But...you know something about Doctor Octavius?" A cautious kind of enthusiasm was creeping over her, injecting her voice with a careful keenness as she said, "Do you...do you know if he's okay?"
The voice of the woman who had introduced herself as "Katarina Morrigan" was dryness incarnate in response. "Okay by whose standards? Miss Griffin, do you know the term catatonic?"
Escher blinked. The Miss Griffin' sounded inexpressibly weird to her, only a week past her twentieth birthday and still undeniably a teenager inside her head. "That'sbad, right?" she guessed.
"It's the scientific name for what we psychologist people call a vegetable'."
If there had been any chair in the vicinity that wasn't covered with sheets of newspaper or art supplies, Escher would doubtless have dropped into it. As it was, she had to settle for leaning against the wall, coherence practically slammed out of her by shock.
"Do you ever watch those movies where you have people in rubber rooms in straitjackets?" continued the voice, in the tone of one trying to describe something horrible as brusquely as possible in an attempt to make it less painful to say. "Imagine that." A pause. "Plus tentacles."
It was no good. The wall was just not going to do. Escher shoved some paper aside with her foot and sat down on the floor, her legs folding under her. This wasinsane. The man she knew justwell, he just wouldn't have let something like that happen to him. He just wouldn't.
She brought up a mental image of Doctor Octavius as she remembered him, and tried with all of her formidable imagination to apply it to the kind of picture that this woman was describing. It was like trying to imagine that humans evolved from bologna.
"But...but...I-I mean, I haven't heard from him in, like, years...but he was fine last time I..." Escher trailed off. Another thought had just struck her. She knew very little about mental illness in general, and even less about the profession of psychology in particular, but a nasty little ray of comprehension pierced the clouds nevertheless as she remembered that, according to what this woman had said, she was presumably in charge' of Doctor Octavius at her asylumplace. Escher had always been bad at maths, which probably accounted for her knack for adding two and two and getting five, "Wait" she said, slowly. "A psychologist, huh?" Her mossy eyes narrowed. "What did you do to him?'"
An impatient snort on the other end made the line crackle. "Miss GriffinEscher, if I mayif I had done something to him, why in hell would I be calling you? Do you think I like to run up my phone bills on being sadistic?"
"You tell me!" snapped Escher, getting up again, her New Rocks scuffing a black streak on the boards as she started to pace. Truth be told, she felt the need to get angry at someone in response to the shattering news, and this psychologist' with the somewhat sarcastic voice was the only person within yelling distance. "All I know, is that when I last saw Doctor Octavius, he was perfectly normal-" Abruptly, she stopped, the pacing as well as the yelling, "Um...well" she trailed, deflating unhappily, "that isas normal as..."
"as normal as he could be."
Silently, not trusting her own voice, the young woman nodded, the fingers of her left hand fiddling with the hem of her shirt. A snide little inner voice was murmuring; yes, of course, that's the catch, isn't it? Remember seeing him so close to the edge? Not to mention so far gone -due to a certain little invention- that the edge didn't even apply any more? Normal isn't an applicable term.
Mentally she shook herself, tuning back in to reality. In her ear, Katarina was still talking.
"And the last time I heard from him, he was fine"' she said. "Until I got hired here and was told I might recognize a subject.' And I think you know as well as I do that Otto is far from insane."
"I...I'm sorry." Escher turned back to the canvas, staring at the puddle of ink that was still spreading from the bottle that lay on its side on the floor. The bright pool was starting to run hazardously close to the edge of the newspaper, the seeping flood making it look like the floor was bleeding, a la Amityville. "I...you can probably...this is sort of a shock." To put it mildly.
On the floor, the pool continued its happy little bid for freedom, and Escher eyed it with growing urgency. This was her mother's apartment, which meant that a lot of things came free. The cleaning deposit wasn't one of them. "Um...would you mind hanging on for a sec?" she said, eventually. "I have major ink leakage." She balanced the receiver on top of the canvas and started to gather up the soaked papers, crumpling them automatically while her brain raced.
"...ink leakage?" said the phone from its perch, just about audibly. She dodged out of the large, open-plan living area room and stuffed the papers into the kitchen bin, pausing to screw the top back onto what was left of the ink.
"Yeah...I was working on something when you rang," she said, picking up the phone again, and regarding the canvas. It glistened unpleasantly at her. "But it'll dry. Eventually."
"I see..." said the voice. Amusement, hinted that familiar dry sarcasm. "Anyway...wellthis is going to soundvery...criminal of me...but...I need someone else to tell me if he belongs there."
Escher frowned at the phone. The last part of that had come out in a rush, and a rather guilty rush at that. The confident-analyst tone had slipped a bit, too. Coming across anyone that shared her opinion of Doctor Octavius was not something that she was used to at all but in this voice, under the professionalism, Escher got the feeling that this person actually cared. She took a deep breath. "Well... Katarina, was it?"
"I prefer Kat."
"Sure, okay... well... Kat... if you think it'll help him, I'd be more than happy to..." She dry-swallowed. "Although I, um, really don't like hospital-ish places.."
It wasn't a phobia, not exactly. Phobias were generally irrational fears, and Escher felt that she had every reason for her dislike. What with one thing and another, she'd been in enough enforced waste-of-time counselling' sessions in icky-wallpapered clinic rooms to last her two lifetimes. After her ordeal', a lot of experts in the field of various juvenile trauma-related disorders had found her interesting' enough to convince her concerned mother that she had needed' them. Bunny ear phrases like these were no fun when they were being applied to you, especially when in the same sentence as tridazine' and twice daily'.
"I'm sure I'll be able to handle it..." she said, eventually, and even managed to summon a short, shaky laugh. "I mean, how bad can he be?"
Kat's voice snapped back, flat and deadly serious. "He didn't know what the things attached to his back were. Does that explain the severity of the situation?"
The grin stayed where it was, however, the rest of Escher's face sort of slid away from it. She stared, unseeing, at her half-finished painting. It was abstract, full of shapes and shadows and vague twining stripes. At a certain angle, if you knew where to look, there were tentacles there.
Another thought occurred to her.
"Uh...speaking of which...wouldn't those things on his back' be trying to sort of...help?" She remembered the ruthless force with which Otto's smart arms protected their host, the lengths to which they would go to preserve his life. And once- several times, in fact- they had saved hers.
As long as my existence endures, they will never tire.
Surely, surely, they would never let him get into such a situation. She knew that they were probably incredibly persuasive, and that their distrust of people in general matched and excelled Otto's at the height of his misanthropybut surely, she thought, if they sensed him losing it, they would try to find him some help?
"If those things on his back were alive and well, I'm sure they would. Did you study the spinal ridge? Ever seen the charred spot at the very top?"
Escher felt relieved. Finally, something she knew. "Yeah, where the inhibitor chip thingie went. He told me about it."
Kat sounded a little impressed. "Rightwell, I suspect...I can't be sure...but I think each actuator separately has been placed with a chip similar to that, except much, much stronger."
"...So he can't hear them?" Escher ran a hand through her bangs, the silver claddagh ring on one finger snagging in the purple strands. "At all?"
"I don't think they're functioning at all. They don't move, and their eyelights aren't glowing. Not in the faintest."
"Hell," she said, quietly, "Isn't there anything you can do?"
"Well, I can't just let him out." There was a hint of frustration there, enough for Escher to guess that this was exactly what Kat Morrigan wanted to do, "It's my job to make sure people in there are supposed to be in there. I don't know much about Otto's condition. If he really is catatonic, then he belongs there...but...I don't knowSo that's where you come in. Second opinion. I'm going to find out what medication he's on tomorrow and do more research on his condition. By then, I'll know if he is in there because he's mad or he's mad because he's in there. Get what I'm saying?'
Escher sighed, "I wish I didn't...but...yes."
"I'll have to pick you up, as you need my clearance to get in. I'm thinking day after tomorrow. When are you open?"
"Umm..." Escher checked her timetable. This didn't take long- her timetable consisted of a series of scattered Post-Its, tacked in an exploding pattern across the far wall. One caught her eye, its blotchy marker lettering yelling MISS LFE DRWING + DIE THURS 900AM.
"I'll skip life drawing," she said, "I'll be home."
"Is 10:30 good?"
"Fine." And then, tucking the phone under her chin; "Is there anything I should bring?"
There was a pause, presumably as Kat thought. "Anything that would mean something to him." she said, eventually.
Escher looked around the organized chaos of her apartment, an idea knocking timidly on the door of her forebrain. "I'll have a look."
"Excellent," Kat's voice was brisk, professional again. "Where's your apartment?...If you have one."
"64th...corner of 3rd...It's a big grey brick apartment building, you can't miss it. I'm in 12, top floor, just take the lift and buzz."
"Alright. I'll explain it to you further when I get there." A pause, then, thoughtfully; "Also...have you ever heard anything that sounds like Past time and present time all meet together in future time and all future is irredeemable'Or something like that, anyway?"
"Ummm..." Escher wrinkled her nose. She was about to answer in the negative when, somewhere in the dusty filing system of her mind, a card waved.
Footfalls echo in memory
"WaitThat really sounds familiar." Her head turned to the corner, where a tall black-shelved bookcase stood. Hersomewhat eclectictastes had stacked it with a bizarre range of literature, from Shakespeare to Stephen King, Nietzsche to Jhonen Vasquez. "It's poetry, I think."
"Any idea what sort?"
"Hang on...I've got an anthology." She did, and according to Sod's Law it was right underneath everything else, half hidden on the bottom shelf by a ridiculously large dictionary of idioms and, inexplicably, a box of cornflakes. By the time she had managed to extract it, leaf through it, and find what she was looking for, nearly ten minutes had passed and the splatters on her canvas had dulled to the sullen red of an open wound.
"Here...yeah, I knew I knew it..." With the book balanced in the crook of her arm, she ran her finger across the heavy text, reading aloud with the phone still squinched against her ear. Time present and time past are both perhaps present in time future, and time future contained in time past. If all time is eternally present, all time is unredeemable.' Is that it?"
"That's exactly it." said Kat, immediately. "Who wrote that?"
"Uhmit's by Eliot. T.S Eliot." Shutting the book created a sinus-invading powder-puff cloud of dust. "Uhhckghwhy? Where did you hear it?"
There was a brief silence. "Ottohad this...this spasm. And suddenlyhe was himself, and he rattled it off. Verbatim."
"That's crazy." said Escher, without thinking, then winced. Open mouth, insert foot. "I meanstrange."
"It's very crazy." Kat's voice was dry again, with a touch of despondency. "And please, prepare yourself for it. If you knew him like I did...well..."
"I knew him pretty well." said Escher, somewhat defensively. The more Kat told her about this condition', the more a sense of foreboding gathered over her. She was now entirely certain that this visit wasn't going to be enjoyable "And I knew he wasn't crazy."
There was a sigh. "If you knew him for who he was, then, if you want me to be blunt about it, seeing him now is pretty gut-wrenching."
but what did "enjoyable" have to do with anything? Her own needs weren't the issue, here.
"Well, frankly," she said, resolutely, "If there's anything I can do by being there, I think my gut can deal."
"Exactly," It was possibly her imagination, but Escher thought she could detect a touch of relief in the older girl's voice. Relief, possibly, that she wasn't going to be squeamish (and shallow) enough to bail and leave Kat to deal with this on her own.
"...Good luck with your...research, Kat." she said.
"It's not the research I'm concerned about." The reply was tinged with worry. "Good luck with your...whatever you're doing with that ink."
An unexpected laugh escaped from Escher at this, a little too shrill to be much to do with humour. "Hah! Sorry...it's not funny...it's just that, before you rang, all I was worried about was finishing my...ink whatever...and where my cat's got to...and college tomorrow...normal, boring stuff. And then-" A hand flicked out, describing the path of a diving missile "-neeeeeeeeeowwkrshhh, you ring, and, well" Another memory hit her, this time of being bored out of her skull in a boring summer job and being told to bring some boring book down from the seventh floor. She grinned a small, nervy grin.
"I was worried about keeping my job before this." There seemed to be the faintest of smiles in Kat's voice, too.
"Thursday, then." said Escher.
"Absolutely positively."
Click.
Kat placed the phone on the hook and let out a long sigh. Escher had understood. And she had said she'd come with. That was a success. And she hadn't sounded like a bad person who might try and betray her or Otto either. This was a success. The ink leakage.she didn't know that one.
But anyway, there was still stuff to be done. She looked around her apartment and walked to a drawer, pulling out the second cabinet and digging to the back of it. The drawer was filled with everything that was completely miscellaneous key chains, keys, little pieces of paper with small things to never forget on them, receipts, even a piece of leather that had come from Otto's old coat. Her stomach twisted at the sight of it and reminded her again of what he was like now and what he should be, and told her she was doing the right thing by doing this. But besides that, she reached into the very, very back and pulled out three photo albums out of many. On one of them was scribbled, "HS", fond memories of high school times with her old friends, Jake and Michelle in high school, and various other things. It was filled to the brim and more, of course, but that wasn't the point.
The second was labelled "College", memories of days with Halley and Mae (who she'd never forgiven after that day) and all her other friends Jessi, Terra, Mike, the entire gang of idiots. There were pictures of term papers and projects and her classes, pictures of teachers all with little quotes and doodles and dates and what have you. This one also proving useless, she took the third and looked at the front, which was labelled only with two interlocking O's, something similar to the infinity symbol or a horizontal eight.
She smiled a little smile to herself and opened it. This one was filled with pictures of the tentacle-boy. Most of them had been taken while he was asleep and with permission from his tentacles, so they contained mostly sad emotions on his face and closed eyes. A few of them were of the tentacles specifically.
These pictures were different, she knew, pictures that held more thoughts then one could imagine, thoughts she remembered amazingly clearly. Some of them, she knew what she was doing, what she was wearing and what day it was, even without looking at the date on the picture.
A very select few were of Otto's face. Those that were burned with the life of Otto Octavius, burned with a furious passion to survive that had overcome odds that she couldn't even try to imagine. Odds that, no matter what happened, he had always dealt with; and no matter what it had been that he was dealing with, or how come, he was always good. And she did more then respect that- she admired it.
Despite anything, Otto had become an idol of sorts to her during that time, and the time they'd had no communication. She'd admired his will to live, to live his way, to make things right and to try and deal with what could not be righted. She'd taken these pictures, and hopefully they'd bring some memory.
Hopefully.
But nownow this, this creature that had taken over the doctor's body, this creature of evil and horror and despair, this creature who bore only one name, a name she didn't want to speak, didn't want to hear. To speak it. She couldn't believe that he was truly insane. That would never happen, and her, Otto, the tentacles, and Escher all knew it, somehow or other, in some subconscious state. For considering what Octavius had got through and gotten out almost perfectly (almost), nothing should so hard to deal with.
She couldn't take all of them that much was clear. She picked out five ones that she remembered. One was a full open shot of a tentacle in all its open-clawed mechanical glory, its eye glowing magnificently and the rest of the arm curling around it. The second was a picture of the sleeping Otto, his face a dead, hurt expression, the four tentacles extending off the photo. The third, a full front shot of Otto Octavius and the mechanical actuators, glare included. She'd made him pose very specifically for this picture. And she was very, very fond of it. The fourth, a picture taken by Halley, was Kat clinging on Otto's back, both the man and the tentacles all giving her a glare that clearly spoke of disembowelment in the near future. Lastly was her favourite, no doubt.
The three (four?) of them were in this one, due to the glories of time-delay photography. In the middle was Otto, of course, in the new coat that had just been bought for him, and on either side, Kat and Halley hugging him very tightly. Otto had an expression that read shoot me now', whereas the four tentacles were all curled around the three of them in a sort of tentacle hug, though she doubted they'd meant to do that. This one dropped her stomach (again) as she thought of the limp and dead tentacles that were now attached to the lifeless doctor.
She tucked the three of them into her bag and glanced up at the nearest clock. 11 alreadyI must have been ruffling for a damn lot longer then I thought.with a shrug, she opened the door to her miniscule room and changed into an outfit more suitable to sleep. She collapsed onto the bed and sighed, her thoughts before drifting into sleep landing on solely on what she intended to do the day after tomorrow.
A long way across town, past blocks and parks and cooling, clearing streets, a light still shone in a window at the top of an imposingly tall grey apartment building on the corner of 64th and 3rd. Inside, the sporadic thumps, scrapes, and papery slithers suggested that it wasn't only Kat who had decided to go digging through her possessions that night.
Escher locked the metal acrossbar of her small stepladder and sighed. Investigating her old folders had turned into sifting through an antique (read collapsing) filing cabinet of papers had turned into excavating the stacks of documents that she'd stored underneath practically every item of furniture she owned that was raised off the floor more than a few millimetres. She'd found an interesting stick, a very very old TV license bill, and a peanut butter sandwich, but not what she was looking for. Now, at ten to midnight, it was the pile of stuff that she could see on top of the bookshelf that looked promising.
She mounted the ladder and gathered the pile towards her, groping blindly over the top of the shelf in case there was anything that had slipped down the back. At the trickiest moment of her stretch, her hand came up against something soft, warm, and furry, and the shock very nearly made her fall off the ladder altogether.
"Mrrr?"
Two pumpkin-coloured eyes regarded her reproachfully from over the edge of the shelf. Meeting them, Escher recovered quickly from her start, dumping the pile of paper on the floor and reaching up towards the sleek tabby shape that poised, paused, and then jumped silently down onto the top rung of the stepladder.
"Jellie, you little monster, you nearly scared me to death!"
"Mmmmmmwwwwwerrrrr." agreed Jellie, aka Jellylorum, sole other resident (and to all intents and purposes co-owner) of Escher Griffin's home. Descending another rung, she suffered herself to be briefly stroked, then dropped to the floor and padded pointedly towards the kitchen, turning back towards her owner with the beseeching look of one who fully understands the function of a can opener, but has no opposable thumbs.
"You'll have to wait." Escher said to her pet. "I'm busy." She bent to pick up the papers, and then looked up again as another thought struck her. "And it's not like you can't feed yourself, eitherunless all those mice I keep finding under the couch died of old age. Which I doubt."
The cat gave her an insulted look.
Escher sifted through the papers, her hopes of finding the one thing she needed concealed amongst them quickly fading as she realized they were just old junk mail. It was part of her personality to hoard stuff like a global shortage was on the horizon- a global shortage of everything. The only thing that kept her apartment in its perpetually messy, friendly, and habitable state was the whirlwind throw-outs that she perpetrated every few monthsand she was getting very much afraid that this was exactly what her target had fallen prey to.
There weren't many more places to check. The place was fairly large, but another thing which stopped Escher's life descending into chaos was the fact that she knew where things wereHowever out-of-hand things looked, she could have found maybe 95 percent of her possessions in under three minutes, because no matter how much stuff buried them, she knew where they were Escher's apartment was messy, but her brain was neat.
She dropped the last piece of mail to the floor (CONGRATULATIONS! YOU HAVE WON ONE OF 9,0000 PRESTIGIOUS PRIZES!) and rubbed a palm against her forehead, still as a statue in a moment of utter frustration. She watched vaguely as, across the room, Jellie gave up hope of anything edible happening anytime soon and started to tread round and round on a few crumpled sheets of scrap paper that had been dumped on the couch, preparing to settle.
that had been dumped on the couch
she hadn't dumped anything on the couch.
Escher crossed the floor in an instant, twitching the pages out from under her pet rather like a magician pulling a tablecloth out from under the plates- the paper was removed, but the cat stayed stationary. A quick glance told her that the pages must have slipped from under the stack she'd removed from the top of the closet, right at the start of her search nearly two hours ago, fluttering onto the couch. Chances are, she would never have noticed them.
"Thanks, Jellie."
Two pieces of blank paper scythed over her shoulder as she flipped through them, stopping dead on the third. She looked at it for a moment, and then started to smile, flipping the side that had started the smile over to regard the black sharpie letters that were still visible on the creased, grubby paper.
This Book Belongs to Escher G.
If found, pleeeeeeeze return to 17 Lyndstrom Heights, 156 72nd St, M, NYC.
Thank you!
Absently, Escher sat down on the couch, reaching out to tickle her pet behind the ear. "You'd've liked him, Jellie-o." she murmured, as the cat purred like a lawnmower. "Maybe you'll get to meet him, huh? This Kat lady says he's gone crazybut he can't really be all that bad, can he?" She looked at the other side of the page again, running a finger down the ragged edge where her scared fourteen-year-old self had torn it from her sketchbook and given it to the man that it portrayed as a peace offering. A sacrifice, even, to save the rest of her work.
"I'll find out when I see him, anyway, Jellie-o."
How little had she known about him, back then? How much more did she know now? She'd lost contact with him, and all she could do now was try to remember what she could. Luckily, this was a lot, and it was vivid as it could possibly be. It was as if the page was a visual trigger, bringing her memories of Otto Octavius piling back on her all at once.
And it was a lot easier to hold on to those memories now, without Kat Morrigan's worried words in her ear.
"Nohe can't be all that bad." she repeated, and although she was still addressing her pet, the words were for her own benefit. Jellylorum mrrp'd, curled up, and fell asleep, leaving Escher to realise that she, of all people, should probably have recognised before now that spending her evenings on her own talking to something that wasn't human was maybe not the healthiest thing to be doing.
"I really need to get out more."
An obnoxious, constant, and very, very annoying buzzing woke Miss Morrigan up the next day at about 700 AM. She rolled over and glared at the clock, smacking it several times. Smacking it didn't help, so she pushed it off the miniscule dresser and turned the other way. The clock was stubborn, however, and even face down over a pile of papers and Kat faced the other way, the cursed electronic still managed to make itself heard.
"I HATE you." she grumbled, picking up the clock and glaring at it, the surface scratched from repetitive abuse. "I hate you, you vile, vicious little machine of death and hell." With another curse, she turned the thing up and put it back on the dresser, stood up, and sulked to her closet.
Clad in only a pair of boxers and a long Yankee shirt, she opened the closet and pulled out a pair of nice pants and
a good shirt on a hanger. Throwing it on the bed and not caring much how much or how little it wrinkled, she put
the hanger on the top of the door and stepped into her shower. This was the reason she didn't gain any weight
she wouldn't fit in said shower.
An hour later she exited the apartment, pictures included, washed, dressed, and looked all nice and pretty and
ready to deal with her sadness again.
Laying out her plans for the day mentally while driving gained more honking horns. Ah, well, she fit well in the chaos of New York City like no one else could drive. At least she wasn't shaving, talking on her cell phone and a hot coffee between her legs, because she'd seen that before. Needless to say, she was driving better then the vast majority of New Yorkers.
Pulling into the parking lot and exiting with briefcase in hand, the woman stepped inside and hopped into the elevator. She was so consumed in her thoughts that she wasn't really sure how she'd gotten to Mereii's office. She was just there.
"Good morning, Miss Morrigan," said Dr. Mereii, his face hidden behind the Daily Bugle. "Are you going to make more progress today?"
If Kat wasn't on the verge of exhaustion then and there, she would have punched the man. "I can't make any progress on a vegetable, John, I've told you that already."
"You will." He put down the newspaper and eyed her. "Or, I'll show you how to, at least."
I'm sure you pump him with more drugs then Karos has correct predictions, thought Kat, a smirk hinting on her lips. "No, that's all right. Thank you, though."
Kat watched John from where she stood, studying him intently. She had no idea how she was going to keep this job if she didn't make any "progress", and she needed to keep this job, so she needed to make "progress".
"Johnwhat medication is Mister Octavius on?" she asked him evenly.
The man's eyes flickered up at her behind his slim-framed glasses. He eyed her purple contacts and thought for a few moments before opening his mouth and replying flatly, "That's classified."
There were a few moments of silence in which Katarina Morrigan felt she was going to maul John Mereii.
"I'm his psychologist, Dr. Mereii, that's the sort of thing I need to know so I can make progress. After all, you wanted PROGRESS didn't you?" Her voice had fallen to a low hiss, maybe even a faint growl.
The man eyed her again and shrugged. "Kat, if you're going to keep exploding like that—"
"I'm NOT EXPLODING! YOU'RE JUST NOT GIVING ME WHAT I NEED TO DO ANYTHING!"
John watched her with a smug smile.
"I NEED INFORMATION! I NEED TIME, AND I NEED A BRAIN! GODDAMNIT, JOHN, I'M NOT A GODDAMN MIRACLE WORKER!"
".not exploding?" Mereii asked with a lift of an eyebrow and that smirk. "You're screaming. You're exploding."
There were a few more moments of silence in which Katarina Morrigan felt she was going to maul John Mereii.
".I'm going to work now," she said, her teeth gritted and her voice filled with barely contained rage. With a nod, she turned on her heel and all but stormed away.
She fumbled with the card around her neck as she slid it through the slot and sulked into the rubber room, glaring down at its patient. But it was hard -impossible- for her to be mad at Otto, especially in his current state. All the rage that had been boiling her blood instantly melted into pity at the sight of the man. "Otto?"
He made a little noise. At least he had realized her presence.
"Do you remember me?"
From before. she thought. ANY before. From however many damn years ago. Or at least, for God's sake, from yesterday.
A vague shake of the head was all the reply she got, neither assent nor negative in its neutral movement-for-the-sake-of-movement twitch. The shake stirred his hair slightly, the russet shade of it appearing darker than she remembered, her eyes tricked by the glare of the polar walls. "I remember something about a girl. and and me," he mumbled, although he didn't look up.
"Here" She dropped the file of stuff and pulled out a picture, the one of him sleeping, "Do you recognize this?"
He lifted his head slowly, the weight clearly uncomfortable on his bound shoulders, and eyed it, "Sleeping?" he guessed in a voice that sounded like a two-year old solving algebra.
"Who is it?" she asked him softly, mentally praying.
"I don't know" He looked at the picture for several moments before his head fell back in front of his chest, apparently succumbing to the forces of gravity. "Who?"
"It's you," she whispered, putting the picture on the ground so that Otto didn't have to raise his head to look at it. "It's you, a long time ago."
His face knitted together tightly, trying to focus. "I don't remember.. this."
She pulled out the second, the one of the tentacle. "What's this?"
The answer was more than she'd expected, but far, far less than she'd hoped. "It's it's a thing that doesn't talk anymore. It goes into me."
"Go on."
"It's a, a thing. A tentacle a metal tentacle.' There was a pause, and then, with suddenly crystal-clear enunciation; "It's a mechanical actuator." From the puzzled look that shifted across his face at that point, it was clear to Kat that he had absolutely no idea of what this particular spark of enlightenment meant. "A thing." he repeated, a moment later
just before the spark became an explosion.
"And, and i-it used to talk but it didn't and they gagged it and I miss it and I need to hear it and I need it and I want it and I have to have it and I need it and I must get it and you have to get it for me and I would do anything for it and and. and" Abruptly the flood of words stopped, just as if someone had thrown a switch and plunged the inside of his head back into darkness. Which, Kat guessed, wasn't far from the truth.
He'd blanked. Kat cursed mentally, but forced herself to wait, patiently, for the thousand-yard stare to roam back into contact range. This time, when it did, her patience was rewarded after a fashion- the lift of his head was quicker, coupled with a shadow of something which might have been frustration. Yes, he'd blanked- but this time, he almost knew that he had.
"I was saying something important and I forgot it," he said, slowly.
She nodded silently. He frowned and shook his head, sighing. "I don't remember things anymore I don't remember ever remembering."
The psychologist pulled out the picture of Otto in all his glory tentacles, himself, coat, and death glare included. She placed it in front of the tied-up doctor and watched him carefully.
Looking at the picture with what was presumably intense focus for someone whose mind was probably operating at about ten percent of its usual capacity; Otto knitted his brows together loosely as he examined it. Kat looked thoughtful for a moment as she watched him closely. Up until now, her meeting with him had been filled with surplus emotion, pushing everything else she could think of away. Her mind had been filled with escape plans and the days they had spent together, the vast majority involving one or both of them running from the police. Now, with a soft smile at the dazed Otto, she spoke in a hushed, quiet tone; "They never did like you, did they, tentacle-boy"
Afterwards, Kat could only reason that it was the sound of the familiar nickname that called down this particular bolt out of the blue.
"That's me." He spoke in a breathy, desperate voice. "That's me, before they did this to me and"
She looked sharply up at him, her eyes filling with amazement, leaning closer to him to catch every word.
"That's me before this and. and and onetwothreefourfivesixseveneight nine! Nine! andand TEN!" He almost screamed this last one, startling the girl. "Ten comes after nine! Eleventwelvethirteenfourteenfifteensixteen... seven seventeen!" His voice rose even more as he spoke, gaining strength, life, vigour. Kat watched him raptly, her eyes hopeful and the first smile she'd smiled since last night coming onto her face. He continued fast, forcing the words out, focusing on his surroundings, on her, as if he remembered.
As if.
"Seventeen eighteen nineteen." His head drooped a little bit, and with it Kat's hopes. "Nineteen nineteen."
A long, sad sigh emanated from the figure of Katarina Morrigan as she let herself fall onto her side in the stark-white rubber room. She laid there, her eyes closed and her face etched with despair, the last other two pictures falling from her grasp.
"Wake up" she whispered bitterly. "Wake... the hell up this isn't you... this isn't where you should be and and I need... I need to get you the hell out of here" The corners of her eyes glistened with unshed tears. "Wake the hell UP, DAMN YOU!" She burst up and shouted at him, the tears beginning to fall. "I KNOW YOU'RE IN THERE! GET OUT! GET OUT! GET OUT OF MY FRIEND'S HEAD!"
Otto just watched her with a dull, placid expression. Yes, ladies and gents, Octavius has left the building. She might as well have been shouting at a brick wall for all the reaction she was getting.
Kat glared viciously at the brain-dead doctor, biting her lip as tears trickled. "God DAMNIT WAKE UP!"
"Why are you shouting?" he asked her blurrily, his head cocked to the side, "Have I done something wrong?"
If the room hadn't been soundproof, expletives would have echoed down the hallway and through the asylum.
Octavius watched her with a calm, mellow expression, clearly unthreatened. If anything, his face was confused.
"I I must have... have done something wrong, right?"
Kat opened her mouth to scream again when she heard a pressurized hisssss of the door. She stood back up straight and didn't turn. To let Mereii see her tears was to give herself a pink slip.
"Kat, I'm going out for lunch. I'll be out for an hour or two. It's 1:30 now, okay? Check back to me at five, and I'll dismiss you."
Her bleached ringlets bounced in a nod. There was a faint squeak followed by the hisssss of the door closing. Kat turned and glared at the door, her reddened eyes narrowed. A slightly evil smile crept upon her face as she opened the door and slid out, closing it behind her.
Sitting down at Doctor Mereii's computer, she eyed the machine warily before moving the mouse and flicking the monitor into life. There was no screensaver password, but she guessed that was the only the first of the possible obstacles. Searching through his files, she found a locked folder and smiled at it. As trite as it sounded, this one was labelled in capitals; CLASSIFIED.
"Classified my ASS, John."
She chuckled to herself and clicked on it, and it, as expected, prompted her for a password. She regarded the empty white rectangle with the flashing black line in deep thought, tapping her lip for a second. With a little nod, she typed in John Mereii.
INVALID PASSWORD. PLEASE REENTER.
Damn. She clicked the okay box and it reverted back to the evil white rectangle. There were a few more seconds of thought before she typed in twenty-eight street.
INVALID PASSWORD. PLEASE REENTER.
"Stupid bastard" she growled, aiming this remark more towards the owner of the computer than the computer itself. "How the hell does he expect me to make progress without-" The metaphorical light bulb went off. "-HAH!"
She typed in Progress.
The folder successfully opened. Her speed-reading eyes scanning its contents, she glanced at the various folders; all named very simply by someone who obviously had no expectation that anyone would be reading them save himself.
FUNDING, EMAIL, PATIENTS.
"Hah hah hah hah hah" She giggled contentedly like a child and clicked into the one named PATIENTS.
Each one, again, was named. Very organized, she thought with a grin, eyeing each folder again. The mouse hovered over Toren, Michael, and Karos, Chet, for a second before flying across to the one named Octavius, Otto.
There were three things in the folder. One of them was called information. The other two were neatly labelled medication and email. Her curiosity piqued on email, she opened it and a clicked a random document. As her eyes scanned the screen, her mouth steadily dropped.
.god.
The email read as follows
Dear John,
It was a pleasure speaking to you last night. I simply cannot believe my luck upon discovering you and your willingness to volunteer those in your care. I wanted to thank you for advance before I lay out my ideas and suggestions for you and the subjects that you have offered so graciously. The FDA has commented time and time again that testing upon human subjects is illegal and morally questionable, but I am happy to see that you hold a different opinion. Again, I have to extend my most gracious thanks to you for letting me do this. I trust you can decide for yourself which of your patients would be most appropriate for each medication. Also, be sure to try different amounts on each one, as with many of our products we have no information on which to fix this variable. With the wide range of products I am enclosing, I am sure you can find exactly what works best for each condition.
Whatever money that my company makes for selling and marketing, you will receive one quarter of the profits plus the additional funding we are sending you now. I hope this is acceptable to you and I look forward to our next conference.
Again, my thanks,
Trevor
"He's." She clicked the email closed and tried another one.
And this one was almost exactly the same.
"This isn't even." Opening both of them, she promptly went to file, then print, and the papers begin to slide out of his color laser printer quickly. She closed the email folder and opened the one labelled medicine, now afraid, downright sick with dread in fact, of what Otto would be on.
"Rodedineumm, what? atorvastatine what on earth? .paroxetineprednisone A, prednisone B, and, what do you know, prednisone Cnever head of thator this onethis one" Another light bulb dropped on her. "Wait...a second...these areoh. Oh God."
Her face pale in the cathode-glare of the screen, Kat counted breathlessly.
Onetwelve. He's on twelvedrugs," Completely astounded, Kat leaned back in the expensive leather chair and ran a hand over her face. No way could John Mereii, her boss, be incapable of doing something so horrifying to any of the people he was supposed to be treating.
...but apparently he was.
She glanced over the file again as it printed out, determination knotting her forehead. With a few keystrokes, the copy of Otto's medication instruction list that would be sent to the staff servers with the evening update was reduced. Very severely. To a blank page. She didn't think that Karen would think to question it before passing it on to the orderlies- she seemed a nice person, but as a secretary, the woman was a liability. And if she did notice, well, looks like the file got a little buggy. Worse things happen in cyberspace.
Maybe this would helphell, it had to.
Closing the file again, a sick feeling eating at her stomach, she guessed- hoped, at least- that there was no more to know about Otto. This was surely why he was like he was, because this man, this shithead, was testing DRUGS on him. How dare that little
"Scumbag" she growled, closing the folder. She clicked into Karos', eyeing its contents. Here were the same folders that she'd seen in Otto's, and with a few more clicks, more illegal drug testing was exposed. More illegal funding shipped straight into Mereii's personal accounts. More horrifying things that were happening to the people here, and god, she didn't even want to SEE what Mereii had Star on.
Looking through each file with a quick pace, she printed out everything she saw. There was barely anything legal, and she was piecing together this little puzzle quickly.
Everything started with Otto's appearance on the records. Sure, there were a few minor misdemeanours before that date (if you could call skimming and testing dodgy chemicals on human beings minor) but when Octavius, Otto' arrived, which, Kat noted, was very nearly a year ago, the floodgates opened. It was like her friend had been an instant focus for Mereii's callous, profiteering abuse, almost as if he had been waiting, expecting him to turn up. What John Mereii had against Otto she couldn't possibly fathom, but whatever it was, it was bad. And the rest of the place, not to mention the other residents, was getting hit by the surplus anger from it as well.
And on top of everything else, a few glances at the asylum's budget had shown that yes, it was huge, but 53 and 10 did not add up to one hundred. The other 37 of the money, she discovered with a victorious grin, was being used for various things which probably weren't going to be used for the good of the patients (like anything was). Such as a brand new BMW, and a flat screen, high definition, plasma TV. Mereii wasn't just being an asshole; he was evidently trying to enjoy it as much as was possible while he was at it.
The time slid by unnoticed to as she looked through each and every file. And a very, very large percentage of them were about unapproved drugs or unknown funding or embezzlement. Or all three.
She yawned a bit and collected the stack that had come out of his printer. Shoving it in her briefcase and closing it the best she could, trying to hide the massive amounts of paper in it, she stood up. She glanced over to the clock and tapped her chin.
"4:00!" she asked in amazement. Mereii had been out for almost two and a half hours. She had to get out of here and she had to do it now.
All this would be enough for a very, very, very nice lawsuit.
She collected the files and closed the folders, scooting out of the office. With these stashed away in her briefcase, she opened the door to Otto's room and looked down at him. Placing a hand on his shoulder, she gave him a soft smile, "Help is on the way."
He just looked up at her with those sad, forlorn eyes.
There was no more progress to be made on Otto for the moment. She guessed that, earlier, she'd been witness to the biggest flash of awareness that he'd had in monthsand now, as his glazed, introverted stare suggested, he was paying for it, whatever remained of his intelligence exhausted by the effort. So she sat in a corner of the room and leaned back, ruffling through the files. Some order was, well, in order.
With this done, she glanced at her barely-used watch, which read a nice, even 4:30. Perhaps John had seen fit to mosey back from his THREE HOUR lunch break. She picked up the briefcase and smiled at Otto, then whisked out.
A little elatedness bounced in her system as she skipped into Mereii's office. She had no idea when he'd gotten back, but as per usual, there he was hidden behind the standard Daily Bugle.
"You're dismissed."
"Thank you, Doctor Mereii." She smiled at him and closed the door as she exited, practically running down the hallway and into the car park. In truth, she felt like an examinee who has managed to get away with stealing the answer paper from the teacher's desk. If her Focus had been open-top, it was conceivable that she would have vaulted into it. She was in that kind of a mood.
Instead, she had to settle for doing the standard New York driver thing to relieve the nervous bounciness that assailed her. Twenty miles above speed limit and squeaking brakes, that is.
Finally home, she rushed over to her phone and dialled Escher's number, "Escher? Doing anything? Good. I'm coming over."
"Sure, come over, wh—"
Click.
The slamming of the receiver on the phone and the slamming of the door were almost synchronized as Katarina Morrigan disappeared out of her apartment again, briefcase and paper bearing address in hand.
Escher lowered the droning receiver from her ear and blinked.
"Okay" she replied to the dead line, then looked up and surveyed the chaos around her. She'd been far too tired to make any attempt at straightening anything up the previous night. Then, this morning, she'd woken up about quarter of an hour before she was due for registration in the main lecture hall of her college, halfway across the city. As a result, tidying of any sort had failed to happen. If Kat was on her way, she was going to have to start clearing up right now
Jellie materialized at her side, and promptly dug needly claws into her leg.
"Wrrrrrll!"
after she'd fed her cat.
