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"This is reality," Professor Langford had said. "The sooner you accept that, the longer you'll live."
Jack was trying to accept that advice, but it was hard to ignore the voice in his head that kept telling him he must be dreaming. After all, he'd had his share of bad trips before. Pink elephants with sharp, nasty teeth and poison, wicked claws. But he'd never imagined a pressurized diving suit with a mind of its own trying to bore his insides out with a drill.
And, if he was dreaming, why was he in so much pain? Every bruise and scrape ached with each step Jack took.
The strangest part, though, was that, as odd as it all was - an entire city on the ocean floor, little girls singing eerie nursery rhymes, strange creatures with a lust for blood, and rag-tag outcasts with the power to control the elements - Jack was taking it a lot better than he thought he should be.
"Hey, watch it!"
He'd been so lost in his own thoughts he'd walked right into the back of the big Italian, Giuseppe.
"Sorry," he muttered.
The company had stopped ahead of him. Evelyn, leading the group, was staring uneasily at something on the ground.
"Dang it," she said. "He's back."
Jack stepped around Giuseppe. When he saw what Evelyn was looking at, he gagged into his hand.
Evelyn noted Jack's recoil with her usual haughty frown.
"Still sure he's the guy, Lucky?"
She gave Jack another look of disgust before calmly returning to the grisly scene in front of her.
What had once been a person was lying crumpled next to a bulkhead, its gender hard to determine, its face torn to shreds and dripping blood. The parts of the face – eyes, nose, lips - were in the wrong places, as if the face had somehow been turned upside down on the head.
Jack moved his hand and took a deep breath, trying to regain his composure. It was a bad idea. He inhaled the scent of decaying flesh and it made him cough as he spoke.
"Who's back?"
"J. S. Steinman," Evelyn said. "Rapture's very own serial killer." She took another hard look at the body. "It's fresh.
"Looks like he's definitely back on his home turf," Lucky commented.
"What's the 'J. S.' stand for, anyway?" Pancho asked.
"I always thought it was for 'Johann Sebastian'," Twitch responded. Teagan looked at the boy. "You know, like the composer."
"Steinman was a doctor," Evelyn continued, looking squarely at Jack. "The most respected plastic surgeon in Rapture. Then he started thinking o' himself as an artist . . . and o' people's faces as his canvas. This is how Dr. Steinman's patients turn out nowadays. The lucky ones are still walking around, too spliced up to realize what he did to them."
"We was hopin' the good doc wouldn't still be around," Lucky said. "That he'd be somewhere else, workin' on his 'field research.' Unlucky for you, it looks like the doc is in."
"Still sure you can handle this?" Evelyn said, looking at Jack defiantly.
"You don't have to do this," Teagan insisted, stepping between Jack and her sister. "I'm healin' up just fine. We can all do without the supplies right now."
As she spoke, another drop of blood slipped out between her fingers.
"No," Jack insisted. "I'll do it."
Evelyn passed him a flashlight.
"Here, take this," she said. "Try to stay out o' Steinman's way. But if I see you come out o' the Pavillion, and you ain't carryin' our supplies, you'll wish you'd met Steinman. I'm going to give you a gun. You know how to use it?"
Jack nodded as Evelyn handed him her revolver. The nod was a lie. Still, as he felt the cold steel in his palm, it felt strangely comfortable. The same way it had when he'd taken it from her earlier and held it on Peach. Though he couldn't remember ever touching a weapon before that moment, it felt like it belonged in his hand.
Giuseppe wrenched the bulkhead open and Jack slipped inside.
When the bulkhead slid shut behind him, Jack was submerged into pitch blackness. He took a deep breath, swallowed, and turned on the flashlight. No turning back now.
The beam of the flashlight revealed a giant, disembodied pair of purple lips around one row of large, yellow teeth. The sign said: "Dandy Dental."
He scanned the expanse, his beam exposing the storefronts of a variety of rundown medical facilities, from dental offices to crematoriums. Jack slowly began his walk to Dr. Steinman's Aesthetic Ideals, not noticing the glowing red light of a security camera as he passed it.
Andrew Ryan remembered building his mansion on the surface.
He remembered storming down the stairs of his new summer home as it was nearing the end of construction, a brass spigot in his hand.
"What ish thish?" he demanded, waving the brass piece at the lead contractor, a tall, burly man in a grease-stained shirt.
"What's what, sir?"
"These brrash fittingsh. You're trying to cheat me, you scoundrels. Trying to fleece me out of my harrd earrned money. You musht think shince I've so much of it I'll just let you take it from me. But a wishe man knows when to be frugal. I ashked for for tin fittings, and the tin is all I'm going to pay forr."
The man didn't seem at all intimidated, or even ashamed. He just stared Ryan down with his cool, steady eyes.
"Tin, sir, will not do the trick," he said. "Not unless you plan on spendin' the money you're savin' on those tin pipes of yours by calling the plumber over to fix a leak in your lavatories every week. A job like this demands brass."
"Don't try to pull one over on me," Ryan barked. "I'll not be a victim of shome parasite. I asked for tin, and I'll take my chancesh with the tin."
"With all due respect, sir," the contractor replied in his Cockney accent, "you won't. I'll pay the difference for the brass fitting if you'd like, sir, out of me own pocket."
"And why would you do that?"
"Because, I've a reputation to keep up. A house built by Bill McDonagh does not leak."
Instantly, Ryan's sour scowl had turned into a hearty laugh.
"You're a very interesting individual, Mr. McDonagh. Come, sit down with me and let's have a drink . . ."
Ryan didn't shed a tear, looking back on it. The Great Chain moved, and many were crushed beneath it. Good men and parasites alike.
"I got someone on the monitors."
The voice came from behind Andrew Ryan, a low snarl. Ryan didn't bother to turn around in his chair. He recognized the voice of Sullivan, his chief of security. Sullivan was as short as McDonagh had been tall, with beady eyes, and bushy wisps of hair around his baldness.
"An intruder," Sullivan went on. "First new guy I seen in Rapture since we shut down the bathyspheres. He's in the middle of the Medical Pavilion now."
"Then keep an eye on him, Sullivan," Ryan replied. "That's all."
Ryan listened to the security man's footsteps fall away from his office, then leaned over the microphone and hit the Intercom button.
Jack was growing closer to the big doors of Aesthetic Ideals when he heard static coming from the loud speakers overhead.
"Wellll, who shent you?" Jack recognized the voice from the film he had watched on the vessel from the lighthouse. The Scottish burr was calm and even, curious if anything. "The CIA wolf or the KGB jackal? It makesh no difference. I don't know how you got here, but I'd advise you go back the way you came. Andrew Ryan isn't shome giddy playboy who can just be shlapped around."
Jack looked around the room. The announcement didn't seem to draw any attention to his presence. It had probably broadcast over the entire city. He sensed no movement, heard no sound but the closing crackle over the loudspeakers, than complete, eerie silence.
He felt across the big doors, looking for a knob for a minute before feeling a button on a panel next to the door. It felt sticky when he pressed it. He examined his hand in the flashlight's glow and realized it was now covered in blood.
The button must have released some kind of catch, because the doors swung open with a chilling creak. Jack entered an open foyer, empty except for a few empty chairs, some potted ferns (mostly dead), and some faded newspapers. He followed the hallway to the door marked surgery.
Inside, he waved the beam of the flashlight over steel tables and cupboards, trying to creep silently over the strewn about surgical instruments and debris that littered the floor.
Then his flashlight caught a human hand. He let out a quick gasp. But the hand remained still. Following it with his light, Jack found that the hand belonged to a body that had been savaged in the same manner as the corpse he had seen outside of the Pavilion.
Jack stepped back. There were two more bodies nearby, all three stretched out on hospital gurneys. Beneath each one, words were sprawled in blood. The first one: "Too fat." The second: "Too thin." The third: "Too symmetrical."
Then Jack heard it. A metallic tinkle. Someone was stepping across the surgical instruments on the other side of the room.
Jack quickly turned off the flashlight, hoped he had acted in time. He scrambled behind the nearest cupboard.
The footsteps continued to move around the room.
"I know you're here," a voice said in a smooth-as-cultured-cream British accent. "Come out so I can see you."
As Jack's eyes began to adjust to the dark, he could see a tall, shadowy figure moving around the room.
"I'm not going to hurt you," the figure continued. "I took the Hippocratic Oath. First, do no harm."
Jack held his breath and clutched Evelyn's revolver.
He peered around the side of the cupboard again, but he had lost sight of the shadow.
"Please, let me help you."
The voice seemed to be echoing around the tiny room, bouncing off every corner.
Paper rustled inches from Jack's hand.
As Jack turned his head, he felt the tip of a needle pierce his neck.
The room was blurry. Jack blinked a couple times. He was still surrounded by the stainless steel cupboards and tables.
He tried to get up, but he was barely able to move an inch. He looked down at his wrists and realized he was held into a medical chair by leather straps.
A bright light was swung in his face.
"I'm sorry," the British voice from earlier said. J. S. Steinman. "I didn't have as much anesthesia left as I'd hoped. And I'm afraid that was the last of it. We'll just have to do without."
He stepped into the light. Only one eye was visible above a crimson breathing mask and a blood red smock. In the light, Jack could make out stains slightly darker than the rest of the red on Steinman's coat.
Jack struggled against his bonds.
"Calm down," Steinman said. "Can't you see I'm trying to help you? After all, ADAM took away any excuses man has to not be beautiful. And you – forgive me, old boy – are . . . UGLY!"
Something caught the light for a second and Jack felt a blade tear across his cheek. He cried out in pain.
Steinman's mask moved in and out as he took several slow, deep breaths, studying the blood on his scalpel and regaining his composure.
"Sorry, old boy."
The mask shifted against the muscles beneath it. Steinman was smiling. He pressed the blade lightly against Jack's cheek. The man in the chair writhed more vigorously against his constraints.
"This is going to hurt," Steinman said. "But it will be worth it. I'm going to make you beautiful . . . like me."
He slowly pulled the mask away.
His second eye was beneath the first one, the right ear where the nose should be and the nose beneath the left ear. He smiled from a pair of lips, slanted diagonally from the right ear towards the cleft in his chin, a pencil mustache between ear and mouth. The face was a Cubist painting sprung to life.
"While you were sleeping, I injected the tiniest dose of ADAM to make your face easier to sculpt. In a few moments, your face will be like a painting." He slid the scalpel across Jack's cheek. "I'll do with a scalpel what Picasso did with a brush."
Jack strained against the straps again. Finally, the old leather off against one of his arms. Jack managed to grab hold of the arm holding the scalpel.
They struggled, the most important arm wrestling match of Jack's life. The tip of the blade stayed pointed at his face, held back by whatever strength Jack could summon. As the blade drew closer, Jack twisted Steinman's wrist. He wrenched it to the side.
The blade drew across Steinman's forehead. Jack brought it back across again, and then, still pressing the knife against his face, drew the blade up the doctor's forehead. Blood flowed down the tear and covered Steinman's face.
The doctor let go of Jack's wrist and turned away, lifting a mirror to study his own reflection.
"It's perfect," he said, his voice noticably weaker. "That's just . . . what it needed . . . a nice splash of color. You have the gift . . . my boy. You'd have made a fine surgeon."
He was dropping to his knees, but Jack wasn't satisfied. He thrust the scalpel into Steinman's back repeatedly as the surgeon collapsed.
He waited, just watching Steinman's body lie still on the floor, before using the scalpel to cut through the rest of the leather straps.
Stepping over the body, Jack felt a little guilty about the satisfaction he took in Steinman's mutilated face. He opened one of the stainless steel cupboards and began pulling the contents of the shelves down into the fold of his sweater.
Running out of room, Jack spotted a leather bag among the rubbish on the floor, emptied the contents, and began filling it with the bandages, gauze, and drugs he found in the cupboard. Returning to the shelves, he found a strange device. Jack pressed a button and it began speaking in a young woman's voice.
"He hasn't come to see me," the voice on the device said. "Not since the incident at Kashmir's on New Year's Eve. Dr. Steinman seems very interested in my case, though. Says he's going to fix me right up, make me the prettiest girl in Rapture. He's so attentive. So sweet…"
He hit the next button to make it stop. He returned to the bag he'd found and noticed a crate nearby. The lid was placed on loosely. Jack opened it and looked inside. Buried beneath more medical supplies was a short-wave radio.
Jack switched it on and scanned the frequencies. He caught a man's voice intermixed with the static, and kept tuning until the voice was finally clear.
"Ya can hear me now, can't you?" The voice spoke in a pleasant Irish brogue with an almost sing-song rhythm. "You're the new fellow, ay? I've been using a hacked security bot to keep an eye on you. Nice work on Steinman, by the way. About time someone did somethin' 'bout that sick bastard."
Jack heard a sound and looked up. Many legs were shuffling into the Medical Pavilion, towards surgery.
"We don't want to hurt you," not-quite-human voices were bellowing. "We just want someone to talk to."
"Bloody splicers!" the voice on the radio swore. "Listen, boyo. Stay calm and we'll get you outta there. I'm Atlas, and it's in both o' our best interests that you stay alive."
A/N - More to come . . .