The Secret Basement

The wait ended soon enough. He was safe from the musket fire, but not from what was in the room. Studying the area, Craig wasn’t chained up like the rest of them in the concrete cinder-block room. He counted nine individuals in chains, wearing institutionalized garb. He shivered, perplexed and relieved all at once. The room was half dark, with lights on farther down in the corridor, but where he was now, he was shrouded in darkness. The room leaked from the foundation, the stink of stagnant and earthy-smelling water filling up the area. Then there were feces and urine hanging in the air.

“Where the hell am I now?” he whispered to himself. “This shit is unending.”

“Silence back there—I’ll rip your tongue out if you speak again! I thought I sedated all of you. It will be your turn soon enough. Your wait won’t be much longer.”

The speaker was a woman. He thought back to when he was walking the halls of a sanitarium. The walls here were also institutionalized and characterless. You’d think when trying to cure the mentally ill, you’d give the place a bit of pep. I wonder if the paint color is named Clinical Depression?

The joke left his mind immediately once his eyes adjusted to the darkness. The mental patients were all in straightjackets. Leather belts were wrapped tightly around their eyes. Hands and feet were shackled to the walls. Water dripped from the ceiling and gargled and belched down the drain feet from where he stood, the trickle slow but steady. Farther down the room was the reason why their eyes were blocked by belts. His mouth unhinged at the sight. First, he took in the strange device—homemade in appearance and craftsmanship. The guillotine was crafted from two planks of wood with a hole cut out for the head, the blade a piece of sheet metal sharpened to slice. Chains were connected to the wood to keep the hands in place behind the back. The device stood on a metal pushcart for easy transportation.

A guillotine on wheels, how original?

Shuck!

Another’s head was removed, the hands waving, chains rattling as the hands flung about in peril. The woman collected the head from the bucket, the shaved head drenched in red from what spurted down from the neck. Then, she shoved the head onto a vice on a nearby table. She placed a metal crown onto the skull and spun a handle until the gradual cracking turned into one loud and sharp crick noise. The woman removed the head device—a crown with razors, he guessed—and the top section of the skull was detached. She plunged her fingers and retrieved the brain with practiced and monotonous skill.

The body finally went still, all nerve pulses killed. The woman dumped the brain into a plastic case brimming with a clear fluid. She sealed it, labeled it by name, and was working toward the room with the other patients in-waiting when she caught Craig hiding.

“Who are you and why aren’t you in restraints?”

Craig tightened his fists. “I’m not one of the patients you’re exploiting. You take another step, and I’ll hurt you.”

She smiled, tickled by his defense. “You will do no such thing.”

“Let me guess, you’re another Krone. And you’re crazy too. Another crazy Krone.”

“Excuse me? How do you know me?”

“You’re extracting brains. All of you do that. Every Krone is obsessed with brains, and memories, and whatever else you people do. And let me guess, we’re in one of his facilities. You’re killing patients and nobody cares to find out about it. You’re doing research.”

“I’m helping my husband complete his work. Hey, why aren’t you in a straightjacket? You don’t belong here, do you? Come here. Let’s straighten this out.”

“You don’t take another step toward me.” He eyed the space behind her work area. Five headless bodies were heaped in a laundry basket on wheels. “I’m not ending up like them, and you’re not hurting another one of these people.”

“I only want to cure them of their minds,” she explained, her intensity revealed by her widening, globe eyes. “I work alongside my husband. His work is essential. These people take their meds, shit their diapers, suffer manic fits, and they stay here locked up in these depressing quarters. Our facilities offer no cure for these people. Families leave them behind, heartbroken and fed up. We have to physically extract the maladies they contain. And it’ll take a practiced physician to actually enter their minds, their memories, and their thoughts to save them.” She tightened her fists. “Can’t you see this is crucial work?”

“Do you have anybody’s consent to do this?”

She scoffed, shaking her head, and feigned resignation. “This is work taken with a leap of faith. Our hearts are in the right place, and more importantly, so are our minds. Breakthroughs aren’t made by the books. All will be forgiven when these patients will walk out of here sane, cured, and able to live meaningful lives. And I’m preserving our patients’ minds. Their souls are very much still alive, and they will be forever.”

“How do you know this? You can’t, really. Nobody’s been cured.”

He caught the row of brains on a shelf hooked to electrodes, and the EEG machine spitting out readings. Two bodies were placed standing on an upright stretcher. The brains were exposed, another EEG machine charting brain waves.

“You see those two bodies,” she explained. “I switched their brains, and they still live! It’s amazing. Imagine if I can get them to return to consciousness what they might say.”

Craig yelled with every muscle of his throat, “What the hell is the point of this work?”

“I’m going to cure them of their maladies!” she shrieked and aimed a pistol at him, what had been tucked under her belt. “Look, I don’t know how or why you’re here. Now I can either shoot you, or I can drug you. Regardless, that brain of yours is all mine.”

“Wait!” He battled to create a diversion from her shooting him. “You see, I’m a part of your husband’s work. He’s created a machine. This machine can play my memories on a TV screen. He can also enter my mind and my thoughts.”

She was stumped. “My husband showed me the machine, but he hasn’t gotten it to work. Is he keeping secrets from me?” She raised the gun so it was face level. “Tell me how you know about this right now, or I’ll kill you.”

“I’m one of his patients,” he pleaded, then realized he was talking to Dr. Krone, Sr.'s wife. “Look, I'm actually one of your son's patients. And he’s in my mind playing games with me. He’s not curing anybody. He’s enjoying himself, the sick fuck.”

She trained the pistol at his head. “No, you lie. You're not making any sense!  You're just another one of these lunatics.”

The patients mumbled collectively, ball gags stuffed into their mouths. Many drooled and their muffled laughter distracted the woman long enough for him to launch over to her. He landed a stiff punch to her stomach, swinging hard. He pushed her to the ground, forcing the gun from her grip after stepping on her wrist. Craig raced to pick up the gun, and he couldn’t believe what he witnessed in the back of the room.

Dr. Krone, Sr. stood confused and frightened.  The doctor helped his wife to her feet. Craig raised the gun and kept them where they stood. This was his chance to observe the rest of the room.

Heads without eyes were stored in formaldehyde jars. Hundreds of brains floated in preservatives. More bodies were also wrapped up in blankets and heaped in laundry carts.

“What do you do with the bodies, Krone?”

Dr. Krone Sr.’s brow sweated and he clutched on to his wife, shaken from his daily routine. “I don’t have to tell you anything.” He turned to the woman. “Are you okay, Hillary?”

She nodded, still out of sorts.

Craig insisted, “Where are we right now?”

“You don’t know where we are?” Hillary was stumped by his naivety. “Why don’t you know? Isn’t it obvious?”

He raised the gun. “Spell it out for me, or I shoot you both. I’m in my brain. I guess it’s not murder.”

“You’re in one of my sanitariums,” Dr. Krone, Sr. enumerated, sharpening his eyes, penetrating Craig. “And what do you mean by ‘I’m in my brain?’”

“You hooked me to a machine. You, no, wait, your son, Dr. Krone, he did it.  That fat bastard roams my memories and thoughts. He's manipulating my past. Treating me, that’s what he calls it. Tormenting me is a better word. I guess in the future, he fucked up and decided to have fun instead. He's a sadistic voyeur. He's nothing more than a criminal.”

“My son brought you here by the machine?" 

Dr. Krone, Sr. almost fell backwards, the revelation so powerful. Hillary propped him up straight, making sure he wouldn’t tip over again. “This is…well, staggering. The machine works. I haven’t hooked a living patient up to it yet. I wanted to commit to more research first, but if what you’re saying is true, I’m launching into it right now.”

He pointed the gun between Dr. Krone, Sr.’s eyes. “You’ll do no such thing. This ends now!”

He pulled the trigger.

The gun blast was rudely abbreviated by the blink. Dr. Krone, Sr. was in sight, the bullet shattered his skull, and then the doctor was gone. A shout involuntarily slipped from Craig, high-pitched and from his sternum. He forced himself quiet and stood in place. The darkness was blinding, and Craig was forced to rely on a different set of senses to survive, namely his nose. Something wet and ice cold was seeping through his shoes. The stench became a film on his skin. Pneumonia strong. He coughed, and coughed, and coughed to breathe. Death consumed the room. He could smell blood and spoiled human carcasses en masse.

He feared stepping another inch. The room, whatever box he was now in, was silent. No crazies babbling in their padded rooms or victims mewling in torment. From above, a series of light bulbs flickered on. Rust light provided red and orange hues to the damnable room. He didn’t hear anybody’s approach yet, and it gave him an opportunity—though it nearly claimed his wits to do so—to study the horrifying box.

The institutional appearance made Craig believe he was still in an asylum. The walls were tiled, the floor concrete. He counted fifteen steel gurneys haphazardly strewn side by side, discarded and piled up, with bloodless corpses on them. Their skullcaps had been removed, the brains pilfered. Many of the bodies had begun to putrefy into greens and browns. Faces reflected waxen, bodies sunken and soft in the middle, and they were leaking their bodily fluids, the brackish substance dripping from the edge of gurneys in thick caramel consistencies. Sets of tools on carts ranged from scalpels, pinch claps, bone saws, circular saws, and pliers. Hundreds of used surgeon gloves littered the floor.

The rusted light kept the room healthy in its supply of shadows. Somehow, Craig managed to decipher the bulky items positioned throughout the rest of the corridor—the very purpose of the room. They were prototypes, he believed, of the machine he was hooked up to, though he hadn’t seen the damn thing yet. Craig compared many of them to the body of a tractor where the engine component was hidden. Steel doors were open from two sides of the machine, and within, nine brains were housed in a dark yellow fluid. Electrodes were inserted between hemispheres and lobes of the brain, though they were collecting green growths and far from fresh. From the back end of the machine, an industrial-sized plug-in trailed out. It was unplugged and discarded as a failure.

Across the room, four men in straightjackets were sitting with their backs to each other in chairs. Their mummified heads were reared back with a silver bowl placed over their skulls. A long steel rod extended out the bowls and connected to a black box with circuits and projection lights. The victims’ mouths were wide in an eternal scream.

The stink hit a crescendo, and Craig covered his mouth and held his breath. A glass box the size of a hatchback’s trunk contained hundreds of deflated, cut-up, and otherwise ruined brains. They stank and stewed in a yellow fluid. Whatever preservative it had been, it had lost its potency.

He then inched toward a wall, curious at what was taped up on display. He counted twenty, thirty, forty, and many more blueprint sketches of the machine throughout the various stages of its development. Each had the steel box as the core. The power source ranged from mechanical hinges, lawnmower engines, to car engines, and a wheel-and-pulley system—an Amish version of Dr. Krone’s machine, he thought. Ropes, and circuits, steel wires, and bared wire were used interchangeably. Car batteries, nuts, bolts, copper wire, computer keyboards, steel gears, and rods were among many of the pieces scattered about the floor.

Disturbed from his investigation, he heard the confident stride of footsteps enter the corridor. Ducking behind a wooden crate, he looked out and found it was father and son Krone. He caught their shadows come closer, and Craig couldn’t stand to be in the wretched cesspool room a moment longer.

He closed his eyes and thought of a happier place.