Free of the Machine

Edith unbuckled his straps, and one by one, they came loose. She worked at the restraints at his feet. Craig was so caught up in his escape that he forgot he was hooked up to a catheter and IV fluids. Urine filled half the plastic bag. Edith turned away and let him unhook himself. “Don’t be embarrassed. I was hooked up like that too.”

After freeing himself, he tried to stand, and when he did, he unleashed an abbreviated shout. “Ah God!” His legs were assaulted by pins and needles. He rubbed at them to force circulation. He rotated his neck and twisted his back. He’d been sitting in the same position for essentially days. He grinded his teeth and cursed and cursed under his breath. Craig laid flat on his back, and then he returned to his feet and used the wall for support.

Edith hugged him, clinging to him for relief.

“It’s okay, you can cry,” he encouraged her. “This is worth crying over.”

She wept. “I-I just want to see my children again. I want out of this damnable place. The windows are boarded up. Every door is locked. There’s no way out of here.”

The news soured his excitement of being free of the machine. He turned to the device. Craig didn’t mean to laugh. The device was a metallic box the size of a refrigerator tilted to its side with a chair bolted to one end. Metal legs propped it four feet high. A computer screen and keyboard were crafted into the side, but the monitor was black. A trail of wires, thick as rope, exited one end and continued through a hole in the wall.

Edith was confused. “What’s so funny?”

“This machine, it’s so…so simple. I expected Dr. Frankenstein’s lab. This is all it takes to open up a person’s memory and play it on a movie screen and to place the person back into their memories?”

He walked to the machine and dared to touch it. Maybe there was something inside the steel box. He traced the edges and the thin line where he thought the box would come open. The edge wouldn’t budge. It was locked by a series of three keyhole entries.

More secrets, great.

“Whatever’s in there,” he speculated, “is what’s fucking with our minds.”

He touched the cords trailing out the back. He tugged, ripped, and yanked to unplug the machine. No luck. The wires held strong. The device was homemade. Soldering lines and different shades of metal lent it a rough prototype look. I’m sure this was independently funded. No university in their right mind would allow this to happen. The testing alone, and the trial research.

It doesn’t matter.

Just get the hell out of here.

“Let’s find a way out of this place.”

He was careful leaving the room. Edith was glued to his side. “Listen, I couldn’t find an exit. Like I said, everything’s sealed up. A mouse couldn’t get in or out.”

Craig challenged the hallway. The wallpaper was a floral print and stained from water spots. Pieces of plaster showed through the wall and littered the floor in powdery circles.

“The maid’s on strike,” Craig joked.

The narrow corridor went on for a series of rooms. Edith’s room was three ahead of his. The same machine was positioned in an otherwise empty room. The electrical cords also trailed into the wall.

“Where do those cords lead to?”

Edith shook her head. “It beats me. You have to see the living room and kitchen. This is somebody’s home.”

“Wait,” he said, making her stop. “How did we escape the machine?”

Edith had the answer. “The power went out. It flickered back on five minutes later. The needles in my eyes and my skull were removed, and I slipped from the restraints.” She smiled, flexing her eyebrows. “I’m flexible.”

“But if that’s true, how come nobody’s coming after us?”

She pointed to the end of the hall. “Forget it. Help me find an escape before they do find us.”

They rushed forward and stopped at a living room where they found cherry-finished wood floors, mauve drapes over the windows, a three-piece furniture set, and an Egyptian rug that covered the majority of the room’s surface area. She was correct, this was somebody’s home. Craig rushed to the windows. There were wrought iron bars preventing their escape. The front door had no doorknob.

“Step back.”

He rammed the door with his shoulder.

Big mistake.

“Shit, shit, shit.”

Craig grasped his shoulder, which was covered in wild blinding pain. “It’s like a concrete wall.”

He rapped on the door with his knuckle. “Yep, it’s concrete.”

Edith was devastated, and she failed to reserve her emotions. She bounded into the kitchen, weeping. The room was well-furnished—pizza oven, overhead pots and pans rack, modern oven and stove, and a refrigerator with a television installed on the door. The room was perfectly clean. Edith had been in the room before. She quickly located a bottle of scotch in the cupboard and tilted her head back to enjoy a swig.

“Easy,” he advised, checking the room over again. “I don’t need you drunk. They could be watching us. Dr. Krone or that nurse, whoever she is, might be skulking about.”

He observed the stairwell that twisted up to the second floor. There was another set that led to the basement. “We should check upstairs and down next.”

Edith nursed the bottle in her hands, standing in the kitchen. Craig eyed the refrigerator. He was starving. He wrenched the doors open and scavenged for something. The insides were bare except for sandwich meat, wine, and cheese. He located a loaf of Wonder Bread on the counter and slapped a wad of turkey between the bread. Craig ate, watching every direction for anyone. He feared this was the bait inside a trap.

He finished the sandwich, and with his belly satisfied, Craig thought about the stairwells. Where did they lead? Edith’s glassy eyes were in a trance. She was defeated, broken-hoped. Craig studied her arms, and legs, and body. “Dr. Krone’s a liar.”

Her reply was delayed. “Huh?”

“I was attacked numerous times when I was hooked up to that machine, but I don’t have a scratch on me now, except from those needles on that metal crown we wore on our heads." 

“No. I guess you’re right. It was all in our minds.”

“I say we comb over this place. Those electrical cords channel somewhere. Perhaps there’s a power source we can knock out.” He pointed at the kitchen window armed with iron bars. The windows were tinted, and he couldn’t view outside. “We still don’t know where we are. It’s a mansion, sure, but where is it? They don’t have us contained in our minds anymore.” He sighed. “Those were horrible memories.”

“But there were good memories too.” She enjoyed a short pull from the bottle. “It was beautiful, at first. The moment after giving birth to your first child, when the pain has finished, and there’s an endorphin kick, and then a slow release of tension, and you have this little child in your arms. It’s yours, and this person is the only thing you can really call yours. It came from you, you know what I mean? Trent was there with me. He still loved me then, my first husband. I had a decent job. I worked at a print shop, making copies for businesses. Trent was a truck driver. We both had money and what we needed to be happy.

“But it quickly went to shit. Dr. Krone would manipulate the situation. Trent would steal my children. He’d hold them hostage. I would be at home, and I’d receive pieces of them in the mail. Fingers, toes, and locks of hair, and before I woke from Dr. Krone’s machine, he sent me a head. I couldn’t recognize it, it was so mutilated.” She winced, shutting her eyes, banishing the image from her mind and failing. “I can still feel the blood on my fingers.”

He wrapped his arms around her, sensing her emotional fatigue. Their memories had something in common. Heartbreak and violence.

Edith continued her story, living down the tears. “Trent really did kidnap Fiona when she was three. The cops arrested him, but I didn’t press charges. Fiona wasn’t hurt. She was gone for two days. But in the machine, all my children were kidnapped, and each was murdered. They also came back as…as monsters to hurt me. Snarling demons with red eyes and demented claws. And then I’m behind Dr. Krone in the mausoleum. He’s removing a coffin, that Bruce Denning guy. I see desiccated bones. He unfolds another body in a towel and buries him there. Dr. Krone said a prayer over his father’s body, and he fled the cemetery after returning the coffin into the wall. He was crying, really upset. That’s why I stayed inside the place. I thought he was terrified to enter the mausoleum.”

Craig pondered the memory he had of Dr. Krone, the doctor working with his wife in the asylum, and the numerous contraptions and early prototypes of the machine. He explained the details to Edith, and she was astounded.

“So the Krones own insane asylums, and they were stealing victims as test subjects?”

“I’m not sure how they were used, but I also had a shorter glimpse of another memory. I believe I was watching Dr. Krone’s father twisting out the brains from his patients. There were dead bodies in that room strewn all over the place.”

Edith bit her lip, puzzled. But then her eyes lit up. “It makes you wonder why our memories are so terrible. Our past is twisted against us, and we’re attacked by our friends and loved ones. Who would wish that on anybody?”

Craig smiled. “Someone who’s obviously criminally insane would enjoy that kind of shit.”

She was snapped out her pitiful victim stance. “Dr. Krone is watching all of this. He has control, yes, but maybe he’s losing that control himself.”

“Or he’s influenced by his victims.” He strained to think, parting the gray curtain over the facts. “Consider it. He’s had too many visions of insanity or he’s lived in the heads of the criminally insane one too many times. That’s who he’s been dissecting. If he’s lived in our heads like that, he’s done it with the straightjackets too. But we’re missing a big piece of information. How he uses the machine and the mental patients, we still don’t know. This is merely speculation on our part. That’s why we should check out the place. This machine is obviously dangerous, and I want to destroy it.”

Edith’s jaw clenched. “He kidnapped us against our will. It’s obvious his bullshit about treating us for our problems is a hoax. He said I had a case of depression and alcohol addiction.” She eyed the scotch in her hands. “And maybe so, but none of this is for the bettering of me.” She tipped the bottle into her mouth again. “I’m obviously not cured.”

“I agree,” he sighed, experiencing the same vexing thoughts. “I was originally going to visit a psychiatrist. I was court ordered to do so.” He cleared his throat and lowered his eyes. “I, um, slammed a barstool over my best friend’s body. I was drunk, unemployed, and desperate…”

She touched his shoulder. “We’ve all been there. You’re sorry, I can tell.” She injected him with encouraging words. “Let’s escape so we can make up for lost time. It’s been at least two days. We’ll have a wild time, me and you—fast friends.”

He laughed. “No shit. This’ll make for a great story, for anybody that’ll believe us. If we escape, we’re having the biggest party ever.”

She stole another swig from the bottle to acknowledge the idea. And then her eyes skirted to the wall, and she placed the bottle on the counter, moving to the magnetic kitchen strip and taking the five-inch kitchen knife. He was disappointed the other knives were gone—perhaps other people had escaped the machine and taken them—and after rooting through the drawers himself, he came upon the best option—a rolling pin. He studied the upstairs and then the bottom stairs. He believed the cords from the machine traveled down, not up, but it was merely a guess.

“I say we check out the basement first. The cords should lead there. I really want to bash the shit out of whatever makes that machine tick.”

She sprinted down the hallway, impelled by an idea she didn’t share with him. Craig chased after her, growing paranoid with each step. There were closed doors and any one of them could harbor Dr. Krone and Rachael. Edith was already in the room she came from, where she was held captive to the machine. She tried to saw through the cords around the box, but the effort was wasted. They were impenetrable. Craig bashed the steel box. The connections didn’t even dent or harm the surface.

Edith was frustrated. “This is bullshit!”

Craig cut her off. “Let’s search the place out. This isn’t getting us anywhere. This thing has a power source. We can destroy it.”

She was the first out of the room, finally embracing the idea, and Craig was fast at her heels.

The Krone mansion tour began.