Dr. Krone,  Sr.

Craig backed up to the other side of the room, creating more space between him and the strange man. He was the same person in the video—lab coat, red fingerprint stains caked along the front, faded beige pants, and a determined and hungry face. Murderously intelligent.

He couldn’t speak. The doctor’s presence robbed him of words. He simply shook his head and mouthed, “No…”

“This is reality, Mr. Horsy, and I am flesh and blood.” Dr. Krone, Sr. raised his arms and took a slow spin around. “I’m a body, and I’ve been dead for many years. Amazing, don’t you think?”

Craig spat it out, “What the fuck are you talking about? This is murder you’ve participated in, not a scientific breakthrough.”

“But it is a scientific breakthrough. Ah, I’ve skipped ahead of the explanation. Forgive me.” He walked to the corner with a metal pushcart stocked with glass bottles of booze. He poured himself one and raised an empty glass at Craig. “You want a drink?”

He shook his head, refusing to believe this conversation was happening, but what choice did he have? 

“You're persistent—you and that woman, what’s her name? She broke free of the restraints on her own. She’s the first to escape, besides you.” His face hardened. “You see, the machine turns itself off before it overloads. The power goes out, and the patient usually can’t move or doesn’t move. But that lady, she’s one tough bitch. We only have three machines. I don’t think the house can support anymore electricity use. The rest of the mansion usually sits in the dark to conserve. You’re the first to escape ever for this long.”

“Hurray for me,” Craig snapped. “You realize you’re a murderer, right? I’ve seen you in action. You steal mental patients from the asylum, and now you’re kidnapping innocent people from the streets. I take it nobody walks out of here alive either, or cured.”

Dr. Krone, Sr. poured himself a scotch and drank it straight up. He was more concerned about the drink than Craig's accusations. “This is the first thing I do when I wake. It’s the best way to come out of death. A good stuff drink down the hatch.”

He was confused. “Wake up from death?”

Dr. Krone, Sr. was enjoying the Q&A session. He sipped the scotch contentedly. Patting his belly, he sighed, “Ah, that’s better. Yes, I’m dead—remember? But the brain is a powerful vessel. It doesn’t have to die. It has many abilities the human race has yet to decode. I’ve simply discovered a special feature of the brain. My great, great grandfather located this phenomenon, this special feature. I’ve simply harnessed it. Turned it into something worth exploring. My son discovered the soul is in the brain. The soul itself is the electrical charge that occurs when nerve impulses called ‘action potentials’ command the body to function—to remember, the move, to act, to feel, to hate, to love, and so on. The soul is capable of anything if instructed, including returning to life after death. I am living once again.” He turned his head to the side, trying to read Craig. “I’m not completely alive, but once a week is better than never in eternity, I’ll say.”

Dr. Krone, Sr. poured another drink, determined to catch a buzz. He frowned when speaking, sharing his private pain. “Death is pitch-black. It’s not sleep. There’s nothing in death. Oblivion. Expansive black. I fear going back to it. I woke here after a long stay in death. My soul was commanded back to life by the machine, and I’ve returned once a week since I died of a stroke.” With a creeping smile he said, “My son has seen to that.”

“So you’re essentially a walking corpse. But you’re real now. Why not leave the house and experience the world if you’re real? I’d go out, so why don’t you?”

The doctor closed his eyes and rubbed them. “Ah, that’s one feat we haven’t mastered. The energy field can only reach so far, maybe half a mile from the house, if that. So I’m stuck here, Mr. Horsy. My son is working on fixing that issue. Once he dies, that’s it. Somebody else will have to work the machine to keep me alive. It all hinges on ‘action potentials’. You stimulate the right channels in the brain with electricity, the stronger the reaction you receive. The machine is so powerful, it not only creates these electrical charges, it takes them from you and replicates them on a screen, replicates them in your mind, lets others like my son into others’ minds.”

A malignant smile demurred his face. “The machine also mimics the memories in flesh and blood for a short period of time.”

Unable to one-up the man, Craig turned his creation into a joke. “I bet your electricity bill is insane.”

Dr. Krone, Sr. was disappointed at Craig’s lack of appreciation for the profound. “We don’t get all of our power from the house. Electricity from nerve impulses, the soul itself, channels much of our power in this residence.”

Craig asked, “How did you locate the soul?”

Dr. Krone, Sr. rested on one of the leather swivel chairs, feeling tipsy. “The Krone family used to own ten asylums in the Midwest. My son finally sold off the businesses. Our goal originally was to cure insanity, dementia, and just about every mental disorder. I guess Dr. Larry Krone, the first to try in the late 1800s, already knew of the soul. He had forefathers before him who’d operated on fallen or near-dead soldiers during the Civil War and American Revolution. They discovered the nerve impulses and the electrical charges in the brain, the soul at work. The truth is the machine had already been built for decades. You see, other American asylums were very much interested in getting inside disturbed minds as well.

“The insane are the perfect guinea pigs. The families leave their loved ones behind once they’re deemed incurable. Hundreds of thousands of victims of mental illness suffer this fate. Writing the DSM, shock therapy, drugs, none of it added up to shit as far as cures go. Treatments subdued the beast, but it didn’t send the beast packing. We wanted the infirm to live a normal life. This is the price for that privilege. The machines were banned from use and destroyed, after, let’s say, certain unwanted outcomes.” He furrowed his eyebrows up and down. “But somehow, the Krones got a hold of the last prototypes. Three machines. I’ve had to spend years tweaking the machines to do as I wish. I got them to work again.

“At first, the machine simply projected images onto a screen. Memories. I wanted to physically enter the mind and encounter the mental illness myself. So many patients have been hooked up to the machine over the years, thousands, and it’s added up to something miraculous. The databanks alone are so prolific. The electricity, the souls were collected in mass numbers up to the point the machine gained abilities of its own.”

His booming voice shook Craig to the core, the news shouted from a confident maniac. “How else do you think I’m flesh and blood after death? This machine made it happen on its own. I’m real again. I was taken from death and put here. My soul was copied and is exactly as the original—it looks the same, thinks the same, deduces and reasons the same, but I’m not real. I am real, though.” He waved his hand at Craig not to ask. “It’s confusing. The living soul is not aware of itself, but the dead soul is free to venture into other places if it can be awakened and brought back to reality. The soul, the brain, it has so much potential yet to be discovered.

“That’s why we’ve taken to kidnapping people from the streets. It’s difficult to obtain enough mental patients after my son sold the business. He’s dedicated his time to locating people like you. People with rich minds to tap. Those troubled and on the verge of criminality. Admit it, you’re amazed. What I’m telling you is revolutionary.”

“Tell me something, Doctor.  What success have you had?”

The question interrupted his proud reverie of success. “How do you figure?”

“You wanted to cure mental illness. Well, have you?”

The question lingered, and floated, and dissipated. Dr. Krone, Sr. motioned to speak, but he stopped himself. The man was puzzled. Nobody had pointed out the flaws of his reasoning before. It also occurred to Craig their guinea pig picking pool comprised of the insane. The souls charging this machine were disturbed, irrational, violent, and terrified.

“That’s why my memories were turned against me,” he said as a private revelation. “And that’s how come your son is talking to my friends and loved ones and convincing them to conspire against me. That’s why my dead wife tried to murder me. And the walking corpses at the mausoleum, it makes sense. You’ve allowed pandemonium to take over science.”

Dr. Krone, Sr. was clearly offended. He clutched his empty glass as if to chuck it at Craig. “Maybe you’re right. But maybe it’s because I don’t want to share what we’ve found with the rest of the world. Nobody would understand. The machine would be trashed, and forgotten, and banned like it was half a century ago. I’ve made many friends, been to many foreign countries, have had sex with thousands of women, and I’ve experienced the world after death.”

Pleased with the sound of his own words, his mouth quivered as if on the verge of weeping. “It’s worth every drop of blood shed to reach this point. I’ve lived so many people’s memories. Sadly, the patient does die after the fifth day strapped to the machine. The soul is completely removed and turned to energy for the machine. Each soul is catalogued into a computer database. I can type the dead up, and they can be flesh and blood again once a week, if I so chose. Once the machine has enough soul energy built up, it can do anything.

“Once a week that machine rests. It takes stock of the new souls, and when it comes back on—and you’ll hear it—for twelve hours, my son can program that computer hooked to the device to play out any memories he wants. Flesh-and-blood memories, Mr. Horsy. Your memories. Anything in your mind can be recreated by the machine. You’ve been strapped in for three days. That’s long enough for the machine to know an awful lot about you.”

His smile was threatening. “And the memories in your head were harsh. We’ve tweaked your past a bit. Since you escaped, it’s the least we could do to send you off according to the trouble you’ve been to us. But I have a feeling I won’t bring you back to life again once you’re dead. Your soul will be lost forever.” He pretended he had Craig’s soul in his hand, and he dropped it, looking around, and he couldn’t find it. “You’ll be oblivious in oblivion.”

The glimmer in his eyes shined like a diamond. “We like to have fun. Being strapped to the machine for so long, we can hear your family and friends cry for you. They have things they want to share with you. Unfinished business. Why not let them have their way with you? It’ll be therapeutic.”

“Wait, my memories will come to life?” Craig was confused, watching the walls, the doors, and listening hard for what the man was talking about, what could come out and attack him at any moment. “No, you can’t do that. Don’t do this to me. Don’t bring them back. What can I do to convince you to stop this?”

Dr. Krone, Sr. stole the scotch bottle. He exited the room, content with what he shared with Craig, but before the door closed, he whispered, “You’ll have visitors soon, and I’ll be watching.”