“MY ALLERGY.”
He nods. “You once told me you nearly died when you were younger. Airways closed right up. Only a swiftly administered EpiPen saved you. And with the medical care in this place, well, you wouldn’t be so lucky this time,” he says, smiling. “All I needed that day was a moment alone with my Dee … And when it was over, I’d ‘find’ a few peanuts in your pocket and accuse the hospital of gross negligence for letting you anywhere near them with your rare peanut allergy…”
“Then quietly clear out of 1954.”
“A simple plan,” he says as we pass a door marked SECOND FLOOR. “And satisfying, getting to watch you in Sherman’s office, no memory, trapped like a caged animal. Denying you were my mental wife, while trying like hell to figure out what was really going on … But then came that moment when you realized I was the man in your one memory. That you had to be Dorothy. Seeing you, of all people, break down in tears like that … So frightened. Vulnerable…”
“At your mercy,” I say. “Must’ve been quite the turn-on.”
“For sure,” he says, “but it was so much more. I could suddenly see the possibilities of this unique situation. The opportunity to obtain a more tender, agreeable, and trustworthy version of you, one not driven by your merciless save-the-world agenda. A you I could enjoy this not-yet-fucked world of 1954 with … at least for a little while.”
Stokes’s yoloyear fantasy: living out his last months here with an “improved” version of me. He must’ve gone AWOL from Kameron Rook and the Tabula Rasa to pursue it.
“Mr. and Mrs. Paul Frasier,” I say. “You just needed Sherman to damage me enough to accept it.”
“Exactly,” he says. “I already had a couple factors in my favor—your brain damage from the botched time travel. And all that free-floating guilt and fear swirling around your subconscious.”
“The perfect candidate for your fucked-up mind control experiment.”
“A brainwashing challenge worthy of my talents and expertise. So when Dr. Sherman begged me to let him treat you in the Unit, I gave my consent.”
“All the while letting me think it was my choice.”
“Absolutely. The most crucial factor in a successful reeducation is that the subject believes they’re making their own decisions, even when they’re not. That illusion of free will—that’s what gets them to double down on choices you’ve already gotten them to make. To really own them. So the subject won’t question a situation, a belief, an authority figure. Because they think they chose that situation, that belief, that person exerting control over them. And therefore, to question it would be irrational.”
I remember the repatterned part of me urging me to be sensible, presenting all those solid, grounded reasons I should comply. Christ.
“I knew if I raised the right fears, dangled the right rewards, I could get you to choose the Unit,” he says. Cocky motherfucker. “Just needed something you were so desperate for, you’d do anything to get—and keep it.”
My crazy-maker. “Freedom,” I say.
Stokes is hardly able to contain himself. “It was perfect. You wanted out of Hanover so damn much, I knew you’d cooperate.”
“Freedom depends on my cooperation,” I say, repeating the line that’s inhabited me, like a tapeworm, these last weeks.
Stokes chuckles. “That governing phrase Sherman embedded in you. Still firmly in place, I see.”
“You knew everything he was doing to me in the Unit?”
“Of course. Sherman got off on all my adulation and interest in his work. Kept me well-informed on his progress with you,” he says, as we pass a door marked THIRD FLOOR. “The doctor has a workmanlike grasp of mind control. Nothing spectacular, but between his protocol and your existing issues, it was definitely working, you were accepting the changes being wrought on you, becoming habituated to your new role. Your new you.”
“Till I faked the seizure.” I wonder if I suddenly turned around, could I get that gun out of his hands before he pulled the trigger? From what I’ve seen of his reflexes, I’m guessing no.
“Bold move,” he says, “and convincingly done. Still don’t know how you pulled it off. Fooled Sherman. Even I was sure they’d overtreated you—and gotten you close to full regression. It made taking you out of Hanover too tempting to pass up. To be in total control of your reprograming, not have Sherman muddying the waters…” We reach the fourth-floor landing, come to a door marked TOWER ACCESS. “Open it,” he says.
“So you forced them to release me,” I say, unlocking the door.
“Yeah,” he says, prodding me down a hallway. “But once you were home, it quickly became clear a part of you was fighting the process, insisting on your independence. Still wanting to accomplish its ‘mission’—even if it hadn’t a fucking clue what that was. I needed to make you more afraid of yourself, of what your disease could make you do. So you’d let the mission—and your independence—go.”
“The hardware store.”
“A healthy dose of sedative added to your antiseizure capsule that night. Then an additional injection between your toes later so you wouldn’t wake till Arthur Morris found you in his store the next morning.”
That’s some grade A gaslighting.
The hallway opens up on a set of narrow steps that hugs the four brick walls of Hanover’s clock tower, as it rises upward like some M. C. Escher staircase. I could try to—
Not the ideal place for a fight. Wait for a better opportunity.
Stokes shoves the barrel in my back to get me moving up them. “I had Eloise slog through that mud outside the house in an identical nightgown and socks, then change you into them.”
“Who is Eloise?”
“Out-of-work actress heavily in debt to a loan shark. You find the right, desperate people, they’ll do anything. And I gotta say, she played the role of disapproving nurse quite well,” he says. “But even though I’d scared you enough to agree to the medication, the limitations, you still had questions. I had to know where they were coming from. What you were keeping from me.”
“So you left me alone, undrugged, yesterday. A test.”
“Which you failed. ‘Magically’ healed enough to climb out a window, steal a truck. Now I knew you’d been lying. But I was curious. Wanted to see how close you’d gotten to the truth.”
“So you did follow me.”
“At a discreet distance. Too discreet—you managed to lose me after the church.”
I knew I sensed the asshole. Thank God he didn’t follow me to Worthy’s house. At least so far I’ve kept him from knowing about the deputy and me.
Let’s not congratulate ourselves yet. He’s still about to kill you. Us.
“When you didn’t return with your tail between your legs,” Stokes says, “I spent the night wondering just where the hell you’d gone, my ‘wife’ with no friends outside a mental ward and fuck-all faith in herself. You’d either gotten your memory back or jumped—which would lead you where? Hanover? But Mary Pell’s a vegetable … or is she?”
“So today you called Sherman.”
“You are the smart one, Dee.” Fucker. “When he told me you’d been readmitted, I realized Mary Pell must’ve been faking a little damage of her own. Could still share the location of her viral sample. What I didn’t count on was how easy you’d make it, Beatrix. No need for me to torture it out of you back home on Birch Lane.” He shows me the scrap of pink streamer. “You gave it up so willingly.”
“Fucker.”
“So now it’s time to end my failed experiment.”
I turn around to face him, stall him. For what I don’t know. Worthy’s cavalry is hours away. “You don’t have to do this.”
He smiles. “Isn’t death what you wanted from the time machine? So you’d be free of all the guilt for your dark deeds?”
“Dark deeds? Conning you and Kameron hardly seems worth killing myself over.”
A look of genuine surprise appears on Stokes’s face. “The nerds didn’t tell you. Didn’t want their best soldier distracted from her job. That’s cold.”
“What are you talking about?” I ask.
“Haven’t you asked yourself why some part of you is so damn driven to save us all? Accomplish its mission? What awful thing it’s trying to make amends for? Eventually you’d figure it out. Enough memories would return—and then you’d know who you really are. What you did to Theo.”
The boy in the selfie. Kameron’s brother. What did I do to him? I can feel my knees going wobbly and grab the railing to steady myself. “The boy at the quarry that day.”
“Darling, you’ve remembered something!” Stokes says in his Paul voice. “Yes. Kameron’s little brother. God, that kid loved you. Followed you around like an overgrown puppy. And I think you actually cared about him. Not the BS you pretended with me. Real affection—which meant he was doomed.”
“What happened?” I ask.
He gestures with the gun. Waits for me to resume the ascent before responding. “That night in June, after the day at the quarry, you managed to get hold of papers Kameron was carrying with the location of our nearby drop site. Theo must’ve seen you sneak away and followed you. I imagine when he caught you breaking into the place, he realized you weren’t all you appeared to be. So you killed him to keep him quiet.”
“No. That can’t be—”
“But it can, Beatrix. It’s what happens—people who care about you die. In the end, they’re the ones who pay the price for all your hero-ing. Your missions.”
Suddenly the creaky stairs, the tower’s brick walls, and Stokes are gone. All I can see is darkness punctuated by the staccato of bullets pinging off metal nearby. The smell of gunpowder hanging in the humid night air surrounds me.
Then the bullets die down and I see the boy, Theo, crouched behind a large crate. “Beatrix, I’m here,” he says, and starts to stand just as the sound of a single shot resounds through the air. Theo looks at me in surprise as he crumples to the ground.
Theo … That’s why Kameron was so intense on that stage. Why he so badly wants me dead. I killed his brother.
I keep climbing steps, feet still going through the motions, but I’m not entirely in my body. My mind’s floating somewhere in the stairwell.
Do I really need to remind you Stokes is a psychopath and not to believe a word he says?
But I saw Theo go down. I know that happened.
“Theo was just another expendable loved one to you,” Stokes says. “But not to Kameron. He took off into the woods like John the fucking Baptist. Gone for weeks. That’s when he came up with his New Covenant. Started believing his own bullshit. You were the inspiration for it all, Beatrix. The Reclamations, the camps, the misogynistic rules and restrictions.”
“Christ.”