"The Veil of Dreams" (Part 2 of 2)

 Story starts in part 1, posted previously (here)

Katherine’s coins were more than enough for Conrad to rent a room above one of the town’s numerous bars. As soon as he was alone inside it, he emptied his pockets onto the room’s tiny table and paced. Was what he was contemplating, he wondered, the only way? Probably not. But what else did he have the resources for? The matte black device that had weighed so heavily in his pocket reflected the oil lamp’s flickering light. It was a weapon, he knew, because he recalled practicing with it, perhaps in preparation for this venture. All he needed to do was hold the button down and touch the metal studs to someone, and it would - it would what? He didn’t remember that part. Presumably, kill or disable them.

That Dr. Greene had refused to return with him voluntarily weighed heavily on Conrad’s mind, but what was he to do? Neither of them were supposed to be here. It was an accident that had brought Katherine here, and another accident that had given Conrad the insight he needed to follow her. The second accident almost seemed to balance out the first, and it would - if Conrad could return home with Katherine.

Neither of them would remember much about this place anyway, Conrad realized. Even if Katherine were to resist him, once she was returned home all would return to normal. He wouldn’t even remember that he’d had to rescue her against her will. Not even his own conscience would blame him.

Resolved, Conrad retired for the night. His plan was simple and direct. By this time tomorrow, he would be home, with Katherine in tow, and this would all just be a bad dream.

The servants in the Gardner household were instructed to bring in the meal and then depart until called, but Margred and a few of the others still heard the commotion and rushed to see what was the matter. There was a shout from Mr. Gardner and then a thud and a scream, the last in Mrs. Gardner’s voice.

By the time they burst into the room, it was all over. Oswald Gardner lay crumpled on the floor, breathing shallowly, and as for what had become of the strange guest and Mrs. Gardner, they could see no sign, save that one of the maids spotted a wire-thin needle and a small glass bottle, contents spilled out, on the floor.

Margred ran to her employer’s side, and helped him get shakily to his feet. None of the staff failed to notice the pair of red burns on the back of Oswald’s neck.

“He took Katherine.” Oswald helplessly balled his fists, looking like he didn’t know whether to be more bereaved or more furious. “He took her back there.” As soon as he was able, he staggered to the corner of the room and retrieved a gold ring, Katherine’s wedding band, from where it had fallen when Conrad had thrown it. “And I can do nothing for her now.”

Dinner by firelight. Awkward conversation - fear? Panic? Anger, even. Screams. The crumpled form of a man, lying on a hardwood floor. Pain, sharp and sudden. All fading into all-consuming numb...

Conrad, Katherine semi-conscious and supported by his hand around her waist, recognized the intersection visible out the mouth of the alleyway immediately. What was odd was that the last thing he remembered was - no, it was the needle, in the isolation chamber. It was all coming back now - the theory concerning how the serum worked, which was half-baked at best, and more importantly the reason he’d injected it into himself, the rescue of the woman now leaning woozily against him.

Katherine, too, head clearing slowly, became aware of her surroundings and straightened, though a dizzy pain in her head made her lean on an adjacent building’s wall. She was dressed in a strange fashion - was that a corset around her midsection? - not to mention an impractical one, and immediately wondered how she’d been coaxed to get into the getup in the first place. At first she wondered if she’d been tricked into playing some sort of bizarre bedroom game, but no, the outfit was far too modest for that to be the case. The skirt came down to her ankles and the neckline was above her collarbones, held in place with a large button. Besides, she was hardly seeing anyone at the moment, if memory served.

Wait, no, that wasn’t right. Katherine looked down at her hands, not sure if she should be surprised to be wearing no rings or not. Wasn’t she -

The memory slipped away as Dr. Greene grasped for it. She would have shook her head, but the pain suggested that to be a bad idea. Something in her mind expressed discomfort at the idea of self-identifying as “Katherine Greene” - but why would she identify as anything else? That was her name.

“You all right?” Conrad asked, offering Katherine a hand.

“Umm...” Katherine rubbed the source of the pain, and found a fresh lump, as if she’d been hit. “I don’t remember. I think I hit my head.” She made the logical leap. “Concussion?”

Conrad shook his head. “Nope. The memory loss is... from something different. I have my fair share. Good to have you back.”

“Where’ve I been?” Katherine suddenly realized where they were. “And where am I now?” She thought back. The last memory she had was of the rats in the lab testing room, and of needles, and - and that was it. There was nothing but static after that, but she seemed to think that the testing room was some time ago.

“You’ve been gone three years.” Conrad replied simply. “Looks like my little gambit to rescue you worked.”

“Rescue?” Katherine frowned. “Where’d I go? Was I a hostage?”

“I’m not quite sure.” Conrad gestured to the dress. “Why don’t we deal with this first?”

Katherine, confused, still managed to refuse. “I can stand to be dressed like this for a little while. Besides, if I’ve been gone three years, I don’t have an apartment to change in or clothes to put on anymore.” Katherine’s parents were dead, and she was an only child - she wondered briefly where they’d sent her belongings. Three years? Intellectually, it didn’t make sense, but the memory of the lab did have the correct distance about it. What had happened in between?

Conrad shrugged. “All right. To the lab, then. I’ll explain there.” He exited the alley to hail a cab, leaving Katherine to herself.

Katherine massaged the bump on her head, which still hurt. It seemed to be a fresh injury, and it felt as if she’d hit her head only minutes before, but she had no memory of doing so. Even so much as trying to think back to before finding herself woozily leaning against Konrad in this alley was impossible - it was like trying to recall a dream too long after waking. There was only a fuzzy nothing. Katherine was intrigued, but also a little scared - she had never before had such a large section of her memories simply wiped away. She was always so good at remembering, that this was an entirely unpleasant development.

Her last memory, barring a dreamlike hazy scene that might have been a hospital, was of working in the lab, injecting the new compound into rats to test its effects. It was a rather unremarkable memory, which simply faded into the fuzz.

No. Katherine squeezed her eyes shut. There was something else. The last rat was squirming more than the rest, and she’d slipped. The last thing that she remembered was of the needle plunging toward the back of her own hand as the rat made a last-ditch effort to escape it.

Katherine’s head hurt too much to wonder what the serum had done, and Conrad had promised to explain, so she left it at that, for the moment.

A brief taxi ride took the pair to the lab, and Conrad left Katherine with the cab while he ran inside to fetch some cash (his wallet, apparently, was not with him when they came to the alley, however they came to do that. The driver was clearly curious about Katherine’s “costume”, but was polite enough not to ask.

Conrad returned, and escorted Katherine inside. The lab was just getting ready to lock up for the night, but even those members of the staff that had already gone home were summoned to the building’s one conference room for Conrad’s explanation, which he promised would be valuable and that represented a sort of breakthrough. Katherine was greeted with awkward relief by her co-workers, who had probably decided she was dead years before. The new staff, most of whom had probably heard of the mystery of the disappearance of Dr. Greene, greeted her cordially, excitedly, only a little less awkwardly. Apparently, she’d become a bit of a minor celebrity after vanishing from the lab.

Mary Ellen, the new lab tech, even had a change of clothes that would fit Katherine in her clean room locker. With relief, Dr. Green retired to one of the restrooms to disassemble the awkward costume in which she was dressed. This was a more involved process than she thought it would be - the getup was probably designed to be removed with help (which put Katherine back to thinking it might be related to some bizarre bedroom game). Still, Katherine was able to get out of the dress and into more normal clothes: sweat pants and a tee shirt.

Folding up the pieces of the out-of-place dress, though, Katherine heard something crinkle, like paper. She quickly located a pocket inside the outer blouse, which contained a thick envelope of a beautiful cream color, the kind that she thought might be used for formal wedding invitations and the like. It was unmarked, save for a single swooping handwritten word on the back: Katherine. The letters were archaic, but she strangely was able to read them as if they were perfectly normal. It was sealed not with the usual method but with a blot of red wax.

Curious, and suspecting the envelope to be a link to the enigmatic period her memory knew only as fuzz and fog, Katherine broke the wax and opened the top.

Inside, folded in a double layer of waxy paper, was a letter, penned in the same hand as had written her name on the outside.

Katherine, my beloved wife:

I cannot assume that you remember me in reading this missive, or that anything I say here will help you to remember. That you are reading means that you have been taken from me, back to that place from which you came into my life, and I can only assume that you were taken against your will by some greater force.

You promised me once that if you had a choice, you would choose to return, that you would prefer that our marriage would be permanent despite the barrier of forgetting that lies between your world and mine. I have no power to enforce that promise, and do not want to force your return out of feelings of obligation. I would hope that some shred of me remains in your memory, that our years of marriage have not faded entirely from your mind. But even that I cannot assume.

I would wait for you forever, if it took that long for you to find your way back, but I hope and pray with every hour that you are gone that the next will see you returned to me. But if the world you find yourself in bears wonders so great or duties so pressing that what we have must wait, I will understand, and ask for no explanations when you return. For I know that there can be none.

Until next you pass through the veil of dreams and return to my waiting arms, may God watch over you and keep you well.

Yours forever,

Oswald.

Katherine, reading the note, did not have a flood of returning memories, but she knew that every word on the page was true. The name “Oswald” conjured up the image of a handsome man of about thirty-five, average height and build, with clever, dark eyes. The handwriting was as familiar to her as her own, though it was archaic - she should have had to pause to decipher some of the more difficult penmanship, were the writer truly a stranger.

That she wasn’t a hostage wherever she’d been was becoming clear, but then why had Conrad brought her back? Had she elected to return, knowing about the letter in her pocket? She rubbed the aching bruise on her head reflexively, and then stopped, realizing that it might be related. Had Conrad abducted her to bring her back here?

Katherine knew immediately that Conrad himself no longer knew. Still, she folded the letter up and stuck it in the pocket of her borrowed sweat pants, and left the bathroom, leaving the bundle of clothes. Rather than head back toward Conrad’s growing audience in the conference room, where he promised to explain how the serum that Katherine had been exposed to worked, she headed in the opposite direction, a plan in mind. Katherine could not trust Conrad, no, but neither was she entirely ready to trust Oswald, who she remembered only in small pieces, if favorably.

Conrad waited ten minutes longer than he thought reasonable for Katherine, but she did not return. Still, he did not start, having promised her an explanation. At twelve minutes, he sent Mary Ellen to check on Katherine’s progress. The rest of the room, some summoned from dinner with families, looked agitated, annoyed, but excited that what Conrad had promised them might be true. He knew he could keep them there for a little while longer, because what he was going to tell them would be worth the wait.

Mary Ellen knocked on the bathroom door gently, then harder when there was no answer. “Dr. Green, I know you’ve been through a lot, but Conad won’t start without you.” She waited to a count of five. No answer. Wondering if Dr. Green was all right, Mary Ellen pushed through the door. “Dr Green, are you - ”

The bathroom was empty, save for a few sheets of what looked like butcher’s paper rustling on the floor, and the bag which Mary Ellen’s own spare set of clothes had been kept. With a frown, the lab tech returned to the hall, looking in both directions. Dr. Green hadn’t made it to the conference room, and wasn’t here, so logically she’d gone the other way - perhaps she didn’t know her way around. After all, Mary Ellen reasoned, she hadn’t been here in over three years. With a sigh, the woman started off away from the conference room, hoping that she could find the wayward PhD before too long.

Katherine set down the armload of assorted things she’d been carrying, then turned to close and lock the door. The building’s labs had no locks, but the offices did, and Katherine had found that the security code for her old office (now reassigned to someone else) had not changed. She paused to make sure she had everything - a flash disk, a pair of fresh hypodermic needles, pen, notepad, and all of the lab’s samples of the old compound - the one Katherine had accidentally exposed herself to three years ago - and all she could find of the new one, Conrad’s return serum. Apparently, the rat trial hadn’t gone well, and it had been abandoned, until she’d briefly reappeared a few weeks ago.

Katherine began writing fervently on the notepad, writing down everything she could think of about herself that she wanted to remember. She was surprised to barely come up with three quarters of a page.

Next, she moved to the office’s computer. It accepted her credentials immediately, though it insisted that her password was expired and needed to be changed. Katherine immediately opened a connection to the data server and located Dr. Pazio’s research notes relating to the two compounds. Rather than read them, she sent a “delete” command.

The computer rejected the command, and Katherine cursed softly. Of course, research notes were meant to be permanent, and could not be deleted or altered, only appended to. She thought hard for a moment, before realizing that her account had, three years ago, had access to do a bit more than was probably safe, courtesy of shoddy IT work.

Katherine, hoping that the loophole in security hadn’t been corrected, typed in the command to reformat the server’s hard drive. It paused for a moment, then asked for confirmation, and Katherine knew she had her answer. Except that there were backups, on servers that did not have this loophole. Katherine, not being a security expert (knowing only a bit more than average about the lab computers when she had been taken from here), knew she couldn’t crack open the backups.

Katherine left the computer at the confirmation stage and sat there for a moment, wondering what to do about that rogue data in the backups, until she realized that they wouldn’t be delete-protected like the main server. A quick few commands later, they were gone, and the only thing left was the confirmation on the main server.

Katherine took the time to save the files to the flash disk she’d grabbed and then, after only a moment’s hesitation, confirmed the command, and the server in the basement began to self-destruct.

There was a flash of movement in the little window on the door, causing Katherine to look up. As she did, it returned - the new lab tech, Mary Ellen, walking swiftly around, looking for her. As she looked up, Katherine’s eyes locked with the tech’s, and Mary Ellen turned toward the office door. She seemed genuinely surprised to find it locked.

“Dr. Greene, open up!” She pounded on the glass. “Everyone’s waiting!”

Katherine didn’t answer. She wondered if the name “Dr. Greene” was even hers anymore, or if she’d taken her husband’s name, as she gathered up all of her things but one of the bottles and one needle, stuffing them in her pockets until they bulged comically.

Mary Ellen, who didn’t seem to know what Katherine was doing, continued to pound, as Katherine wrote a simple note on the next page of the notepad and tore it out. Send no-one after me this time, it read. Setting this on the desk, Katherine opened the one bottle and the needle’s packaging, and drew the same dose she’d tried to inject into a rat, in what seemed like another life.

“What are you doing?” Mary Ellen shouted in, still pounding, but Karen still ignored her. Suddenly, the woman’s face vanished, and Katherine heard her sprinting back towards the conference room.

The needle prepped, Katherine paused. She had all she needed to make a return trip and then some, of course, but this was admittedly still a huge risk. What sort of a world lay beyond the haze and static, she wondered? Was what she’d forgotten in coming here worth leaving all this behind?

Footsteps in the hall again - multiple sets. Katherine realized it was now or never, and jabbed the needle into the vein in her left arm, depressing the plunger. There was a cold feeling, and numbness, and then -

Dr. Pazio, breathless, following Mary Ellen’s frantic pace, got to the indicated door and looked in, just in time to see the last shadow of a form fade out into nothing. The owner of the office unlocked it, and the whole group crowded inside, but all they found was the note, and the computer faithfully reporting the completion of the server’s disk reformat.

Dr. Katherine Greene was never heard from again.