Chapter 21 - The Cold Nursery
The name stamped across the brass plate was not a trick of the sodium flare or the sleet scouring my corneas. It was my name, struck into the metal with the heavy, uneven hand of a steel die: *ARTHUR REID — SUBJECT B — 1994*.
The excavator’s diesel fumes drifted into the trench, mingling with the stench of stagnant water, black mold, and old zinc. Ten feet below the roots of the dead orchard, the subterranean room lay exposed to the sky for the first time in three decades. The concrete walls were four feet thick, coated in a weeping layer of crystalline efflorescence that looked like crushed bone.
Marcus had Billy pinned against the mud near the lip of the pit, his knees driven into the boy’s kidneys. Billy wasn't fighting back anymore. He was shivering violently, his split lip leaking dark blood onto the crust of snow, his eyes fixed on the trench with a horror that was completely lucid.
"Don't look down there, Art," Billy whispered, his voice cracking against the wind. "He said if you ever saw it... he said the noise in your head wouldn't ever stop."
I didn’t answer. I dropped down onto the cold iron tread of the backhoe and slid into the trench.
My boots hit the flooded floor of the chamber with a hollow splash. The water reached midway up my shins, freezing through my socks instantly. The chamber was twelve feet square. There were no windows, no vents, only four heavy conduits running from the ceiling into a junction box sealed with lead solder.
And the three cribs.
They were not made for infants. They were elongated, built of heavy square-tubed iron, welded directly to plates set into the slab. The middle one—the one bearing my name—was fitted with thick leather cuffs lined with rotted wool, bolted to the horizontal bars at wrist and ankle height. Above the head of the frame hung an articulated steel arm, terminating in an apparatus that looked like an inverted colander lined with concentric rings of blunt copper studs.
A stereotaxic frame. A surgical halo.
I reached out, my glove wet with slurry, and touched the headpiece.
The moment my fingers brushed the tarnished copper, a violent, high-voltage jolt arced through the right side of my skull. It wasn’t an electric shock from an outside circuit; it was an internal detonation, an acoustic spike that drove straight through the titanium-mesh bridge behind my ear. The world bleached white. My knees buckled into the brine.
*Clang.*
The sound of porcelain shattering. The smell of gravy, bay leaf, and scorched hair.
*“Look what you made me do, Artie. Look what you made me do.”*
"Art! Get out of the hole!" Marcus’s voice ripped through the static.
I hauled myself up against the bars of Crib B. The brass plate under my palm was cold, but beneath the grease and mineral scale, something else was wired to the frame: a pair of black rubber-shielded coaxial cables that ran down the leg of the crib and vanished directly into the concrete floor, heading south—straight back toward the foundation of the house on Duke Street.
Beside me, the third crib—Crib C—was empty. Its tag read: *MARGARET REID — SUBJECT C — 1996*.
I turned my head toward Crib A. The tag was missing. Torn off with cold chisels, leaving only two jagged screw shanks in the galvanized rail. But inside Crib A, half-submerged in the ice water, was a heavy canvas duffel bag wrapped in miles of rusted bailing wire, bloated and dense.
I pulled my pocket knife, sawing frantically through the hemp stitching of the duffel until the frozen fabric split.
Inside were six three-inch reel-to-reel magnetic tapes, sealed in wax jars, and a single, waterlogged leather journal embossed with the crest of the Pennsylvania Department of Public Welfare, dated 1991.
"Art, we've got headlights on the lane!" Marcus yelled from the edge of the pit. "State police! Three cruisers! You need to climb up now!"
May you like
I grabbed the jar containing the earliest tape and shoved the leather journal inside my coat, zipping it tight against my chest. As I pulled myself up the excavator’s teeth into the biting sleet, the sirens were already drowning out the wind.
***
