The Explosionist (25 page)

I
T TOOK HARDLY ANY
time at all to get to Hume Close. Sophie crossed the road and walked into Buccleugh Place with a good fifteen minutes to spare, feeling terribly exposed as she walked past Adam Smith College.

The receptionist inside the Braid Institute took her national insurance card and showed her where to wait. The hall outside the waiting room had an exit at the back into the garden, a heavy door with panels of frosted glass. If Sophie could just nerve herself up, it wouldn’t be hard to open and shut the front door as a decoy, so that it sounded as though she’d gone, and then race down the hall and let herself out the back door into the garden. And hope she didn’t find herself trapped there, she added to herself, though there was almost
always some way out of a garden.

Just thinking about sneaking around was making her pulse race so fast she was practically hyperventilating. To calm herself down, Sophie picked up a sample of the waiting-room literature, an odd-looking pamphlet called
How to Magnetize
.

It was not long before Mr. Braid appeared in the waiting room, his face humorous and weather-beaten, an attractive contrast to the impeccably polished attire of his navy pin-striped suit and gleaming dress shoes. He shook Sophie’s hand; if he felt the sticky remnants of the ice cream, he was too polite to show it.

Inside the consulting room, they established that Sophie had come to see if he could do anything about her limp.

“In ordinary life,” said the specialist, “mind and body work together in tandem, with no clear ascendancy of the one over the other. In the trance state, the mind’s power over the body emerges in its full force. Under these conditions, the mind is sometimes able to cure the body of ailments as diverse as gallstones, ulcers, varicose veins, even broken limbs.”

Broken limbs! How absurd. Sophie stifled the desire to laugh.

“The magnetic trance makes sense of a host of otherwise inexplicable phenomena,” Mr. Braid continued, gesturing enthusiastically in the air. “Surely it’s only an illusion that humans have a finite and self-contained center of conscious
ness or will—I would venture to say that there is no such thing as a coherent self.”

Sophie was pretty sure that
she
had a coherent self, and she thought Mr. Braid was probably sure
he
had a coherent self as well, but she schooled her expression so that he wouldn’t be able to tell she disagreed with him.

“I am quite sure that we
all
possess a second self,” the doctor continued, “a self that lives an independent mental life and has ways of acquiring knowledge off limits to our everyday self.”

Sophie’s second self wanted to laugh, but she didn’t give in to the impulse. Some of the most powerful theories of the twentieth century had elicited laughter, after all, and often from people who should have known better. Think of how many jokes one heard about Wittgenstein’s Uncertainty Principle, silly jokes whose punch lines stupidly made fun of the Austrian physicist’s incendiary hypothesis that one could know either the position or the velocity of a subatomic particle but never both at once.

“Well, then, Miss Hunter,” said the doctor, “the order of the day will be to obtain from your second self an account of the accident that led to your limping.”

“But I was a very small child,” Sophie protested. “I don’t remember anything about it.”

“Your mind contains reservoirs of knowledge to which
your conscious self lacks access,” said Mr. Braid, settling into his chair and rubbing his hands together in a gesture that might have been sinister if he hadn’t seemed so transparently well intentioned. “We won’t be able to do anything about the limp until we have learned as much as possible of its etiology, both physical and psychological.”

Then, when Sophie continued to look skeptical: “Trust me, Miss Hunter. I’ve been doing this for twenty years, and I still see new things every day, things that fill me with awe and gratitude that I am able to pursue this work. We’ll try a spot of automatic writing first. I’ll hypnotize you and then ask you to lay out whatever you can remember about the accident and your body’s own awareness of the physical damage that remains. Afterward you won’t remember anything that’s happened—”

Sophie hoped this wouldn’t be the case….

“—and I will keep the statement back from you until the end of your course of treatment, in case the knowledge should prove traumatic for your conscious self in these early stages of our working together.”

What wouldn’t Sophie’s conscious self be able to face? She prided herself on her pragmatism and willingness to face facts.

“How long is the usual course of treatment?” she asked the doctor.

“It varies from case to case,” Braid said, “but twelve weeks wouldn’t be at all out of the ordinary. On your way out, ask Miss Tiptree to schedule your next appointment.”

“Shall we begin?” said Sophie, unable to stop herself from looking at her watch. Twenty to five. Not bad. If she left it too much later, there’d be nothing to see next door but girls spooning mush into their mouths at supper.

“Let me explain exactly what I’m about to do,” said the doctor. “In the early days, the mesmerist put his client into the trance state by means of an extraordinarily showy set of passes in the air. Do you know the sort of thing I mean?”

“Yes, of course,” said Sophie.

“It’s not nearly as flashy as the comic-book version, of course, but I will use my hands to help you pass into the mesmeric trance—”

Sophie was suddenly much more nervous than she’d imagined about the prospect of being hypnotized. What if, when the doctor hypnotized her, she revealed to him her plan to infiltrate IRYLNS by way of Mr. Braid’s back garden?

“—and then I’ll ask you a series of questions, to which you will write your answers with the pencil and paper I provide. I have found,” the doctor added as an afterthought, “that patients are less disturbed by the idea that their second self can communicate by means of writing than by the idea of another speaker borrowing the vocal machinery.”

Well, that was sensible enough. Just like a séance…. Now the doctor began to motion with his hands. Sophie waited for his questions and prepared herself to make some illegible scrawls on the paper in front of her. Really it couldn’t be too hard to fake….

“Very good,” said Braid, rubbing his hands together. “
Remarkably
good, for your first time. How very glad I am, Miss Hunter, that you telephoned my office!”

Sophie looked at him with amazement, slowly realizing that her right hand ached where she’d been clutching the pencil. A heap of pages of semilegible writing lay on the table between herself and Braid, pages he now swept up and out of her view before she could decode a single line.

But he’d only just begun! Surely she couldn’t have fallen into a mesmeric trance without even realizing it?

She looked at her watch and saw that almost thirty minutes had passed since she’d last checked. But that had only been a few minutes ago!

Braid refrained from laughing at Sophie’s incredulity.

“Everyone’s taken aback the first few times,” he said in a kindly manner. “Disconcerting, isn’t it?”

“What did I say, though?” Sophie said, leaning forward and gripping the edge of the table, her knuckles white. “Did I say anything…
bad
?”

“Miss Hunter, I assure you that you need never worry
about the confidentiality of what passes in this room,” said the doctor. “All communications between us are privileged—and when I say ‘us,’ I include your other self, the self that emerges under hypnosis.”

“So I do have another self? A self that wrote things down in answer to your questions?” Sophie asked, hardly able to believe it.

“Yes, and the nature of that self’s responses has already suggested to me some further avenues of inquiry,” Braid said.

“Can’t you tell me what I wrote?” Sophie begged.

“No, I’m afraid I can’t,” said Braid, “for that might jeopardize the force of the therapeutic intervention later on. But we have some interesting weeks ahead of us, Miss Hunter, and I look forward very much to our collaboration.”

He stood and shook hands with Sophie. It was strange to think that just half an hour earlier, she’d been eager to rush in and out of Braid’s office at top speed so as to get on with her real mission.

Well, she would learn no more of her history today. She made an appointment for the following Thursday and asked the receptionist if she could use the washroom in the hall.

“Of course,” said the young woman. “It’s the first door on the left, toward the back.”

“Thank you.”

“Will you be all right letting yourself out?” the secretary asked.

Sophie looked and saw she was poised to go, scarf tied over her hair, handbag packed up, keys in hand ready to lock up.

“You see, usually I leave just at five,” the girl continued apologetically, “and I’ve still got the shopping to do before I go home.”

“I’ll be fine,” Sophie said, inwardly thanking the god of illicit investigations for this lucky break.

They left the office together, the receptionist locking the hall door after them (“Mr. Braid will be there hours longer,” she explained) and rushing out the front door while Sophie let herself into the lavatory. She was so nervous by now that she thought she might be sick, but the sight of the toilet fixture calmed her stomach, and in the end she simply washed her hands and splashed cold water over her face.

She peered out into the hallway. Seeing nobody, she raced down the hall and out the garden door. Thankfully it hadn’t an alarm system, just a dead bolt that opened quite easily from the inside. She entered the garden and pulled the door closed behind her. As it closed, she realized she might have stuck a bit of cardboard in the jamb to prevent it from shutting all the way.

Oh well, perhaps it wasn’t locked.

She tried it.

Locked.

So that bridge was burned. She’d have to find another way out when she was finished.

She located a series of footholds on the sturdy wooden fence that separated the Braid Institute’s garden from that of IRYLNS next door. Very cautiously, she lifted herself just high enough up to see over into the garden.

It was completely empty. Taking a deep breath, she pulled herself up and over the fence, then gracelessly dropped down to the ground on the other side, twisting her ankle, and stumbled forward. It felt like enemy territory, and the movement of a tabby cat on the other side of the garden almost made her scream.

S
OPHIE’S OBJECTIVE ALL
along had been to get into the locked ward. Even just a few pictures of girls like the ones she’d seen that day in the garden would surely make Priscilla and Jean take Sophie seriously. The windows at the back of the building were tiny and high off the ground and opened barely wide enough to allow a very small person to pass through, but there was no hope of getting by the guards at the front.

Some gardening equipment lay abandoned near the fence, and Sophie, feeling like a criminal (she supposed she
was
a criminal), dragged a wheelbarrow over to beneath the window, climbed up onto it, and peered inside.

The scene might have come straight from one of the famous photographs of the alienist Flaubert’s patients at the
Salpêtrière in Paris. A host of young women in white hospital gowns wandered up and down a narrow central ward; others were visible through the doorways leading to the secondary wards.

About a third of the patients were in bed, a handful more in wheelchairs. Those lucky enough to remain ambulatory looked dazed and unhappy and somehow
damaged
in a way Sophie couldn’t explain. She took Nan’s camera out of her pocket and snapped a picture, but she would have to get nearer for the photographs to really be any good.

There were no nurses or other authority figures in sight, so far as Sophie could tell. She’d take the chance and go in.

Crossing her fingers for luck, Sophie hissed a few words through the window: “Hey! You, there!” Then, when a girl slowly turned her head toward Sophie: “Yes, you! Look, I need to get inside. Can you help me through the window?”

The girl’s face showed an utter lack of understanding. Another girl, though, had stopped pacing up and down and come near.

“What is it?” she said, her speech slurred.

“I need to get in. And the window’s got one of those security things; the screw’s keeping me from pushing it up from the outside.”

Some expression flitted across the girl’s face, but Sophie couldn’t read it.

At that point the wheelbarrow tilted beneath her, tipping her to the ground. After remounting, bruised and rather dirtier than before—thank goodness the camera wasn’t broken—she found the other girl’s face only inches from her own, her fingers fumbling with the screw over the sill.

Sophie tried another friendly overture. “What’s your name?”

The girl looked up and opened her mouth, then closed it again, her face puzzled and pained.

“Don’t remember,” she mumbled finally, finding words with difficulty. “Been here for ages. No name. Don’t remember coming here.”

Despite the uncertainty of her fingers, she managed to loosen both screws and raise the window. She placed her hands on Sophie’s wrists as Sophie fought to lift herself up onto the sill. It was a struggle, but she made it in an awful scrambly way that left her shaky and out of breath. It wasn’t hard after that to swing her legs over the sill and slide in through the window.

Inside, Sophie found herself in the midst of a small mob. The girls thronged around her, congregating from all over the ward, and for a moment Sophie almost panicked.

Then one of the girls—it was hard to tell them apart with their identical gowns and cropped hair, here and there a bandage covering the downy tufts—stepped forward and leaned
over her, as if to confide something important.

Sophie froze.

“They.
Watch.
Us,” said the girl, using the pauses to tell Sophie something important. “Watch. Us. From. Off. Ward.”

She looked inquiringly at Sophie, who caught on and said, “You have to block me from view?”

The girl gave a slow nod.

She must be heavily dosed with tranquilizers, Sophie thought. Or else—much worse—could it be massive neurological damage from the surgical procedure?

Sophie wanted to ask them all what had happened, to listen to each and every story so as to go out and bear witness. But she had, she thought, at most half an hour before the odds of being discovered would become disastrously high, and all she could sensibly do in that time was to gather enough evidence to persuade Jean and Priscilla to change their minds.

“I need to see the very worst,” she said now to the girls pressed around her, speaking softly in case the authorities were monitoring the ward for sound. “I can’t stay long—I mustn’t be found here—but I’ve got two friends at school, and I need to tell them exactly why they shouldn’t come to IRYLNS. I’ll take pictures of whatever you show me, if you don’t mind.”

The girls consulted briefly with one another in garbled sentences she couldn’t understand. Then three of them took
Sophie between them and moved her down the ward in a formation like fighter planes escorting a bomber, weaving in and out to mislead the watchers.

They stopped short next to a bed whose occupant seemed little more than a narrow, bolster-shaped lump under the covers. Maneuvering Sophie into position, the girl who’d first helped her climb through the window drew a set of curtains around the bed and made a series of gestures (easier for her than speech, Sophie guessed) to tell Sophie she now stood out of the watchers’ sight.

Movements tentative, Sophie knelt by the bed and put a hand out to the place where she thought the girl’s shoulder must be.

The girl in the bed groaned and rolled toward Sophie. One of the other occupants of the ward pulled down the covers so that Sophie could see the girl’s face.

The girl in the bed was unmistakably Sophie’s former idol Sheena Henshawe.

Her body was thin to the point of emaciation, and her arms and neck were covered with sores and rough discolored patches. Most of her hair was shaved down to uneven stubble, the remaining strands thin and colorless. A shunt taped to Sheena’s head drained through a tube into a basin full of pus by the side of the bed (the smell was almost intolerable). An IV delivered fluids into her arm, and the bed was surrounded
with a frightening amount of medical equipment.

This emptied-out shell of Sheena grunted and tried to pull herself up into a sitting position. Lacking the strength, she had to let the other girls prop her up.

Though it might have been more a function of her own desire than of anything really there, Sophie believed she saw a glimmer of recognition in Sheena’s face.

“Sheena!” she cried out. “Whatever happened to you?”

Sheena shook her head. “Can’t…tell,” she said, her blistered lips hardly moving as she spoke. “Why…here?”

“I’m not here to undergo the training,” Sophie said quickly. “I’m trying to stop my friends Jean and Priscilla from joining IRYLNS, and I thought if I could tell them about what really happens here, I’d be able to persuade them not to. Oh, Sheena, it must be stopped! Look at you….”

The girl shook her head, too weak to answer.

“What
happened
to you, Sheena?” Sophie cried out.

She didn’t know which transformation disturbed her more: the real Sheena into the gleaming, perfect secretary that day on the bridge, or that beautiful, well-groomed mannequin into the degraded wreck lying before her.

“Emotion…overload,” Sheena mumbled. “Seizure. Surgery.”

Her eyes appealed to Sophie for something Sophie couldn’t identify. She tried and failed to come up with a tactful way of
asking about Sheena’s prognosis. Would Sheena ever get back to anything like normal health?

As a compromise, she said, “What will you do when you’re well again?”

She was horrified to see the tears spill out of Sheena’s eyes and down her rough, chapped cheeks.

“Only thing in the world I ever wanted,” Sheena said, her words suddenly much clearer. “Best thing in the world. Serving my country. Can’t do it now. Don’t want to live.”

Sophie stroked her arm and felt a furious surge of hatred for the people who had done this to Sheena.

“Sophie,” Sheena said, clutching her hand so hard that Sophie jumped. “This place…all for good. Good of others. Greater good. Good of country. Highest good, IRYLNS. Friends…”

“But don’t you think it should be stopped?” Sophie asked. “Sheena, look what they’ve done to you!”

Sheena shook her head, pulling herself up a little and digging her nails into Sophie’s arm.

“More important, Sophie. You and the others…must come to IRYLNS. The country needs…Serve. You must.”

Then she fell back onto the bed, shattered by the short conversation.

Sophie’s horror exceeded anything she had ever felt before. She’d been so
sure
about this venture, so sure that the
girls who’d been destroyed—destroyed not once but twice over—would welcome any chance to get the word out and save a few others. And here was the worst thing imaginable, Sheena Henshawe—Sophie’s hero Sheena—reduced to this wreck of skin and bone, and yet still rehearsing the most coherent version she could manage of the message about duty and service and self-sacrifice.

It was the last thing in the world Sophie had expected, that she would find IRYLNS’s most pitiful victim and be told that nothing was more important than giving oneself up for the cause.

She stared at Sheena and didn’t know what to say.

“I won’t tell the others,” she said finally. It was the least she could do. She didn’t have the right to go against Sheena’s wishes, not really. “I won’t say anything at all, if that’s what you want.”

As a faint smile came to Sheena’s lips, the other girls who’d clustered around them suddenly froze.

Sophie looked up. “What is it?” she said.

Before she got an answer, though, she heard two familiar voices approaching the bed.

There was no way to escape discovery.

“Let’s have a look at Sheena Henshawe,” said one of the new arrivals.

“There’s no chance she’ll be of any further use,” said the
other. “Will you send her to the asylum at Rothersay?”

“I think so,” said the first speaker, “assuming she recovers from the infection. The worst-case scenario is that we’ll have to place her in a nursing home. They’re not really equipped at Rothersay for the level of care that girls like Sheena are liable to require.”

A hand swept back the curtain around the bed, and Sophie found herself under the eyes of Great-aunt Tabitha and her friend Dr. Ferrier, the Institute’s director and its most fanatical supporter.