Sleeper Code by Thomas E. Sniegoski
“I saw him get into a van and—”
Tom’s father shook his head. “You saw no such thing,” he corrected. “Tom went up to bed, and that’s where he’s been ever since.”
“But I saw him,” she insisted. There was no way she could have mistaken last night’s events.
“You saw wrong,” Mason answered firmly. “Tom’s been home, in his room, asleep, all night long. Okay?” He was smiling again, clearly urging her to surrender.
“Can I see him?” she asked. “Could you wake him up and tell him that I’d like to talk to him?”
Mason’s smile quickly turned to a scowl. “No, I will not wake him up. The boy needs his sleep, and besides, it’s five in the morning.”
“But I just want to—”
He cut her off before she could plead her case. “Look,” he said, stepping back into the house, ready to shut the door. “I need to get ready for work. I’m sure Tom will give you a call when he wakes up.”
And before Madison could say another thing, Mason Lovett had closed the door and the porch light above her head winked out.
She replayed the whole encounter in her head as she returned home, more convinced than ever that she had not imagined last night’s events. The odd expression that had appeared on Mason’s face when she had mentioned seeing Tom getting into a van nagged at her.
It looked like Tom’s father had known exactly what she was talking about.
So then why had he lied?
Chapter 10
Tom Lovett came awake with a start, the memory of his latest narcoleptic attack painfully fresh in his mind.
Hoping that he’d only been asleep for a short time, he raised himself up on his elbows and looked around.
“Mom? Dad?” he called out, his eyes taking in his foreign surroundings. “Madison?” An anxious lump formed in his throat; he was desperate for a familiar presence.
He appeared to be in a cabin, sparsely furnished with slip-covered furniture, hardwood floors, and a large stone fireplace, a fire blazing within.
“I … I’ve been here before,” Tom said aloud in sudden realization as he climbed to his feet. His eyes caught sight of a large fish—a bass, stuffed and mounted on a plaque hanging above a bookcase crammed with leather-bound books that he’d known would be there. Gradually he was starting to remember this place, but he didn’t have the slightest idea why, or how, he had come to be there now.
“Hello, Tom,” a voice said behind him, and he whirled around to find a man with a wild head of snow white hair sitting in a wingback chair in the corner, a halo of smoke from the pipe he was puffing on drifting above his head. “I’m sure this all seems a bit odd right now, but if you’ll give me a chance…”
“You,” Tom gasped, horrifying imagery—memories of an old man feeding a fire, then dying violently as his chest was struck with bullets—filling his mind. “In a dream … I watched you die.”
The old man calmly smoked his pipe. “If you are here with me now, that’s probably so,” he said sadly. Then his eyes glazed over and he seemed to become lost in thought. “Actually, if you’re here with me, then I am most definitely dead.” His eyes snapped back into focus and he returned his attention to Tom. “And you were my killer,” he stated, pulling the pipe from his mouth and jabbing at him with its stem.
Tom’s body tingled with panic. He had to get away from this place—this crazy old man. He had to get home, where it was safe.
“I can’t stay here.” He headed across the room, knowing where the door would be.
“You don’t want to do that, Tom,” the old man called out behind him, grunting as he pulled himself up out of the chair. “You’re better off here with me, at least for a little while longer.”
Tom strode down the hallway with purpose, the hardwood floor creaking beneath his feet. He knew that if he stayed another second, he would lose his mind. He had to get home.
“Tom, don’t,” the old man pleaded from the end of the hall.
But Tom wasn’t listening. He reached out and grabbed the metal doorknob. It was cold to his touch, so cold that it stuck to the flesh of his hand. But that didn’t stop him. He threw open the door. And nothing could have prepared him for what awaited him outside the cabin.
Nothing.
Nothing, for as far as his eyes could see, an ocean of darkness spread out before him. He grabbed the door frame to halt his momentum, to keep from being thrown out into the cold void. Then movement in the hallway behind him caught his attention, and he turned away from the universe of black to see the old man watching him.
“You don’t want to go out there,” he said, slowly raising the pipe to his mouth for another puff. “No up or down, just emptiness. Come back inside where it’s more hospitable,” the man said kindly. “I won’t bite. I’m Dr. Quentin, Bernard Quentin, and the answers to your questions are here with me.”
“So you’re telling me that this isn’t real?” Tom’s voice was tinged with skepticism. He sat on the ancient sofa in the cabin, a spring somewhere beneath the threadbare cushion poking him uncomfortably in the butt.
“It’s called a mental construct,” Quentin said from his seat across the room. He tapped the side of his head with a finger. “A calm place inside your mind. I based it on my cabin in Maine. I used to bring in pictures to show you. You always asked when you could visit—you said that it looked so peaceful you wished you could live there.”
The old man chuckled as he tapped the contents of his pipe out into an ashtray resting on a small table beside his chair.
Tom felt sick to his stomach but didn’t know how that was possible, since this was all supposedly happening inside his head.
“But I don’t know you.” He shook his head vigorously. “The first time I ever saw you was in a dream where…” His voice trailed off, the terrifying images of the nightmarish hallucination again flashing in rapid fire across his mind’s eye.
“Where I was murdered?” Quentin finished casually. He stuck his finger inside the bowl of his pipe and scraped out the last of the blackened tobacco. “It’s quite all right, really,” the old man offered. “It was something I always suspected would happen. And actually, it needed to happen so that you could find your way here.”
“So you’re not real either—you’re a, what did you call it? A mental construct?”
Quentin smiled and nodded. “Yes, a mental construct based on a memory. Part of an interactive program downloaded directly into your brain. Amazing, isn’t it? It’s almost as if I’m still alive.”
Tom felt like he was about to jump out of his skin. This was insane, and he had no doubt that his narcoleptic condition was somehow responsible. Is it possible for narcolepsy to mutate into insanity?
“Dr. Quentin, I don’t know you,” he said, sliding forward on the most uncomfortable couch a psychotic mind could conjure. “I mean, I know who you are because of my condition and all, but I’ve never met you—you’re just a name, somebody that my screwed-up illness is named after.”
The old man had removed a tobacco pouch, wedged into the side of his seat cushion, and was refilling his pipe.
“We have met before, Tom,” Quentin assured him, packing the tobacco tightly into the bowl. “It’s just that you don’t remember. That’s the way it is with the project.”
Tom buried his face in his hands. “I wish I could wake up,” he moaned under his breath, but he knew that the strange, hallucinogenic dream would have to run its course first.
Raising his face from his hands, he looked at the old man. “Fine, I’ll play along. Who or what is the project? Aliens, maybe—I’ve never hallucinated them before.”
The doctor struck a match and lit his pipe. “I can only imagine how overwhelming this must be for you,” he said, drawing on the stem, igniting the contents of the bowl. Plumes of sweet-smelling tobacco billowed from the man’s mouth as he extinguished the burning match and tossed it into the ashtray. “The project is the Janus Project, and it has made you what you are today
Tom shuddered as a sudden chill ran up and down his spine. “Made me into …? Into what? I don’t understand.”
Quentin quickly raised a hand. “Everything will be clear in time, but first we must start at the beginning, and that, I’m afraid, is with me.” The doctor’s expression grew very grim and his eyes became glassy as he seemed to gaze right through Tom.
“It was all an accident, really,” he said dreamily. “I had never intended for my research to be used in such a way, but I would have done just about anything to help Michael.”
“Michael?” Tom interrupted. “Who’s Michael?”
The doctor smiled sadly. “Michael was my son,” he explained. “And my sole reason for beginning to research narcolepsy.”
“Your son had it?”
The doctor nodded. “And it wasn’t your normal, run-of-the-mill form of the sleep disorder either. It was something much larger—much more incapacitating.”
“Quentin’s narcolepsy,” Tom whispered.
“The very first patient to be branded with that moniker,” the doctor added, gazing out into the past. “His case was quite severe, and it seemed to grow worse as he matured.” He sighed, setting his pipe down in the ashtray. “I did everything I could to find a way to make him well. We performed every type of physical test imaginable and then performed them again, just to be certain we hadn’t missed anything. But we still learned practically nothing, and Michael’s condition continued to worsen.”
Tom looked around the room as the man spoke, his eyes falling on a framed picture resting on the mantel above the fireplace. “Is that him?” he asked, walking over to the photograph.
Michael was sitting on a bed, surrounded by books, smiling weakly. He was good looking, with brown hair, and when Tom looked closely, he could see the resemblance to the doctor.
“It wasn’t long after that picture was taken that he…” Quentin’s words seemed to become stuck in his throat, and Tom looked over to see that the old man was overcome with emotion.
“What happened to him, Doctor?” Tom asked, fearing the answer but needing to know.
“I was so wrapped up in my research that I didn’t noticed how withdrawn he’d become, how depressed.” His voice was filled with pain, as if each and every syllable were razor sharp, cutting as they left his mouth. “My son took his own life one October morning, using the very medications that I had prescribed to help him.”
The old man seemed to become smaller, bowing his head in sadness as he sank deeper into the embrace of the wingback chair.
Tom set the picture back on the mantel and quietly returned to the couch.
Quentin slowly regained his composure. “I became lost in my grief, throwing myself deeper into my research, hoping to find a way to help so that others would not suffer as my Michael had.”
The doctor paused.
“And that was when Brandon Kavanagh walked into my life.”
With the mention of the man’s name, Tom’s body suddenly felt like it had been thrown under a cold shower, the gooseflesh rising on the skin of his arms, the hair at the back of his neck standing on end. But as far as he could recall, he had never heard the name until now.
“I’m sure you don’t remember him,” Quentin said with a vague shake of his head. “And for that I truly envy you.”
Tom rubbed his arms to warm them up as he waited for Quentin to explain.
“Kavanagh worked for the government,” he said, chewing on the end of his pipe. “He was in charge of a highly classified project that at the time I knew nothing about. All I knew was that he had seen my research on Quentin’s narcolepsy and believed that somehow the sleep disorder that had caused the death of my son could provide the missing piece of a puzzle that had managed to evade him for years.”
“And this was the Janus Project?” Tom asked.
“Exactly,” Quentin answered. “The Janus Project had been attempting to artificially create a form of multiple personality disorder where two distinct personas would exist in one body.”
“Why would somebody want that? What would the benefit be to making somebody mentally ill?”
“That’s why there are people like Brandon Kavanagh in the world,” Quentin responded. “He believed that this was the way to create the ultimate assassin: a compassionate, rational thinking being one moment and then, with the flick of a switch, a conscienceless killing machine that would stop at nothing to complete its mission.”
“I still don’t see what your research into narcolepsy had to do with creating assassins,” Tom argued, unsure why Quentin was telling him all this; not that his hallucinations ever really had to make sense.
Quentin sat with his eyes closed and gripped the arms of the chair as if bracing himself for something painful to come. “Kavanagh had seen something in my research—the missing component, something in the chemical makeup of my patients’ brains—that would make them susceptible to the process Janus had developed to fragment the personalities of test subjects.”
“What good is a narcoleptic assassin?” Tom asked.
“Only one of the personalities would have the sleeping disorder, to be used as a kind of fail-safe if necessary,” Quentin said, slowly opening his eyes.
Tom stared at the old man, the truth finally dawning on him.
“A microchip was surgically implanted in the subject’s brain. When activated, it would stimulate a narcoleptic seizure, acting as a kind of switch, turning off the existing personality and allowing the artificially created persona to become active.”
“Why are you telling me this?” Tom asked, an edge of panic in his voice. An area of his scalp had suddenly become quite itchy, but he ignored the discomfort, totally engrossed in the old man’s words.
Quentin focused on the boy. “You have to know—before it’s too late, before any more damage is done.”
Tom suddenly laughed nervously, getting up from the couch to pace around the room. “This is nuts,” he said, digging deeply into his memories for any exercise that might free him from this most disturbing of hypnagogic hallucinations.
“The most susceptible to the conditioning are children,” the doctor continued, a tremble in his voice. “I imagine it has something to do with brain development, but they take to the process much more effectively than the adult subjects.”
Quentin laughed sadly, that faraway look again appearing in his weary eyes. “Kavanagh was so excited that he scoured the world’s orphanages, searching for unwanted children born with the symptoms of Quentin’s narcolepsy. He called them his special babies—I was surprised by how many he was able to find.”
The headache came on him in an instant, a sharp, throbbing pain deep inside his skull that pulsed excruciatingly with the beat of his heart. Tom groaned as he placed his fingertips to his temples. “You did … you did experiments on kids?”
“He said that he was giving them a purpose—a chance they would never have had if it wasn’t for him.” Quentin shook his head slowly. “He truly believed that we were doing a good thing.”
The agony inside Tom’s head was growing worse, and he was finding it difficult to keep his balance. “What’s happening to me?” he asked, his voice beginning to slur. He stumbled backward against the mantel.
Ignoring Tom’s question, Quentin went on. “I was a fool, completely blind to the insanity that I’d become a part of. By the time I truly realized what he was doing, it was too late.”
The room started to spin, and the pressure inside his skull continued to build. “I’m going to be sick,” Tom gasped, pushing off from the fireplace and lurching across the room. The floor seemed to move beneath his feet, as if this dream world was starting to warp, to break apart.
Quentin’s voice was low, ashamed. “We took children and hid monsters inside them.”
The throbbing inside Tom’s head was so severe, he almost wished that he would die just to make it stop. He had to get away. He would rather risk the unknown of the darkness outside than stay in this
But Quentin reached out, grabbing his arm in a steely grip, preventing his escape from the disintegrating dream place. “We don’t have much time left, and there’s still so much to tell you.” There was panic in the doctor’s voice.
Tom tried to pull his arm free, but the doctor held fast. “Let me go,” he demanded. The walls of the cabin creaked and moaned, bending impossibly, as if made of rubber. “I can’t stand it anymore… I have to wake up.”
“Listen to me, Tom,” Quentin bellowed over the noise. “The children of Janus were supposed to be the perfect weapons—weapons that had no idea they were weapons. Do you know why I’m telling you this, Tom?”
The cabin lurched to one side, loosening Quentin’s grip on his arm, and Tom managed to pull away. “I can’t listen to this anymore,” he cried, starting down the shifting corridor in a spastic run.
The cabin door loomed ahead of him and he reached for it, just as something began to pound savagely on the other side. Tom froze, watching as the wood of the door trembled and shook from the force of the blows.
He turned and saw that Dr. Quentin stood at the end of the hallway, smoking his pipe. “What is it?” Tom asked.
“The truth,” Quentin said, puffing on his pipe, creating a swirling fog that threatened to envelop him. “The truth is on the other side of that door.”
The smoke grew thicker, spreading down the hallway toward Tom. He felt a sudden warmth on his face and reached up to his nose. His hand came away covered in blood. The door shook in its frame, and he turned back to it. It has to end now, Tom thought as he took hold of the numbingly cold knob and flung the door wide.
Tom wanted to scream, but his voice had been taken away. Standing in the darkness outside the door was someone who looked exactly like him, was even dressed like him … but something was different. Something about this person was deeply disturbing.