Sharley, Von Rached, and everything to do with them have their roots in The M Universe, though this series of stories stands on its own. This one has a sequel, Alien Soul.
~
Von Rached was bored.
That was a rather difficult feat to accomplish, really; his curiosity was boundless, often to his patients’ detriment. However, the novelty of America had worn off, and he’d all but exhausted this facility’s supply of interesting cases. Though he had a large measure of autonomy here, his freedom was not as absolute as it had been in Germany: he had, for now, to make sure his test subjects stayed alive. His position remained too new for him to utterly disregard his superiors — unless he wished to suborn the mind of every single one of them, which would be a waste of his time and energy.
The dawn was clear and grey and crystal-pure when he left his apartment. He hadn’t slept last night, despite the rather heroic dose of morphine he’d taken, but the drug did temporarily soothe his restiveness. It meant he could appreciate the light breeze, the mingled scent of dewy grass and damp asphalt as he strode down the sidewalk. This early there were few cars on the road, which meant less eye-searing exhaust. He’d seen more cars in his first year in America than in the first three decades of the twentieth century in Germany. While he owned one himself, he only used it in foul weather, preferring to walk outside when it was fine. He saw little enough fresh air when he was working.
The walk was long, and the sun had crested the horizon by the time he reached the facility. The night-nurse, pale and exhausted, gave him a perfunctory greeting, and handed him a sheaf of papers.
“We took in a new patient last night,” she said. “She won’t give her name — won’t speak, in fact. Good luck with her.” She shuffled away from him unconsciously, as most people tended to do, though he’d never yet given any of them concrete reason to want to. Von Rached was a self-admitted monster, but he didn’t make a habit of terrorizing his subordinates.
“Thank you,” he said. “Now go home. You look ready to fall over at any moment.”
Off she scurried, and he flipped through the paperwork. Female, approximately six feet tall, approximately one hundred forty pounds, age approximately thirty…
They got absolutely nowhere with her, did they? he thought. Well, no patient, no matter how combative, was a match for his telekinesis. Whoever this mystery woman was, she wouldn’t remain a mystery for long. They’d locked her in room 114, which was one of the padded cells. At least she had nothing to use as a weapon in there.
The woman was sitting in the left corner, he found, and she didn’t squint when the lights kicked on. They hadn’t even managed to get her into a straitjacket, which told him nobody had successfully drugged her. She was still in her street clothes — faded Levi’s and a man’s work shirt, stained with blood he strongly doubted was hers.
She said nothing when he entered, nor did she move. Her eyes, bright and razor-sharp, didn’t match — sectoral heterochromia, in both. Interesting. One was a mix of blue and green; the other, so dark it was nearly black, had a segment of brown so bright it looked orange. Her hair was a long tangle of dark auburn, but what was truly peculiar was her scent. Von Rached had an exceptional sense of smell, and this strange woman smelled like metal and lightning.
“I am certain you have a name,” he said, shutting the door, “and I am equally certain you will not willingly tell me. You need not make this difficult on yourself.”
Silence. She only watched him, ever more wary as the seconds passed — she couldn’t know what he was, but she clearly realized he was dangerous. Hmm.
Von Rached sat on the padded floor in front of her, cataloging her reaction. Even seated, he suspected the approximation of her height to be accurate, but he had a good five inches on her. Those odd eyes flickered up over his head, and she actually scowled faintly — it would seem she disliked people taller than her.
“You’re older than you look,” she said, tilting her head as she regarded him. Her voice was hoarse; her accent, though faint, suggested Alabama roots.
It took a great deal to surprise Von Rached, but that did it. She was right; he was a good twenty years older than he appeared, but she had no reason to suspect it. “And why would you think that?”
She blinked, and gave him the barest hint of a very dry smile. It was a ghost of an expression, fleeting, but it was there. “Because you are.” She offered no more than that — she truly seemed to be one of those patients, who made extracting even the slightest information like pulling teeth. Unfortunately for her, she was in for a surprise.
He brushed at her mind, very gently. Diving straight into a person’s thoughts was often a bad idea, since it could damage the patient and render them useless. Telepathy, unlike telekinesis, was an art form, a process that should not be rushed. And he was extremely intrigued by what he found.
Though she was no telepath, her mind tried to resist him. Oh, it didn’t work, but the attempt was there, and it was entirely unconscious. There was something vaguely unpleasant about it, too; touching her mind was rather like dipping his fingers in slime, and that too was thus far unheard-of. Who was this woman?
Sharley. He found her name, even as she twitched, pressing herself hard into the corner — could she actually feel his mental intrusion?
“Knock it off,” she growled, eyes wide: yes, she felt it.
“No,” Von Rached said flatly. “I will take whatever I wish from your mind, Sharley. You are my patient until I deem otherwise.”
Sharley went still — very still, so much so that she didn’t seem even to breathe. Her expression held all the animation of a statue as her eyes again flickered over him. “No,” she said, “I’m your lab rat. We all are. You think you want immortality.” Again there was a ghost-flicker of a smile. “You shouldn’t.”
He knew there was no point in asking how she knew that. He crept deeper into her mind, searching, and met even more resistance — he might as well have been wading through mental glue. No two minds were alike, but he’d never seen one like hers: there were many dark patches, places where memory was not merely repressed, but somehow excised entirely. Did she somehow run up against another telepath? His kind were, he knew, very rare; the only other he’d known in his entire life was his mother.
Sharley hit him, or tried to; his telekinesis caught her arm before her fist could connect. She made no sound, however, even when he squeezed her wrist so hard the bones ground together.
“You,” he said, “are an extraordinarily strange creature, Sharley—” yes, there was her last name “—Corwin. Tell me, when did you last encounter a telepath?”
Once more he received only silence in response, and he fought the urge to sigh. His telekinetic grip tightened on her wrist, though he was careful not to actually break it, but still she sat noiseless. To his increasing exasperation, she just stared, and sat utterly motionless.
“Well, Corwin, I did give you the chance to make this easy on yourself,” he said, and grabbed her other wrist — physically, this time.
Never in his life had Von Rached come so close to recoiling. For some reason, actually touching her was unspeakably distasteful; if he’d thought contact with her mind was bad, it had nothing on contact with her skin. And from the dark triumph far back in her eyes, it seemed she knew it.
Every instinct he possessed warned him to let go, but he had a job to do. Touching a subject made it easier to read their mind, however unpleasant it might be. Her skin was significantly cooler than average, so much so that it almost felt like touching a corpse, and the sensation was a nasty distraction he didn’t need.
To his disappointment, physical contact did not make her thoughts much easier to sort. Never had he seen a mental landscape so strange, or so scarred; the black patches remained dark, like nothing so much as gaping holes leading to an abyss that bore exploration. Her memories churned together, far more difficult to sift through even than the maddest of his other patients.
The earth of her landscape was barren, strewn with sharp black rock that looked like obsidian. The sky was a dim, dull red, scattered with clouds like smudges of rust and charcoal. There was no sun to be seen, but the air was hot and desert-dry, and smelled rather like Sharley herself — copper and lightning, with the bittersweet sharpness of petrichor. There were trees in the distance, half-dead firs gone russet and brown, but whatever lay beyond them was lost in darkness.
“Get out.”
That was not a thought — or at least, not a thought of Sharley’s. It was a voice — a young adult male, accent indefinable.
“I will leave when I please,” Von Rached said. “Who are you?”
“His name’s Jimmy,” another voice piped up, female and childlike. “I’m Layla, and we mean it — get out. You don’t wanna be in here.”
Yes, he very much did, though holding her wrist was swiftly becoming ever more unpleasant. He could find no signs of another telepath’s interference, but something had burned those holes in her mind, and he was damn well going to find out what.
Searing pain tore through him — a shocking jackhammer that hit right between the eyes. It wasn’t enough to drive him out, but it so startled him that it was a damn near thing. It had been a very, very long time since anything had hurt this much, and he hunted for the source with avid curiosity. He didn’t think it was a conscious defense, but the very fact of its existence shouldn’t be possible. This woman was no telepath, whatever she might be, but she fought as though she was.
He dug deeper, though it grew more difficult with every passing moment. Whatever alien presence lurked within her mind was attacking with a vengeance he had to admire, inconvenient though it was —
Quite suddenly, he found he’d come back to himself, his connection to her mind abruptly severed. The pain lingered, but Von Rached hardly cared; Sharley had somehow managed to kick him out of her head entirely. How? It was fascinating — maddening, but fascinating.
She watched him with an expression that was entirely unreadable. His mental invasion must have hurt, but one would never know it by looking at her. Only the hammering of her pulse beneath his fingers gave her away.
He released her wrist, and fought an urge to grimace in revulsion. “You and I, Corwin, are going to have a great deal of fun,” he said.
She arched an eyebrow, though otherwise her expression remained unchanged. “Somehow I doubt that.”
~
In the months that followed, Von Rached was anything but bored. He hadn’t, in fact, enjoyed himself this much in years.
Corwin, he discovered, had a truly monstrous tolerance for pain. She also had a great deal of scar tissue — long, jagged lines that twisted around her arms, gouging deep across her shoulder blades. They had to be around fifteen years old, white and faded, but the wounds that left them ought to have killed her — the blood loss would have been catastrophic, and clearly none of them had been sutured.
Try though he did, he couldn’t locate the source of the injuries within her mind, either. She offered no information aloud, no matter what sort of torture he put her through — never had he met anyone who could remain so silent. All she did was watch, to the point that he was soon the only one who would work with her. There was something so unnatural about her that he didn’t wonder why, either.
He’d learned in short order that if he didn’t want to keep her in place with his telekinesis, he had to strap her down — and he had to do it very securely, because she was unusually strong, despite the fact that she was downright rawboned.
While she rarely spoke, the voices he had discovered within her mind more than made up for it. There were, in fact, four of them, two male and two female, and they had astonishingly well-developed personalities. Von Rached slowly came to realize that they were not the bi-products of psychosis, though they could easily drive one to it. It was certainly impossible to shut them up.
They were in fine form on this blistering August day. The air conditioning, still quite new, rarely worked, and as a result the entire building was sweltering. Corwin didn’t seem to care, and Von Rached had long ago learned to ignore his own discomfort; no mere heat wave was going to slow him down. The voices, however, seemed determined to try — especially once they found out what he meant to do.
Reading Corwin’s mind was all too often an exercise in frustration, and was therefore a task he wasn’t willing to attempt every day. He’d tried drugging her, but thus far her body had either reacted too oddly to the drugs, or not at all — her metabolism was ferocious, and burned through what ought to have been near-lethal doses of sedatives. Finally he’d started brewing his own chemical cocktails, but even they had yet to have the desired effect. This time, though, he thought he was onto a winner.
He let her sit up today, shackled to a chair that was in turn bolted to the floor. Though the window was open, it did little to cool the room; what breeze came through it was like something out of an oven, smelling of hot asphalt and parched grass. Corwin, however, didn’t seem capable of sweating, and ignored it as she seemed to ignore all else. Her eyes tracked him as he moved to and fro, assembling ampoules and hypodermic needles on a steel tray.
“Now, Corwin,” he said, filling a needle with a viscous blue fluid, “you will talk to me sooner or later.”
Corwin, predictably, said nothing, but one of her voices sighed. It was the other male, Kurt, who sounded somewhat younger than Jimmy, and who seemed more than a little sociopathic. “Why?” he muttered. “She doesn’t have anything worth saying. Sharley’s crazy — we should know. We keep her that way.”
“Not helping, Kurt,” Layla said. Given how incessantly she chattered, Von Rached didn’t wonder much at Corwin’s instability. Anyone would go mad if they had to endure it all day, every day. “You really should just give up, Vonny. Sharley’s like a rock, and you can’t drag anything out of a stone.”
“I do not plan to drag anything,” he said. As ever, he approached Corwin carefully — bound or not, he didn’t trust her.
She glared when he injected her left arm, and the force of it was palpable. “Clearly that approach is ineffective.”
He drew up a folding chair while he waited for the drug to do its work, and sat facing her. Her glare fixed on the top of his head, and he didn’t bother fighting a smirk; Corwin did indeed hate people who were taller than her, though he had yet to divine why. He kept quiet, preferring to let the voices chatter at him and one another.
“You know what’ll happen if you fuck up and kill Sharley, right?” Kurt circled him, rather like an invisible and exceptionally obnoxious shark. “You’ll be stuck with us. Forever.”
“Ew, no thanks,” Jimmy said. “I don’t want to be stuck with this tool.”
“You two are so insensitive,” the fourth one said severely. Her name, Von Rached had been amused to discover, was Sinsemilla, and she seemed to be the closest thing the group had to a leader. “And you are not remotely helping. There will be no being trapped with him forever, because nothing will happen to Sharley.” The threat in her tone was not at all veiled.
“Not forever,” Corwin said. “Never forever. Humans can’t find immortality and still be human.” Her eyes had glazed over, and now they wandered the room, her gaze for once not locked on him. “You won’t find it. You don’t find it.”
“Sharley,” Sinsemilla warned.
“Tell me why you believe you know so much about me,” Von Rached prompted.
Corwin actually laughed. It was a hoarse, rusty, broken sound, and there was no humor to be found in it. “I see what you were, and what you are, and I almost feel sorry for all the things you might become.”
Her head lolled to one side, her eyes tracking back to him, and their expression somehow managed to be both sly and bitter. “You were born in 1898,” she said, in a voice far sharper. “Your middle name is Hermann, which, let’s face it, is awful. When you were eighteen you killed your mother and tripped off to med school, but you might have waited until you were twenty-five, just to see what would happen to her. You also could have driven her insane when you were twelve, which really wouldn’t have ended well and you must have known it, because you didn’t do it.”
There was something unsettling in hearing the facts of his history laid out by someone who had no business knowing them. Nobody knew he’d killed his mother, so how on Earth could Corwin? He leaned forward, and rested his elbows on his knees. “What do you mean, you see?” he asked. Interestingly, she actually was sweating now — a faint sheen on her forehead — and her cheeks were flushed, as if with fever.
She snorted. “I thought you were supposed to be a genius,” she said. “I see. What was and what is, what might be and what could have been, and d’you have any idea what that’s like? I could show you, if you wanted to lose your mind.” Her eyes left him again, wandering to the golden square of sunshine on the wall beside her. She was silent a moment, and Von Rached allowed it; if he pushed too hard she’d clam up, drugs or no drugs.
There were, he knew, precogs out there — people who could see the future. He’d dealt with one during the War, and that experience meant he knew that Corwin was no more a precog than she was a telepath. Precogs saw only the future; the past was barred to them.
“A storm’s coming for you, doctor,” she said at last, still staring at the wall. “Not for a long time yet, but with that serum of yours, you’ll still be plenty young enough to see it. Your world and mine, and they both might die, and I can’t warn anyone, I can’t. If you knew, you’d try to do things different, and there’s already so many potentialities and oh shit it hurts.”
Incredibly, there were tears in her eyes when she looked at him again. “You spoiled bastard, you have no idea how lucky you are. You’re powerful and whole and totally human, and you’ve never known want in your life, have you? Everything you want, you get, and it doesn’t even take much effort. You think you know so much, but you’ve never really earned a damn thing. You and your telepathy — you just go in people’s heads and play ’til you get what you want.”
“Sharley, stop,” Sinsemilla said.
“Why?” Corwin snarled. “I never say anything, and it’s my damn turn. He gets away with everything right now, but all accounts balance, Vonny. The interest will catch up to you, and you’ll be the one who hurts.” The sweat ran in rivulets down her face now, which was so flushed he worried for her blood pressure.
“I want to go home,” she said. Her voice broke on the last word. “It isn’t much, but it’s better than here. I miss the wind and the lightning and the dead, and you have no right — no right — to keep me here, you bastard.”
Her hands, as scarred as her arms, clenched into fists, knuckles whitening. “You can’t do worse to me than’s already been done. You’re human and mortal and I was born with my brain in pieces, and someday you’ll know what that’s like, and I hope I’m there to laugh.” Her voice was downright savage, even hoarser due to such unaccustomed use. She had always seemed subtly alien, but there was nothing subtle about it now. The electric-petrichor scent of her had somehow intensified, and it was almost enough to make him draw away. Corwin might be the most intriguing subject Von Rached had ever found, but she also unnerved him to a degree that nothing and no one ever had before.
Corwin shut her eyes, her head falling forward, hair obscuring her face. “You’d best get your tests in while you can, doctor,” she said. “I think I’m gonna die soon. I dunno how or why or even exactly when, but I will, and I know your damn stubborn brain won’t take this in, but being able to die is a good thing.”
She peered at him through the curtain of her hair. “People don’t ever seem to realize just what eternity really means. Imagine how bored you’d get after a thousand years. How bored were you, before I came along?”
That struck a chord. However, he’d only been bored by this facility. The world itself still had endless possibilities. “Why do you think you will die soon?”
Corwin laughed again, raising her head. “Do you really not listen? What is, what was, what might be and might have been, doctor, but also what could be. What will be is somewhere in there, too, if I can ever find it, but sometimes I just know. You’re being deliberately dense.”
Von Rached would have been insulted if that hadn’t been exactly what she wanted. She seemed determined to make no sense, and she was close to succeeding. His patience was wearing dangerously thin. The drug had certainly loosened her tongue; perhaps it had loosened her mind as well. Steeling himself, he reached out and touched her forehead.
To his surprise, Corwin didn’t fight him, physically or mentally. He didn’t know if she was unwilling or unable, and he didn’t care. This time he sought not the past, but the present — he wanted to know just what it was she saw, and how, and why.
Seeing through another’s eyes was normally almost effortless. As with everything about Corwin, however, it was rather difficult, and latching onto her vision took time. And when he had, for the first time in his life, he almost wished he’d failed. He quite suddenly understood what she truly meant when she said ‘it hurts’. The pain was far from excruciating, but it settled in his chest like a lead weight, and creeped through his limbs.
He saw himself, but not as he was — or rather, not only as he was. Overlaying his seated form was the ghost-image of a small boy, with an expression solemn but also slightly devious. Another was himself at eighteen, already near his full height, pale eyes sharp and filled with arrogant superiority — was this really how he had looked to others? It was only a wonder no one had tried to punch him.
But there was another Von Rached, this one surely from the future — he appeared perhaps forty, which meant he had to be much older. His blond hair had mixed with pale grey, and there was a truly vicious scar on his neck: it looked very much like someone had tried to tear his throat out with their teeth. Who on Earth could have managed that? He couldn’t imagine anyone dodging his telekinesis so effectively.
He tried to force Corwin to see it, and only succeeded in sending a spike of pain lancing straight into his head. Corwin barely seemed to notice; no wonder she endured his torture so well, if this was the way she felt all the time. Something metallic and astringent coated the back of his throat, bitter on his tongue, stinging in his sinuses — storm-scent. With it came the arid heat of her mental landscape, wrapping around his mind like a shroud, binding him—
Von Rached broke away, snatching his hand from her forehead with almost unseemly haste. He didn’t know just what had attempted to trap him in Corwin’s mind, but he was quite sure it was not the woman herself.
Her drill-bit eyes bored into him when he sat back, and he’d swear she was trying to read whatever passed for his soul. She’d bitten through her lip, and her teeth, when she smiled at him, were smeared with red.
“I keep telling you you don’t want in my head, doctor,” she said. “Even I don’t know if you’ll get stuck there. I don’t wanna find out, and I doubt you do, either.” Again there was a sick sort of triumph in her gaze.
Von Rached was not a violent man, but in that moment he could have hit her. He could have broken her neck, if only to stop her staring with those bright, mad, inhuman eyes.
For she could not be truly human, no matter what her biological makeup. Something fully alien lived within her mind, lurking behind her eyes, and he could not deny to himself that it unsettled him. Never in all his life had anything done so, but for the first time, he really wondered what sort of viper he’d let into his facility. This was meant to be a sanitarium for the mad, at least on paper; it was not supposed to house humanoid abominations. There had to be a reason that touching her felt so very wrong, and he could think of few others. It was as though she was some sort of toxin given female form, her very presence a poison.
He didn’t hit her, tempting though it was. He did, after all, have standards to maintain, even if everything else seemed utterly wrong. “If I release you, Corwin, will you behave yourself?”
She arched an eyebrow, and gave him another bloody smile. “You mean, will I attack you? No. I think you’ll get enough of that later.”
Perhaps she was right. Some morbid part of him actually looked forward to it.
He unlocked her shackles, and she stood, a trifle unsteadily. Though she was five inches shorter than him, she seemed taller than she actually was — and even now, she stared.
“You shouldn’t have done that, doctor,” Sinsemilla said. She sounded shaken. “Stirring Sharley’s mind really isn’t a good idea. Even we’re not sure what might come to the surface.”
She was probably right. It likely wasn’t safe to continue doing so, but Von Rached didn’t care. However dangerous this creature might be, he could not pass up the opportunity to study her, for however long she remained in his custody. Somehow, he did not think he would be able to hold her forever.
