It was the day after her meeting with Doom. Orloff and Kariana had lunch together as often as they could manage it. For half an hour they ate bagged meat pies, kicked their legs over the drop, and giggled at the vertigo. And they usually managed, for more than a few of those thirty minutes, to be something other than a neurosurgeon and the captain of the guard. In those moments, Orloff was not experimenting with the dead, and wrestling with her excitement about doing so.

  But today, Kariana was worried, and asking her about her dream.

  “It was another bad one,” Orloff said.

  “Was it about what you’re doing?”

  “No. It was about Walpurgis Night again.” She dreamt a lot of demons, and of the thing that had burst from a patient’s head. The dreams had become more frequent and more vivid recently.

  “That’s happening a lot,” said Kariana. She had noticed too.

  “Are you going to say something about displacement?”

  Kariana gave her a wry smile. “I was thinking about it. Are you worried about what you’re doing?”

  “The ethics…” Orloff grimaced. “I don’t know. I don’t think so. If this was futile, that would be one thing. But it isn’t. Doom found something. If I manage to…” She couldn’t quite bring herself to say it.

  Kariana did it for her. “To read the minds of the dead?”

  Orloff laughed. “Can you imagine? Can you imagine what that would mean, just that fact that there are minds to read, let alone being able to do it.”

  “I find the idea that there is still something in the corpses disturbing,” said Kariana.

  “You think I don’t? What we’re detecting might not be a mind at all, or anything remotely like a self. I hope that there’s some other explanation.”

  “Like a glitch in the recordings?”

  Orloff shook her head, emphatic. “No,” she said. “In the first place, I know it isn’t a glitch. And secondly, I don’t want this to be futile. There is something there. And that’s pretty incredible.”

  “There’s the excitement back again.”

  “I am excited.” She paused. “I’m also worried, and frightened.”

  “Good.” Kariana squeezed her shoulder. “Those sound like pretty healthy responses to me.”

  “I need to understand what we’re seeing, Kari. I need to know.” She looked at Kariana, meat pie forgotten in her hand.

  Her wife nodded slowly. “That’s what’s really worrying you, isn’t it? That you need to know.”

  “Yes.”

  “Finish your pie,” said Kariana.

  “What?”

  “Do as I said.” Kariana took her own advice, finished eating and brushed the crumbs from her hands. She waited for Orloff to do the same. “OK,” she said. She shuffled closer on the rampart so their shoulders were touching. She took both Orloff’s hands in hers. “Tell me. Are you causing harm?”

  “I don’t see how.” That was true, but it was also true that causing harm was one of the things she was afraid of.

  “But…” Kariana prompted.

  “It’s what I’m brushing up against,” said Orloff.

  “Are you telling me that piercing the veil between life and death might be a little on the fraught side?”

  Orloff smiled. “Let’s just say I’d prefer it if my last words don’t sound like I’m quoting a Boris Karloff character on his deathbed.”

  “That’s why you need to do the job well,” said Kariana, “so there will be no danger. And you will. I have faith in you. So does Doom, and that’s more important than what I think.”

  “He has faith in my abilities.”

  “Rightly so.”

  “That makes me want to keep going. It makes me feel proud. But that’s the thing…”

  “The thing being mixing curiosity and pride.”

  “Exactly!” Orloff squeezed Kariana’s hands and sighed, so grateful that Kariana understood, because of course she would, just like she understood Kariana’s fears when they surfaced. “What if I go too far?”

  “Who even knows what that means in this case?” said Kariana. “I’ll tell you what not going far enough would be, though. That would be stopping before Doom is ready to stop, and that’s not what you or I do. We’re made of sterner stuff than that.” She sounded stern then, too. “Besides,” Kariana went on, “you’ve always pushed back the boundaries of your field.”

  “So have other Orloffs,” she spoke quietly.

  “You already talked about this with Doom.”

  “Yes.”

  “I doubt I can add anything to what he said.”

  “He knows a lot about me,” said Orloff, “but he doesn’t know me.”

  “I wouldn’t be so sure about that.”

  “He doesn’t know me like you do, then.”

  Kariana laughed. “I should hope not!”

  “Don’t be biblical,” Orloff said, but she smiled too. “You know what I mean.”

  “You know I do.”

  Orloff leaned her head against Kariana’s shoulder. “Just tell me the same thing again. Tell me I’m not like my ancestors.”

  “You aren’t. That’s a promise. Are you doing this for personal power or gain?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Tell me why you’re doing.”

  “Because Doom commands it.”

  “That goes without saying, but it also needed to be said. That’s good, Elsa. That’s important. And why else?”

  “Because I need to know.”

  “Of course you do. You’ve always needed to know. That’s always been who you are.” Kariana dropped her voice to a tender whisper. “I’m grateful for who you are.”

  Orloff squeezed her hands again. The weather had turned cooler. The sun’s rays felt thin, brittle, their warmth cast away by the slightest breeze. But there on the ramparts, held by and holding Kariana, Orloff felt autumn pull back a little and give her another few moments of summer.

  “You can tell the difference between curiosity and obsession,” Kariana said. “You’re not going to fall over the line. I guarantee it.”

  At the mention of falling, Orloff looked down at the drop below them. “I hope you’re right.”

  “Are you going to make our lunch place all symbolic now? Are we going to have to talk about precipices and abyssal descents every day now?”

  Orloff finally laughed. She let go of Kariana’s hands, wrapped an arm around her and held her tightly. “Would that be OK?” she asked. “I was sort of hoping we could make existential crises a regular thing.”

  “You’re seriously asking to be pushed, you know. I am the captain of the guard – I’ve had people executed for less.”

  “I’m not worried. I know you’ll always hold on tight.”

  “Count on it.”

  Five

  There weren’t any nightmares that night, or the night after. Orloff had a few days’ respite, and then they returned, sporadically, but more upsetting. The demons kept coming for her, and now they started taking Kariana away from her. The worst was one where Kariana was the patient on the table. Orloff woke up gasping and drenched in sweat.

  The days were better. She felt newly inspired after her talk with Kariana. The doubts were at bay, and the drive to crack the secrets before her stronger than ever. Though there was no immediate measurable progress, she felt she was on the verge of a breakthrough. She found her attention shifting from the corpses to the machinery that recorded the signals. It wasn’t a conscious turn of thought at first, but when she realized what she was doing, she followed her instinct.

  She was grappling with the impossibility and the fact of sorcery. She lived in Latveria, and so she knew that sorcery existed. That was a given as inescapable as the sun rising in the east. The Werner Academy had entire wings devoted to its study and practice. It was, though, something that Orloff had never encountered in her work at the hospital. Knowing abstractly that sorcery coexisted with science, and seeing it happen in the machine Doom had created, were two different things.

  Once she realized what she was struggling with was a paradox, she decided that what she needed to do was embrace it. She was no witch. She had no powers of her own. But the obelisk operated as it should when she used it. Maybe other machines imbued with magic would too.

  That thought was the first part of the breakthrough. The second part flowed from the first, and was the result of mental experiment.

  If I could add magic to another piece of technology, what would it be?

  As she walked around Doom’s machine, a new set of corpses connected to it, her eyes fell on the electrodes connected to the skulls, and she suddenly thought, God helmet.

  The experiment had been a sensation in the early 2000s, and had still been a fascinating footnote during Orloff’s university years. The God helmet generated light magnetic fields when worn. The contention was that the experiences reported by some test subjects so closely mirrored religious experiences that, ipso facto, religious experiences were themselves simply neurological events. The problem was, no one else was able to replicate the results, and the generated fields were so weak that they were unlikely to have any effect at all. Magnetic placebo, Orloff remembered having thought after reading one of the critical responses to the helmet. She had thought the device and the claims for it were too simplistic, too prone to confirmation bias. Yet its conception had appeal.

  What if the fields were stronger? she thought now. What if they were… supplemented?

  She felt a surge of nervous excitement. Transcranial magnetic stimulation did have real effects. And if something else with real effects was working in conjunction with it…

  She wrote down what she needed for the lab and gave the note to Boris. Three days later, he brought a large case for her. Like magic. She didn’t know how the logistics for the supplies worked, and if Doom vetted her requests or not. She put them in, and they were fulfilled. A researcher’s utopian dream.

  Orloff opened the package after Boris had left. Inside was a helmet. She lifted it out of the metal case and placed it on the work table next to one of the corpse slabs. It was surprisingly light for something that appeared to be forged of bronze. It was inlaid with silver, forming lines of runes that ran down from the crown in three lines, one on the back, and the other two on the left and right. The front of the helmet would cover the face down to the nose. A bronze shutter could snap down over what looked like a glass pane at eye level.

  Why do the dead need to see?

  Orloff examined the helmet in growing wonder. Three days. That was all it had taken to turn her written words into a reality. How many other labs were there in the castle? How many researchers were working on how many tasks for Doom? She thought about asking Boris when he next checked in, then realized she already knew the answer.

  As many as necessary.

  She placed the helmet on the nearest corpse, then thought better of it. The man had been dead only two days, and with the helmet on he gave the impression of someone taking a nap.

  “Bravo, the hard-headed scientist,” she said, the sound of her voice hollow and very alone in the morgue. “Good, rational decision, that.” She removed the helmet and placed it on another body. The flesh on this one was green-gray. “Much better,” she said, fixing the helmet in place. “Everybody’s doing better, aren’t we?”

  She was glad there was no answer.

  There was a note in the case, handwritten by Doom. His cursive was regimental in its precision on the unlined paper. The style seemed old-fashioned to her, as if it belonged on a contract for her soul. It didn’t ask for that. It outlined briefly how the helmet worked, how she could open it to modify it, and where to take it in the castle for further work, as needed. The lab she was directed to was on the same level as the morgue, and a short walk away.

  She was amused and a little ashamed by how pleased she was to know that there were other people working in close proximity to her. It felt good not to be alone.

  She stopped herself and took a breath. “OK,” she said, trying to be stern. “Talk to me. We weren’t jumpy like this until just now. What’s going on?” She turned to the helmeted corpse. “You have any insights?”

  The body reserved judgment.

  “Great help. Thanks for your contribution.” She tapped her fingers on the helmet. “You know what I think it is? I think it’s this thing. I think we’re about to make some real progress. And that’s scary exciting. You get me?”

  The body did not contradict her.

  “Glad we’re on the same page.”

  There was a set of controls on the right-hand side of the helmet. She turned it and the obelisk on. They hummed at different registers. A violet aura surrounded the obelisk, and a brighter one formed around the crown of the helmet, the halo of a dark saint. The pressure behind Orloff’s eyes was stronger than it had been before.

  There was a dial on the right side of the helmet that controlled the strength of the magnetic field. Keeping an eye on the readouts of the screen, Orloff slowly turned the dial up. The EEG spikes on the readout shot up at once. Between the highest peaks, where the line had appeared flat, now there were smaller variations.

  After a minute, she turned the machines off.

  “Friends and colleagues,” she said, “we have amplification. A polite round of applause, if you please.”

  She grimaced into the silence. “No, I’m not clapping either,” she said. “Doesn’t really feel like that big a deal, does it?” She had succeeded in one of the tasks Doom had given her, and it was the least important of the two. She was no further along toward deciphering the signals.

  She pulled up a stool and sat down next to the helmeted corpse. She steepled her fingers and tapped them against her lips several times.

  This wasn’t why she had had the helmet made. Admit it.

  She removed it from the corpse, looking at the eye slit.

  Why would the dead need that? They didn’t. That was for someone else. Doom knew why she needed this before she did.

  She took the helmet over to a sink on one side of the morgue and sanitized the interior. “Are we doing this?” she asked aloud.

  Of course they were. Stop delaying. The whole point of having a God helmet made was for her to put it on.

  Technology and sorcery. A magnetic field to stir things up, to create the sense of a presence. The sorcerous factor that she could not understand, but knew to be genuine. The helmet wasn’t for amplification. It was for connection.

  That was why she had asked for the ports to be built into the helmet.

  She thought about everything she and Kariana had discussed on the ramparts. She thought about her family history. I’m doing my duty, she reminded herself. I’m not going to hurt anyone.

  What about yourself?

  She would be careful. She would stop if things seemed to be going wrong.

  How will you know?

  “Because I’m good at what I do,” she declared to the silence. “And I’m not going to try this on anyone else.”

  She carried the helmet back to the slab, her heart pounding. She was scared. She was also excited. She didn’t know what she was about to experience. She was sure she was going to experience something. She was pressing against the veil, ready to tear it.

  Ready to do more than step into the unknown. Ready to leap into it.

  She linked the helmet to the electrodes attached to the corpse’s skull. Then she put the helmet on.

  •••

  The machine in the bowl of the mountains was complete. Doom circled the site slowly, examining the construction for flaws. Workers stood to attention, heads bowed as he passed, waiting to make any corrections he commanded.

  The sky was overcast and low, dark clouds concealing the mountain peaks. The wind blew with the confidence of fall, flapping Doom’s cloak and plucking the cables of the assembly like a harp.

  The base of the construction was two giant, concentric frameworks, the outer one twice the size of the interior. The inner assembly closely resembled an oil derrick, which it was in many of its essential components. The derrick housed a massive drill, one designed not to extract oil, but to pierce a hole down which it would be possible, if necessary, to travel. It was going to create a shaft fifteen feet wide. The framework that surrounded the derrick was of much more massive construction, and made of adamantium-reinforced steel. The structure had to be strong to support the pyramid it held suspended over the derrick. Doom had had the pyramid built of obsidian and silver, and its base and its peak inscribed with occult runes. It was a hundred feet on a side, and a bit more than sixty feet high, its proportions conforming to the golden ratio. It was hollow. At Doom’s command, it would drop, swallowing the derrick, and containing whatever might have been released from the depths.

  Doom circled the outer framework, then went inside to examine the derrick. Zargo went with him, his reluctance plain. As they walked around the derrick, Zargo kept looking up at the dark mass of the pyramid, as if he expected it to fall and crush them.

  It would not. Doom’s construction specifications were exacting, and there would have been no deviation from them in even the smallest particular. The speed with which the construction had been completed would have been impossible almost anywhere else except Latveria. Few other places had the resources to devote to the task. And nowhere else had Doom to demand the work be done. He saw his will made manifest in the form and in the time he had required, and he was pleased.

  He looked down at Zargo’s stricken face. “We are about to begin the dig,” he said. “If it will salve your conscience, you may plead with me not to do what we both know I shall. I will not have the time or the patience to listen to your fears once the drilling has started.”

  “The thing beneath us is dangerous,” said Zargo. “I don’t know what it is. But I do know it is strong. It’s pulling me, and it’s pulling at my memories.” He paused. “It’s pulling at my identity. That’s what it feels like. I’m afraid of what it will be capable of if it’s in the open.”

 

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