Chapter 17
Wells Ward... a few minutes later
"Mr. Kincaid!... So... we nearly have a full house." Dr. McLean smiled, as he saw the dapper Englishman approaching. He wondered what it was about his patient that engendered such loyalty from this disparate group of men... but then again, were they so different... and was Derek Rayne so different?
"What news?" Ian asked, surprised to see Nick and Sloan heading away from Derek's room.
"My office, if you please. The good Father will stay with our patient." The doctor lead the parade towards his small, cluttered office. "Please, sit down... if you can find a place." He cleared a stack of files from one shabby chair, saw there was no room on the desk, and so deposited them on the floor.
He noticed the looks from the others. "I've not yet been won over to the advantages of keeping records in cyberspace. Instead, I prefer the Sherlock Holmes method," he explained with an embarrassed grin. "But I know where everything is... really... and other than an occasional topple off the desk, my system never crashes."
"So long as no one dusts," Sloan drily commented, grabbing the cleared chair. Age and seniority had its privileges; Kincaid and their host settled themselves in those remaining. Nick looked at the couch with its mountains of books and papers, shrugged, and perched himself on the corner of the heavy, oak desk. He absently considered that it might be a good desk to have in California... suitable for diving under in an earthquake. Despite the tenseness or the situation, or perhaps because of it, he chuckled to himself... only Californians tended to look at furniture with such a thought in mind.
"Let's get on with it, shall we?" Ian requested, uneasy that the others might know more than he did. "What's happening?"
"Derek has regained consciousness.... Well... in a fashion...." McLean began to describe his patient's condition. "He's certainly aware... at the most basic level.... He reacts to stimuli... pain... pressure.... He hears... sees.... He's breathing unaided, swallowing, blinking... all the automatic responses.... The spark of consciousness has been lit, but... I'm afraid... gentlemen... that's about it."
"But he'll get better...," Nick interrupted, "given time... won't he?"
"Well, now...." The physician steepled his fingers in a gesture strangely reminiscent of his patient. "That, Mr. Boyle, is... what's the phrase... the sixty-four thousand dollar question?"
"So... what's the answer?" Sloan asked, terrified of the response he was likely to receive, yet needing to hear it. He'd been there, a quarter-century ago, at the start of this mess. When Derek had become involved in Dr. Ernst Reston's experiments, he'd tried to stop them.... First, by informing the university of the dangerous irregularities, then by direct assault on the Legacy's funding.... Finally he'd staged a sit-in at London House... but he'd been too late. The damage had been done. Derek had recovered and had seemed fine, but the others had paid a terrible price. He had put the affair and this place from his mind. Even while serving as Ruling Precept, he'd avoided any mention of Wells Ward.... He'd been the ostrich with his head in the sand... but, now he knew, no one had escaped unscathed.
"I wish I could tell you, with certainty," McLean replied.
"Tell us with 'uncertainty'," Kincaid instructed.
"Very well.... It's not an optimistic prognosis.... Dr. Rayne may be able to function at the most basic levels... to meet his bodily needs... water... food... that type of thing, but I fear not much more. In other words, if you put food and water in his mouth, he'll swallow, reflexively... because it's there, but he won't know what that stuff is that's in the glass or on the spoon, let alone what the glass or the spoon is for. If he's cold, he'll shiver, but, though the blanket is right there, he won't cover himself with it, because his mind doesn't understand what it is."
"What're you basing that diagnosis on?" Kincaid pointedly asked. "If he's conscious, it must be an improvement. Perhaps, more will come.... Surely, Doctor, he's not been awake long enough for you to jump to such dire conclusions."
"It's based on history... and my other patient who experienced similar symptoms."
"Patterson," Sloan murmured. In the past few hours, he'd forced himself to read the files that he'd avoided for so long. Once a gifted medium and clairvoyant, Patterson had been in this twilight state... neither awake... nor asleep... just existing... before sinking into the deep coma that slowly, but relentlessly claimed his life.
McLean nodded. "I think that the trauma of recent events has triggered in Derek the sequence that induced the... 'illness'... in the other patients in the ward. In a way, he's been lucky to hold off the onset of the disorder... It's been nothing short of remarkable... His mind and body have been amazingly strong and resilient, but now, in my opinion, he's in the early phase of what I call Stage Three.
"I have a scale of Stages One through Five, with Five being the death process. Stage One was what occurred to the mind during the experiments. No one really knows what happened because Dr. Reston was the 'observer'... but he participated... and ended up here... with his subjects."
"I don't understand," Nick interrupted. "Patterson was in a complete coma... a skeleton being kept alive by machines. You told me that he'd been like that since he'd been admitted."
"I'm sorry," the doctor replied, absently twisting his gold wedding band. "I deliberately misled you... medical privacy.... The less I told you, the better. When you saw him... yes... Patterson was deep into Stage Four... coma, but before he slipped away from us... back around the mid-eighties... he was in the same condition as Derek is at this moment. He was that way for more than a decade."
McLean sighed deeply... explaining the mind, with all its unknowns and variables, to laymen, even informed laymen, was always an ordeal. "OK...," he began again. "As I said, we don't know what Stage One was.... When we lost Reston to insanity, we lost the key to his notes and observations.
"Stage Two, with all the others, seemed to be a deterioration, different in each case... but the commonalities were a brief loss of consciousness... a few hours to a few days... followed by a disorientation and a disassociation from the world around them. They were all aware of this and, in one way or another, first sought to cope, then sought help, but it progressed fairly rapidly and was irreversible... but...." He placed special emphasis on the word. "...each case has variations.... Each man possessed different psychic talents... took different drug combinations... and reportedly had widely different experiences. None of it was handled like a legitimate, scientific test.... There was no 'control'... no way to understand the deviations.
"Derek may have experienced the beginnings of Stage Two back when Mr. Sloan, here, intervened. He was unconscious for several days, but the symptoms may have been arrested and the process may have lain dormant for over twenty years... but then... something stimulated a resurgence... prompted Stage Two to resume... as witnessed by the coma and his subsequent erratic recovery, restlessness, and aberrant decision making processes. The coma was out of the norm, but so was the remission. As of now, I'd suggest that culprit in the resurgence was the hypothermia back in early 1999."
"I was with him. Am I at risk for something like this?" Nick asked. "I experienced that 'time slip' too." The former SEAL laid a special emphasis on "time slip", as if to state his firm knowledge that there had been such an event.
"Unlikely," the doctor pontificated. "Your psychic mind is not the same as Dr. Rayne's... nor any of the others. Yours is relatively normal. Plus, we don't know if what occurred with them or you was really a 'time slip' or merely something the mind perceived as such... an altered state of consciousness... brought on by a chemical imbalance in the brain."
"But I was there... in 1850," Nick protested. "I had claw marks on my chest from the wolf attack... I had to take rabies shots... and Derek had cuts on his arm from that wannabe vampire and rope burns on his neck."
"Yes...," said McLean, "but you also experienced hypothermia, which has mental as well as physical symptoms... and it's possible... that Derek's mind, in its 'altered state', affected your mind... and there are physical injuries, such as stigmata, that are believed to be produced psychosomatically."
"Then you doubt the whole 'other' universe, 'other-self' scenario that Derek said he experienced while he was in the coma?" Ian asked.
"I don't know," McLean replied with a telltale shake of his head. "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio.... I suppose, it's possible.... We, of the Legacy, have to accept such possibilities... but always with scientific skepticism. However, we are also dealing with an extremely unique human mind.... What delusions can it produce for itself? What illusions can it produce for others? What physical things is it capable of doing... like stigmata... like psychokinesis, a phenomenon not unknown to Dr. Rayne?... After all... it did produce pyrokinesis... and a raging fever that occurred simultaneously to the inferno in the World Trade Center."
McLean looked at his watch and suddenly rose. "I have rounds.... I'll leave you to talk this through. Please, use the office for as long as you like." He paused and looked down to inspect his shoes. What he was about to say was difficult... and he was sure it was unnecessary, but nonetheless, it had to be said. "You know that Derek will receive the very best of care here... for the remainder of his life, if necessary.... We'll do everything we can for him." He looked down at his toes again, then continued, "After all, he's the one who brought this place into the modern world... turned it into what it is today... a place for the study of 'special' minds... rather than the 'asylum' that you might think it is.
"By the way," he added, placing a thin, red folder in William Sloan's hand. "Here are Dr. Rayne's handwritten instructions. I think, now, that he foresaw all of this... perhaps a long time ago."
"Thank you, Doctor," said Ian, distracted, as he watched the man leave. "Jesus...." He turned to the others, despair written on every pore of his craggy face. "We've really lost him."
Sloan slipped on his glasses, read, then, with a sigh, handed the yellow, legal paper bearing Derek's round, vertical script to Kincaid. "It's binding and explicit," he stated. "It's exactly what McLean said it was... consent to test and monitor, but not to treat symptoms, other than physical ones that might endanger himself or others.... If he did become a danger, they were to restrain and confine him as necessary... totally at their discretion.... And there's a DNR in here... 'Do not resuscitate'."
With a deeper sigh, he added, "I'd rather Derek went the Patterson route... coma... than that he turned into a drooling, raving madman.... Reston and the other two have spent a third of their lives in restraints or in that padded hell."
"You don't know what you're talking about," Nick snarled. "It's not lying peacefully in a bed... sleeping. He'll be connected up to tubes... wires.... There'll be muscle contractions... sores that don't heal... diapers... and a piss bottle under the bed."
"I understand that," Sloan sharply retorted. "I'm the one who's got to tell Barbara... and Ingrid."
"Joseph will be devastated...." Ian was unable to hide the tremor in his voice. Guilt lay like lead in his stomach. No matter the cause ascribed by the doctor... he knew.... The fault had been his.
"Wake up to yourselves!" Nick rounded angrily on the others. "I don't give a shit what the doctor says.... I'm gonna work with Derek.... I'll keep plugging away.... He's not Patterson... or one of those other 'no-hopers'.... He's Derek Rayne. He's gonna get better.... He always pulls through... and he's stronger for it. We've just got to help him hang on... until he can win."
Ian smiled.... Loyalty must be in the Boyle genes, he decided. "I don't doubt your dedication, my boy... but do you think that's what Derek would want?... You wasting your life... trying to work miracles... for him? The medical staff here are the best.... He's been a part of seeing to that. They won't give up on him.... He came here for that very reason." The old man paused, then added, "McLean was introducing reality into the equation, that's all."
"...And, Mister... I shouldn't need to remind you," Sloan spoke icily, "that's a precept's ring you're wearing... Derek's ring.... You've got a House waiting... and duties to be performed."
"I know where my duty lies," the former SEAL retorted as he stalked angrily from the room.
"You're not playing that one right, Willie," the Brit informed the other man.
Sloan snorted in disgust. "Frankly, Kincaid... right now... I think, you're the last
man to give advice."
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