Her heart beat louder; she felt the throbbing pulse in her whole body.
She hesitated a second, suddenly unsure.
Did she want to see?
No.
But she needed to.
She started thumbing through the files.
The earliest records she found were dated more than fifteen years earlier—before she was even born. She pulled out a couple of files and laid them on the desk.
Patients were referred to by letters. Patient A. Patient B. Medical records. Long lists of medications.
Almost all of them had been given some combination of sodium amytal and Metrazol. Vi committed the names to memory, planning to look them up in Gran’s drug book when she got back to the house. There were mentions of experiments with psychoactive plants, lysergic acid diethylamide, things with Latin names Vi didn’t recognize. She thought of the jars of leaves, roots, and berries in the basement at home and wondered if some of those were hallucinogens; if Gran was making her own mixes and experimenting with them.
The notes contained descriptions: Electroconvulsive therapy. Sensory deprivation. Cold water therapy. Hypnosis.
Even surgeries. Vi looked down at carefully sketched diagrams of the brain, of cranial cuts, of areas stimulated, pierced, and cut away.
These were not cures.
These were experiments.
She felt dizzy; things looked blurry. She made herself look away from the notes, all carefully charted in her grandmother’s neat penmanship.
These people had been tortured.
Cut open like the rats in Gran’s basement.
Her stomach flipped, and she thought she might be sick.
Was Iris one of these patients? A subject of Gran’s experiments?
Had she gotten the scars on her head and chest from surgeries done down here in the Inn basement?
Vi continued to scan the charts, read how Gran tested her subjects’ memories, their cognitive abilities and IQs. Again and again, she was disappointed in the results:
Another failure. Memories and sense of personhood are gone, but there are too many deficits. Pt can no longer toilet himself, much less read, write, or have a meaningful conversation.
Vi looked through the first three drawers, frantically searching for something that would help her understand who Iris was. She found a folder on Patient I, but he was a thirty-six-year-old man, a transient with a history of alcohol abuse. At the end of the notes, paper-clipped to the inside back cover of the manila folder, was a photograph. A snapshot of Patient I in a hospital gown, a scar on his shaved head. A scar just like Iris’s.
Vi’s breath was stuck in her throat. Her heart seemed to freeze, to forget to beat for a second. Because she recognized this man, Patient I.
Patient I was Old Mac.
She closed the file, put it back, looked at her watch. Another five minutes had gone by.
Shit, shit, shit.
She had to get out of here. Had to hurry.
But she couldn’t leave quite yet. She was too close. She skimmed through more folders until she got to the last one in the third drawer. There, her eye caught on a line scribbled in her grandmother’s familiar handwriting.
The project has not shown the results we are looking for because of one reason: I have not found the right subject.
Until now.
Patient S is the one. I know she is.
The one who will change everything.
Vi shoved the file back, moved to the final drawer, the one at the bottom.