"Well, someone's a clever girl." The low, husky drawl drifted sinuously out of the darkness into Lian's ears, a confident purr that belied the harsh environment of the cell. It didn't sound like the voice of a woman who'd spent seven years down here among the gloom and shadows with no one to talk to except herself; it sounded warm, soothing, the kind of voice you could imagine unburdening all your troubles to. Lian found herself shivering with terrified fascination. She closed the door behind her, gripping the key tightly in her left hand to reassure herself of its presence.
The woman in the shadows continued to speak despite the lack of a response. "What was it that gave Daniel away?" she asked. As Lian's eyes adjusted, she saw a pale face, framed by long dark hair, staring out from behind the Plexiglass barrier that separated her from her visitor--well, it would be pale, wouldn't it? Johanna Kraen hadn't seen the sunlight in close to a decade. "It was probably the requisitions, wasn't it? Seventeen patients according to the paperwork, but here he is buying enough food for eighteen. Was that how you noticed me, clever girl? Did I finally nibble my way to someone's attention?"
Despite her fear, a tiny smile dimpled Lian's tan, rounded cheeks. "It--it was the staffing numbers," she said nervously, trying to tell herself that it was okay to engage Kraen in conversation despite Doctor Okorie's lurid, paranoid stories. "We had two employees on the books who didn't have any assigned role in the hospital's hierarchy. I followed them down into the sub-basement, and found this room. When I talked to Da--Doctor Okorie about it, he.. he told me about you." She knew that every tiny hesitation, every pause in her speech and hitch in her breath, told the woman in the cell volumes about Lian's state of mind. She couldn't escape the feeling that she was made of glass, that the stranger was looking right through her to see what was inside her head at every moment of their conversation.
Johanna chuckled. "Oh, I'll just bet he did," she snarled bitterly, a cynical laugh escaping her sneering lips. "I'm sure he was full of fascinating stories about his old partner. Is my name still above the doors of the institute? Does he make excuses for me, tell everyone that I'm engaged on important research or away at a very long conference in Switzerland? Or has he simply buried my role in his distinguished career?" She paused, her expression softening. "I'm sorry," she said, the soothing warmth returning to her voice. "I'm sure he's something of a hero to you. It must be very disconcerting to discover that he's capable of an action like this."
"N-no, it's fine," Lian replied, even though it wasn't fine at all. She hated how easily she was being manipulated into accepting Doctor Kraen's outbursts, conditioned through targeted social pressure to defer to the other woman. But recognizing a pattern of behavior wasn't the same as correcting it. "He... he doesn't speak of you. When he does, it's to say that you had a nervous breakdown and you're being cared for privately."
Johanna greeted the news with a derisive snort. "By two orderlies who are completely deaf, and not a single visitor in seven years. Did he mention that to you, clever girl? Did he tell you that your voice is the first I've heard since he drugged my drink and locked me away down here? He won't even come to see me himself. He writes me letters, sends them down with the daily papers and the journals I still subscribe to. I can't reply, of course--no pen, no ink. Even if I did, all my correspondence is burned in front of me. This is an oubliette, you see. A place where communication goes to die." The bitterness returned to her tones, an undercurrent of anger in a plea for sympathy. Lian tried to remind herself that Doctor Kraen deserved none.
It worked too well. "Can you really blame him?" Lian asked, breaking her own stricture against engaging in debate with the prisoner with the same disconcerting ease that had drawn her into conversation with Johanna. "He told me everything you did in those last few months, all the things you--you convinced people to do, the experiments you engaged in." She cursed herself for that moment of hesitation, almost certainly a tell to someone as well-versed in reading people as Doctor Kraen. She might as well have put up a flashing neon sign that said, 'I'm Afraid of Being Hypnotized.' "He... he called you a monster."
A slow, triumphant smirk spread across Johanna's face. "Oh, let's not mince words, clever girl. I've read volumes of his correspondence over the years. I know exactly what he thinks of me. He called me the very devil itself." She paused, baiting the hook with silence. "Did he tell you why that was?"
Lian shook her head. The confession of ignorance terrified her, an unforced error in the game that she suddenly realized she was playing with the older woman. She didn't know the rules, she didn't know the stakes, but she understood with numb dread that she was nowhere near as skilled as her opponent. "N-no, I... no," she murmured, desperate to fill the silence and certain that Johanna would use that desperation against her from now on.
Johanna sighed, rising from the low bench on the far wall and crossing to the Plexiglass barrier. "It was a private joke between us back at the beginning, a play on the old quote about the devil quoting scripture to his purpose. He thought I was a little too glib, you see, a little too confident in my ability to argue people around to my point of view. We laughed about it, back in happier times. Back before his paranoia got the better of him." Her expression softened, becoming wistful and melancholy. "We thought we were going to change the world then. Revolutionize the study of the human mind. Perhaps he still will."
Lian shook her head in furious denial. "No, no, he's not--he showed me evidence. You recorded the sessions, you made videotapes of everything you did. You made those people--" Lian's voice choked off, unable to get the enormity of her emotion out through her tiny, choked-off throat. She was grateful that the darkened room and her tawny skin hid her blush--she didn't think of herself as a sheltered woman, she'd studied paraphilias and provided therapy to all sorts of people with frankly astonishing fetishes. But those videos had left her squirming in discomfort by the end. She would have switched them off if Daniel hadn't insisted that Lian needed the full context to understand why he'd taken such extreme measures.
It was discomfort, she told herself. Nothing more than that.
But Johanna didn't seem to believe her private insistences. "I know it must have been... confusing for you," she purred, her pause insinuating another kind of emotion lurking in the recesses of Lian's mind. "But I assure you, I had a reason for everything I did. For all that we've been studying hypnosis since Mesmer, it remains as much the province of frauds and charlatans as it belongs to psychiatry. We know that it works, we know that the trance state is every bit as real as sleep or hallucination, but beyond that? It's as deep and as dark as the Marianas Trench."
She began to pace the length of the cell, warming to her subject as only a woman who's been alone with the sound of her own voice for seven years could. "The truth is, hypnosis has never been subject to the kind of rigorous, controlled psychological studies that other branches of the field have. For every one researcher who's playing around with an MRI machine, another dozen have written the entire concept off as the domain of stage magicians and television psychics. It's simply too difficult to find a true control, to prove that a mesmerized subject is genuinely acting under the influence of the hypnotist and not their own volition. I'm sure you've discussed the problem with Daniel from time to time yourself."
Johanna's footsteps clicked rhythmically back and forth, each step as measured as a metronome. "Think about it. Think about the scope of human behavior, its breadth and depth, its triumphs and tragedies. The same man might be gentle and loving to his family, warm and kind to everyone he knows... and then, at the command of a general, willing to march off to a foreign country and shoot a hundred strangers. How can you prove the influence of hypnosis in a world where something like that can happen? Moreover, how can you prove it ethically? I may be a devil, but I have no interest in hurting anyone. There are limits to even my hunger for knowledge, I assure you."
