September 2nd, 1964
“Right this way, Miss Olsen,” Dr. Hughes said. He led Gemma down a long, dimly lit hall and carried her suitcase for her. There were doors on the left side, each with a thick sliding bolt lock. Gemma noted these with some trepidation. When they reached the end of the hall and the last door, Dr. Hughes slid the bolt on it and pulled it open. The other side of the door didn’t look like a door at all, but a paneled wall.
Dr. Hughes gestured for her to enter the small room on the other side of the disguised door. Gemma was having second thoughts about this ruse of hers. She had lied about developing Joy intolerance in order to get into Haworth Labs’ personalized care program. It was the only way to find out exactly what happened to the other people who went into the program and seemingly never came out. Now that she was in this tiny, very bright, all white room, she realized she may have made a mistake.
“If you don’t mind, Miss Olsen, we’ll need to go through your belongings before we admit you,” Dr. Hughes said, setting her suitcase on the bed and inviting her to open it. “I know it can be delicate request for a lady, but there are certain items we can’t permit our patients to keep. They compromise the data, you see.”
“All right,” Gemma said. She popped the latches on her suitcase and lifted the lid. Inside were several dresses with matching pairs of tights, her toiletries, her hairbrush, toothbrush, another pair of shoes, a set of flannel pajamas, her lingerie, several paperback books, a few notepads, and several writing implements.
“I’m afraid I’ll have to take most of these items. The toiletries will be set aside for shower time, but we can’t allow books in the program. We monitor your emotional state closely and your response to reading material can skew those data points. We also cannot allow you pens, pencils, or paper. And, well, this is a rather… ticklish question but… are there metal underwires in your brassieres?”
“Yes,” Gemma answered, suspicious.
“I’ll have to confiscate those as well. We’ll keep all of your things safe for you, of course, to be returned when you leave the program.”
“How do I know you’re not just trying to steal my unmentionables?” Gemma asked. She meant it to sound flirty, but it came out nervous.
“I assure you that is not at all my intention,” Dr. Hughes said. “But I will need the one you are wearing right now as well.”
Gemma grimaced at this request, but she was committed to her investigation.
“Could you turn away please?” she asked. Dr. Hughes obliged and turned away from her. Pulling her arms into her dress, she asked, “Why do you make the doors look like walls in here?” She unhooked her bra and worked her arms out of the straps.
“We found that doors made the patients… artificially anxious. No idea why!” he said cheerily. “The mind works in mysterious ways.”
Gemma pulled her bra out through her left sleeve and said, “All right. Here you go.”
Dr. Hughes turned back around, took the offered bra, and collected the rest of the forbidden items in Gemma’s luggage.
“You can store the rest of your clothes and grooming items in the dresser there, and you can place your suitcase under the bed,” Dr. Hughes instructed. “Do you have any further questions before I leave you?”
“How long does it normally take to see results?” Gemma asked.
“It varies greatly from patient to patient. For a mild case such as yours, I expect we will see a fairly quick turnaround,” Dr. Hughes said. Gemma assumed that to be a lie. Too many other people just dropped off the face of the Earth after coming here, and she’d yet to find anyone who returned.
It was the moment of truth. If she was going to turn back, now was her last chance.
The story was more important.
“I think I can take it from here, Doctor,” Gemma said. Dr. Hughes tipped his hat to her and backed out of the room. The door shut behind him and she heard the bolt slide.
Gemma inspected her new home. The room was white. Really fucking white. White as hell. There was a bed, a dresser, a small table, and a chair to sit at it in. The far wall was almost entirely a giant observation window that left Gemma feeling very exposed. There was another oblong window on the to the left. Gemma looked through it and what she saw on the other side of the glass filled her with dread.
The window looked into the room next to hers. In it, a man in his sixties was pacing a small, restless circuit around the room. He wore glasses and had fastidiously combed hair and a tidy mustache, but he looked anxious and shaky. No Happy Face mask. Gemma had memorized his face ages ago, as it had been pinned to her investigation board for almost a year.
The man next door was Dr. Harry Haworth, missing since April 6th, 1960.
Gemma knocked on the glass, and Haworth started at the sudden noise. He stopped his pacing and approached the window to meet his new neighbor.
“Harry Haworth?” she asked. Haworth squinted. He couldn’t hear her and was trying to make out her words. Gemma mouthed his name again, slower and more deliberate.
Har-ry Ha-worth?
Haworth was taken aback. Gemma guessed that not many people had the memory any more to recognize him if they saw him. He gave her rueful nod.
Had he been here the entire time? Gemma mouthed “how long” at him.
He took a second to parse what she was saying, then Haworth held up four fingers.
Harry Haworth had been locked in that tiny room for four years. Jesus Christ.
What did that mean for her? She supposed it meant she was actually a prisoner too, but effectively she knew that already. The bolt on her door left little doubt that she was now captive here, the exact conditions of that captivity were merely a matter of semantics.
Gemma then noticed Haworth had a window too. She leaned to the right to peer beyond Haworth and into the third cell. The man in it had his back to them, but he was carving a bunch of scrawlings into the wall. She could just make some of them out. “Plantagenet – TRUE KINGS!!!” and “KING HARRY”
Gemma looked back to Haworth with an expression of amazed horror. She exaggeratedly mouthed out “Harry Plantagenet?” at Haworth.
Haworth rolled his eyes and nodded. Then he twirled his finger around his ear, signaling that Plantagenet was crazy. Haworth mimed placing a crown on his own head for further context. Gemma nodded her understanding of his performance. She found it a striking situation to be in, having poor mad Harry Haworth telling her that someone else was insane. Haworth didn’t look all that mad to her though, especially in comparison to the man behind him, carving out the tenuous logic explaining why he should be king of England into the wood paneled wall. Gemma wondered what Plantagenet was using to do it. Maybe it’s a bra underwire, she thought sardonically to herself.
She was definitely worried now that she may have bitten off more than she could chew.
Still, if Haworth had been here for four years, perhaps he knew about some of the other people who had gone missing.
Gemma mouthed “Prudence Holmes?” at Haworth, but he only frowned and furrowed his eyebrows at her. He gave her a questioning shrug. Gemma bit her lip and thought. It would have been so much easier if they’d let her keep her pens and notebooks. Perhaps this was exactly why they didn’t. If she could only write out what she was saying…
She held up a finger at Haworth, telling him to wait, and she looked around the room for anything she could use to send a message. Maybe the dried flowers? She could break the stems into little twigs and spell things out on the floor. The Doctors might not like that though. It would make a mess and she got the impression from the pristine and overt whiteness of the room that they wanted to keep things tidy. Aside from the flowers, all there was in the room was furniture. Nothing soft or malleable… except for the bed sheets!
Gemma yanked the blanket on the bed back and stripped the top sheet from underneath. Then she twisted the sheet longways into a rope and arranged it on the floor to spell “Prudence” in cursive. Haworth looked upon her work, read the name, then waited for her to do the same with “Holmes”. Gemma then gave him a questioning look.
Haworth shook his head no. Prudence hadn’t been through the program. Gemma repeated the sheet writing trick for Johnny Bolton, to which Haworth gave a wistful expression as if Bolton’s was a name he hadn’t thought about in a long time, but he answered in the negative for him as well. Gemma found these answers puzzling. She was sure Holmes and Bolton had been victims of Verloc’s plot too, but if they were, it wasn’t this part of it.
Haworth knocked on the glass to get her attention. He placed his hands together flat and rested his head on them, miming sleeping, all the while wearing a contrite frown. Gemma nodded and set about remaking her bed. She anticipated tomorrow being a trying time.
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