Psycho Babbles by AR Cook
Tabby blinked as she awoke, wincing at the sterile fluorescent lights above her. There was a searing vice engulfing her head, and when she reached up to touch it, she felt bandages. She sluggishly took in the surroundings, the walls and ceiling white and stark, with the only furniture in the room being the cot that she was currently lying upon.
This shouldn’t be happening. Didn’t the doctor say that the extraction process would not require any invasive surgery? Tabby shut her eyes again, disoriented by all the whiteness. She recalled what she had been told: Just lie on the scanning bed, let the extractor do its thing, and it would be done in three minutes. That was it—or should have been it. After that, she could just jump up, be on her way with a smile, and remember to report back to the clinic in two weeks for the re-assimilation follow-up.
Of course, knowing her history with doctors, she should have predicted that this would turn out to be another mess. Had she really been so desperate to fix her…what was it, psychosis?…that she actually had believed this rubbish that Piece of Mind had been proclaiming? That the psychosis itself could be extracted from the mind, chemically treated to be “cured,” and then injected back in your brain?
It had been printed in bright, calligraphic lettering on the pamphlet sitting in her mailbox last week: “The most effective, safe, and direct solution to any and all mental illnesses. A medical revolution. No more years of therapy or potentially harmful medications. Be permanently cured of your mental anxieties in a mere two weeks.”
Tabby’s hope was that the Piece of Mind Clinic would be a quicker remedy than her current psychiatrist—number five, to be precise, and just as much a pain in the posterior as the previous four. Just one day in the clinic, the follow-up, and then feign to her new doctor over the next few weeks that she was getting better. A massive head bandage, however, would be difficult to explain. Tabby sat up, groaning.
“Took you long enough to wake up.”
Tabby snapped her head up. There was no one else in the room with her. She could only see two doors, one that led into a small bathroom, and the other she assumed led out into the hallway.
Wonderful, she thought. Whatever they did to me is making me hear voices. I’m suing all these jerk-offs.
Tabby swung her legs around to the side of the bed to stand up, but her legs were gelatin, so she sat for a minute for the feeling to return. The pang in her bladder gave her the incentive she needed, and she pushed herself off the cot, trudging wobbly over to the bathroom.
After she finished, Tabby leaned against the bathroom sink, staring with dark-rimmed eyes at the mirror above it. From the looks of it, her head injury couldn’t be all that bad. All of Tabby’s hair was there, from what she could see, so nothing had been shaved for surgery. She looked her whole body over, but the rest of her seemed fine.
“What’s the matter, Freakshow? Don’t like what you see?” asked the voice she had heard before.
Tabby noticed that, when the voice spoke, there was a small vibration in her right ear. She plugged up her ear with her finger. “Say something else.”
This time, the voice was muffled, but it sounded infuriated at being restrained. Tabby took her finger out of her ear. “What the heck did those people do to me?” “Do to us,” the voice corrected. “I was quite happy where I was, before you gave in to all
those quacks and shrinks who made you think I was a problem. You’re spineless, Tabitha Forrest, a complete jellyfish. Now unwrap your head.”
Tabby paused, not sure if she liked this voice. “Who are you?”
The voice chuckled. “Only now you’re asking that? You know who I am. You just don’t want to admit it. You don’t want to admit that I’m a separate entity from you. Then you’d realize you were subjecting a living thing to scientific experiment—maybe even torture, I don’t know what those knife-happy hacks had planned. But I’d rather not find out, so get this bandage off and let’s make tracks.”
Tabby suddenly understood. “Y…you’re what the clinic was going to take out of me?” “Ding ding ding, we have a winner.”
“But…no, they were removing my psychosis. That’s an intangible thing. It’s like a…thought, or an emotion. You’re not alive.”
The voice seethed hot venom, causing Tabby’s ear to burn. “Look, I’d love to wax philosophical with you all day long—actually, no I wouldn’t—but I don’t want those freaks shoving us back in that crazy machine to pull me the rest of the way out. So move your fat butt already!”
“What do you mean, ‘rest of the way out’?”
“Hey, I wasn’t being torn out without a fight. I got a little…stuck.”
Tabby’s hands frantically unwrapped the layers of bandages around her head, unraveling the fabric with the speed of an excited child opening a present. As the length of gauze fell to the floor, Tabby stared at her image in the mirror, petrified at the eyes glaring back at her. The eyes set in her forehead, right above her own normal eyes.
These new eyes were slightly smaller than her own, almond-shaped and emerald green, making Tabby’s brown eyes look dull and drab. They were strangely beautiful, yet harbored a glint of maliciousness.
“How disgusting,” the manifested brain-child said. “You look like something out of a zombie horror flick.”
Appropriately enough to that comment, Tabby screamed.
*
“Why can’t I see it?”
Dr. Lancaster glanced at Stan over the rims of her glasses, seemingly annoyed that he would ask. “Mr. Plunkett, we store hundreds of extracted psychoses for processing in this facility, and yours has already been filed away. It is important for treatment that your psychosis is exposed to as little interference or outside stimuli as possible. When you return in two weeks
for your re-assimilation, we will allow you to see your cured specimen before we reintroduce it to your mind.”
Stan rubbed his hands along his pant legs. “But…I want to see it now. I mean, my babble must be filed with my name and info, right? Can’t you just have it brought out here for a minute, or maybe someone could let me into storage?”
“The storage unit is restricted to clinic personnel only,” Dr. Lancaster replied. “And bringing it out, even for ‘a minute,’ would be immensely traumatizing to it, as they are not used to being outside a human brain. Don’t worry, Mr. Plunkett. Your extraction was a perfect success. Your babble… psychosis…will be taken care of with the utmost care. Now, you are due back on September 5th at 2:00. Check out at the front desk before you leave today.”
Stan sighed, and stood up. “Dr. Lancaster, you sure everything went fine? No… mishaps or anything?”
“Not during the extraction. Why? Do you feel all right?” The doctor stood up, pressing her fingertips on her desk. “It is common to experience slight headaches or disorientation after the process. I would recommend a mild pain reliever—”
“No, I’m all right. Thanks.” Stan shook the doctor’s hand and scuffled out of the room. This was unfair. The whole point of his coming here to get his babble out was so that he could see it as it was, unchanged. Now he wasn’t being allowed to see it until after it would be cured. What was the big deal anyway?
If you had asked Stan a month ago, “What do you think about that weird therapy group that’s been all over the news lately? The ‘Piece of Mind Clinic.’ They say they take the craziness right out of your head and fix it, so you don’t have to take actual therapy or drugs or nothing,” Stan would have replied, “Can’t talk right now, gotta finish inking these last few pages.”
That was what Stan was doing on all his free time outside of his college courses, doodling and inking superhero, alien and monster comic books. He was more than an adequate artist, and even though he had been rejected by every graphic-novel publisher he had submitted his work to, constructing these illustrated landscapes of dream-fuel were as crucial to him as the
inhabitants of his worlds—if one could believe those inhabitants existed in some parallel universe.
As one could easily surmise from his timid gawkiness and beaten-dog posture, Stan was a classic introvert, so while other students were careening to their dorms after epic keggers or taking weekend trips home so their mothers could wash their laundry, he was in his off-campus apartment inundating his sketchbook with pictorial novelties, and reading online forums about conspiracies, supernatural sightings, and tabloid-worthy “news.”
That was how he had found out about the Piece of Mind Clinic. He was scoping out a forum that he frequented often, and he had ignored that new thread the first couple of times, the one that read, “Brain Spawn Created in a Lab: Is this for real?” Most posts like that were trash, but the thread had gotten 247 replies in only an hour, and over 1000 people had viewed it. Figuring he shouldn’t be left out of the loop, Stan clicked on the post and read it over. These brain-children, or “babbles,” since these things would talk nonstop when first extracted, were literally pulled from your brain by some machine that the clinic had developed, and somehow manifested into a physical form (“Chupacabras or alien goblins or something,” one poster had rumored of the babbles’ appearances), so that the “problem” could be given direct treatment. No one seemed to know how that was done, but theories abounded, from lobotomies to electroshock to implanted microchips. Meanwhile, the patients could keep living their normal lives, without
weeks or months of hit-or-miss therapy. Also, it was cheap—one didn’t even need medical insurance.
Stan mulled this over for a long while. His first reaction was that it was all fabricated, but there were testimonies from people who had gone there, claiming that the process really worked. They had not felt so at peace and well-balanced in their entire lives until after their babble had been cured and reinserted. Apparently, it was necessary to reinsert the treated babble rather than just terminate it, because a babble was a part of one’s brain, and for the brain to remain incomplete could cause some undesirable side events. Think of it as a chipped piece of glass from a vase (as one of the clinic specialists would elucidate); if one didn’t return that broken-off piece and weld it back into the whole, the vase would just get bigger and bigger cracks stemming from that original fracture until…well, it wouldn’t be much of a vase long after that.
It was not because Stan had any severe psychological problems, or any paranoia or emotional scarring that usually warranted a babble extraction (although on his paperwork, he had listed ‘extreme masochism” as his reason for attending the clinic, because—let’s face it—he had to have an addiction to pain to keep putting up with the crap that he went through on a daily basis). It had struck him as a rare opportunity to finally attain something that he had wanted his entire life: a friend who truly understood him. After all, a babble would come straight from his brain. If his babble wasn’t on the same wavelength as he was, who would be?
As desperate and silly as it may have sounded to most people, that was why Stan wanted to meet his babble so badly. He didn’t even want it to be “cured.” He wanted it exactly how it already was, as messed up as he was. To be told his babble was already locked away and out of reach dealt Stan a mocking blow and reminded him that Fate was continuing to enjoy screwing him.
Stan’s raggedy sneakers plodded heavily down the front steps as he exited the building. He glanced back over his shoulder, entertaining a quick thought of breaking into the facility late at night, ninja-style, and stealing his babble out of there before anything could happen to it. A bolder, more rebellious version of Stan might have seriously contemplated the notion, but boldness and rebellion had never been strong suits of Stan’s, and he felt even less of those things now than he had before.
Maybe my babble has those now, he wondered. Maybe he’s a cooler guy than I am. Man, only I would end up sucking more than my own babble.
*
Stan awoke that night to something opening his apartment door…from the inside. He heard a soft scuffling of feet over his entryway carpet before the click of his lock, and the door whining momentarily as someone murmured something in a low voice.
If Stan had been in a fully functioning frame of mind, he might have thought it odd that the intruder had been inside his apartment before unlocking the door, since the only other way in would have been through the window that had no fire escape or any means of reaching it from outside, and he was on the third floor. But, as he was still half-asleep and therefore not in a condition to analyze, he unplugged and picked up his bedside lamp, quietly slunk out of his bedroom and peaked around the corner at the end of the hall.
What he discovered were two things that had never been in his apartment before: a three foot tall monster, stained pitch black from the tops of its tentacle-like antennae to its lizard-esque tail, and a woman.
The monster, which gave the impression of a living cartoon, turned its head towards Stan, blinking narrow, pupil-less white eyes. The only other parts of it that were not solid black were the red spiral on its white belly, and the row of perfectly triangle piranha teeth protruding over its bottom lip. The woman, on the other hand, appeared normal enough: long, straight dark hair, a pale complexion that begged for sunlight, and a small, sharp nose. She wore a leather soft cap on her head that was a size too large, so the brim shrouded the upper half of her face. Yet when she looked up at Stan with her deep brown eyes, Stan’s heart suddenly squeezed tight in a way that he couldn’t decipher was fear, or…that other thing he had heard so much about. “That him?” the woman asked the inky-black thing.
The monster grinned, its overbite of serrated teeth making it look more goofy than threatening. “Yep, that’s my man, Stan! See, told you he wouldn’t mind us bunking here. Hey, Stan, you got anything to eat, or should we call for takeout?”
Stan took a step into the room, staring with speechless bafflement at his guests. “Uh…what?”
“An eloquent one,” the woman muttered. “Look, I’d kill for some coffee right now, if you got some.”
“She would, you know,” said a mystery voice that sounded like it came from the woman, but the woman’s lips had not moved when it spoke. “She’s a psychopath. Actually, it’s me who’s a psychopath, but since we’re—“
The woman stuck a finger in her right ear, and the mystery voice was smothered. Stan put the lamp down on the floor. “Okay, this is either the weirdest dream I’ve ever had, or someone is pulling a really good prank.”
“This isn’t the weirdest dream you’ve ever had,” said the monster. “The weirdest dream you’ve had was probably that one where you were wearing a diaper while trying to wrestle the shark in the yellow bikini that was spitting muffins at you—”
“Hey!” Stan snapped. “What the heck are you, anyway?”
“Come on, you don’t know me?” The creature’s grin rotted into a prickly grimace. “You put me in almost every notebook margin while you were taking calculus. You had me bite the head off a doodle of Mr. Simmons, remember?”
Stan’s eyes widened as the familiarity of this sketchy monstrosity registered. “Holy…Skritch? You’re…you’re real?”
“Surprise! This is Tabby,” Skritch explained. “She’s escaped from the clinic too. And that thing in her head calls itself Attic, I think. Don’t mind it, it likes to insult people. It’s a whole Jekyll and Hyde thing.”
Stan raised his hands in a gesture for everything to slow down. “Okay, hold it. How can one of my drawings be standing here in front of me? Who are you—” he pointed to Tabby— “and why are you all IN MY APARTMENT??”
“You were at the Piece of Mind Clinic, right?” Tabby asked.
Stan was about to reply, but he was caught by her gaze again, and found he could only look at the floor and nod.
“Well, Skritch is what they pulled out of you,” Tabby said. “And this is what they tried to pull out of me, but it only came halfway out. I hate to add one more level of bizarreness to your day, but you were bound to notice it sooner or later.” She removed the cap from her head, revealing the extra pair of green eyes planted in her forehead.
Stan’s jaw hung open to his chest.
The green eyes narrowed wickedly on him as Attic spoke out of Tabby’s ear. “Ooooh, fresh meat. I like the geeky ones.”
Tabby’s face flushed as she forcefully shoved her hat back on.
“You suck,” Attic spat.
“That place, the clinic, is no good,” Skritch continued. “They got all these babbles locked up in containers, pumping us full of chemicals. But they didn’t know that I can make myself two-dimensional.” He demonstrated by pressing himself down into the floor until he was as flat as shadow. “So I slipped out of storage, and did a little reconnaissance. I found Tabby and Attic locked in a room, so I let them out. We gave the doctors the slip out the back, and the only place I could think to go was here so I squeezed under your door and let us in. Answer your questions?”
“And I can’t go back home right now,” Tabby said. “They’ve probably already found out I’m gone, and they have all my info so they’ll come after me. They may know Skritch got out too, and when they do, they’ll come looking for you, so we better find someplace to hide out for now until we sort this all out. You got any place we could go?”
“Wait, wait, wait.” Stan’s head was beginning to hurt from all the information being thrown at him. “Why do we have to run from the clinic? I mean, how do you know it’s ‘bad’? And if we don’t want them ‘curing’ us, why should they care if we changed our minds? They wouldn’t really send cops or something after us, right?”
“Not cops,” Tabby said. “But something.”
“Stan, you’ve read the forums. You’ve read the ‘rumors.’ Buddy…” Skritch’s face scrunched into sour detestation. “They—are—killing—us.”
“K…Killing? The babbles? But…I thought the babbles needed to go back into our brains, so our minds don’t fall apart. People said that they’ve seen their cured babbles at re assimilation.”
“Not their babbles. A babble, but not theirs.”
“Whose, then?”
“We think the clinic manufactures artificial ones,” Tabby said. “Ones that are designed to…influence people.”
“Like, brainwashing?”
“More permanent. Irreversible. Why, we don’t know. Could be some kind of government-funded conspiracy, or maybe underground anarchists.”
“Just like the forums say,” Skritch said. “When you were reading them, I was reading them too.”
Stan wiped his hands over his hair, taking deep breaths. “Okay…so, say the clinic is messing with people’s minds, for whatever reason. What are we supposed to do about it? It’s not like the police will believe us, even if we show them Skritch…which probably would not be a great idea. And I’ve never been a mastermind about anything. I’m just…me.” “Hey, set yourself on ‘chill’ mode,” Skritch replied. “I’ve got a plan.”
*
“We sure blew this one, didn’t we?”
Stan gazed out the window, down at the streets where pure Hell had broken loose. Anyone with any sense had locked themselves indoors, since the whole city was now infested with babbles of every shape and size, all with unbridled, unstoppable insanity. Off in the
distance, Stan could still see the smoke from where the Piece of Mind Clinic was still engulfed in flames, which it had been since yesterday. No doubt the babbles were still roasting stolen hot dogs, garbage and house pets on sticks while dancing around the smoldering ruins.
“Stan, it’s your turn.” Tabby pointed at his spot next to the Scrabble board, where she and Skritch were sitting on the floor. Fortunately, the babbles had not broken into the apartment yet— maybe because they knew that Stan, Tabby and Skritch were their unwitting liberators, and had agreed to leave them alone. Or they were just having too much fun elsewhere.
Stan sighed. “I always wanted to change the world. Now I frackin’ destroyed it.” Skritch chewed on a Scrabble piece before spitting it out. “Relax, man. It may take a few months to blow over, but they’ll probably move on and then all you humans can come outside again.” He paused. “Unless the babbles get to a nuclear reactor. Or eat everybody. Or find a way to extract babbles from everyone, causing all human brains to disintegrate and turn you all into drooling veggies.”
Attic, no longer masked by the hat, rolled her eyes. “Great, stuck playing board games like it’s only a rainy day rather than the Apocalypse. I want to go make havoc! Everyone is blaming the clinic for all this madness anyway. I say that lets us off the hook to do whatever we want!”
“SWAT teams or the national guard might get called in,” Tabby retorted. “I’d rather not be outside when they start shooting up the town.”
“It’s our fault they all got out,” Stan said.
“Okay, so my plan wasn’t so hot,” Skritch admitted. “But I came from your brain, after all, so it was kind of your idea too. Do we have any pizza poppers?” He got up and scurried over to the fridge, crawled up the side like a gecko and rummaged through the freezer.
Stan hung his head. “You know, with Skritch outside my brain, my mind’ll start fracturing. What’ll you do if I go mental?”
“Don’t freak, Stan,” Tabby said. “The clinic might’ve been lying about that ‘mind-decay’ stuff to make sure people came back for re-assimilation. And Skritch’s right, this all has to blow over eventually. Until then, Skritch can sneak around outside and get us food and stuff, we’ll see how long the electricity and water last, and we can just…hang out, I guess.”
“Hang out?” Stan raised his head to look at her, and he gulped. “Uh, Tabby…since I might go mental or die pretty soon…”
“No, Stan, I will not be your girlfriend,” Tabby said.
“Come on! This might be my last chance!”
“You’d rather die a virgin, believe me,” Attic chuckled. “She’s not that good.” “I will ram you against the wall until my head cracks open and I can pull you out myself!” Tabby hissed.
Stan shook his head. “Figures. Only by unleashing a race of manifestations of people’s most psychotic brain-spawn on the world, I finally got some guys to hang with.” Tabby smirked. “Wanna know what else ‘figures’? Now that babbles are running everywhere, you and me are the ‘normal’ ones by comparison. Me with four eyes, and you with an ink-bug doppelganger. That’s the norm now.”
Stan grinned. “I think I’m cool with that.”