Protagonists#

• Clement Scheidegger - FOC Representative, Mountaineer (Michalis)
• Narinder “Nari” Sodhi - Natural Sciences Student (Ioannis)
• Sofia Picado - Chemistry Student (Istvan)
• Susan Chen - History Student (Konstantina)
• Lillian Neill - Anthropology Lecturer (Tasos)

Pick Your Brain#

“It is better never to learn about these things, Mrs. Neill.”

— Dr. Armitage, in the office above the Restricted Collection

Summary#

• Pizza Gambino — O’Bannion, furious over the empty warehouse, accuses the group of killing his cousin and of leading him into a trap; he takes Sofia and Clement hostage and drives Susan, Nari, and Lillian to the Aylesbury Pike shack to find Higgins.
• The shack — a hidden charge wrecks O’Bannion’s truck; the changed students emerge from the house and surgically remove a gangster’s brain into a metal cylinder while Lillian photographs it from the treeline.
• The escape and the hijack — Clement and Sofia overpower their guard at Gambino’s and seize a Tommy gun, but O’Bannion — wounded, escaped — flags down their cab on the pike and takes it at gunpoint, leaving all five of them on foot.
• The shack, searched — Clement finds dynamite and, upstairs under the collapsed roof, three gangster corpses with the tops of their skulls gone.
• Learmonth’s house — a false police call and a midnight visit do not convince the professor; he recalls the Cobb’s Corners drinking rumours and sends them away.
• Dawn — Wilmarth agrees to carry a message to Armitage; Lillian, working exhausted in her darkroom, destroys the only photograph of the brain extraction.
• Armitage’s office — Armitage is convinced at last: he will hide the Restricted Collection and asks them to stand with his guards tonight.
• The laboratory and the kitchen — Nari and Susan barricade Learmonth in his lab at gunpoint; Clement tails Jason Trent into the cafeteria kitchen. At dinner Trent passes their table smiling — and they realize the food has been dosed. Most of them have already eaten it.

The Back Room#

The man at the front door barely looked up when Susan gave her name. The boss is waiting for you. He waved them through.

In the back room of Pizza Gambino the card tables stood empty and the air smelled of cigar smoke and walnut shells. Danny O’Bannion was not smiling. A man by the wall was cleaning his shoe, and the stain on it was red and still wet. Another stood by with a crowbar.

So we went to that warehouse, little lady. And besides the fact that it was empty — it was empty so fast.

Susan told him they had moved. The things, the students, whatever they were now — they had cleared out, and they were in a house, with the explosives, and his cousin was surely with them. O’Bannion’s face changed when she said cousin. He came around the table.

Did you kill my cousin?

The room went tight. Sofia met it head-on, the way she met everything — it is not your cousin anymore, Señor — and O’Bannion did not like being called a fool by a girl from Nicaragua. The walnut man cracked one next to her ear, the shell loud as a knuckle. Then the handkerchief, the chloroform, the rope. Sofia was gagged and held.

Clement stood his ground when the crowbar came. He did not step back, and the man with it did not swing — but they bound him too, beside Sofia, and set a guard named Johnny over them with a cigarette and a glass of whiskey and a rigged slot machine.

The rest — Susan, Nari, Lillian — went with O’Bannion into the truck, to show him the place. And the place, when they reached it, was not there.

The House That Wasn’t There#

Aylesbury Pike. A dirt track. Forest on every side, and dark, and the place where the house should have been was only trees.

Where’s the house, lady?

Nari heard it before anyone — a small hiss, a spark of light near the truck, a fuse burning down like a lit fuse is the last thing you ever want to see at midnight in the woods. She was already shouting when it went.

The blast threw them flat and lit the treeline. The truck was a twisting pile of metal and fire. Nari, Susan, and Lillian ran — into the dark, between the trunks — and behind them the gangsters scrambled and shouted and one of them did not get up.

They came back when the echoes stopped. On their bellies, through the leaf-rot, to the edge of the firelight.

And now the house was there.

It had not been there before. It stood against the stars, two stories, a gambrel roof with a section gone, a dead oak beside it — the same shack, the same house, appearing as though it had been waiting for the noise to stop before it showed itself. At the door stood four of them: Jason Trent, William Noakes, Terrence Laslow, and Clarissa Thurber. Two of O’Bannion’s men lay on the ground. A third — Bobby — was on his knees.

Bring the sonic emitter, someone said, and Trent went inside and came out with a thing like a metal scoop.

They held Bobby still. Trent knelt beside him, set the edge of the instrument against the crown of his skull, and cut — a single precise incision, the way a man opens a parcel. Bobby screamed once. Clarissa held open a metal cylinder the size of a man’s head, and inside it something crystalline caught the firelight, and Trent lifted out the brain and set it in, and they closed the lid.

Lillian, behind the bush, pressed the shutter. The truck’s fire gave her just enough light for one frame.

Three Bodies Under the Open Sky#

At Gambino’s, Johnny was not watching closely enough.

Clement worked the rope against itself, slowly, making no secret of it, until his hands were free and Johnny’s eyes went wide. The Luger came up. Johnny was tied to a chair, locked in the toilet, and told to stay quiet, and Clement took the Tommy gun from the table and all the keys on the hook and walked out the back with Sofia into the alley.

They found a cab and pointed it west.

On the pike, the cab’s headlights found a man standing in the road. He was bleeding from the head and he was holding a gun and the gun was the size of the night.

Get out of the car now.

O’Bannion. Wounded, escaped from the shack, furious, and in no mood to share a vehicle. Sofia slid behind the wheel — but her foot found the gas before the gear found its place, and the engine only moaned, and a bullet came through the windshield and starred the glass an inch from Clement’s ear. They got out. O’Bannion took the cab, turned it, and drove it back toward Arkham alone.

On foot, the two halves of the group found each other by the glow of the dying truck. Nari raised her camera — I have the evidence. Lillian showed the Tommy gun. They stood in the road and put it together: the extraction, the cylinder, the brains.

Clement went back to the house.

It was empty now. The cars were gone. Inside, mold and old furniture and nothing — until he climbed the stairs and put his shoulder to a door that would not open. It gave at last. Behind it were mattresses soaked through with seasons of rain, and on them three bodies laid out neat. O’Bannion’s men. The tops of their heads were gone and the skulls were hollow and clean.

Clement stood in the doorway and said his mother’s name, once, to no one. He took two sticks of dynamite from a box below, and Sofia found a jerrycan of kerosene, and they walked back to the city in the dark.

The Man Who Would Not Listen#

Nari and Lillian reached a telephone first. Lillian gave a name that was not hers, an address on College Street, a break-in, screams. We’re sending a unit now, ma’am. They took a cab to the professor’s house and watched from down the block as two young officers knocked and a man in a robe answered the door, spoke to them, and shut it, and the police drove away.

Then Lillian knocked.

Learmonth opened the door annoyed and half-dressed. Upstairs, a woman’s voice — Tell them to go away. Lillian told him what she had seen: students who were no longer students, a raid planned for tomorrow night, his own name on their list, something they wanted from his brain. He heard her out the way a man hears out a rumor about his neighbor’s dog, and then he mentioned Cobb’s Corners, and the drinking, and the trouble she had caused, and it was clear that this was the version of her he had decided to keep.

She had a photograph, she said. She would bring it in the morning.

At dawn she stood in her darkroom with the chemicals and the negative and the exhaustion of two days without sleep, and she forgot the curtains, and the morning light came in, and the image was gone — burned to nothing on the film. The one thing that might have convinced him. She stood in the yellow light and understood that she had nothing left to show.

The Books and the Soup#

By afternoon, Wilmarth — woken with his milk and his newspaper at Clement’s rooms, distraught at the loss of the dog — agreed to carry a message to the one man who might listen. Dr. Armitage heard it in his office with the door shut. Lillian told him about the cylinder, the crystalline lining, the brain lifted out and sealed inside. He was troubled, but he was not surprised. It is better never to learn about these things, Mrs. Neill. He said Harrold had come to him asking for the Restricted Collection, and he had refused. He would hide the books himself. He asked them to be at the library tonight.

At the Science Annex, Learmonth gave his lecture on rock strata to a half-empty hall. None of the changed students were there. At six he walked to his laboratory, and Nari and Susan walked in behind him, wedged a chair under the door handle, and set the barrel of the Tommy gun on the desk between his papers.

Your lesson was boring, Professor. Sit down.

The handle rattled. Clarissa’s voice came through the wood, pleasant and patient.

Professor, we just want to pick your brain. We have some questions…

A chair scraped in the corridor. A face rose above the door’s transom window — Clarissa, looking down at them, smiling in a way that Clarissa Thurber had never smiled in her life. Then she was gone, and the footsteps went away.

Learmonth threatened he would inform the dean. He threatened he would call security. He did not believe a word of it. They left him there, alive and stubborn, with a door that no longer locked.

Across the quad, Clement — who could not set foot in the buildings — had followed Jason Trent from the East dormitory to the West, and from the West hall into the cafeteria kitchen. Trent came out whistling. Clement pushed through the door after him and found only a cook, smoking over a pot of soup, who knew nothing and saw nothing and begged not to be reported.

At dinner Nari & Lilly sat in the cafeteria and ate what was put in front of them. Chicken. Potatoes. Trent passed their table on his way out. He looked at each of them in turn, and he smiled, wide and easy, and he nodded once and was gone.

Lilly set down her fork. Nari looked at her plate.

They had eaten the food.

And whatever was in it was already at work.

Next: the night of the raid. The library Armitage has emptied. The laboratory Learmonth will not leave. And in the blood of everyone who ate in the cafeteria tonight, something is already beginning to forget.