Stories Of Mist And Glass

Reanimation

A scientist finds a way to cheat death.

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Ava

You ever wonder what goes on in a twisted mind?

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The Stranger

A different kind of sickness plagues a man and his family.

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Reanimation

“This is highly irregular, isn’t it?” The female in the white lab coat asked, more as a statement than a question, her flaxen hair in a knot as severe as the furrow in her brow.The male stood beside her busied himself with a clipboard. “You really have to stop making molehills out of nothing, doctor.” He sighed, saying the last word as if it was an inside joke. “This is just the next step in the process. We’re doing something good here. Can we focus? What readings are you getting?”The female bristled. Voicing concern over the morality of unfreezing a cryogenically preserved corpse was hardly making molehills. Was that even the right expression? She was pretty sure molehills were small. She shrugged it off. A battle for a different day. She studied the monitor and confirmed the reading with her handheld. “260 millijoules and rising. 270. Holding steady at 280.”“Are you sure? It’s never been that high before.”The female fought to keep her voice even. “Yes, I’m sure.”They both watched in silence as the body on the exam table twitched ever so slightly. It happened so quickly it could have been their imagination. Was that a clenched fist? A flicker of an eyelid? The body was still slick from the cryoprotectant solution. It could be a trick of the light.The male’s knuckles were white from holding the clipboard too tightly. He was now staring at the monitor. “Holy shit. Look at the signals we’re getting. I can’t believe it, we never thought…”Something was not right. The female felt it first. She involuntarily took a step back, her body a tight coil, ready to sprint. Her hand automatically reached for the red alarm button on the wall. She hovered over it hesitantly, stubborn doubt flooding her brain, her thoughts merciless: The emergency alarm, really? This is hardly more than a frozen cadaver. Here you go again, making molehills out of—No, no, no.The body was now sitting up. Its eyelids fluttered open slowly, agonizingly, as if the neurons were struggling to remember how to fire synchronically. It’s mouth gaped open then closed, the lips quivering like it was trying to speak.“I’m getting the fuck out of here.” The female slammed her fist on the alarm button and pulled on the glass door. It didn’t budge.A chuckle from behind her. “Where are you going, doctor?”The male had an eerie smile on his face. He looked positively ecstatic. “What, you don’t want to talk to our new friend here?”“Did you lock the fucking doors?”“Oh, for God’s sake, calm down, I knew you were going to freak out so I took some… measures.” The male reached over to the body and pushed on a syringe connected to an intravenous cannula. “It’s funny, isn’t it? Like how this sedative will be circulated throughout this body. The heart is not beating, so we have to electrify it artificially. And then…”The body slumped back onto the exam table like a freed marionette.“Voila.” The male looked as if on the verge of laughing. “Exciting, isn’t it? Just think of all that we can do with this.”The female counted her breaths. She predicted this would happen eventually, didn’t she? After all, she was the one who invented a way to reverse thermal stress in cryogenically frozen tissue, repair the tiny fractures from the freezing process. But no, there was something very wrong here. The body…. it was trying to tell her something. She struggled to remember the way the mouth moved.The male was excitedly tinkering at the controls. “We have so many calls to make. I can’t believe we just made this much progress so quickly—”Help. The female realized. That was the word it was trying to say. But how? As a biologist she knew there was absolutely no way the brain could have survived the freezing and revival process. The purpose of the experiment was just to see if they could reverse the vitrification of individual cells, regenerate tissue, maybe whole organs, but not a whole person…Get yourself together. The female scolded herself, her eyes never leaving the exam table, her right hand still grasping the glass door handle. The body was already dead when it was cryogenically frozen. Already dead. The repair should only occur at the cellular level. There is no way it could cause a corpse to… what? Come back to life?--Her name was Alice.She was twenty-five when she died. It was quick, or at least that was how she remembered it. If remember was the right word.It was late Spring, flowers were in full bloom and the sun hit her skin in all the right places. The air smelled of lilacs and honey and she was happy. A reckless, youthful, giddy type of happy. Why wouldn’t she be? She was a cellist in the making. The moment before she died, she remembered humming a tune softly, her heartbeat a metronome.Suddenly, the metronome stopped. Then… nothing.The doctors would later call it a ruptured arteriovenous malformation. Alice would have deemed it a nice death. Poetic, really. There was no pain, only music and lilacs.As luck would have it, her parents were wealthy. Obscenely so. The type of wealthy that can throw a billion dollars at a cryonics lab without making a dent in their expense account. In their world, money could buy anything, so they foolishly believed they could cheat death and buy their daughter’s life as well. Like Death was someone they could negotiate with. Just another shady business deal. It sounded fair, didn’t it? A billion dollars for their daughter.The body on the exam table, however, was not their daughter. Oh sure, there were fragments of her in there, a memory of lilacs blooming, a line from her favorite song, the distinct sound of the stubborn wolf tone of her cello. But it was not Alice. Not really.Far from the innocent happiness Alice felt just before she died, the body on the table awoke in unadulterated agony. It was angry and confused, like a feral animal in a cage, desperate to be freed.The male scientist grinned ear to ear at the monitors beside the body, the rhythmic pulsation of his carotids thumping hypnotically like a siren’s song. If Alice were here, it would have reminded her of a metronome. Unfortunately for the scientist, the corpse that was once young, beautiful, musically talented Alice, was now just blindingly, single-mindedly, very, very hungry.

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Ava

Ava always thought that if anybody could hear the sticky slimy thoughts that ran through the crevices of her brain, that they would run for the hills screaming.Sure, she spoke like a good person and acted like a good person, but her thoughts were almost never those of a good person. Ava knew how to act and look the part; she’d been pretending her whole life, after all. It was easy to be good when she intimately knew what was bad. The bad being her natural inclination.Still, she lived in constant fear of someday being found out. She learned early on in life that if she acted like herself or said her real thoughts out loud, that she lost friends and people’s affections. No, that wouldn’t do at all.After many years of work and excruciating self-restraint, Ava had achieved what many would call a charmed life. She was successful, popular, and well liked by a select group of her peers. She married into wealth, obviously, to a good-looking man with a good name and old money. Not that Ava needed anyone to provide for her. Not at all. She made her own fortune as a chief financial officer in Big Pharma.Ava enjoyed her job. It gave her an arena in which she could play. She was successful because she had the distinct advantage of having zero moral qualms in making decisions. It was easy, really. Plus, it was nice having a double income household. The old adage was true: the more money you make, the more you spend.Wealth aside, she specifically chose Jeffrey as her husband because he didn’t need mothering, constant reassurances or cleaning after. She didn’t need any insecure jealous messages blowing up her phone when she did whatever she wanted. Where are you? What time are you coming home? She nipped that habit in the bud early on in the relationship. Jeffrey claimed he was being a thoughtful partner when he engaged in such behaviors. He learned to give her the exact amount of space she needed with time.Ava could tell Jeffrey loved her. She supposed that should be one of the top reasons she married him. She was astute when it came to other people’s feelings. She just had trouble feeling them herself. She liked Jeffrey, he was a good life partner for what she needed. He didn’t annoy her on a daily basis and he played his role. Ava decided that was good enough.Besides, Jeffrey gave her two perfect children: Sophia, sixteen, and Oliver, ten. They were nice enough kids, well-behaved, beautiful. Perfect for the image that Ava had been cultivating. On a good day their Christmas photos could rival that of the English Royal Family.Sophia was the spitting image of Ava, with strong cheekbones and long wavy copper hair. She was the athletic darling of her soccer team and a social butterfly. Already Ava could tell Sophia was charming but secretly ruthless, which should serve her well in life. Oliver took more after his father, academically gifted, with light brown curls over intelligent brooding eyes. Ava predicted he would be successful in his own right, even though he lacked the ruthlessness of his sister.So long story short, Ava’s life was pretty much exactly what she wanted and needed it to be. The darkness in her mind notwithstanding. Ava prided herself in her self-control. She had impulses, sure, but she would never, ever risk the life she had built.Well, to a degree. She did have to let the dark out once in a while or else she would go crazy. She just had to be very, very careful.There were casualties, as Ava liked to call them, throughout the years. Friends who incurred too many infractions, work rivals who mistakenly thought they could compete at her level, PTA moms who learned the hard way not to cross Ava Louise Stanton.For most of them Ava simply orchestrated life-ruining events (an outed affair, fraud allegations, financial ruin, to name a few choice ones), but some did suffer physical consequences. Ava liked those the least: they were messy, risky, and took more meticulous planning. She favored psychological torture the best, it was enjoyable like an expertly played game of chess. Invariably, the payoff in the end, regardless of method, was always worth it.So yes, Ava knew something was very wrong with her. But hey, at least she was self-aware enough to practice what she thought was an admirable level of self-restraint. After all, she never purposely hurt anybody who didn’t have it coming. She deserved some kind of medal for that.

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The Stranger

It was uncanny.The stranger looked and acted almost exactly like his wife, and yet Garrett knew, deep in his bones, that the woman in his kitchen was not the Jennifer he knew.No, not at all. This woman, smiling at him over a plate of over easy eggs and crisped bacon, was someone else entirely, someone terrifying.The woman stood calmly, like she belonged there, and she had Jen's honey hair swept in a messy chignon. She was even wearing Jen's favorite scarf that was that very specific shade of Robin egg blue. Despite the neat exterior Garrett could sense the woman was tense. A single drop of sweat was visible on her otherwise perfectly made up forehand."What's the matter, Garrett?" The woman who looked like Jen asked liltingly. A tad too cheerful, like she was hiding something. "Not hungry?"Garrett swallowed. He noticed that his pulse was racing. Something was wrong. He thought back to the night before. Had his wife been acting strangely then? Had their daughter? Oh God, Emma! Garrett was suddenly filled with suffocating panic. Where was their ten year old daughter? Today was Saturday, there was no school anyway, because of the sickness. But shouldn't she be awake by now?"Emma?" Garrett called, his voice breaking, his eyes never leaving the woman pretending to be his wife. He suddenly realized he was doing this all wrong. He should be pretending like everything was normal. He could not let on that he knew something was off. That was the only way to save himself, save Emma.The new was droning on in the background. Jen always had the news on in the background while she cooked breakfast. How had this woman known to do that?'Authorities are advising the public to stay home. It is still unclear how the virus is transmitted, but it is encouraged that any persons showing any suspicious symptoms be isolating immediately. The first signs are fever, conjunctivitis, increasingly erratic behavior, diaphoresis...'Garrett watched Jen wipe a drop of sweat from her eyebrow. She was nervous, Garrett surmised. Were her eyes red? He couldn't quite tell from this distance. She did look like she had been crying. Or perhaps ill..."Mom? Dad?" Emma's voice from he top of the stairs sounded hesitant, scared."In here, sweetie." Jen called back before Garrett could open his mouth. Her voice an unnatural high pitch. "why don't you stay up there, Ems, and I'll bring up your breakfast? A special treat, just for today."As Jen's eyes flicked over at Garrett nervously, he knew he did not have time. He couldn't play this game. It was a matter of minutes, wasn't it? What they warned about on the news. Things could go from bad to worse very quickly.He had to move fast. Garrett took a quick glance out their bay window. The neighborhood was eerily quiet. Everybody was hunkering down from the disease on the news. Would anybody come if he called for help? Would anybody hear their screams?The news droned on:'Infected persons can become extremely violent quickly. They will exhibit signs of psychosis, paranoia, and increased strength... Emergency services are limited...'"Mom? Is Dad...?" Emma's tiny voice sounded close to tears."It was this moment that Jen's expression slipped. All of a sudden she looked terrified, feral, like a caged animal desperate to strike. Garrett noticed for the first time that she had a butcher's knife in her right hand. She was ready to use it.Garrett had to do something. Now. His wife was not herself. She had succumbed to the virus. She was a danger to herself, to their precious daughter.He reached for the first heavy object he could find. With strength he didn't know he had, he charged at the woman with a ferocity that was fueled by fear for his life and love for their daughter.It was over surprisingly quick, with Garrett barely aware of what was happening, his actions purely instinctive. The sounds and smells were muted for a few minutes, like a fever dream, and Garrett felt a huge surge of relief when he knew he had done what he needed to do.Emma's screams from he top of the stairs just barely got him out of his trance."It's okay, Ems!" He called out, trying to keep his voice steady. He had to remain calm for his daughter. "It will be okay now, we're safe. I just have to clean up for a bit here but then we can have breakfast, okay?"Emma was not listening. She had run back to her room and Garrett thought he heard her door lock. Through the walls he could hear her sobbing.Garrett felt a sudden crushing sadness when he realized that Emma was probably infected too. He shook his head, his relief from a few moments ago dissipating. Of course his daughter was already infected. He was foolish to think he could save her. The virus spread too fast, didn't it? That's what the news kept saying.Come to think of it, his daughter had been acting strange all morning, like a stranger, not his daughter at all.