Sixteen Minutes to Midnight

Chapter 5

The thumping in my chest grew louder and a quiet drone filled my ears. The world blurred around me, and I made jarring movements with my head. I watched in horror as Jeanne burst into teeming slits of blood, and then I watched it some more. And again. My head replayed the moment over and over. Every repeated viewing made it a bit more tolerable to watch. I could pick out the little details - her facial expression, the way her body movements suggested she were contorting in pain, the way everybody only realized what was happening after it had already happened - and then it rewinded, and I watched it once more.

I blinked my eyes, and found myself back in the present. Someone was calling my name.

"Craig?"

I turned.

"Craig, are you all right?"

I found myself lying on the couch, a wet handkerchief draped over my forehead. I sat up, and looked at Renault. "Are you all right?" he asked. I groaned.

"What happened?"

He turned away. "Jeanne...shit. Jeanne...I'm going to find that son of a bitch who did this and gouge out his eyes," he paused, then loudly screamed 'damn it' and swore some more. It must have been tough for him. Then the room slowly came into focus and I stood up from the seat.

"Where is she now?" I asked him. He pointed to the table, where I saw the still body of a young girl. There was a large white linen rag draped over her body, and the hushed murmurings of the servants as they inspected it.

"I have no idea how these cuts sprang up out of nowhere," said Sandra to me as I approached the body, "but my god it was freaky. Like magic or something."

"Actually, it's probably more like science," I said, "magic doesn't exist."

"Believing in magic makes this death so much more easy to explain," she said coldly. "You know, I was talking to Jeanne a while ago and I could tell she was so excited about being out of college. She could finally get a job! Be on her own two feet! She isn't ever going to get her wish, is she? God, I feel so sorry for the poor girl."

"Huh...yeah. How's your golf going?"

She shrugged. "My game is good. Don't tease me about that, please, it's better than last time." She added a nervous chuckle at the end of the sentence, and I smiled. At least she had gotten over the shock.

"What do you think happened?" I asked Dmitri.

"Well, if you will recall how the young mistress suddenly broke into a fit, I would assume she was hallucinating. That would explain the...uh...butterflies, was it? Yeah, the butterflies."

"Interesting observation," said Gilbert, "but how do hallucinations result in death?" 

"Maybe the drink contained something that killed her from the inside? Like...tiny little nanite robots or something," said Sandra, "I dunno."

"What a load of bull," I said dryly. 

"Well," said Dmitri, "it's entirely possible that the hallucinations were in someway tied to the neural system. I'm not really sure how to explain it."

"Psychophysiology," said Renault suddenly, and I noticed he was standing behind me. "You know, mind over matter, that sort of thing. The mind thinks something is happening, the body feeds back the sensation into the mind. So if you think butterflies are cutting you, well, the body is going to simulate those cuts. Only extremely vivid hallucinations could even come close to achieving something like this though."

"So a very concentrated drug or something?" I asked.

"Well, yes, but you're not going to get any drugs around here."