The Monster Farm

The Monster Farm

(1,333 words)

1.

From a scientific perspective, the experiment was worthless. It yielded no new insights, it broke no new theoretical ground, and it failed even the most basic conditions for experimental validity.

From an ethical perspective, the experiment was inexcusable. If anyone had known what Dr. Crowder had been doing all those years, he would have been discredited, ostracized, and incarcerated for the rest of his life.

Of course, these considerations were purely academic now. All that really remained was to gather the forensic evidence, reconstruct that which could be reconstructed, and contain the threat.

Regrettably, these tasks would not be easy. Dr. Crowder’s farmhouse had been burned to the ground by the person or persons who had murdered him. His files were a pile of ashes scattering into the brisk autumn air from the location where his living room once stood. The files had been soaked in gasoline. The files had been the ignition point for the inferno which had followed.

Captain Ostazio sat in the driver seat of the squad car, door opened, seat reclined. The radio squawked dispatcher calls, its speaker turned low enough to render the sound mere background noise.

He rubbed his eyes and thumbed through the photographs. The photographs had revealed nothing.

The interviews had been more helpful. They had come into the station in dribs and drabs over the previous week: furtive souls who invariably waited until they were sure that nobody else was present in the station lobby, furtive souls who invariably approached the front-desk officer and asked in hushed tones for an audience with Captain Ostazio.

And Captain Ostazio had patiently heard them out, had patiently asked careful questions, had patiently reassured them that they had made the right decision, that they had done the right thing by confiding their secrets with him. And they had left the station with more confidence than they had come in with.

But with each interview, Captain Ostazio’s dread had only grown. It seemed that very few people in the sleepy community had not been touched by the late doctor’s activities.

A crime scene investigator in a school-bus-yellow raincoat made his way over the far ridge behind the ruins, down the sloping back yard, around the side of the blackened heap of charred wood and twisted metal, and across the gravel drive to the car where Ostazio sat. It was Kerwin.

Ostazio looked up from his photographs at Kerwin.

“We found something,” said Kerwin. “Remains.”

“Human?”

Kerwin shook his head. “Animal. Lots of animal.”

Ostazio sighed, slipped the photographs into the manila envelope, and pulled himself from the squad car. He closed the door and followed Kerwin to the site.

And there was animal. Lots of animal.

Dr. Crowder and whoever had not even bothered to bury the remains. There had been no shallow grave, no masking of the site save for several pieces of old carpeting cast carelessly over the carnage.

And most of the carnage had fully skeletonized. Some of it had not, and the death stench, not overpowering, but still present, licked around Ostazio’s sinuses like the malignant echo of a shouted curse.

The crew would catalog all of it, but Ostazio was fairly certain that they would simply find more of what they were already seeing. No human remains; just lots and lots of dogs, cats, squirrels, birds, and stray livestock. The human remains, if there were any, would be more carefully concealed.

“What was this guy doing?” asked Kerwin. “Making some kind of monster?”

“Many monsters,” said Ostazio.

“Some kind of Frankenstein freak wannabe?”

“Not exactly,” said Ostazio. “But something like that.”

Kerwin laughed. “I didn’t see no lightning rods and electric gizmos in the house. Maybe he returned the crap to Radio Shack after the experiment didn’t work.”

Ostazio wasn’t laughing. He turned to Kerwin and almost snapped at him, but then he thought better of it and held his tongue. Kerwin had been working the same insane hours he had.

“Just get this stuff catalogued,” said Ostazio. “I want you to pay special attention to any indications that the animals were injured or tortured prior to death.”

“Torture? Jesus. Was this part of his experiment?”

“Yes.”

“But the guy was a shrink, not a medical doctor. What were the animals for?”

“Training. Conditioning. Maybe rewards,” said Ostazio.

2.

Dr. Adelson placed a thick folder on Ostazio’s desk and slumped back into his chair. Ostazio leaned forward, took the folder, and began thumbing through it.

“What have you found so far?” asked Ostazio.

Adelson exhaled and shook his head. “It’s a huge mess, Crowder covered his tracks as he went. We don’t know who was really transferred out and who was simply moved to his farm.”

“He faked the paperwork?”

“We think so. There’s nothing in the records we’ve seen that really tells us who he recruited.”

“Shit,” said Ostazio. “So we still have no idea how many there were.”

“No, we don’t,” said Adelson. “And thirty years is a hell of a long time.”

“Okay,” said Ostazio. “Let’s assume he had between one and five boys in that farmhouse at any one time. And let’s suppose that each boy stayed with him from two to five years.”

They did the math. Best case: six. Worst case: seventy-five.

“That doesn’t tell us much,” said Adelson.

“No,” agreed Ostazio. “It doesn’t.”

Adelson looked out the window.

Ostazio decided to try a different approach. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s go with quality over quantity.”

“Quality over quantity?”

“Yeah. Go back over the Boy’s Home files and find the worst cases. You know, the bed-wetters, the fire-starters, the animal-killers. Then follow through to see if their transfers and discharges really took place, or if they just seemed to disappear off the map.”

“That’s going to take a lot of work.”

“I’m sure the F.B.I. will help,” said Ostazio. “What did you find in his office?”

“Oh, God,” said Adelson. “The ravings of a crackpot.”

“What kind of ravings?”

“Well, he did his homework,” said Adelson. “He had everything ever written by Zimbardo, Milgram, and Rosenhan. Those weren’t ravings. But what he made of their stuff is nuts.”

“Enlighten me.”

“You’ve heard of Zimbardo and Milgram even if you don’t know their names,” said Adelson. “Zimbardo did the Stanford Prison Experiment.”

“Yeah,” said Ostazio. “I know that one. Bunch of college students pretending to be guards and prisoners in the Seventies.”

“Right,” said Adelson. “The experiment went out of control, and the guards started abusing the prisoners. They had to stop the experiment early.”

“And the other guys?”

“Milgram did the electric shock experiment. People were told that they were shocking someone behind a screen.”

“Because a guy in a white coat was telling them to?”

“Right. Some of the people kept obeying the doctor, even when they thought they were administering dangerous shocks.”

“Okay. And the third guy?”

“Rosenhan. He got healthy people admitted to psychiatric facilities with fake symptoms. Then he tested to see if the mental health staff could tell the difference between people who were really sick and those who were just faking it.”

“And?”

“They couldn’t tell the difference.”

“Nice.”

“Standard undergraduate stuff,” said Adelson. “It’s Crowder’s conclusions that scare me.”

“He wrote papers?” asked Ostazio.

“Yes,” said Adelson. “And he submitted them to various journals. I suspect none of them were published, though. I can’t imagine any reputable peer-reviewed publication accepting that crap.”

“That bad?”

“Scary bad. Our doctor apparently believed that psychopaths could be cultivated, shaped, and then taught to control their urges. He called his theory ‘Dark-side Sublimation.’”

“What do you call it?” asked Ostazio.

“Bullshit quackery. It’s a wonder he didn’t get himself killed years ago.”

“So, where are they?” asked Ostazio. “Where are all his psycho protégés?”

“They could be anywhere. One of his papers suggests that he shipped them off to different cities after he had successfully ‘rehabilitated’ them.”

“Only they weren’t rehabilitated.”

“Of course not,” said Adelson. “They were just cleaned up and charm-schooled.”