I stepped into the room and over to the side of Merritt’s bed opposite Dr. Marteneiss. Heggy and I took hold of the bed on our respective sides and wheeled it out of the room. The nurse followed along beside us, guiding the IV line as she led us to the imaging room. I grabbed the thin blanket piled at the foot of the bed with my free hand and pulled it over Merritt’s body, up to her elbows, to hide her restraints from view. I’d already taken enough of her dignity by putting her in the suicide ward. I didn’t want her to lose any more on my account.

We made relatively good time. The bed’s mechanisms clicked and clacked as we turned round corners. Though, as was always the case with Ward R, we had to pause several times to allow for traffic to pass by. Unlike the ER, in Ward R, the patients had the right of way. But we found our way soon enough.

“Here we are,” the nurse said.

With a grunt, I helped turn the bed and roll it into the imaging room. The imaging room was in two pieces: an antechamber, and the business end where the machine was. Broad glass panes in the antechamber’s walls gave a clear view of the antechamber from out in the hall, as well as to the machine room beyond it.

And, speak of the machine! The sight of it never failed to impress. The MRI was a magic metal doughnut (though you couldn't quite tell with that sleek red casing on top of it). A table was threaded through the hole. “Magic Metal Doughnut” was a term of endearment, used by those of us who had seen the massive instrument of clockwork intricacy hidden beneath the casing. Wires and cables ran down from the base of the casing, onto the floor, and up onto the back side of the glass-paned wall. It was like a portal to another world, just waiting to be powered up. A dark, swinging door on the left side of the wall separating the machine room from the antechamber was the only way from one side to another. The controlling terminals were situated on a desk built into the dividing wall, and the cables fed directly into them. The technician sat there in his swivel chair, turning from side to side, nearly as idle as the machine.

“Hello, Dave,” I said. Except for newcomers, I knew most of the MRI operators on a first-name basis.

The technician spun around to face us. “Perfect timing.” He pointed his thumb back at the machine. “She’s all ready to go.” He looked at Merritt’s unconscious form. “A cranial scan, I take it?”

I nodded. “Of course.”

“Okay-doke, let’s get her in.”

Dave rose from his seat and pushed open the swinging door. Heggy, the nurse, and I pushed Mrs. Elbock’s bed into the antechamber, through the doorway, and up to the machine.

“On the count of three,” Heggy said.

We lifted Merritt and set her on the table. Dave slid the table further into the machine until Merritt’s head was buried in the doughnut hole.

“Shouldn’t you lock it in place?” the nurse asked.

“Nah, it’s alright.” Dave waved his hand dismissively and then glanced at Merritt. “This patient’s out cold. She’s not going anywhere.”

All of us backed out into the antechamber. Dave sat down by the control terminal and went to work, his fingers darting across the touchscreen of the built-in console. Clicked, whirrs, buzzes and chirps filled the machine room as the device initiated its scan of Merritt’s head. Even with the dividing wall in the way, the noise the thing made was loud enough to startle. I yelped softly. Despite all the years of familiarization, I hadn’t quite managed to keep it from spooking me.

Heggy and I watched the console screens on the wall from over Dave’s shoulders, awaiting the appearance of cross-sections of Merritt’s cerebrum.

The screen flashed. Monochrome static danced across the glass.

A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

“What the hell?” Dave furrowed his brow and pursed his lips. He tapped the screen, but to no avail.

Suddenly, the table suddenly slid out from the machine, pushed by an unseen force. Shocked, the nurse let out a yelp even louder than mine. We all stared, not knowing what to make of it. A second later, the screen went back to normal.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“It looks like the machine is processing something, but whatever it is, it’s having a difficult time handling it,” Dave said. “Lemme go take a look.” He got up from his seat and walked through the dividing wall. The nurse followed him, while Heggy and I stayed behind.

On the other side of the glass, Dave and the nurse slid the table back into the machine, taking care not to jostle Merritt. After inspecting things for a bit, Dave leaned down and pushed the latches that locked the table in place. Then he turned to me and said, “Hey, Doc, press the Run Scan button on the terminal screen, would’ya?”

The acid feeling that had been brewing in my stomach ever since Heggy and I had set foot in Ward R started squirming about. My pulse raced. Obviously, I was under quite a bit of stress at the moment, but… I couldn’t shake the bad feeling in my gut.

The past twenty-four hours had been pretty darn crazy. There was no reason to think things would change anytime soon.

“I…” my voice trailed off, and when I continued, it came out as a mutter. “I don’t think I should do that.”

I breathed slightly easier. A feeling of genre-savviness flowed through my arms as I held the back of Dave’s chair. Of course, real life wasn’t like genre fiction, but that didn’t mean genre fiction didn’t have worthwhile lessons for us to learn.

Insistent, Dave waved his hand. “No, it’s fine,” he said. “The machine’s emissions aren’t dangerous. Not at these levels.”

Both Dave and the nurse stood a couple feet in front of the edge of the table.

“That wasn’t what I meant,” I said.

“Just press it, would’ya?”

Begrudgingly, I complied.

So much for my savviness.

This wasn’t surprising. Savviness was not my forté.

As I pressed the button, the touchscreen was warmer to the touch than I thought it would be. The MR beeped optimistically as it thrummed back to life. And this time, the scan went through.

The sagittal and cross-sectional scans of Merritt’s brain were coming in, filling the display screen with their psychedelic monochrome. An MRI did not give us a portrait of a living mind; no technology in the world could do that. Instead, an MRI presented snapshots of the physical mind, taken slice by slice, and displayed in monochrome, the brighter the pixels, the denser the object. Skulls and bones were stark white; empty spaces were patches of darkness. Within the skull’s white walls, a healthy human brain would have been a puddle of pale gray lightning, fringed in a darker gray, like a giant neuron, only without any organelles Diseased portions of the brain frequently appeared as of discolored spots, black or white; black representing empty space—common in neurodegenerative disorders; white representing everything from a tumor to a hemorrhage.

But, what I saw here?

“What in the world…?” I muttered.

I craned forward, grimacing in shock. What I saw in Merritt’s brain defied all logic. It stole my breath, and pushed my heart against my chest.

She really should have been dead.

There were serpents in Merritt’s body. They interwove like mating earthworms, twisted and knotted as they spiraled up toward her brain. Bleach-white filaments sprouted all across Merritt’s spinal column, planting their roots inside her flesh. And her head? The cross-sectional images showed blooms of white lightning that flashed against a backdrop of Night. Darkness flowed through her white mind in intricate, runic patterns; a fractal labyrinth; an alien scream, given flesh. There was something hypnotic about it. Its depths seemed endless, folding and refolding, white on black on white on black. The patterns etched into my vision, haunting it like a ghost of the sun.

Heggy leaned in over my shoulder. “Break the Tablets…” she whispered.

Then sound exploded in my ears.

The console’s speakers blasted out an impossible wail, the screams of a thousand lifetimes as they passed from one end of oblivion to the other. Distortions rippled across the screen. Something burned, filling the room with an acrid stench.

The MRI clicked and thumped. It rollicked. The screen’s distortions fluttered into a crescendo as an unseen force slid out the table and picked up Dave and the nurse and flung them across the room like twigs in the wind, slamming into the wall with an impact that rattled the glass.

Heggy gasped; I screamed.

The MRI bellowed. It clanged and shrieked.

Neither Dave nor the nurse fell. The force held the two of them there, pinning them to the wall like insects; dying insects, limbs a-twitch. I slammed my hand onto the terminal’s Abort Scan icon so hard, my palm stung. The MRI’s rumblings cut off, and the two bodies fell, hitting the linoleum floor with a pair of heavy thuds. Heggy ran into the machine room as fast as she could, rushing to their sides.

They weren’t moving.

I slammed the bright red Emergency button on the nearest wall-mounted console and then darted out into the hall. I yelled at the top of my lungs.

“Help!”