Extracted - Chapter 11 – Round One and Round Two – Part 2 of 2

 

Extracted

By Karen Singer

 

Chapter 11 – Round One and Round Two – Part 2 of 2

 

It was stupid and annoying.  Just one more annoying thing in this stupid new life Stephen found himself in.  Just because he was stuck in this lousy little girl’s body, everyone thought that he really was a twelve year old girl, and that he had to be treated like one.  He was seventeen years old!  And he wasn’t a little girl, he was a boy, and a big strong one at that.  He had a driver’s license and his own car.  He was going to be a senior in high school.  He could take care of himself!  But no.  Just because he looked like a little girl they had to treat him like one.

Instead of being left in this room to wait alone, Emily had to come with them to babysit while his fake mother was in talking to the doctor.  Why?  They had both talked to the doctor a couple of times now already, including this morning.  Now they were back here again.

He knew for a fact that Emily wasn’t exactly happy about having to keep an eye on him as well.  Emily made no bones about the fact that she didn’t like him and wanted nothing to do with him.  All just because he had stolen the real Nancy’s body.  He hadn’t stolen anything.  Someone had stolen his body, not to mention his entire life!

The thought of his life being stolen made him realize something else.  What if the police found his real body…dead!  He hadn’t thought about that before.  Was he…in reality…dead?  That thought scared him to death because it would mean that he could never get back to his real body.  Not that he had the slightest clue how he had wound up in this body.

And why a little girl?  Somebody sure didn’t like  him.  Who the hell had he pissed off?  He didn’t know, but he’d sure like to find out.  Finding out by himself though didn’t seem likely.  Not as long as they insisted on treating him like a little girl all the time, just because he had Nancy’s little girl body.

It was all stupid!  And annoying!

 

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Doctor Montcliff walked into the small conference room that was in the clinic she worked out of.  Usually, the room was used for meetings between the clinic staff members.  Today, it held outsiders.  “Hello everyone,” she said politely as she walked in and took the seat at the head of the conference table, not her usual seat for the meetings held here.  In fact, it might be more appropriate for Wanda Stiller to be sitting here since she was the wife of the congressman and would have the most power of anyone at the table.  But Wanda had taken another seat already.  She didn’t see Nancy or her sister and guessed they were in one of the other offices somewhere else in the building where they wouldn’t be seen.

“Thank you all for coming,” she told everyone.  Other than Wanda, she didn’t know the two other people in the room.  She was guessing they weren’t the one person she’d like to be there.  The one person she needed eventually to get to.  There was one other person she wanted access to eventually as well.  Looking around though, she had no doubt at all that neither of those two people were here.

“I’m Isabella Montcliff,” she told the two newcomers.  “I’m the psychiatrist who has been asked to look into…”  She looked over at Wanda Stiller.  “Can I use names here?”

Wanda seemed to consider that for a moment, then agreed.  “Yes,” she said.  “Do you know who these people are?”

“No,” Montcliff admitted.  “I was just getting to that.”  She looked at the other woman in the room.

“FBI Special Agent Ellen Rosenberg,” Agent Rosenberg told her.

Montcliff looked at the man.

“Philadelphia Detective Nolan,” Nolan introduced himself.

Montcliff looked to Wanda.  “Do you want your identity kept a secret?”

Wanda shook her head.  “Agent Rosenberg already met me once at the hospital.  She turned to the man who was the Philadelphia detective.  “I’m Wanda Stiller.  I’m the wife of Congressman Michael Stiller.  And it was our daughter Nancy that was kidnapped.”

Detective Nolan’s eyebrows went up a bit, but he wasn’t that surprised.  Everything pointed to someone important.  “Nice to meet you,” he replied.

“As you can imagine,” Wanda continued.  “Our need for strict security about what has happened needs to be everyone’s utmost concern.  And that includes you detective.  Can you assure us that you won’t mention anything about who we are to anyone else?”

“As much as I can,” Nolan admitted.  “I have a team who are helping me investigate this.”

“Of course,” Wanda agreed.  “Just please, try to keep our names out of things as much as possible.  It’s very important for us.”

Nolan nodded.  “I’ll try.”

Wanda nodded and looked again to Montcliff so she could continue.

“Right!” Doctor Montcliff said.  She looked at Rosenberg.  “I was kind of hoping I’d get a chance to speak with you.”

“Why is that?” Rosenberg asked.

Doctor Montcliff nodded and sat back in her seat, trying to figure out how to begin.  “What I’m going to be telling you, is going to sound like the most far-fetched thing on earth.  And believe me, you’re going to be right, it is the most far-fetched thing on earth.  The entire thing has to be some kind of hoax or something made-up, except that it appears to be absolutely real.  Which, should be impossible!”

“What are you talking about?” Rosenberg asked since the doctor was doing nothing but beating around the bush with nonsense.

“Have some patience!  Please,” Wanda told her quickly.  “I can’t believe it either, except that I do.  I really do.”

Rosenberg felt annoyed.  This woman was trying to admonish her?  Get real.  She was the FBI!  Still, she nodded and looked to the doctor, albeit impatiently.

“I was asked by Congressman Stiller’s representatives to look into his daughter’s little problems.”

“Problems?” Rosenberg asked.

“Yes.  Problems,” the doctor confirmed.

“What kind of problems?”

“Mental problems.”

“From the abduction?  Why weren’t we told?”

Before the doctor could answer, Wanda leaned forward toward the FBI agent.  “Do you want to leave this meeting right now and we’ll have someone else assigned, or sit back and learn something?”

Rosenberg stared Wanda down.  “Who the hell do you think you are?  I’m an agent with the FBI.  I’m the one trying to find out what happened to your daughter!”

Wanda didn’t bat an eyelash.  “And if you can’t shut your mouth and listen for a while, I can make one phone call and have you removed from this case and someone else put in charge!  That’s who I am!”

Rosenberg was angry.  Unfortunately, this woman was right.  As the wife of a U.S. congressman, she probably could do that.  Completely frustrated, she sat back and angrily glared at the doctor, who couldn’t seem to move along with the information.

“Are we done?” Doctor Montcliff asked.

“We’re done!” Wanda replied firmly, giving another glance at Rosenberg.

“As I said,” Doctor Montcliff continued.  “I was asked to look into Nancy Stiller’s mental problems.  Problems, the likes of which I’ve never seen or heard of before.”  She glanced at Rosenberg and knew that the FBI agent wanted to say something else, but was purposely trying to keep her mouth shut.

“Now listen carefully to what I’m about to say,” Montcliff told them all as she leaned forward.  “Somehow, twelve year old Nancy Stiller has completely lost her entire identity, personality, and memories, and all that has been replaced with the very real memories, personality, and identity of someone else.  That someone else being a seventeen year old boy named Stephen Marsh, who claims his father is the District Attorney for Philadelphia.”

“What?” Detective Nolan exclaimed, now fully interested.  “How the hell…”

The doctor shook her head.  “I don’t know.  But trust me, Nancy has absolutely no knowledge of her previous life at all, yet she can go on for hours about Stephen’s life, including details of football games, his sex life with his girlfriend, and a thousand other things.  Unbelievably, she knows it all!  But…she doesn’t know one single thing about Nancy.  Not one!  It’s as if Stephen Marsh is simply living in Nancy Stiller’s body, and I don’t know where Nancy is.  I can however make some wild guesses.”

Rosenberg shook her head.  “That has to be the weirdest fantasy I’ve ever heard!”

“Yes.  It is.”

“But it’s real!” Wanda added.  “Too real.  Frighteningly real.  I know.  I know it for a fact, because Nancy is my daughter.  And that…thing…is living in my daughter’s body, and I don’t know what to do about it.”

“Try an exorcism,” Rosenberg threw out sarcastically.

“Believe me, we’ve thought of that,” Wanda admitted.  “We’ve seriously considered it.”

“You said you had some thoughts on what happened to Nancy?” Nolan asked the psychiatrist.

“Yes,” Montcliff replied.  “As far as I can see, and believe me, since I first started working with Nancy a few days ago, I’ve done a lot of looking into things.  Nancy, her personality and memories, are either gone completely, as if she’s dead.”  She paused a moment then continued.  “Or…what I’d really like to know…since Stephen’s identity is now living in Nancy’s body, is Nancy’s identity living in Stephen’s body?”  She looked directly at the Philadelphia detective.

“I have no idea,” Nolan admitted.  “I never heard anything about that.  Other than the one time I talked with the boy in the hospital after he finally gained consciousness, I never bothered to talk with him again.  But I can tell you that he certainly knew who he was when I saw him.”

“Nancy too,” Rosenberg told everyone.  “She was definitely herself when I spoke with her.”

“Yes.  I’m sure they both were,” Doctor Montcliff agreed.  “After the first time I met with Nancy, I did a simple internet search to find out if there really was someone named Stephen Marsh.  To my surprise, I was able to confirm not only that he existed, but the first thing I found were the news articles saying that he had been abducted and then later returned at the same time as Nancy.  It just seemed like there were too many identical circumstances for it to be completely separate from Nancy’s case, so I asked Wanda here to look into what the FBI had discovered about both cases.”

“And we’re just catching up now,” Rosenberg admitted.  “We never made the connection.”

“Neither did we,” Nolan admitted.

“Since then,” the doctor continued, “in the little time I’ve had, I’ve made other…let’s say inferences, since I have no direct proof…yet!  For the sake of no better explanation, let’s simply look at this as something that someone did to those kids.”

She paused for a moment to let that sink in, then continued.  “They were both abducted at nearly the same time, although succeeding nights.  They were both drugged and kept that way, keeping them unconscious the entire time.  They were both found on the same night outside of restaurants.  I don’t know anything about Stephen’s condition, other than that he was found unconscious, but Nancy complained heavily about her head and the room around her constantly spinning around, keeping her in great distress.  She also complained about a lot of confusion.  Confusion that we now know grew worse and worse the longer it went on, until there was no confusion at all anymore and her spinning head finally stopped.  All of Nancy’s memories were simply gone at that point, and the only identity that she knew, was Stephen.  A seventeen year old boy, stuck in a twelve year old girl’s body.  Completely bizarre!”

“You said someone did this!” Nolan noticed.

“For the sake of trying to at least think about it.  Yes.  I have no idea as to what really happened, but this is simply a framework for us to try and understand the entire situation better since it is such a complicated one.”

“How would someone do it?” Rosenberg asked.

“I haven’t a clue.  Despite all the science fiction shows, it should be impossible.  I can’t even imagine all the things someone would have to think of to extract everything from someone’s brain, store it in a computer somewhere, and then stick it all into someone else’s head.”

“And what if they install that identity into a number of people?” Rosenberg asked.

Montcliff shook her head.  “Thank you for making this entire nightmare worse.  I hadn’t even thought about that.”

“We’re talking about someone who could take someone with a brilliant mind and make a thousand copies of him,” Rosenberg explained.

“Or a psychopathic killer,” Nolan suggested.

Rosenberg nodded.  “That too, which would make it the world’s worst nightmare times ten!”

“Except we don’t know if that’s what really happened,” Montcliff reminded them.

“You’re the one who threw out the suggestion doctor,” Rosenberg told her.

“True.  I did.  But it was just a suggestion so we could all understand the situation.”

“Maybe it was too good a suggestion,” Rosenberg replied.

“One thing to keep in mind,” the doctor said, “is that this…process we’ll call it, for lack of anything better, is a gradual process.  It didn’t happen all at once.  Remember, Nancy was herself, then gradually grew more confused, until she was only Stephen.  We don’t know about the real Stephen.  But whoever did this was so confident of their process, that they were able to drop the kids off and let it continue happening right in front of everyone.  Which means that this couldn’t have been the first time they’ve done it.  Somewhere out there, there have to be others who have been put through this strange process as well.”

“Like we said,” Rosenberg replied, “adding to our nightmare.  Okay, we’ll keep it in mind.  Believe me!  My bosses in the FBI are going to have a fit!”

“Where do we go from here?” Nolan asked.

“First thing!” Doctor Montcliff said quickly.  “We don’t know if Stephen is exhibiting any psychological problems at all.  For all we know, he’s perfectly fine.  And believe me, I hope he is.  We’ve already got one too many headaches to handle.  However, if he is showing any problems at all, especially if they’re anything like the problems that Nancy has, I’d really like to talk to his doctor about it, and more importantly, I’d love to talk to Stephen as well.  These two cases are connected.  Having multiple doctors could be slowing any progress down.  Even though in other ways, multiple doctors might not be a bad idea.  I simply have questions that need answers.”

“And my daughter has problems that need…”  She shrugged.  “Answers may at least be a good place to start for her as well.”

“We all need answers,” Rosenberg agreed.  She turned to Nolan.  “The FBI is now taking the lead on your case.  You can continue to work it, but we’re going to be in charge.  Are you going back to Philly today?”

“It’s only a two-hour drive.”

“Then I’ll follow you down.  I need to interview the entire Marsh family, especially Stephen.”

“I’ll make some phone calls,” Nolan told her.  “Before we get back, I’ll try to have some answers on Stephen’s mental situation.”

“Perfect!” Rosenberg declared.  She looked around the table.  “Any more atomic bombs for us today?”

“Just that I’d really like to see the other patient,” Montcliff reminded her.

“Noted!” Rosenberg replied.  She nodded towards Wanda.  “Mrs. Stiller,” she said, saying goodbye.  She stood up and Nolan followed her out of the room.