Nine Perfect Strangers

Yao had worried that it was perhaps too subtle, but what did it matter? The code-breaking wasn’t integral to their transformations. If the guests couldn’t break the code within the hour, they would let them out and lead them straight to the dining room for platters of fresh fruit and organic, sugar-free hot chocolate for breakfast. Yao had been looking forward to that part, imagining how everyone’s faces would light up as he, Masha and Delilah triumphantly entered the dining room, plates aloft. People would clap, he’d thought.

Yao had eaten a nectarine after his own psychedelic therapy session, and he could still remember the sensation of his teeth sinking into that sweet flesh.

Once they’d eaten, the group was to share what they’d learned through their experiences. After that, beautiful hardbound journals would be handed out, so that everyone could write down how they planned to integrate what they’d learned about themselves into their lives back home.

But nothing was going according to plan.

It felt like it had first gone off track with Heather’s unexpected question, ‘Have you been medicating us?’, which meant that Masha’s presentation of the treatment had begun on a defensive note, although she’d responded brilliantly, even under attack. People had got so angry, as if they truly believed something sinister was going on, when this was all for their benefit.

Yao had checked and rechecked the dosages, the possible side effects, the guests’ medical histories, their daily blood tests. There should have been only positive outcomes. He had checked everyone’s vital signs throughout the night. Nothing had gone wrong. There had been no unexpected side effects. Napoleon had become agitated, but Yao had given him a dose of lorazepam and he’d calmed down.

It was true that the therapy side of it, from Yao’s perspective at least, had been a little clunky. There was a disappointing banality to some of the insights the guests experienced, especially when compared to his own transcendent revelations. But Masha had been thrilled. After all the guests had fallen asleep, she’d locked the door of the meditation studio, flushed with success.

They had not imagined this.

As the time had passed, both Yao and Delilah had begun to say, ‘I think we should let them out. Or give them a clue.’

But Masha was convinced that they would work it out. ‘This is essential to their rebirthing,’ she’d said. ‘They need to fight their way out like a baby squeezes its way out of the birth canal.’

Delilah had made a small sound like a cough or a snort.

‘We have given them so many hints,’ Masha kept saying. ‘Surely they are not so stupid.’

The problem was that the longer they left them locked up, the hungrier and angrier and stupider they got.

‘Even if they do work it out,’ said Yao now, ‘I think their primary emotion will still be anger.’

‘You may be right,’ said Masha. She shrugged. ‘We may need to be more creative going forward. Let us see what happens.’

Yao

saw himself on that chair, his small, pudgy hand reaching for the pot of boiling water.

‘Look!’ said Masha. She pointed at the screen. ‘Finally. We have progress.’

chapter fifty-five

Frances

Frances and Tony sat next to each other in companionable silence. Most people were sitting now, except for Napoleon, who paced constantly. No-one was attempting to decode the security lock of the cellar door.

Someone hummed ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’. Frances thought it was Napoleon. She sang the words in her head along with him: Up above the world so high, Like a diamond in the sky.

She thought of the night of the starlight meditation and her sleigh ride across the starry sky with Gillian. Lars had been singing ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ before. That was the song that had been playing when she first lay down on the stretcher.

She mentally listed the other songs that had played through the headphones.

‘Vincent’.

‘When You Wish Upon a Star’.

Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight Sonata’.

They all related to stars or the sky or the moon.

What had Masha said last night? Something like: All your life, you’ve been looking down. You have to look up.

‘I think we’re meant to look up,’ she said. She got to her feet.