Free This Mortal Coil by Logan Thomas Snyder

awaiting their arrival. “Welcome,” he intoned mirthlessly, his accent unplaceable. “Dr. Valda will see you now. Please, follow me.”
    If their escort was at all concerned by the fact they had been prepared to violently storm the building just moments earlier, he concealed it well. Instead, he turned his back on them, stepping with precise, measured movements down the length of the hall. Not once did he look back to confirm they followed in his wake. Their curiosity, he knew, would propel them forward soon enough.
    Willem and Theresa exchanged glances. “After you,” she said. He nodded, starting after the man. The halls he led them through were bare and unadorned, marked by an institutional sameness threatening to rob them of time and direction. Intersecting corridors branched off every few meters, all distinctly indistinct, yet still their path remained straight as an arrow. He was leading them to the very nerve center of the facility.
    At last, their escort brought them to a halt before a massive set of frosted glass doors. Pushing them open, he clicked his heels sharply and announced, “Ladies and gentlemen, Dr. Eugenie Valda.”  
    Eugenie Valda sat behind a desk of polished obsidian as cold and black as her eyes. The rest of her features proved no less striking. Even seated she was statuesque and willowy, with a straight, narrow face and sharply accented cheekbones set around an aquiline nose. She made a clucking sound behind pursed, bloodless lips, standing to inspect them more closely. For several moments, she and the disheveled, confused members of the company stood staring at one another like mismatched reflections before she fixed her iron-hewn gaze upon Willem. “Amazing.” She smiled coolly. “I had always imagined you to be quite dashing in your youth, Dr. Morgenstern, and here before me stands the proof.”
    Willem narrowed his eyes, swallowing uncomfortably. She had a peculiar way of directing her voice to the side while she addressed him, as if in fact she wasn’t at all. “My name is Willem.”
    “As you say,” Dr. Valda replied. “Though I imagine that will likely be the cause of some consternation, will it not, Dr. Morgenstern?”
    Willem eyed her warily when into the room stepped a man who was unmistakably himself, though a great many years advanced. White hair, whited eyes, withered complexion—yet beyond the mask of age the man was Willem down to the quick. “Oh, how you flatter me, Dr. Valda. My goodness, but he is a handsome fellow, isn’t he?” Willem the Elder said with a rattling chortle as he came to stand before his younger self in the flesh.
    “Quite,” agreed Dr. Valda, smirking tweely.
    “What the absolute fuck?” Theresa asked. Apparently the resemblance was as uncanny to her as it was to him.
    “And you would be Theresa, of course.” Willem— Dr. Morgenstern —eyed her lecherously, reaching out as if to stroke her cheek with the backs of his fingers.
    “Try it, you wrinkly old fuck,” she snapped, stepping back and swinging her rifle up in place of her scowling face, “and I guarantee it’ll be the last happy memory you have.”
    Dr. Morgenstern sighed, shaking his head sadly. “I fear we shall find them quite uncooperative in their current state,” he lamented, turning away with the slowness of such advanced age. “Best to sedate them now and be done with it. Do please initiate the pulse, Dr. Valda, and see them transported to Ward C for further evaluation.”
    Before any of them could react—before they could say so much as a single word—Dr. Valda tripped the device that sent them all into the most violent, mind-bending seizures. Dropped were their rifles and their bodies, the latter thrashing about on the floor in a most undignified, uncontrollable fashion. A host of masked figures filed into the room a moment later, stripping the company of their ill-gotten arms and uniforms in preparation for the journey to Ward C and beyond.

    Willem was center