Stamps bored him, and butterflies were too hard to catch, but inventor Maxwell J. Peabody was an avid collector of oddities, and of all he had collected, nothing ever truly satisfied him until he began collecting human minds.

He would leave world-ruling to other “mad scientists,” the lazy, ferret-stroking, cackling geriatrics who needed armies to feel good about themselves; perhaps Maxwell would dabble in world domination when he retired from his true calling: penetrating the individual human psyche.

To study it Maxwell was highly selective about the minds he captured for study, vetting subjects for their intelligence, creativity, and emotional insecurity. He preserved his minds in a sky-lit museum-like room on the topmost floor of his five story mountain home which seemed to absorb, rather than repel, the cold from the snow-swept grounds outside.

He had filled his “mind room” with carefully labeled glass cases where he kept remnants of his old collections, including his extinct beetle fossils, moon rocks, and octopus eyeballs, but most of his private museum contained minds now, each one confined to a glowing elevated round stand resembling a dinner plate.

Maxwell could see them, ghost-like human figures smiling adoringly at him from their circular stands as he passed. Others sat hunched and rocking back and forth, their knees bent upward, their interlocked hands cuffing their ankles, but he could see veiled pain in all of their eyes, even as they smiled at him.

Maxwell had made the minds visible with “Blue MINK,” a self-concocted metaphysical ink he had sprayed on the minds to reveal ghosted versions of themselves which he called “mind shadows.” Mind shadows were wispily transparent, and each was surrounded by a wavering blue outline. As ghosts were reputed to sometimes do, mind shadows could move small objects for short periods of time due to the energizing quality of the MINK, but mostly the “shadows” were just images.

However, instead of looking as they did in real life, his subjects looked the way they saw themselves. A skinny person could manifest as being fat, for example, and an elderly person could look twenty.

How the mind shadows looked changed for better or worse depending on how they saw themselves on any particular day. To his infinite delight, Maxwell could influence this change, and watching the daily flux of their appearance could be more mesmerizing than gazing at a lava lamp while stoned.

Right after entrapping his minds with his extraordinary invention, the Mind Extraction Machine, Maxwell set about conditioning his subjects to adore him, because where was the fun of being a mad scientist if you could not have your test subjects worship you as a god? And what better way to do that than by controlling minds?

Of course, minds did depend on brains – one reason Maxwell made sure not to kill the bodies upon mind extraction. Rather, he sought to preserve the metaphysical threads that united their minds with their bodies. The farther away from their bodies he pulled their minds, the thinner the thread linking them became, and the less communication got through. The mind shadows shifted into an almost perpetual dream state, processing any new stimuli sent from their bodies as vague and not quite real.

The extraction was not total. Maxwell left enough auto-control in their bodies for them to do what was needed for self-maintenance, like driving, eating, paying bills, and going to their slavish dead-end jobs. But their dreams, their secret hopes, and their imaginations, he took for himself to mold according to his liking.

Validation seekers were the best candidates. To “capture” minds he baited sleeping subjects with compliments so honeyed that they came to his Mind Extraction cage of their own free will.

Thus, once possessed and confined in the museum, his mind shadows did not even need bars on their “cages,” as long as he fed them enough compliments, peppering in a little criticism here and there, so that the praise would not lose its power.

The mind shadows were toys to Maxwell, and he played with them as a child plays with dolls. Maxwell particularly enjoyed getting his subjects to change their careers, the aspect of their lives that consumed most of their time and attention.

He convinced some subjects to give up magnificent careers as singers to become accountants, and he persuaded accountants who loved their work to overthrow their careers for minimum wage jobs stacking grocery shelves or manufacturing styrofoam peanuts.

Sometimes he went into the city and followed the physical bodies of his subjects around to make sure the mind-to-body command link was working properly. He observed them as they ate lunch or went from their cars to their jobs, until he was satisfied that the “robot” bodies were obeying the orders he had given his mind shadows.

Of course, Maxwell did not give a damn what his subjects did for a living. He Just liked being the puppeteer who pulled the strings of his subjects so that they believed they were acting freely.

He was making outstanding progress with an 18 year old girl named Christine. When captured she had already been proficient enough as a painter to make a living at it, but he had more than half convinced her she was far more suited for a job cutting and styling hair.

She was insecure and craved approval more than anything, especially his approval, and her craving for affection shaped her mind shadow.

Like her real body, her shadow self had clear ivory skin and long blond hair, but there was a big difference; she looked dreadfully cold. Overall her skin had an anemic bluish pallor, except on her face where some chapping appeared as red blotches. Ice cycles had frozen parts of her hair into clumps. Her lips were the palest pink, and her elbows appeared sheathed in ice. What appeared to be frozen tears glimmered on her cheeks. There was lively warmth only in her eyes.

At least there had been at one time. Even her eyes were losing their life-like glimmer now. Her mind shadow was losing its personality, and soon it would become a dull and empty vessel just like her robotic real body. It was a shame that he would be forced to abandon her as he had his other exhausted experiments.

Controlling his subjects was both good and bad. The price of success for which Maxwell sometimes felt regretful was that it meant turning once vibrant and spontaneous creatures into tedious drones whose admiration was hardly worth having. After a while of being with Maxwell, his subjects became as predictable as the seasons, and just as jejune.

Christine was hurrying down that path until one day, when he thought she was fully under his power she began to act unpredictably. There were few things Maxwell hated more than unpredictability.

An alarm actually wailed from his computer, and Maxwell rushed to it to see what was wrong. He kept the computer in his museum to monitor the thoughts of his subjects, especially their thoughts about him. He made sure his subjects would always see a handsome photograph of his face every day along with the messages he sent them, and his computer would reveal how his image appeared when filtered through the eyes of his admirers; according to his plan, he had been elevated by his subjects, enlarged, haloed in light, and imbued with a divinely mysterious aura.

But when he came to Christine, he saw himself as a silhouette, a hazy shadow that kept blinking on and off. What did it mean? He checked her verbal thoughts, and sure enough, they confirmed his fears. “Where am I? Why can I not escape this damned circle?” Maxwell hurried to the circular elevated “cage” to get a closer look at the mind shadow in distress.

Christine was looking around the “museum” as if trying to get her bearings. All at once she closed her eyes tight, as if the sight were too much for her. After taking a deep breath, she went so still she looked like a mid-eastern guru, on her knees, her posture perfectly erect, and her movements perfectly controlled. She reached her slender, frost-bitten fingers toward the invisible outer circle of her cage, and seemed surprised when she could only reach them so far, considering no barrier was visible. She blinked several times and tried again.

Appearing to sense Maxwell looking at her, she turned a direct blue gaze on him.

Maxwell tensed. It was not unusual for subjects to look around, but they rarely did so with real curiosity. And while they sometimes gave him vague, adoring smiles, none of them had ever studied him like the girl was doing. Her blue-grey eyes appeared to scan every contour of his face. She seemed disarmingly…aware.

His heart accelerated as she looked straight at him. “Where am I?” she asked him, “and who are you? And what is this? She held up the hairstyling magazine called “Snipping Beauty” that he had left in her “cage” in an almost flat, gift-wrapped box with a spiraling red velvet ribbon on top.

Maxwell, a man of few words, was again taken off guard. To speak to one of his belongings, to reward it for questioning him seemed beneath his dignity. The rest of his subjects had regarded him as most behold a creature in a dream; they tended to be bleary-eyed and adoring, nothing more. Maxwell made a mental note to record the aberration of Christine in his experimentation log; he was nothing if not conscientious about his work.

Before he could get away, the girl repeated her question, “Where am I?” At first, the question came out as a whisper. Then she said it again, more insistently, her voice rising toward a frantic pitch, “Where am I?” She glanced at the last compliment message Maxwell had written on the text mirror and read it aloud, “I applaud your unselfish efforts to lend your artistic talents to the endlessly fascinating world of hairdressing.” She regarded the message with an expression of dismay.

The text mirror was one of four mirrors Maxwell had placed around Christine as he had with each of his other subjects. They were more than mirrors; they also served as monitors. One mirror displayed the compliments or criticisms Maxwell sent to subjects through his computer. Another showed videos extolling the careers he had chosen for his subjects, only instead of seeing real employees carrying out the jobs, his subjects saw themselves performing them with expressions of extreme bliss on their faces. Another mirror, their “dream mirror,” displayed their deepest wishes and most fanciful imaginings; it reflected their true longings, personalities, and aspirations.

For Maxwell the game was to get the control mirror and the dream mirror to match; for Christine that meant replacing her fantasies of being a painter with those of cutting hair. The final mirror contained an enlarged image of him, Maxwell, looking the way his subjects saw him at any particular moment, ideally haloed in divine light.

Maxwell decided to talk to the girl, lest his messages lose their power over her. Honesty, deliberately applied, could be powerful at times, he had noticed. “My name is Maxwell J. Peabody, and I am your god. You are part of my collection,” he said, “a fact that should make you most proud. I do not collect just anyone, you see, only interesting people with interesting dreams.”

“A collection?” Her voice sounded baffled, but he could tell his compliments had affected her, if only a little, by the way a blush touched the tops of her cheeks. However, it faded quickly. “Why do I feel so…disconnected? The compliments,” she looked around, “every day, so many compliments. I loved them at first, they felt good…they felt warm. But now…I wonder why I never asked why there were so many. I see other people here, yet I feel isolated.” Frantically she looked around. “I remember I used to have a room with an easel with a palette full of oil paints. And brushes. Where did they all go?” She looked down at her circular platform and drew in a sharp gasp. “And how did I get here…on this big cake plate? Oh my God, am I an object in a museum? Is this a dream?”

Maxwell did not respond. It was obviously time to “reline” her cage with praise the way you might reline a parakeet cage. Maxwell hurried to his main computer in the center of the room. The kind of awareness the girl was expressing must have been due to a fluke or a glitch.

He drew out his dossier on her, the one he had compiled when he was doing research on her to determine her viability as a subject. She had come from a household dominated by abusive parents. The had employed an unusual form of punishment; whenever she had “misbehaved,” they had locked her outside their house to suffer in the brutally cold wind and snow where her toes and fingers had gone numb.

Where she had lived, it was almost always cold, white blanketing the ground, fir trees, and rooftops. She had gone through her life obsessively collecting warm items, symbolic and literal: space heaters, quilts, cats, teddy bears, and varieties of hot chocolate. As for getting back into the house as a child, her parents had always given her an unjust condition: Christine was forced to make a self-degrading apology, even when she had done nothing wrong.

She had tried to rebuild her self-esteem by being a good artist, a painter. She had spent every free moment painting and there was nothing she liked better than praise for her work.

In doing research Maxwell had collected a few of her paintings and hung them on his office wall: leafy mountain landscapes with moons too large to be real, portraits of children with troubled eyes, and ferocious animals that appeared to be charging toward the viewer. One of her paintings was particularly striking: a baby bundled in a pink blanket lying alone on a twilit snow-swept landscape.

Her most recent paintings were the best because two years ago, she had endured the death of her younger brother, the only person she had loved and been close to. Her suffering during that period had brought her artistic talents to a peak, and her paintings had begun, modestly, to sell, presaging a vibrant career.

She had appeared to be a worthy acquisition; he liked his subjects to be dreamers, after all.

He pattered out a bunch of fresh compliments on his keyboard. “You have a flawless sense of design, Christine, and an imagination bigger than the universe.” He smiled at his hyperbole, “qualities that would delight any customer seeking to improve the appearance of their hair.” He smiled and typed out the coup de grace designed to hammer her into full compliance. “While certainly creative. your paintings nevertheless reveal a lack of emotional depth; therefore, applying your creativity toward becoming a professional painter would be selfish folly at best. Let roller brushes be your paintbrushes, Christine. Let hair dye be your paints. Make the world more beautiful, one person at a time. Be a hairdresser, Christine, and my favor will be eternally yours.”

But the girl was not looking at his messages; she was sitting on the heels of her white sneakers, knees still bent, stretching her arms, trying to straighten them on either side, toward the invisible edges of the “cage,” testing, observing, studying, and perhaps wondering, if the cage was so uncomfortable, why she was still there.

When she glimpsed the march of new messages, she turned, flinching, toward the mirror displaying them. Wide-eyed, she read them aloud. At one point a slight smile touched her lips. Maxwell could tell by her sudden pallor when her gaze landed on the critical remarks at the end.

Maxwell expected to see her attractiveness fade when she saw the last message. Instead she frowned thoughtfully, bit her lip, and turned her head to look directly at Maxwell. “Operant conditioning,” she murmured. “Operant and classical.”

Her response surprised him. “Excuse me?”

“These messages, they come to me every day. I expect them. I hope for them. I thought they meant something, but now I know: To you I am neither an artist nor a hair dresser, but Pavlov’s dog. How long have you been training me to drool at the sound of your bell? You do resemble him, you know. Pavlov. Are you him, reincarnated? Or a zombie version, risen from the dead?”

“Pavlov? No, my name is…”

“B.F. Skinner? Another big conditioning maven. I learned about him in my tenth grade psychology class. He was a psychologist who experimented with operant conditioning, manipulating animal behavior through rewards and punishment. To control someone, intermittent rewards mixed with punishment are far more effective than rewards alone, especially when neither are predictable. You applied his insights perfectly. On me. Using praise as bribes, you pushed me to study hair dressing, an occupation I would never have considered by myself. You gave me generous rewards at first only to later withhold them in order to punish me. Your praise sends me soaring, but you have to criticize and punish me, too, so I will struggle hard to please you. Your game is like a Vegas slot machine; one I will never win.”

Maxwell felt the muscles in his jaw ache with tension. “Now, Christine, what astounding accusations. Do you hear yourself? You are overthinking. I am your friend.”

Christine looked at him as she were regarding a mythical sea monster. “Before, whenever I would see you pass me beneath the sky light, your face shadowed by your cowl, my heart would beat faster. I took it all so seriously, but all along, you were just conditioning me. Who are you? Why am I here? And why do you, a scientist, care if I cut hair?”

Frantic, Maxwell returned to his computer keyboard and pattered out more praise to be displayed on the monitors but when he glanced at Christine, she seemed oblivious to him. She raised her arms again, slowly, by her sides, a human bird testing outstretched wings, trying to straighten them fully as she lifted them, unbending her elbows, struggling to move her arms past the invisible wall, and looking perplexed when she found her hands still blocked.

“Why is it so hard,” She spoke with deep despair, “when there is nothing here to hold me? That is the question I keep asking myself, the question that woke me up: Why am I still here when it hurts to stay, why can I not just leave? And now I know. The praise gives the illusion of warmth.” She dropped her arms, then made a fist with her right hand, and struck out against the invisible barrier. Her fist could not penetrate the wall. She dropped her arms and stared at Maxwell in total confusion, tears clinging to her eyelashes.

Looking at her, Maxwell felt a great measure of relief. It was wonderful; she had guessed what he was doing, yet still found it difficult to escape the compliment trap he had woven since the day he had collected her. He was more powerful than he knew.

She squirmed in her small, cramped circular space. Her virtual hair was messed up, she looked disheveled in her jeans and wrinkled Van Gogh “Starry Night” t-shirt. Yesterday she had been wearing a black hair styling smock. What had happened? “Was none of it real?” she asked. “Everything you said about my flawless sense of design? Was it all a lie to keep me here, inside your circle, or web, or cage, or whatever this is? To make me cut hair, just because you said so?”

Despite his reluctance to lower himself by engaging in conversation with a test subject, Maxwell was curious enough to ask a question. “If you think I am trying to hurt you, why do you stay?”

She had a faraway look. “I only wish I knew. Why do I stay? This cage is cramped. I feel lonely. And so cold. For months now, the highlight of my day has been your messages, especially at first when they were all praise, but then the criticism came, and then the silence. I have been confused ever since. But with all of that, it is hard for me to leave.”

The mad scientist enjoyed an electrical surge of hope. She was still his. Even knowing everything, she would continue striving to please him for the single ray of warmth his praise represented. He had known his methods of control were effective, but not nearly as effective as they were. He could not wait until she began her hair dressing career; he would take photographs of her cutting hair and post them on the walls of his trophy room.

The girl continued to press her pale palm against the invisible wall. “All my life,” she said, “I wanted to be liked. As a kid, my parents were always telling me I would either grow up to be a homeless bag lady or a criminal, just a loser of some sort. More than anything I craved their approval. And when I came here, you gave me what I had always wanted, for a little while, the warmth, the validation. But then the criticism began, with the little bits of praise stirred in like croutons in a salad, and I stopped having fun. I want to leave now.” She looked into his eyes. “Why can I not leave?”

Maxwell could not help but grin. How much more satisfying to be admired by a thinking person, someone who knew he was controlling them, yet still stayed. “You will remain with me. Like you said, where else will you go? The warmth you sensed was no illusion, Christine. I do treasure you. You are perhaps the most interesting object I possess, although I only just realized it. To question me, yet still remain. You have the ability to fight and defy me, yet still you submit. I have to say, I like it.”

She looked at him with tortured confusion. “Some part of me keeps saying, stay here, what is the matter with styling hair if it makes Maxwell beam at me? I forget to ask the question that really matters: Why do you want me to style hair? What difference could it possibly make to you? What is wrong with me?” She shook her head vigorously, as if trying to dislodge a leaf from her icy hair.

“Nothing is wrong with you, Christine. Quite the contrary: You are my favorite possession. At the moment, of course.” He decided to push his luck with honesty since it had been so rewarding the first time. “That does not mean you will never be replaced as my favorite. You see, I am easily bored. If you defy me, you will be punished beyond what you can imagine, but the more I control you, the more you obey me, the less interested in you I will become. Eventually your eyes will go dull and your movements will turn sluggish. You will lose every quality that made you interesting to me. You will become a lifeless shell, if that.” He looked at her with pain in his eyes, as if he expected sympathy. “Such is the trial of my existence, that all good things must pass, in time. You may enjoy my full attention for now, for as long as your dreams continue to interest me, and for as long as you are able to obey me without boring me too much.”

Christine glared at him.

“Now, now, stop that,” Maxwell went on. “Even after I drain you of your innermost essence, I may still allow you to serve as my top minion. My other assistant, Mongrel Jim, is loyal to a fault but, I must confess, he is not the brightest light in the sky. Some tasks require more…finesse…than he is able to offer. Even with your innermost essence drained, you are likely to make more intelligent decisions than he.”

She shot a burning glare at him. “Staying here with you is wrong. Your warmth is fake. I want to be…independent.” The last word may have meant to come out as a call of defiance, but it tapered into something more like a mewl. “All the time I tried to please my parents, I knew better. Even when I was little and they locked me out of the house, in the cold, I tried to deny the truth: that they were far colder than any snow, sleet, or wind could ever be. I should have braved the physical cold, I should have escaped, for even the slightest shred of hope of finding a place with people who had real pulses.”

“When I turned thirteen, I knew I needed to move on, to stop seeking hugs from ice burgs, and to make my own decisions without apologizing or asking their permission.”

“I am not denying you independence, Christine,” Maxwell said. “It is fully within your grasp. You should be able to support yourself nicely once you become a proficient hair dresser. Stand on your own, as it were.”

She glared at him. “I do not want to become a hair dresser, nor your minion, and if you begin draining me of anything, particularly my essence, I will bite your hand.”

“Oh please Christine. Be realistic. Your last couple of paintings were no better than the scrawling of a child. Do be practical. Grandiosity does not become you.”

“Grandiosity? Me?” She scalded him with her glare. “You called yourself a god.” She wrinkled her forehead thoughtfully and said, “Your compliments seduced me into adoring you. but all along, your praise was just a handle for you to swing me by. Nothing more. I feel so stupid.”

“Oh, come, Christine. Do you honestly think…?”

“I need to throw it all away, all of the fluff, all the denial, all of the delusion, I need to let it all go, and if I die, at least I will die as myself, as an artist, not a hair dresser, not your pawn, not your minion, and certainly not your worshipful devotee.”

She knocked one of the rectangular mirrors from its metal stand. With her opposite hand, she struck down another. She hit the one in front of her so hard, it went flying off the circular stand and shattered on the floor. She turned around and swept the one behind her from the platform, until all four mirrors had fallen, including one with a video of herself smiling radiantly as she snipped the white locks from an elderly woman. But once the mirrors were all lying flat, Christine looked not victorious, but deeply sad.

“Ha! I knew it!” Maxwell said. “You worship me. You will never leave,” Maxwell said. “What are you planning to do? Go back to your old life trying to please your thankless parents?”

“I don’t know,” she said, “but I’ve lost something, Maxwell J. Pavlov. And I need to find it.”

“Oh please, Christine, cut the puerile antics. Call me by my real name and give up chasing unicorns. Leave me and you will be going back to a life full of loneliness and insecurity. Stay here, I can protect you from the winds of life, the unbearable chill of reality. I can liberate you from having to make choices. I know you. I know what is best for you. Do you have any idea how high my I.Q. Is?”

Christine said. “I want freedom.”

“Making decisions is not freedom, Christine; it is a terrible burden and the biggest source of anxiety there is. I know you are upset but I am not the enemy. Life is the enemy. Uncertainty is the enemy. I am your helper. Besides,” he made his eyes as sincere as he could, “it is lonely being superior to everyone else, and I have taken a fancy to you. I like you Christine. Perhaps I even need you.”

“Ha! You need me? Sorry. You will have to cut your own hair. Or get Mongrel Jim to do it.” With renewed determination, Christine had begun reaching her right arm out again, again and again. She sent a defiant glare toward Maxwell as her hand at last slipped past one of the fallen mirrors and shot through the invisible barrier. Maxwell tensed in alarm as she tried with her other arm, which also went through. Christine turned in her circle, unfolded her legs, swung them around, then stepped onto the checkered museum floor. “I am going to leave you now, Maxwell. I want my body back.”

“Your body?” Maxwell sighed wearily. “I am terribly disappointed in you Christine. So shallow. It is your mind and your personality that matter. They are why I like you, why you should like yourself. Besides, you said you adored me. Worshiped me.” Maxwell grinned.

Christine crossed the floor of the room to the iron door on the back wall made of wide, chunky grey stones. She tried grabbing the brass door knob before realizing that her non-corporeal self was too weak to move it. For a moment she appeared perplexed, but then she took a step back from the door and fixed a solid gaze on it.

In its center, a swirling vortex appeared as the mouth of a tunnel which allowed a view to the world outside the door. A powerful wind gusted into the room, tossing in a wild flurry of snow and sleet. With a gasp she stumbled backward, but she did not fall. The wind at surface level roared and the wind far above made high, plaintive whistles in the soaring white-capped cedar trees.

“There, Christine, see? The weather on this mountain is terrible. Darkness is falling. Are you not afraid?”

With wide, child-like eyes, Christine looked at him. “Scared, yes,” She turned her head and focused on the stormy drama outside. Slowly, she reached a hand beyond the opening, seeming to test the impact of wind and snow on her. Then, relaxing, she released a slow, tremulous breath. “My brother used to try to comfort me whenever I felt sad in our drafty old house. He would say, there is beauty beyond these walls, Christine, warmth beyond the snow, and I think he was right. If I can just move through the snow storm and let it do its worst, another world is waiting for me on the other side, a place with real warmth, and not just the light of illusion.” She took a step toward the spinning window.

Maxwell felt an odd sensation grip his chest; panic? He could not lose his possession as soon as he had come to value it, not like this. Surely there was a way to stop her, but all his gratification rested upon his acquisitions choosing to stay. Maxwell was not one to employ violence; using force seemed so…rude, so crass, so beneath him. Quickly he crossed the room and stepped in front of her. “Stop, Christine. You adore me. You said so yourself.”

She stared at Maxwell. “Adore you? If any part of me does, it’s not why you think. All my life I have sought approval, and all my life I have tried to change the empty place inside me that craves it. Wanting my parents to love me gave them power to hurt me. More than anything, I wanted not to care. But you have shown me, as no one else ever could, that praise means nothing, except to those who weave it into webs. By imprisoning me with my own vice, you have set me free.”

Christine tried to go around him but he side-stepped in front of her. She tried again, but once more he blocked her. Finally, she locked eyes with him, stepped toward him, and walked right through him. As she passed through Maxwell, he felt an odd sensation like a breeze, a blending of warm and cold, a mixture of yearning, fear, anger, and defiance.

Before he could react, he heard her say, “Goodbye Maxwell J. Pavlov.” Abruptly he turned to see her translucent back receding from him. The wind roared through the circular window as she took a homeward step beyond its threshold, at first tentative, and then another, more certain step, into the icy, vast unknown.

If you enjoyed this post you might like my other writing. Take a moment and sign up for my free starter library. Click here. Also my new novel “The Ghosts of Chimera” will soon be published by the folks over at Rooster and Pig Publishing.