Must feel nice, being invisible. No chores, I imagined Keith saying at the doorjamb of room number 6. For some reason, in my mind’s eye, a bead of blood was trickling down his nose.
Come on, you’ll love it in here. They got Death-boxes galore.
Go home, Keith! I don’t want you here.
I shook the cobwebs from my head and dialed up the volume on the song.
Staring at the door, I knew the truth: room number 6 was my room. Probably it would be empty on the other side, too, which is exactly how I planned to keep it.
There was one more door, at the very end of the long hallway. The seventh, a door that would open into a room that sat alone at the bottom of a spiral staircase.
The seventh room, Rainsford’s room.
And the only room left for Avery Varone.
I was in a cold sweat by the time I collapsed on the cot in the bomb shelter and finally turned off the music. My hands were shaking, and my breath came in deep waves as if, like Kino, I had been underwater for a long, long time searching for something of great value. It had been, I decided, the most terrifying night of my life. Something about not being able to hear the world around me amplified the terror ten times. I couldn’t hear someone coming after me as I made my night journey back to the Bunker, and that, more than anything else, had almost crippled me with fear.
Looking at my watch for the first time in more than an hour, I was surprised to see just how late it was: 3:40 AM. A few more hours and the sun would be up. Mrs. Goring would return with her stupid banging food cart, and I’d be scared all over again. I didn’t know how much more I could take, and vowed right then in the bomb shelter to get away. I’d find some way to tell Marisa—a note or a whisper when no one was around—and we’d run. We’d run up the path until we found Davis’s car parked on the washboard road. I didn’t have a license and neither did she, but we’d crash right through the gate, out of the wilderness, and get back to our normal lives.
Mrs. Goring’s not going to come in here, I told myself. I was so tired I couldn’t keep my eyes open. I hadn’t even turned on the light in the bomb shelter. I’d just pulled the door almost closed and fallen dead asleep on the cot, staring at the black ceiling.
Gotta set the alarm on my watch. Gotta do that. Gotta do it right now.
But I didn’t.
The thing about a bomb shelter tucked away in the corner of a entombed cement basement is this: it’s stunningly quiet. I could only guess that Mrs. Goring, for some unknown reason, had neglected to feed the guests. Or maybe she’d gone the other way around and delivered a box of cold cereal and a gallon of milk, an errand that didn’t require a rolling cart. Either way, I’d slept for a very, very long time. So long, in fact, that, looking at my watch, I was unsure if it was night or day in the world outside.
4:15. I thought I’d only slept for a half hour, but then I blinked fully awake and saw the tiny letters: PM.
“Oh no,” I tried to say, but the words were more of a thought as they crept past my dusty throat. I reached for a bottle of water and guzzled six or seven gulps, feeling the empty space in my belly.
Hungry didn’t begin to cover how famished I was, but the idea of one more Clif Bar was so depressing, I couldn’t bring myself to rip one out of its package.
“I need food. Real food.”
My mind wandered to Kino on his canoe as I riffled through boxes and cans on the shelves in the basement. I could see him paddling out to sea, leaving everything behind. It was a peaceful thought, until the canoe was smashed into a thousand pieces in my mind, as it had been in the story. It seemed that for Kino, the pearl invited nothing but misfortune.
Mrs. Goring had done some canning, or someone had, and I searched through a shelf filled with jars of peaches and pickles.
“No way she’ll notice just one,” I said, taking a jar of the golden peaches and heading for the electrical panel. There I grabbed the metal lunch pail in my other hand and returned to the bomb shelter. About a minute later I was standing in front of the main monitor, the giant headphones on, digging sliced peaches out of the jar.
Everyone was in the main room, even Mrs. Goring, and Davis had returned.
“Thanks for the chicken,” Connor was saying, licking his fingers. “Just what the doctor ordered.”
“I’ve eaten Mrs. Goring’s dinners,” Davis said, playfully it seemed, but also a bit cutting. “Good to get a break.”
I spied a KFC bucket on the round table, where all the guys sat eating greasy chicken.
“Nobody starves around here,” Mrs. Goring commented. “You of all people should know that.”
I couldn’t see Marisa, which bothered me. Maybe she was outside, or sleeping in the girls’ quarters where I couldn’t see. Cycling through the monitors yielded no sign of her, and I worried as Davis went on.
“I think I’ll stay and sleep in the guys’ room tonight; there’s an extra bed in there.”
“Suit yourself,” Mrs. Goring said. “Just stay out of my way and don’t make a mess. You know the drill.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“No luck yet with Will?” asked Avery. She was sitting on the couch close to Davis.
“I’m heading out again as soon as these guys get going. He has to be getting tired of sleeping out there. It got pretty cold last night.”
“Let’s do this thing,” Connor said, wiping the back of his hand across his face. Years of heroics on the field were likely to help Connor endure whatever Rainsford threw at him. “I’m ready to get it over with.”
“Me, too,” said Alex, although a lot less forcefully. Scoring high on the style chart wasn’t likely to offer much in the way of comfort during a cure.
“You’re positive you guys want to go at the same time?” asked Ben Dugan. “I’m not even sure that’s possible.”
“It’s fine, right, Mrs. Goring?” asked Davis. He’d sat down next to Avery, the two of them practically touching shoulders.
“Whatever Rainsford says. How should I know?”
“Maybe it’s better to wait until we find out for sure,” Avery said.
“You just don’t want it to be your turn; that’s what this is really about,” Kate said. She’d clearly given up the battle for Davis’s affection and wanted to get a dig in at Avery.
“I already told you,” Avery replied flatly. “I’m not going. I can’t be cured.”
There it was again, that Avery Varone defiance, as if her fear was worse than anyone else’s. A big part of me wanted to cede Kate the point. Knowing what I knew, it was hard to imagine a worse situation than what Kate had lived with.
“I think Avery’s right,” said Davis, surprising no one. He and Avery were growing closer to each other rapidly. “It’s early yet, and besides, he’ll want to talk to you before you guys go.”
He looked at Avery and said something I could barely hear. “But you’re wrong. You can be cured. You just have to believe.”
“No, I can’t,” Avery replied, a wistful smile on her face, as if it didn’t matter either way as long as Davis was around.
Kate appeared to roll her eyes, but she was pretty far away from the camera, so I couldn’t say for sure. She was wearing a T-shirt like Ben’s, white with some sort of emblem on the front—the letter E.
“What the heck is that thing?” I said out loud, dripping peach juice down my chin and wiping it away with the sleeve of my hoodie. The peaches were sweet and gooey, and it tasted like Mrs. Goring had thrown a dash of cinnamon in there, too.
Davis touched Avery on the hand and told everyone he was heading out to look for me until Rainsford came back, which made me nervous. It was only a matter of time before he’d start to wonder, Could that kid have actually gone inside Mrs. Goring’s bunker?
I took off the headphones and went back into the basement so I could find a place to hide a half-empty jar of peaches. I ended up stuffing the remains behind the tarp by the electrical panel, where I was sure Mrs. Goring would never find them. I was sti
ll hungry, and looking along the food shelves, I found a row of boxed crackers. A box of saltines was already open, and I slid a long, wrapped package of them out.
Two people had appeared while I was gone; and taking them together, they added up to one very bad thing. Marisa and Rainsford were both standing in the main room in front of the door to the girls’ quarters.
“They were together,” I said, and I imagined I was still holding the glass jar as it slipped through my fingers and smashed all over the floor. I threw the package of crackers on the cot and put the headphones back on, hoping for some clue to where they’d been and what they’d talked about. I couldn’t verify that Marisa had told my secret, and neither could I be sure that Rainsford knew anything at all about my whereabouts; but doubt had seeped into the bomb shelter. What had they spoken about if not Will Besting?
“Maybe he took the elevator,” I said, wanting to give Marisa the benefit of the doubt. He’d come out of the doorway I’d gone through, where Kino was painted on the floor, and everyone was gathering around him.
“Davis?”
The first word I’d ever heard Rainsford say: Davis. It was as if he felt his absence the second he arrived in the room. It was a question: Davis, where are you? But there was also an odd sense of confusion in his voice: Where has Davis gone in my absence? And one more thing, deeper still in the voice: an accusation. I told him to stay here. He should not have wandered off.
“He’s looking for Will Besting,” said Avery, pointing to the main entryway. “Out there.”
“Of course he is,” Rainsford agreed, smiling as if he’d simply let the fact slip from his mind but had remembered now. He moved on to more pressing matters.
“Kate, how are the headaches? he asked. “Better, I hope.” They were all standing in a circle around him as if they were five and he was about to hand out bags of candy.
“Yeah, I feel much better. Totally better,” Kate said, but it was so obviously a lie that Mrs. Goring caught on.
“In a pig’s eye,” she said. “Stay put. I’ll get you another aspirin.”
Rainsford seemed more willing to believe Kate’s answer and didn’t acknowledge Mrs. Goring other than to nod appreciatively.
“Ben, you’ve recovered, I see,” he said, touching Ben on the shoulder.
I heard Mrs. Goring cackle from off screen as the door to Fort Eden slammed shut, a sharp ‘HA!’ followed by a slam. And I had to agree. Ben was saying one thing by nodding yes to Rainsford. But his hands told a different story as he made and released fists, trying to work the stiffness out of his fingers.
“Mrs. Goring has been my helper for many, many years,” Rainsford said, nodding toward the front door where she’d exited. “She’s not nearly as mean as she wants all of you to believe. In fact, if one of you was drowning in the pond, she’d be the first to dive in after you. Just ask Davis.”
“Really?” Avery asked, trying to calculate exactly what the remark meant.
“Really,” Rainsford concluded, and moved forward three or four steps, turning to face them as one. “It’s uncommon for two people to be cured at once, but not entirely unprecedented. Sometimes it’s a comfort to have a friend.”
“It’s not that,” Connor said defiantly. “I just don’t want to wait anymore and neither does he.”
“Is this true, Alex?”
Alex confirmed with a loud yes, but I think that if he could have been truthful, he would have agreed more with Rainsford. Alex Chow didn’t want to go alone, whatever going alone meant.
Everyone fanned out except Rainsford and the two guys, the three of them standing close in a circle as Rainsford said something I couldn’t hear. This went on for a minute or so, and then Rainsford and Alex and Connor all went through the doorway. On the other side, they’d find the black curtain, and then Kino would guide them to the elevator. Apparently Alex and Connor didn’t have any interest in talking to Dr. Stevens first, or they’d already done it earlier in the day. I thought about that and cycled back to the boys’ quarters.
“How’d I miss that?” I said, because something had changed. They’d both been in there all right, because the 3 and 4 on the back wall had been painted through. The 3 was slashed over with the color green, the 4 with the color orange.
“So Alex is green and Connor is orange,” I said, eating a stack of three crackers and chasing them with water. I felt oddly as if I was in a movie theater, eating a snack as I waited for the show to start. Maybe it was because I’d become jaded in the bomb shelter, or possibly it was because I didn’t really know Connor or Alex. Whatever the cause, I didn’t feel sorry for these guys. If anything, I was experiencing a misplaced sense of wonderment. What’s going to happen? How badly are these two going to get the juice?
I imagined Keith in his room, mowing down other players in a virtual arena, bodies all over the place.
Now we’re talking!
You know, Keith, this probably isn’t good for your brain.
Sure it is! Look how much fun I’m having!
I stood in the bomb shelter waiting, wishing Keith was standing there with me. He’d be all into it, which would make it seem okay.
These dudes are gonna fry—the suspense is killing me!
I know, right? Hey Keith, I bet this one will have dogs.
Dogs?
Yeah, mean ones. And I bet they’ll be huge.
Sweet. Give me some of those crackers, bro.
The center screen had taken on an almost ghostly quality as I waited. Everyone seemed to have gone completely numb, sitting around as if they were praying or falling asleep. Marisa, again, was nowhere. I knew she was staying up late a lot, too afraid to sleep at night. Probably she was sleeping, but it bothered me not seeing her among the others.
I pulled out my Recorder and opened the photographs I’d shot early this morning, the ones that had to do with Connor and Alex. A quick look at the doors first, then I swiped forward to the long, skinny shots of the walls with their bizarre paintings. Alex Chow’s wall was covered with horrific wild dogs, their eyes wide and rabid. The dogs crested like waves as they crashed against one another, searching for something to sink their teeth into. The other wall, Connor’s, was in the same style but paneled across like a comic strip. Four panels, all of the same image: buildings, morbidly intertwined like tangled rope, twisting as if down an unseen drain a thousand feet below. On the first panel, the silhouette of a body falling through the center of the scene, and in each panel that followed the body getting smaller and smaller. The panels made my head feel dizzy and I turned away, checking my watch. 5:00 PM. The witching hour, it turned out, for two monitors began to glow. They were monitors that hadn’t turned on before, so I knew they belonged to Connor Bloom and Alex Chow.
A morbid curiosity passed through me and I glanced back and forth between the screens as if they were projecting reality shows gone horribly wrong.
Alex had gotten through the doorway and stopped moving, his dark eyes wide with surprise. If I hadn’t known better I would have said someone had driven nails through his shirt sleeves and pant legs. He was literally pinned to the wall with fear, staring at the other side of the green room, where two rotting dog houses sat next to each other. Both were huge, their black doorways staring back at Alex like the hollow eyes of a monster about to wake up and rip the world apart. The helmet sat on the stone floor of the room, halfway between the dog houses and Alex Chow, its tangle of wires and tubes lifting into the ceiling.
My attention turned to the other monitor, where things weren’t going any better for Connor Bloom.
Some people probably find it entertaining to watch an otherwise brash young athlete being brought down a notch or two. But there was nothing fun about watching Connor Bloom step into the orange room and crumble to the floor. I thought I might enjoy a small moment of superiority—Hey, big man on campus, welcome to my world. This is how you make people feel when you pick on them. How’s life treating you now, huh?—but there was none of that, not even a
glimmer of satisfaction. If this place could put Connor Bloom on the floor that fast, I wondered what it could do to me if Rainsford ever figured out where I was hiding.
What had brought Connor to his knees was a ladder, one of the kind that opens up and stands on its own like an upside-down V. It was sitting in the middle of the orange room splattered with orange paint, and at the top sat the helmet. He’d have to climb six rungs in order to reach the top, where, I guessed, he would be required to sit down and put on the helmet.
From this point on my eyes took turns moving between the two monitors as they flashed and crackled with life. Soon enough both Connor and Alex had gathered enough courage to make their individual journey’s to the helmets, undoubtedly helped by the whispering voice I’d blocked out on my own visit below Fort Eden.
I watched as Connor and Alex endured dueling nightmares, taking turns on an expedition into madness.
Connor, I knew, was so afraid of heights that he’d begun having trouble with even the most basic related tasks, such as going up a flight of stairs at school or a set of bleachers at a football game. The screens popped wildly, going back and forth between the orange room and the scene inside the helmet. On the screen itself, the words and the orange mercury line appeared.
Connor Bloom, 15
Acute fear: falling
Connor Bloom’s muscular forearms were held in a tight flex as he gripped the edges of the ladder; and as the screen changed to what he saw, I could understand why. He was still on the ladder, looking down at his own feet; but the floor in the room had begun falling away. The four legs of the ladder sat precariously close to what remained of the floor, a two-foot-square pillar of stone. Outside the helmet, a cable with a hook had dropped from the ceiling, which Connor reached out for blindly. A moment later, it was clipped to the back of his leather belt. He seemed to calm down a notch, glancing up and finding the cable hooked into the ceiling along with all the wires and tubes from the helmet. The scene went back inside the helmet, where the floor around the ladder continued to slowly fall away, now twenty feet below in the shadows.