“I’m sorry,” I said. “If it’s any consolation, we almost share something in common.”
“What’s that?” she asked, her neck still tilted back but her head turning to me now.
“You can’t be cured, and I won’t be cured. I think this entire thing is insane.”
“Could be,” she said thoughtfully. “It doesn’t really matter either way.”
“Listen, Avery, I think I’m going to leave now. Please don’t tell anyone I was here or where I’ve been.”
“I won’t,” she said. “And, Will?”
“Yeah?”
“She likes you. She told me so.”
Avery Varone was incurably romantic. She was falling for Davis and paying attention to others falling around her. My heart fluttered—she likes me? I had a moment of feeling it was too good to be true. It was a moment that was not to last.
“Speaking of Marisa,” I said. “Usually she’s the last one up. Where is she?”
“I thought you knew,” said Avery. And then Avery said three words I will never forget as long as I live.
“She’s being cured.”
I didn’t believe Avery Varone when she said she wouldn’t tell. How could she keep a secret like that? I could already hear the conversation with Rainsford.
I know where Will Besting is.
Do you, now.
I do. I’ll tell you if you give me Davis’s number.
A fair arrangement. Have you a pen?
Sadly, as far as I was concerned, Avery was already under Fort Eden’s spell, so more likely it would go something like this:
I know where Will Besting is.
Tell me. Now.
Basement, Mrs. Goring’s bunker.
Go away.
Yes, sir.
I thought these things as I ran down the extended tunnel between the fort and the Bunker. I thought them as I entered the bomb shelter and set the huge monkey phones on my ears, felt the soft sting of the cracked plastic on my skin.
I wasn’t someone who prayed very often, mostly because I didn’t understand what I was doing. But I prayed that night in the Bunker, or did something like praying as I waited for Marisa’s monitor to turn on.
I know I said I wouldn’t listen. I said I wouldn’t watch, but I’m not doing this because I want to. I’m doing it so you don’t have to go through it alone. I’m right here. Please, God, if you have any heart at all, let her know she’s not alone. I’m here. I’m here. I’m here.
I was whispering the words, hearing them muffled in my head, wishing the monitor would never turn on. Maybe Avery was wrong, or maybe she’d lied in order to get me back down here so I’d be trapped.
I’m here, I’m here, I’m here.
I’d listened to Marisa’s audio sessions with Dr. Stevens so many times that they were like memorized songs I could return to whenever I wanted; and waiting, the words drifted into my mind.
Do you ever go back?
You mean home?
Yes, home. Do you ever go to Mexico?
No, never.
Can you think of why this might be so?
Because people will judge me. They’ll think of me as something I’m not.
You speak perfect English, Marisa. No one’s going to judge you for visiting home.
Hablo espanol mejor que Ingles.
You speak Spanish and English.
I speak Spanish better than I do English. I just don’t want to.
But why, Marisa? It’s a beautiful language. And Mexico—it’s your heritage.
Do we have to talk about this?
There’s a connection here, Marisa. Why have you abandoned your history?
I don’t know.
Does it have anything to do with what happened to your father? Marisa? What happened to him wasn’t your fault.
Dejame en paz.
No, I won’t leave you alone.
You must.
But I won’t. What are you afraid of, Marisa?
I knew what Marisa feared. She was convinced that someone was in her house, trying to take her away. He would take her in the dark while everyone else slept. It kept her awake at night as she stared at the doors in her room: the bathroom door, the closet door, the door from the small family room. Often she would sit on her bed at night and cry, but she was too afraid to speak or call out. She was sure someone was in her room, and always there was the burlap bag.
You’re practically a grown-up, Marisa. I don’t think they make burlap bags that large.
I think they do.
When you’re really afraid—when you’re flooding with fear—the man is holding the bag?
Yes, he’s at one of the doors, holding the bag. He says he’s going to put me in it.
Are you sure about that part?
It’s a big bag, big enough for three of me at least. He says he’s going to put me inside.
Are you sure?
Why do you keep asking me that?
Because I want to know about the bag.
I told you about the bag.
Who’s in the bag, Marisa?
Estoy en la bolsa. I am in the bag.
Are you absolutely sure?
I waited, thinking about Kino and The Pearl. Why was he so dead set on rising up? Couldn’t he see all it would cost him? And why was Marisa so focused on being as not-Mexican as possible? Every person I’d ever met from that part of the world was friendly and relaxed, full of life, interesting. What was the big deal?
I waited, the humming in my ears starting to bother me.
This is a setup, I thought. Any second now, Mrs. Goring will be at the door. She’s going to murder me with a can of corn. She’ll beat me to death with it. She’s a very angry woman. She could do it.
And then, just like that, the waiting was over.
Marisa’s monitor was below and to the left of the one in the middle of the group. It fluttered to life magically, softer than the others had: a white room with a glowing edge like an angel’s halo.
Maybe God heard me, I thought, adjusting the headphones so they sat right over my ears.
There was something very odd about this room, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. And then I realized: there was no helmet with its ghastly wires and tubes, just a white room and a white door that opened.
Marisa put her head through the doorway, and for a moment I thought she might turn back. It also crossed my mind that a true friend would have gone down there and gotten her. I felt small and worthless, as if I’d let her down when she needed me most. She stepped through the doorway; and when she closed it, the nightmare began.
The room went from all white to completely black at the click of the latch, all but the thing that lay on the floor with the wires and the tubes. The helmet was there, stark white against the blackness all around it, glowing as if it was filled with neon light. The light fell on Marisa’s face and gave her a pale, hollowed-out quality as she picked up the awful device and held it over her head.
You are adored, I said, closing my eyes.
It was the only prayer I could think of.
Marisa Sorrento, 15
Acute fear: being kidnapped
The monitor in the bomb shelter lit up with what was being shown inside the helmet. Marisa was someplace I had never seen before. It was very dark, the faintest light coming from down long rows of boxes. A man, brown skinned and smiling, with a thick black mustache, held a little girl’s hand, pulling her along. When he spoke, it was in broken English, thick with a Spanish accent.
Marisa, come, I show you. Mas grande de setas.
Speak English, Papa. You know how angry they get.
Si, Ingles. Come, Marisa. Follow me. We go to the big mushrooms.
Back in the room, Marisa had knelt on the floor, which bothered me. Was she praying? I think she was. The white line along the right side of the screen began to rise, and the image switched back to inside the helmet.
The long, wooden boxes were filled with mushrooms. She was underground, in some
sort of plant where they were growing thousands upon thousands of mushrooms. What could it possibly mean?
You there! Come here—this guy needs a hand moving boxes.
A voice from down the long row, calling Marisa’s father away. He turned to her, told her to stay right where she was. He would be right back.
There seemed to be a moment in which the little girl started to search and became lost, calling for her papa. When the screen softly filtered back to the room, Marisa hadn’t moved. But the white line had. It was nearing halfway.
Well, hello there, Marisa Sorrento. What brings you down here in the dark?
Back inside the helmet now, Marisa turning fast to the voice. A different man, a bad man, holding a flashlight under his face in the way that men do to scare kids at a campout. He wore a cowboy hat, and his pale face shimmered with sweat.
Stay put now, don’t go running off on me.
“Run, Marisa! Run!” I yelled in the bomb shelter.
You’re daddy needs to shut his mouth, understand?
The helmet nodded up and down.
A strike won’t do. Can’t have it. Tell me you understand.
I do. A small voice of a five- or six-year-old, afraid.
You see this here bag, Marisa Sorrento?
The giant burlap bag, flopping over the side of the bad man’s leg, and the helmet nodding once more.
You get your daddy to shut up, and I won’t put him inside. He shuts up, they all shut up. It’s all on you. Understand what I’m saying?
The monitor moved to the darkened room, where the white line moved faster, past halfway, into the realm of gushing fear.
When the screen returned to inside the helmet, Marisa was in a bedroom, her bedroom, I imagined, and the hour was late. The image had taken on a bluish night security camera glow and in the glow, an empty doorway. The image fluttered, and the empty doorway was filled with a man who wore a cowboy hat. Next to him, a giant burlap bag, filled and heavy.
I got your daddy in this here bag. You wanna take a look?
Go away!
Come on, take a look in here.
Leave me alone!
You should have listened to me, Marisa Sorrento. It’s your fault he’s in here.
The man moved toward the bed, opening the bag, and Marisa stared into the gaping black hole.
The monitor switched to the room at the bottom of Fort Eden, which had turned entirely white again. I couldn’t even see the line, wiped out by all things white; but I knew it had happened. Marisa was flooded with fear, and the wires were jumping to life.
All the while, she never moved. She had knelt and prayed from the start.
I stood in the bomb shelter and felt tears running down my face, her staggering courage breaking my heart in two.
When the monitor went dead and she was gone, I felt more alone than I’d ever felt before and vowed right then and there to leave Mrs. Goring’s basement. I would go down the elevator and into room number 5, and I would take her out of this terrible place forever. They could try and stop me, but I’d find a way.
When I turned for the door, I had my first inkling that something was very, very wrong. The door to the bomb shelter wobbled strangely, as if a hard wind was shaking it on its hinges. The headphones, big and clumsy on my head, felt suddenly tighter on my aching ears. From behind the door, Mrs. Goring appeared, a look of wonder on her face, as if something special was about to happen.
And then she spoke, her voice booming past the headphones and into my naked ears.
“Time to get cured, Will Besting!”
She hurled the door shut with a stunning slam that knocked me off my feet and onto the cot. The air in the room turned warm and wet in the darkness, and I fumbled for the light dial, spinning it hard.
The light in the room had changed, a bloody shade of violet, and somehow I just knew.
These headphones are my helmet, plugged into the wall with three wide cords.
This room is my room, sealed away in the basement of Mrs. Goring’s bunker.
I was about to be cured whether I liked it or not.
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
.....................................................................
EDEN 6
WILL
In hindsight, the thing that bothered me the most when I discovered what was happening to me was how blind I’d been. I’d seen what I wanted to see, something far removed from the truth.
Everyone else was being cured in a room, and the bomb shelter was certainly that. Everyone else had put something on their heads that was connected to wires or tubes or both. I had been given the headphones, big and weighty, and I had put them on willingly. The connections from the helmets went into the walls or the ceilings of their rooms; mine traveled into the wall of the bomb shelter. They’d all been underground, where no one could hear them screaming, which is exactly where I was.
It was difficult to accept the fact that Mrs. Goring and Rainsford had known all along. They’d known where I was and understood what I was doing. That was clear from the very start of my cure, which would reveal itself on not one but all seven monitors in the bomb shelter. Everyone else had endured the helmet with its screen and its sounds; I had the monkey phones and the monitors.
Rainsford’s face appeared first in the center monitor, close and terrifying. I had suffered no contact with him other than a distant camera view; and there he was, near and personal. I hadn’t expected to fear him as much as I did.
“I’m sorry, Will Besting,” he began. “Really I am. But every treatment is different. Yours required a lot of preplanning and coordination. Unprecedented. It is, in the end, one of my many masterpieces.”
I wasn’t completely under his spell just yet; and inside, I was appalled by his arrogance. I wasn’t a kid in trouble; I was a bug pinned to a wall, an experiment or a project, something to be achieved.
“Don’t worry,” he said, slowly and slithery, or was I starting to come undone? “You don’t have to sell your soul; I’m already in you.”
I wanted to grab the monkey phones and rip them off of my head, but it was like being hypnotized on a stage with a thousand people watching. At least that’s what I’d heard from my mom, who had done just that in her twenties.
It was so bizarre. I knew what I was doing, but I couldn’t stop.
She’d been acting like a chicken, clucking around the stage with a bunch of other idiots.
Strangest thing in the world, knowing something is all wrong but feeling that it’s all right.
I felt all wrong, as my mother had.
What I knew: the headphones had to come off, and I had to run from the room. But listening to Rainsford’s voice, watching his wrinkled face in the center monitor, what I felt was not the same. Leave the headphones on. Stand here. Watch. Take your medicine.
Will Besting, 15
Acute fear: Peers, groups, crowds
“Most people forget, but not you, Will. You will remember. I’ll see to it. Enjoy it while it lasts, Will Besting. Soon this will all be gone, wiped away, as if it never was. And with it, your fear.”
He was sitting in the same chair that Ben Dugan had sat in, staring at me from the room in the boys’ quarters with the numbers stenciled on the wall behind him. The 1 was gone—Ben’s 1—and the 3 and 4. All of them, gone. Only one number remained on the boy’s wall: the number 6.
“It’s time, Will,” he said, taking a paintbrush in his hand and holding it where I could see. He dipped it in violet paint and stood, went to the wall, and blotted out my number.
What happened after that is not completely clear in my mind. Everything I saw was presented in flashing moments on all the screens; but I remember it as a single event, smashed into one endless space.
I’m sorry, Will.
There were many voices, but no faces, and I was walking. Everything was from my point of view, and it looked as if I was parting a sea of people. So many l
egs and dangling arms, standing so very close to me, all of them dressed in black or nearly black.
Many of the voices seemed to be talking about me as I passed through the throng, but they didn’t know how well I could hear. They didn’t know that hearing was my thing, that I listened better than most.
What’s he going to do? He won’t make it. He’s fragile, always has been.
I saw my own line on the center monitor begin to rise in the bomb shelter, then stop, spreading out. A deep violet splotch of color bloomed at the bottom of the screen.
How did it happen? Did he have anything to do with it? No, no, that’s not what happened. It was no one’s fault.
All at once, I broke free of the oppressive bodies around me; but there were faces all around, ghastly and close up in every monitor, all pale with regret.
Oh, Will.
I don’t know what to say.
Don’t look. It will only hurt more.
No, do; it’s what you need. It will help.
The violet splotch at the bottom of the screen spread like honey in the bomb shelter, filling half of the space.
I was standing alone now, looking down at a white-shirted figure lying in a box, my eyes trained perfectly on a button that hadn’t been pulled through the buttonhole on the shirt. I reached out and fixed the clear button, patted the shirt down so it was nice and neat. It was a pressed shirt he wore, and the clear buttons looked so nice that I lingered there a moment.
What’s he doing?
Why doesn’t he move?
Someone go get the boy.
My eyes moved along the perfectly pressed shirt, and then I was looking at a chest, and then a neck. I saw the color first from the corner of my eye, like a blinding light. His bright green baseball cap, firmly pulled down low on his smooth forehead. It struck me as odd—my brother lying down in the box, wearing the pressed shirt and the green cap he never took off.
Why’s he in the box? I asked.
Why’s my little brother in the box?