The third reason was the biggest. My hearing was rapidly returning. I was back to something like 50 percent, which was probably enough to hear Rainsford’s voice or the haunting sound of garbled whispers if they returned.
I knew which bed was mine because my backpack had appeared on top of it. I searched under the bed and found the plate of food, set it on my lap, and stuffed a king-size wad of spaghetti into my mouth. I’d moved my backpack to the floor and unzipped the main compartment, then started digging. No Recorder. It was gone, as I’d suspected it would be. All the audio files, all the photos and videos of things that happened in the rooms. All of it gone.
“Hey, Will.” Alex Chow had entered the room from behind me. “We need a fourth for some cards. Come on; you can bring your food. Just stash it if Ms. Goring shows up.”
“Give me ten, okay? I need to talk to Dr. Stevens real quick.”
From outside the door, all the way at the table, I heard Connor Bloom calling my name.
“Come on, Will. Get your skinny ass out here! We got cards to play.”
“I’ll stall ’em,” said Alex. “Just hurry up, okay?”
I nodded, forking another monster-size mouthful of spaghetti into my mouth. Three more bites and half a bottle of water from my backpack later, I was up and heading for the back of the room. There were two doors: a bathroom, which I peeked into and found expectedly trashed by three guys, and the room where the guys could sit and talk to Dr. Stevens. I went inside and saw the splotches of paint on the back wall. No more 1, 3, 4, or 6. All of them, including my own, were gone.
I sat in the chair and wondered if Mrs. Goring was in the bomb shelter watching me while she devoured her own plate of spaghetti.
There was a red button in front of the monitor, and I pushed it. Dr. Stevens came up on a screen about ten seconds later, as if she had been sitting there, waiting for my call, wondering why it had taken so long for me to show up. She smiled that slightly crooked smile of hers, sipped from a white coffee cup with a yellow smiley face on it. She sat behind her desk in her office. The webcam was pointed at her face in a way that made her look slightly out of proportion.
“I’m so glad you’re okay, Will,” she said.
“Me, too.”
“Are you mad?”
“What do you think?”
“You’re mad.”
“Dr. Stevens, I don’t know what I am.”
“You’re cured,” she said. “Don’t underestimate how hard it was to pull that off.”
“You lied to us.”
“You won’t feel the same in the morning. Trust me once more, okay? Everything is going to be fine.”
“Why don’t I believe you?”
“I don’t know, but you should. You should believe me.”
“How do you know Rainsford?”
“He was my mentor; I told you that. He’s brilliant.”
“How come he lives at the bottom of such a long staircase?”
She paused, thinking up a lie or a cover.
“Listen, Will. We took risks with you. New risks. You required an isolated connection to the group, something that would slowly draw you out. Just promise me you won’t run off again. Stay put and listen to everything Rainsford tells you. Do that, and I absolutely promise that tomorrow morning you’re going to feel a whole lot better about all of this.”
“Good-bye, Dr. Stevens.”
I didn’t wait for her to say good-bye. I’d been looking at the cans of paint on the floor and the brushes caked with dried paint. I picked up one, dunked it once in every one of the cans, all of which had begun crusting over at the top. By the time I was done, the brush was sopping with a gray goo that dripped onto the table and the floor. I swiped it across the computer screen, blotting out Dr. Stevens’s face, and left the room.
I stopped at my backpack and searched inside one more time, dumping everything out on the bed. My clothes were there, and the Cliff Bars and old wrappers. There were six water bottles, five of them empty. I searched the side pockets, unzipping them all until I came to the smallest one and felt something inside. Unzipping it, I discovered Keith’s tiny MP3 player. I had put the player inside and had written the note, not Keith; and my long neurosis made my face flush with humiliation. I’d been getting pretty far out there before the cure, I realized, and in that respect I was okay with what Fort Eden had done to me.
My black earbuds were attached to the player, which I thought strange until I dug down into the pocket and found a Post-it Note. Not the one I’d written, but a new one. Someone else had written four words on the Post-it Note in block letters. They were four words I wasn’t able to blot out of my mind for the rest of my time at Fort Eden.
DON’T LISTEN TO HIM
Whoever had taken the backpack had removed my Recorder, and with it every shred of evidence I had about this place. But they’d left the useless MP3 player, which couldn’t record or take pictures; and someone had left the note.
Davis, I thought. Had to be Davis. He was there, trying to help me. He knew! The only thing now was to put in the earbuds and keep the music playing.
“Detroit Rock City,” don’t fail me now, I thought, pulling up my hoodie and running the black wire up the spine of my T-shirt, then dropping the MP3 player into my back pocket.
“Dude, Avery’s getting cured, come on!”
I spun around, sure I was caught, and saw that Connor Bloom was coming toward me.
“Rainsford’s on his way; we gotta get a move on. Cards will have to wait.”
“Okay, yeah, I’m on my way.”
But Connor Bloom was having none of it. He was behind me, pushing me toward the door, and he was easily twice as strong as I was.
“What’s with the hoodie?” he asked me.
“Got a chill, I think I might have caught something out there in the woods.”
“Don’t cough on me. Football starts in a week.”
We passed through the door, and I saw Marisa sitting up on the couch. She was rubbing her eyes and patting down her hair, which had gone wild on one side.
“Boy, I really zonked out, didn’t I?” she asked no one in particular.
I looked at the opening where the stairs came up from the basement and saw shadows moving. As Rainsford came into view, it looked as if he was rising out of the earth on a starless night. He was winded, but only slightly, and I got the feeling he’d taken his time climbing out of the gloom.
“Everyone, let’s gather around,” he said at length. He went to the round table and put out his arms as if to draw us in. “It’s time we came to the end.”
Rainsford looked at me, or through me, as Marisa arrived at my side and leaned on my shoulder. I couldn’t see her with my hood pulled up, but she felt soft at my side, the warmth of sleep still lingering on her skin.
“Nice hat,” she said. They would be the last words I heard her say until the next day.
“How are you feeling, Will Besting?” Rainsford asked me. “Can you hear me?”
“I can.”
He nodded as if he thought this was excellent news.
“I’m glad to finally meet you.”
And then the whispering started.
On their own, the sounds of Rainsford’s voice and the whispering mass were hypnotic, but together their power was complete. They created a kind of acoustic dance I’d never heard before and never have since. The whispers turned soft and elastic, bouncing around Rainsford’s voice as if they were trying to get inside. Too, there was something tragic about the incomprehensible language below Rainsford’s voice. It sounded, I thought, like the distant call of lost souls searching for a place to rest.
I struggled to keep my mind focused on a simple, imperative task: get the music playing before it’s too late.
As everyone bustled to get around the table, I was able to secretly put the small earbuds in, place my hand in my back pocket, and hit PLAY.
Let’s get this party started, I imagined Keith saying; and it was okay, a nice
reminder that he was still tucked away in a place where I could always find him. I spun the dial in my pocket, turning the volume to about halfway, knowing that if I pushed it too far, Rainsford would hear the tinny sound of a tiny Gene Simmons trying to shred my eardrums with his bass guitar.
Avery was talking, and I wished I could hear what she was saying. She was finally telling everyone what she’d never told Dr. Stevens in all those sessions. She was telling her deepest fear. At the time I substituted the following: Avery Varone, you are mortally afraid of the seventh room because that’s where the monster lives. You do not want to go down there.
I would later discover her true fear and roll it around in my head for weeks, trying to figure out the mystery of what could possibly cure her. I understood then why Avery believed she couldn’t be cured. We all did. We understood, because she was afraid of the biggest thing of all: death.
Avery Varone was terrified of dying.
I thought then as I do now that Rainsford had met his match. In order for Avery to be cured, she would have to experience her fear. She could only find relief on the other side of the grave, because in Rainsford’s world, dying was the only cure for someone like Avery. He would have to kill her, and that wouldn’t be a cure at all but rather the culmination of a long nightmare.
And yet the proceedings continued. I watched as Rainsford’s eyes passed over each person, including me. I watched as he got up and left the table, looking back just once as he started down the long, winding stairs. I put my hand in my back pocket, dialed the music down very slowly, and found that the room was quiet.
“You can do it, Avery. It’s going to be fine,” Kate was saying as she touched her on the forearm.
“I know. I’m ready. This is going to work.”
Alex, Connor, and Ben got up as one and wandered aimlessly toward the guys’ dorm as the girls gathered around Avery. It felt like my cue to leave, so I got up, too, touching Marisa on the small of her back. I wanted to ask everyone if they really thought this was a good idea, but I was afraid of what that might mean. If I disagreed or questioned what was happening, they’d know something wasn’t right.
At the time, I didn’t know what Avery’s fear was; but even if I had known, I’m not sure I would have had the courage to try and stop her. I moved to one of the couches, felt the guilt wash over me, and stared at the gaping maw of stone teeth leading down to the seventh room.
A few minutes later Kate and Marisa went to their quarters and I was alone with Avery. She hadn’t moved from the table.
“Are you sure this is what you want?” I asked. It was the best I could come up with, and it wasn’t much.
She didn’t answer me. Instead, she got up, walked directly to the winding stairs, and started her descent. I thought she was simply going to leave, but she turned at the very last second. She wasn’t afraid; she wasn’t anything—her expression was as blank as an empty piece of paper.
“Good-bye, Will.”
She was gone, and I was alone in the main room of Fort Eden. There were answers down below, answers I wasn’t sure I wanted to find. It would be nice, I thought, to be ignorant and cured like my friends. But I had a different fate than all the rest. I was meant to know. I would find the truth at the end of a winding stone stair, in the seventh room, at the very bottom of Fort Eden.
When the last of the light from above was gone, it felt as if I was walking toward a nightmare in progress. Not in the dream, but over it, feeling its force drawing me down. There came a stretch of steps in which there was no light at all, and I found myself stumbling on steps that felt less and less firm. They crumbled under my feet, as if they were made not of stone, but of hard clay grown old and cracked. Some of the steps were completely torn away across the middle; and not being able to see them, I slid five or more feet in the pitch-black. When I came to a stop, a sliver of light appeared in the dust settling around me. The light was somewhere below, around one or more turns, and I knew that the moment to turn back was upon me.
This is it, Will, I told myself. Either get it over with or start climbing. You’ll never get up enough nerve to do this again.
And so it was that I somehow found a well of courage I didn’t think existed. I’ve never considered myself a brave person. It certainly wasn’t a muscle I’d put much training into during the previous two years. But there it was, the will to go on and the desire to make myself do it.
I came to a landing where the stairs stopped. To one side, a large door was open just a crack—the source of the light that had drawn me down. Past the door the stairs continued. I went to the edge and looked down, where the winding way continued deeper still.
There was no noise from inside the room, and as I touched the door gently, it opened a few more inches. It was solid, with iron bolts and casings, and it made no sound on its hinges. I didn’t have to go inside; I knew what was in there simply by the object I saw through the crack. That cup. The cup with the smiley face on it.
Dr. Stevens was there. She was at Fort Eden. She’d been there all along.
Trust me, Will, one more time.
I think I’ll pass, if it’s all the same to you, I thought.
I opened the door far enough to go inside but didn’t. I saw bookshelves on the wall, a desk, a computer—very much like her office back in the city. Dr. Stevens wasn’t sitting in her chair or standing behind the door with a baseball bat. She wasn’t in the room, and I had a feeling I knew why. She’d be where Avery was. She’d be down, farther still. I left the door ajar as it was when I’d found it, light bathing the stairway, and then I kept on.
The last stretch of stairs was the hardest. There were peculiar noises down there of a kind I knew nothing about. If I had to guess, I would have said there were machines and liquid and power of some kind at work in the seventh room. They were the sounds of the other cures, only amplified and stretched into something worse. My hearing was getting to maybe 60 percent—no more; if I could hear them, then they were not quiet sounds. A scattered light crept up at my feet, but it was swallowed by the dark. The stairs, the walls, the ceiling—they’d all turned black and dull while I wasn’t paying attention. The walls around me seemed to consume light, to absorb it. One more step and I could lean around a sharp corner and see.
I heard faraway voices and knew who they belonged to.
Dr. Stevens: Thirty seconds and we’re there.
Then Mrs. Goring, her unmistakable gravelly voice echoing off the walls:
Don’t be so sure. She might not even make it.
She’ll make it.
Without knowing I was doing it, I’d let my head slip around the last, sharp corner. It was a miracle I didn’t gasp, or maybe I did and they just couldn’t hear me. A six-sided room lay before me, each wall holding a monitor encased in stone. Ben’s wall was brutally scrawled with dozens of blue number 1s, as if a madman had dunked his hand in a can of paint and slapped the numbers into place, drawing his hand down along the stone. On the monitor, Ben’s cure replayed; but only the part where he was flooded with fear. Over and over, the small boy picked up the arm in the sandbox, his eyes going wide with fear as the spider crawled onto his hand. The sounds were stretched and pulled apart, as if someone was trying to extract something from them.
All six walls were like this: a monitor embedded in stone, repeating the most terrifying parts of each cure, surrounded by violently written numbers and colors that matched the patients.
Ben Dugan—Blue
Kate Hollander—Purple
Alex Chow—Green
Connor Bloom—Orange
Marisa Sorrento—White
Will Besting—Violet
Cords and tubes ran out of the ceiling above each monitor. They came together in the middle like a canopy, where they were bunched together with a thick rope. From there, the whole wiry mass ran down a narrow hall to a room I could not see. It was from this hidden room that the voices echoed. It was a room I knew had a number like all the rest: number 7, where Avery V
arone was getting cured or killed or both.
I’d made it that far only to find my courage failing me. What if they saw me come down the narrow hall? They’d know my memory was still intact. They’d chase me down and make me listen to Rainsford.
Voices echoed through the chamber once more as I managed to step around the corner and begin walking slowly.
Mrs. Goring: It’s not going to work. Pull it!
Dr. Stevens: No! Leave them alone! Just stay back!
The hall was dark and slathered with painted number 7s, but at the end of the hall there was light and movement. Seconds later, after reluctantly forcing myself forward, I was able to peer around the last corner at the bottom of Fort Eden.
Avery Varone was sitting in a large chair, facing away from me. She had the helmet on, and the tubes and wires were running up into the ceiling. Sitting next to her, also facing away, was Rainsford. He, too, wore a helmet bursting with wires and tubes.
Say it’s not true, I thought.
Dr. Stevens: She’s flooding. Do it now!
Mrs. Goring: I won’t!
Dr. Stevens pushed Mrs. Goring aside and threw a lever on the wall. I watched helplessly as both Rainsford and Avery went rigid and the wires and tubes went wild overhead.
Say it’s not true, I thought again.
The two of them were connected. Something was passing between Rainsford and Avery Varone. Understanding this fact produced reasonable questions I didn’t want to ask.
Had I been attached to Rainsford when I was cured? Were all of us? And the biggest question of all: WHY?
It was over swiftly, and with it, all sound died. Stillness at the bottom of the world, and then words.
Mrs. Goring: She’s dead.
Dr. Stevens: She’s not.
Mrs. Goring: She is.
Dr. Stevens: Just give her a second. She’ll be fine.
For the first time since I’d met her, Mrs. Goring seemed the slightest bit sad. When she spoke again, the edge in her voice had returned, and I thought that this was my best chance to get away. While she was talking I backed up, but I heard enough. Enough to know that I should never have trusted Dr. Stevens.