I knew what Mrs. Goring—she’ll always be called that in my mind—was talking about. There was a file on my Recorder with a peculiar name, so I knew where to look. The file was in all caps: OPEN YOUR EYES. The file I just transcribed was called ME FIRST! I obeyed the command, and the commands put forth by some of the other file names. Others were AFTER YOU SEE and ME THIRD! and so on. Mrs. Goring was not a subtle person. The instructions were loud and clear.
OPEN YOUR EYES was a video file I clicked on; and not wanting to miss anything important, I put on my headphones and cranked up the volume. The video showed Rainsford with the helmet on. He was in the seventh room where all had gone quiet. I was long gone, probably in the guys’ quarters already, as Mrs. Goring zoomed in close on Rainsford. He was old, and whatever procedure had taken place, it looked as if it had killed him and he was already decaying before my eyes. But I could not have been more wrong. Dr. Stevens and Avery were gone, or so it seemed. It was only the old man and Mrs. Goring, the two of them alone beneath Fort Eden.
His face began to move oddly, as if it was liquid. His hair was disheveled and gray around the edges of the helmet. I blinked hard as the camera zoomed in even closer: only his face in the lens, the eyes closed and the corners of the mouth turned down. The wrinkles on his forehead began to peel away. His crow’s feet, once deep and rutted, softened. His hair began to darken at the tips, and I felt a sting of recognition. The helmet lifted up off of his head, pulled up to the ceiling by a chain. When he opened his eyes, they were a brilliant blue, but they were not the eyes of an old man.
It was Davis who sat in the chair. They were not two men, but one.
They were the same person.
I will admit to a morbid fascination with that video. I watched it four more times before continuing on, and each time I tried to find reasons why it couldn’t be true. Rainsford and Davis had been in the same room at the same time, hadn’t they? At first this felt true enough, but putting the question to the test, I couldn’t say for sure. I’d thought Davis was helping me; wasn’t that true? But it had been Mrs. Goring who’d given me the MP3 player and told me not to listen.
Another thought prevented me from watching the video for a sixth time: Mrs. Goring was once young, like Avery. And so was Rainsford.
ME THIRD! began thus:
Now you know the most terrible part. The rest won’t be so bad, although there is the cure, which I admit has a ghastly quality. Let’s give it a rest for a few seconds and talk about Rainsford while you recover your strength.
He has had many names, a new one every seventy-seven years. But I prefer to call him only Rainsford, and so I will.
Don’t ask me to explain why the seventy-seventh year matters so much, because I don’t know. And I beg you; don’t waste your time trying to make Rainsford into a vampire. It’s quite the opposite—without Rainsford, there is no vampire. If such a legend exists at all, he is him.
I grew old, but so did he. And I had no memory of what he’d done. My life before the cure has always been a blur, like a piece of glass smeared with paint. He could have gotten away with never telling me. It took a batch of strong moonshine to find the truth. Oh, how he liked to talk when I got him on the hooch.
If Rainsford is to be believed, I was his fifth wife. Do the math, Will Besting. Rainsford has been around for a long time.
The ME FOURTH! audio file began:
How he became the way he is, at the very start, is hard to say. I’m not sure even he knows. I know he was connected to a great deal of money and status as a child, because he told me as much. The question, I suppose, would be, When exactly was he a child? And by that I mean truly an infant, not the third or fourth go-around. Whenever it was, money and power had roles to play. Someone spent a fortune figuring this out; and as far as I know, Rainsford was the only beneficiary.
Immortalist. That’s the best word I can think of to describe Rainsford. He has devised a way to live forever—or someone devised it for him long ago—and he chooses to keep doing it. I hesitate to mention this for fear it will come back and bite me, but I have tried to kill him. Twice, actually. Once when I was forty and again when I was sixty-seven. About every twenty-five years, give or take.
The first time was after I learned the truth and he was passed out on the floor in the main room of our home, which you know as Fort Eden. I shot him through the heart with a pistol. Not a trace of blood; in fact, it woke him up. He sat bolt upright and asked me if I might be willing to make him some dinner, which I did. Twenty-five odd years later I hit him over the head with an iron rod, and he fell off the dock into the pond. He endured a period of years in which he hated going down there, but after that he knew what I’d done and things got ugly.
His seventy-seventh year couldn’t come fast enough, and that’s when he and Cynthia began scheming behind my back. The proceedings had a certain rhythm to them, like it had all happened four or five times before. She did anything he asked; but he never told her the truth, and neither did I. How could I? She believed he was brilliant. She believed what she told you, that he was her mentor. That the process would cure both him and you. And I suppose, technically, she was right.
It’s a shame I’ll have to tell her he’s dead. I can’t think of what else I can come up with; and either way, he’s gone. Rainsford won’t show his face around here again until she and I are both in our graves.
Bastard.
ME FIFTH! was the last audio file she added to the Recorder. It begins here:
I turn now to the cure. If you’re not sitting, I suggest you do so. This won’t be easy.
Facing the worst of your fear in the room has little or nothing to do with making you well. People have been trying that stuff for a thousand years. For someone as screwed up as you, immersion therapy is a waste of time.
No, the flooding was for his benefit, not yours. It’s his blood that cures you, and your blood that makes him young again. It has to happen during his seventy-seventh year. If he waits beyond that, some of his old blood starts to have real problems. Sooner, and the new blood has no effect. There must be something about the seventy-seventh year—like a flower blooming for a season—when the procedure works like it’s meant to.
He requires seven transfusions from seven different subjects over no more than seven days. And they can’t be just any transfusions. They have to be flooded, and acute fear is the safest way of getting it. Check behind your ears; you’ll find two small scabs. The helmets and the headphones are alike that way—when you flood with fear, he digs in and takes what he needs. And he sends some of his blood in your direction, too. It’s his blood that cures you. Forget all that fear-based garbage. You and your friends are well because you had a transfusion of immortalist blood in you. Not enough to make you live much longer than your normal life spans, but enough to cure what ails you.
The first six subjects turn him young again, but only for a little while—several hours or a day, depending on the person on the other end. Girls work better for some reason. The seventh is the most important—she’s the one that makes it stick.
Before you start liking Rainsford for giving you some of his blood, you should know one thing: the blood he’s giving you is the stuff he needs to get rid of. He has to get it out of his system and replace it with the fear-flooded blood you provide. It’s why you’re all old in one way or another; get it? You probably don’t.
Ben Dugan’s got arthritis, and he’ll have it for the rest of his life.
Kate Hollander has a blood clot in her brain. Hopefully a stroke won’t kill her, but it probably will.
Alex Chow has circulation problems in his legs. One day they’ll go to sleep and never wake up.
Connor Bloom has a bad case of senile dementia. He’s as dumb as a dishwasher, so nobody is likely to notice; but the dizzy spells won’t go away. He’s stuck with those.
You like Marisa, and I hope it works out. Just know what you’re getting yourself into. She’s fatigued in general and always will be.
She’ll nap like a cat her whole life long.
And you, Will Besting, you got a raw deal, too. Enjoy that hearing while you’ve got it, because it ain’t gonna last much longer. I give you twenty years, tops.
Avery Varone got the white hair, which makes me hate her more than anything I can think of. It’s what I got, too. It’s the lottery in this situation. She’ll be totally white in another decade, but that’s it. Otherwise she’ll grow old just the same as Rainsford. He probably planned it that way, though I have no idea how.
I don’t know, nor do I care, what you do with this information. My only debt was to say the words. Where the words go after I’m gone is not my problem. You strike me as a feeble young man. I’ll be honest with you. If I could have chosen, I would have taken Kate Hollander in a second. Her I liked. She would have screamed the truth from the rooftops. But the circumstances surrounding your cure were what made my plan possible. Without them, the secrets of Fort Eden would be gone forever.
In the end, I know he’ll erase my memories, too, and that will be the final insult. At least I won’t have to remember his ugly face.
Do what you want, Will Besting. My obligation is met.
I can see her, and it makes me sad. She is alone, sitting on the dock, staring at the pond as winter settles in over the water. The trees are barren, and she is old. Her chosen one has betrayed her, left her to die alone in the coldness of the woods. She is not thinking about Avery as she stares at the water, this girl who completed the circle. She is not thinking of very much at all, because what she knew has been erased. Rainsford fixed the pump at the pond, so she’ll have plenty of water. There are enough canned goods in the basement of the Bunker to last a lot longer than she will. Her fate is sealed; her time has passed.
Marisa awoke briefly just now, and we played Berzerk on my Atari 2600 for a half hour. Then we each put one earbud in an ear and listened to our song—I Wanna Be Adored—and she drifted back to sleep as we held hands.
If we’re lucky and we stay together to the end, she’ll sleep twenty hours a day and I’ll stumble around the house, unable to hear a word she’s saying. But it’ll still be heaven. We won’t be afraid, and my memory of these events will have faded. One day we’ll find each other on the other side, healed and whole again. Keith and Marisa’s dad will be there, and our friends and the rest of our families. Mrs. Goring will be waiting for us, and so will Avery Varone.
There is, of course, one person we won’t find no matter how long we wait.
One day Avery Varone will sit on the dock at the pond alone. Her companion will be young again, but she will be old; and she, too, will be made to forget. She will perform the task that lies before her because he’ll ask her to. And then she will be alone, and Rainsford will go on as he always does, as he always will.
The old Eden is no more, if it ever was at all.
Only a dark Eden remains.
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OBSERVATIONS
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RECORDED SOME TIME LATER,
AFTER FURTHER CONSIDERATION
FEARS AND AFFLICTIONS
I’ll never know for sure why the seven were chosen or if the things we feared mattered. We probably could have been afraid of anything at all, so long as the fears were irrational. Whatever the answer, I think Rainsford had special knowledge of our situations. And although I can’t prove it, I think he may have even caused some of our fears for his own purpose. In some cases he might have watched us for a long time, studying our personalities and our pasts with Dr. Stevens’s help. But in other situations I think he instilled the fears in us from the start.
Do I believe Rainsford had something to do with Kate Hollander’s car crash or Ben Dugan’s discovery in the sandbox? Yes, I do. Connor’s fear of heights, Alex and the dogs—it’s easy enough to imagine how Rainsford might have manipulated those conditions over a period of years. I don’t think he had anything to do with Keith’s death or the death of Marisa’s dad; but then again, I will never really know for sure. Whether or not he was involved, I have little doubt he was capable of setting these things in motion.
That leaves Avery, for whom there are many unanswered questions. I don’t know why she feared death. I don’t even know if she was ever cured. Was she killed during her treatment, then brought back to life? Maybe she had one of those fleeting moments at death’s door, only to be pulled back from the brink at the last second. I believe she loves Davis; and oddly enough, I believe Davis loves her. I even think it might be part of the process—the power of love—which is at its most dangerous at fifteen or sixteen.
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THE COLORS AND
The Masque of the Red Death
BLUE
PURPLE
GREEN
ORANGE
WHITE
VIOLET
BLACK
For weeks and weeks I mulled over the colors of the rooms. Rainsford had a reason for everything, and I was convinced he had a reason for this, too. Putting them into a bunch of different search engines eventually gave me the answer.
Edgar Allan Poe had written a short story, like five pages long, called “The Masque of the Red Death.” In it, a prince or a rich young ruler—it’s hard to say which—closes himself off inside a castle with all of his privileged friends. Outside, a plague is ravaging the city, killing just about everyone; but inside, constant revelry permeates the castle. It’s almost as if the prince in the story is daring the plague to try and find him. In the story there are seven rooms, each with its own brand of wicked fun. The seven rooms have the same colors as ours did; and in the story, the colored rooms appear in the same order.
Oddly enough, at the end of “The Masque of the Red Death,” the prince chases an uninvited masked guest. When the prince finally catches the intruder, the uninvited guest turns, and the prince falls dead on the spot. The guest, of course, turns out to be death itself.
The message of the story seems to be that no amount of money or privilege will stay the hand of death. But I believe Rainsford sees himself as not just privileged and rich, but as truly untouchable. Using the same colors as those in the story is Rainsford’s way of thumbing his nose at death. The setup is the same, but the result? Rainsford keeps winning. He keeps cheating death over and over again. I have to wonder though: does he worry? He must. He has to know that death can only be put off for so long. It will catch even him, and maybe that’s why he chose the story of “The Masque of the Red Death,” to remind himself that the end is coming whether he likes it or not.
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The Pearl, The Woman in the Dunes, AND RAINSFORD
I’m curious about when Rainsford first entered the world, but regardless of when it was, the use of The Pearl tells me a lot about his world view. It also makes me think Rainsford has been around for a long time, maybe as far back as the Dark Ages, when the caste system was still deeply embedded throughout the world.
In The Pearl, Kino goes underwater to find something that will change his life. My journey was like that, too. I went underground to find something that would take away my fear. We all did. In Kino’s case, what he found destroyed his family and his way of life. Though it seemed like a blessing, the pearl was a curse. For me and my friends, we discovered a place where fears are destroyed forever—but at what cost?
I think Rainsford believes in the idea that whatever station someone is born into is exactly where the person should
remain. Kino found a pearl of great price and tried to use it in order to rise to a higher class. He only wanted a better life for his family and a slightly easier go of things. But soon enough Kino’s life was in ruins.
I haven’t spoken to Marisa about these things, but I think she’s more like Kino than the rest of us. She tries to speak perfect English, and she doesn’t want to talk about the past. I don’t know, maybe for Marisa, language is like Kino’s canoe, a symbol of leaving her heritage behind in pursuit of something that seems somehow better or safer.
The Woman in the Dunes, which I have now finished reading, has a slightly different take on things. In it a man is trying to find a rare insect, but what he’s really looking for is a sort of immortality. If he can find the insect, he’ll be remembered forever for having made the discovery (a paper-thin sort of immortality, but immortality just the same). His quest leads to ruin, and eventually he has to rethink what life and death mean. How strange that Rainsford has a similar problem: he is always here, and yet never remembered. What he does, he does in secret. No one knows who he is. He’s like a ghost in that sense: ever-present, leaving no trace.
And lastly, his name, which I’m sure is a fairly new invention. He has had, I would imagine, many names. But Rainsford suits him pretty well in a totally ironic manner of speaking. In another story I discovered, “The Most Dangerous Game,” there is a character named Rainsford. He’s a big-game hunter, and he complains to his companion that he is always the hunter, never the hunted. He gets his wish when his boat lands on a strange island, where Rainsford becomes the game for a crazy hunter who is set on tracking him down and killing him. The funny thing? I was Rainsford at Fort Eden. We all were. The man doling out the cures was the hunter. This is one of the more curious things about the entire experience. Why did Rainsford use a name that makes him out to be the one being hunted? I think it goes back to the colors. I think Rainsford is being hunted by the most efficient killer of them all, and he knows it—a hunter who never, in the end, ever misses.