I was plugged in.
Now all I needed was a system that actually worked.
I stood at the wall of monitors, cycling through all four buttons, but there was almost nothing. A slight humming noise, like electricity running through power lines overhead, buzzed in my ears.
I looked at my watch, 11:04 PM. If Marisa was trying to send me a message, I couldn’t see it. I set the headphones on the cot and went into the basement, where I turned off the light and put the green lunch pail back where I’d found it. When I returned, I dialed down the light in the bomb shelter and pushed the white G-for-girls button. I put the headphones back on and sat down on the rickety cot, waiting.
Ten minutes later I fell asleep.
Kate’s head hurts.
She hasn’t come back to see me. How’s she doing otherwise?
Great. She went to bed early, like 10:30. She was tired, but different.
Different how?
She’s not afraid anymore.
How do you know for sure?
I know what it looks like in a girl. She’s cured.
My eyes came open and I moved, but I couldn’t hear the squeaky springs on the cot. My ears felt smashed and hot, and there were voices.
That’s very good news, Marisa. Are you excited? It won’t be long now.
I guess I am. It’s so mysterious, you know? Kate says she can’t remember what happened; she just woke up and knew.
It will be the same for you.
I was drawn rapidly out of sleep and stood before the wall of monitors.
“I can hear you,” I said, barely hearing my own voice through thick foam and cracked plastic. “I can hear what you’re saying.”
“So anyway, I just wanted to say everyone went to sleep. You know me, always the last one.”
Marisa glanced at the floor and then back at the screen as if she was looking at me, not Dr. Stevens.
“Just a little longer. Hang in there, okay?”
“Okay. Sorry to call so late.”
“It’s never a problem, Marisa. Anytime.”
Marisa got up out of the chair, and I heard the door open and close.
“I gotta move, and fast,” I said, jamming the stuff in my backpack that I’d poured out on the floor. It was amazing how fast I’d turned the bomb shelter into something that looked more like my room back home. I hadn’t just dumped out my pack, I’d stacked things in piles. Extra clothes, my Recorder and Keith’s MP3 player, a mountain of Clif Bars, bottles of water all in a row. I’d stacked it all neatly against the wall while emptying my bag, then neglected to put it all back once I had on the super-sized headphones. I took less care putting my things away, stuffing the shirts and then the bars and the bottles like a marine packing to get out of a foxhole under fire. The headphones were still on, that slight sound of static dancing in my ears; and then voices appeared, crisp and unexpected, and I turned to the wall of monitors. The room was still empty, but Dr. Stevens was speaking to someone who had a gravelly old voice. Rainsford. Had to be.
She’s not ready yet. Better finish off the boys first.
I can take them both at once. It’s what they want. I’ve seen to it.
We’re not even halfway there. Don’t overdo it. And we still haven’t found Will Besting.
Davis will find him. I have little doubt of that.
There was a static-filled pause, the click of a button, and then more.
I’m not sure she can be trusted.
Don’t be ridiculous. Of course she can. She’ll play her part; I’ll see to it.
Fine.
Off channel marker. 12:21 AM.
I took off the headphones and pulled the plugs from the wall, my ears adjusting to dead silence.
I’m not sure she can be trusted.
I didn’t want to know what that meant, but there it was: one of us wasn’t who they appeared to be. Someone was in on whatever was happening, a she. Kate Hollander or Avery Varone, I told myself. It’s one of them. They’re keeping an eye on everyone, making sure no one steps out of line. One of them is a mole.
I walked into the basement and put the headphones back into the lunch pail, returning it to the top shelf, and then finished packing my things away. I was tired of carrying my backpack around and hid it on one of the shelves in the basement. One back pocket filled with my Recorder, the other with my paperback copy of The Pearl, and I was ready to go.
All the while, a single thought ran through my head, over and over, until I was up the ramp and pushing the door open into Fort Eden.
Please don’t let it be Marisa.
She sat closer to me on the couch from the start, and she looked at me as if she’d missed me. Thoughts of betrayal were already melting away, but I was cautious, a little guarded.
“I hope Rainsford doesn’t come out here and catch us. Or Mrs. Goring. That would be bad.”
She told me they wouldn’t, brushing over it as if it didn’t really matter, and I began to worry that the whole thing was a setup. Everyone would arrive, all at once, and I’d be trapped. Mrs. Goring from the basement, Rainsford from the winding stone stairs, the other kids from the back rooms; they’d crawl out from every corner of the fort like rats and corner me.
“Don’t be nervous, Will,” Marisa said. She knew me already. She could tell I was struggling. “No one is going to find us.”
She reached out and touched my hand, her fingers soft and trembling in the dark, and my heart skipped a beat.
“You haven’t told anyone about where I’m hiding?” I asked.
“No, I haven’t,” she answered, the slightest wisp of defensiveness in her voice, the hand pulled away. “You’ll come back when you’re ready. You just need time.”
“What if I don’t?”
“Then you don’t. But I think you should.”
“Why?”
“Because, Will. It works. Kate’s cured.”
“How can you tell for sure? There are no doctors out here in the woods.”
Marisa’s dark brow furrowed, and her head tilted. How had I known what Kate was afraid of? I’d slipped, but she let it pass.
“You know what it means to be afraid,” she went on. “You know what it looks like. There’s a certain something, always there no matter what. Both Kate and Ben had it, like you and me. But it’s gone now.”
She looked at me, and I felt the wall I’d put up between us start to crumble and fall. If she was going to tell them where I was, she would have done it already.
“I have to tell you something.”
There were many reasons why I told her that night in Fort Eden: the crushing guilt, the loneliness, the absolute fear of being caught and thrown into a room at the bottom of the world. But mostly, I just wanted to hold her hand one more time. After that I could die in peace. Maybe my best and only hope was to come clean.
And so I told her many things, but not all. I told her about the audio files, making sure to mention the part about how I truly felt I had to take them. I told her I’d discovered headphones that would let me hear, but that I absolutely would not break our trust and listen when I felt I shouldn’t. I told her it was lonely in the bomb shelter and that I didn’t trust anyone but her. I stopped short of telling about the colored rooms and what went on inside them, because I still wasn’t sure if I should rob her of a chance to be cured, no matter how bizarre the methods were. If she knew, she’d never go through with it.
After that, the hardest part of all.
I told her what I feared.
“I’m afraid of people,” I said; “it’s why I couldn’t come in here.” And just as quickly, she answered, “I know. It’s okay.”
Was it that obvious? The trembling hand was back, and I breathed deeply for a moment that I wished would never end.
“I can be at home,” I went on, encouraged. “My younger brother is irritating, but I can be around him. And my parents and Dr. Stevens, but that’s about it.”
“And me,” she added, and I realized she was righ
t.
“Yeah, and you.”
She took her hand away once more and rubbed her palms on her flannel pajamas.
“So I don’t need to tell you what I’m afraid of, you already know?”
“I do, and I’m sorry.”
It was a big sorry, full with meaning, and she understood: I was sorry for my mistake; but much more, I was sorry she had to be afraid. I had imagined what this moment would be like. She’d get up and leave and never come back or run through the fort knocking on doors, telling everyone what I’d done.
She didn’t say anything at all though, and she didn’t move. She just stared at her shoes as if she was thinking of standing on them and walking away but couldn’t quite make herself do it. Her head tilted up, staring out into space.
“It’s nice not having to tell. I don’t like talking about it. But what you did was wrong.”
“I know it was.”
More silence, and I was sure what had begun between us had already found its end. Then her voice.
“I might have done the same thing if I’d thought I could get away with it.”
I needed a perfect answer, and for once I think I got it right.
“No, you wouldn’t have. You’re better than that.”
She looked away, hiding a fleeting smile, and delivered the punishment.
“No more hand holding for twenty-four hours.”
A fitting punishment, because it was the only thing I wanted.
We never got around to taking the books out and talking about them. Our conversation drifted into what we’d been doing while we were apart. I told her about seeing Davis; she told me that Avery was falling hard for him. She told me that Kate was having headaches, and Ben was still feeling a little sore in his joints—aftereffects of the treatments, which Rainsford assured them would soon pass.
I asked why no one went near the winding staircase that led down to Rainsford’s room; she said he had told them not to, so they didn’t. I asked about the door between the rooms where people went to be cured; she said it was for a certain purpose. No one went through there until it was their time.
There was that part of her that seemed too compliant—a part I didn’t understand—as if someone else controlled a piece but not all of her mind. It was this part of her that made me come back an hour later, after she was finally asleep.
It was time for me to open that door and see what was behind it.
Don’t be nervous, Will. No one is going to find us.
Marisa’s greeting from earlier in the night repeated in my head, the kind of thing a girl might say if she was inviting you into her bedroom for the first time. At least that’s what I imagined as I stared down the hallway. Why couldn’t we be in her room instead of discovering each other in a madhouse?
I’d opened the heavy door, which on closer inspection was solid oak. It was the kind of weighty slab of wood I feared getting my fingers caught in, a real bone breaker; and as far as I could tell, it had no lock.
Behind the door, a few feet back, a heavy black curtain.
I pulled the door closed behind me and felt a bottomless twist in my gut, as if I’d sealed myself in a coffin and a gravedigger was about to start throwing dirt on top of me. I parted the curtain at the middle and stepped through, and saw a faint light overhead at the end of a long hallway. The hall reminded me of the ramp up out of the basement between the Bunker and Fort Eden, only it was shorter and tilting downward. There was a rail on either side, and on the sloping floor before me, grave black-and-white images. Looking down, I found that I was standing on a painting of Kino, the man from the book who’d found the pearl. He was floating down the floor in a canoe, his back to me. Farther away, there he was again, smaller in the distance, and again smaller still under a pale bulb of light at the end of the hall. The way down had the appearance of a man floating away from something, or into something; it was hard to say what the meaning was.
I held one of the rails and started walking, but stopped short at the sound of a distant whispering voice radiating from the deep. It sounded like someone was searching down the long hallways of my mind, trying to find me but failing. I snapped a picture of the floor with my Recorder, then put in my earbuds and played the sounds from the pond in my ears: splashing water, voices, birds, and wind in the trees. The whispering fell away in the forest and I walked, pulling up my dark hood. The ramp leveled out at the bottom, where a black-and-white image of Kino painted on one side of an elevator door stood staring at me. In one hand he held the pearl, dripping with water or blood, I couldn’t say which. In his other hand he held the standing canoe, the top of which was cut off by the top of the elevator. To the right of the elevator door, a glowing orange button with a down arrow.
Am I really doing this? I asked myself, my finger hovering over the gleaming round button. What if the door opens and it’s a shaft a hundred feet deep? I could fall in. Or worse, what if Rainsford is standing inside and I’m caught? What if he grabs me and pulls me into a room and shoves a helmet on my head? Then what?
I tapped my Recorder off and found that the whispering had stopped. Dead silence as the painting of Kino, a big man with a face like stone, stared at me. His face did not say one thing or another, not Follow me or Turn back, you fool. It was a vacant stare, like the decision had already been made and could not be unmade. I willed myself to push the button. When the doors opened, I saw a small square window dead center against the back wall, a black zero painted on the stone behind it. I leaned my head inside a wood-paneled elevator and was relieved to find both an UP and a DOWN button.
At least it goes both ways. If I go down, I should be able to come back up again.
I stepped inside; and as the doors began to move in from both sides, the whispering started again. This time I had a harder time telling my thumb to touch the button of my Recorder, filling my head with sounds. The voice was hypnotic; it felt as if it was digging. It was trying to get inside.
I spun the dial to a song I’d downloaded weeks ago and had heard a hundred times already: I wanna be adored, which I fast-forwarded into deafening guitar and vocals.
When I looked up, the doors to the elevator had closed and I was moving. I pushed the UP button over and over, but it had no effect. I was going down to the very bottom whether I liked it or not.
The inside of the elevator doors were painted, too, but Kino was gone. His canoe lay smashed against the rocks, broken into pieces. As the elevator moved down into the depths of Fort Eden, I wondered how deep I was going. Fifty feet, a hundred? The song played through and I started it again before the ride was over and the doors slowly began to open. I held them open but didn’t leave the safety of the elevator; outside the floor slanted downward, going deeper still. Kino and his canoe were gone, replaced by a floor of dirt and stone. It smelled of cold earth, a smell of being buried alive.
The door didn’t act as an elevator door should, pushing against my hand every few seconds like a mouth trying to shut. I took my hand away and the doors held, waiting, it seemed, until someone pushed the UP button.
“These are the rooms,” I whispered, though I couldn’t hear my own voice over the music. Outside my head, beyond the noise, the whispering voice would draw me deeper still, until the helmet was on my head and I was screaming.
No thanks, I think I’ll pass.
I ventured a foot against a flat stone outside, then another; and without really thinking about it, I found that I’d stepped out of the elevator and into the realm of rooms.
“Ben’s,” I said, turning to my right first and then to my left. “And Kate’s.”
I kept the music playing but snapped pictures as well: the walls, the doors. On Ben’s side a mural of bugs, like gothic graffiti or a paisley tie gone completely insane, and on Kate’s the same style of artistry, only swirling scalpels and drills and saws. I looked inside Ben’s blue room, where soft light bathed the chair in which he’d sat. Leaning inside the other room, I saw purple walls and the barber’s chair.
The floor was flat in the rooms, unlike the one in the deeply sloping stone hall I stood in, which made the whole place feel like a crooked house at a badly run-down theme park. There was no sign of a wired helmet in either room; it was as if I’d dreamed the helmets’ existence from the start.
On each of the doors, a square and a number, stenciled like I’d seen in the rooms with Dr. Stevens’s monitor.
Ben’s door: number 1.
Kate’s door: number 2.
Beyond the two rooms, at the end of a short hall, was another thick black curtain. I pushed it aside gently and peeked through. Two more rooms, two more walls, and yet another curtain at the far end. I knew by what was painted on the walls that the rooms were for Connor and Alex. I snapped pictures of the mysteriously painted walls and the doors marked with a 3 and a 4.
I didn’t need to go any farther, as the entire basement mapped itself out in my mind: there would be six rooms, three on each side of the hall, separated in pairs by dark curtains leading down, down, down. But I kept going anyway, drawn into the farthest depths of Fort Eden by what felt like a pure, malevolent force.
Through the last hallway curtain I found a wall on my right covered with a painting of giant, swirling mushrooms and a locked door stenciled with a number 5. It had to be Marisa’s room, but the image made no sense at all. The thought of her sitting in there with that helmet on made me angry, but it also made me wonder: could whatever happened in there actually cure Marisa? As twisted as this place was, was it my obligation to take that from her? Nothing I knew of Marisa led me to believe that mushrooms had anything to do with what she was afraid of. It was a mystery that threatened to draw me closer in, until I glanced across at the other side of the hallway and saw a door with the number 6 on it. The wall was utterly blank, which stood to reason. I had been ignored or forgotten. I wasn’t there. I was alone. There wasn’t anything they could paint on my wall, because no one knew me.