Dark Eden (15 page)

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.

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 legs 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?

For the smallest part of a second, I knew the truth, and then my whole world collapsed around me. Something deep inside split apart—what I saw and what would become my reality—and I ran from the coffin. A mob of people pushed and pulled, and I couldn’t breathe. I had to get out. I had to run and never come back.

But the people wouldn’t let me go. They were everywhere. I fell, gasping for air, surrounded by pale and weeping faces.

The center screen in the bomb shelter filled with deep violet color. I felt a searing pain behind both ears, a scorching sting as if I had been cut by two knives, and then I was having a seizure. Was I on the floor in a funeral home surrounded by people who wouldn’t let me escape, or was I in the bomb shelter with some part of me being sucked away, exchanged for something else?

I felt a piece of me return, the part I’d blotted out about Keith, a darkness I couldn’t hold without losing my mind. Stillness then—a drifting through time—and then nothing. No feeling at all, just empty space.

When I awoke, the headphones were gone. I didn’t take notice of this fact at first, nor the fact that the room itself had been greatly altered. The monitors, gone, replaced by a plain white wall. My backpack, gone, and with it my Recorder. The cot remained, on which I found myself lying.

All of these details eluded me on waking, because there was only room in my small world for one thought. It was a thought so big that it could never fit in before; but now, on the other side of Rainsford’s inhuman treatment, I could finally hold it inside and live with it.

My little brother wasn’t alive. My Keith, with the stupid green baseball cap and the mad basketball skills. He’d been gone awhile—two years or more—and I felt the strangest, most unexpected thing at the sudden arrival of this information.

I was finally ready to let him go.

I cried, pretty hard, I think, the memories pouring out and away. The air hockey elbow shot in the basement that never worked; the way he moved in the driveway, slipping past me and driving to the hoop over our dented garage door. His inability to master the simple mechanics of running away from a robot, making me laugh until my sides ached.

It all melted into something soft and deep, a pain I could hold without falling apart.

You were a good little bro, Keith. The best.

You weren’t too bad yourself.

His voice was never the same after that, which sort of broke my heart and kind of didn’t.

Peace, bro. Peace wherever you are. See you on the other side.

The changed nature of the bomb shelter remained a secondary piece of information as I stood and wiped my eyes. There were two other things crowding my mind now, and they seemed of equal importance. Keith was not replaced but rather centered in the deepest part of my heart, where I knew beyond any doubt he would always stay.

My mind moved past Keith now and crept toward the first of two things: Marisa. So much had happened so very quickly, but now my thoughts swung back to her. We held the death of a close family member in common, us two, which made me want to go to her more than I ever had before. I knew her pain. And then, the biggest question of all: had she been cured?

The idea of the cure was what brought my own circumstance screaming back, the second thing that held my attention: was
I
cured? Like the others before me who had been so sure, I suddenly felt sure, too. Maybe it was knowing that Keith was with me, not some fake one I was creating in the empty space around him. Or more likely, it had something to do with what had happened at the end of the cure. I felt the small space behind my ears. There were bones there, and tender skin below. And something new: small wounds, tender to the touch.

Those monkey phones did something to me. Something I was not supposed to know about.

I recalled what Rainsford had said:
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.

There would come a time, soon it sounded like, when everything I knew about Fort Eden would vanish from my memory.
As if it never was.

I had to find a way to make sure that didn’t happen.

At last my mind had arrived at the reality of the moment. I felt battered and bruised, as if I’d walked through a minefield and managed to live through three violent explosions.

“This can’t be right,” I said, staring at the bomb shelter wall. When I said the words, I felt the fourth and final explosion ripping through my mind. It had been so numbingly quiet in the bomb shelter, the thought hadn’t even occurred to me. Everything had seemed normal, but it wasn’t. I said three more words; but they registered as a thought, not as sounds.

I can’t hear.

Everyone suffered symptoms after the treatment, but no one had totally lost something in the exchange. It had been small things—a headache or a sleeping foot—but never an entire category of who they were. The idea of never hearing again struck me as the cruelest deception.

I yelled, not a word but a sound, and found that I had been wrong. The word sounded far away; but it was there, distant and weak. I yelled again, moving my jaw up and down as if I’d dove too deep into a swimming pool and only needed to pop my eardrums. Was it better or the same? I picked up the edge of the rusted metal cot and dropped it on the concrete. The sound bounced quietly into my head and seemed to bring things closer.

“Can you hear me, Will?” I asked myself, loud but not yelling; and I heard my own voice. It was still small and far away, but my ears were getting better. It seemed, oddly, like the more I heard, the better I heard.

“This is what he meant,” I said, too quietly to hear myself say it, but understanding perfectly. Rainsford knew that I’d lost my hearing, and he knew what this would mean: that I wouldn’t hear him talking to me when I joined the rest.

“It’s his voice; that’s what makes them forget. It’s what makes them do what he says.”

But he’d also known that my hearing would return, at least most of it would; and when it did, his voice would undo my memory, break it apart, scatter it in the woods where I’d never find it again. I couldn’t know this for sure, but all the evidence pointed to his powers of persuasion. And it seemed to me that his most powerful tool was his voice, a voice that lulled those around him into doing what he asked. Even if I was wrong, I decided not to take any chances. If hearing Rainsford would erase my memory, than I’d have to make sure and never hear his voice.

I looked once more at the bomb shelter and really took it in this time. Had there ever been a wall of monitors? I didn’t have a watch anymore, and there were no windows in the basement. For all I knew I’d been in a deep sleep for days and days while they removed the monitors. The books were gone, too, and the monkey phones. Actually, the more I examined things, the more it seemed that
everything
was gone. Only the cot remained against one wall, on which I’d been sleeping.

I felt a gnawing hunger in my belly, and salivated at the thought of Mrs. Goring’s canned peaches with the dash of cinnamon thrown in.

Some food, that’s what I need, and then I’ll figure out what to do.

It wouldn’t matter anymore if Mrs. Goring discovered she was missing a jar of preserves. She knew I was down here and had to imagine I was starving. I opened the door and stepped out. It wasn’t as dark as I’d expected it would be in the basement. There was a soft, yellow light overhead, which hadn’t been there before.

Outside the room I saw the wall of twisting mushrooms and, turning, the black door with the number
7
.

“I’m not in the bomb shelter anymore,” I said, hearing my words as if they were whispered from the end of a long hallway. “I’m at the bottom of Fort Eden. I’m in room number six.”