Dark Eden (16 page)

It took me a few minutes to calm down and get past the idea that I’d been moved from one basement to another. The bomb shelter was real; I just wasn’t in it. I stood before the door marked with a
7
and wished I’d had the courage to knock on it, but I didn’t. It was the last room,
his
room. The only person who was going in there was Avery Varone, the girl who claimed she couldn’t be cured.

I walked to the elevator, which stood open, and stepped inside. I took the long, slow ride up to the main floor. Staring at Kino’s smashed canoe, I felt his life going in reverse and imagined him making different choices. When I got out, I walked up the ramp and Kino got bigger on the floor. Parting the curtain was the easy part; but standing at the door to Fort Eden, I had an old, familiar feeling. I was afraid. It wasn’t the old, debilitating fear that grabbed me, but a new one, a rational one. I wasn’t afraid of being with a bunch of people; I was afraid of what Rainsford would do to me if I went inside.

The door opened before I could turn around and go back.

“Get in here; I don’t have all day, and the food’s getting cold.” Mrs. Goring, yelling in my face, loud enough for me to hear.

I stepped inside, nodding, and saw that everyone was sitting at the round table staring at me. In the past, this would have been my signal to cut and run, but I saw them differently than how I’d seen groups of people for a long time. They were smiling at me, saying things I couldn’t hear. Even Connor was glad to see me, pumping his fist and, I think, even a little jealous that I’d put one over on the system, at least for a while.

Nice shirt.

I didn’t hear Ben Dugan say the words; but he was pointing to his own, and I could read his lips. I looked down and saw that I had on the same shirt, the one with the
E
sitting on a blooming pedestal of stone.

I hadn’t moved from the door, and Mrs. Goring was already back at her metal cart, which sat next to the table. She was moving big bowls of steaming pasta and sauce, and rolls of bread wrapped up in foil. A spaghetti dinner, my favorite. Alex and Kate were waving me over, calling my name, but I still didn’t move.

When Marisa got up and started walking toward me, I met her halfway. She reached out her hand, smiling so perfectly, and our fingers touched. Her hand was shaking as much as mine was; and dragging me to the table, she kept looking back, wordless and beaming.

You’re okay
, I said, so softly that I heard nothing. She nodded as we arrived at the table, and I sat down. Her eyes looked tired, as if she hadn’t slept for days; and it worried me. Maybe she hadn’t been cured after all.

“Eat. Now!” Mrs. Goring yelled from behind me. “I’ll be back in twenty minutes.”

Questions were firing left and right, and I caught the general idea: where have you been? Tell us everything.

I pointed to my ears, offered a start: “The cure left me just about deaf, but I can hear a little. I think it’s coming back. Am I yelling?”

Friendly laughter followed, along with a lot of head nodding.
Dude, you’re practically screaming at us
.

Food was making the rounds, the first real dinner I’d been this close to in a while, and I whispered close to Marisa’s ear.

“Can you say something quiet and near? I want to hear your voice.”

She smiled down at her plate, touched my hand under the table, and put her mouth next to my ear. If the hand-holding had been amazing, this was completely off the charts. I felt her warm breath on my skin. The words were alive in my ear, and I heard them.

“Don’t leave me again. Stay.”

“No problem,” I said, and everyone laughed. I had the feeling I’d said it pretty loud, and laughed along with them. I piled pasta onto my plate and covered them in thick, red sauce, then crunched my teeth into the best garlic bread I’d ever tasted. Things were looking up, no doubt.

As I scanned the table, I realized that Avery Varone wasn’t there. I leaned in close to Marisa and asked where she was. She shrugged, pointing her fork toward the door leading outside, smiled absently. She was trying to put up a good front, but there was no mistaking how exhausted she was.

“Where’s Rainsford?” I asked, and got the feeling I’d finally found the right volume for my voice.

Connor had the biggest voice in the group, but Kate was a close second, so I’d aimed my question at them.

“He’s around,” Kate said. “He says we’re going home tomorrow.”

“I’m actually going to miss this place,” Alex Chow offered. I heard his voice, quiet but there. My hearing was slowly getting better, and I understood the reason for the dinner. Rainsford knew that hearing voices would bring me back around. The more I heard, the better I heard. What better place to get people talking than around a dinner table?

I was starving and wanted nothing more than to eat everything in front of me, but I was smart enough to know it was a trick. The longer I stayed, the more I’d hear; and that, I knew, was dangerous.

“Can we take a walk? Is that allowed?” I asked Marisa.

She hesitated, not like she wasn’t sure if they were allowed, but for a totally different reason. She was too tired to go for a walk.

“Go on,” said Ben Dugan. “I’ll hide some food for you. She’ll never know.”

This seemed to give Marisa just enough energy to get up and push me toward the door. The smile was back and we were moving. I looked back, and was happy to see Ben taking my heaping plate into the guys’ quarters.

I did take one slice of garlic bread with me, not for myself, but for Marisa. If the walk ended in a kiss, I wanted her to have the same breath I did. We held hands and walked the path to the pond, taking turns biting into the crisp bread until it was gone.

She leaned in close, putting her shoulder against mine.

“You’re cured,” she said. “I’m happy for you.”

“I’m happy for you, too,” I said.

“You’re yelling.”

“Oh, sorry.”

She smiled and looked at her shoes.

“Do you remember getting cured?” I asked, softer this time.

She shook her head no.

“But I’m not scared anymore. And I’ve put some things behind me. Hard things.”

I wanted to say “I know,” but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. There would be time, later, to dig deeper into both of our pasts.

“Why so tired? Up late last night?”

She laughed, and the whisper was back, close and warm.

“Quite the opposite. I sleep all the time. Must be my symptom, like Kate’s headaches and your hearing. Rainsford says it will go away after a while.”

Maybe you’re just catching up on your sleep,
I thought, which felt true.

We fell into silence on the path, and I wished I had my Recorder. I’d have put one earbud in her ear, the other in mine, and played our song. It would have been epic-unforgettable-romantic-awesomeness. I was lost in this thought, thinking of the words and the tune, when she stopped me and looked into my eyes.

“You’re singing our song,” she said, softly enough so that I couldn’t hear her; but I could tell what she’d said. And I realized that I was.

She leaned in, rising on her toes to meet me, and we kissed.

EDEN 7

AVERY

When we arrived at the pond, Avery Varone was sitting alone on the dock. She was staring at the pump house, holding the pipe wrench in her hand.

Marisa touched me on the shoulder, signaling me to wait at the water’s edge, and then she went to Avery’s side and sat down. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but whatever it was, it wasn’t much. Avery wasn’t in a talkative mood. She kept glancing over at me, and I wondered again:
are you with us or against us?
She had overtaken Kate as the most likely mole in our group for a number of reasons.

I stared off at the pond, silence enveloping me, and thought about what I knew.

Kate Hollander was beautiful and smart, and she knew how to play people; but she wasn’t a follower. Kate led. It was in her bones. I found it gradually harder to believe she would fall into step with someone else’s plan, especially if it was a plan put into play by adults. She was classic antiauthority. She’d be the one at school pulling pranks and causing trouble for all the right reasons. I had come to trust Kate’s motives in the days at Fort Eden, in part because I knew her tragic past, but also because she was a rebel fighting for us, not them.

So Kate was out, and Marisa wasn’t even on the radar, which left only one person: Avery Varone. She was a foster kid, and I knew from her audio sessions that she’d been in at least nine different homes over the past few years. That sort of thing didn’t happen if you were a good kid. My guess is that foster parents are in it for the money, and problem kids get moved along. But more than that was the central problem with Avery: she couldn’t be cured, or at least that was her story. And standing by the pond that night, I thought I’d figured out why. Avery Varone couldn’t be cured because she wasn’t sick to begin with. It was the only answer that made any sense.

I was thoroughly convinced of these facts as Marisa got up and came back toward me, which made what she said all the more confusing.

“How’s she doing?” I asked, making sure to whisper so my voice didn’t carry over the dock. I moved closer so Marisa could answer me.

“Davis came back and saw her. She told him first.”

“Told him what?”

Marisa looked hollowed-out with tiredness, as if she was walking in her sleep. Her words were faint, but clear enough.

“Avery’s ready. She’s going to do it. She’s getting cured.”

When we got back to the main room in Fort Eden, Marisa curled up on one of the couches and fell fast asleep. The guys were hustling one another at cards and tried to rope me in, but I waved them off and headed for the guys’ room for at least three reasons.

1) I wanted the food Ben had taken for me.

2) I wanted to talk to Dr. Stevens.

3) I could hear them.

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.