Dark Eden (17 page)

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
1
s, 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 Varone 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
7
s, 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.

Mrs. Goring:
You went too far.

Dr. Stevens:
I’m his daughter. I did what I had to do.

Mrs. Goring:
You’re wrong. No one forced you.

Dr. Stevens:
Shut up.

Mrs. Goring:
Her blood is on your hands.

Dr. Stevens:
I said shut up!

I had a lot of questions as I took two stairs at a time, escaping from the seventh room before they could see me.
Was Avery still alive? What had really happened during all of our cures? What had I just witnessed?
But I had one answer I knew for sure, and it made me feel scared for every one of us.

Rainsford had a daughter, and her name was Dr. Stevens.

That night no one came out of the rooms. There was no greeting for Avery, because Avery didn’t come back. I crept into my bed and lay there, staring at the ceiling, for a long time. The battery on the MP3 player had maybe an hour left, and I kept the earbuds in and my hoodie pulled up just in case. About midnight I got up and peeked into the main room, which was empty and eerily quiet. I tiptoed across to the girls’ quarters and went inside.

Two empty beds, two full ones. The thought of accidentally waking Kate instead of Marisa weighed heavy on my mind as I stood at the door. Either way, both girls were conked out solid, and I couldn’t see the point of waking Marisa. What could I say? If she had been controlled in a way that made her forget, nothing I said was going to do any good. It would all sound insane, and might even put her and the others in needless danger. I went back to my bed and vowed to keep my mouth shut until morning.

A person entered the guys’ quarters some time later. I’d been drifting in and out of sleep with my finger on the
PLAY
button. The door opened and closed, and then the garbled whispering began and I turned on the music, rolling over on my bed so the hoodie flopped over my face. The intruder had to be Rainsford, and he walked back and forth between the beds saying who knew what. I couldn’t hear him, but Connor, Ben, and Alex could. Their dreams were filled with Rainsford telling them what to remember about this place.

After a while he left and I heard him enter the girls’ quarters. I turned off the music, but the searching whispers remained. I had maybe a half hour of juice left, nothing more, and I let the music play through Kiss and The Who, the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin.

By the time the music died I was fast asleep.

Morning at Fort Eden came early. Mrs. Goring was in the main room, banging two frying pans together, and she was in the nastiest mood I’d ever seen.

“Get up and get out!” she yelled. There was no formal breakfast served, no warm good-bye from the mysterious proprietor, nothing. She stuck a granola bar and a bottle of water in each of our hands as we passed by and answered our questions as tersely as the human language would allow.

“Is Avery cured? Where is she?” Marisa asked. She was more awake than she’d been the day before, which pleased me.

“She’s staying an extra day,” Mrs. Goring said, shoving the meager breakfast in Marisa’s hands.

“No way,
alone
?” Ben Dugan asked.

“Ben Dugan, you are a fool. Of course not alone! I’ll be here.”

“Super fun for Avery,” Kate said under her breath.

“You I won’t miss,” Mrs. Goring countered.

“Where do we go?” asked Connor Bloom, who looked half asleep as he walked by and begged for an extra granola bar, which Mrs. Goring would not give him.

“Same place you came from, up the path. Your ride’ll be waiting.”

“Tell Rainsford thanks,” Alex Chow said, and I could tell by the sound of his voice that he really was thankful for having been cured. “If he needs another Davis, tell him I’ll be first in line.”

“I’m not telling him squat!” Mrs. Goring said.

When my turn came in the line, I waved off the granola bar but took the water. Everyone had gone outside, and it was just us two.

“Suit yourself,” she said. “Like I care if you starve.”

I was about to move through the doorway and out into the clearing when she grabbed me by the arm and held me back. She looked into my eyes, searching for something.

She knows
, I thought.
She knows, and she’s going to throw me down those stairs so my memories can be erased like the others.

But then something unexpected happened. Her eyes began to fill with tears as she stared up at me. Her chin wobbled funny, like she was going to weep for some deep regret she didn’t know how to explain. She let me go, leaned over the wobbly metal cart I had come to know so well, and took hold of a small brown box.

“You won’t know what it means,” she said, “but I have to tell someone, and you’re all I’ve got.” And for once I could imagine her as a young girl of my age, innocent and happy. There was that part of her, locked away; and it proved my point about the power of sound. In her voice was the girl she had once been, before life had disappointed her bitterly. She was not always mean Mrs. Goring. She was once an innocent girl with fears and dreams.

I took the box and put it in my backpack, then I reached out and touched her on the arm, because it seemed like she needed someone to touch her in a kind way just then.

“Get on the path, Will Besting. And don’t ever try to come back,” she said, the old salt returning.

I wanted to tell her that I could probably make it back here the next day if only I had a driver’s license, but I let it pass.

On the long walk up the path, I stayed next to Marisa, and we talked about nothing special. My hearing was at around 70 percent, so I leaned in a lot when she spoke, which she seemed to like. I could hear the crows following us at a distance in the canopy above, as they’d done on the way in, cawing back and forth. Were they happy to see us leaving, or just annoyed at our presence in the thick of the woods?

“Does everyone still have symptoms?” I yelled ahead to the group that led.

The consensus was yes, everyone was still suffering from some strange ailment, and I began to wonder if we’d all left something at Fort Eden that we’d never get back.

Ben Dugan surprised everyone when he yelled Avery’s name over our heads.

“Avery Varone! You’re back!”

She was jogging up the path, trying to catch up to us as we stopped.

“Thank God,” I mumbled, “she’s okay.” Deep inside I was thinking how great it was that Fort Eden wasn’t a murder scene and that my life would not become hopelessly complicated after all. Avery Varone, not dead, meant a lot. It meant I could forget everything that I’d seen if I wanted to and it wouldn’t matter. We were all cured, and no one was terribly hurt. As bizarre as the experience had been, at fifteen, I could imagine letting that be enough.