Dark Eden (18 page)

“So, are you better?” Kate asked. She’d come through the throng of people and met Avery first. She didn’t wait for an answer while Avery caught her breath. “Yep, she’s cured. A girl knows.”

Avery nodded, smiling, and we all seemed to notice the change in her at once.

“Very goth of you,” Kate commented, picking up a long strand of Avery’s hair that we all saw had turned white.

“I know, right?” Avery said. “It’ll grow out. No worries.”

We talked a little more, but the white van awaited, and we all wanted to go home. Everyone pulled out their phones along the way, still finding no signal; and they all discovered that if they had taken any pictures, those pictures were gone. They didn’t care about this detail as much as they should have, and I was convinced that this was all part of the plan. Get cured, go away, remember nothing.

When we’d climbed the entire path and the trees around us had fallen away, the morning had already turned warm. Sweatshirts were wrapped around waists and bottles of water were drained. Dr. Stevens and her white van were not there, so we waited, wondering what we were supposed to do.

A few minutes passed and then a sound came from up the washboard road. We saw the dust rising off the top of the road first, then the dirt bike. It wasn’t Dr. Stevens in the white van, not yet.

“It’s him,” said Avery, smiling as she tucked the wiry white strands of hair behind her ear. “He came back, just like he said he would.”

“Who did?” asked Ben Dugan.

“Davis,” said Kate, a sliver of jealousy returning to her voice.

“Maybe he’ll let me ride his bike,” said Connor. “Should I ask him?”

“Not a great idea, bro,” Alex confided, and I had to agree. Connor Bloom was still a little on the wobbly side. He’d stopped twice on the way up the trail, leaning hard against a tree. Putting him on a dirt bike seemed like a terrible idea.

A plume of dirt rose off the back of Davis’s bike as he came near. He wore a white T-shirt, jeans, boots, and no helmet. He’d been cured, like the rest of us, so maybe he’d developed a fear of anything being placed on his head. Either way, the look suited him, and I was glad once more that he’d chosen Avery over Marisa from the start.

“So you guys are a wrap, huh?” he said, killing the engine as he arrived, and we all circled around a 500cc dirt bike that looked made for riding through the woods.

“Sweet ride,” Connor said, nodding appreciatively.

“Don’t let him near it,” Kate warned. “He’ll run us all over.”

We all laughed, and Davis smiled broadly. He didn’t get off the bike, glancing around at the group. The sun was up over the road behind me, so when our eyes met, he squinted into the bright light.

“Good to see you, Will. Everything cool?”

The question was like a wink—Did you get the music I left for you? Do you remember? Did you figure anything out?—but it felt like the wrong time to give anything away. I needed to be free and clear of this place and get my head straight. It didn’t matter though. Avery Varone was getting on the bike, which pulled everyone’s attention away from me.

“Hey, if you’re giving rides, count me in,” Kate said, and I felt a little worried for Avery. Kate Hollander on the back of the bike with her arms and legs wrapped around Davis … well … not too many guys I know could experience that without thinking twice.

Avery shocked everyone with her reply.

“Tell Dr. Stevens I’ll meet you guys back in the city,” she said. “I raced up here so fast I forgot to bring my bag.”

“You want me to take you back?” Davis asked.

Avery’s arms were already around his middle, her cheek resting on his white T-shirt.

“Here comes Dr. Stevens,” I said, seeing the dust start to rise way up the long hill, the white van off in the distance.

“Go, Davis,” Avery said; and looking at her, I saw that her eyes were closed. “Just go.”

The engine fired and our circle parted. There was something very cool about the whole thing, and everyone began to cheer them on. But I had mixed emotions as Davis shrugged, smiled, and put the bike in gear.

“Enjoy being cured, you guys,” he said, and they started down the path.

Marisa waved and hopped up and down.

“I can’t believe he came back for her,” she said, taking hold of my hand.

“God, it’s like a lovefest around here,” said Kate, the most popular girl somehow managing to end up alone at the end. Connor and Ben each put an arm around her as the van rolled up, and this seemed to bring her around.

I looked down the path, listening for the dirt bike. But it was already outside my range of hearing. Seeing them go down there, where the trees turned the path dark and shadowy, I was really glad for Avery Varone and thought again about how much I knew. I wondered if, later on, after I’d had time to think about it, I’d wish I could forget like all the rest.

Dr. Stevens was all smiles, excited to see everyone and especially curious about me. She searched my eyes, and when it appeared that I’d passed some sort of test, we all began piling into the van. She took the news of Avery’s departure in stride.

“I’ve known Davis a long time,” she said. “He’ll get her home.”

“Wherever home is
this
week,” Kate said, getting in one last jab, but then apparently thinking twice. “Okay, that was beneath even me. Wipe it from your memories, folks.”

“You’re right, that was beneath you,” said Dr. Stevens, and then she let slip a piece of information I knew was more important than it seemed on the surface. “She’s with me now. The last place didn’t work out, and I decided ten homes was enough.”

Dr. Stevens had become Avery’s foster parent.
How convenient
, I thought. If Avery had died during her cure, Dr. Stevens probably would have had a way to make her disappear.

When I reached the backseat of the van, Marisa sat next to me. Ten minutes later she was sleeping with her head against my shoulder and we were out on the highway heading back into the city. I opened my backpack and searched inside, finding the small box Mrs. Goring had given me. It was tied shut with a piece of twine, which I untied and dropped into my bag.

Inside the box I found my Recorder and, cycling through the menu, discovered many files. All the audio files I’d taken from Dr. Stevens’s office were there, plus every audio file I’d recorded at Fort Eden. All the photos I’d taken and all the videos I’d shot, all of them were there and more. And Mrs. Goring had added more things for me to listen to, more things to watch.

The conversation between Rainsford and Dr. Stevens rose up in my memory.

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.

It was not Avery or Kate or Marisa they didn’t trust. It was Mrs. Goring.

I looked up at Dr. Stevens, who was staring at me in the rearview mirror, and wondered what I was going to do.

You were right about her
, I thought.
She’s betrayed you.

But what did that even mean?

I would discover, on that very night, the whole truth of the matter.

It was far worse than I’d imagined.

RAINSFORD

O
NE
M
ONTH
L
ATER

We asked you a question, Will. Why are you hiding in this room all alone?

Because I knew. I knew, and I was afraid.

I remember when I was in the bomb shelter all alone, I thought about what would happen if someone found me. I came up with that answer based solely on the idea that I was afraid of being with other people. It had nothing to do with Rainsford or what happened to us at Fort Eden. I was just too afraid to go inside and face my fear.

As it turned out, I never had to deliver that answer in the bomb shelter at Fort Eden; and, in the end, I’m not sure how I feel about that. If someone would have come looking for us and found me hiding there, everything about my life and the lives of the others would have been different. None of us would have been cured. We’d all still be mired in darkness, trying and failing to make ourselves well again. But we’d each paid a price, some bigger than others; and I knew things no person should be forced to know alone.

Connor Bloom still hasn’t recovered from his dizzy spells, which has brought his athletic career to an end. Everyone is saying he was hit too hard one too many times as he carried the ball, but I know better.

Ben Dugan called me just this morning, and I asked him again, like I always do: how are your hands feeling? He says he’s gotten used to it—the pain in his joints—that it’s gotten a little better.

Kate still has the headache that won’t go away.

Alex’s feet fall asleep all the time, so he can’t do driver’s ed until they get it figured out.

I have fallen head over heels for Marisa, who is sleeping on the small couch in my room as I say these words into my Recorder. She sleeps a lot. She always will.

One week later, I know I’ll never get all my hearing back. I’ve settled for 70 percent and hope it won’t get worse. But it will. I’m nearly positive I’ll be totally deaf by the time I’m thirty, but I hold out a little bit of hope.

I feel certain about the lasting nature of these ailments because Mrs. Goring explained a few things to me. She didn’t just give me back my Recorder; she filled it with things I wish I hadn’t discovered. It began with her voice, quieter than usual, and more human.

I’ve carried these secrets for sixty-two years, but the time has arrived for me to speak, and speak I will. Hear me, Will Besting. Hear me and know.

The first thing I would like to say is that he chose poorly. He should have known better. I might have been afraid, but I was not a pawn. It takes a certain kind of strength to sit in the seventh chair. I had the vigor for it. I could endure. But I was not the person he thought I was, and this has brought me to you, Will, at the twilight of my years.

My name is Cynthia, same as your doctor. This whole ‘Mrs. Goring’ business was for show. Rainsford has been my husband these many years, and Dr. Stevens—or Cynthia, as I prefer to call her—is my daughter. As you are probably well aware by now, Cynthia is very attached to her father. She has done many bad things for him, although it’s hard to say how much she really knows half of the time. You’ve seen the power Rainsford wields. My guess is, that power is amplified in Cynthia. She does as he says.

Cynthia gathered the seven. It was her primary purpose, at least so far as Rainsford was concerned. She was given the assignment without my knowledge—I want that known, so don’t leave it out. Your arrival and the arrival of your friends was sudden. I had very little to do with the proceedings. It was the two of them mostly.

The hardest part of what I must tell you is easier to show you. There’s also the simple matter that you won’t believe me if I say it. Don’t lose heart, Will Besting. I’ve taken you this far; you must go with me the rest of the way. You must come out of the dark where you hid in the hall. You can’t turn back and run up those winding stairs this time. Now you will stay, come into the room, and see. Now you may open your eyes.

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.