Dark Eden (3 page)

I saw them all—the six—standing in front of the fort with worried looks on their faces. Even confident Kate Hollander was rattled.

“This can’t be right,” she said, her voice floating through the clearing in crystal clear shards.

“We could go back,” Ben said, which is when everyone seemed to notice all at once that I wasn’t there. Words pinged sharply against my ears, as if they were fired from the barrel of a pellet gun.

Alex:
Whoa. Spooky. What was his name again?

Connor:
Will! Hey, come out, man.

Ben:
Should we go back and look for him?

Kate:
I’m just saying, if they think we’re living in that thing for a week, they can forget it.

Marisa:
Seriously, Kate?

Avery:
(Sullen, voiceless).

I glanced from side to side, taking in the whole of the clearing, sizing up my options. There was the fort, a rectangle slab of hard corners with one giant door at the front and barred windows along its sides. A hundred feet to the left sat a smaller building, squared off at its sides and just as ghoulishly unappealing as Fort Eden. From the map I knew this was the Bunker, whatever that meant. A huge, fallen tree lay against the Bunker where the trunk had snapped in two, the top half resting like a dead animal on the flat roof. The pinecones and needles of the tree were long since gone, replaced by a swarm of brown mushrooms and clumps of stringy green moss. On the other side of Fort Eden, a pathway lead into the woods, beyond which I knew there was a pond.

Before the others could make up their minds about whether they should go looking for me or climb the front steps and knock on the door to a menacing concrete fort, a person came out of the smaller building. I saw her first, because I’d been looking at the Bunker already. She was old, dressed as a person of the woods: a dark flannel shirt, work pants, boots. The woman walked morosely down the cobblestone path, slow and steady.

“Who feels like running?” asked Ben, too loudly, I thought. But then, he would be feeling the terror start to rise at the back of his throat. The deeper we’d gone on the path, the quieter he’d become. He was beginning to sense the presence of things he wanted no part of.

At the midway point of her journey between the Bunker and Fort Eden, the woman stopped. She was standing directly across from where I hid in the underbrush and was smelling the air like a dog catching a scent. Her gaze settled in my direction, and I had an uneasy feeling in my bones.

She sees me.

Later I would conclude that it had been a trick of the light through the trees. But at the time, hidden as I was and frozen in place, I was convinced that she’d searched the whole of the forest and settled her cobalt eyes directly on my face. Whoever she was, she had a severe face, emotionless and cold. Her hair was short and nearly white, with small flecks of black around the crown of her head. She grew tired of staring off into the trees, and soon she was stomping up the concrete steps of the fort.

She seemed to take almost no notice of the bewildered group of teenagers until she’d cleared the last stair and turned on them.

“I’m Mrs. Goring, the cook,” she said sternly. Her voice was papery but strong. “Not your maid or your mother. Act like grown-ups and I won’t spit in your oatmeal.”

I got the feeling she was taking this opportunity to make her feelings known before the owner of the place could warn her to leave the guests alone. She hooked her thumbs into the pocket of her jeans. “I’m also the entire maintenance crew: plumber, fix-it woman—the works. If you see something in here you think might break, don’t touch it.”

Alex Chow raised his hand.

“I don’t remember saying I was a tour guide,” Mrs. Goring said. “But I’ll take one question. Fire when ready.”

“One of us is missing.”

Mrs. Goring appeared to be counting heads, as if Alex was either playing games or was just plain stupid.

“So I see,” she offered. “Where’d they go?”

Alex opened his mouth, but not fast enough to overcome Connor Bloom’s team captain persona.

“We think he might have tried to go back home,” said Connor, which was news to me.

“Speak for yourself,” said Marisa.

Mrs. Goring waved off the entire thing as if it wasn’t her problem and, with significant effort, pushed open the door.

“Remember what I said,” she concluded. “I’m not a maid. And don’t touch stuff.”

For some unimaginable reason, Kate walked up the stairs and past Mrs. Goring. This seemed to spur an exodus from the grounds as Connor followed, then Ben and Alex. Avery shrugged and climbed the concrete steps. Marisa gave me one last try, turning to the path and raising her voice to the trees.

“We’re going in, Will. If you’re out there, we want you to come with us.”

I wanted to yell back,
You could come out here with me instead. You don’t have to go inside.

But I couldn’t do it. They’d all come running. They’d make me go with them, which was something that just couldn’t happen.

Marisa walked up the stairs, and Connor pushed the door closed behind her.

Looking at the empty clearing, I realized my condition with alarming finality.

I was all alone.

Two hours passed in which I didn’t move at all other than to scan the buildings and open my backpack.During that time, the wind blew in layers of gray clouds and a soft rain began to fall. I’d come prepared with a hoodie, which I pulled out and put on. I had three dozen Clif Bars and six bottles of water in the backpack, too. That plus a Swiss Army knife, some earbuds, seven pairs of underwear, two white T-shirts, a couple of pairs of socks, my toothbrush, and a bar of soap still in its wrapper. Also, a penlight in my pocket and a rolled-up blanket tied to the outside of my pack. And finally, my Recorder
¹
, something I hadn’t dared to pull out of my backpack while everyone else was around.

Some people won’t go anywhere without a cell phone or a book. I’m like that with my Recorder. I capture voices and sounds, sometimes videos, and turn them into something interesting. And I like listening, which is probably what drew me to Dr. Stevens’s files in the first place.

Having nothing else to record but my own voice—something I’d heard way too much of lately—I plugged the mic into the Recorder and pointed it into the grove, recording the sounds of nature as shadows crept over Fort Eden.

At 7:00
PM
, Mrs. Goring came out of the Bunker and sat heavily on a concrete bench, leaving the door open behind her. I hadn’t seen her return from Fort Eden, but maybe there were other doors and other cobblestone paths that wound through the clearing I knew nothing about. She blew her nose ferociously into a rag, then leaned her head back against the hard surface of the Bunker. If not for her occasional movement, I would have guessed she’d fallen asleep.

At 7:10
PM
she rose and walked to the back of the Bunker, where I heard the sharp sound of an ax hitting wood.

She’s no slouch, Mrs. Goring,
I thought
. She can really swing that thing.

I took the sound as a bad sign. If push came to shove and I had to fight my way out of the compound, I’d rather my enemy was good at Monopoly, not chopping up things.

It was the time of year when night turned colder in the suburbs, but I hadn’t counted on night in the mountains and the unexpected drop in temperature. I tightened my hoodie down over my ears, a shiver ran through my body, and I wondered what I should do.

No one had come looking for me as I’d expected they might. No search party, not even a friendly plea to come in out of the cold. Maybe they’d already forgotten I existed or never cared to begin with. Or maybe they were all dead. It was possible.

A brown spider twirled a web over my head between the branches, and I watched it anxiously, listening to the sound of Mrs. Goring splitting wood. It occurred to me then that Mrs. Goring was behind the Bunker, where I couldn’t see her, which meant she couldn’t see me. The Bunker was empty, and the door stood open. I could take my chances and stay outside all night, but how cold and wet would it be at 2:00
AM
, and who or what might come searching for me in the darkest part of night? Fort Eden was out of the question. I wouldn’t go in there. They couldn’t make me.

A deep silence fell over the clearing, and I put my recording things away. Night was coming, and I stood in the gathering gloom, catching my hair in the cobweb overhead and slapping it free.

I took two bottomless breaths, clearing my head as I stared at the door to the Bunker.

And then I ran.

1
History of the Recorder

The first person who saw my Recorder was my brother, Keith. He was eleven; I was thirteen. He’d been stopping in my room every day for weeks, begging for castoffs.

“You don’t even need this one. You’ve got a bunch more just like it.”

Once Keith got his weekly allowance, he couldn’t wait five minutes before riding his bike to Starbucks for a five-dollar buzz. I was the opposite, a saver; and for the longest time I had no idea what I was even saving
for
.

“Come on, let me borrow ten bucks. I’ll totally pay you back.”

I might have said yes if Keith hadn’t already proven himself a lousy borrower. He’s got at least two bankruptcies in his future; and besides, I’d finally figured out what to do with my money.

When I’d turned twelve, my mom introduced me to online college classes at a tech school in India. Shockingly cheap courses taught by thickly accented Indian tech gods about stuff I actually had some interest in. First I took video game programming, then a series on electronics, then hardware integration. I failed approximately half of the classes I took, but my interest was sparked.

I was an audio geek at heart, but I liked video, too. Homebrew degrees in electronics and programming pushed me over the edge. I ended up on Craig’s List buying up old iPods and digital cameras until my money ran out.

Then I opened them up and started digging around.

“What the hell is that thing?”

Keith was back, guzzling his allowance through a plastic straw, looking over my shoulder.

“It’s my Recorder.”

“Looks like a seven-hundred-dollar piece of garbage.”

“Thanks, Keith. Next time I want your opinion, I’ll beat it out of you.”

“Oh, really? You and what geek army?”

God, he bugged me bad sometimes. But I could tell he was jealous. Sure my Recorder was basically the same thing as a new iPhone without the phone part; but I’d built it myself, and it looked gnarly.

THE DAYS OF OUR CAPTIVITY

EDEN 1

BEN

The hulking mass of Fort Eden is alive.

It’s about to leap out of the ground like a crouching monster and rip me apart.

Don’t look back. Keep running for the door.

What I felt as I ran across the clearing couldn’t have been true. It was a nightmarish figment of my imagination, nothing more. But that didn’t make it any less disturbing as I stood with my back against the wall inside the Bunker.

I’d made it, but I couldn’t stop thinking that Fort Eden itself had been watching me, trying to decide what to do about me.

There you are, Will Besting. I see you running. Intruder alert! Intruder alert!

I shook my head and listened for any sounds that might tell me what to do, taking my Recorder in hand and pointing it around the room. Were there others living in the Bunker who hadn’t shown their faces yet? Maybe Mrs. Goring had an insane stepdaughter wearing a white prom dress and clutching a metal yardstick or a baseball bat. If that was true, I’d hear her talking to herself or rapping the weapon against the footboard on her bed. I heard neither sound. For a moment I thought I heard a sniffing, as if from a large and unfriendly animal, but then I realized it was my own nose running down my half-frozen face.

So that was it then; the Bunker would be a quiet place of slab walls and sparse furnishings. Not even a ticking clock. The silence was already gnawing at my insides. It was also chilly inside the Bunker, which was probably why Mrs. Goring had been chopping wood outside as I ran through the clearing.

I walked down a narrow hall, dark and uninviting, listening for Mrs. Goring’s return. I expected to hear my own footsteps creaking on the floor, but the whole place was made of poured concrete, including the floor I stood on. There was something about the dead silence of my movement that scared me. If I could move this quietly, so could someone else. What if there
was
a crazy person living in the Bunker? I wouldn’t hear a yardstick swinging for the back of my head until it was too late.

It was smaller inside than I’d expected, which made me think the Bunker walls were two, maybe three, feet thick. To the right was a sitting room with two ragged chairs and a kerosene lantern like the one my dad bought at a garage sale many summers ago, thinking we’d use it on a camping trip. The trip had been canceled because Keith had basketball camp, and now the lamp sits in our garage collecting cobwebs.

Did the Bunker lack electricity? If so, how did Mrs. Goring cook the food Marisa and the others were going to eat?

In the corner of the room there was a wide, soot-encrusted mouth and black streaks running up the wall: the fireplace.

I kept moving, glancing into the bedroom, where two twin beds sat next to each other in the dark like a pair of rotting teeth. Across from the bedroom, a bathroom I didn’t care to explore. I stood at the center point of the Bunker and faced the far end of the hall from which I’d come. It was dark down there, and I could barely see the door where light crept in from the corners. I turned toward the rest of the Bunker, an exact mirror of the first side. Two rooms—a kitchen and a laundry room—with old but very real appliances. So there was electricity.

I went back to the middle of the Bunker and stared down the hall, two awful realizations hitting me at once.

The first was that there was no place for me to hide, and certainly no place for me to live until Dr. Stevens came back and got us.

The second, far worse realization, was that the door to the Bunker was swinging open.

I headed for the kitchen because it was the room I hoped she’d come to last. Mrs. Goring would make a fire in the sitting room, maybe kick off her boots and sit there awhile. I crept across the slick floor, careful not to bump into anything that might clang or fall, and arrived in the bleakest corner of the room. I crouched down beside a stone counter and, leaning back, discovered that this was no corner but something else: a floor-to-ceiling opening three or more feet wide hidden in the darkness.

My hands touched the cold wall behind me just as Mrs. Goring practically floated into the kitchen. She was like a ghostly apparition—so quiet—and I realized she was in her stocking feet. I’d been right about the boots coming off. I crawled in the dark as a lantern was lit in the kitchen, sending dancing shadows down a sloping corridor.

I was on the other side of the wall, at the top of a solid ramp that led down into blackness, which meant that the Bunker had a basement. It had been part of a fort at one time, so it shouldn’t have surprised me, but it did.

“Can’t wait to cook for these idiots,” Mrs. Goring yelled loudly, all the softness gone out of her voice. She was talking to the walls, complaining. On the steps in front of Fort Eden her voice had seemed softer, almost delicate in its authority. But here, in the Bunker, she could really wail.

A thought crossed my mind as Mrs. Goring left the kitchen to check on the fire. I was down a gravel road, a dirt road, a washboard road. I was down a path, into the woods, and into an ancient bunker in the middle of nowhere. But the basement was something worse. It felt eternal and endless and bleak. The rabbit hole that had started in a van in broad daylight had led to an entrance that would take me underground where no one could hear me scream.

I took the penlight out of my front pocket and tapped it on, washing the way down in a slim bead of blue light. It was indeed a ramp, like a narrow sloping driveway, and at the bottom, an open door.

My options were severely limited: descend the ramp or enter the Bunker and deal with Mrs. Goring.

“One step at a time,” I told myself, and it would have gone that way for many minutes if Mrs. Goring had not returned to the kitchen. Her nearness bothered me, a lucky thing, because no sooner was I down the ramp and through the open door below than I heard her following behind.

By the time Mrs. Goring started down the ramp I was already underground, making my way along a line of shelves in search of a place to hide. As I clicked off the penlight and the room went harrowingly black, a dizzy spell hit me square in the forehead without warning. I reached out my hand and took hold of a shelf, careful not to knock anything over, and started moving for the back wall.

A light turned on overhead, fluorescent and buzzing, the room awash in pale yellow. There were three rows of shelves, and the two I sat between were filled with dry goods. Boxes of cake mix, bags of flour, cans of tomatoes and soup and …

“Hot chocolate, that’s what I need. Take off the chill,” Mrs. Goring said.

She was at the shelf to my right, sifting through the cans, mumbling to herself. If she’d have been looking for a kid sitting on the floor in the basement, she’d have seen me for sure. But I stayed stone still as she found the jar of Carnation and made for the ramp, shutting off the light as she went.

And she did something else I’d hoped she wouldn’t do—a small thing, really, but meaningful given my circumstances.

She pulled the basement door shut, and from what I could tell, she locked it from the outside.

I was trapped.

The air hockey table at our house is in the basement, where long thin windows run along the edge of the low ceiling so daylight can pour in. My mom constantly set stacks of laundry on the table in order to drive us insane; and sometimes when Keith lost five or six games in a row, he’d randomly change the rules, a sort of air hockey madness taking over the game.

Hand stand!

Face burner!

Elbow shots!

Describing these random Keith rules isn’t really necessary. They speak for themselves: pure desperation at a time in our lives when I exterminated him relentlessly. In hindsight I think I did him a favor, toughening him up before the real competition of school and organized sports kicked in. I could have used that kind of training myself, come to think of it.

I was thinking of Keith and how we’d battled in the basement as I sat in the darkness of the Goring bunker. Were there any windows along the top edge, as there were in my own basement back home? It was an important question, because there were risks if I turned on the overhead light. Mrs. Goring might be sitting on the stoop, scaring off the coyotes. What would she do if light washed over the clearing unexpectedly? She would know someone was in the basement. And then there was Fort Eden. I’d seen its barred windows. Everyone inside would see the light. They might think it was Mrs. Goring; they might not.

Listening carefully was useful, because it more or less answered my question and then some. The basement of the Bunker was deathly quiet. I didn’t hear the fire crackling upstairs or the sound of Mrs. Goring as she walked back and forth between the rooms. There was no washing machine, no tea pot screaming with the steam of hot water. I couldn’t hear the soft wind in the trees or the crows outside.

This was both good and bad news as I got up from the floor and tapped my penlight on. Good, because I could knock over shelves of food down hear and no one would hear me. Bad, because no one would hear me if I yelled for help. I double-checked, pointing the light along the ridge of the ceiling to the small room and finding only a gray concrete ridge but no windows. I went to the door that led to the ramp and found the light switch.

I stood in the corner of the basement and checked the door, locked from the outside as I’d feared. My gaze turned to the right—three rows of carefully organized floor-to-ceiling shelves filled with large cans of food and boxes. To my left, a long concrete wall with another door at the far end, which I approached but chose not to open. Better to get the lay of the land first, then I could circle back. I found more shelves against a wall, dry goods and building supplies: scrap wood, jars of nails and rivets, a musty tarp.

I walked to the back of the basement, along the edge of the shelves that held the cans of food, and found one more door. This door was not like the others, which were all made of heavy timber and had iron hinges. The door I stood in front of was made of metal, like a freezer, and on the front a word stenciled with red paint.

BOMB SHELTER

I don’t fear enclosed spaces; in fact, I like them quite a bit more than wide-open cafeterias or ball fields. But the words had the ring of finality. It was a place people went if the world was coming to an end.

There was a pin on a chain holding a freezer handle in place. The pin emitted a sharp sound of metal as I removed it and let it hang from the chain like a body swinging from a noose. The handle was cold in my hand, but it pulled easily enough, and the door to the bomb shelter was open.

A curb ran along the bottom edge, and I stepped over it, peering into a strange and secret place. Before I knew it I was inside, discovering a knob that clicked once and then turned, bringing up the light.

I had come to the farthest corner of where I could go; and, turning around, I pulled the door in close behind me, just shy of locking myself in.

There were many things in the bomb shelter: a drooping cot, a vent trickling earthy air, a toilet against a low wall slung around the edge. There was a fifties style red phone that emitted no dial tone, shelves with a lot of junk and some yellowed paperbacks, and a power outlet that worked, with a hot plate plugged into it.

But none of these things caught my eye when I’d turned the dimmer switch knob and the light went on. It was the wall of monitors that captured every ounce of my attention.

“No way,” I muttered, touching the curved glass of an empty screen. It was a foot across, with a metal housing that was rusting in one corner. And it was not the only screen; there were six more.

There were seven monitors—one in the middle and six wrapped around the outside in a circle, all of them staring vacantly in my direction—and a set of four buttons in the middle. One button was black; the others were marked with letters:
G
,
B
, and
M
.

“Why are you here?” I whispered, staring at a wall that made no sense. The monitors had that old, 1950s era quality about them, so they sort of fit—but how? The room was beginning to feel less like a bomb shelter and more like a safe room. A room that would allow someone to see outside after the door had been sealed shut from a dangerous world outside. There was a part of me—the same part that had been listening to recordings for weeks—that liked the idea of secretly observing the world outside. This could be interesting.

I set my backpack on the smooth floor, retrieving one of the water bottles and gulping down half of its contents. My finger hovered over the
M
button, then I pushed it in and a loud, flat click echoed in the bomb shelter. The center monitor sparked to life. It was dim at first, like a retrograde TV that hadn’t been used in a long time and needed a few seconds to wake up. As the image grew brighter, I saw them: a group in an open room, sitting around a large table as if they were taking turns telling ghost stories. The light was faint, but I knew these people.

Ben Dugan’s back, a mop of dark hair spilling over the neck of a polo shirt. To his right, the shape of Connor Bloom’s cropped, domed head. On Ben’s left, Alex Chow. And the faces of the girls as the circle went around: Kate, Avery, Marisa.

I could see that they were talking, but what they were saying was a mystery to me. The monitor was showing, but it wasn’t telling. There was no audio whatsoever, and after examining the wall, I found no sign of a speaker or volume control. I felt as if I was ten feet underwater, staring through the filmy surface of a pond at talking heads I couldn’t hear. It also felt like a trick or a punishment for what I’d done: the missing half of what I’d stolen. I’d been listening to their disembodied voices for weeks. Now I was seeing them but couldn’t hear what they were saying.

The oppressive silence of the bomb shelter made the images feel haunted, as if they were people long since dead and I was watching silent home movies from a hundred years before. Either that or I’d gone totally deaf in the basement of Mrs. Goring’s bunker. I squeezed the water bottle in my hand and heard the cheap plastic crinkling between my fingers. At least I hadn’t lapsed into a nightmare.