Dark Eden (5 page)

The image frothed with static again and returned to Ben wearing the helmet. The blue mercury line was rising faster now.

“He’s scared,” I said.

No kidding!
I imagined Keith yelling back.

From this point on, the scene leaped back and forth between Ben Dugan in the blue room and the park setting with the small child. There had to be a screen inside the helmet, a screen that allowed Ben to see what I was seeing. Where the footage came from was a mystery—was it real or made up or somehow pulled out of Ben’s brain and projected in front of him?

The kid was in the sandbox now, digging with the plastic shovel. The sand was wet, and the wood rails along the edge of the box were rotting. The boy gave up on the shovel and started digging like a dog, throwing clumps of sodden sand into the camera.

In the room, the blue line neared the top of the screen.

The boy had a hold of something heavy and unexpected. He yelled something I couldn’t hear.
A dinosaur bone! Mom, look!

The angle shifted in a way that made my stomach roll, moving in close on what the boy had found.

In the room, the blue line looked as if it was about to break through the top of the screen and continue up the wall of the bomb shelter. Ben was starting to curl into a ball in the chair.

The boy, who I suddenly understood was a younger version of Ben, had not discovered a dinosaur bone in the sandbox. He lifted the object with great effort, and found that a human finger was in his hand. The finger was attached to an arm, which came out of the sand past the elbow before young Ben Dugan knew what he’d unearthed. The arm was starting to decay, the skin blue and yellow, as if it had been run over by a car and bruised beyond repair. A spider crawled across the arm and reached the boy’s finger.

And then things turned ugly.

Little Ben Dugan looked at the camera, his eyes wide with alarm, holding hands with a dead person. The image froze into a photograph of a terrified child, and the screen began to fill with silhouettes of centipedes and spiders, as if they were crawling on the lens of the camera. Every kind of crawling thing darkened the screen, and soon the sandbox was obliterated from view. The park was gone; the sky, too. All that remained in the end were the boy’s eyes, white with fear. Everything else was covered by a black swarm of insects.

When the screen returned to the blue room, the blue line had found its end and Ben’s neck tightened. The tubes and wires dangled wildly overhead.

And then, all at once, stillness.

He’s dead,
I thought, staring at the slumped-over body in the chair.
Ben Dugan is dead.

No, he ain’t dead. Just watch, he’s coming back.

Shut up, Keith! Leave me alone!

I stood in the bomb shelter by myself, listening to my heart bang against my chest.

A few seconds later the screen powered down, and the blue room vanished from view.

Ben Dugan was gone.

EDEN 2

KATE

I needed answers the monitors wouldn’t give me. The surveillance system had gone dead, which meant I was both blind and alone. I cycled through the four buttons, but nothing happened. Maybe the monitors were on a timer, or possibly whatever had blown Ben Dugan’s mind had also blown a fuse.

A half hour passed in which I tried everything I could think of that might bring the system back online. I searched for loose wires or an access panel, but there were none. I pushed the buttons in every imaginable order on the off chance that I was actually entering a combination that would trigger a restart. I stuck a pencil in the three strange holes made for some kind of audio connection that had gone out of existence decades ago. I even checked the electrical box on the other side of the wall, but everything inside was precaveman era. Touching anything in there, I assumed, would either electrocute me or kill the lights upstairs.

The more I examined the wall of screens, the more the monitors seemed almost alien in their uselessness. I can appreciate old tech, but this was like a dead language or a wheel made of stone: useless to the point of frustration.

Somewhere along the way I became aware of how tired I was. The day had been long and the night longer still, and the strain of hiding out in someone else’s basement was starting to wear away my resolve. I devised a half-baked plan in my head, then set the alarm on my watch and slept fitfully for almost four hours, waking at 3:00
AM
. When I checked the monitors again, clicking through all the cycles for signs of life, they were still dead. I’d had a plan when I’d reclined on the cot with its decaying springs, but now that the time had come, I wasn’t so sure.

I thought about it for several minutes, half asleep on my feet, and decided I could at least go take a look. If things felt wrong, I didn’t have to go through with it. I tried to erase all signs of my existence in the room as I put on my backpack. Then I turned out the light and left the bomb shelter.

I walked up the underground tunnel that led into Fort Eden and imagined I was leaving a movie theater in the middle of the show. The only thing missing was a glowing red exit sign. At the end was a door with a bar across the middle, like they’d had in the gymnasium at my grade school. It was the kind of door that could be locked from the outside, but from the inside there was always the bar if you needed to escape from a fire or a violent game of dodge ball.

I was quieter than Mrs. Goring as I went about my business, slowly depressing the bar on the door until it opened, little by little. A crack, nothing more, and I had my first real look at the inside of Fort Eden. All I could see was a black velvet curtain hanging down the wall, covering the barred windows that faced Mrs. Goring’s bunker. I pushed the heavy door open a little farther and looked through, finding a single light bathing a round table in the middle of the room. A figure was seated there, reading a book.

Marisa.

If anyone was going to be awake at that hour, I’d known it would be her. I’d half hoped I wouldn’t find her so I could look around on my own without fear of being caught, but seeing her there changed my mind. The sound of her voice and the voice of Dr. Stevens drifted through my memory.

It’s especially bad at night, when everyone else is asleep
.

What happens then?

It’s just bad then, like it’s so real, you know?

I know. What then? What happens?

First I can’t move at all, then I can’t get out fast enough. I run down the stairs until I reach the bottom, then I walk to my mom’s room and get in bed with her.

You’re fifteen, Marisa. I know it’s scary, but we should be past this by now.

I know. I’m trying. I just can’t.

I didn’t want to startle her, so I gathered my courage and whispered as softly as I could.

“Hey, Marisa, it’s me.”

It was a long way across the great room, and I wasn’t sure if my voice had traveled the entire distance or not. She was stone still. Nothing about Marisa moved.

“It’s Will,” I whispered, a little louder this time; and her head looked up from the book. She looked noticeably relieved.

“Will?” she said.

“Yeah, Will Besting. From yesterday”

Jeez, Will, get a grip. What other Will could it possibly be?

I opened the door a little bit farther and let it fall against my chest, holding it open. I could go either way now, depending on how this went.

Once she knew it was me, Marisa couldn’t get across the open space of the room fast enough. She moved like a gazelle, sliding on her stocking feet. She’d changed into a pair of flannel pajama bottoms, but was still wearing the same T-shirt.

“You scared me half to death,” she said, and I felt her breath on my face, warm and soft. She had heard my voice at the start. I realized I must have startled her. I felt guilty for making her feel that way.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you.”

“It’s okay. I scare easily at night. And I have insomnia. Bad combo.”

She must have been able to tell I was afraid, too. Maybe I was even backing away, making my retreat for the bomb shelter. Her voice was calm, soothing almost, and she was reaching her hand out toward me as if I was a scared dog that she was trying to reason with.

“Come on, it’s okay, Will. No one else is awake.”

I stepped through the doorway, the faint light over the table drawing my eyes.

“Better leave something to block the door,” she whispered. “It doesn’t open from this side. I’ve tried.”

She looked at me curiously, as if she wanted to ask what was down the long corridor and how I’d come to find the other side of the door, but she didn’t ask. I took off my shoes, setting one on the floor at the doorjamb, and I let the door swing next to it. I was inside Fort Eden, someplace I’d promised myself I wouldn’t be.

“Over here,” she said, taking my hand and guiding me to the right, away from the round table and the faint light. She wasn’t holding my hand so much as dragging me forward like a little kid through a grocery store, and when we reached a grouping of furniture, she let go. I looked at the ceiling as we went, trying to find a surveillance camera, but there was hardly any light to see by. There was something about this corner that seemed important from the start: it was out of range of the view I’d seen in the bomb shelter. We were hidden from whatever camera fed into the bomb shelter monitor.

She pointed back in the direction from which we’d come.

“Everyone is sleeping down there, at the other end. Plus the doors are solid and heavy in this place. I’m not sure they’d hear us if we screamed.”

“Let’s not find out,” I said, following the direction in which she pointed. I saw three doors along one wall.

“The one on the left is for the girls, on the right is for the boys,” she said, and I imaged beds and a bathroom on either side, like little dorm rooms.

“What about the middle door? Where’s that one go?” I asked.

She sat on a leather couch, ignoring my question, and I noticed the book in her hand but didn’t ask what it was. Everything was bathed in shadows, so I took note of what I saw as best I could. I wanted to know this place, to map it out if I could.

“It’s big in here,” I said, sitting down at the other end of the couch, not wanting to scare her away.

“Will,” she said, leaning in a little closer. “How did you end up on the other side of that door?”

My throat turned dry, so dry, in fact, that I didn’t think I’d have a voice if I tried to speak again. I pulled off my pack and cracked open a bottle of water, holding it out to her.

“No thanks.”

Two quick sips, then the cap went back on. Where to begin?

“There’s another building, I’m in there.”

“You mean Mrs. Goring’s place?”

“Yeah, there’s a basement. I’m staying in the basement.”

“But how—”

She seemed to add up things in her head, to imagine how I might have arrived there, and her voice died in the shadows.

“I’m fine,” I said, not knowing how much I should say. “It’s dry. Better than staying in the woods.”

I had questions, many of them, but one in particular I didn’t know how to ask.

Is Ben Dugan dead?

If I asked the question she would know I could see things, and that would lead to more questions I didn’t want to answer. Not yet anyway.

“What’s he like?” I asked instead.

“Who?”

“You know, the main guy Dr. Stevens told us about. The doctor.”

“He’s not what I expected,” she pondered. “I mean, he’s fine. I actually think you’d like him.”

“Really?”

“He came up those stairs after Mrs. Goring left, that part was kind of weird.”

Marisa pointed to a set of stairs—I could only see the first two steps. They were in the middle of the room, going down into black. “Even Kate was scared when he first showed up. You know how there are all those old movies where a beautiful girl comes down the stairs in her prom dress or whatever? This was like the opposite. It was like he came up out of the ground.”

“I thought you said I’d like him.”

“You would. After that he came to the table and told us all to sit down. Then he said his name was Rainsford, but more than that. He was like, ‘
You will be tempted to call me many things—Doctor, Mister, Sir, the old man of the house. Please, just Rainsford.
’ After that it was cool. Just hearing his voice made us all like him.”

Until he killed Ben Dugan,
I wanted to say.

“What then, after that?”

“You’ve got a lot of questions.”

“It’s boring in the basement.”

“Then come back. He asked about you.”

She leaned a little closer; her brown eyes turned black in the darkness. “I think he can help us.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because. He cured Ben. This guy is for real.”

“Cured Ben? But that’s not what happened. Ben’s dead.”

Marisa pulled back, as if the scared little dog she’d coaxed out of the wild was about to bite her.

“Ben’s not dead. He’s fine.”

She pointed to the middle door on the far wall, the one between the rooms for the girls and the boys. “He went through that door; and when he came back, he wasn’t afraid anymore.”

She looked at me warily, as if she wasn’t sure I could be trusted. “What are you not telling me?”

I took another drink of water and felt my throat struggle to choke it down. This wasn’t going the way I’d imagined it. I barely knew Marisa. What if she’d been turned against me in my absence? So it surprised me when I revealed so much, so quickly.

“I found a room downstairs, in the basement of Mrs. Goring’s place. It’s an old bomb shelter, or maybe it’s like one of those places you go so you can see what the enemy’s doing when they show up and take over a fort. You know, to plan a counterattack or something.”

Marisa had moved as far away from me as she could without falling off the couch. She was looking at me, figuring things out. She was a real thinker, this girl.

“Are you
watching
us, Will?”

I paused, a feeling in my gut that I’d said more than I should have.

“It’s not like I found it on purpose or anything. The monitors were just
there
. And anyway, I can’t see hardly anything.”

Marisa didn’t speak, so I charged ahead. “This big room with the table, I can see it sometimes. And there are two other rooms; they’re like confessionals or something. And the room Ben went into. I saw where he went, and it’s not what you think. I thought he was dead.”

Marisa stared at me for a long time: ten seconds, maybe more.

“What did you see?” she finally asked.

I told her about the helmet and the creepy blue walls, but I stopped short of describing the bizarre images that filled the screen.

Marisa shook her head. “All I know is that when he came back, he wasn’t afraid of bugs and spiders anymore. But that is a little creepy, the helmet thing. I wonder what it does?”

Part of me wanted to yell,
It scares you to death!
But there was another part that said,
Don’t do it; leave it alone
. I was starting to doubt myself. Ben Dugan wasn’t dead; and what was more, he was cured, or at least Marisa believed he was. Ben Dugan wasn’t afraid anymore. I envied him that, and I knew what Marisa feared. If she understood that the treatment would put her face-to-face with those fears, she’d never go through with it. As crazy as Fort Eden was, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I might be robbing her of a cure.

“How did you know what Ben was afraid of?” I asked.

“Rainsford made us tell.”

“What do you mean,
made
you tell?”

“That’s not right—I meant he
got us
to tell. He’s a very persuasive guy that way. Everyone told, all but one.”

I could see them, sitting in a circle at the table under some kind of twisted spell, spilling what they knew. And I also knew that of the six, there was one who would never say what she feared.

“Avery,” I said,—another mistake. How should I know who would and wouldn’t tell?

“Yeah, Avery.” Marisa didn’t skip a beat; and what was even better, she moved closer to me on the couch again. “She’s
so
quiet, right? But I’m starting to think it’s more than that. She said something about when it was her turn that gave me the chills.”

I knew what Avery had said. I’d heard her say it a dozen times already.

You can’t cure me. No one can.

I asked Marisa what she thought Avery was afraid of. She shrugged, turning quiet and thoughtful, so I went back to Ben Dugan.

“Ben went into a room and talked for a while, but I couldn’t hear him. That’s something I didn’t mention before. I can only see some things. I can’t hear anything at all. There’s no audio for the monitors.”

“So they’re like security cameras,” Marisa said, and she seemed to mellow about them, her concern turning to intrigue. I couldn’t hear what people were saying, so it was at least 50 percent less intrusive. “I bet the room you saw was where we can go to talk to Dr. Stevens. There’s one on each side in the back, one for girls and one for boys.”