From Darkness Comes: The Horror Box Set (141 page)

She followed Deke, and the glow became bright enough that she could see the shiny cables and lines running overhead. The basement broke into several corridors, and Deke headed toward the middle of the building. Vicky followed, figuring they must be beneath Room Thirteen and Dr. Kracowski’s lab.

“Hey, you,” Deke shouted. Vicky thought he was calling her at first, but then a shadow separated itself from the larger darkness. Vicky couldn’t tell if it was a woman or a man. In fact, it seemed sexless, a shape that was only faintly suggestive of a human. It slipped down the main corridor, away from the light.

Deke followed it. “Come back here, Queenie.”

Vicky knelt behind a row of tall cylindrical tanks. She pressed her hand against one. It was frigid to the touch. Above her, wires crisscrossed in a pattern that seemed an elaborate design, a technological spider web.

Deke’s voice came from deep within the corridor, followed by his muffled echo. “Hey, you can’t hide from me, barf-brains.”

Vicky crept to the mouth of the corridor. Though the glow from the open room carried only a few dozen feet down the corridor, Vicky could make out rows of metal doors lining each wall. Keeping low in case Deke happened to look back, she moved to the first door on her right.

The door had a little window set at head level. The window was glass with wire reinforcement. Behind the glass was a metal grid, as if to protect the glass from being broken from the inside. Like a meat locker where the cows were still alive and plenty pissed off.

She raised on her tiptoes and peered in. A pale face stared back at her through the window. Then she realized it was her own reflection, doubled by the two panes of glass. God, were her cheeks really that chubby? She exhaled slowly, then took a long breath of the stale basement air.

Silly fatso. Bad enough to be chased by a pervert and to sneak around in the dark, but you have to go and start seeing ghosts again.

“Come get some Deke love,” Deke yelled from the darkness far down the corridor. If he were any louder, the counselors might hear him through the floor. Vicky didn’t want to be caught because of Deke’s stupidity. If the other kids found out she and Deke were together in the basement, they’d be making crude remarks until the end of time.

She should get out, but first she wanted to see the room.

She pulled open the door. The room resembled a cell, small and square and windowless. Enough of the blue glow leaked in that she could make out the walls. They had an odd texture, though they were blotched with mold and stains. She went inside, listening for Deke, and put her hand on the nearest wall. It was soft.

Quilted with padded canvas.

A rubber room.

She backed out, ice water rushing through her veins. Down the corridor were more of the rooms. How many people had been penned up down here, their shouts soaking into the walls, their prayers bouncing off the metal bars, their dreams swallowed by the cold stones that enclosed Wendover’s foundation?

How many?

Deke screamed in the far darkness, and Vicky staggered toward the glowing generators and the metal cylinders, then past them to the door and outside. She swallowed a mouthful of the night air and had never been so grateful to see the stars. When her heart slowed enough for her to breathe, she crept up the stairs and traced her steps back to the Green Room, Deke’s scream resounding in her ears.

“You don’t believe me,” Freeman said, fidgeting in his chair, annoyed as always when some shrink wanted to do a vampire number on his soul.

Starlene Rogers sat across from him wearing a UNC Tar Heel sweatshirt and dark slacks, legs folded under her as if she had settled in for a long yoga session. “I believe you, unless you’re lying.”

She’d brought him to Four, one of the little rooms, the one-on-one places that were all the same once you cut to the chase: a place for you to squirm and lie and try to forget while some know-it-all hammered your feelings out of you.

But Freeman was Eastwood-tough, his skin was leather, his attitude was by-God bulletproof. Method acting at its finest. Who cared if Miss Starlene tried her little touchy-feely tricks? Freeman could wait it out. He’d shrunk a dozen shrinks, outlasted some real pros in the past, and he’d survived some real sons-of-bitches. Dad, for instance, the ultimate troll under the bridge.

The secret was in knowing how to tuck it away, tiptoe from thought to thought, to dream only in the safety of night. Or to just come right out and blow their little minds.

“I’m not lying,” he said. “I can hear inside people’s heads. I know what they’re thinking, at least sometimes. And I’ve learned that most people are pretty damned dumb. All they think about are TV shows and money and getting other people to do things for them.”

“Freeman, you’re aware of your manic and depressive cycle. Mania can cause people to believe they have superhuman powers.”

“It’s real. It’s one of those things you just
know.
”

Starlene leaned forward, one of those trained gestures that meant she was pretending to care. Next she would probably touch his knee. “But there’s no definitive scientific proof of extrasensory perception.”

“Doesn’t Kracowski let you in on his little card games?

Maybe you ought to ask your friend Randy about it.”

“What’s Randy got to do with it?”

“He ever mention the Trust to you?”

“The Trust?”

“Never mind. You’re better off not knowing.”

“I can’t help you unless you open up to me,” she said. “That’s the only trust I know about.”

“See, I knew you were going to say that. You’re just like all the others. You can’t see that I’m different. I don’t deserve to be locked away here with a bunch of losers.”

“Do you think Vicky is a loser?”

Freeman watched the way Starlene’s eyes fixed on her notes, like she was afraid to look at him. They were all afraid, when he was like this. They should be afraid. Because he would triptrap into their sad little minds and play games. He would see right through them, scramble their memories, make them pay, he would—

“Freeman. Please sit down.”

Freeman blinked. He was near the door. He didn’t even remember standing up. He walked back to his chair.

“Is Vicky a loser?” Starlene wrote something on her pad.

“She’s okay.”

“For a girl, you mean?”

“Now, don’t
you
start in on that, too. I get enough of it from her.”

“I saw you and her by the lake yesterday.”

“We were just talking.”

“Talking.”

“Yeah.” He debated launching into a patented Pacino rant, a cinematic soliloquy that enumerated the miserable, pathetic failings of God and the universe. “We were talking about reading each other’s minds. And I know what you’re going to say, you’re wondering why we needed to speak if we could read minds.”

“No, I wasn’t going to say that.”

“What were you going to say, then?”

Starlene tucked her pen and paper into the macramé purse beside her chair. She sat back, folded her arms, and closed her eyes. “Tell me.”

Freeman’s arms itched. He should have taken his medicine. It took the edge off when the ups came, when his thoughts were bright icy spears and the world was sharp and he could climb a mountain if they would only let him use his legs. But the medicine also chewed into his brain, flattened out all those fears. He needed his fears. They kept him alive. They kept the troll under the shadows of the bridge, where it couldn’t grab him and eat him.

And he would survive. One day he would leave this place and be free. He would outsmart them all. Even God. But for now, he needed to blow this shrink’s mind. That was a good start.

He closed his eyes. He tried to recall the feeling he’d had in Thirteen, when Kracowski’s machines kicked in and shot his brain on a roller coaster ride. He even forced his legs to tremble a little. But Starlene was a stone wall. If she had any thoughts besides concern for Freeman’s well-being, she had them buried deep.

“Tell me what I’m thinking, Freeman,” she said, in that patient voice of hers.

Sweat arose along the back of his neck. He couldn’t fail, not after he’d bragged so much. Even if she had him blocked this time, he still had that stuff he’d picked up in Thirteen after his treatment.

“You have a cat named T.S. Eliot.”

Starlene’s eyebrows lifted. “How did you find that out?”

“Triptrapping, just like I told you.” He was on again, riding the up, on a supersonic elevator to the top of the whole freaking world. No dumb shrink was going to put anything over on him. He just wished he knew who in the hell T.S. Eliot was. The name sounded familiar. A character actor, maybe?

Someone knocked on the door. Freeman moved to rise and answer, but Starlene held up her hand. “Who’s there?” she asked him, whispering.

Freeman closed his eyes and triptrapped over the bridge, opened up the big sky inside, and the screams hit him like a hundred of Daddy’s fists.

He gasped and fell to the floor, and still the screams ripped through him, tore his hair out by the roots, yanked his fingernails, shattered his rib cage, knocked his lungs from his chest, and ate his tongue.

They’re underneath.

And then he was down with them, in the dark rooms where their shadows walked.

Something tugged at him, and Starlene’s voice came as if from across a canyon. “Freeman? Are you okay?”

He was definitely not okay, because triptrapping had never been like this, it had always been one or maybe a few at a time, but now he was in a dozen, maybe a hundred, different heads.

And these weren’t ordinary heads.

God is a telephone and the Bible is written in crap on the walls, hats are part of a government conspiracy, how can you count to twelve if you can’t say odd numbers, I am a tree I am a tree I am a tree and I leave.

You can only tell the doctors from the patients because the doctors get to go home at the end of the day.

If you kill yourself, pills taste better.

Pretty, pretty paper and a white, white room in which to write
.

And more, lots more, words and thoughts and things that weren’t thoughts but pieces of broken emotion stitched together, and through it all the wails grew louder, the voices combining now into a single scream and Freeman’s head was going to explode and he rose away, triptrapped backwards, but it was like climbing the slick walls of a dark well, and the water below was the voice, the voice grew louder and the scream sluiced through him like liquid lightning and Starlene shook him and his bones rattled against the floor and he opened his eyes and Oh sweet merciful God he was in the little room again, the floor was solid against his cheek, his tears tasted so sweet, this was reality, he didn’t ever want to leave his own head again and someone knocked at the door—

“Freeman? What’s wrong?” Starlene asked, kneeling over him and holding his shoulders.

He pushed his tongue against his teeth to make sure it was still there. “They’re underneath.”

She bent low, her breath on his face. “Your pulse is going wild.”

“They said, ‘Welcome to the party.’”

“Who said it?”

The knock came again. Beyond the door, Bondurant shouted, “What’s going on in there? Miss Rogers, did you get clearance for this?”

Freeman pushed himself up. He didn’t want to be on the floor, not with
them
underneath it.

As the echo of the last scream died away against the curves of his skull, a lone female voice stood out, calm and crystal clear, saying a single word: “Free.”

“We need to go the lake,” Freeman said, and Vicky instantly understood this was a new code, a secret language between them.

She couldn’t read him quite as well as she had tricked him into believing the day before. But she needed to cut through some of his crap, skip that middle ground, and get to the heart of it all. Because this situation was bad, and for the first time in her life, she didn’t think she could survive it alone.

“Just don’t try to hold my hand or anything,” she said, as they turned down the worn path that led between the boulders.

“I’ll leave that for Deke.”

“Don’t be a jerk. Did somebody pee in your corn flakes or something? You’ve been weird today, even for you.”

Freeman slowed when they were out of sight of the counselors, then pulled Vicky into a rhododendron thicket. “I saw them,” he said.

“Them?” Vicky felt the blood drain from her face.

“The people underneath.”

“The same them.”

“You’ve seen them?”

“Last night, I . . .” Would Freeman believe her? She didn’t know if she could stand keeping it in anymore. And he wasn’t triptrapping through her head, either; at least she couldn’t feel that strange tickle, so he wouldn’t know for sure that she was telling the truth.

“Tell me,” he said. “I won’t laugh at you.”

Sure. She’d never been laughed at. Vomit Queen was a term of endearment, after all. Daddy had never, ever criticized her. Mommy had never locked herself in her room with a bag of Oreos. And Vicky liked what she saw in the mirror. Sure.

But big deal if Freeman laughed. He was just another guy who thought just because he was finally growing his first pubic hair he was a real man, and it was common knowledge that all men were jerks. So even if Freeman were a jerk-in-training, she could bounce that laughter away like an overweight Wonder Woman blocking bullets with her golden bracelets.

“I saw a ghost,” she said, before she had time to change her mind for the third time about trusting him.

“Did you . . . you know, read it, or whatever?”

“No. I saw one with my eyes. I sneaked out last night—”

“Outside? You mean you know a way
out
of there?” Freeman pointed behind the boulders in the direction of Wendover.

“Yeah, but that’s not important right now. Anyway, Deke chased me into the basement—”

“You were out with
Deke
?”

Had jealousy flickered across his face? “If you keep interrupting, we’ll never get anywhere. Deke chased me into the basement, then I hid in the dark. There’s all kinds of weird equipment, electrical generators and tanks and stuff. I think it has something to do with Kracowski’s experiments. There’s a bunch of rooms down there, too, like hospital rooms or jail cells. Deke went down one of the halls, and I followed him.”