The Fall of Never (40 page)

“That’s just impossible…”

“Yeah, well, I’ve had to realign my own concept of the world lately. I’m sure you have, too. About a month ago I wouldn’t have thought people like Nellie Worthridge even existed.”

Carlos found himself slowly nodding. His eyes trailed down to the book on his lap. Was it possible that this was all some horrible, horrible dream? That he’d wake up any minute, sweating and shaking, and utter a frightened laugh for dreaming such a morbid and purely ridiculous dream? Again, he felt that same maniacal laughter threaten to bubble up through his body and explode from his throat. His lips played with a terrified smile.

Look at me,
he thought.
I’m going insane.

Josh led him into the darkness of Nellie’s apartment. Even at night, all the shades were drawn against the lights of the city. The apartment lights were all off except for a small kitchen nightlight plugged into the wall beneath a row of cabinets.
Darkness.
To Carlos, this more than anything suggested the old woman’s imminent death. Like some wounded forest creature, she was barring herself from the rest of the world, walling herself up in seclusion. It was something human beings, like many other animals, did instinctively when faced with the sudden prospect of their own fleeting mortality. In fact, the entire apartment suggested an ancient crypt or mausoleum: stagnant and unused, from which all essence of life was being slowly drained over a long period of time.

“She’s still in bed,” Josh half-whispered. “Go ahead.”

Carlos paused in the darkness, uncertain of his next move. He looked back over his shoulder at Josh, but Josh had vanished into the small kitchenette.

I can still feel it,
he thought.
It’s still here, floating in the air—that charge of electricity, that swelling and deflation of the atmosphere, as if the entire room is breathing. It lingers.

Silently, he crept down the narrow hallway, the fingers of his extended right hand tracing the wall for support. As he progressed down the hall, he could feel the apartment’s electrical charge intensify. Nellie was its source; the closer he drew to her, the stronger the vibration.

At the end of the hallway, Nellie’s bedroom door stood half-open. Carlos paused just outside it, catching his breath, his mind reeling with the images from two nights ago. He pictured his wife slumped against the back of her chair while Nellie’s talon-like hand gripped at her belly. He thought of Marie now, and for the past two days, dumbstruck from shock and sleeping in bed amidst a scattering of children’s fairy tales.

He pushed the door open and stepped inside. Immediately struck by the heat, he recoiled, bringing a reflexive hand up to his forehead. It was a dry heat, issuing in rolling waves from across the bedroom, as if the old woman’s body had somehow become some living, breathing generator.

In the gloom, he could make out Nellie’s form huddled in bed. He gasped. She was a skeleton, her skin completely rotted away, her eyes two black pits in the center of gray bone. But no—it was only the darkness playing with his mind. As he stepped closer, her features fell into place, withered and parched as they were. He could even hear her low, raspy breathing now—a sound not unlike the scrape of a rake dragged along a gravel driveway.

“Nellie?” Should he even wake her?

“Carlito,” he heard her mutter. Her voice startled him; she wasn’t asleep after all. “Come.”

He moved closer to the side of the bed. A strip of sodium light from the street passed through the space between the curtain and the window, illuminating the side of the old woman’s face.
She’s a corpse,
Carlos thought.
At least, she soon will be.
Her eyes had sunk deep into her head, their lids paper thin and half-closed, while her ears lay flat against the sides of her head. This close, the sound of her respiration was grating.

“Don’t be scared for your wife,” the old woman said. Surprisingly, she spoke with little difficulty. “What happened is part of a process, an old process. You didn’t need to intervene; she would have been fine.”

He blurted an apology.

Nellie smiled weakly. “I am sorry, but I could not see…anything about the baby.”

“I know.”

“I
sensed
the child. It is so wondrous, so beautiful inside her, Carlito, growing there.”

Carlito.
Hearing her speak the name sent tremors racing through his body. He suddenly wanted to be with his wife, to hold her, to sleep beside her.

“You’re afraid,” Nellie said.

“No.”

“You are. I can feel it.” She shifted beneath the blankets. “She needs our help.”

“The girl Kelly?”

“It’s coming,” she said. “Soon.”

“What is it?”

“I don’t know. I cannot tell.”

“But she’s in danger, this girl?”

“Yes.”

Carlos leaned closer to the bed. He could smell a strong medicinal stink fanning from the woman in hot waves. “How are you able to know this?”

“The human mind is a hidden book, Carlito. For most people, it is a book they open only for themselves. Only they know their secrets, their desires, and their sins. Few others are capable of peeking into these books. They’re not hidden to some. Sometimes, we can see inside. I found Kelly’s mind as she searched through her own hidden book, turning the pages of a past she’d forgotten. She’s as strong as me. Stronger, I think. She just doesn’t know she is.”

“What do you mean, strong as you?”

“We’ve all felt a little bit of Kelly recently,” Nellie said. “Josh, your wife, even you. I’ve felt her, too. She’s reaching out to someone and she doesn’t even know it. She doesn’t fully understand the powers of her own mind.”

It occurred to him then what Nellie was saying. “You mean this Kelly girl has the same…she’s…like you?”

“Stronger,” Nellie breathed.

“How is that possible?”

“We’re not as unique as you might think.”

“But the chances of the two of you—”

“There is no coincidence here,” Nellie said. She was struggling to lift her head from her pillow, to see him better. “I’ve felt Kelly’s presence for a long time now. Years, in fact. It just took me so long to find the source of the power, to find Kelly. It wore me down, caused terrible headaches and most likely even my stroke, and sometimes I found I couldn’t…I found…” She struggled for the words. “Sometimes I was so weak I couldn’t get out of bed,” she finally said. “She may believe our meeting was chance, may believe that she even came to me on her own accord, but that is not the truth. The truth is that I finally
found
her and
willed
her to come to me. I was testing her powers, seeing how strong she was. My father had this gift too, and I believe it might be hereditary. But his gift was not strong enough, not like mine. He didn’t know he was going to die in the accident that killed him. I did. And when I became aware of Kelly’s presence in the city, I was so amazed at the sheer strength of her power that I could feel it across the city, tugging at my brain. So I reached for her. And after time, I made the connection, without her even knowing it. And after some prodding, I managed to make her come to me.”

Carlos backed away from the bed. He was visibly shaken, his hands trembling so much he shoved them into the pockets of his pants. Nothing made sense.

“Don’t be afraid,” she repeated.

He shook his head.

“Whatever danger Kelly is in, it has to do with her own mind, her own hidden book. I feel her searching for something—some memory—but it continues to elude her…and me. I feel that once she finds it, it will open all the floodgates. I’ve been keeping a strong lock on her. When she finally remembers, then I will understand too.”

“How can you help her?” His throat was dry and abrasive. “What could you possibly do?”

“When the time comes, I can reach for her, pull her, make a grab for her. The mind is a powerful thing, Carlito. More powerful than most of us know. Maybe, if we’re careful, there will be a way for us to pull her from this danger.”

“But we don’t even know what the danger is.”

“Soon,” she said. Something in her voice sounded off, as if half her thoughts were occupied by something else. “When she remembers, I will know. I’m there inside her mind, but her mind is thick with smoke, her memories hard to see. The moment she remembers and the smoke clears, I will be able to see. Then it will be time.”

Carlos backed up against the wall. Resting his head against the wall, he peered through the crack between the drawn curtain and the window at the glitter of city lights below. It occurred to him then that he had been a very different person just one short month ago.

Nellie’s voice floated across the room to him: “You are thinking of your son.”

“I am.”

“I feel there may be some connection between Kelly and your son, that the two events are somehow linked. It is too hazy to tell for certain; it is just a feeling I have…”

“I don’t believe that,” he said, not knowing exactly what he believed. “You don’t need to say it to get me to help you.”

“That’s not why I say it.”

“I still don’t believe it.”

“But you will help us?”

Carlos closed his eyes. He could feel the room throbbing all around him. It was as if he were standing in the heart of some great beast—and perhaps he was, in a way. Standing in the center of this vital, life-breathing organ. Or perhaps he was the organ himself.

We’re all a part of the same monster,
he thought.

“I’ll help,” he said.

Part Three

The (Hidden) Book of Thaw

Chapter Twenty-Two

In many ways, the Coopersville Female Institution was very much like the Kellow Compound itself. Constructed in the wake of the Second World War, when it was simply referred to as Coopersville, the immense brick-and-mortar facility’s primary objective had been to accommodate the large influx of injured war veterans from New York State. Later, in the midsixties, and after a lengthy and strenuous renovation, the facility reopened as a hospital for young women suffering from psychological aberrations. The building rested atop a massive wreath of aggregate rock, shouldered on three of its four sides by the sprawling wishbone-shaped Champlain Forest. A squat, three-story building with limited windows (all of which were laid with pebbled, wire-meshed panes), the institute hunkered close to the earth like a crouching beast above the skyline of the feeble and hapless city below. The sheer authority of the building was reminiscent of Kelly’s childhood home: upon her initial arrival all those years ago, the building’s wealth, frigidity, and isolation created in Kelly a warped sense of belonging.

The bizarre death of the two young girls on the third floor was not the only black cloud hanging over the history of the institution. A number of tragedies occurred throughout the passage of years, most notably the electrical fire in 1982 that caused sufficient damage to most of the third floor. At that time, the third floor had served as an invalid ward, catering to the bedridden and physically inept. And due to the failed conditions of these patients, several were unable to be removed from the building in time. The number of deaths was disastrously high. And despite major reconstruction to the floor soon after the fire, the third floor of the Coopersville Female Institution remained closed. These stories were known by many to be legends and ghost stories, monsters in the proverbial closet; they were known to few others as the truth.

Now, all these years later, Kelly maneuvered her father’s Cadillac up the paved incline that led to the institution’s front entrance. She braked the car as it cut through a clearing in the trees, enabling her to view the building in all its monstrous grandeur. She stared at it for a long time, suddenly deaf to the car radio humming softly from the dash, and was somewhat surprised at her own lack of emotion. She’d spent three years of her life inside the walls of the institution, caged and numbered, while her mind worked on suppressing the memory of the very evil that had forced her into such a place. Yet looking at it now, she felt only a sinking dullness at the core of her being, too distant and meaningless to rile her.

She continued up the driveway and pulled around to the side parking lot where she docked the Cadillac in a visitor’s spot.

Inside, she found herself frozen in the doorway of the front hall. All the emotions that had thus far eluded her now slammed home all at once. Her sense of function evaporated into nothingness. Her legs went weak and her bladder suddenly blossomed into a well of bursting agony. Before her eyes, the hallways appeared to cant to one side, to shift positions in an attempt to throw her off balance. After all this time, nothing had changed. The cinderblock walls were still painted in the same industrial flavors; the carpet beneath her feet remained the color of iodine, the texture of Velcro; the light fixtures in the ceiling still buzzed and hummed and spat with a persistence as deliberate as human personality.

That’s it,
she thought.
That’s why this place is so similar to my home. It’s because both places feel alive.

Home. It wasn’t her home.

She moved down the hallway toward the nurses’ workstation. The air smelled strongly of antiseptic. Somewhere within the maze of the first floor, a young girl was shouting something about Gavin, Gavin, where did you go? Kelly felt herself begin to tremble, the pressure at her groin growing more intense. What little she remembered about the place was suddenly reinforced; and all that she’d forgotten had started filtering in through the cracks in her mind.