Centralia (24 page)

He’d been hooded and escorted by vehicle to an unknown building in an unknown location. He was placed in a room that couldn’t have been more than ten by ten, just big enough to accommodate a cot and latrine. Darkness as black as octopus ink surrounded him, forming long tendrils of despair that wrapped around his limbs, torso, and neck and found their way into every orifice, penetrating to his soul, bringing a lightlessness that breathed and felt and thought.

But Peter didn’t care anymore.

In fact, he welcomed the darkness, even embraced it. It offered him the solitude he needed, the protection from his own senses. It took him to a place where there were no more lies, no more stories, no more conflicting memories, a place where there was
just darkness. And yet at the same time, it tormented him terribly, loomed everywhere and over everything, threatening to overshadow every last memory he had, whether real or not. All Peter had now was his mind, as fractured and fragmented as it might be, and he didn’t want to lose it too.

Day after day he’d sit on his cot and relive the events in his home that morning the men came, the morning he shot and killed all three of them. He’d run through every event
 
—and every senseless death
 
—that followed: Amy, the Oceanview, Ronnie, Habit, Centralia.

Day after day he relived what memories he still had of Karen and Lilly. He focused on the details of their personalities, their lives, wondering what had been real and what had been fabricated as part of his imprinting. What had he really experienced, and what had he only imagined? Worst of all was that he couldn’t even picture them in his mind without second-guessing what he saw.

And day after day he rehashed the words as they circled through his head.

“Remember your training, Patrick? Huh? It’ll come back to you. It always does.”

“You don’t remember yet. You will. Give it time.”

“Things aren’t what they seem. They’re not what you think.”

“What’s not what I think, Amy? What do you mean?”

“This. You. Me. Everything. We need to find Abernathy. It’s
 
—”

Peter flinched at the sound of the shot echoing through his head. The memory of it still startled him. The way Amy’s head had snapped back, the way her body had slouched and slumped to the pavement, still twisted his stomach.

“Things aren’t what they seem. They’re not what you think.”

When the darkness entered and tyrannized his world, the
dreams of the house ceased, replaced by that dream of falling. Always falling but never hitting bottom. And always coming face-to-face with Nichols. Night after night he fell; he groped at the air; he fought to avoid Nichols’s grinning face. And every time he’d awaken when Nichols drew his gun, aimed, and fired.

Nichols’s “few days” had turned into what seemed like weeks. Hopelessness, with its featureless face and formless figure had emerged from the darkness and wrapped its smooth, chalky hands around Peter’s mind, around his heart, squeezing out what little faith was left. Day and night meant nothing to him anymore. His biological clock no longer functioned properly. He’d sleep in spurts with no concept of how long he’d slept or how long he’d stayed awake. At times he’d awaken on the concrete floor and think he was on the wall, stuck there like a fly. He’d feel the air for the cot only to find it just feet from him.

His movements now felt sluggish, as if gravity’s pull had increased in the darkened room, tugging at him with greater force, straining his muscles.

His thoughts had also turned dark. He tried to remember Karen and Lilly, but their image was fading in his mind like an old photograph exposed to the sunlight for too long. His memories, false or actual, were slowly being replaced by thoughts of death and a myriad of interesting ways he could quicken it. He’d be better off dead.

And still the dreams of falling continued. But the feeling encompassed so much more than just his dreams now. Even in his waking hours he’d suddenly feel as though he were falling and clutch at the floor and walls to steady himself.

His body wasted; his muscles atrophied. His legs wobbled as if they were jointless when he stood. The tasteless food they fed him was not enough to nourish a child, let alone a grown man.

He knew what they were doing, that they were breaking him all over again. This was part of the scrubbing process. Or maybe they weren’t. Maybe he had it all wrong. Maybe they’d locked him away in this dungeon and forgotten about him. And this was where he’d slowly fade away and die alone. Of all the exotic ways he’d come up with to welcome death, oddly, starvation was not one of them.

But there was a moment when things changed for Peter. Whether it was day or night he did not know, did not care. He was awake, lying on the floor, arms and legs outstretched, contemplating death and how easily he might accept it, when he suddenly had the compulsion to pray. As before, he didn’t know where the urge came from. He’d had no inclination to talk to God since that day in the hospital when he’d pleaded with him and received no acknowledgment. His begging had gone unanswered, his pleas unnoticed. God was silent. But now the yearning to speak with the Almighty was very real. A need. He
needed
to pray. At first he resisted it as he had last time, fought it as if it were not just a waste of time but an adversary seeking to rob him of his last sliver of sanity. God could not reach him in the pit. Peter was too far gone, too resolved to his own hopeless death, too given to the darkness that now infused every fiber and cell of his body.

But still the urging persisted.

For an undetermined yet lengthy period of time, it went on and Peter resisted, used his remaining ounces of resolve to combat it. And though the pressure to pray tormented him, he was thankful for it because it gave him something to think about, something to focus on.

But over time his willpower faded and the persistent voice inside him grew louder and louder until he could block it out no
longer. He had to give in; he had to surrender. There was no fight left in him. Finally he dropped to his knees on the concrete floor, covered his face with both hands, and prayed. It was not an earth-shattering prayer of celestial proportions. It was not anything you’d hear in a church from the pulpit. It was not anything you’d read in a book, nothing that would get a host of angels excited. But it was a prayer. And this time, he knew it was sincere. It felt right, familiar, like a glove that had been stretched and molded to fit only his hand.

When he had uttered the last word, Peter lowered himself to the floor, prostrate, limbs splayed. Oddly, peace surrounded him in the darkness of the pit. The thoughts of death had not been banished, his wounds had not been instantly healed, but for the first time since lying in that hospital, he felt a spark of hope.

Eventually he fell asleep on the floor and awakened inside the house.

The second-floor hallway loomed like a hotel’s endless corridor. What a relief it was to see light again. For a moment, Peter basked in the sunlight of this dreamworld, until the third room beckoned him, pulled him in as if it had some magnetic power. Keeping his hand on the wall to steady himself, Peter walked the hallway and stopped in front of the third room. The door stood open, waiting. Before, when he’d looked into this room, it had been furnished with one bed
 
—the bed he’d had in his childhood room
 
—a dresser, a desk, and a collection of objects one would acquire in the military. A footlocker, helmets, a flak jacket, uniforms folded neatly on the bed. There were no weapons. This was the room where Peter would usually find Karen, sitting on the edge of the bed looking like she wanted to tell him something, like she
needed
to tell him something.

Now, though, the room’s decor had changed. It was set up to appear identical to Lilly’s bedroom. The same bed and pink bedspread. Same light-green shag area rug. Same dresser and lamp. The shades were pulled to cover the windows and not allow in any light. Only one thing remained out of place. In the far corner, between the bed and wall, stood the floor lamp with the
C
on the shade.

Peter entered the room and reached for the lamp on the dresser. He clicked it on and noticed the Mickey Mouse watch next to it. He picked it up and rubbed its face with his thumb.

Replacing the watch, he crossed the room to the floor lamp and ran his hand over the glass shade and traced the
C
with his finger. Why had this lamp affected him so much that it now appeared in every room of this dream house?

He heard a shuffling in the hallway behind him. Peter turned and faced the doorway. More movement in the hallway drew him out of the room.

Lilly was there
 
—his Lilly, as he remembered her, wearing the last outfit he’d seen her in: pink capris and a white T-shirt with a red-and-pink floral design on it. Her hair hung loosely around her shoulders. She was no more than ten feet away, facing the door of the fourth room. The locked door.

Peter wanted to run to her and scoop her into his arms. He wanted to hug her and bury his face in her hair, breathe in the fresh scent and never let go, never leave her again. But she was a mirage, a sleep-induced figment, as much a counterfeit as any three-dollar bill, and he wasn’t sure he could trust this version of his daughter.

So instead he stayed where he was and said, “Lilly, what are you doing?”

Still turned away so he couldn’t see her face, she put her hands in her pockets and shrugged. The image was so much like her. The way her shoulders lifted and dropped, her posture. It was all Lilly to a tee. His mind had remembered so many details that made his sweet girl unique.

Peter knelt. He didn’t know why but he felt compelled to, like it was just the right thing to do when you saw your daughter after so long and so much.

“Lilly, baby, please turn around and look at Daddy.”

Slowly, as if to move too fast would cause her to lose her balance and fall, Lilly turned. She was the girl from the bunker, the girl that had hugged him so tight and stirred him so deeply.

Was this still Lilly? She was only an actress
 
—Maddy.

The girl smiled at him, a genuine smile that went all the way to her eyes. Peter wanted to push away, though, to move back down the hall. He wanted to wake up. But he couldn’t. He couldn’t move and couldn’t stir himself to awaken.

The girl took a step toward him.

“Stop,” Peter said. “You’re not
 
—”

“I am Lilly, Daddy,” the girl said. “You have to remember.”

That was what the woman had said right before she left Peter in the tunnel to go to her daughter, who had been taken by the agency.
“You have to remember.”

“Remember what?”

The girl’s smile disappeared and was replaced by a pouty frown. “Me. Mommy. You have to remember.”

“You’re the girl from the
 
—”

“I’m Lilly. You saw what they did to me.” Her eyes teared and reddened.

The monitor, the electric shocks. The poor girl had been
through so much and now Peter was rejecting her. He couldn’t. Even if she wasn’t who she thought she was. Maybe they’d brainwashed her too. Scrubbed and imprinted her mind.

She advanced again and stopped not two feet away and tilted her head to one side, studying him like Lilly did, the same way Karen did. The corners of her mouth turned down and she said, “You’re scared. Why are you scared?”

It didn’t matter what she looked like, Peter realized. In his mind’s confusion of a dream, this girl was his daughter, and it had been so long. No matter what Peter thought of her, he couldn’t hurt her any longer. She believed she was Lilly, and there was no harm in playing along.

Peter said, “I miss you.”

“But I’m right here.”

“In a dream, yes. But when I wake up, you’ll be gone.”

Her smile returned again. “I’m not gone, silly. You have to find me.”

Inexplicably, tears pushed on the backs of Peter’s eyes, and he suddenly found it impossible to swallow. “Where? Where do I look?”

She reached for his hands and held them. Her touch was the touch of his daughter. “I’ll pray for Jesus to help you.”

“I need it,” Peter said. “I need his help.”

“Mommy and I will be okay.”

“How do you know? How can you be so sure?”

She let go and cupped his face in her hands. As much as Peter didn’t want to cry in front of her, he couldn’t help but let a stray tear slip from his eye.

“Jesus will take care of us, Daddy. Don’t worry, okay?”

But Jesus hadn’t taken care of them yet. Jesus seemed nowhere to be found.

She studied his eyes, looking past them and into his soul. “Don’t think that, Daddy. It’s not true.”

She’d read his mind. She’d seen past his exterior armor and looked right into the hurricane that engulfed his heart. As if someone had run an ice cube down Peter’s spine, he shivered.

“But he hasn’t helped you.” Peter couldn’t believe he was verbalizing his deepest struggle to this eight-year-old.

She frowned again. “But he
has
taken care of us. He hasn’t left me alone, not for one second.”

More tears pushed from behind Peter’s eyes and found their way out, cascading down his cheeks.

“Trust him, Daddy. Do you trust him?”

Peter hadn’t. He’d given up on trusting God, trusting Jesus. But now it seemed different. This child, this imposter of his daughter, had strangely given him hope. She’d begun the process of renewing the faith he once had, the faith that had survived multiple brainwashings or scrubbings or whatever Nichols wanted to call them. They could take away his old mind, his old memories, his old life, but they couldn’t take away the underlying core of who he was. That much survived.

It wasn’t a knock-’em-over, tingle-and-break-into-laughter experience. It was as subtle and natural as a trickle of springwater from a rock, and as deep and real as the water vein from which it flowed.

He was ready to trust again. He was ready to embrace the faith he’d once had and the faith that remained. He was convinced it was the only way he’d find the real Lilly and Karen. Peter nodded. “Yes. I trust him. I’m ready.”

The girl broke into a wide smile, her eyes bending into crescents. She even giggled a little. “Good. You need to start with the Bible in my room.”

“I didn’t see a Bible in there.”

“It’s on my dresser, my Precious Moments Bible.”

“There wasn’t anything there but your watch.”

“Go look again with your new eyes.”

Peter stood and entered the room again. And there on the dresser was Lilly’s little pink leather-bound Bible. He lifted it and balanced the weight of it in his hands. As he shifted it to the other hand, the book fell open, and the pages parted to the same passage he’d read the last two times in the Bible he’d found in the other rooms.

He traced the words while he read in the gospel of John.
“I am the door. If anyone enters by Me, he will be saved, and will go in and out and find pasture.”

Peter closed the book and placed it back on the dresser. It was the passage he’d read before but couldn’t remember.

That last conversation he’d had with Audrey Lewis walked through his mind.

“I think it means your subconscious mind is keeping something from you.”

“So what do I have to do?”

“Find the key.”

She’d made it sound so easy when Peter thought it would be impossible to find the key. The door would remain locked for the rest of his life and he’d spend the rest of his sleeping nights wrestling with it and the rest of his waking days wondering what secrets it protected.

But now he knew it. The Bible. The verse.
“I am the door.”
It was the key. Or more specifically, Jesus was the key.

And it had happened just like Amy said it would at the Oceanview. A trigger. This girl and her faith. Faith was the trigger.

Peter left the bedroom and stood in the hallway. The girl was
now gone, the hallway left empty. All that stood before him and the door was ten feet of flooring and a mountain of faith. He needed to stop trusting in himself; that’s what Karen would tell him. Stop trusting his skills and ability to fight out of every situation. Ultimately it had gotten him nowhere. He needed to let go of the reins he held so tightly and give them to God. He needed to admit he couldn’t do this on his own, to stop striving and just surrender.

Then, from the first floor of the house came a terrible banging noise, like someone taking a sledgehammer to the very foundation of the home with an intent to destroy it and bring the entire structure down.

Peter fought the ache in his bones and rolled to his back, opened his eyes. The dream was over; he was awake. The door to his room was open about six inches, and light, beautiful light, poured in and colored the concrete floor a pale gray. He squinted as it opened the rest of the way. Before him stood the backlit silhouette of a woman.