Dark Eden (9 page)

I wondered again what it meant to destroy the numbers, but I was starting to catch on. If Kate was number 2, than she was wiping out her fear, and with it, some part of herself.

I cycled quickly to the main floor and caught her coming out of the girls’ quarters, looking back at the table where everyone was waiting for her. Connor made a sort of fist-charging sign, and others were rooting her on. She turned to that middle door, the one between the boys’ and the girls’ rooms, and opened it.

She was gone, and I started to think about where on earth she was going. I’d thought it all through, mapping everything out like a level on a video game screen. There had to be a long hall and at the end, stairs.

How far down was the purple room Kate would enter, where she would find the strange helmet dangling from wires? If it was at the same level as Rainsford’s quarters, it was a long way down into the depths of the earth.

A long time, what felt like an hour, passed in the bomb shelter. No one seemed to move in the main room. Stillness had invaded the world of Eden.

The screen on one of the six dead monitors began to flutter. There was the monitor in the very middle—the one I could control—and six that went around it in a perfect circle. Ben had been on top, and now Kate would fill the first monitor to the right; that would be hers.

I was struck by the room itself, which was different from Ben Dugan’s in two ways. First, it was not blue, but deep purple, coarsely painted and shot through with streaks of black. Second, Ben Dugan had found a simple wooden chair; but Kate’s chair was more elaborate, a barber’s chair or something like it.

What was the same about the room could not be missed: the helmet was there, sitting on the barber’s chair, its torrent of wires and tubes rising into the ceiling.

By my watch, which I had used to time the event, it took Kate Hollander only three minutes to get from the main room in Fort Eden to the purple room with the barber’s chair.
Three minutes?
It ruled out a long flight of treacherous stairs, so there must have been some other way down into the deep.

As with Ben’s video feed, I was getting some strange sounds from somewhere inside the wall: deep electrical static I’d never heard before entering the bomb shelter.

Kate picked up the helmet, put it on, and sat in the barber’s chair. The screen filled with data as it had done before. The mercury line on the right of the screen, a bobbing dot of purple waiting to lift off, and in the top left corner, words:

Kate Hollander, 15

Acute fear: Doctors, hospitals, clinics

For a long beat nothing happened, and I began to wonder if Kate Hollander’s resolve was stronger than the cure Rainsford had devised. Then the chair started spinning around, first to one side and then to the other, as if it was controlled by an unseen hand.

Sorry Kate
, I thought.
I think the trouble’s just begun.

What was on the screen melted away, replaced by a doctor in a white coat. I was seeing inside the helmet, the same scene Kate saw; and I wondered again where the images came from. The doctor was suddenly up close, a spot of blood the size of a dime on the corner of his white mask. He looked at me, which meant he was looking at Kate, tilting his head to and fro like a creature planning its attack. The eyes were all wrong, at once vacant and searching. His hand came up close to the screen, and he snapped on a plastic glove. Was he speaking to her? With the mask, I couldn’t tell.

The chair spun wildly, and the screen jerked back to the purple room, where the barber’s chair spun, too. Kate Hollander was holding on with white-knuckled fingers.

The screen jumped back to what Kate saw: the back of a woman’s head, full of blond hair. She was driving a car, so the view was from someone in the backseat. The camera angle sloshed downward, revealing small legs tucked into a car seat. A child of five or six, and the child’s stuffed animal had fallen to the backseat floor. All the while, strange sounds filled the bomb shelter, as if the wall of monitors was digging its way out of a hopeless dream.

There’s more sound this time then last
, I thought.
And the sounds are worse.

The chair spun again, the screen switching back and forth from the purple room to the insanity inside the helmet. The doctor was facing away, but when he turned, he held a rusted metal contraption that was clearly designed to fit over a patient’s head. There were long bolts aimed into the center, decayed with age and sharp at the ends. He advanced, placed whatever this thing was on Kate’s head, and began spinning the bolts. I found myself wincing for poor Kate Hollander.

The screen went wild again, landing in the car, where the woman at the wheel had turned to the child as they drove. They were talking, the child agitated about the lost toy on the floor and trying to free herself from the car seat. The woman—Kate’s mother, it had to be—was looking back and forth between the road and the child, her arm reaching blindly for the backseat floor.

The chair spun again, found the doctor moving in, squirting a line of purple liquid from a long needle.

Oh no. This is bad,
I thought, the screen veered wildly, focusing on Kate gripping the barber’s chair, but only held the image for a second before the doctor reappeared.

How does he know these things about us?
I asked myself.

I was prepared to answer in one of three ways:

1) Rainsford had been following each of us for a long time, recording these events or, worse, setting them in motion.

2) The helmet had opened Kate’s and Ben’s minds before that. Rainsford had devised a way in which he could find a certain kind of memory, then bring it to life inside the helmet and on the screens I watched.

3) Dr. Stevens had revealed every last detail of every last fear, somehow gathering the information from relatives or hypnosis sessions or who knew how, and the scenes had been meticulously re-created in order to evoke a feeling of extreme fear.

And the central question above all the others as the doctor wielded a hacksaw, sharpening it against a stone in his hand:
Why are you doing this to us?
It looked as if the doctor was planning to use the saw on Kate’s head; but as he moved closer, the chair spun again. The purple line on the edge of the screen was moving fast, faster then it had for Ben Dugan. Kate Hollander was petrified.

A weird sound from the wall—like a boat engine echoing up and down on a choppy sea—and the screen returned to the car, where Kate’s mom was leaning down over the seat, staring at the floor, the road wobbly behind her.

Then the semitruck.

And after that a burst of hard, white light paired with a brutal noise I never want to hear again: an awful churning sound, like big rocks tumbling inside a cement mixer.

The monitor flashed back to Kate, where the purple line had reached the top of the screen. The wires in the room shot to life. Kate shook violently, but only for a moment, and then it was done.

The purple room went soft and quiet as the chair spun slightly to one side, like a tricycle bumping into a curb on a dead end street. The only sound in the bomb shelter was my own breathing.

She wasn’t moving, but I’d seen this once before and knew she wasn’t dead. Far from it. As the image of the purple room crackled on the monitor and then vanished entirely, I understood what had happened.

Kate Hollander had been cured.

EDEN 3 & 4

CONNOR AND ALEX

I didn’t worry as much about Kate as I had Ben, and I expected to worry even less about Connor. In that way, the cures were like a video game. I played mostly old games—Berzerk, Donkey Kong, stuff like that—but once in a while I’d wander into Keith’s room. He had an Xbox, but I called it his Death-box. If I hadn’t been in there for a while, say a couple of weeks, I’d find myself stunned by the blood and the guns, the ridiculous body count in the games he plays. Funny thing, though. If I hung around for a few minutes, it started to bother me less. A half hour later, if I was still in the room, I wouldn’t care anymore. The blood and the bodies were meaningless.

When I saw Ben Dugan get cured, I felt real pain, as if a person had been snuffed out of existence. And I was afraid. If Ben was dead, I could be next, and I wasn’t ready to be dead. Plus, whatever he’d gone through had looked painful and terrifying.

With Kate, I knew the truth. She’d been scared, but not literally to death. Knowing this took the sting out of the proceedings and, frankly, not in a good way. I was turning numb to it all. This feeling would deepen, I knew, with Connor and Alex. But what would happen when Marisa put the helmet on? That one I would feel.

Maybe I’d even get back what the cures were taking from me.

Something very important happened while I was waiting for the central monitor to kick back on again. It happened because I was in a state of extreme boredom.

I’d finished reading
The Pearl
, a short book I was keen to talk about with Marisa, and had begun
The Woman in the Dunes
. But I wasn’t a big reader, and I’d already read quite a lot. With nothing else to do, I ate a Clif Bar and dumped out the entire contents of my backpack. I emptied every single zipper compartment, for no other reason than it was something to do besides stare at the walls. Inside one of the small pouches I found a crappy little MP3 player I hadn’t packed, which I recognized immediately as Keith’s. The thing was tiny and ancient, the only kind my penniless brother could afford. It wasn’t even made by Apple. He’d stuck a yellow Post-it Note to the player, but it had fallen off and lay in the bottom of the pouch. I picked it up and stuck it to my finger.

I am playing Berzerk. Get well. Keith.

He was a huge punk; but for some reason, the note made me choke up inside, my throat tightening as it had in the van on the way to Fort Eden. I missed his competitive goofiness. And it was kind of a big deal, him sending the player. He was always walking around the house with earbuds in, listening to classic rock and roll, which he claimed made him smarter. By sending the note and the player, he was trying to help me in his small way, even if he’d never admit it. Going without his music would be a sacrifice. He’d have to listen to my mom nag him all day.

The white earbuds he’d sent along were caked with earwax, so I stuffed them back in the side pouch of my backpack and got my own. Mine were black and perfectly clean. If I wore them under my hoodie, it was hard to tell I had them on at all, which I liked very much. I pulled up the hood and cranked up the volume.

I did not recognize the first song or the second, but the third was Kiss—“Detroit Rock City,” which told the tale of someone hitting a semitruck head-on. Coincidence? I don’t know, but it connected me to Kate and the others in an unexpected way. I clicked back and played it again, listening for words I’d missed, and walked out into the basement. It was dark out there, but a shaft of light from the bomb shelter poured into the shadows as I started aimlessly looking at cans and boxes. I let one earbud dangle at my side and listened through a single ear, just in case Mrs. Goring arrived unexpectedly. Around the corner where the electrical panel was, it was too dark to see, so I turned on the basement light. When I went back, the song was over and I started it again. A mindless tune, really, but it was growing on me. I could see why Keith liked the way it blocked out the rest of the world.

There was a set of metal shelves next to the electrical panel I’d only glanced at before. A tarp, caked with dirt, was stuffed into the bottom shelf like a giant wadded-up Kleenex. The second shelf was covered with old paint cans and mason jars filled with nails, screws, washers. The top shelf was harder to see, its surface above my sight line, but it looked like more of the same: some old coffee cans filled with things I didn’t care to look at, an oil pan, a lunch pail.

The lunch pail caught my attention, and I felt surprised I hadn’t noticed it sooner. It was the big green kind a carpenter takes to a work site, rectangular at the bottom and curved on top. When I was a kid, I’d imagined myself with hammers and saws, building a house, carrying my lunch in just such an object. I reached up and lifted it by the handle.

“Whoa, this thing’s heavy,” I said, setting it on the concrete floor with a weighty
thunk
. I picked it back up and looked at the bottom, where someone had used a thick black pen to write the word GORING in all caps. “Detroit Rock City” was coming to an end in my one earbud as I set the box back down, the car going ninety-five in the song, swerving in front of the oncoming semi. I popped the two rusty latches on the lunch pail and tipped open the top. Inside, wadded up in a tangled mess, was the one thing I’d wanted more than anything else.

Headphones.

Not earbuds but
real
headphones, big ones that would stick out on the sides of my head like giant monkey ears. I took them out, letting the glob of twirling cord flop out of the box.

A Who song, “My Generation,” started playing in my ear, and I pulled out the earbud. Holding the end of the headphone cord in my hand, I examined three strange plugs, as wide as if they’d fit into a car cigarette lighter—their size a perfect match to the holes in the wall of monitors. I was fast on my feet, my shoes sliding as I rounded the corner. When I reached the bomb shelter, I untangled the long, thick coil that led from the headphones to the connectors.

“Come on; work. Give me something I can use,” I said, placing the headphones over my ears. They were so old that the plastic on the wide ear coverings was cracked and brittle. And they were big, so big, my hoodie wouldn’t fit over the top without stretching. Not the most comfortable pair of headphones I’d ever worn, but they were one of a kind. They were made for the bomb shelter monitors, and this I knew, because the three connectors snapped into the holes in the wall with ease.

I was plugged in.

Now all I needed was a system that actually worked.

I stood at the wall of monitors, cycling through all four buttons, but there was almost nothing. A slight humming noise, like electricity running through power lines overhead, buzzed in my ears.

I looked at my watch, 11:04
PM
. If Marisa was trying to send me a message, I couldn’t see it. I set the headphones on the cot and went into the basement, where I turned off the light and put the green lunch pail back where I’d found it. When I returned, I dialed down the light in the bomb shelter and pushed the white
G
-for-girls button. I put the headphones back on and sat down on the rickety cot, waiting.

Ten minutes later I fell asleep.

Kate’s head hurts.

She hasn’t come back to see me. How’s she doing otherwise?

Great. She went to bed early, like 10:30. She was tired, but different.

Different how?

She’s not afraid anymore.

How do you know for sure?

I know what it looks like in a girl. She’s cured.

My eyes came open and I moved, but I couldn’t hear the squeaky springs on the cot. My ears felt smashed and hot, and there were voices.

That’s very good news, Marisa. Are you excited? It won’t be long now.

I guess I am. It’s so mysterious, you know? Kate says she can’t remember what happened; she just woke up and knew.

It will be the same for you.

I was drawn rapidly out of sleep and stood before the wall of monitors.

“I can hear you,” I said, barely hearing my own voice through thick foam and cracked plastic. “I can hear what you’re saying.”

“So anyway, I just wanted to say
everyone
went to sleep. You know me, always the last one.”

Marisa glanced at the floor and then back at the screen as if she was looking at me, not Dr. Stevens.

“Just a little longer. Hang in there, okay?”

“Okay. Sorry to call so late.”

“It’s never a problem, Marisa. Anytime.”

Marisa got up out of the chair, and I heard the door open and close.

“I gotta move, and fast,” I said, jamming the stuff in my backpack that I’d poured out on the floor. It was amazing how fast I’d turned the bomb shelter into something that looked more like my room back home. I hadn’t just dumped out my pack, I’d stacked things in piles. Extra clothes, my Recorder and Keith’s MP3 player, a mountain of Clif Bars, bottles of water all in a row. I’d stacked it all neatly against the wall while emptying my bag, then neglected to put it all back once I had on the super-sized headphones. I took less care putting my things away, stuffing the shirts and then the bars and the bottles like a marine packing to get out of a foxhole under fire. The headphones were still on, that slight sound of static dancing in my ears; and then voices appeared, crisp and unexpected, and I turned to the wall of monitors. The room was still empty, but Dr. Stevens was speaking to someone who had a gravelly old voice. Rainsford. Had to be.

She’s not ready yet. Better finish off the boys first.

I can take them both at once. It’s what they want. I’ve seen to it.

We’re not even halfway there. Don’t overdo it. And we still haven’t found Will Besting.

Davis will find him. I have little doubt of that.

There was a static-filled pause, the click of a button, and then more.

I’m not sure she can be trusted.

Don’t be ridiculous. Of course she can. She’ll play her part; I’ll see to it.

Fine.

Off channel marker. 12:21
AM
.

I took off the headphones and pulled the plugs from the wall, my ears adjusting to dead silence.

I’m not sure she can be trusted.

I didn’t want to know what that meant, but there it was: one of us wasn’t who they appeared to be. Someone was in on whatever was happening, a
she
. Kate Hollander or Avery Varone, I told myself. It’s one of them. They’re keeping an eye on everyone, making sure no one steps out of line. One of them is a mole.

I walked into the basement and put the headphones back into the lunch pail, returning it to the top shelf, and then finished packing my things away. I was tired of carrying my backpack around and hid it on one of the shelves in the basement. One back pocket filled with my Recorder, the other with my paperback copy of
The Pearl
, and I was ready to go.

All the while, a single thought ran through my head, over and over, until I was up the ramp and pushing the door open into Fort Eden.

Please don’t let it be Marisa.

She sat closer to me on the couch from the start, and she looked at me as if she’d missed me. Thoughts of betrayal were already melting away, but I was cautious, a little guarded.

“I hope Rainsford doesn’t come out here and catch us. Or Mrs. Goring. That would be bad.”

She told me they wouldn’t, brushing over it as if it didn’t really matter, and I began to worry that the whole thing was a setup. Everyone would arrive, all at once, and I’d be trapped. Mrs. Goring from the basement, Rainsford from the winding stone stairs, the other kids from the back rooms; they’d crawl out from every corner of the fort like rats and corner me.

“Don’t be nervous, Will,” Marisa said. She knew me already. She could tell I was struggling. “No one is going to find us.”

She reached out and touched my hand, her fingers soft and trembling in the dark, and my heart skipped a beat.

“You haven’t told anyone about where I’m hiding?” I asked.

“No, I haven’t,” she answered, the slightest wisp of defensiveness in her voice, the hand pulled away. “You’ll come back when you’re ready. You just need time.”

“What if I don’t?”

“Then you don’t. But I think you should.”

“Why?”

“Because, Will. It works. Kate’s cured.”

“How can you tell for sure? There are no doctors out here in the woods.”

Marisa’s dark brow furrowed, and her head tilted. How had I known what Kate was afraid of? I’d slipped, but she let it pass.

“You know what it means to be afraid,” she went on. “You know what it looks like. There’s a certain something, always there no matter what. Both Kate and Ben had it, like you and me. But it’s gone now.”

She looked at me, and I felt the wall I’d put up between us start to crumble and fall. If she was going to tell them where I was, she would have done it already.

“I have to tell you something.”

There were many reasons why I told her that night in Fort Eden: the crushing guilt, the loneliness, the absolute fear of being caught and thrown into a room at the bottom of the world. But mostly, I just wanted to hold her hand one more time. After that I could die in peace. Maybe my best and only hope was to come clean.

And so I told her many things, but not all. I told her about the audio files, making sure to mention the part about how I truly felt I
had
to take them. I told her I’d discovered headphones that would let me hear, but that I absolutely would not break our trust and listen when I felt I shouldn’t. I told her it was lonely in the bomb shelter and that I didn’t trust anyone but her. I stopped short of telling about the colored rooms and what went on inside them, because I still wasn’t sure if I should rob her of a chance to be cured, no matter how bizarre the methods were. If she knew, she’d never go through with it.