by Dan Wells
“I…” He’s right. If I can remember where I was—what I saw, what I did—then I can know for sure that none of it is real. “I’ll do it. I’ll remember—I’ll try as hard as I can.” I look up. “What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to stop this idiocy.” He stalks to the door. “I’m going to talk to your father.”
* * *
I REPEAT THE PHRASE over and over, all evening, trying to keep myself calm: It’s all in my head; nothing’s going to hurt me. My delusions are gone, my hallucinations are gone, and I’m back to the way I was at the end of the Seroquel—I’m better, actually, because I don’t have any of the other side effects like fatigue and muscle aches. Even the dyskinesia is almost completely gone. There’s nothing to be afraid of. The test won’t hurt me because the reasons I’m afraid of it are all based on stupid, crazy things I don’t even believe anymore. It’s just habit. I’m fine.
It’s all in my head.
I’m too restless to stay in bed, so I get up and pace around the floor, watching the clock, wishing I had a window. I realize I haven’t seen the stars in two months—we have outside windows in the commons room, but we’re only in there during the day. The impulse seizes me, and before I know what I’m doing I’m opening my door, listening for the night guard, and slipping down the hall in bare feet. The commons room is vast and dark, faintly lit by moonlight from the windows and harsh yellow light from the nurses’ station down the hall. The sound of a TV drifts through the air. We’re not allowed out of our rooms at night, but if I’m quiet she won’t even know I’m here.
I trace a path through the tables and chairs and come to the window, leaning against the metal grate and peering up into the sky. The bars are cold against my cheek. The city lights are bright, turning the dark sky pale, but the clouds are thin and the brightest stars shine through. I can count maybe a dozen. Half the sky is blocked by the neighboring building, and I move to the next window, then the next, looking for a better view. The stars are tiny, barely visible from the heart of the city. I press my face against the grate and stare.
The sky is a geometric puzzle, cut apart and pieced together by cold metal bars.
I hear footsteps behind me. I turn quickly, not wanting to get caught, but the noise is still somewhere down the hall; I haven’t been seen yet, but I can’t get back to my room. Moving from window to window has brought me to the far end of the room, to the TV area, so I slip behind a couch and lay down. The footsteps come closer, but there’s another sound with them—a high-pitched squeak, loose and intermittent. It seems vaguely familiar. I creep to the edge of the couch and look out just in time to see a dark figure come out of the hallway, pushing a mop and a rolling bucket. The janitor. I’ve heard his wheels before, but I’ve never seen him. Like the stars, he only comes out at night.
I pull back behind the couch, waiting for him to continue to the gate and leave, but instead the squeaking stops. I peek out again and see him standing in the dark—not mopping, not moving, just standing. I think he has something in his hands, something wide and flat, but I don’t know how he could see it in this light. I hide again.
This is stupid. He’s just a janitor—he doesn’t care if I’m out of my room. I should go back now, before the guard shows up, and everything will be fine.
I need to stop being so paranoid.
I shake my head and take a deep breath. I’ve been in here for two months; I feel better than I ever have. I’m practically cured. If the last few things I need to deal with are these stupid, lingering fears then the best thing to do is to face them head-on. I stand up. The janitor’s mopping the floor, backing slowly toward me as he goes. I weave around a long table and call out softly.
“Excuse me, I just need to get back to my room—”
And then he turns around, and the world stops, and my heart freezes in my chest.
He has no face.
“Um. Um.” My mouth is babbling by itself, my brain too shocked to do anything. The man lowers his mop and takes a step toward me. His voice is a thin whisper.
“Michael.”
I can’t talk. He drops the mop with a loud clatter and comes toward me, slow steps at first, but as I back away he breaks into a run. My eyes go wide and I stumble, tripping over a metal chair. He’s almost on top of me now, his face a dark blur of nothing, and suddenly panic takes over—a pure animal instinct—and I pick up the metal chair, swing it around in a full arc, and slam it into his blank, horrifying face right as he lunges the last few feet to tackle me. He flies to the side and I stagger backward, carried by the chair’s momentum. He hits the floor with a heavy smash, scattering two more chairs as he lands. I fall to my knees, clutching my makeshift weapon, waiting for the guard or the night nurse to come running, but nobody comes. The TV from the nurse’s station drones in the background.
Did nobody hear me?
I watch the fallen body, a shapeless black shadow, but it doesn’t move. Slowly I stand up, creeping forward, nodding compulsively; I’m too distracted to bother trying to stop it. The man lies completely still. He’s not breathing.
I killed him.
SIXTEEN
I GLANCE UP AGAIN, looking for the guard, but no one’s coming. I walk around the table and creep closer to the fallen body, pausing as I get within arm’s reach. Nothing. I pick up a fallen chair and set it aside, moving closer. The janitor lies on his stomach, his face—if he has one—to the floor. I prod him cautiously, getting no response, then jab him harder in the stomach. When he still doesn’t move I stand up, glancing around again, and grab him by the arm, hauling him over onto his back. He rolls heavily. In the dim moonlight I can see him more clearly, and it’s true—stunningly, shockingly true. He has no face. I move my head and the air around his face seems to ripple and fold. I reach toward him, my breath catching in my throat, irrationally convinced he’s going to lunge up and grab me. He stays still. I reach closer, simultaneously thrilled and horrified by the blank blur, morbidly desperate to touch it. A foot away my fingers start to buzz and I jerk my hand back in surprise. It’s the same electric resonance I feel from a clock or a TV. I reach out again, probing the air to be sure, and there it is again. I’ve known that feeling all my life.
Drugs or no drugs, it terrifies me.
The Faceless Men are real. I feel my pulse rushing through my chest and arms, searing my skin with a violent inner heat. He’s real. I stagger away to sit on the floor and put my head between my knees. I’ve had 100 milligrams of Clozaril in the last twelve hours; I haven’t seen or heard or smelled a hallucination in weeks. I live a life dedicated to snuffing out every conceivable psychotic element. I can’t see anything unreal because it’s physically, medically impossible.
And yet here he is. A Faceless Man.
I push myself farther back, scooting away from the horror in the dark. He knew my name; he tried to attack me. Why? Why is he here?
It doesn’t matter why he’s here. He is, and that means there’s more, and that means I need to get out—I need to get out now. I climb to my feet, crouching lightly, ready to run. Where? I should be safe in here; there are people watching and protecting me. I shake my head. Watching me, yes, but protecting me? I have no idea.
The world seems to shift around me, spinning wildly, and I grip a table for support. He’s real, an actual Faceless Man, but does that mean the rest is real? The clocks and the maggots and the cyanide in the hot water and all the things I thought and feared and ran from—is that all true too? What about Lucy? Reality shifts around me so fast I can’t keep up. What if I’m hallucinating again? What if I’ve killed an innocent man? I shiver and gasp for air, trying not to retch.
He was looking at something. I creep across the floor in the dark, the tables turned flat and jagged in the dim moonlight filtering through the windows. My hands rakes across a shadow and I pull it back quickly; something cut my finger. I probe the darkness carefully and find a clipboard, and when I pull it into the moonlight my breath catches in my throat
: clipped to the board is a page with my name and photo, plus a short dossier. I hold my breath, reading in shock through a full list of all my symptoms, my full police history, a record of every place I’ve lived. The information runs onto the back of the page. Behind it, stuck to the wooden face of the clipboard, is a Post-it note with a four-digit number: 4089. I glance at the keypad on the gate; is that what I think it is?
The guard’s been gone too long; he’ll be here any minute. I stand up and take a step, then stop myself: what can I even do? If I’m right then my nightmares are true—the whole hospital could be infiltrated—and if I’m wrong then I’ve killed an innocent man. Either way I need to leave. I look back at the clipboard, tapping the gate code with my finger. If I hide the body they might not find it until morning; I could be long gone by the time they even know I’m missing.
But only if I work quickly.
I take the papers off the clipboard and shove them down my shirt, then grab the janitor by the feet and pull him around the chairs and down the hall to my room. I pause, look at the clock, then toss a blanket over it just in case. I check the janitor’s wrist, hoping against hope. He’s still dead.
I’ll never get out of the hospital wearing patient’s pajamas so I pull off the janitor’s dark blue jumpsuit and pull it on over my clothes. Aside from his face, the man’s body looks completely normal. I heave his body up into the bed, in case the guard looks in the window, and position him as best I can without touching his head. I listen for footsteps, but there’s still nothing.
I need drugs; I can’t leave without drugs. If I start hallucinating again I’m as good as caught.
I slip into the hall and grab the mop handle, pushing the bucket in front of me and trying to look like a janitor. I pause at the nurses’ station, eyeing the gauntlet of electronics Dr. Little still keeps in the window. The gate’s right there, less than fifteen feet away. There’s no other way. I just have to deal with it. I push forward, glancing through the door into the bright nurses’ station. Sharon the night nurse is slumped forward in her chair, her head on the desk, the colored lights from the TV dancing across her hair.
What’s going on?
I slip into the room quickly, searching for medicine cabinets, but there’s nothing. They must store them somewhere else. I slip back out of the office, gasping, realizing I had held my breath the whole time I was in the office. Calm down, I tell myself, you’re not getting out of here if you don’t calm down. I can’t risk any more time wandering through the hospital; I’ll have to get medicine somewhere else.
The hallway buzzes with electrical fields, and my head buzzes back. I press forward, gritting my teeth, and type in the code from the Post-it. It works. I push the bucket through and let out a gasp of breath as the gate closes behind me. I lower my eyes, push through the double doors, and go. I find the stairs; I find the lobby.
I’m outside.
I’m free. I can feel wind on my face, and soft rain on my hair, and when I look up I can see the sky—not a piece of it, half-glimpsed through a grated window, but the whole thing, vast and dark and endless. I walk slowly, through the hospital parking lot and out to the street, never looking back, never hurrying, trying to look like a normal guy leaving a normal job in the most normal way possible. It’s just after three in the morning.
The janitor had some change in his pocket, but no identification. A small ring of unidentified keys. I assume he left his wallet and car keys in a locker somewhere, but I don’t dare go back to look for it. The change is enough for a bus, if I decide where I’m going, and maybe a cheap breakfast or a burger. I could take the train, but they have cameras; once they know I’m gone, they’ll start checking around and they’d see me on the train cameras. Do buses have cameras too?
I can’t risk public transit; I need to find the nearest freeway and hitch a ride out of town. Get out, get gone, and never look back. The farther I go the better. The Faceless Men are real—I’m still reeling from the discovery. I have to go as far and as fast as I can. Whatever they were trying to do to me, I’ve escaped, and I can’t ever let them find me again.
I come to an intersection and wait, turning up my collar against the rain. The street is full of cars, even in the middle of the night; dark blurs and streaks of reflected light. The city is alive with light, teeming with light, neon and halogen and phosphorus screaming electrified photons in every direction. Even the pavement glows, gleaming back colored lights from puddles and gutters. The traffic lights snap from red to green; the flow of traffic shifts and I move with it across the street. There’s a camera hanging over each traffic light, and I keep my eyes down. They’ll have access to those too. I need to get somewhere safe.
Powell Psychiatric Hospital is in a relatively expensive part of town, a business district with office buildings and trees and storefronts. I walk another couple of blocks and the taller buildings fade away into gas stations and car dealerships, shorter and brighter. The sky is sectioned by tall poles and skeins of wire. I’m not the only person out in the rain, and I wonder what the others are running from. I keep going, moving away from the traffic cameras into the back-streets of an industrial district: block walls and barbed wire and long, lonely warehouses. I pass security gates with more cameras. My clothes are wet and my legs are tired and sluggish. I wipe rain from my eyes and keep walking.
The freeway, and then out of town. It’s my only chance.
I walk past old dry cleaners and pawn shops, through slums and alleys and business parks, until at last I reach a freeway ramp. I stand and rub my hands together, stamping with cold. A car passes, and I stick out my thumb. Nothing. A minute later another; traffic out of the city is practically nothing this time of night. I hold out my thumb to ask for a ride and the car drives past without slowing. Minutes pass, and the sky grows slowly lighter. Three more cars, then four more, then nothing.
The tenth car stops.
“Need a ride?”
I shuffle closer. “Where you going?”
“Manteno. That far enough?”
“Sure.” I reach for the door. I stop.
The man gestures at the door. “Hop in.”
I don’t move. For the second time, faced with an open escape, I know that I can’t take it. There are too many others—other victims, other children. Other corpses. The Faceless Men are real, and it’s not enough to free myself when there are so many people still trapped in the Plan.
I still don’t know what the Plan is.
“Hey buddy, you coming?”
I look up and catch his eyes. “Do you have a newspaper?”
“What?”
Dr. Little told me there was a girl there to see me, and then I was visited by two. Lucy turned out to be a hallucination … which means the reporter was real. “The Sun-Times,” I say. “Do you have a copy?”
“No I don’t. You want a ride or not?”
“No thank you. I have to find a paper.”
“Whatever, man.” He rolls up his window and drives away. I walk back the way I came and find a garbage can on the sidewalk, dark and hooded and bolted to a streetlight. I walk forward slowly, conscious of the stark yellow glow above me, and pull back the hinged metal lid. The can stinks like old food and overflows with trash. I root through it gingerly, avoiding the worst of the sludge, and pull out a folded newspaper. The morning is brighter now, weak sunlight filtering through the night’s gray. I find Kelly’s name on the seventh page of the paper, on a story about an accidental shooting. Kelly Fischer. She’s real. She’s a crime reporter, just like she said. I refold the paper and look for a number in the masthead—some contact info of any kind—and find a tip line. I walk another block to find a pay phone—the only safe kind, with the signals curled into shielded cords instead of buzzing sharply through the air. Still frightening, but not as painful. I drop in a quarter and dial.
Ring.
A machine answers with a list of business hours; I hang up in a rush, breathing heavily. Machines are bad enough when they d
on’t try to talk to me.
I look at the slowly graying sky. It’s still early; I can rest now and call again when she gets there for work. I find a place to curl up out of the rain—the entrance to a parking garage. I drape the paper over my head and try to sleep.
I dream of a hollow city, filled with hollow, shambling people.
* * *
RING.
“Sun-Times.”
“I need to talk to one of your reporters,” I say. “Kelly Fischer.”
“Who’s calling?”
I hesitate. I don’t want to give them my name. “Ambrose Vanek.”
“One moment.”
The phone clicks, dead, and I wait. The phone clicks again and I hear the reporter’s voice.
“This is Kelly Fischer.”
“Hi, it’s me.”
“Mr.… Vanek? I’m afraid I don’t recall the name.”
“No,” I say, looking around, “it’s me.” I pause, waiting, but she doesn’t speak. “Michael.”
“Michael,” she says slowly, then abruptly her voice changes. “Michael Shipman? I didn’t know they let you use the phone in there.”
“I’m not in there anymore. Can I meet you somewhere?”
“Congratulations on being released, that’s great. There’s no need to meet, though. That story … took a different direction. Thank you, though.”
“This is important. There are things I didn’t tell you before.”
“I don’t doubt it, but really, we don’t need to meet. Thank you—”
“Don’t hang up!” I shout, desperate to keep her on the line. “Listen, this is very important, but we can’t discuss it over the phone—I don’t know if They’re listening or not. You have to believe me—”
The line goes dead.
I shake my head—I’ve got to get Kelly to believe me. Something’s going on here, not just with Powell and the Faceless Men but with the Red Line Killer and the Children of the Earth and who knows what else. They’re all connected, and Kelly is the only one I can talk to—the only one who’s done all the research to figure it out. I need her information. I need her.
