The Passage

by Justin Cronin

  “Sanjay? What are you doing?”

  The man had come to a halt before the breaker panel. His right hand, which hung loosely at his side, gave a little twitch.

  “I don’t … know.”

  “Isn’t there,” Michael ventured, “I don’t know, someplace else you have to be?”

  Sanjay said nothing. He lifted his hand and held it before his face, turning it slowly back and forth as he gazed at it with the same mute puzzlement, as if he couldn’t quite decide whom it belonged to.

  “Bab … cock?”

  More footsteps outside; suddenly Gloria was in the room. She, too, was wearing her bedclothes. Her hair, which she tied up in the daytime, fell halfway down her back. She seemed a little out of breath, having evidently run from their house to follow him. She ignored Michael, who by now felt less alarmed than embarrassed, like an incidental witness to some private marital drama, and marched straight to her husband’s side, taking him firmly by the elbow.

  “Sanjay, come to bed.”

  “This is my hand, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” she replied impatiently, “it’s your hand.” Still holding her husband by the elbow, she glanced toward Michael and mouthed the word “sleepwalking.”

  “It’s definitely, definitely mine.”

  She heaved a sigh. “Sanjay, come on now. Enough of this.”

  A flicker of awareness came into the man’s face. He turned to look about the room, his eyes alighting on Michael.

  “Michael. Hello.”

  The earphones were gone, hidden under the counter. “Hey, Sanjay.”

  “It seems I have … taken a walk.”

  Michael stifled a laugh; though what, he wondered, had Sanjay been doing at the breaker box?

  “Gloria has been good enough to come after me to take me home. So that is where I’m going to go now.”

  “Okay.”

  “Thank you, Michael. I’m sorry to have disturbed you in your important work.”

  “It’s no problem.”

  And with that, Gloria Patal had led her husband from the room, taking him, presumably, back to bed to finish whatever it was he’d started in his restless, dreaming mind.

  Now, what to make of that? When Michael had told Elton about it the next morning, all he’d said was, “I guess it’s getting to him like the rest of us.” And when Michael had said, “What it? What do you mean by it?” Elton had said nothing at all; he seemed to have no answer.

  Brood, brood, brood—Sara was right; he spent far too much time with his head stuck down the hole of worry. The signal was between cycles; he’d have to wait another forty minutes to listen to it again. With nothing else to occupy his mind, he called up the battery monitors on the screen, hoping for good news, not finding it. Bell plus two, a hard wind blowing all day through the pass, and the cells were below 50 percent already.

  He left Elton in the hut and went to take a walk, to clear his mind. The signal: 1,432 megahertz. It meant something, but what? There was the obvious thing, namely that the numbers were the first four positive integers in a repeating pattern: 1432143214321432 and so on, the 1 closing out the sequence, which reloaded with the 4. Interesting, and probably just a coincidence, but that was the thing about the ghost signal: nothing about it felt like a coincidence.

  He came to the Sunspot, where often there would be people milling about well into the night. He blinked into the light. A single figure was sitting at the base of the Stone, dark hair tumbling over her folded arms, which rested on top of her knees. Mausami.

  Michael cleared his throat to alert her of his approach. But as he neared, she glanced his way with only passing curiosity. Her meaning was clear: she was alone and wanted to stay that way. But Michael had been in the hut for hours—Elton hardly counted—chasing ghosts in the dark, and was more than willing to risk a little rejection for even a few meager crumbs of company.

  “Hey.” He was standing above her. “Would it be okay if I sat?”

  She lifted her face then. He saw that her cheeks were streaked with tears.

  “Sorry,” Michael said. “I can go.”

  But she shook her head. “It’s all right. Sit if you want.”

  Which he did. It was awkward, because the only way to sit properly was to take a place beside her, their shoulders practically touching, his back braced by the Stone as hers was. He was beginning to think this hadn’t been such a great idea after all, especially as the silence lengthened. He realized that by staying he had tacitly agreed to ask what was bothering her, even, perhaps, to find the right words to comfort her. He knew that being pregnant could make women act moodily, not that they weren’t moody to begin with, their behavior at any given moment as changeable as the four winds. Sara made sense to him most of the time, but that was only because she was his sister and he was used to her.

  “I heard the news. I guess, congratulations?”

  She wiped her eyes with her fingertips. Her nose was running, but he didn’t have a rag to offer her. “Thanks.”

  “Does Galen know you’re out here?”

  She gave a dismal laugh. “No, Galen does not.”

  Which made him think that what was bothering her wasn’t just a mood at all. She had come to visit the Stone because of Theo; her tears were for him.

  “I just …” But he couldn’t find the words. “I don’t know.” He shrugged. “I’m sorry. We were friends too.”

  She did something that surprised him then. Mausami placed her hand on top of his, twining their fingers together where they rested at the top of his knee. “Thank you, Michael. People don’t give you enough credit, I don’t think. That was exactly the right thing to say.”

  For a while they sat without speaking. Mausami didn’t withdraw her hand but left it where it was. It was strange—not until this moment had Michael truly felt Theo’s absence. He felt sad, but something else, too. He felt alone. He wanted to say something, to put this feeling into words. But before he could, two more figures appeared at the far end of the plaza. The pair came striding toward them. Galen and, behind him, Sanjay.

  “Listen,” Mausami said, “my advice is, don’t let any of Lish’s shit get to you. That’s just how she does things. She’ll come around.”

  Lish? Why was she talking about Lish? But there was no time to consider this; Galen and Sanjay were suddenly towering over them. Galen was perspiring and breathing hard, as if he’d been running laps around the walls. As for Sanjay: the befuddled sleepwalker of two nights ago was nowhere to be seen. Standing in his place was a scowling figure of pure paternal self-righteousness.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” Galen’s eyes were pulled into an angry squint, as if trying to bring the image of her into focus. “You’re not supposed to be out of the Sanctuary, Maus. You’re not.”

  “I’m fine, Gale.” She banished him with a wave. “Go home.”

  Sanjay shouldered forward so he was standing above the two of them, an imperious presence, bathed in the lights. His skin seemed to glow with his fatherly disappointment. He glanced down at Michael once, casting his presence aside with a quick clenching of his generous eyebrows—dashing, with this single gesture, any hope Michael might have had for some light-hearted acknowledgment of the other night’s events.

  “Mausami. I’ve been patient with you, but that is at its end. I don’t understand why you have to be so difficult about this. You know where you’re supposed to be.”

  “I’m staying right here with Michael. Anybody who thinks different will have to take it up with him.”

  Michael felt his stomach drop. “Listen—”

  “You stay out of this, Circuit,” Galen snapped. “And while we’re at it, what do you think you’re doing out here with my wife?”

  “What am I doing?”

  “Yeah. Was this your idea?”

  “For godsakes, Galen,” Mausami sighed. “Do you know how you sound? No, it wasn’t Michael’s idea.”

  Michael became aware that everyone was looking at him
now. That he’d come to find himself in the middle of this scene, when all he’d wanted was a little company and fresh air, seemed like the cruelest trick of fate. The expression on Galen’s face was pure burning humiliation; Michael considered whether the man was, in fact, capable of doing him real harm. There was something vaguely ineffectual about the way he carried himself, his attention always seeming to lag a step behind the goings-on around him, but Michael wasn’t fooled: Galen had a good thirty pounds on him. On top of which, and more to the point, Galen viewed himself at this moment as defending something like his honor. Michael’s knowledge of male combat was limited to a few childhood skirmishes in the Sanctuary over not very much, but he had swapped enough punches to know that it helped if your heart was in it. Which Michael’s certainly wasn’t. If Galen could actually manage to aim a blow, it would all be over fast.

  “Listen, Galen,” he began again, “I was just taking a walk—”

  But Mausami didn’t let him finish. “It’s all right, Michael. He knows you were.”

  She rolled her face to look at him; her eyes were swollen and heavy-lidded from crying. “We’ve all got our jobs to do, right?” She took his hand again and squeezed it, as if to seal a bargain between them. “Mine apparently is to do as I’m told and not be difficult. So for now, that’s what I’m going to do.”

  Galen reached down to help her to her feet, but Mausami ignored him, rising on her own. Still glowering, Sanjay had stepped back, his hands on his hips.

  “I don’t see why this has to be so hard, Maus,” Galen said.

  But Mausami acted like she hadn’t heard him, turning away from the two men to face Michael instead, still seated with his back against the Stone. In the glance that passed between them, Michael could feel the diminishment of her surrender, the shame of marching to her orders.

  “Thanks for keeping me company, Michael.” She gave him a sad smile. “That was nice, what you said.”

  Sara, in the Infirmary, was waiting for Gabe Curtis to die.

  She had just returned from riding when Mar had appeared at her door. It was happening, Mar said. Gabe was moaning, thrashing, fighting for breath. Sandy didn’t know what to do. Could she come? For Gabe?

  Sara retrieved her med kit and followed Mar to the Infirmary. As she stepped through the curtain into the ward, the first thing she saw was Jacob, awkwardly leaning over the cot on which his father lay, pressing a cup of tea to his lips. Gabe was choking, coughing up blood. Sara moved quickly to his side and gently took the tea from Jacob’s hand; she rolled Gabe onto his side—the poor man weighed almost nothing, just skin and bones—and with her free hand reached to the cart to retrieve a metal basin, which she tucked under his chin. Two more hacking gasps: the blood, Sara saw, was a rich red, and spotted with small black clumps of dead tissue.

  Other Sandy stepped from the shadowed recess behind the door. “I’m sorry, Sara,” she said, her hands fluttering nervously. “He just started coughing like that and I thought maybe the tea—”

  “You let Jacob do this by himself? What’s wrong with you?”

  “What’s the matter with him?” the boy wailed. He was standing by the cot, his face stricken with confused helplessness.

  “Your dad is very sick, Jacob,” Sara said. “No one’s mad at you. You did the right thing, helping him.”

  Jacob had begun to scratch himself, digging the fingernails of his right hand into the scraped flesh of his forearm.

  “I’m going to do my best to take care of him, Jacob. You have my word.”

  Gabe was bleeding internally, Sara knew. The tumor had ruptured something. She ran her hand over his belly and felt the warm distention of pooling blood. She reached into her kit for a stethoscope, clamped it to her ears, pulled Gabe’s jersey aside, and listened to his lungs. A wet rattle, like water sloshed in a can. He was close, and yet it might take hours. She lifted her eyes to Mar, who nodded. Sara understood what Mar had meant when she’d said that Sara was Gabe’s favorite, what she was asking her to do now.

  “Sandy, take Jacob outside.”

  “What do you want me to do with him?”

  Flyers, what was wrong with the woman? “Anything.” Sara allowed herself a breath, to steady her nerves; it was not a time for anger. “Jacob, I need you to go with Sandy now. Can you do that for me?”

  In his eyes Sara saw no real comprehension—only fear, and a long habit of obedience to the decisions that others made for him. He would go, Sara knew, if he was asked.

  A reluctant nod. “Okay, I guess.”

  “Thank you, Jacob.”

  Sandy led the boy from the ward; Sara heard the front door opening and closing. Mar, sitting on the opposite side of the cot, was holding her husband’s hand.

  “Sara, do you … have something?”

  It was not something that was ever discussed in the open. The herbals were all kept in the basement in the old freezer, stored in jars stacked on metal shelves. Sara excused herself to go downstairs and retrieved the ones she needed—digitalis, or common foxglove, to slow the respiration; the small black seeds of the plant they called angel’s trumpet, to stimulate the heart; the bitter brown shaving of hemlock root, to numb the awareness—and set them on the table. She mortared them into a fine brown dust, poured it onto a sheet of paper, and, angling this over a cup, dumped the mixture into it. She put everything away, swept the table clean, and ascended the stairs.

  In the outer room, she put water on to boil; the kettle was already warm, and soon the drink was ready. It had a faint greenish cast, like algae, with a bitter, earthen smell. She carried it into the ward.

  “I think this will help.”

  Mar nodded, taking the cup from Sara. Part of their unfolding understanding was that Sara would only provide the means; she could not do the rest.

  Mar gazed into the cup’s interior. “How much?”

  “All of it, if you can.”

  Sara positioned herself at the head of the bed to lift Gabe’s shoulders; Mar held the cup to his mouth, telling her husband to sip. His eyes were still closed; he seemed completely unaware of them. Sara was worried that he wouldn’t be able to manage it, that they had waited too long. But then he took a first, tender sip from the cup, then another, pecking at it steadily like a bird drinking from a puddle. When the tea was gone, Sara eased him back down onto the pillow.

  “How long?” Mar wasn’t looking at her.

  “Not long. It’s quick.”

  “And you’ll stay. Until it’s over.”

  Sara nodded.

  “Jacob can never know.” Mar looked at her beseechingly. “He wouldn’t understand.”

  “I promise,” said Sara.

  And then, just the two of them, they waited.

  Peter was dreaming of the girl. They were under the carousel, in that low-ceilinged prison of dust, and the girl was on his back, breathing her honeyed breath onto his neck. Who are you, he was thinking, who are you, but the words felt trapped in his mouth, bunched inside it like a woolen rag. He was thirsty, so thirsty. He wanted to roll over to see her face but he couldn’t move, and it wasn’t the girl on him anymore, it was a viral, the teeth were sinking into the flesh of his neck and he was trying to scream for his brother but no sound came and he began to die, one part of him thinking, How strange, I’ve never died before. So this is what it’s like.

  He awoke with a start, his heart thumping, the dream dispersing at once, leaving in its wake a vague but poignant impression of panic, like the echo of a scream. He lay motionless, reassembling his sense of where and when he was. He arched his neck to look out the window over his bunk and saw the lights shining. His mouth was bone dry, his tongue swollen and fibrous-feeling; he’d dreamed of being thirsty because he was. He fumbled for the canteen on the floor beside his cot, lifted the spout to his mouth, and drank.

  Caleb was sleeping in the bunk beside him. Peter counted four other men in the room, snoring piles in the shadows. All had come in without his once awakening. How long since he’d s
lept like that?

  Now, lying in the dark, he felt the first stirring of antsiness, a low-grade hum of physical impatience that seemed to have taken up a permanent residence in his chest since his return up the mountain. The obvious course was to report for duty on the catwalk. But Soo had made it clear that she wouldn’t have him on the Watch until at least a few days had gone by.

  He decided to go see Auntie. He hadn’t told her about Theo yet. Probably she knew, but still he wanted her to hear the news from him, even if the information was repeated.

  Sometimes it was possible to forget all about her, over in her little house in the glade. Oh, Auntie, people would say when her name came up, as if they’d only just remembered her existence. And the truth was, the old woman got on surprisingly well without much help. Peter or Theo would chop wood for her, or do small repairs on her house, and Sara might assist her at the Storehouse. But her needs were few, as she kept a large vegetable and herb patch in the sunlit plot behind her house, which she still managed to tend with virtually no aid from anyone. With the exception of her gardening, which she performed from a seated position on a stool, she spent most of her days inside her house, among her papers and mementos, her mind adrift in the past. She wore three different pairs of eyeglasses on a tangle of lanyards around her neck, alternating between them for whatever task she was attending and, except in winter, went barefoot everywhere she walked. By all accounts, Auntie was close to a hundred. She had married, or so it was said, not once but twice, but because she could never have children of her own, her life span seemed a natural marvel without purpose, like a horse that could count by stamping its hooves. No one could quite figure out how she’d survived Dark Night; her house had weathered the quake with very little damage, and in the morning they had discovered her sitting in her kitchen drinking a cup of her famously awful tea, as if nothing had happened at all. “Maybe they just don’t want my old blood” was all she’d said.

  The night had cooled; the windows of Auntie’s cottage were glowing faintly as Peter approached. She claimed never to sleep, that day and night were all the same to her, and in fact Peter could not recall a time when he’d failed to find her up and working. He knocked at the door and opened it a crack.