by Steven James
“And that’s the point of your story? That it’s impossible to tell them apart?”
“No. We’ve brought you here to help turn what appears to be a curse to you into a blessing for others.”
“Like with the son.”
“Exactly.”
“But he had to become disabled first.”
Malcolm hesitates. “Yes. He did.”
We check out a few more of Jess’s videos.
Things do not end well for her.
She begins calling out to people who aren’t there, then batting her arms through the air at something only she can see.
It’s troubling to watch how quickly her blurs overwhelm her, until in her last video, Malcolm is standing by himself in the geometrically tiled hallway watching as someone in a white coat wheels Jess toward the elevator.
She’s strapped down and shrieking something about someone named Sam.
Based on the patterns on the floor I can tell they’re on B1.
We pull up Liam’s footage.
His mental deterioration happens even more quickly.
At the end of the second video, he breaks a lava lamp that looks identical to the one here in the apartment, grabs one of the glass shards, and starts going to work on his left arm with it.
A thin jet of glistening blood spurts from his wrist and sprays onto the wall.
Malcolm has to wrestle him down and twist his wrist backward to get him to drop the glass.
During their struggle, Liam rakes the glass shard across Malcolm’s face, giving him the cut that turned into the scar I noticed earlier.
The whole time, Liam is laughing in a wild, unsettling way.
There are only three videos of him.
In the third one, he’s being rolled away as well.
Though she can’t see the images, Alysha can hear the guy’s mad laughter as the video ends. “Is that what’s going to happen to us?” she asks softly.
“No,” I tell her. “Because we’re getting out of here. Malcolm should have been back by now. Something’s wrong. He told me that we needed to find the senator’s daughter before nine o’clock, and that’s never going to happen if we don’t get moving.”
She picks up her cane, a white stick about a yard long, and then asks me, “Do you trust him?”
“I don’t know, but I believe him, and right now I think that’s what matters most.”
Tane brings the key card so we can get into the other rooms. “So, split up or stay together?”
“Stay together.” Alysha is tapping her cane in front of her on the way to the door. “Bad things always happen to teenagers in situations like this when they split up.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
The campus safety officer stared at Kyle over the top of his wire-rimmed glasses from where he sat on the other side of the counter. “So, how long has your friend been missing?”
“We don’t know, exactly. He was supposed to meet me this morning for breakfast, but he didn’t show up.”
“Maybe he slept in.”
“I checked. He wasn’t in his room.”
“Well, maybe he went for a walk.”
“We looked all over.”
“Does he have someone he knows in the area? Someone he might have gone to meet?”
“We’re from Wisconsin. He’s never been to the South before.”
The cop shifted his gaze to Nicole and Mia. “You girls know of anyone?”
“No,” Nicole said, but then backpedaled a little. “I mean, I don’t think he knows anyone down here.”
“You don’t think he does.”
“Right.”
“Listen,” Mia cut in. “This is serious.”
“And so is you being here. Before I send out a car or dispatch officers to look for your friend, I need to make sure this isn’t some kind of prank.”
“It isn’t a prank.”
“Have you tried calling his phone?”
Kyle produced it from his pocket. “He left it in his room. The last text he opened was at 10:46 last night from someone telling him to answer a call, but there’s no indication that one came in.”
“Who sent the text?”
“No number shows up when you open it. You can check it for yourself.”
“I’ll take your word for it.” He sighed heavily as if he was really going out of his way to do this, then shuffled through a stack of forms, pulled one out, and jotted a few things down.
He asked for Daniel’s full name, date of birth, address, and a physical description. Kyle handed over Daniel’s driver’s license to save time.
“Where did you get this?”
“It was in his room. In his wallet.”
“Along with his phone?”
“That’s right.”
The cop was quiet for a moment. “Let me ask you a question: Has your friend ever tried to hurt himself?”
“What?” Nicole said. “What do you mean?”
“Self-harm. Cutting. Suicide attempts. Anything along those lines.”
“No. He would never do that.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes. Absolutely.”
“Alright.”
To Kyle, it didn’t sound like the officer necessarily believed her, but the man moved on and asked him, “You said you got this wallet from his room. What dorm is he staying in?”
“Berringer Hall. Room 303.”
The man noted it on the form. “Is there anything else I should know? Anything else that might be helpful for us in finding him?”
Kyle wondered if he should tell him that Daniel sometimes hallucinated and ran in front of trucks as they sped down the highway, but decided that it probably wasn’t going to help them locate his friend. He could always fill him in more later if he needed to.
When none of them spoke up, the officer agreed to contact the residence hall director and the coaches in charge of the camp to see if they knew anything, then ended by reassuring them, “I’m sure your friend is fine.”
“What makes you say that?” Nicole asked.
“These things happen all the time. They never turn out to be anything serious. Maybe he just met some girl last night and—”
“That’s not what happened.”
“Alright, alright. Whatever you say. So, how can I reach you if I find out anything?”
She gave him her number and the three friends left the office.
Outside the building, Mia swore, and then began ranting about how much that cop pissed her off. “He didn’t take anything we had to say seriously.” But then her tone changed in a way that was hard for Kyle to read. “Unless you count him asking about if Daniel might have hurt himself.”
Nicole folded her arms in defiance. “Well, we can’t just sit around and do nothing. We have to keep looking.”
“Do you think I should call my aunt? Tell her what’s up?”
Kyle shook his head. “We still don’t know what’s going on, that’s the thing. All we know is that Daniel isn’t here. I don’t want Sue Ellen or his parents to worry, especially if it’s nothing serious. Let’s just see if we can find him.”
“Where else do you think we should look?”
“I . . . I’m not sure.”
They all thought about it, and finally Nicole turned to Kyle. “You know how that cop in there asked if there was anyone in the area who Daniel might have gone to meet?”
“Yeah, but like I told him, Daniel’s never been down here before.”
“Right, but what if somebody went to meet him?”
“What do you mean?”
“Remember last winter? That guy Malcolm Zacharias? When we helped him out of that snowbank, his car had Georgia plates. Then there’s this text message on Daniel’s phone and the lack of a phone call. We already know that Zacharias was able to get in and delete records of calls—he did it with my phone in December. Plus, there’s this anonymous person who paid for Daniel to come down and attend the camp.”
“You think that was Zach
arias?”
“I don’t know, but whoever did that might be our link to where Daniel is now.”
“So,” Mia said, “you’re thinking that if we can find Zacharias, he can lead us to Daniel?”
“I mean, it’s worth a shot. I don’t know what else to try at this point.”
“But Zacharias didn’t seem very excited about being found last winter. How are we supposed to track him down now?”
Nicole chewed on the side of her lip, deep in thought. “When we checked Daniel in, over in the dorm lobby last night, the director had all the basketball players’ registration forms with him. Well, there must be a record somewhere of who paid Daniel’s fee. I say we start with those forms.”
Kyle nodded. “I might be able to help with that. When I was looking for Daniel earlier, I saw the receptionist in the field house office filing them.”
“Okay.” Mia looked back and forth from Kyle to Nicole. “So how do we get in there to have a look at them?”
“We’ll need a way to distract him,” Kyle replied.
Nicole’s eyes lit up. “You know, I might have an idea, but first we’ll need the name of one of the guys in the camp, and maybe where he’s from.” She started toward the cafeteria.
“Where are we going?”
“It’s almost lunchtime. They’ll all be standing around or getting in line. It’ll be easy pickings.”
CHAPTER THIRTY
Following the mental map that I formed earlier during my trek through the labyrinthine hallways, we begin to systematically search this level for Malcolm.
Tane uses the key card to access rooms.
We find a kitchen, a rec room, bathrooms, and more dormitory-type rooms similar to the one I woke up in. None of the rooms are labeled. All of them are empty.
Tane shakes his head. “Man, someone went to a lot of trouble designing and constructing this place.”
“Yes,” I agree. “They did. But why?”
“Your guess is as good as mine.”
After checking two more rooms, I’ve had enough. “Listen, let’s go back to the apartment and scroll through the footage from the moment Malcolm left. It should be archived. We can follow him camera-to-camera, see where he went. Track him down that way.”
As we retrace our steps, I’m impressed that Alysha only has to tap her cane intermittently, and is still able to stay in the center of the walkway.
“Do you think this might be some kind of test?” she asks me. “I mean, him leaving us alone to see what we can figure out?”
“I don’t think so. Not if there really is a tight deadline and someone’s life is on the line.” As we walk across the algorithms formed by the coded symbols, it gets me thinking. “Listen, does math come easily for either of you?”
“I’ve never really been too into it.” Tane shrugs. “But, yeah. I’d say it does.”
“Me too,” Alysha replies. “Why?”
“I’m wondering if that analytical ability has something to do with our blurs. Maybe there’s a part of our brains that takes the images or the sounds and makes sense of them. Malcolm mentioned cohesion to me. Order out of chaos. So, math. Logic. Maybe those are some of the skills we need for this to happen.”
“That’s possible.”
We reach an intersection and Alysha begins to turn, just at the right time, remembering how many steps we’d taken since passing through here earlier.
“Do either of you sleepwalk?” I ask.
Tane tells me no, but Alysha says that she sometimes does.
He looks at her quizzically. “Do blind people sleepwalk? Really?”
“Sure, why not?”
“Well, I mean, they can’t see where they’re going, and—”
“And what? We never see where we’re going. We have spatial understanding, though. I probably don’t imagine things quite the same way you do, but if you were to describe where the furniture in a room is, I could make my way past it. I do the same when I’m sleeping. But now you’ve got me wondering—what’s it like for you guys when you have a blur?”
“It’s the same as experiencing anything else,” I explain, “except the blurs are usually pretty shocking. I’ve seen dead bodies come to life, heard them speak to me, even had them reach out and clutch my arm.”
“Have you seen any recently?
“Any?”
“Dead bodies?”
“I saw one in my attic last week. It looked just like me.”
“Whoa.”
“A couple days before that I saw a boy who wasn’t there. He was standing in the road and I tried to save him from an oncoming truck. He disappeared at the last second and the truck hit me. That’s how I dislocated my shoulder.”
“What about your leg?”
“My leg?”
“You favor one leg. Did you hurt it in the accident?”
“Actually, my ankle. Yes. How did you know that?”
“When you walk. I can hear your gait. It’s uneven.”
Man, she’s good.
We get back to the room and Tane and I immediately head to the monitors to see if we can get some answers about where Malcolm went.
Kyle waited outside the cafeteria as Nicole and Mia entered and got in the lunch line behind a bunch of guys from the basketball camp.
The girls had told him to give them five minutes.
“Should be more than enough time,” Nicole had said, then smiled and motioned for Mia to walk with her. “Come on, Mia, let’s go.”
We discover that Malcolm stood just around the corner from this room talking on the phone for ninety-one seconds before leaving for the elevator.
As I’m trying to find footage from an interior elevator camera, or at least figure out what floor he might have exited on to, Tane grabs my arm and points to another screen. “Look.”
Movement.
But it’s not Malcolm.
“That’s a live feed,” he says.
“Level B1. That’s the level where I woke up.”
Alysha asks what’s going on.
“There’s someone here,” I tell her.
“Who?”
“I don’t know.”
The towering man in the video walks stealthily down the empty hallway. When he pivots toward the camera, I see that he’s carrying a handgun.
And I recognize him.
Last winter he introduced himself to me as Detective Poehlman, though he never mentioned what police department he worked for. He questioned me when my dad was attacked.
At the time, he’d acted somewhat suspiciously and even then I wasn’t sure he was a real detective.
I’m even less sure of it now.
“We need to get out of here.”
“Wait.” Tane indicates the adjoining screen. “There’s another guy.”
“Who are they?” Alysha asks.
“Two men. Both armed.”
“What!”
The second intruder is on our level and is approaching this apartment.
I study the screen, evaluate the direction and speed that he’s moving and compare that to what I know about the floor plan of the two levels I’ve walked through. “I think I might know a way out of here. Follow me.”
As we cross the room, Tane is by my side. Alysha is right behind us, gauging where we are by the sound of our footsteps.
At the door, I tell them, “Two rights, two lefts and a right and we should be at the elevator.”
“How do you know?” Tane asks.
“It’s my instrument.”
Cautiously, we enter the hallway.
Clear.
I take the lead, with Alysha between me and Tane.
As we follow the route and make the turns, we don’t see anyone—
Until that final hallway.
Just as I’m glancing around the corner to make sure it’s clear, I catch sight of that second man coming this way.
I leap backward, grabbing Alysha’s hand to pull her back as well.
“What is it?” She ke
eps her voice low.
“He’s coming. He might have seen me.”
“What do we do?”
“We need to get past him if we’re going to get to the elevator. It’s the only—”
Wait. What wouldn’t he expect?
What—
There’s a room right behind her.
“Tane, use the key card. Open that door. You and Alysha go in. I’ll lure the guy in front of it. When I yell ‘Now!’ I want you to jump out and punch him as hard as you can. When you do, I’ll go for the gun.”
“That’s your plan?” Alysha exclaims. “What kind of a plan is that? You’ll lure the guy and—” She cuts herself off, listens. “He’s close. We need to do something.”
“Get in the room. Hurry.”
Somewhat reluctantly, Tane swipes the card, the door opens, and they disappear inside.
Hurrying to the other side of the hallway, I drop to the floor and sprawl out, pretending to be unconscious.
I figure that the man might shoot at someone who was confronting him or even running away, but I’m banking on the fact that he won’t shoot me while I’m lying on the floor.
His curiosity should play in our favor.
At least I’m hoping it will.
I hear him come around the corner.
His footsteps stop abruptly.
