Dan and Kevin marched off. All was silent except the chirpy songs of the monitors. Chance emerged from under the nurses’ station counter, stood up to stretch his cramped body, and peeked out into the hallway, where a Balliope sprayed him in the face with an aerosol that instantly blinded and nauseated him. Chance fell to the floor.
“Hah!” said the thing, whose voice sounded like a seal playing a harmonica. “You can elude a dull-witted Vyrndeet, but not a devious Balliope like moi! Ha-ha-ha!”
Chance—sightless, sick, supine—lost consciousness.
CHAPTER 16
When Josh Ringle called Mersey Marsh and asked her out on a date, she thought, How much more promising could a summer day get? But two nights later, Mersey found herself Josh-less, with an e-mail from her best friend announcing that she was chasing her brother down a subterranean pipe, perhaps never to return.
During the barbecue, Mersey had been unable to think of anything but Josh and what she could wear to make him fall in love with her, and she had spent most of the event up in her bedroom experimenting with different ensembles. Mersey’s love fog obscured thoughts of anything else—pork ribs, corn on the cob, Uncle Dob and his weird wicker puppets, and, unfortunately, her friend Pauline Jeopard, whom Mersey could see from her bedroom window, sitting by herself at a crooked picnic table, eating chicken and waving away flies. Mersey was sure her friend understood how important this was to her. Mersey would go to Pauline’s after the date the next night to tell her all about it.
Mersey Marsh decided on a black skirt and a black T-shirt illustrated with a tombstone reading RIP MERSEY MARSH. It had been a gift from her second-best friend, Lila Hammerglitz.
Mersey spent an hour shaping her brows into perfect arches and another hour on her face, a tour de force of painterly maquillage in lights and darks.
Josh had picked up Mersey on the corner a few houses down in an old olive-green pickup magnificently cratered with dents. He gave her a fake black rose.
“I couldn’t find any real ones,” he said with the merest hint of a lisp, which Mersey found thrilling.
“That’s okay,” she said. “I like fake flowers.”
At the theater, Mersey sat, paralyzed by uncertainty over movie-date protocol, throughout Buzzard People, a cinematic failure about a chicken-borne virus that transformed infected humans into flightless birds of prey who feed on their uninfected brethren. When the movie was over, she had trouble bending her knees and elbows to stand up.
They went to Dairy Queen after, where Mersey continued her social paralysis. Josh appeared to have had some experience dating—he talked animatedly to Mersey about school, summer, Dr. Kinfiggish, his truck, and his passion for geology. Mersey smiled and nodded but added nothing.
They drove around town in his truck, drinking Dr Peppers. Slowly, Mersey became more comfortable. It got later and later. She was finally able to talk without stuttering, and she was able to glance over at Josh and admire his curly hair without worrying he would catch her.
During a conversation about national parks, Mersey glanced at her phone and noticed it was past one in the morning. She was supposed to be at Pauline’s!
But Mersey did not want the date to end. Neither, apparently, did Josh, who continued to drive around, stopping for gas and more Dr Pepper, until four in the morning, when he finally stopped at the corner where he’d picked Mersey up. Mersey went home and slept until three in the afternoon. When she woke, she immediately called Josh.
“I really had fun, Josh…,” said Mersey.
“Look, I had fun and all, too, but, you know, I … but, well, I received a call today.”
“A call? What do you mean?”
“A phone call. From someone.”
Who? Mersey could not say it.
“From this person. In Mr. Fwope’s algebra class. She…”
She. Mersey put her hand to her throat.
“… wants to be my girlfriend.”
Mersey missed Pauline so much at that moment she could taste it, a bitter carbolic tang at the back of her tongue. All at once she felt horrible about neglecting her. She felt even worse for not considering how Pauline must be feeling about the date.
Who?
“Clarissa Speen,” he said with what sounded like veiled triumph.
“Oh.”
“She’s, like, bugging me to go out with her. So.”
Mersey felt faint. If she hadn’t already been sitting down …
“That’s cool,” said Mersey. “Clarissa’s cool.”
“Well, uh,” said Josh, “see you around?”
“Huh,” said Mersey. “I do not think so.”
Mersey hung up.
Mersey dialed Pauline. She was desperate to apologize to her friend for being so late, to explain. To cry on her shoulder, possibly. Yes.
But there was no answer.
Mersey checked her Gmail. She had four new messages.
The one from Pauline would change her life forever.
CHAPTER 17
Pauline hung helplessly in midair by the back belt loop of her jeans, which was hooked on a shiny steel talon of a great metal claw hanging from the arm of a crane in a vast room filled with mail, while three terrifying pig-turtle things with candy hats pointed at her. They appeared to be laughing, judging by the way they held their furry bellies and rocked on their heels, their pig-turtle mouths gaping wide.
Had Chance experienced this? Pauline didn’t know if her brother could handle this sort of thing. Pauline wasn’t sure if she could. Those creatures couldn’t possibly be real—some kind of twisted robotics genius must have devised them. But some part of Pauline—the part that was scared of closed closets, stick insects, drains—knew those creatures were real. And this giant metal claw was certainly no illusion.
A huge drawer opened in one of the walls, as if a giant had pulled it out of a monumental dresser. The crane began to swing around, eventually poising itself directly over the open drawer. Without warning, the claw let go of Pauline, and she dropped into the drawer, which was actually a chute of some kind: a long, steep steel slide that, after a terrifying ride, deposited her like a gumball on the carpeted floor of a large, tidy room dominated by an oversize table surrounded by four oversize chairs. In one corner was a huge coffeemaker, in another, a gigantic filing cabinet. And in the middle of a wall was a fifteen-foot-tall door, its softball-sized doorknob too high for Pauline to reach. Pauline wondered if she’d somehow shrunk by half, or if everything really was double scale. Or if she was dreaming. Was she in bed at home, Chance in the next room, snoring like a pennywhistle? Of course. Only in a dream could such insanity unfold.
On the other side of the door, in the distance, there were whoops and yells and gleeful snorts, coming closer and closer.
They sounded very real. Maybe it wasn’t a dream.
Humans are not welcome here, hospitalprofunda.com had said.
There was nowhere to hide. What would they do to her? Put her in a pipe back to the surface, put her in a pen, put her in a pan, put her in quarantine, put her to death?
Pauline tried to open the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet, but it was locked.
If only she weren’t human.
Pauline paused. Hmm.
She began to hunt through her pockets. Where were they? Had she lost them in the pipe, in the mail room, on the slide? The hoots and screams were getting closer. And now they were just on the other side of the door. A key rattled.…
Here they are! Right in her front pocket, way at the bottom. She popped one of Mersey’s fangs on one tooth and the second on another just as the room began to swarm with creatures that looked like large leather beach balls. They were each wielding a medieval-looking halberd, some of whose tips appeared to be covered in blood. Pauline screamed.
“Hey,” said one of the creatures, its voice high but waterlogged, like a baby gargling syrup. “She’s not a human. Look, she’s a vampiress.”
“False alarm!” shouted one of the creatures,
which Pauline later learned were called Balliopes and not considered very bright. “Everybody back to their stations!”
Most of the Balliopes left, disappointed their quarry wasn’t one they could lance to death with medieval cutlery, but two remained behind with Pauline.
“Sorry to scare you, miss,” said one of them, shutting the door behind him. “You won’t bite me, will you?”
The Balliopes began to chuckle, a horrible sound, like drowning wildebeests.
“Seriously, are you all right? How did you get caught in a mail pipe?”
“I … I thought it was a, you know, a different pipe.”
“Ah. Happens sometimes. Why are you here?”
“I have … uh, chicken pox.”
Both the Balliopes stepped back a few paces.
“Whoa, I didn’t even know vampiresses could get chicken pox.”
“We can,” said Pauline, praying the fangs wouldn’t pop off while she was talking. “Can you tell me where to go?”
“Sure. Want a cup of coffee first?”
“Uh, no, it makes my fangs brown.”
Both creatures nodded thoughtfully.
“Just follow us.”
The Balliopes opened the giant door and led Pauline down a long blue hallway lined with doors and windows of different shapes and sizes until they came to a bank of elevators. More than a dozen sets of double doors, above each a sign indicating which floor it went to. Apparently they were on the 1,515th floor. One of the creatures pressed the UP button on an elevator that went up to the 1,456th.
“How many floors are there?” said Pauline, feeling somehow at ease with these creatures.
“Oh, around 6,250, though there are rumors of catacombs beneath the basement. All told, Saint Philomene’s Infirmary for Magical Creatures is nearly ten miles deep. Plus, every floor is half a mile wide, half a mile long. Way down at the bottom are empty floors, broken elevators, junk, garbage, leaks, bad smells, corpses, armored mantle rats. Nobody goes down there. Except prisoners. That’s where you would’ve gone if you’d been a human.”
The Balliopes laughed.
One of the elevators had only a DOWN button. The sign above it read BASEMENT. A hand-lettered sign taped to the doors said BUSTED DON’T USE. If Chance had been captured, that’s where he would be: the basement. It was worth a shot. Pauline surreptitiously leaned on the button to the broken basement-bound elevator while they were waiting for the elevator to the 1,456th floor. It seemed to take forever. Finally, their elevator door opened. At the same time, the door to the basement elevator opened. Pauline pretended to follow the two Balliopes onto their elevator, but just as the door was closing, she darted out and ran to the open basement elevator, realizing too late that the elevator car itself was not there. It was just an open shaft.
Pauline fell in.
She screamed for a full thirty seconds, tumbling in space, falling, falling, watching the numbered floors pass by her more and more quickly—1,810, 1,820, 1,830. Faster now, the air rushing by her at a 120 miles per hour—2,320, 2,330, 2,340. Calculating she had about two and a half minutes to live—3,190, 3,200, 3,210—oh, how she missed her mother and dad and brother.… Poor Chance, he would die alone at the bottom of Saint Philomene’s Infirmary for Magical Creatures, just as it appeared she would, too—3,990, 4,000, 4,010—it was getting hard to breathe now, and her blood felt like it was boiling in her veins. Then, she drifted too close to a wall, hit it, the friction causing her to spin head over heels, now no longer able to read the floors as she fell, until she was able to right herself again—6,050, 6,060, 6,070—oh no, it was nearly over, less than half a mile to go. Pauline squinted into the depths, detached now from her fate, wondering with curiosity exactly what she would hit—6,090, 6,100, 6,110—wait, what was that below, at the bottom? It was brown, jagged in a way, coming closer—6,190, 6,200, 6,210 … what?
Boxes?
Pauline was suddenly in a world of cardboard. When she finally came to rest, she had compressed forty feet of empty boxes into ten. She slowly made her way up through all the crushed boxes that had closed around her as she fell through them, found the doors to the 6,249th floor, pried them open with her hands, and climbed onto a darkened, abandoned hallway. Right next to the elevator was a door marked STAIRS. She opened it, climbed down one flight, then opened another door, put an empty tin can between it and the jamb so it wouldn’t lock behind her, and found herself in the basement, directly across from Cell #1, which contained, of all things, a Balliope. It appeared to be dead. Cell #2 was empty, as were numbers 3 and 4. But Cell #5 housed a creature that an instant’s inspection revealed to be a true vampire, who came at her with such speed and bloodthirstiness that Pauline thought it would break the thick bars containing it.
“You are a fraud,” the vampire said, its voice shrill and cold, its malarial eyes seeming to bore right through her. “Come closer, let me pluck out those fictions!”
Pauline hurried away, the vampire screaming as she jogged along the dark, endless hallway, illuminated by small pitch torches in sconces on the passageway walls. Each torch provided the only light to the cells, which were either empty or domiciled by bizarre creatures, all of whom were in one of two states: active (leaping, crashing, screeching, thrusting, writhing) or inactive (deceased or sleeping or catatonic or simply unwilling to move). The odor was such that Pauline had never experienced. Every imaginable fetor and musk, the top note of which was the smell of sweaty feet, assaulted her olfactory nerves and stung her eyes.
“Chance!” she shouted, jogging by the cells, one by one. “Chance, are you here?”
She stopped. She looked around.
This is ridiculous. This is not happening. The evidence of her senses now contradicted everything she thought she knew to be the steep truths of the world. So she was simply off. Maybe she’d eaten some bad Count Chocula. Or maybe she’d gone psychotic with worry about her brother. She was sure she’d come to her senses and all this would be a figment, a memory.
To prove this to herself, Pauline, the devout skeptic, wound up and punched the “stone wall.” Hard.
“Ow!”
Maybe the “stone wall” was in fact a stone wall, without the quotes. Hm. Maybe it would be in her best interests to accept, for now, this manifest world.
She walked down the corridor. She stopped in front of a cell divided into twenty-four tiny cages, none larger than a cat carrier, each containing a very small being; some were vicious, snarly monsters worrying the bars of their cages with dull, broken teeth; others were beatific, comely things blinking their gorgeous eyelashes at her; still others Pauline recognized to be, without a doubt in the world, gnomes.
“Help us!” they said, thrusting their tiny hands through the bars, reaching for Pauline.
She looked up. Cells #120, 121, 122. How many cells were there? A quarter of a square mile’s worth? She hurried on through the murk and stink, closing her ears to screams; dodging outstretched arms and tentacles and other articulated protuberances; ducking torrents of spit issued by members of a fishlike species who must have been innately bad or recidivistic, given the disproportionate number populating the cells.
“Chance!”
Some creature in a cell way down the passageway nasally mimicked her voice. “Cha-a-a-nce!”
Finally, at Cell #299, she stopped. She took out her envelope again, shining her little flashlight on it. Resident 251987. Yes, Cell #299.
“Chance?”
No movement.
In a far corner, on a crude mattress at the base of a rough stone wall blackened by time and filth, lay a shortish elf-like figure that was on his back, eyes open, mouth wide, clawed hands frozen, grasping at air, a long thick chain next to him.
“Sir?”
The creature did not move. Pauline pitched a small stone at it, which pinged off its forehead. No response. She was about to throw another when she noticed its mouth move.
The mouth, inexplicably, opened wider. A huge white tongue began to protrude
.
“Sir!”
Except it wasn’t a tongue. It was a worm.
Pauline screamed and fell back against the cell behind her. She finally settled herself, stood up, and shined her flashlight on the worm. She shuddered and was about to move on when she noticed something on the rear wall. She moved up to the bars and peered in, her flashlight focused on a drawing.
A bee.
Chance was alive!
Chance used to draw bees all the time. On account of his middle name: Bee.
They must have caught him and put him in here. How did he get out? Was he taken out, maybe by a judiciary that planned to interrogate him? Or did he escape? And if the latter, where could he possibly have gone?
Think, Pauline, think! Where would I go if I were Chance? Maybe he had sought out the dead elf-like thing in the cell in order to deliver the letter that had been in the envelope now in her possession. Maybe the being had told him where to go. But where could that be? Maybe Chance, succeeding in his mission, had endeavored to find his way home?
Pauline noticed one of the cell’s badly corroded bars was broken, allowing enough space for a boy of Chance’s dimensions to squeeze through. That he had broken it did not surprise her; Chance could be creatively ingenious. Perhaps he was already home. If only she could make a call or send an e-mail or something, but her phone didn’t work down here at all.
How to proceed? Pauline sat down in the filthy passageway and put her head in her hands. A headache was starting, possibly from the air pressure at such a great depth, not to mention the voices in her head.
What does she think she’s doing there? said a voice in her skull, as if on cue.
Pauline shook her head to rid herself of the voices, but it did no good. They kept on, assaulting her like a straight-line wind.
Oh, where is she?
The voice actually sounded familiar. Was Pauline going crazy? She had read about the harrowing trials of insanity, the profound ways in which people afflicted with off-balance brain chemistry could suffer. It would explain everything she’d seen. Or thought she had seen. Was everything a hallucination?
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