by Ronald Malfi
“I know.”
“I sensed the child. It is so wondrous, so beautiful inside her, Carlito, growing there.”
Carlito. Hearing her speak the name sent tremors racing through his body. He suddenly wanted to be with his wife, to hold her, to sleep beside her.
“You’re afraid,” Nellie said.
“No.”
“You are. I can feel it.” She shifted beneath the blankets. “She needs our help.”
“The girl Kelly?”
“It’s coming,” she said. “Soon.”
“What is it?”
“I don’t know. I cannot tell.”
“But she’s in danger, this girl?”
“Yes.”
Carlos leaned closer to the bed. He could smell a strong medicinal stink fanning from the woman in hot waves. “How are you able to know this?”
“The human mind is a hidden book, Carlito. For most people, it is a book they open only for themselves. Only they know their secrets, their desires, and their sins. Few others are capable of peeking into these books. They’re not hidden to some. Sometimes, we can see inside. I found Kelly’s mind as she searched through her own hidden book, turning the pages of a past she’d forgotten. She’s as strong as me. Stronger, I think. She just doesn’t know she is.”
“What do you mean, strong as you?”
“We’ve all felt a little bit of Kelly recently,” Nellie said. “Josh, your wife, even you. I’ve felt her, too. She’s reaching out to someone and she doesn’t even know it. She doesn’t fully understand the powers of her own mind.”
It occurred to him then what Nellie was saying. “You mean this Kelly girl has the same…she’s…like you?”
“Stronger,” Nellie breathed.
“How is that possible?”
“We’re not as unique as you might think.”
“But the chances of the two of you—”
“There is no coincidence here,” Nellie said. She was struggling to lift her head from her pillow, to see him better. “I’ve felt Kelly’s presence for a long time now. Years, in fact. It just took me so long to find the source of the power, to find Kelly. It wore me down, caused terrible headaches and most likely even my stroke, and sometimes I found I couldn’t…I found…” She struggled for the words. “Sometimes I was so weak I couldn’t get out of bed,” she finally said. “She may believe our meeting was chance, may believe that she even came to me on her own accord, but that is not the truth. The truth is that I finally found her and willed her to come to me. I was testing her powers, seeing how strong she was. My father had this gift too, and I believe it might be hereditary. But his gift was not strong enough, not like mine. He didn’t know he was going to die in the accident that killed him. I did. And when I became aware of Kelly’s presence in the city, I was so amazed at the sheer strength of her power that I could feel it across the city, tugging at my brain. So I reached for her. And after time, I made the connection, without her even knowing it. And after some prodding, I managed to make her come to me.”
Carlos backed away from the bed. He was visibly shaken, his hands trembling so much he shoved them into the pockets of his pants. Nothing made sense.
“Don’t be afraid,” she repeated.
He shook his head.
“Whatever danger Kelly is in, it has to do with her own mind, her own hidden book. I feel her searching for something—some memory—but it continues to elude her…and me. I feel that once she finds it, it will open all the floodgates. I’ve been keeping a strong lock on her. When she finally remembers, then I will understand too.”
“How can you help her?” His throat was dry and abrasive. “What could you possibly do?”
“When the time comes, I can reach for her, pull her, make a grab for her. The mind is a powerful thing, Carlito. More powerful than most of us know. Maybe, if we’re careful, there will be a way for us to pull her from this danger.”
“But we don’t even know what the danger is.”
“Soon,” she said. Something in her voice sounded off, as if half her thoughts were occupied by something else. “When she remembers, I will know. I’m there inside her mind, but her mind is thick with smoke, her memories hard to see. The moment she remembers and the smoke clears, I will be able to see. Then it will be time.”
Carlos backed up against the wall. Resting his head against the wall, he peered through the crack between the drawn curtain and the window at the glitter of city lights below. It occurred to him then that he had been a very different person just one short month ago.
Nellie’s voice floated across the room to him: “You are thinking of your son.”
“I am.”
“I feel there may be some connection between Kelly and your son, that the two events are somehow linked. It is too hazy to tell for certain; it is just a feeling I have…”
“I don’t believe that,” he said, not knowing exactly what he believed. “You don’t need to say it to get me to help you.”
“That’s not why I say it.”
“I still don’t believe it.”
“But you will help us?”
Carlos closed his eyes. He could feel the room throbbing all around him. It was as if he were standing in the heart of some great beast—and perhaps he was, in a way. Standing in the center of this vital, life-breathing organ. Or perhaps he was the organ himself.
We’re all a part of the same monster, he thought.
“I’ll help,” he said.
Part Three
The (Hidden) Book of Thaw
Chapter Twenty-Two
In many ways, the Coopersville Female Institution was very much like the Kellow Compound itself. Constructed in the wake of the Second World War, when it was simply referred to as Coopersville, the immense brick-and-mortar facility’s primary objective had been to accommodate the large influx of injured war veterans from New York State. Later, in the midsixties, and after a lengthy and strenuous renovation, the facility reopened as a hospital for young women suffering from psychological aberrations. The building rested atop a massive wreath of aggregate rock, shouldered on three of its four sides by the sprawling wishbone-shaped Champlain Forest. A squat, three-story building with limited windows (all of which were laid with pebbled, wire-meshed panes), the institute hunkered close to the earth like a crouching beast above the skyline of the feeble and hapless city below. The sheer authority of the building was reminiscent of Kelly’s childhood home: upon her initial arrival all those years ago, the building’s wealth, frigidity, and isolation created in Kelly a warped sense of belonging.
The bizarre death of the two young girls on the third floor was not the only black cloud hanging over the history of the institution. A number of tragedies occurred throughout the passage of years, most notably the electrical fire in 1982 that caused sufficient damage to most of the third floor. At that time, the third floor had served as an invalid ward, catering to the bedridden and physically inept. And due to the failed conditions of these patients, several were unable to be removed from the building in time. The number of deaths was disastrously high. And despite major reconstruction to the floor soon after the fire, the third floor of the Coopersville Female Institution remained closed. These stories were known by many to be legends and ghost stories, monsters in the proverbial closet; they were known to few others as the truth.
Now, all these years later, Kelly maneuvered her father’s Cadillac up the paved incline that led to the institution’s front entrance. She braked the car as it cut through a clearing in the trees, enabling her to view the building in all its monstrous grandeur. She stared at it for a long time, suddenly deaf to the car radio humming softly from the dash, and was somewhat surprised at her own lack of emotion. She’d spent three years of her life inside the walls of the institution, caged and numbered, while her mind worked on suppressing the memory of the very evil that had forced her into such a place. Yet looking at it now, she felt only a sinking dullness at the core of her being, too distant and meaning
less to rile her.
She continued up the driveway and pulled around to the side parking lot where she docked the Cadillac in a visitor’s spot.
Inside, she found herself frozen in the doorway of the front hall. All the emotions that had thus far eluded her now slammed home all at once. Her sense of function evaporated into nothingness. Her legs went weak and her bladder suddenly blossomed into a well of bursting agony. Before her eyes, the hallways appeared to cant to one side, to shift positions in an attempt to throw her off balance. After all this time, nothing had changed. The cinderblock walls were still painted in the same industrial flavors; the carpet beneath her feet remained the color of iodine, the texture of Velcro; the light fixtures in the ceiling still buzzed and hummed and spat with a persistence as deliberate as human personality.
That’s it, she thought. That’s why this place is so similar to my home. It’s because both places feel alive.
Home. It wasn’t her home.
She moved down the hallway toward the nurses’ workstation. The air smelled strongly of antiseptic. Somewhere within the maze of the first floor, a young girl was shouting something about Gavin, Gavin, where did you go? Kelly felt herself begin to tremble, the pressure at her groin growing more intense. What little she remembered about the place was suddenly reinforced; and all that she’d forgotten had started filtering in through the cracks in her mind.
Just before approaching the front desk, she turned and dashed into the bathroom at the end of the hall. There, she assaulted a stall, dropped her jeans, sat, and urinated for what felt like an hour.
God, I can’t do this. What the hell am I even doing here?
Back in the hallway, she stepped toward the nurses’ workstation like a timid child.
Because last time I was here, she rationalized, I was a child.
“Can I help you?” one of the nurses behind the desk asked without looking up from her paperwork.
“I’m here to see someone.”
“Name?”
“Kelly Kellow. I’m here to see Jennifer Sote, a patient—”
“Relationship?”
“Relative.”
The nurse looked up at her only briefly, her eyes running a scan of Kelly’s face. “Sisters?”
“She’s my cousin,” Kelly lied.
“Identification, please.”
Kelly produced her driver’s license. The nurse scrutinized it. She was a compact little woman with squinty eyes and a lipless mouth.
“I haven’t changed back to my maiden name yet,” Kelly said to assuage the woman’s suspicion at her last name.
“Let me see inside your purse, please,” the nurse said.
Kelly spread open her purse and the nurse peered inside.
“Carrying any sharp objects, such as pocket knives, metal nail file, toenail clippers with a file, screwdrivers, or any eating utensils?”
“No.”
“Jennifer Sote,” the nurse grumbled, swiveling in her chair to face a large computer screen. Her bony fingers attacked the keyboard, hammered away at the keys.
Is it possible that she’s no longer here? Kelly wondered. It’s been roughly six years. Isn’t it possible Mouse has moved on? Doubtful she was released—she was too far gone for that, I think—but she could have moved to some other facility. Then on the heels of that: Or she could be dead.
“Jennifer Sote,” the nurse repeated, tapping a fingernail against the computer monitor. “Second floor, room 218. Would you like someone to show you up?”
“I’ll find it, thanks.”
She moved swiftly down the corridor, deliberately refusing eye contact with any of the other nurses, just as she had done as a teenager. When she turned the corner, the hallway opened up into a spacious recreation room, aligned with a multitude of television sets and activity tables. Some of the ward’s occupants had gathered here—young girls in varying stages of repression, depression or outright psychosis. It occurred to Kelly that some things never change. These girls were no different than the ones who’d inhabited the institution six years ago. Perhaps twenty years ago, for all Kelly knew. They were children: some the victims of domestic abuse, rape, incest, the whole gamut. Others were here suffering from uncontrollable bouts of depression, hopeless in the face of any type of medical treatment. And then there were others, though perhaps only a slim few, who displayed running strains of violent tendencies. No—some things never change.
A young girl passed her in the hallway, her head bent toward the floor, though she followed Kelly from the corners of her eyes. As she passed, the girl whispered, “Electric tongue,” and continued down the corridor.
The second floor housed the older residents. Though the facility did not usually admit adults, the second floor was comprised typically of those residents who had been unfortunate enough to grow old inside the walls of the institution. Had Kelly’s condition been more severe—as severe as Mouse’s, for instance—she too might never have left, doomed to haunt the second floor of the Coopersville Female Institution for the remainder of her life.
The hallways were white—white walls, white linoleum floor, white clapboard ceiling tiles. Her footsteps echoed across the floor as she advanced down the hallway. One of the doors to her left opened just a crack. A pair of bright blue eyes examined her from the other side. Two more residents paced back and forth up ahead, where the hallway emptied into a lounge and dining area. A group of women in colored sweatpants sat watching television; only one of them turned her head to watch Kelly pass.
The door to room 218 was closed.
This is insane. What could I possibly say to this woman? Why am I even here? That’s it—I’ve finally gone out of my mind.
Yet she could feel Becky’s essence piloting her actions, refusing to relent. This was something that had to be done, something that was essential to the stimulation of her memories. This place—these blank walls and blank stares—held secrets. That was fact; she knew this as plain and as simply as she knew her own name. And just as she’d been during her jaunt into the basement back at the house, she was overcome by the notion that there was something here. What Mouse had to do with any of it, she didn’t understand. But that feeling was there and she was powerless to ignore it.
I’ve come this far, she thought and knocked on the door.
Nothing.
Looking back over her shoulder she noticed a few more women had turned to watch her. Most of them stared at her with blank expressions, their distant eyes traitors to the severity of their psychological instabilities.
Of course she won’t answer your knock, a voice spoke up in her head, you didn’t do it correctly.
Code. The secret knock. Two knocks, shake the knob, two more knocks. Wasn’t that it? It’d been six years, but wasn’t that it?
To her consternation, a small grin tugged at the corners of her mouth. Kelly administered the secret knock, then waited. And at first it seemed that nothing was going to happen. Was Mouse even in the room? But then she heard the advancing shuffle of feet across the floor on the other side of the door. Kelly’s trembling became more pronounced. In her mind, she held onto her mental picture of Mouse, or Jennifer Sote, and wondered what she looked like now. Moreover, she wondered what the girl—the woman—acted like now, what she thought like. Back then, Mouse had been slipping. Her mind had been slowly deteriorating, leaving her for some remote corner of an infinite void. After these six years, had Mouse’s mind finally retreated for good, given up the ship? Even as a teenager, her brain’s gradual degeneration was most prominent not in her actions but in her eyes, practically foreshadowing her doomed future. Her fingers were always scabbed because she chewed at them. Her skin, particularly her legs and neck, always boasted a variety of colorful bangs and bruises.
“I can’t do this,” she breathed.
Yes-yes-yes, her mind insisted.
The shuffling feet stopped but no one came to the door. Secret knock? What was she thinking? After all this time, did she honestly expect Mouse to
remember something as ridiculous as a secret knock?
She probably won’t even remember who I am, she thought.
More women from the lounge were watching her now. One of them appeared to be making her way in Kelly’s direction, although she moved with the hesitation associated most often with curious forest animals. Very few women seemed interested in the television now. Anxious, Kelly searched the hallway for a nurse. Found none.
She knocked again. “Hello?”
There was definitely someone inside; she was certain she’d heard movement.
“This is where they make the ice cream,” a woman said from behind her, shambling along the hallway like someone lost in a dream.
“Yes, okay. Excuse me.”
Kelly turned back to the closed door. She took a deep breath, turned the knob, and pushed open the door.
It was a small, single-occupancy room with a solitary bed tucked into one corner and a simple white throw rug in the center of the floor. A few arbitrary drawings were taped to the walls, each of them at waist-height. A single window stood opposite the bed, through which the muted rays of daylight filtered. No details of the outside world could be made beyond the wire-meshed, frosted pane.
An undernourished woman in a white cloth gown stood in the middle of the room, half-poised to look out the window, but was instead staring at the wall. Her hair was as black as fresh tar, stringy like cobwebs, and framed her pale, ghostlike face with matted tendrils. She looked emaciated, the knots of her elbows and knees bulging from inside her skin with painful exaggeration. Her feet were bare, the ankles ringed with bruises.
Herself moving dreamlike now, Kelly entered the room, shutting the door behind her. She expected the room’s occupant—Mouse?—to turn around at the sound of the door closing, to at least acknowledge her arrival, but the woman did not move.
“Jennifer Sote?” Kelly stepped around the small room trying to get a better view of the woman’s face.
As if reading her mind, the woman lifted her head and stared at Kelly. It was Mouse; there was no doubt about it now. Mouse. At least, what was left of her: Mouse’s face was jaundiced and sallow, her eyes two bruised pockets of flesh. Her lips were dried and peeling, a pale blue. A fading discoloration on the left side of her face just above the jaw-line suggested some sort of physical abuse.
