The girl in back blows out her candle and shrinks into the dark. The girl in boots holds her ground, pointing the light at the door. She looks around for a club or something sharp. She can throw the candle at them if she has to, charge them.
The door flies open.
She steps back, crouches. Ready to defend herself.
Two girls look inside. They’re wearing designer clothes that were dragged through the mud and tattered from long days. The white girl’s hair is matted and knotty.
“Cyn?”
The girl in boots doesn’t know what that means. Sin?
The smaller one steps inside, her skin black. She smiles and points at the back of the bunkhouse.
“Jen,” she says.
Jen cowers, slightly. The strangers approach her slowly, gently. They wrap their arms around her. She doesn’t try to stop them.
The smaller one begins weeping. “We’re so sorry, Jen,” she says. “We couldn’t stop him…”
The girl lets them hug her, lets them weep and apologize. Not that she can do anything about it; they’ve got her locked between them and aren’t letting go.
“What the hell is going on?” the girl in boots says.
They wipe their eyes, laughing and crying, putting their arms around Jen and guiding her around the stove.
“We’d hug you,” one of the girls says, “but you dangerous when you don’t know what’s going on.”
“Then tell me.” She holds the candle up.
They shield their eyes.
“I’m Kat and this is Mad. We came to get you out.”
“Where am I?”
“Later.” Kat reaches out, squeezes her arm. “I’m so glad to see you, Cyn. We were afraid…”
She chokes on rising emotion.
Mad comes over and, despite her reservations, puts a hug on Cyn. They both do. Cyn stands there stiffly and lets them.
“You saved our lives,” Mad says, squeezing tightly. “All of us.”
Cyn doesn’t know what any of this means. Neither does Jen. They watch the strangers go through another round of laughing and weeping. Mad stands back, wipes her eyes.
Kat reaches under one of the empty beds, blows her nose in a t-shirt, and throws it back under.
“Why can’t I remember my name?” Cyn asks.
“You will, pretty soon,” Kat says. “We need to get going. It’s a little chilly outside. There are clothes under your beds—you should get dressed. We’ve got to walk a bit to reach the gate.”
“What gate? What’s going on?”
“Just trust us.”
Cyn isn’t trusting. She sure as hell isn’t moving.
Kat keeps an eye on her as she pulls a box out from beneath the bed and gets out a few sweatshirts and some jeans. Mad does the same for Jen, and Jen goes along with it.
“Look, you got no reason to trust me, I know. But you’re going to have to make that leap.”
“I don’t know you.”
“You don’t know yourself.”
Kat holds the clothes in one hand, reeking of body odor. Cyn isn’t reaching for those rags. But Kat’s right: she doesn’t know anything. These girls seem to know something.
“We know you, Cyn,” Mad says. “I can prove it. Check those pants, the ones from under your bed. You read the tag on the inside of the waist, see what it says.”
Kat throws them at her feet. Cyn bends down and picks them up without looking away from her. She flips the waistband, finds a white tag sewn to the inside.
Cyn.
“I know that don’t prove anything.” Kat holds up her hands. “But we’re telling you the truth. You don’t have to be near us, you just need to follow. And if you don’t like what you see, you just go on your own way.”
Mad starts to protest. Kat stops her.
“We got a deal?”
Cyn looks at the pants.
“You ain’t got nowhere else to be, nothing else to do. And no one else to trust. You just got to fall with us, Cyn.”
Jen is dressed and ready.
Cyn stares at the tag. She puts the candle down, slides the jeans on one damp, moldy leg at a time. Kat throws the sweatshirts at her feet and she puts those on, too.
Fall with us.
Kat goes to the door, puts her hand on the knob. She takes a breath and opens it.
Cyn steps back. Alarms go off in her head.
An old man lies on the ground, his hands and feet tied with strips of clothing. He groans through a dirty rag tied around his mouth. His angry words are distorted, his eyebrows pinched. His scalp is red and ridged.
“We brought him with us,” Kat says. “We didn’t hurt him, Cyn. He was just taking up space he didn’t need to be taking up.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Don’t matter. We’ll leave him here.”
The old man growls, a string of words muffled by the gag.
“Why?” Cyn asks.
Kat looks at Jen. “He’s a real bad man, Cyn. This is where he belongs.”
Kat checks the bindings, makes sure they’ll hold long enough for them to reach the gate. Mad guides Jen outside, staying between her and the old man. Cyn comes out next, the old man cursing nonsense at each of them. But cursing for sure.
The morning chill slips down her neck. Cyn crosses her arms, shivers while staring at the helpless old man. He bites the cloth like a muzzled dog.
“Is that his house?” Jen asks.
There’s a large brick house to the east where the sky is glowing, the sun still below the trees. A lamp lights up one of the front windows.
“Yeah,” Kat says. “He lives there with his daughter. They helped build this place. We’re going to let them have it all to themselves.”
Kat, Mad, and Jen start walking towards a meadow. The old man begins another round of guttural, angry protests. A window lights up on the second floor of the brick house. The curtains part, and the outline of a girl appears. Her hand on the glass. Maybe she’ll come out for him when the girls are gone, untie him. He looks hungry.
The old man rolls into Cyn’s leg. His eyes plead. The growls turn to whines.
“Come on!” Kat shouts.
Cyn walks around him. The grunts and cries fade behind her. Grass brushes her waist, the flowers tickling her outstretched hands. Mountains are on the horizon to her right. The brick house recedes in the distance, only the lit windows visible.
“Where you taking us?” Cyn asks.
“A mile due south.” Kat says. “We’re going to fall out of here, Cyn. I just need you to remember one thing.”
Kat leans in, whispers in her ear.
Pain radiates between her eyes. A face hovers over her. Short brown hair drapes like curtains, framing an angular face and green eyes.
“Password?” Linda says.
Cyn’s arms are pinned at her sides. Jackie stands at the IV, a syringe inserted in the tube, her thumb on the plunger.
“Password?” she asks again. “What is it? You know it—tell me.”
Cyn shakes her head. She hasn’t a clue what she’s talking about. There’s no password. She knows that, but maybe something has changed. She thinks, tries to remember where she was a second ago. She just woke up in the bed. But before that, she was…she was…
“Last time,” Linda says. “Password?”
She closes her eyes, holds her breath. There was a tree and a rock. The sun was rising when she grabbed onto it.
When she fell.
When Kat told her to say—
“Sandy sent me.” She opens her eyes.
“What’s your name?”
“Cyn.”
“Full name?”
She hesitates. “Cynthia.”
Linda nods at Jackie. She pulls the syringe out of the tube.
Someone reaches over Cyn’s head, her finger and thumb on the wire stuck between her eyes. A needle slides out of her head, a cold sliver that’s been in far too long.
A drop of clear liquid streams across her for
ehead. The pressure between her eyes eases. Linda embraces her tightly.
“Welcome back, Cynthia.”
And there’s applause.
The bunkhouse is full of people. The youngest of them fall on her. Cyn is trapped by three girls and a grown woman.
Home.
63
The grass is knee-high. Wildflowers sway here and there, but few are left as the mornings have gotten colder. Mad, Kat, and Jen wander up the slope, Jen with a fistful of white flowers from the meadow.
Jennifer. And Madeline and Kathryn.
“Those are their names,” Linda reminded Cyn. The three-lettered versions are the names inside the dream.
We’re not in the dream anymore.
It’s been weeks since she woke up. Weeks since Kat and Mad were brave enough to come back for her and Jen. It took a lot of work, though. Linda and Thomas wouldn’t get duped again. There was a close watch on those needles. They weren’t planning on the girls going back inside. Cyn had done it, and look what happened to her.
“She did it for us!” Kat had argued. “You ain’t stopping us.”
No good, though. They were just kids—they didn’t know the risks. And Thomas and the important people did, and they weren’t going to take them.
But then Kat and Mad got clever. They lied to Linda and Thomas, said that Patricia was about dead and that Cyn and Jen would be lost to the Nowhere forever. They had no idea the word “Nowhere” would sell it. Linda bought it, came to their rescue. She persuaded Thomas to let the girls go back inside the needle.
“We running out time,” Mr. Thomas,” Kat had added. “We’ll lose Cyn forever.”
Besides, Cyn wasn’t getting out until someone escorted Mr. Williams back inside the dream. Otherwise, she had no body.
Yeah, Cyn’s body.
His body is dead.
He exited the dream into the one body he knew would be vacant. Cyn was still in the dream when he made his escape, opened his eyes as a sixteen-year-old female, which beat the hell out of spending eternity in the Nowhere. He could figure out bras and tampons. No one would know the difference.
But Thomas and the important people had done their research—they knew how things worked on the island. They knew there was a password. When an old man transferred into a young man’s body, they were asked for it in order to confirm the identity, to make sure the right person was in the body.
Linda asked for a password the first time and Cyn didn’t know one. The girls were asked, too. They had no idea.
But Mr. Williams had said, with a smile, “Foreverland.”
After that, he was easy pickings.
They sent him back inside the dream to make room for Cyn to return. It was her body, after all.
She shivers at the thought of that old bastard sliding into her body. It was a good thing she couldn’t remember him when Kat and Mad came back for her and Jen. She would’ve done something to him.
Something very bad.
Strangely, she feels sorry for him. A small part of her, deep inside, will miss him. She told Linda that. She decided it was time to start talking about things, to start digging through the memories and working them out. To start remembering.
When she said a part of her was fond of Mr. Williams, Linda called it Stockholm Syndrome. Cyn doesn’t like the way it feels—wanting to kill him and save him at the same time.
“Little by little,” Linda had reminded her. “We heal little by little.”
The girls climb the green slope toward a split boulder with a picturesque bristlecone pine nudging the fracture wider. The ancient-looking branches are loaded with seed-bearing cones and short needles.
Unlike the dream, it’s full of life.
Why did Patricia choose this as the gate? Was it because it was so far from the cabins? Cyn doesn’t think that’s it. She couldn’t keep them from leaving the dream, but used their fears to trap them. Ultimately, the girls could leave at any time. They chose to stay in the dream by refusing to face their fears.
In the dream, the tree was dead.
But it was so difficult to see through the illusion when they were immersed in it. Cyn hadn’t slept more than an hour at a time since escaping, afraid she’d awake in the bunkhouse, marks on the wall. And how does she know this isn’t a dream? What if dreams are endless layers, each another dimension of reality? Which one is real?
When they’re all peeled away, what will be in the middle?
She looks at her hands, turns them over. Linda had said that will help to ground herself, remind her she’s in the flesh. In the dream, you doubt. Here, you know.
But Linda wasn’t there. She wasn’t seduced by the sights and sounds. The suffering.
Cyn touches the sensitive hole in her forehead. The stent is still there. Maybe they can remove it one day, but she doubts it. It will be there forever, Patricia’s parting gift, something to remember her by. Maybe that’s not a bad thing. In the dream, there was no hole. She can always look at that instead of her hands.
The girls reach the top of the hill. Jen lays the bundle of flowers on the stone. The flowers from their earlier trips are still there, dry and crumbling, the seeds blowing on the ground where they will bloom again. They’d done this several times over the last couple of weeks to honor all the girls that are lost in the Nowhere.
Sandy is out there.
Miranda forgot what she’d done. She woke up with no memories in a young body with blonde hair. Why would she believe that it wasn’t her body? She brought Sandy out to the Fountain of Youth and destroyed her identity so she could take the body. Whatever they are—a soul, an identity, an essence—can be moved in and out of bodies.
Sandy was pushed out and Miranda moved in.
Maybe the Fountain of Youth program intentionally made her forget what she’d done. Maybe it was easier that way, to forget what she’d done to Sandy. To forget she’s a murderer.
Miranda started fresh. Her essence, her soul, got a new body to make more memories. We are not our memories, that’s not who we are. Cyn even suspects Miranda had some of Sandy’s memories, convinced herself she was innocent. She was using the stolen memories to ease the guilt. How would she know? How would any of us know who we really are if we get someone else’s memories?
Doesn’t matter. Whatever Miranda is, it’s in Sandy’s body.
So she’s a murderer. And a thief.
All the girls, all their souls, are lost in the Nowhere and Thomas promised to find them, get them out. But how will they get out? They don’t have bodies anymore.
The distant thumping gets louder.
The girls look up. A helicopter banks to the east. Jen waves. They can’t see her, but that’s not why she’s doing it. The helicopter is carrying Patricia to a lab far away. A universe is inside her, a world that contains Sid, Miranda, and Mr. Williams.
Mr. Graham.
Somewhere in the real world his wife is hoping to find him. She’ll be expecting to reunite with her husband, expecting him to be inside a young man’s body, one that he sponsored.
She’ll be disappointed. But at least she’s not trapped in the Nowhere.
A utility vehicle putters out of the trees. Linda steers it around a dip in the ground. Roc sits in the passenger’s seat.
Cyn avoids looking at her. They don’t like each other any more in the skin than they did in the dream. Roc would’ve killed them, and Cyn can’t forgive her for that. A part of her wants to send her back to the dream with the old man and Miranda, because she’s a piece of garbage.
But that’s how the old women saw all of them: girls that had wasted their lives. The old women were just taking a body had already been abandoned by the mind. A body is a terrible thing to waste.
“Time to go,” Linda says.
The girls come down the slope, their laughter ahead of them. Linda doesn’t mean it’s time to leave the hill. It’s time to leave the camp. Forever.
Kat, Mad, and Jen have family. They have brothers or sisters, uncles, cou
sins…someone in the world who wants them. Roc, it turns out, is eighteen. She doesn’t need family. She can go right back to her crappy life. They’ll keep an eye on her for some time. Probably forever. Some government official had informed them that they would be compensated for their pain and suffering with funds confiscated from the Fountain of Youth operation.
We’re talking millions.
Cyn’s memories about her stepfather were legitimate. Evidently, she was removed from the home by Family Services and placed with a foster family. She didn’t stay long, though; she was reported missing a month after she arrived. She doesn’t remember much of that, and the memories are coming back slowly. She’s not going back to Ohio, though. She’ll go somewhere else that has the funds to support her.
For now, she’s going back with Linda. Cyn hopes it’s more than just temporary.
The girls climb into the back of the vehicle.
“Can we make a detour?” Cyn asks.
“Depends.”
“It’s not far.” She points down the slope at a line of trees. “I just need to see something.”
Linda checks her watch. “I think we can manage. Hop in.”
The vehicle is weighted in the back, but they’re going over smooth terrain, straight downhill. She taps Linda on the shoulder and points at the gap in the trees.
Cyn climbs out.
The short hairs on the back of her neck tingle. She’s afraid to move, afraid that it will mean that her worst fears are true. But she finds the courage to take a step toward the opening. She holds her hand out, reaching for a feeling she’ll recognize in the lump still in her neck.
Fear stiffens her arm.
She steps onto the road, the tracks still on the ground. The same road she encountered in the dream, where the world ends. She walks several feet down it and turns around.
Drops her arm.
The girls are watching her from the vehicle.
Cyn lets out a deep breath. Smiles. Nothing tingles, nothing stops her. And the gray is still in the dream. And this is not the dream.
She’s ready to start a new life in the real world. She’s convinced it really is out there. And she’s in it. At least this layer.
“Looking for a dead body?” Kat shouts.
Foreverland Is Dead Page 23
