Harbinger

by Sara Etienne

  And yet, with guards crawling all over Holbrook, here she was. Wandering around free. This girl might be in her own little crazy-world, but maybe she could help me. The barest shadow of hope traced itself in my mind. “Do you know how to get out of here?”

  Her face pulled tight across her cheekbones, her forehead wrinkling in thought. As she looked out over the sea, the early-morning light etched lines across her almost transparent skin and circles under her eyes. “The path is here. Only I can’t seem to find it . . .”

  Her words faded to barely a whisper. “I’m lost myself.”

  Freddy was getting closer now. “Fa-aye, Faye!”

  His shouting finally caught her attention and the girl glanced in my direction. She didn’t shy away from my gaze, but the eyes that met mine were vacant and clouded. She smiled and held out her hand. “Are you Faye, then? I’m Rita. How nice to meet you.”

  Yep. Crazy. I almost laughed at the absurdity of the situation. Some thug was after me and she was making proper introductions? But what did I expect, I was at Holbrook after all.

  Then Rita’s face creased again in concern. “Be careful. The path is hard to follow.”

  There was a crash and I whipped around to see Freddy break through the trees. A terrifying grin on his face.

  “Please! What path?” I turned back to her, begging. But she was gone.

  “Got her, up here by the sculpture garden,” Freddy bragged into his earpiece. “I’m handling it.”

  I just stood there petrified. Like one of the blackened, bronze statues.

  He paused, listening to the response in his ear. Anger twisting his mouth.

  “Uh-huh.”

  His face went from medium rare to bloody.

  “Uh-huh.”

  Not a man of many words.

  “Said I’m handling it.” And he started for me.

  Freddy clutched his pepper spray and edged closer. His eyes were everywhere, checking out the area around us, evaluating my movements. Then he looked straight at me, and I saw a flicker of fear in his eyes before he looked away. Like I was an escaped tiger who might attack at any second. I had the urge to do just that. To rave and scream and claw. But my sense of defeat overwhelmed everything else.

  Sweat slipped down my forehead, stinging my eyes. I touched my back pocket, wishing my sketchbook were there. I’d draw myself into someplace safe. Without possessed statues or sadistic schools. I’d make my life make sense again.

  Freddy was feet from me, inches now. This wasn’t gonna be pretty. I’d seen what they’d done to Nami. His fat hand twitched, eagerly, and I braced myself.

  Then his radio beeped again. He paused, listening to his earpiece.

  “Crap. Another one.” Freddy’s watery eyes filled with regret. “I don’t have time to teach you a lesson right now. But I promise, I’ll get to it soon enough. And I’m a man of my word.”

  Freddy grabbed my sore arm and dragged me back into the trees. The branches bent low, tangling in my hair. Ripping it out as Freddy pulled me along.

  I wished I were back out under the open sky of the clearing, even if it meant being near those creepy statues. Or listening to Rita.

  Be careful. The path is hard to follow. There’d been something in her voice, an urgency, that made it hard for me to just shrug her off. But Rita and her path vanished from my thoughts as soon as I saw Dr. Mordoch waiting outside the Compass Rose with her satisfied little smile.

  “Thank you, Caretaker. I assume she wasn’t too much trouble.”

  “Oh no, Dr. Mordoch. We can handle the students. Firmness and restraint. Just like it says in the handbook.” Behind Freddy’s smile was a glint of spitefulness, but Dr. Mordoch didn’t react. She sent Freddy off toward the next “incident” and turned to me.

  “I’m glad this happened before we officially started our semester.” Dr. Mordoch motioned for me to follow her back up the hill, in the opposite direction from the dorms. A breeze swatted uselessly at the stagnant air. We skirted around the other house I’d seen from the roof that morning. Its wooden porch sagged and the paint was faded and chipped. A brass plaque gleamed incongruously on the weathered door, reading Knowledge Annex. Next to the house was a wide, empty corral, big enough for cows or horses. Some sort of barnyard therapy?

  “It allows me to be lenient. I’ll give you this chance before we begin our term to decide whether you’re going to allow Holbrook to help you. Perhaps, if I give you some time to think it over, you’ll come around.” She beamed at me as she led me up a dirt trail through the oppressive woods. “Meditation can work wonders.”

  We came to a small skinny building that looked a little like an old rest-stop bathroom. Only a row of metal ventilation pipes on the roof kept the place from blending into the trees completely. Five doors evenly divided the wooden building, each with a stick-on silver number labeling them one through five.

  “The monks used this building for contemplation.” Dr. Mordoch unlocked the fence that circled the building. No razor wire here. “The Meditation Center serves the same purpose for us at the Academy. At every turn, I’ve tried to incorporate the values of self-reflection and discipline when designing this school. The outside world can be such a distraction from . . .”

  I stopped listening to her lecture. Dust clogged the air as we crossed the barren yard. Hundreds of resistant feet had obviously beat any grass into submission. My translator finally kicked in as she unlocked door number three. Meditation Center = solitary confinement.

  Dr. Mordoch guided me into the closet of a room. It was sweltering and reeked of sweat. My chest squeezed tight with anxiety. I wanted to bolt, but I already knew there was no place to go. Plus, Dr. Mordoch was blocking the only exit.

  I took it in quickly. Six feet wide and eight feet long. Cement floor. A wooden platform stuck a couple of feet out of the back wall. A large metal ring was mounted near the floor. I don’t even want to know.

  “Swami Sivananda once said, ‘Meditation is painful in the beginning but it bestows immortal Bliss and supreme joy in the end.’ Faye, sometimes pain is the only way.” She gave me a benign smile and shut the door.

  Then I was alone in the blackness. I tried to push down the panic. But the adrenaline rush from this morning had gone clean through my body, making me feel washed out and weak. There was no inside doorknob, but I shoved my shoulder into the door anyway. Hoping.

  The lock held and fire ripped down my already bruised arm. A low animal moan escaped my throat.

  “Fear is an illusion. I’m in control of my own reality.” My words sounded muffled in the walled-off space, making me feel even smaller.

  How did I end up here? It’d just started out as bad dreams. Night terrors, the doctor had called them. Always the blue waves rushing at me. Pulling me down. But the nightmares of drowning were less terrifying than the kids who cried just because I looked at them. Or the teachers who called me a liar and a bully.

  Doctors checked my eyes, my ears, my brain, searching for a reason for my strangeness. They tested me for ADHD and dyslexia. By junior high I’d been poked and prodded and screened for everything in the book, and they still had nothing to blame it on. But by then I’d figured out how to hide it. At night, I took refuge in the empty streets of the Cooperative. Out under the dark sky, there were no lies to tiptoe around. No eyes to avoid. There was no one to hear my screams.

  But, last year, the nightmares had found their way into the daylight and everything had fallen apart. My parents realized I would never be like everybody else. And I realized I didn’t want to be.

  So here I was. Locked away in a place where I couldn’t pretend even if I wanted to.

  Pacing, my boots thumped out a steady rhythm on the cement floor. Blood pounded in my ears, keeping time. Whoosh. Whoosh. Whoosh. My shins hit the platform at the end of the room. Whoosh. Whoosh. Whoosh. I ran into the door.

  The drumbeat from last night came back to me. It’s time. The song pulsed in my veins. For you. It throbbed through my head un
til it hurt to move. I leaned against the door, letting it hold me up.

  Fresh air wisped through the spaces between the close-fitting boards. As I breathed in the sweet smell of pine sap, something stirred inside me.

  Under the insistent drumbeat and the whooshing in my head, I could hear the creaking of the branches. I imagined swaying in the breeze. The sound of the wind rustling through leaves.

  I clung to that sensation of being outside. I pressed my hand into the wood, trying to share its solidness as the music hammered at me. My feet rooted to the floor, even as my head spun.

  I didn’t want to lose myself here in the dark. “Please.”

  Something shattered inside me when I heard my feeble voice pleading with a locked door. Throwing my head back, I screamed. I screamed at my father, who’d left me here. At my mother, who was too big a coward to even come. At Dr. Mordoch, who thought she had some special right to drug and imprison me.

  I threw my body into the door and pain thrilled through me. I used it, adding it to the rage. I kicked the door, slamming my sole into the wood. Striking that rhythm again and again.

  I slammed my palms against the boards, pushing back against the drumbeat, against everything. “No! Fear is an illusion!”

  Splinters cut my hands. But I couldn’t stop. Couldn’t control the deep, welling rage, even if it was about to swallow me up.

  The boards gave a little. I was stronger than all of them. Stronger than the door. The flats of my hands pummeled the wood harder. And with a crack, a board loosened, letting in a tiny rift of light. I stood blinking in the yellow beam and shouted, “I’m in control of my own reality!”

  A scraping sound came from the other side of the door and it swung open. A figure was silhouetted by blinding sunlight. She stepped inside and I saw it was Dr. Mordoch. Relief flooded through me. She would help me. She would save me from myself.

  “Faye, you need to try harder. How can we help you if you fight us like this?” Dr. Mordoch touched the crack I’d made in the boards, testing it. But the wood held solid now.

  I blinked, my eyes straining to adjust to the sunlight. As Dr. Mordoch ran her hand over the crack again, lines pulled down her mouth and crinkled her forehead, her face a mix of surprise and worry.

  “I w-want to come out.” My voice was weak.

  “I know you do, but we can’t always have everything we want. Until you can settle down, until you can be quiet and show us that you’re ready to accept our help, I can’t let you out. It would hurt your recovery.” Dr. Mordoch grabbed my hand, her rough fingers closing around mine. For the first time she really looked at me. “Faye, I don’t want to hurt you.”

  I couldn’t answer, because the world was dissolving around me. The sunlight faded into darkness and the tiny room had been replaced by icy waves. Dr. Mordoch and I were the only things still the same.

  We were standing in the ocean, the full moon shone a deep crimson, and the stars burned bright without smog. Dr. Mordoch still gripped my hand, but somehow everything had gotten flipped around backward. I was seeing from inside Dr. Mordoch. One of her muddy hands was fighting against the oncoming tide, the other holding on to my own tiny hand. The hand of a half-drowned six-year-old Faye, standing in the tumbling waves.

  “Faye, I don’t want to hurt you.” I felt myself saying the words, but they were Dr. Mordoch’s words. Dr. Mordoch’s voice.

  Six-year-old Faye pulled against my hand, trying to wade deeper into the waves. Her hand slipped out of mine just as a tall wave crashed over us.

  “Faye!” I screamed at her in Dr. Mordoch’s voice. But it was like she didn’t hear me. Spitting out salt water, she tilted her head back and started singing. It was the same eerie melody that’d been haunting me since last night. And for a second I just stood there, stunned, rooted to the spot as she moved farther and farther away from me.

  Another wave rushed toward her, and unflinching, she let it engulf her. Her song cut out and I shook off my terror, springing into action. I dove into the water and raced after Faye. Groping for her in the dark waves. Pushing my way through ropes of seaweed and clouds of sand, till my hands found her tiny body. I clutched her to me, our wet clothes dragging as I fought my way back to the beach.

  Footsteps pounded across the sand and my parents, disheveled and dirty, ran toward us, shouting. Faye struggled in my grip and cried for her mom and dad. She yanked her hand out of mine.

  And the connection was severed. I was me and not Dr. Mordoch. The sea disappeared and the harsh morning sun returned. I was back in the room, staring up at Dr. Mordoch, yanking my own hand out of hers. What was that?

  Dr. Mordoch also looked shocked, and for a second, I thought she’d seen the vision too.

  But she just looked down at her empty hand and repeated to herself, “I don’t want to hurt you.”

  Then she turned and walked out.

  “No!” I started toward her. But I slammed into the closing door.

  With the darkness, the vision came back and with it, the blue-black sea. Swirling around me, tugging at my feet.

  “Help!” My fingernails scraped against the crack in the door, trying again to claw my way out. “Somebody! Please.”

  “It’s time,” the waves whispered. They dashed against me, pulling me under. Pounding at me like drums.

  I wanted out of this place. Out of this room. Out of the fences. Out of my mind.

  But the rhythm rang out louder and louder, eddying around me in that same insistent song. Until I was chanting along.

  “Now you. It’s time. For you.”

  One last thought surfaced through the panic. Maybe they’re right to leave me here. Maybe I needed to be locked up in a place like this, surrounded by barbed wire and security guards and rooms with bolts on the outside.

  Maybe I am crazy.

  6

  KNOCK, KNOCK.

  The noise sifted down through my terror, cutting across my whimpering.

  Knock, knock.

  Who’s there? So crazy. So crazy who? So crazy. So crazy who? So crazy So crazy So crazy.

  Knock, knock. There it was again. Someone knocking on the wall.

  Blinking in the thick darkness, the ocean waves threatened to crash over me again. I tried to sit up, but my body seemed locked in its position, curled tightly against the wall. A terrible animal sound came from somewhere, and I realized it was me.

  I reached out my hand to answer back, then stopped. It could be a trick. Some test to see if I was behaving. But if it was, it was a stupid one. I knocked back.

  My knock was returned, this time a little ways down the wall from me. I succeeded in sitting up, ungluing my sweaty legs from each other. A sharp twinge from my stiff knees cleared the fog from my mind. I followed the noise and knocked back. The next time was a few feet farther, moving away from the door.

  It was a pointless game. But, the Marco-Polo back and forth was slowly returning me to myself. I followed the knocking down the wall, finally army-crawling under the platform at the end of the tiny room. The solid cement floor pressing against my skin made me calmer somehow, and some of my fear evaporated.

  I knocked again, right near the floor, and my knuckles grazed a rough spot. It was too dark to see, but I traced the area with my fingers. There was a small knothole in the wood.

  “Mayday. Mayday.” A muffled voice drifted through the hole. A guy’s voice. “Can anyone hear me?”

  It was like someone turning on a night-light. Just to hear another voice in the crushing darkness. I nodded, then remembered that whoever he was couldn’t see me, and tried out my voice.

  “Yeah?” The darkness weighed heavy against me while I waited for an answer.

  “You okay? Are you hurt in there?”

  My face flamed, thinking about the horrible mewing sound I’d been making.

  “No.” My throat was raw from shouting or singing or whatever that’d been.

  “No you’re not okay or no you’re not hurt?” There was real concern in the mute
d words, and I closed my eyes, grabbing on to it. I am not alone.

  “No, I’m not hurt.” Okay is another matter entirely.

  “Oh. Good . . .”

  Then the room fell quiet again and I could hear him breathing through the knothole. Even with the wall, the physical closeness was comforting in a way I wasn’t used to. My breath fell into rhythm with his and I laid my cheek against the cool floor. The warm scent of ginger on his breath mixed with the chalky concrete.

  “I feel like a dog in a cage. In hell.” His low whisper was raw, and tinged with panic. “And there’s no way out . . . The walls, the door, everything’s solid. Just this friggin’ hole. God, it’s way too hot for September.”

  I belly-crawled, inching closer to the hole, craving this new connection that kept away the dark and the waves. His voice sounded a little clearer.

  “By the way, I’m Kel.”

  My name jammed in my throat like an insidious glob of peanut butter. I swallowed, easing my sore throat. “Faye.”

  “What’re you in for?” Kel’s tone was forced, trying to make a joke.

  At Holbrook? In Solitary? I didn’t even know where to start. Silence welled up around us, pressing in with the darkness.

  “Sorry. Too personal. I’m just a little flipped.” He sounded as overwhelmed as I felt. “Yesterday, everything was normal. Then two guys bust into my room in the middle of the night and order me out of bed. I was about to scream bloody murder when my stepmom popped her head in and told me to brush my teeth. ’Cause, of course, dental hygiene is super-important when you’re being kidnapped.”

  A smile tugged at my lips, but then it fell off when I remembered that my own mom hadn’t even been home when Dad and I left for Holbrook. No hug. No kiss. Not even a wave good-bye.

  “And you know what my dad said?” The humor disappeared from his voice, and I could almost taste the bitterness in his words. I shook my head, forgetting again that he couldn’t see me. But it didn’t matter, Kel kept talking, his voice dropping into a gruff imitation. “He said, ‘Son, we’re only doing this because we love you so much.’ Bullshit. I mean, love may come in many forms, but kidnapping isn’t one of them.”