by J. Thorn
The metal tanks themselves would have been cause for wonder, set in rows with coils and wires around each. The wiring that Vicky had tried to describe circumvented the ceiling, and several sizes of conduit ran overhead. An array of expensive-looking machinery lined the walls behind the tanks. The technology was a vivid contrast to the musty gray of the stone foundation, but that wasn’t what caused Starlene’s blood to freeze in her veins.
An old woman, Bondurant’s “woman in the wall,” stood in the glow of the generator components.
The woman had an ugly scar across her forehead, her facial wrinkles so deep that it looked to be the work of several hundred years of gravity. The woman’s eyes were set back in her skull like the openings of small caves, holes that allowed no light to enter. From the tattered condition of the woman’s robe, she looked severely neglected.
Starlene’s first instinct was to help the woman. “What are you doing here?”
The woman’s mouth opened, as slow as dust. Bondurant had pulled a flask from somewhere and was busy assaulting his central nervous system. “She lives here,” he said, after removing the flask from his lips.
“Here?” Beyond the tanks set in the middle of the room, a series of dark corridors broke off from the main floor area. Starlene saw a few doors that promised even deeper shadows.
“When she’s not in the walls, I mean,” Bondurant said.
The woman’s lips moved again, slowly, and Starlene thought the woman had spoken. Or maybe sound wasn’t what the woman emitted, because the top of Starlene’s spinal column tingled and the words “A white, white room in which to write” flitted across her head and were gone. Except the voice had been a man’s, not an old woman’s.
Bondurant put his arm around Starlene, the gesture more boozy and paternalistic than sexual. “We got plenty down here. They’re the best kind of patients you could think of. Don’t have to feed them, they never complain, and no Social Services bastards breathing down your neck.”
“You mean they stay down here?” The cobwebs, the stained concrete floor, and the wet smell of corruption made the basement seem more suited for a colony of rats.
“They don’t stay here all the time. They used to, then they got in the walls. And now, sometimes, they get out.” Bondurant waved his hand toward the ceiling, indicating the rooms above them.
They took it by hook and by crook.
The words were there, inside Starlene’s head like voice-over edited into a movie soundtrack. The woman’s lips hadn’t moved, but Starlene was sure the words had been the woman’s.
I got half a mind to tell somebody about it, what they did.
But I only got half a mind.
Maybe Freeman had been telling the truth. He’d exhibited some remarkable guess work during his session with her. But mind-reading was a little too loopy, a little too unnatural, a little too much like something God would never allow. Yet so were old men who walked on water and disappeared. And shadowy secret agent types making deals with doctors. And expensive equipment hidden in an underfunded children’s home.
“Who are you?” Starlene asked the woman.
The woman said nothing, just turned her stooped body and shuffled back towards the shadows. It was only after she’d reached the throat of the widest corridor that Starlene’s legs obeyed her brain enough to follow.
“You don’t want to go back there,” Bondurant said.
“She needs help,” Starlene said, angry. “How could you stand it, knowing she was living down here in this filth?”
Bondurant’s drunken laughter bounced off the stone walls. “I don’t think ‘living’ is the right word.”
Starlene paused in mid-stride, and stood breathless in the center of the metal cylinders. Ahead of her, the woman had faded to nothing.
The woman’s final words reverberated inside the bone cave of Starlene’s skull: Got half a mind. Off to find the other half.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
“Starlene went down there,” Freeman said. The sound on the rec room TV was turned down, and a cat food commercial was playing. He looked out the window at the sun sinking behind the impossibly distant mountains. Eastwood in “Escape From Alcatraz.”
Vicky had “finished” her meal, and the counselors hadn’t noticed that she’d only eaten one teaspoonful of food. Freeman had no appetite, so they left the cafeteria early. They were allowed to wait in the rec room near the offices while the rest of the kids ate. Randy had cast a suspicious eye at them, but then had to go break up a shouting match between Raymond and a second-string goon who was probably making a play for Deke’s throne.
“I guess Starlene can find out for herself,” Vicky said. “You can’t talk any sense into a grown-up’s head. They already think they know everything.”
“She’s not so bad. Not like The Liz or Doctor Krackpot.”
“Who do you think those people down there are?”
Freeman looked at the ugly swirl rug beneath his feet. He narrowed his focus, deliberately keeping his attention above floor level. He was pretty sure he wasn’t keen enough to triptrap into the heads of the people underneath, but he didn’t want to take the chance right now. “I’m not sure, but they’re somehow wrong.”
“Do you believe in ghosts?”
“No, but that doesn’t mean that ghosts don’t believe in me. I didn’t believe in ESP, either, until it jumped up and bit me.”
“Do you believe in anything else?”
“Sometimes.”
Vicky sat back in the worn armchair and crossed her thin legs. “When it’s dark and all the other girls are asleep, I talk to God.”
“Now that’s what I call ESP.”
“No, really. And I feel like He’s talking back to me.”
“Starlene got to you, didn’t she? Fed you the company line. Well, has your life gotten any better since you’ve developed a meaningful personal relationship with a thing you can’t see?”
“Why do you always get so defensive over things that have nothing to do with you?”
“Why do you vomit every time you eat?”
Vicky pointed at the scar on Freeman’s wrist. “You disappear your way, and I’ll disappear mine.”
Freeman moved away from the window to the entrance of the rec room. Through the glass cafeteria doors, he could see the counselors stooped over their food. All he had to do was walk away. No one would even notice he was missing, at least until after-dinner group sessions.
He headed down the hall past the main office. The office lights were off, and Bondurant was nowhere around. Vicky called Freeman, but he pretended not to hear. She wasn’t the only one who knew how to escape. He’d been doing it for years, both inside and outside his head.
Freeman paused at the front entrance. A keypad beside the door blinked, a security system that required a code. The door’s release bar would set off an alarm. Still, if he ran fast enough and reached the fence at the back of the property, he could cross over the farms and hide in the woods. From there, he’d have a decent shot at making it to . . .
Where?
He had nowhere to go.
Just like always. He put his back against the cool glass and slid to a sitting position. Vicky was waiting.
“I know the code,” she said. “That’s how I get out.”
“What did you do, read the night watchman’s mind?”
“No. Cynthia . . . did things for him in trade.”
“Does Cynthia want to get out, too?”
“No, I think she just likes doing it. She told me what she did, and I didn’t believe her until she gave me the code. I think she wanted to shock me.”
“Did it work?”
“I’ve heard worse. Like your saying you could triptrap into my head and not being afraid of what you found. That’s way worse.”
Freeman looked up. Vicky’s eyes blazed with intensity. Even if he could have triptrapped her at that moment, he wouldn’t have dared. She punched three keys, a green light flashed, and she pushed the door
open.
The evening Appalachian air swept over them, whisking away the mildewed odor of Wendover. Freeman rolled to his feet, grabbed Vicky’s hand, and then they were off, running silently across the lawn. The grass was damp from an early dew, and Freeman’s sneakers were soaked before they reached the boulders. One of the second floor windows lit up but they didn’t stop.
“Is this the best way to go?” Freeman asked.
“There’s a place on the far side of the lake where you can climb a pine tree and jump over the fence. You land in a laurel thicket. Get a few scratches, but no broken bones.”
“Sounds like you’ve done it before.”
“You’re not the only one with secrets.”
They slowed when they reached the cover of the boulders and Freeman let go of Vicky’s hand. The moon was three-quarters full and glowed off the skin of the lake. Among the scant patches of forest, reflected light spilled silver across the ground. They moved down the path, Freeman’s ears straining for the slightest sound.
It wasn’t sound but sight that stopped them.
They rounded the bend, and the old man in the gown stood on the path in front of them.
“You can’t go this way,” the man said, or maybe he hadn’t said anything, only put the words in Freeman’s head. His lips hadn’t moved at all, just parted as if he wanted to draw a breath but couldn’t.
“Did you hear that?” Vicky whispered.
Freeman nodded. “I didn’t even triptrap.”
The old man stood there, unmoving. Moonlight caught his flesh where the gown was ripped. His skin was milky, translucent, as if you could poke a finger in and it would keep on going.
“Who are you?” Freeman said, wondering if he even needed to speak in order for the man to understand.
“I live here,” the man said or thought. He waved his hand across the lake. “I used to sleep here. But they woke me up.”
“They?” Vicky said.
“I kept them.”
Freeman looked behind Vicky. He couldn’t decide if he was more afraid of the old man or of Bondurant and Kracowski and whatever was happening in Wendover. They could rush past the old man and make it to the fence. Even if the man had any muscle inside the ragged gown, he looked to be a hundred and twenty.
“I saw you in the home,” Freeman said, waving in the darkness toward Wendover. “You say you live here?”
“Here, there, nowhere,” the man spoke-thought. “It’s all the same.”
“Are you . . .” Vicky said. “Are you dead?”
“Not dead. Not anymore. The dead get to sleep. The dead are lucky.”
Freeman pressed backwards against the rhododendron branches. “You’re one of the people underneath, aren’t you? The people in the deadscape.”
“You can’t go this way.”
“We don’t want to go back to the home. It’s too scary.”
Vicky gave Freeman a look that said So even a snake-eyed tough guy suffers a moment of weakness now and then.
“You can’t go this way,” the man repeated in a voice like the lost wind over an empty grave.
“We’re in a hurry,” Freeman said. “Any minute, the counselors are going to notice we’re gone.”
“Please,” Vicky said. “We haven’t done anything to you.”
The old man looked out over the lake, eyes as blank as water. “Drowning isn’t so bad.”
Freeman nudged Vicky away from the old man and stepped between them. “You’re not going to hurt us. I won’t let you.”
The man’s lips finally moved, lifted into a wrinkled smile that might have been hiding swallowed light. “I don’t need to hurt you. They’re doing a good enough job of it already. Wendover gets us all, sooner or later.”
As they watched, the man’s form softened and blurred, the edges blending with the moonlit night. His body broke into milky ropes, which then unthreaded themselves until at last only a pale mist hung in the air. The mist drifted from the path, down the grassy slope of the bank to the water’s edge. There, it slowly dissolved, and Vicky and Freeman were left with nothing but the distant chirping crickets and the fireflies blinking against the thicket.
The old man’s words came again from the sky, falling like dead snow: You can’t go this way.
Neither of them spoke for a moment. Freeman’s heart was pounding so hard he could feel his pulse in his temples. A bullfrog croaked and splashed. From the darkness beyond the rhododendron came the hoot of an owl.
“Let’s go,” Freeman whispered.
“But he said—”
“Who cares what he said? He’s gone and, besides, he’s dead. What can he do to us?”
“I don’t like this.”
Freeman glanced at the night sky. The moon had risen higher. The ground was well-lighted now, and they could make good time if they kept moving. Every minute counted when you were serious about running away.
“Do you trust me?” he asked.
“Trust doesn’t mean anything. You trusted Starlene Rogers, but you left her back there at Wendover, in that creepy basement. No telling what’s happened to her.”
“She’s a grown-up. She’s one of them. The enemy. You have to stomp people who get in your way, like De Niro in ‘Raging Bull.’ She’d end up shrinking you to nothing if you gave her half a chance.”
“I’m going to be nothing anyway.”
“Someday we’re all going to be nothing. But we have to keep trying, keep dodging, keep running as long as we can. I don’t know about you, but I’m not going down without a fight.”
Vicky pulled away from him and sat on a flat stone at the edge of the path. “And I thought you were brave. You really fooled me, didn’t you?”
Freeman walked away from her, to the edge of the lake. He looked across the water where the mist had disappeared.
“You can stand up to a bully like Deke,” she said. “But you can’t stand to look inside yourself. You play tough but you’re nothing. You’re as scared as any of us. Clint Eastwood, my ass.”
“No fair. You don’t know anything about me.”
“I went inside your head, remember? Triptrapping works both ways when you’re dealing with somebody else who can do it.”
“You didn’t see anything. I’ve got all that stuff locked away. I’m over it. Nothing’s bothering me anymore.”
“Except your Dad. And what he did.”
Freeman balled his hands into fists. He wasn’t going to lose it. Not like Clint in “Dirty Harry.” Though it would feel so goddamned good.
The heat rushed through him and he fought the pain in his head. He wasn’t going to cry in front of a stupid girl. Especially one who was nothing but skin and bones, who was so messed up she couldn’t eat a solid spoonful of food. Who was she to tell him what was going on inside his own head? The best shrinks in the state system hadn’t been able to touch him. He was by-God bulletproof.
“I know about the acetylene torch,” she said quietly. The water lapped at the shore with a series of tired sighs.
“He didn’t burn me on purpose.”
“Not the first time. And I know what happened to your Mom. What you saw—”
Freeman wheeled and stormed over to her. He could break her in half, she was so scrawny and brittle. He could slap her and make her skull shatter like an eggshell. He could rearrange her face until she shut her big fat mouth.
“You don’t know a goddamned thing about my Dad, or my Mom, or about me,” he yelled, so loudly he could hear his own echo across the water. Anyone listening from Wendover could have heard him, but he didn’t care.
“Admit you’re scared, and I’ll show you the way out.”
Freeman had lied plenty of times in his life. Lying was a survival skill when you were in the system, when you were one of society’s mistakes. And right now, he could lie and get his way. He could fool Vicky into thinking he was scared, because girls seemed to get the emotions of anger and fear mixed up. He could play her, manipulate her the way he’d done with
every group home shrink and sociologist in the state.
But Freeman wasn’t going to lie, not this time. “I’m not scared. I just want to see what it’s like to live one night under the stars, to not have somebody tell me when to go to bed and when to wake up, or make me get in touch with my feelings. Or shock me like a freaking lab monkey until I do tricks and turn flips. Even if they catch us, I need one night where I belong to me.”
“You know something, Freeman? You’re a selfish bastard. You had people looking up to you, kids like Isaac and that boy Dipes—”
“He’s okay for a little brat.”
“See what I mean? Even Cynthia said she thought you were cool. You give other people hope, Freeman. But all you’re worried about is your own damned neck. All you want to do is run away.”
“You’re one to talk.”
“I only run away for a little while. I don’t know if I can handle the world outside these walls.”
“All the more reason to take off.” Freeman’s anger had left him, his soul a deflated tire.
Vicky stood. “I wonder if the old guy in the lake is coming back.”
“He said we couldn’t go this way. But I think he’s as bad as the rest, just trying to keep us boxed in. Even the dead people are against us.”
Vicky laughed, a sound that was out of place in the still night. “You’ve got a hell of a chip on your shoulder, don’t you?”
“You can stay here if you want. I’ve had enough.”
Freeman turned and jogged down the trail. He tried to tell himself it was the mist off the lake that blurred his vision, but the truth stung like salt. Clint Eastwood never cried. Clint Eastwood never looked back, either.
He gained speed, hoping the cold air in his lungs would shock him into numbness. The path thinned and branches slapped at his face. Soon he was among the tall stands of oak and hickory that bordered the rear of the property. The foliage blocked the moonlight, so he crept forward in the silent dark, the fishy smell of the lake now mingling with the odor of rotting leaves.
He reached the fence, and the moon broke through a gap in the branches overhead. The light caught the curled razor wire atop the fence. Insulators hung on poles, and several lines of bare wire ran along the top of the stone wall. The air tingled with ozone.
