by Dale Bailey
The rest was all confusion: two belligerent drunks with their faces full of windshield glass and a twelve-year-old with cerebral swelling already convulsing on the table and Lara in transit between with a nurse, a new nurse, this one, fresh out of school, tugging on her sleeve, saying, hey, you mind double-checking this order, and she snatched it away, glancing at it as she pushed through the doors into Trauma 2, calling over her shoulder, “Yes, that’s right, just do it,” and the nurse, as ordered, just did it. Lara had no clue that anything had gone wrong until low-blood-oxygen alarms started screaming down the hall and by the time she got there, by the time she had tried and failed to intubate the little girl who looked eerily like her own sister lo! these many years ago, by the time she had finished performing a nasty little procedure called a cricothyrostomy—that’s a tracheotomy to you—and had gotten Katie Wright breathing again, well, by then it was too late.
“Seven minutes without oxygen,” she told Ben, as he worked above her. “Best-case scenario, seven minutes without oxygen means irreversible hypoxic brain injury.”
“And worst case?”
Katie Wright’s fate: “Brain death.”
The Wrights, hoping for a miracle, as parents will, had opted to put their daughter on a ventilator, but Katie’s case was hopeless. All the ventilator did was maintain a rosy simulacrum of life. Katie’s real life, though, was over—Lara had known that even then.
“So what caused it?” Ben asked, and that brought her, as always, to the crux of the matter.
Lara herself hadn’t known for sure what had happened, not until later, after Katie’s parents had been dispatched to the cafeteria to drink coffee and ponder their futures and the car accident victims had been cleared and the ER had settled back into its routine state of mild chaos. That was when she’d finally found the time to steal a few minutes at Katie Wright’s bedside. That was when she finally found the time to examine the chart; it was a simple error, a brain fart Lana would have called it, easy enough to make at the best of times, all but impossible to avoid when you’re fatigued and stressed and a thousand things are happening at once. No excuses, though: in her haste, Lara had miswritten the drug order; she’d substituted MSO4, the chemical symbol for morphine sulfate, for MgSO4, the symbol for magnesium sulfate. The morphine had stopped Katie’s breathing. By the time Lara got her back—
Well, she never really had gotten her back, had she? Not unless you were going to accept a vegetable on a ventilator as a reasonable substitute for a human being.
Lara didn’t know how long she stood there looking down at the child on the bed below her. But for the ventilator, she looked perfectly normal. She might have been sleeping. She would never wake up, though. She would never wake up again, and even now Lara remembered reaching out to trace the line of Katie Wright’s jaw, the arc of her skull so visible in repose. Even now she remembered thinking how fleeting everything was, how close to the flesh the studs and beams, the joists and girders on which a life was draped, how big a wind was death, and always blowing, and each human life that turned its shoulders to the gale nothing more and nothing less than a fragile house of bones.
33
Abel was in the north stairwell, heading for the lobby, when the homeowner returned.
Freshly shod, with six hundred milligrams of Extra-Strength Tylenol flowing in his veins, he felt considerably better—so much better, in fact, that he had briefly considered climbing higher into the building in hopes of finding Ben and Lara. Given his own recent history, however, he ultimately decided that it might be wiser to get the hell out of Dreamland altogether, contact the authorities, and send them help rather than trying to render it himself. He’d just begun to nurse hopes that he might actually succeed in this plan—he’d already reached the second floor, four flights from the lobby—when he felt that black presence slipping once again inside his mind, and all his scheming went out the window.
Abel struggled to repel it, but something essential had changed inside him during that final reading. He might not choose to collaborate with his invader—as he suspected (and, given the dark omniscience inside him, more than suspected) Keel had—but having thrown open the doors to admit it, however inadvertently, he could not close them again. So he retreated before it, seeking refuge in the tunneled wainscoting of his own mind.
His husk, outwardly unchanged, paused on the steps, considering. A moment later it resumed the descent.
34
Lara saw a moment too late that the railing Ben was balanced on had passed from loose to outright unsteady to dangerous. She was just getting ready to warn him, her thoughts still fogged with Katie Wright, when a bolt sheared off with a screech and the handrail, unhinged on one side, swung out from under him.
“Shit,” Ben cried, and then he was on the floor beside her, the car rocking underneath them once again, as though somewhere in the dark shaft above them, a braided steel cable had started to unwind.
“You okay?” he asked.
“Yeah, I’m fine,” she said, climbing to her feet. “Are you?”
He stood, wincing, one hand pressed to his side. “Yeah. Yeah. I’m fine.” He stared up at the hole in the ceiling—he’d managed to dislodge the cover, revealing a square of darkness—and then turned back to the broken railing.
“Trouble?” she said.
“No. I don’t think so. In fact—” He crouched to examine the railing, now dangling vertically from the remaining post. He twisted it with one hand, the bolt rattling where it entered the wall. “In fact, I think this might come in handy. Here.” He glanced over his shoulder at her. “Give me that hammer, will you?”
She stared at it, reluctant to touch it. Ben had wiped it more or less clean before he went to work on the control panel, but just looking at it reminded her of Keel, and what he’d done to Ramsey Lomax. And with that everything else came sweeping back: Abel Williams and the phone that had stopped working and the elevator that had countermanded its own electronic instructions. She felt the fear return, her own panicky observation—
—it’s not going to let us get away—
—closing around her throat like a noose. For the second time that day, she put the question of their escape odds to the magic eight ball in her mind, and this time the answer that came swimming up through the green murk lacked even the wiggle room of Signs say no. This time the answer came up cold and definitive: No.
“Hey, you okay?”
Lara forced a smile. “I’m doing better,” she said, and that much, anyway, was at least marginally true. If nothing else, unloading the story about Katie Wright had defrosted her brain a degree or two—her synapses now seemed to be firing only a second or two slower than their normal rate. And if Ben could continue to function, well then, so could she. She picked up the hammer and handed it to him.
“Watch your ears,” he said.
Three sharp blows, each one echoing inside the car like a gunshot in a steel drum, finished the job age had started and the burden of Ben’s weight hurried along. Ben picked up the severed railing and inspected it critically. Angling the rail against the floor, he struck it twice more, delivering each blow with a purse-lipped expression of concentration. One of the two welded anchor posts shot off across the floor and rattled to a halt against the far wall. Ben grunted in satisfaction and displayed his handiwork for her—no longer a handrail but a flat brushed-steel post, three feet long and three inches wide. The tapering wall anchor at the top looked like a spike.
“What do you think?”
“What’s it for?”
“Dual use,” he said, smiling. “Pry bar. Club.” He hefted it experimentally, then looked over at her. “You ready to do some climbing?”
She shrugged. “I guess.”
“All right. We’re going out through the trapdoor. You go first. I’ll come up after you.”
“Okay.”
She clambered up on the remaining handrail, this one none too steady in its own right, and let him boost her toward the access h
atch. She scrabbled for purchase, her fingers sinking into a thin layer of greasy muck, and then, using all the strength in her forearms and triceps, she levered her weight up and onto the elevator car.
She stood, brushing at her blue jeans.
It was dark here, with a sense of heavy mechanical components crowding the gloom. A thick cable of woven steel disappeared into the shadows overhead, and the air smelled of iron, black grease, and corrosion. They had evidently come to a halt—or had been halted, she thought uneasily—just short of the eighteenth floor. A narrow vertical line of lesser gloom, starting at about knee level, marked the crack where the doors met. Lara shivered, suddenly stricken with an image of the elevator lurching into motion, smashing her like an insect against the ceiling somewhere up there in the dark.
“Everything cool?” he asked, handing her the pry bar.
“Hurry,” she said.
“I’m hurrying,” he said.
A moment later, he had scrambled up beside her, gasping with pain. He was nearly invisible in the darkness, but she didn’t need to see him to imagine the gradually expanding patch of blood-black seepage under his left arm. When he had caught his breath, he took the length of railing from her. She watched him, a shadow among shadows, bending to slide the flat end into the crevice between the doors.
“So they finally took her off life support?” he asked.
After a moment of confusion, Lara realized that he had taken up the thread of conversation where they had dropped it a few minutes ago: with Katie Wright.
“Yeah,” she said. “After a week or so. She didn’t last long after that.”
“Yeah? So what happened next?”
Ah, she thought. Next.
That was the complicated part.
35
On the tenth floor, a thing that was and was not Fletcher Keel stopped to catch its breath. He felt an aching resentment at having to do so: if everything had gone as planned, he would have finished the matter on the fifth floor; failing that, the elevator should have delivered Prather and the woman both right to him.
The strength beating inside him—that thin, hating voice—had promised him as much. Instead, Prather and the doctor seemed to have disabled the elevator somehow. Smart—he would give them that. He was going to make them pay for the inconvenience though.
And it wouldn’t be long now, either, he thought, testing the edge of the blade he had taken from the kitchen. It was a good knife, ten inches long, perfectly weighted, and sharp. Very sharp, indeed. Say what you want about Ramsey Lomax, the man didn’t skimp when it came to cutlery.
Keel took another breath, and looked up the stairwell.
The darkness—and it was pitch black in here—did not bother him. Keel was at one with the building now, joined in a kind of joyful symbiosis: he gave it the mobility, the physical presence, it would not otherwise possess; in return it gave him strength, the fearless stone-cold certainty he’d always longed for. He did not need his eyes to see: he had instead an absolute and unerring knowledge of Dreamland itself, an instinctive awareness that infinitely transcended the paltry blueprint it had shown him that first night in the south stairwell. He could feel the fifth-floor furnace warming in his bones, the joists and archways creaking in its subterranean depths were like his own creaking tendons, the wind sculpting the cap of snow on the roof might as well have lifted his own hair. And the footfalls of his adversaries came to him like the sound of mice scurrying through the labyrinth of his own body.
Close now. They were close.
And he had a sudden image of Lara McGovern writhing underneath him. Rewards awaited.
Keel smiled and resumed climbing.
36
“The worst part isn’t being suspended,” Lara said. “The worst part is knowing that even after I’m reinstated—if I’m reinstated—she’ll still be dead. I’ll still have killed her.”
Listening, Ben pried at the elevator doors with the length of steel. Despite the cold—and it was cold here, a blistering blue-black cold—Ben was sweating, a slick feverish perspiration that had less to do with exertion than with the spokes of pain that clutched at his rib cage with every movement, however minor.
Gasping, he released the pressure and stood upright. He lifted his glasses and wiped sweat from his eyes, two fingers at a time.
“How many lives you figure you’ve saved—or will save—over the course of your career?” he asked.
“Yeah. I’ve thought of that. It doesn’t help.”
“Hmm.” He wedged the flat edge of the post between the doors, spike pointing in the opposite direction, and pushed. Something groaned deep inside the wall. The door shuddered half an inch, met resistance, and ground to a halt.
“She was nine years old,” Lara said.
“It would have been better if she was twenty-nine?” he said without rancor.
“No, it’s not that, exactly.” In the smoky radiance leaking through the crack, her face looked thoughtful, like a child’s face, frowning in concentration over some especially difficult algebra problem. “It’s that somehow she got mixed up in my head with my sister,” she said finally.
“Lana?”
“Yeah.”
“You were twins?”
“How’d you—”
He laughed—a real laugh, though a somewhat subdued one, and how much it surprised him, that laugh. As a reporter, he’d occasionally been struck by the resilience of human beings in the face of even the most horrific adversity. But to see the principle at work in his own life—that was something else.
“Lana, Lara?” he said. “You don’t even have to be a psychic to figure that one out. She’s dead?”
“Leukemia. She was nine, too.…” Lara looked at him again, her face divided along the terminator line cast by the bluish light between the doors. “Sometimes I hear her voice inside my head,” she said. She shook her head. “‘It should have been you, Lars.’”
Ben didn’t answer, at a loss for words.
He wiped his forehead with the back of his hand and turned back to the doors, the phrase echoing inside his head. He slipped the lip of the bar between the doors and leaned his weight into it. The motion pulled at his side, peeling the bandage free from the slowly drying blood in a lacerating line. Something groaned inside the door. “Help me,” he gasped, and she closed her hands over his, adding her weight to the bar. His shoulders shook with the effort. Something snapped far back in the wall, and suddenly the resistance was gone. The door sprang back abruptly, nearly spilling them.
The stench of mold and wood rot rolled in from the elevator bay beyond—the heap of abandoned carpet remnants, he remembered, and that reminded him of something he’d been trying not to think about. Apartment 1824. It brought with it no clutching sense of panic this time, just a numb imperative, a summons.
He straightened.
Both of them stood absolutely still, half expecting some kind of attack from the gloom of the elevator bay. Nothing came. Panting from exertion, Ben turned back to Lara, his head suddenly filling up with the answer that had eluded him a few minutes ago. It arrived full-blown, already formulated in Paul Cook’s familiar tones; all he did was repeat it. “Maybe that’s not Lana’s voice,” he said. “Maybe it’s your voice. You ever think of that?”
Then an impulse seized him, and he did something totally unexpected—something he didn’t even know he’d been planning. He pressed his lips gently to her forehead. She did not pull away. She just stood there, watching him out of wide gray eyes.
“It wasn’t your fault, Lara,” he said. “You don’t have to punish yourself anymore.”
Embarrassed, he tossed the length of railing into the elevator bay, and clambered out after it. Turning, he reached down for Lara. Their hands clasped, and he was struck for the second time that day by the sense that somehow they’d been made for one another, those hands, perfectly machined to match.
“Now what?” Lara asked after he’d pulled her up.
“The stairwell,”
he said, feeling the lie inside him and willing it not to be a lie. Bending to retrieve the rail, he repeated the words, “The stairwell,” unsure whom he was trying to convince, her or himself.
37
The lie caught up with him at the intersection of the central corridor and the south wing. Lara saw it happen.
In the bleak yellow pall cast by a distant lightbulb, the last bulb yet burning, by the door into the south stairwell, she saw it happen: saw his fingers close around the door handle, saw them blanch with indecision, saw them pull away. As if summoned, he turned, looking down the long dark corridor toward the apartment where his family had died. Another exit sign glimmered down there, a distant beacon, shining over the same door that Lara had hustled him through on their way to the roof the other night.
“Ben—” she whispered.
He looked at her, unspeaking, and she thought of Abel Williams, she thought of Fletcher Keel, both of them out there somewhere, hunting them in the midnight dark. She thought of Ramsey Lomax, slumped against the wall, his body already going cold, and she said, “No, Ben—”
“Lara.” The voice was thick with entreaty; it was hardly his voice at all.
She touched his hand, willing some of her strength to pass through into him, as his strength had buoyed her during those dark moments in the elevator. “No!” she said.
His voice broke as he responded. “I have to, don’t you see that, I have to—”
She looked in his eyes and thought of his words back at the elevator—you don’t have to punish yourself anymore—and another voice cried out within her—not Lana’s voice, her voice. Hers.
And how are you supposed to stop? it asked.
Lara knew the answer to that one. There was only one way. You faced it. You faced it, and you breathed it in, you soaked it up like a sponge. You made it part of yourself. You said, This is the worst thing I have done, and for this I bear responsibility. And you surrendered the rest of it, the part you were powerless to change. You honored it, but you did not own it. And then it could not own you, never again.
