On the second floor she found condoms and beer bottles on the floors, a pair of old sneakers, someone’s discarded bra, a torn picture of the Empire State Building, an advertisement for Regent cigarettes.
Troy called from outside. “Here, I found a door.”
Sherry retraced her steps, watching carefully where she placed her feet—many of the stairs were rotting through—as she made her way past the charred remains of a mattress to the foot-high roof Troy was walking across. “There’s a stairwell here on the side,” he said, pointing. “Let’s look inside.”
Sherry ran to catch up, but Troy had already disappeared below ground level. The deep stairwell was dusted white and covered with broken tree branches, weeds, and old leaves at the foot of the door. Someone had beaten one hinge off the frame and the door hung there stubbornly, a foot and a half open, and she squeezed past it into the dark.
Sherry caught a faceful of cobwebs as she cleared the door. It was windowless and pitch black but for their flashlights. She saw Troy shining his beam up and down the walls along a long straight hall.
“One way in, one way out,” Troy called back. His voice was distant and it echoed off the walls.
Sherry saw that there were rooms to their right, each one a little different, offices perhaps, all cleared of furniture, floors bare and concrete.
The walls were scarred and spray-painted with graffiti like the outside of the buildings. Sherry caught up to Troy and saw a rat cross into the shadows in front of them. There was one steel plate from an old set of barbells. It read 20 lb. Marks in the floor where tables had once been mounted, a half wall into a room full of sooty ceiling vents that could only have been a kitchen. This is where they once ate, Sherry thought, imagining an Italian cook who could not speak English.
Sherry walked down the hallway deeper into the cavernous foundation, leaving Troy to linger behind. Her light found a Campbell’s soup can label with a cherubic girl, a glass aspirin bottle sitting on a ledge, a yellow marble, a red wooden checker.
There was a series of smaller rooms with adjoining doors and bathrooms. They must have been bunkrooms, she thought, looking at a long dried snakeskin in one corner.
The last door in the hallway was still in place, made of steel, the hinges welded onto an iron frame. It had a glass window in it, screened and double paned. Someone had cracked the glass but not completely shattered it.
The door was closed and stuck. Sherry wrestled with it a moment and it moved an inch, then another. She played her light around the hall and saw a section of lead piping at the very end that someone had torn from the wall. With it she was able to leverage the door several more inches until the sound of the old ceiling creaking warned her to stop.
She tried to squeeze herself through the open space and just managed to slip into the dark room.
She played her penlight around the walls, up and down the length of a long wooden table in a room that had once been painted white. The legs of the table were broken and it leaned precariously like a long dusty ramp toward the far side of the room. It was the only piece of furniture still left in the bunker, the hardwood boards too long to be removed. It must have been built in place.
Sherry’s light found a square recess in the wall by the door, large and deep enough to accommodate a movie projector that could be operated from outside the room. She could picture where the chair would have sat at the end of the table, the chair that Monahan had been in. She could imagine the strange metal machine with its cones and dial at the far end of the table. She could almost hear the voices in her head.
“Can’t…on, can’t…on.”
He was here, she thought. Right here. Fifty-eight years ago.
She bent over and brushed concrete and plaster from the end of the table until she found the groove he had carved into the table with his thumbnail. She put her own thumbnail in it and rocked it back and forth as Monahan had done.
He would have been sitting here, war cinematography beamed by the projector to the blank wall on his left, bombs going off and people dying. He would have been looking at the machine at the opposite end of the room and hearing the voices telling him to pick up the gun and kill himself. He would have been trying to concentrate on the numbers on the gauge, the needle bouncing up and down, five, ten, fifteen, twenty…the gun would have been right there on the table in front of him.
Can’t…on. Had he repeated those words over and over in his mind to block out the voices in his head? She concentrated and tried to imagine what it all might have looked like, in spite of her little experience with sight. She had never seen books or magazine or computer images of the period. In fact, the closest she had ever come to visualizing the era was at Case and Kimble’s museum this morning. Like the exhibit of a long-bearded physician in a black waistcoat, administering vaccines in an old-time schoolhouse, or the room full of antique brain wave synchronizers that predated modern entrainment devices, the massive artificial kidney units, the iron lung, the LFP—low-frequency pulse—apparatus used on patients with psychological problems and neurotic disturbances.
And she stopped.
She remembered the LFP, the primitive-looking wood-and-metal box sitting at the end of this table, the large white dial with numbers in increments of five through thirty. And there at the bottom, the manufacturer’s stamp. She remembered thinking it curiously familiar at the time. It read CANTON, OHIO, only the word CANTON was divided by the resting pin of the gauge’s needle and it looked more like CANT! ON.
The numbers and then the letters. Monahan was trying to focus on the gauge and not the gun. It was the only other thing in the room to think about but the bloody films playing out on the wall.
She suddenly sensed something that she hadn’t felt in quite some time.
Unequivocal danger.
She held her breath and listened. Something was terribly wrong, she knew. Something wrong, and she was in the middle of it.
Sherry catches vibes like spiders catch flies, a friend had once boasted, and in spite of her blindness, it was true. There was a time Sherry could accurately describe the guests of a party long afterward, just by hearing their names.
She couldn’t describe them physically, of course. Voices don’t always ring true. But a few minutes of conversation was all it ever took to discern someone’s nature, whether aggressive or passive, proud or kind-natured, whether someone thought himself clever enough to hide a lie.
Sherry’s intuition was without equal. Or better said, had been without equal.
Sherry had never believed in coincidence before, but wasn’t it just a week ago that she had a chance meeting with a man in a hospital waiting room and then again a few days later, only this time across town and carrying a book about the orphanage she grew up in? And then he takes her to an aquarium in Camden that she had been to with someone she loved.
Oh my God, she thought. She wasn’t just getting dull with sight. She was getting stupid!
Someone at Case and Kimble—and it would had to have been one of the two founders—had been here in 1950 with his antiquated LFP microwave machine. And Troy Weir was here to see that no one would ever know, to make sure that the story of Thomas J. Monahan was never told.
Her purse, she thought. Troy had specifically asked her to leave her purse in his office. He didn’t shake hands with the curator Winston when he entered the museum, but he did when he left. She saw him straying slightly behind her until they were out the door. Had Winston given him her house keys?
And if Troy Weir had her keys, it was because he wanted the diary.
She remembered the gun he took from the glove box. He was going to kill her. She needed to get out of the bunker, and there was only one long hallway back to the entrance.
“Find anything?” Weir asked from the other side of the partially cracked door.
Sherry’s heart was pounding in her chest. She shook her head. “Just an old table.”
What was in his hand?
“You don’t look so good
.” Weir cocked his head sideways, studying her face. He took the pipe and pried the door open further. Mortar and pieces of concrete rained down on them as he squeezed into the room.
“You know, I thought you and I were really going to get it on the other night.” He brushed the white dust from his wet hair. “What a shame. I think you would have been good.”
Sherry watched his face come into focus in the ambient light off the walls. He looked so very different all of a sudden. As if the layers of his physical attractiveness were shedding before her eyes. She could see him now as he really was. She could feel the cold chill of his presence.
He reached into his jacket pocket and Sherry began to arch her back, stepping to her left and setting her feet. A snap kick would disarm him, she thought. Then she would roll into a side kick aimed at his solar plexus and that would put her near the door. It wouldn’t kill him, but it would be enough to immobilize him until she could clear the building, and once she was in the woods he might never find her again.
But it wasn’t a gun that he drew, it was a pen, and she saw the floor and leg of the table appear on a cell phone screen in his other hand. She stepped to her left, and he moved to block her way. She saw her shoes and then her legs on the screen of his phone.
She felt a wave of nausea, the white lights coming again, and when her vision cleared she saw a chunk of concrete lying on the high end of the table.
“Don’t worry. I won’t leave you here,” he said. “The friends of your friends might decide to come looking for you one day,” he mocked. “Besides. I have friends too. Friends who can make it look like you shot yourself in your own bed.” He laughed, the sheer evil in him coming to the surface.
Suddenly the table was gone, she could put it no other way. The table was gone and the room was gone and Troy Weir was gone. Everything gone.
She felt herself looking down the end of a long, well-lit hall. She felt herself walking toward the room she was now in.
…The halls were lined with olive metal file cabinets, illuminated by bare lightbulbs in heavy wire casings. There was a man in uniform at the end of the hall, sitting by the front door. He was young and he was in uniform and he was drunkenly raising a bottle of whiskey to his lips. There was a smaller man in a white smock, a weasel of a man, maybe sixty years old. He wore thick spectacles and a stethoscope around his neck and he was standing at the door with the glass window.
A-P, she noted on the tabs of a file cabinet to her right, PZ on the next one. Another cabinet was labeled R-Iodine, R-Calcium-R-Iron, and in large capital letters, SUPPLEMENTS.
A dead mouse lay in a space between the next set of cabinets and these were labeled NUCLEONICS and LFP-ELF respectively. There was a cold black cigar stub balanced on the edge of the last one, and just beyond that, pushed against the wall, sat a metal hospital gurney on rubber wheels. It had restraining straps on it.
The small man in the white smock and glasses was beckoning her to the door with the glass window. She walked past him and through it.
Sherry had experienced dreams of residual memories before, the finer details of things seen or remembered by someone in those last eighteen seconds before death. Such a dream usually came unexpectedly, in the middle of some night, when the subconscious mind comes out to play. Having the recent experience of sight and television, she likened it to instant replay, those dramatic, slow-motion, time-stretched moments when things become evident that could not be seen in real time.
Only this time she wasn’t sleeping and she wasn’t dreaming. This was here and now. This was in the light of day. She knew that something had changed when she took Thomas J. Monahan’s hand. That his distorted memories had thrown some cerebral switch in her head and opened a brand-new door.
She caught the peripheral images of light flickering on the wall to her left, a jeep approaching a spread-eagle woman in the medical corps uniform, the water buffalo, the mist of blood and brains as the grenade was pulled from her clamped teeth.
How many times had she, no he, been made to see it? How much violence had he been forced to watch to desensitize him to death? Was it over hours or days or even months?
The machine was there at the end of the table, the needle on its resting pin, and she knew it would remain that way until the weasel was safely outside the door. The pistol was there on the table where he’d sit. Everything in its place, everything ready to resume.
“Cant…on, Cant…on,” she whispered.
She thought about leaping for the gun, wondering if it was loaded. She looked at it, studied the contour of its frame, the smooth curve of the trigger guard, the barest glint of light on the steel blue barrel. She caught the slightest whiff of cinnamon, the smell of good gun oil. She admired the walnut diamond-stamped grips. She could even imagine the weight of it as she raised it to her…
She took two steps forward and reached for it. She picked the gun up and raised it to her head. “Are you there?” she whispered, and Troy Weir laughed, and as he did she spun and slammed it down on his forehead. It wasn’t a gun, she saw, as she snapped back to reality, but a baseball-sized chunk of concrete. He stumbled as she hit him again and again and the last time she hit him she heard it break the cartilage of his nose.
His hand grabbed hers, wrestling for the weapon, but he was blinded by the blood running into his eyes and their hands were slippery with it as she pulled herself out of his grip and found the opening of the door, and squeezed through it. She ran down the hall, smelling the wet air in front of her as Troy Weir hit the door with his shoulder to follow her. There was a loud groaning sound and small chunks of ceiling began to pelt down on her head, but then she was beyond the door and the mortar began to give way and one of the interior walls of the bunker crumbled under the weight of the roof.
Sherry ran up the stairs and across the glistening ice, hoping she could put enough time and distance between herself and Weir to allow sleet to cover her tracks.
She found her way through the woods by a deer path, crossed a dirt road, and in minutes was at the fence where it had been torn from the ground by the roots of a massive tree. She got on her belly and crawled under the opening, pulling herself forward with her elbows until she was free. Then she stood and ran and it was as if she knew where she was going. As if every step had been predetermined. She saw the front gates of the State Psychiatric Hospital to her left as she crossed a wide field. She began to ascend a ridge when she reentered the trees, rising like the spine of a sleeping giant to the neck of the mountain. A thousand feet higher she was looking out over the Catskills toward the jagged Delaware Water Gap.
The overlook road was visible just above her and she clawed her way up a grassy embankment to a guardrail and followed the road to the top of the mountain.
There were picnic tables around the overlook. A wire safety fence prevented children from wandering out onto Chimney Rock, the most prominent formation overlooking the horizon.
She vaulted the small safety fence and walked out onto the top of the rock.
It was mesmerizing to watch the sleet falling around and beneath her, a haze of white filaments as spare and delicate as spider’s silk. Why had she come here? she wondered. Why hadn’t she run to the asylum’s gates for help?
“Dramatic, wouldn’t you say?”
She turned and saw Troy.
His face and shirt collar were crusted with blood. His hair was wet. Rivulets of pink water coursed beneath his collar.
“You’re still in his head, aren’t you?” Weir said.
Sherry just looked at him.
“You’re going to end it just like he did, except my guess is you won’t survive the fall.” Weir put a hand on the wire fence and threw a leg over the rail.
“They’ll call it that too,” he said, moving toward her on the rock. “A copycat suicide. They’ll say you snapped. Drawn to the grave by a dead man. Lots of magazines will sell that story, I would predict.”
Sherry saw Weir’s hands come out of his pockets. He was ho
lding the cell phone with one and raising the pen with the other. She knew he would be looking at an image of her head on the screen of the phone.
He was going to finish it now.
Sherry raised a finger to her lips in time to catch a stream of blood running from her nose. Her vision began to blur until she could see only light and then broken fragments of Weir and the trees and the sleet, as if they were shards of a shattered mirror. It was happening again, she realized. Whatever he was doing to her was opening that same door and reversing what Thomas Monahan had done to her mind. Troy had created a link between them.
He was thinking, she realized, and then she smiled.
He was instructing her to step off the end of the rocks.
She turned toward the edge of the cliff and leaned forward, seeing glimpses of the rolling hills and showering white lights. She was in that place between sight and blindness again.
“Troy?” She heard his shoes grinding on the dirt behind her and she knew where he was and she turned and thrust out her hand and grabbed his fist clamped around the small device.
“Did you ever imagine MIRA working both ways?” He tried to wrestle his hand from her grip.
“Imagine that a defectively wired mind might mirror your own contrivance. What might happen in a moment of rare eclipse as the device performs in your hand?”
By squeezing the skin cell receptors of his hand, her most unusually configured mind was feeding the link back to him. He scratched with his nails to remove her hand, but she clamped her other over it as well and held on.
“Troy?” she whispered.
“No,” she heard him say. “NO!” he screamed and she knew he was hearing her thoughts.
“Stop it!” he yelled, wriggling in her grasp. “Don’t do this!” he begged.
Sherry pivoted to maintain her grip as he stepped to her side and then past her toward the edge of the cliff.
“Jump,” she said softly.
“Don’t!” he cried.
“Go ahead, Troy, jump.” She was looking his way but could no longer see. She took a breath of fresh air. She had traded her eyes for her gift, for her life.
Second Sight Page 24
