by Amy Plum
“No, what’s wrong with you?” Remi points his finger in my face. “You’d rather we all die than four of us get out alive? What would Fergus want?”
“I don’t give a shit what Fergus wants,” I growl. “We’re taking him with us.”
Remi sees I’m not backing down. He narrows his eyes at me and turns to Sinclair, shaking his head in defeat. Sinclair shrugs his shoulders and walks back to us.
“How are we going to carry him?” I ask Ant. “Can you make us a stretcher like you do in the Void?”
Ant closes her eyes. After a moment she opens them and shakes her head. “I have to feel relaxed. There is no way I can be calm enough here.”
“Is there anything in our bags?” I ask, swinging the backpack off my shoulders and unzipping it. Inside are a flashlight, a light blanket, and a camping canteen. I hold it up, looking quizzically at Ant.
Sinclair bursts out laughing.
Ant shrugs. “I didn’t know what we would need.”
“That’s okay.” Eyeing Sinclair, I say, “We’ll all help plan next time.”
Ant points to where a rusty fire escape ladder protrudes from a pile of fallen bricks and rubble. “Maybe we could use that,” she says. She picks her way over and shakes it loose. “It’s not heavy.”
“Perfect,” I say, and help her carry it to where Fergus lies.
Sinclair seems resigned to helping us. “It’s long enough to fit his body if his legs hang off the back,” he remarks, and bending down, lifts Fergus by the armpits. “You get his feet.”
We hoist Fergus up while Ant slides the ladder beneath him. “Let’s give it a try,” I say, and Sinclair pulls up the ladder by the front rung. I grab the side rails on the back, and we lift. It’s heavy but doable.
Fergus’s knees dangle over the back rung, his feet knocking against my legs. I wedge myself between his calves and nod at Sinclair. “Not a bad stretcher.”
We set Fergus back down. The smoke is so thick now, my eyes are watering. “I’m all for going through the door, but shouldn’t we check it out first?” I say, choking on my words. The fumes have begun to smell like burning plastic.
“I’ll do it,” says Remi, who has been watching our makeshift stretcher exercise dubiously. Even if he’s not enthusiastic about bringing Fergus along, he wants to show he’s still part of the team. “That boy monster . . . it’s not going to hurt me, is it?”
“We’re the ones who hurt him,” Ant says, stepping forward to join Remi. “Brett,” she calls, “do you want us to follow you? Through that door?”
Brett’s shape levitates and drifts out of the doorway, leaving them room to pass. Ant looks back at us for reassurance as Remi steps forward and grabs the door handle. As soon as he touches it, our surroundings change. The red filter is gone and the alley has become a tunnel. Sinclair and I stand on a set of tracks.
Multifaced Brett lets out a high-pitched screech that sounds like metal scraping metal, a noise echoed by the screaming of train brakes. Twin beams of light shine from my right, growing stronger every millisecond.
“Grab the ladder!” I yell.
Sinclair gapes at me. He sees me grab my end of the ladder and, suddenly remembering we’re supposed to be carrying Fergus, bends down to grasp the front rung.
“Remi! Go!” I scream.
“But we don’t know what’s behind . . .” he begins, and then looks around and sees the tracks. The oncoming train. He turns the handle, throws the door open, and flings himself inside. Ant tumbles in after him.
The front car of a subway train comes hurtling around a corner just yards away from us, lights blinding. Sinclair freezes, eyes glued to the oncoming train.
“Sinclair!” I scream, jolting him from his paralysis.
He bolts ahead, almost jerking the ladder from my grasp. Fergus’s body tilts dangerously to one side. I tighten my hold and jerk up to tip him back onto the ladder as we pitch forward.
Brett and the train make the same metallic shriek, an earsplitting grind as the train locks its brakes. The boy-monster pushes me through the door just as the train crashes by.
Chapter 3
Ant
WE ARE IN A ROOM AS LONG AS TWO OLYMPIC swimming pools placed end to end (so approximately one hundred meters or three hundred twenty-eight feet) but only as wide as one pool (twenty-five meters or eighty-two feet). Two rows of cast-iron beds run the length of the room—one row down either side.
A single bed is generally ninety-nine centimeters wide (thirty-nine inches), and since they are spaced one bed apart from one another with gaps left on either end of the room, there should be forty-nine beds. But people generally prefer organizing groups in even numbers, so I predict there are fifty beds on each side, meaning one hundred in all.
The air smells like mildew and rancid pee.
The metal bed frames have peeling white paint and their thin mattresses are spotted with easily decipherable stains: blood, urine, feces.
On the two end walls are wooden doors. Closed.
A row of floor-to-ceiling windows runs along one wall. They are the length of two beds with half a bed space between them, so thirty-nine-point-six, round up to even number—forty windows. Some of the panes are broken. Others are so dirty they are almost impossible to see through. Although it’s not dark outside, very little light is able to filter in.
A row of . . . I count . . . twenty-five lights with dirty glass shades hang down the center of the ceiling. Most are broken, except for one glowing steadily on the far end. The rest flicker on and off at different tempos.
These details—the stench, the decay, the sense that a disaster happened years ago, right here in this spot—trigger a visceral reaction in me. My chest is tight. My throat is clenched. I feel my pulse. My heart is beating faster than normal.
There is a buzzing sound, like static, coming from behind me. The monster . . . Brett . . . hovers next to the windows. He stands not really on the floor, but a few inches beneath the wooden floorboards. He reminds me of a ghost who doesn’t realize that he aimed low. My heartbeat remains accelerated.
I begin to tap the floor, but stop after two because I don’t remember what I’ve got with me. One tap for my hat. Two more for my gloves. I touch my pocket. Two more for my notebook and pen. That’s five things. And with a stabbing feeling in my chest, I remember. George. She’s my sixth thing. My most important thing. And she’s gone.
I sent her away. I had to. Fergus almost died for her. Might still die, I think, and turn to see Cata and Sinclair heaped on the floor on either end of the ladder. Fergus has rolled off it. He lies on his back, arms stretched out on either side and head facing away from me. Getting up, I walk quickly to him, turn his face toward the ceiling, and hold my hand in front of his mouth. Warm air puffs on my palm. The tight strap across my chest loosens a fraction.
Cata sits up and raises a hand to her forehead. She glances at me, red-eyed and shaking. I run through the facial recognition flash cards I memorized to help me identify emotions. Cata is in shock.
I should say something like, Are you okay? But the words don’t come.
“That was too close,” she says with a tremor in her voice.
Remi lies motionless on the ground a few feet away from us. I walk over to him and squat by his head, holding my hand over his lips. He’s breathing too.
His eyelids flutter open and, seeing me so close, he jerks away. Startled, I think, classifying his emotion. He squeezes his eyes closed again. “Do you have to lurk?” he murmurs.
“I was making sure you were alive.”
“I’m alive. Now can I have some personal space?”
I back off as Remi rubs his hand against his temple and holds it up to see it smeared with blood. His eyes grow wide. Scared, I identify. I should reassure him. “It’s just a small cut.”
“What is this place?” he asks, dabbing at the blood with his T-shirt. Reassured that his wound is not serious, he looks around.
“What is anything in a nightmare?
” Cata replies, rising to her feet. “It could be one of Brett’s memories. It could be a scene from a book he read or a film he saw. Or it could be a sample of his unleashed imagination.”
All around us the room glitches, wavering and becoming solid again. “More like unleashed brain,” remarks Sinclair in a voice quiet enough that he must not require a response from us.
I look back to where Brett hovers. He’s staring at the far end of the room. There’s an antique upright piano in the corner, and as I watch, a figure slowly materializes, crouched over the keyboard. It is dressed in a long-sleeved nightgown and has a shock of stringy gray hair. I can’t see the face, but it reminds me of my great-aunt Ruby after she went crazy and my uncle found her living in the dog’s house in her backyard. It was a Great Dane’s doghouse, but still . . . doghouse.
The sound of piano notes unfurl like a bandage, I think, congratulating myself on the simile. I’ve been working on similes and metaphors as an exercise at nonlinear thinking. The song is played slowly but inevitably, like a dirge. The song is in a minor key and most of the keys are out of tune. It reminds me of the old-fashioned horror movies they show on TV late at night.
“Nice,” moans Sinclair, dusting himself off. “All we need now is a chorus of creepy kids’ voices and we’ll be stuck in Children of the Corn.” I have not seen that film but suppose there are children singing in the soundtrack.
From the tilt of Sinclair’s chin and ramrod-straight back, I think he’s trying to act brave, but he avoids looking at the piano player. I glance back and notice that the elderly person’s fingers aren’t actually touching the keys, but the music is playing all the same.
Goose bumps rise on my arms, and my throat closes. Fear. I tap five times on the floor and, inhaling deeply, remind myself that this is just a dream. One that’s going to end in . . . how long?
I access that place in my mind that always has a stopwatch running and make an adjustment for the heightened heart rate. “Twenty-eight minutes to go,” I say, more to myself than to the others, but I can see the remark register in the others’ silence.
“What can be going on in Brett’s brain?” Cata asks after a moment.
“Sinclair suggested that his ‘brain got fried’ in the experiment,” I say, avoiding using air quotes. People don’t tend to like that when you’re referring to their statements, even if they have used colloquial language. “But, seeing that none of the rest of us were affected, I think that’s unlikely.”
Sinclair nods, accepting my argument. He glances at Brett’s writhing, flickering form. “I’ll bet he was already messed up when he signed up for the test. And those voices out there in the alleyway . . . I’ll bet those were his parents.”
“This isn’t just a regular old nightmare. What kind of insomnia would make someone’s dreams this . . . bizarre?” Remi asks.
“Maybe he hasn’t slept for a really long time and it made him delusional,” Cata offers.
“No,” I say, shaking my head. “I’ve studied insomnia, and . . .”
Sinclair is looking at me funny.
“What?”
“Nothing,” he replies, lifting an eyebrow at Cata.
She frowns and shakes her head. “Go ahead, Ant,” she urges.
“It’s completely normal to try to understand a disorder after you have been diagnosed with it,” I insist.
“You’re totally right!” Sinclair says. I can’t tell from his expression whether he means it or if he’s being sarcastic. A lot of his expressions are not on my flash cards.
I shake my head. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Come on, Ant,” pleads Cata.
I sigh and try to phrase it in a way that won’t make them stare. “One of the voices mentioned FFI and brain degeneration. FFI stands for fatal familial insomnia. It’s like mad cow disease, eating up parts of the brain. The person can’t sleep and finally dies. There’s a whole phase before that happens where they’re hallucinating and delirious.”
We all look at Brett. He is Rooster Head again. Sinclair says, “Well, that would definitely qualify someone for a cutting-edge insomnia study.”
“And if we appear in the Dreamfall the way we perceive ourselves, it explains how he looks. There has to be something really wrong with his brain if he sees himself like that,” Cata says. After giving Fergus a once-over, she walks over to one of the beds, wrinkling her nose at the stains and choosing a clean patch to perch on.
“If he doesn’t have much of a rational brain left . . . if he’s in the delusional stage of the illness . . . maybe that’s why he can’t get into the Void,” I suggest. “He’s stuck in the dream phase.”
Everyone looks at me like I just created electricity. (Simile.) “It’s just a hypothesis,” I say. The room starts glitching again. A large mirror appears above each bed on the nonwindow side of the room. Contained in each mirror is an identical full-length image of a teenage boy.
He is blond and emaciated, and his eyes are empty and unfocused. He wears striped pajamas identical to the ones Rooster Head wears, but no straitjacket. He takes something invisible out of the pajama top pocket and mimes combing his hair.
I don’t understand why something so simple affects me so strongly, but the combination of his hollow gaze and the ineffective use of an imaginary comb on his bed hair makes me shudder involuntarily.
I glance over at where Rooster Head floats, and for once his twitching seems minimal, just an occasional glitch as he stares intently at the mirrors.
“The kid in the mirror is Brett in real life,” guesses Sinclair. “At least, it looks like what you can see of his face when he’s human.”
“Yep, that’s him,” agrees Remi.
“He definitely looks crazy,” confirms Cata as the boy in the mirror stops combing his hair and starts pretending he’s buttoning his pajamas. They’re already buttoned up to the collar, but he’s miming the action with great concentration.
“I don’t know what’s scarier. The old hag playing show tunes or Mime Boy dressing himself for a day in the mental asylum,” Sinclair comments.
“Unicorn,” comments Remi.
“What?” asks Sinclair.
“It’s a unicorn now. Playing the piano,” Remi says, pointing.
The stringy gray hair has been replaced by what looks like the head of one of the corpse horses from the alley, but there is a horn protruding from it. A band of dried blood circles the neck like a scarlet ribbon (simile) where the head has been stitched onto the body in the nightgown with thick black thread. As if sensing our stares, the thing turns its head slowly to us, the head pivoting one hundred eighty degrees . . . way farther than it should be able to go. Its mouth opens and closes as it sings, “Waaaaaay down upon the Swanee River. Far, far awaaaaaaay.” It has a rich, nasal Broadway-singer voice.
“Fuck. Me,” yelps Sinclair. He is no longer trying to act brave. He looks completely “freaked out.”
“Show-tune unicorn is definitely scarier,” Cata murmurs as it turns slowly back to the piano and continues singing.
The boy in the mirror has started using an invisible toothbrush. From above us comes the same voice we heard in the alley. It’s so loud, it feels like my eardrums are going to burst. I press my hat flaps hard against my ears to muffle the sound.
“Do you think Brett can hear us, honey?” the woman’s voice says. But now her voice is warped. . . . It sounds like it’s been slowed down.
“Dr. Zhu says he can hear our voices, but she’s not sure if Brett understands what we’re saying,” the man responds.
“What do we do if this doesn’t work?” the woman asks. “The clinic says their staff isn’t trained to care for this severe of a condition.”
“Zhu mentioned the Priory,” the man says.
“We can’t send him there. That place is an asylum!” the woman’s voice responds, getting lower and slower until it kind of grinds to a stop. Mirror Brett continues brushing his teeth, his eyes wide and vacant.
“We’re i
n an asylum,” I say. Although I used some deductive reasoning to come to my conclusion, I am still extrapolating, so there remains some epistemic uncertainty. But George would say it isn’t the time to bring that up, and now that she’s gone, I’ve begun to think about how she would do things. So I keep quiet.
Cata nods. “I think you’re right. This must be straight from his imagination. This is probably what he fears most—being put into a place like this.” She raises her hand to her mouth and stares between the boy in the mirror and the floating static monster. “That is so incredibly horrific. I can’t even imagine what he’s going through.”
“This whole dream is coming from someone whose brain is being eaten up by a disease,” Remi says.
Sinclair moans. “Oh man. We are well and truly screwed.”
A clicking sound starts up in the direction of the door next to the piano player, who has switched to a high-pitched rendition of “Moon River.” A dark liquid starts pouring into the room from the crack beneath the door as the clicking sound grows louder.
“What is . . .” Remi says, and then as we all realize what it is, he scrambles to his feet and runs toward the windows. Climbing up to perch on the windowsill a couple of feet off the ground, he cowers as the stream widens. The clicking noise morphs into a metallic scuttling as millions of cockroaches pour under the door and spread outward to fill the width of the room with their teeming mass.
“Quick! Get Fergus onto a bed!” I yell. Cata and Sinclair unfreeze and rush to pick him up. They manage to yank his rag-doll body onto one of the mattresses before stepping up onto it themselves, and watch with expressions of horror as the wave of insects floods toward them.
I scramble onto the mattress of the closest bed and clutch the metal headboard, more for emotional support than for physical. The cockroaches are swarming up and over everything in their path. The unicorn continues to play as the cockroaches scale its body. As they reach its face and pour into its mouth, it starts gagging, coughing, and spitting. It stands abruptly and begins flailing like it’s having an epileptic fit.