by Yvonne Woon
“An entrance to the tunnel network,” he said, and clicked to the next slide, a photograph of the stairs inside leading down under the earth.
He clicked ahead. A tunnel entrance beneath a building. A staircase in the back of an alley. A wooden hut on the side of Mont Royal, which marked the center of the city.
“And conveniently, they all connect here.”
He showed a black-and-white illustration of a sprawling gothic building with castle spires and pointed alcoves. “This is the Royal Victoria Hospital, just after it was built by the Monitors. Of course, at the time it was called Hôpital Saint-Laurent.”
Something within me began to throb with anticipation, as if years of effort had led up to this moment. I was suddenly overwhelmed with the need to know what rested behind its walls. Not the patients or the doctors and nurses, but something else.…
“In the early days, when Monitors ran the city, Royal Victoria was one of the first hospitals in North America to treat Undead children. Later, during the 1890s, the hospital was taken over by the Plebeians, but this sketch was drawn during the time of the Monitors.”
I blinked and the image was in color.
“Tunnels from all across the city led directly to the hospital supply room. That way, if there was ever an Undead attack, the Monitors could easily access supplies like gauze, ointments, and scissors in the hospital.”
I blinked again, and the flags on the building’s spires seemed to move in the wind.
“After the Monitoring community began to die out, we slowly lost control over Montreal.”
I blinked once more, and the classroom around me seemed to collapse into itself.
“Today, Montreal is no longer run by Monitors, nor is the hospital. In fact, most people here are not even aware that we or the Undead exist.”
That was the last thing I heard before everything went black.
The next thing I knew, I was in the image, standing in the grass on the lawn in front of the hospital. It was a crisp autumn day, a slight breeze making the flags on the spires billow. I was holding a bouquet of flowers.
Four ambulances were parked in the driveway outside the hospital as I walked toward the entrance and through the double doors. In the foyer was a reception area lined with nurses sitting behind a counter. Smiling, I leaned over to get their attention.
“May I help you?” a young nurse asked. She was zaftig, with round cheeks and lots of freckles. She wore a white-and-yellow uniform.
“Yes, I’m visiting the patient in room 151,” I said, holding up the flowers.
“Is the patient related to you?”
“My sis—I mean, brother. He’s my brother,” I said quickly.
The nurse gave me a sad smile. “I’m so sorry,” she said as she typed something into her computer and directed me toward the pediatrics wing.
The hallways were sterile and fluorescent. I looked through the window of the door before opening it, to make sure no other visitors were inside, and then turned the knob.
A little boy lay sleeping in a hospital bed. He looked about five and was very thin. He shifted under the sheets as I closed the door. Flowers lined the windowsill. I set my bouquet on the sill amongst them and approached the bed, checking the floor on either side. It was covered in creamy linoleum. The gap between the frame and floor seemed just big enough to fit my arm in comfortably. Kneeling down, I rolled up my sleeve and reached under the bed.
I couldn’t feel anything at first, but after patting around, my fingers grazed something cool and bumpy. Engraved metal. Relieved, I opened my bag and took out a piece of paper and a stick of graphite. I slid the paper under the bed until it was covering the metal spot, and, quietly as I could, I rubbed the graphite over the paper to make a print of the engraving.
Just as I finished, the door clicked open. I shoved the paper in my pocket, stood up, and leaned over the sleeping boy. I didn’t even know his name. A nurse was holding the door open with an elbow, her back turned to me as she laughed and chatted with someone in the hall. The boy shivered and clutched the sheets to his chest. Gently, I pulled up his blankets and tucked him in. Above me, the lights flickered and slowly darkened until the room, the boy, and the nurse’s laughter all faded away.
I woke up in a strange room, my face cold and wet. A well-dressed man stood over me, holding a spray bottle.
“Ah, here she comes,” he said, his voice gruff. “Sorry to spray you with water, but we tried ammonia several times,” he said, putting the bottle aside. “It seems you have a weak sense of smell.”
“It comes and goes,” I said, sitting up. I was lying on a worn leather couch. The room around me was made almost entirely of mahogany—the floors, the walls, the furniture. Several diplomas and certificates hung above a desk. A medical coat was draped over the back of the chair. On its breast pocket was a name tag that read DR. NEWHAUS.
“Am I in the hospital?” I asked, bewildered. Without thinking, I patted my pockets, looking for the paper that I had rubbed against the floor.
“You’re at St. Clément,” the man said, taking a seat in a chair next to the couch. His face was dull, fleshy, and somehow expressionless. As he stared at me, I noticed that one of his eyes was crooked, as though it was sliding off toward the side of his head. “My name is Dr. Newhaus. I’m your psychology professor, though we haven’t met yet, and I’m also the school doctor.” Opening a briefcase, he pulled out a stethoscope and a flashlight.
“You gave us quite a show,” he said as he listened to my breathing.
“What do you mean—” I began to ask, but he quieted me.
“How strange,” he said, lowering his stethoscope. “You have a slightly irregular heartbeat.”
“It’s just a murmur,” I said quickly. The doctors this summer had noticed it, too. “I’ve had it for a while,” I lied.
Leaning toward me, he listened again, the stethoscope cold beneath my shirt. “This is quite different,” he said. “It almost has the cadence of an Undead—”
I cut him off before he could finish. “What did you say happened to me?” I asked, squirming away from him.
He removed the scope, draped it around his shoulders, and crossed his hands in his lap. “You collapsed during history class and seemed to have had a kind of fainting spell.”
I glanced at the clock above his desk. It had been a few hours since the start of class. “What do you mean?”
“I was hoping you’d be able to tell me.” His expression was so placid that it made me uneasy.
I stared at the paisley patterns in the carpet to avoid his gaze. How had I dreamed of the hospital when I’d never actually been there? It seemed alarmingly similar to my dream of Miss LaBarge.
He studied me with one eye while the other wandered off to the right. “I unsettle you,” he said, his lip curling into a frown. “It’s this.” He motioned to his eye. “I don’t blame you; it makes most students uncomfortable.”
“Oh, no. I, um—” I stammered, feeling suddenly guilty. “It’s not that. It’s just, well…” He waited for me to finish, but I let my sentence trail off.
His expression softened. “Just a moment ago, you were patting your pockets. Did you lose something?”
The rubbing. The dream had been so vivid that when I woke up, I thought I might still have it in my pocket. “Oh, it was just…nothing.”
He raised an eyebrow, but then let it drop. “Do you have any preexisting neurological conditions or a history of brain trauma?”
“No.”
“Have you ever fainted like this before?”
“No.”
“Do you remember anything that might have triggered the event this morning?”
I thought of the slide of the hospital, of how I was overwhelmed with the need to know what was behind the building’s walls. “No.”
Lowering his pad, Dr. Newhaus tried to meet my eyes, but I looked away. “I’m not your enemy,” he said. “I’m here to help you.”
“I’ve had a lot of
bad doctors in the past.”
“I understand,” he said. “So have I. That’s why I decided to become one.”
He smiled, one eye resting on me, the other on the trees swaying outside the window. He seemed trustworthy.
“Can you remember what happened before you fainted?” he said. He crossed his legs, revealing mismatching striped socks.
For some reason, they put me at ease. “I remember Mr. Pollet telling us about the founding of Montreal and its tunnels. I remember him showing us slides of a bunch of old buildings. The last one I saw was of the Royal Victoria Hospital, before everything went black.”
He shined a flashlight into my eyes and asked me to count backward from ten. When I was finished, he asked, “And you don’t remember anything in between then and now?”
Wringing my fingers together, I thought about my dream of Miss LaBarge, about all the sleep I’d lost, and all the mornings I’d woken up in sheets drenched in sweat.
But at least those dreams had happened at night. Passing out in class was different; it was abnormal, intrusive, and frightening. “I had a dream,” I said, looking at my feet. “Or something like one. I’m not really sure.”
“Of what?”
“Of the Royal Victoria Hospital. I was walking through it to a certain room, looking for something. Everything was so clear and detailed, like I’d been there before.”
“Have you?”
I shook my head.
“Can you describe what you saw?”
I told him about the hospital waiting room, about going to the pediatric ward and entering the boy’s room and making a rubbing beneath the bed.
He looked unnerved. “That’s startlingly accurate,” he said. “The layout, the interior of the hospital—that’s all correct. Are you sure you haven’t been there before?”
I nodded.
The doctor frowned. “Have you had other dreams like this?”
I swallowed. “At night, yes. In each of them, I’m searching for something.”
He took notes as I told him about the nightmares I’d had all summer. When I was finished, he made me stand up and walk across the room. He then tested my balance, my vision, and my hearing.
“Physically, everything seems to be fine, though your body is exhausted and sleep deprived. I’m going to schedule you for some tests, just to make sure everything inside is okay.” He leaned forward. “But if I may speak candidly, you’ve been through a lot in the last year, and I think you’d benefit from a little help. I’d like you to consider coming in to see me regularly.”
I wiped off a dusty mark on my stockings, which must have been there from when I fell out of my chair.
“You can think about it if you’d like. In the meantime, these may help you get some sound sleep.” He jotted something down on a pad and tore off the prescriptions for two kinds of pills.
“What are they?” I asked, trying to sound out the names in my head.
“One is an antianxiety medication. The other is an antidepressant.”
“But I’m not depressed.”
“That may be,” he said, in a way that made me think he was humoring me. “However, for now, this medication should put an end to these dreams of yours, and hopefully help you relax and get some much needed sleep.”
“But what if I don’t want to stop them? What if I’m seeing them for a reason?”
“And what reason would that be?” he asked, puzzled.
I let my hands drop into my lap. “I don’t know.”
I spent the rest of the day undergoing tests and scans of my brain. When they all came back normal, Dr. Newhaus reviewed my chart one last time and let me go. By then it was already late afternoon, the shadows shifting over the courtyard as the sun sank in the sky. Classes were over, and students poured out of the buildings. Keeping my head down, I clutched my bag to my chest and hurried through the columns that lined the perimeter of campus. A group of girls was sitting on the stoop of the dormitory, Clementine LaGuerre’s voice ringing above the others.
“Apparently she had some sort of seizure in class today,” she was saying, popping her gum as if to punctuate her sentence. “I heard from one of the fourth-years that she wasn’t even that good of a Monitor at Gottfried,” she added, turning to April and Allison and three other girls who had lived down the hall from me last year.
I hid behind a column and watched them. “She was good,” April said, looking to her sister for approval.
“Well, she wasn’t that good,” Allison corrected. She was only distinguishable from her sister by the mole on her chin and her haughty tone. “She just made a big show whenever she found a dead animal. I bet in reality she was only a little bit above average.” The other girls nodded in agreement.
“So how did she do it?” Clementine asked, her voice calm. “How did she survive the kiss of an Undead?”
I leaned closer, trying to hear Allison’s response, when her eyes met mine. Her face dropped and everyone turned.
Swallowing, I raised my chin and pushed through them, using all my courage to act like I didn’t care. I was almost at the doors when Clementine slipped off the ledge, her legs bare and smooth beneath her wool skirt. “So are you going to answer my question? Or are you keeping it a secret because you know you’re a fraud?”
A fraud? Her words tripped me midstep. Maybe they stung so much because somewhere inside me I agreed with her—I didn’t know how I had gotten first rank, and I didn’t know what was happening to me. All I knew was that it was real—it was all real, and it was separating me from the person I loved the most—Dante. Slowing, I turned around. “Or maybe the truth is too painful to relive,” I said. “But of course you wouldn’t think of that because all you care about is your own ego.”
A hush fell over the girls as Clementine struggled to respond, but I was already through the doors and up the stairs to my room. Opening my dresser, I rummaged through my underwear drawer until I found a half-burned candle left over from Eleanor’s stash last year. Even though it was still light out, I lit the wick and set it on my desk, feeling suddenly better as I stepped back and stared at it, imagining I was still at Gottfried.
Before the wax could even melt, a gust of wind came in through the window and blew the flame out. Except it didn’t feel like wind, exactly. Approaching the candle, I held my hand up, letting the black smoke coil around my fingers. The breeze had a smell to it, a taste, a wetness, as if it were the long cold breath of someone I had known in a previous life. Dante.
I ran downstairs, bursting through the doors to where the girls still stood on the stoop. Clementine put a hand on her hip. “You have something to say to me?”
But I barely heard her. She couldn’t feel it; none of them could. When I made it to the school gates, I stopped and balanced at the edge of the curb, feeling the breeze lick at my ankles.
I could feel Dante before I could see him. A prickling sensation climbed up my legs, making them move, and suddenly I was winding through the Montreal streets, following a thin strand of air as it swirled past people on the sidewalk, coaxing them out of the way.
My skin tingled as I passed butcher shops, fish markets, a veterinary clinic, and a funeral home. Animals, humans, soulless and empty, I could feel all of them—some intensely, some weakly; their presences grasping at me like the fingers of a ghost. Disoriented, I spun around, the lights of the intersections changing from green to yellow to red as I glanced down one street and then the next, trying to figure out which one led to Dante. A throng of people in suits pressed past me as the walk sign blinked white.
I had to find a way to filter it all out. Letting my hands drop to my sides, I closed my eyes and concentrated on Dante, remembering the way his presence felt—its weight, its texture, the way it seemed to absorb me.…
“Are you okay?” a balding man with a briefcase asked, tapping me on the shoulder.
Frustrated, I brushed him off and closed my eyes. Unbuttoning my cardigan, I let the breeze lap against my chest until eve
rything around me—the cars, the people, the traffic lights, and the yelling; the wisps of the dead beckoning me—blurred into white noise.
I found myself outside a looming cathedral, its arches chiseled with saints, their faces darkened by the elements. Running up the steps, I pushed at the doors until they parted with a gasp. Tea lights lined the entrance. A handful of people were scattered about in the pews, their heads bowed. Windows stained the light red, blue, purple, gold. No one looked up when I followed Dante’s presence down the left side of the cathedral to an alcove behind the altar.
Dozens of faded tapestries hung from the walls, each displaying an old map. I approached one that illustrated the path from earth to the afterlife, with a square-sailed ship traveling toward a frayed edge and beyond. In the still air of the church, the tapestry billowed.
“Dante?” I whispered, passing my hand over the heavy cloth, the material coarse beneath my fingertips. But it was just a draft that had blown in. I followed the current to a door that opened onto to a lush, tangled cemetery, its walls overgrown with flowering vines.
The wind blew patterns into the yellow grass until it rearranged itself into a path. I took a step, the grass flattening beneath my shoes, and then another, around a dry fountain and toward the corner of the yard, where a boy was bending over a grave.
Stopping behind a tree, I watched him, suddenly nervous. Was it him or someone else? This boy looked older, taller, more like a man—far older than seventeen years. His shoulders curled as if they were too wide for his body; a white-collared shirt stretched over them. His long dark hair was pulled into a messy knot, a stray lock falling in front of his face as he stood up.
Trembling, I waited for him to turn around. And when he did, he was both familiar and strange—his pensive eyes and ashen cheek as pale and angular as stone—they were all exactly as I remembered, though somehow sad, like a statue that looked all the more beautiful in person.
A branch cracked beneath my foot, and Dante’s gaze met mine, his lips forming my name.
“Renée?”
He took a step toward me and then stopped, as if he were too scared to come any closer—as if I weren’t real. Suddenly I felt like I was seeing him for the first time; like we were meeting each other all over again in Crude Sciences, shivering as our fingers touched beneath the table.