The pounding gets louder. Yelling comes in sharp staccato, like crests of high, frothy waves. Only now do I notice the reflection of a door behind me, the handle jiggling against the steel bolt of an electric lock. A keypad glows green. I’m being held captive.
The staff is trying to get in. Trying to get us to open the door. They sing a chorus, chanting commands, but all I can focus on is the mirror as it ripples and bends.
“Help us!” I scream, shocked by the power of my voice.
But the Oakside staff can’t get in.
The mirror folds in, bulges out, folds in.
“Kenny, we have to go!” I can hear myself shouting, but I can’t take my eyes away from the reflection in front of us. I can hear his breath above me, coming in gulps and gasps. “Kenny, we have to get out of here! It’s coming!”
I tear my eyes from the mirror, wiggling my head out of Kenny’s grip, and frantically look for an escape route. It’s a smaller room than the one I was in the other day with Dr. Keller. There’s a medical gurney, its thin mattress covered only by scratchy-looking disposable sheets with a tiny pillow. Thick nylon straps cross the mattress and hook to metal rods beneath the gurney. This is a procedural room—with a wall of mirrors.
“Kenny, I’m unlocking the door.”
“It won’t unlock. You need the code,” Kenny says, as though in a trance.
I turn back to the mirror. The glass melts into a thick liquid, pulsing like a heartbeat.
“Then tell me! What’s the code?” My voice doesn’t even sound like my own. It’s desperate. I can barely push the words from my throat.
“I broke it. This way they can’t interrupt. They’re not allowed in. Just us. It’s time for this to end. Look! It’s coming!” Kenny is breathless, and it brings a new terror to my gut. Turning back to the mirror, I can see something moving behind Kenny’s reflection, like a shadow trying to pull away from its host.
I tug at Kenny’s big meaty arm, making his head wobble on his neck, but his eyes, orblike, are fixated on the mirror.
“Kenny! You have to help me with the door! The staff are trying to get in, but they can’t!”
I have no way of knowing if Kenny even understands what I’m saying. He doesn’t seem to hear any of the noise on the other side of the door.
Before I can plead my case, I see the oily hair. Shaggy remnants fall in pieces around a gaunt, skullish face. Then come the bottomless holes where eyes should be. But it’s the mouth, with its cracked lips and protruding teeth, which move in silent, urgent intervals, that I stare at, horrified. I’m fixated by the soundless words it forms, its parched skin pulling tighter and tighter over the bone until it looks like the terrible leathery skin might come undone, revealing something even more hideous underneath.
“We have to get closer,” Kenny says, his entranced voice drifting over my shoulder.
I feel his belly against my back. His grip on my wrist has tightened so that I can barely feel my hand. The pounding on the other side of the wall is faster and more feverish than ever, but I still can’t make out what the voices are telling me. It wouldn’t matter if I could. I can’t seem to move from where I’m standing. All I can do is watch that horrible mouth.
“I . . . Kenny, we . . . please,” I whisper, knowing with terrified certainty it won’t make a bit of difference what I say. Kenny’s the one who brought me here. And for what? Legos? The promise of something good in a place that’s so horrible?
“We have to listen to what it’s saying. It’s the only way,” he says so quietly that I can barely hear him over the pounding on the door.
“Why? Why do we have to listen? I don’t understand,” I’m pleading with him now. He starts to push me, lean against me to get me to move toward the mirror with him. Closer to it.
“We have to know what it wants,” he says. Absurdly, his reflection is the most lucid I’ve ever seen him. But this only frightens me more. He’s serious. He’s not hysterical. Whatever he’s doing, he thinks it’s right.
“Kenny, this isn’t the way to make it stop! Listen to me. I’ve talked to Adam, okay? I know what this is, and this isn’t the way. Kenny, no!”
He breaks his gaze from the creature and spins me around, his nose inches from mine.
“He’s one of them, you stupid girl! And besides, he left. This is the only way.”
He turns me and pushes me again, and I can’t hold him back. He could throw me into the mirror if he wanted to. He could feed me to that thing like I was no more than a raw steak getting tossed into a lion’s cage at the zoo.
“But the poem. You gave me Nell’s poem. Remember? You gave that to me so I’d know what happened. So I’d find Adam!”
Kenny grits his teeth. “No! So you’d know to stay away. You should have stayed away. Now it’s too late! There’s no one here for me. Not for us. Just the two of us.”
“What do you mean the two of us? Jesus, Kenny, stop!”
Kenny lunges, and I stumble closer to the mirror. Adam’s words scream through my head.
It tells you what it knows you want to hear. That’s what it murmurs in your ear. That’s how it tries to find its other half.
“Sophie, the code!” I hear a voice screaming, but I can’t hear what it says after that. Kenny’s arm is pressing against my ear.
“Code! You have to . . . we can’t from our . . . he cracked the . . . punch . . . Sophie, listen!” A voice screams from the other side of the wall, but it might as well be speaking another language because I can only catch snatches of what it’s saying.
“HELP!” I scream.
My feet are squeaking against the dull gray floor. It’s only going to be another few seconds before Kenny offers me to that hideous thing in the mirror.
“HELP ME!”
“Kenny, please,” I whisper, now completely drenched with his sweat and mine. Our shared moisture slicks the space between us enough for me to wiggle away from his arm. Finally, my other ear is freed.
“Sophie! The code! One-zero-zero-five-eight-five!”
The shadowy shape has begun to bend away from the glass. Separate from the glass. It’s becoming an entity of its own.
Kenny’s arm flexes. I slide from his grip in a single movement, and I’m up against the door, the metal handle pressed into my palm. The digital keypad above the handle glows like something toxic. A single voice still shouts on the other side, but I can barely hear it over the screaming that echoes inside the room.
15
* * *
THE THING IN THE MIRROR snatches Kenny. It happens so fast that I’m almost not sure it happened at all. He slides up the mirror, the Taker dragging him by his toe. Then there’s blood dripping to the floor, and Kenny hangs from the ceiling above the Taker—suspended by a force I can’t see. Suspended by only his big toe.
The shadowy figure spills onto the dull gray floor, leaving something slick like oil in its wake. The stench of rot fills the air. The Taker looks at Kenny, inspecting its work. Its mouth is moving faster than ever.
I grip the door handle behind my back, hiding it like a secret. I don’t dare take my eyes from the Taker. Its body is more visible outside of the mirror. It’s gaunt, emaciated, like a decomposing shell. The entire room seems to darken and dampen with its presence.
It walks toward Kenny.
The Taker is only inches from his face. He’s as still as a fly caught in a spiderweb, and the Taker sizes him up.
Kenny’s eyes blink with a steady rhythm. Blood has rushed to his head from hanging upside down, and his blue Oakside-issued shirt has crept up his belly, sticking to his stomach with sweat. Where is the blood on the floor coming from?
The shadowy thing lifts what looks like a hand—though its fingers are too long, and too thin, to be any ordinary hand—and reaches for his face.
“Hey!” I yell, the sound leaping from my throat before I can retract it.
The Taker stops cold and slowly turns to face me.
Its mouth moves faster.
“Sophie, you have to unlock the door! The code!” They scream the numbers to me.
But I can’t move. I can only stare at the thing. It takes one slow step toward me, then another. Its mouth is in constant motion, its words lost somewhere in the silence of the room. I can’t hear Kenny breathing. I can’t even hear my own breath.
Kenny moves slightly. The Taker slides back to him faster than I can blink.
“Kenny,” I whisper, pleading with him to defend himself. I take a step toward the Taker, my legs threatening to collapse under me.
His eyes shift in their sockets, and for the first time, he looks at me, his face completely calm. It terrifies me. He looks defeated. He’s given up.
“Now it’s just you two,” he whispers, and before I can take another step forward to help him—how, I don’t know—the Taker lifts its arm, puts its skinny fingerlike tentacles to Kenny’s ear and leans forward to speak.
Kenny’s eyes go wider, and just like that, the life in them dies.
My heart throbs so hard in my chest, I think I might pass out.
“The code, Sophie! Are you still there?”
I back up again, groping for the keypad above the door handle. My fingers ache with the strain as I punch the numbers shouted to me from the other side of the door.
Even though I can recite the code from the repetition, my brain can’t make sense of it. It’s like one of the synapses won’t fire. I’ve forgotten the shapes of the numbers.
I hear a dragging sound behind me, and before I can turn around, I feel the heat of breath on the back of my neck. A putrid smell fills my nostrils and my eyes water. Air catches in the back of my throat, and my trembling fingers stop in midair above the keypad. My muscles feel like they’ve crystallized.
I can’t hear the voice on the other side of the door anymore. All I can hear is the sound of a jaw working, moving up and down, and the clicking of teeth—long, yellowed teeth.
The Taker is right behind me. It wants me to hear. To understand.
“Sophie, unlock the door!”
I’m frozen.
“The keypad, Sophie!”
My shaking finger finds the first number: One. A tiny beeping sound is my reward, and the green button gets momentarily brighter.
As I reach for the next number, the mouth moves into my peripheral vision.
The Taker wants me to turn around and look at it. It wants me to listen to what it’s saying. It wants to tell me the same secret that it shared with Kenny. I can see those long fingers reaching slowly for my face. The voice on the other side of the door is silent, and maybe that fear of being given up on searches out my reserve of bravery. I punch the next number.
Another beep, and again as I hit the zero, then the five, then eight.
And just as I reach for the last five, the Taker tries to step in front of me. I squeeze my eyes shut and scream.
“NO!”
My finger hits a button. I have no idea if it’s the right one. A beep follows, then a series of three rapid beeps. I can barely hear them over the clicking of the rotting jaw, but I clutch the handle of the door like a lifeline and pull back, desperate to put distance between me and this thing, which seems like it’s taking the breath straight from my lungs.
Then I hear another click. This one mechanical. I feel a pinging in the handle. The door has freed itself from the bolt.
I yank the handle so hard it wrenches my shoulder. The door flies open, and when I dare to open my eyes again, I am stunned to find myself staring at a pale, sweating Dr. Keller. He’s collapsed against the wall in the hallway, his hands spread against the gray as though they’re trying to grip something that isn’t there.
“Did you see her?” he asks me, and I can think of nothing to say in return.
His eyes are wide. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen him unsettled. It’s as though he’s registering a phantom before his eyes. Then his gaze moves over my shoulder, and his terror returns. My stomach sinks like an anvil, and I’m 100 percent sure that the Taker is still behind me. But it’s vanished. The only evidence the Taker was here is the residue on the mirror. And what Dr. Keller is staring at: Kenny.
Kenny hangs from the ceiling, one leg bent like a dancer, his foot fixed behind his left knee. His arms are stiff at his sides, not hanging above his head as they should be if gravity were in control. But the most disturbing thing is how Kenny is suspended. His one big toe is hooked into the ceiling panel’s seam—his massive weight held aloft in a way Dr. Keller knows, and I know, should be impossible. Yet there he is. The pool of his blood on the floor glistens like some sort of sacrificial offering. The light catches the puddle and the surface shakes. I can now see that the blood is dripping from his ear—the same ear the Taker murmured into.
“Where . . . where is . . . ” Dr. Keller breathes his words. He can’t take his eyes—or won’t take his eyes—from Kenny. He seems at once horrified and suspicious, as if Kenny might drop from the ceiling and charge him at any moment.
The Pigeon—Gladys—appears and approaches Kenny with the same caution Dr. Keller and I use to observe him. But she is the only one brave enough to touch him. I watch as her shaking, shriveled fingers reach for his neck, which is about at her eye level. She puts two tightly pressed fingers to his bulging neck, squints, and turns away. She shakes her head at Dr. Keller.
And with that prognosis, Dr. Keller regains his composure. The scared man transforms back into the cunning, handsome doctor I’ve come to expect in these horrid gray halls.
“Why did you do that?” I find the courage to ask. “Why did you put me in there with—?” A panic seeps into my veins. The Pigeon has finished her inspection and now stands in the doorway, blocking my view of Kenny, which should be comforting, but somehow isn’t. Dr. Keller is now at my side, and several orderlies in stiff white smocks round the corner, one of them handing Dr. Keller a stethoscope and a blood-pressure cuff.
“Shhh,” he coos. “You’ve already had quite enough excitement.”
Then he presses the stethoscope to my back. The cold slips past the thin denim of my jacket, chilling me to my spine.
“What are you—would you stop?” I flick the stethoscope away and start to raise my other arm, but the Pigeon clasps my wrist with such efficiency, I’m too stunned to move.
“Thank you, Gladys. Sophie, we’ll just check your blood pressure here,” Dr. Keller continues, his voice even and liquid. Gladys tightens the cuff to my arm as Dr. Keller gently pushes the head of the stethoscope to the bend in my elbow.
“That must have been quite a fright for you,” Dr. Keller says. “Poor Kenny, I’m afraid he experienced a psychotic break. He overpowered us, then dragged you into that room.”
This is enough to break the spell of Dr. Keller’s voice. “You’re lying,” I spit. “You’re all lying. And I’m not the only one who knows it.”
I back away, tearing the blood-pressure cuff from my arm, shoving an orderly from my path.
“Oh, I’m afraid you won’t be going anywhere tonight, dear,” the Pigeon says, her beaklike mouth twisting into her version of a smile.
“Watch me.”
I break into a sprint, my mind operating on autopilot. I’m strangely reminded of my fifth-grade teacher, Mrs. Gibbons, telling us about the fight-or-flight instinct and the adrenaline that floods our bloodstream when we’re faced with certain danger.
My legs pump, my arms flail, and my heart chugs. I race down the gray hallway, rounding one corner after the other, passing one nondescript door with its tiny rectangular and wire-mesh window after the next. Finally, the lobby stretches before me. Through the sliding glass doors, I can see my mother’s beat-up Buick waiting for me under the flickering light of the parking lot.
I can hear squeaking shoes behind me, and orders to stop me, to keep me from leaving.
I lunge for the control room to release the inner door. I punch the button so hard I think my palm might split as the footsteps grow closer. The inner door sighs and eases
open. I take my first running step, then another. I’m almost out. My keys jingle in my pocket. I’m almost free.
And then an arm encircles my waist.
The air is shoved from my gut as I’m pulled back inside. Both feet off the ground, I kick, claw, jab. But I can’t reach anything. I can’t reach.
The door grows smaller as I’m dragged away from it.
“Nooo!” I scream, but a hand eases over my mouth.
“There there, no need to get excited. You’re in no shape to go anywhere right now, young lady,” a voice oozes into my ear. A Pigeon’s voice. “You’ll be much safer here with us.”
My arms are pinned against my sides by the same strong grip that’s pulling me back toward the room where Kenny hangs from the ceiling, where something wants to whisper to me from the mirror.
“It appears you’re not just a danger to yourself anymore, now, are you? I mean, look what happened to poor Kenny,” the Pigeon says.
Her hand muffles my response.
“Doctor, I think we’re ready for you.”
Dr. Keller is in front of me now. We’ve stopped in the corridor leading to the mirrored room. He unzips a small leather kit, revealing a set of syringes and vials, clear liquid trembling in their bottles. He deftly removes one of each, and piercing the top of a vial with a syringe, draws the liquid into the needle.
“NO!” I scream from behind the Pigeon’s hand, but it’s no use. I’m too far from the door, not that anyone’s there to hear me anyway.
“Now, this might hurt,” Dr. Keller warns. “But it’s all for the greater good. You’re going to finish the job your sister started.”
The Pigeon offers Dr. Keller my arm, and soon I’m drifting toward gray.
Gray.
Then darkness.
16
* * *
I’M BELOW A TREE, AND it’s hard to breathe. Winds swirl around me, almost through me, shaking needles down from the ponderosa pine that towers above me. The needles fall like snow, piling on top of my shoulders, and I shrug them away. Then the needles flatten into little disks and turn color. A train of green Legos forms a trail, leading into a fog that builds all around me.
The Murmurings Page 15