The Murmurings

by West, Carly Anne

  Pucker-Mouth’s voice rises defensively, and I glance over my shoulder again to reassure myself that they’re still too preoccupied to be paying attention to us. This time, when I turn back to Deb, her eyes find mine with tremendous difficulty; they look heavy and slow.

  “Deb? Can you hear me? Do you understand me?” I squeeze her ankle in hopes of jogging some sort of response from her.

  Her mouth closes, then opens, then closes again. She’s trying to say something. Her breath sounds tight in her throat, and comes out in tiny, mouselike squeaks. I lean closer, and at last, I make out two repeating words.

  “Linen closet.”

  I pull away, shaking my head. “I don’t understand.”

  But her lips shape “linen closet” over and over.

  Suddenly, I feel an iron grip on my shoulder.

  “That’s enough. No more social time for you,” the Pigeon says, dragging me to a standing position.

  She pulls me toward the hallway. Then Robbie’s voice calls from the lobby.

  “Gladys, you need to get over here!”

  “Handle it, Robbie, I’m busy!” she scolds.

  “But Gladys, I . . . I don’t know what to—”

  “Not now, Robbie!”

  It all seems to happen at once.

  I hear a dull banging that sounds like it’s coming from the end of a long tunnel. But when I turn back toward the lobby, I see the shadows of two figures, one of whom is flailing from behind the glass doors. It’s growing dark outside, which makes it difficult to see who it is. But then the doors part, and a frightened-looking Robbie emerges from the Plexiglas room with the door controls. All at once, Evan and Aunt Becca are standing in the lobby, their eyes searching for the nearest person in white, which unfortunately for them and for him happens to be Robbie.

  “Where is she? Where’s Sophie?”

  “Please, I need to see my niece!”

  “Visiting hours are over. You’ll have to come back tomorrow,” Robbie insists, his voice cracking.

  “Please, my sister and I are very worried. You haven’t let us see her since we admitted her, and we’re rethinking—”

  “Where is she?” Evan demands, fists clenched.

  “Sir, please, you’re going to have to calm down,” Robbie pleads.

  “Where is . . . oh God . . . ” Evan gasps.

  The Pigeon’s remarkably strong arm slips across the front of my shoulders while her palm clamps over my mouth with so much force that I nearly bite my own lips. I shake off my shock, and adrenaline shoots through my veins. I pull against the Pigeon’s grip with everything I have. But at the moment, she seems to have more strength, and my struggles are in vain. She tries to jerk me around the corner, but I manage to keep my feet planted in the hall.

  Evan ducks out of view and then starts shouting.

  “Oh my God . . . it’s Deb. Deb? Deb! It’s me. It’s Evan. Do you recognize me?”

  I try to scream but the Pigeon’s hand stifles the sound before it can leave my mouth.

  “Evan, are you sure?” my Aunt Becca says.

  “Please, this is highly inappropriate. You really have to leave. This is against policy,” Pucker-Mouth demands, the strain in her voice on the verge of panic.

  “What did you bastards do to her? What’s wrong with her?”

  “Sir, if you’ll just follow me outside, I can explain,” Robbie says, fear popping in his voice like tiny sparklers.

  “Please,” Aunt Becca repeats. “I just need to see my niece. We’ll leave tonight. We’ll come back tomorrow during normal visiting hours. I just need to see her tonight. We need to see her. To make sure she’s okay. Then we’ll go and come back tomorrow per regulations.”

  Good ol’ Aunt Becca. Always the diplomat.

  I feel the Pigeon lean toward my ear.

  “You’re going to go out there, and you’re going to put on a nice little show for us, or your friend Deb’s going to develop a permanent drooling problem. Do we understand each other?”

  She pinches the muscle on top of my shoulder as punctuation, and I nod, blinking back tears.

  “Good. Now get rid of that look on your face, and let’s go.”

  She marches me to the lobby, releasing my shoulder just in time for Aunt Becca’s worried gaze to find me.

  “Sophie!”

  She nearly knocks me over with a hug so tight, she cuts off my air. I’ve never in my life been happier to suffocate.

  I try to open my mouth, try to say something, but I can’t set aside the knot that’s formed in my throat. Instead, I just squeeze her back, trying to make my hands do the talking my mouth can’t.

  I smell a sweet musk and feel the shadow of Evan close to us, and when I pick my head up from Aunt Becca’s shoulder, I see his faded football jersey, still stained with grass. Even after re-creating him in my nightly dreams, nothing compares to the real thing. He looks better than I’ve ever imagined him.

  Aunt Becca holds me at arm’s length and examines me. It takes every ounce of willpower to not burst into tears. Evan watches me, then turns to Deb in the far corner of the room, then turns back to me again. I give him the faintest nod, and he returns it. In that one exchange, I feel sane for the first time in over a week.

  “Sophie, are you—?”

  “I’m fine, Aunt Becca,” I lie.

  Evan stiffens beside Aunt Becca, and I twitch my head to create a tiny shake, warning him not to pursue it. He seems to get the hint, because his shoulders settle back to a level below his chin.

  “They treat us well here at Oakside Behavioral Institute,” I say, hoping they both catch on to the formality of my speech and the un-Sophie-like delivery. “They’re giving me the help I need.”

  I’m forcing a calm over myself, and I’m surprised to find it’s actually working. My voice betrays only a hint of strain, the quavering only recognizable to the closest observer, which frankly could be anyone in this room except for Robbie. He and Pucker-Mouth stand near Deb, watching in silence. I can feel the Pigeon’s stare on my back. I know the second she gave the command, Robbie and Pucker-Mouth would cart Deb away for another heavy dose of drugs and a visit to the mirrored room.

  “Your mom and I . . .,” Aunt Becca starts to say, her voice catching in her throat. She swallows and tries again, Evan’s hand providing support on her shoulder. “We’ve been so worried about you.”

  Her voice collapses under its own weight. In those few words, I understand everything. That they’re sorry. That they made a mistake in letting Dr. Keller keep me here. That they’re trying to get me out. In Evan’s touch on her shoulder, I see that he’s told them at least some of what we know. I see that he’s forgiven how I betrayed his trust by coming here without him. As with Aunt Becca and my mom, he’s only focused on getting me out, and getting Deb out. And that makes me realize that I have this one chance to communicate with them. And it doesn’t take me long to figure out what I need to say and to whom.

  I lock eyes with Evan to make sure he understands the significance of what I’m going to say, and when he leans slightly forward, I say, “Dr. Keller is just like family. Like a long-lost father. He’s so . . . charming.”

  Evan pulls back from me and furrows his brow, as though he’s trying to unlock my meaning. All at once, the lines disappear from his forehead, and he says, “I’m so glad to hear that. I can think of a few charms he has right off the top of my head.”

  “All right, I think that’s enough visiting for tonight, everyone,” the Pigeon interjects in her most hospitable but firm tone.

  Aunt Becca opens her mouth to object, so I say something first.

  “I’m okay, Aunt Becca. Really. Just go home and take care of Mom, all right? I’ll see you during visiting hours.”

  She frowns and says, “Your mom’s fine. We just—we should have been—I wish I’d—”

  I put my hand in Aunt Becca’s and squeeze. “I know. It’s okay. Just tell her I’m fine.”

  She draws me in to give me another l
ung-collapsing squeeze, and I let her. I feel Evan’s hand reach for mine, and we lace our fingers together. I fight another wave of sobs and pull away from them both using my very last reserve of strength.

  The Pigeon guides me away as Robbie and Pucker-Mouth usher Aunt Becca and Evan out the sliding glass doors to the parking lot.

  When we arrive at my bedroom door, the Pigeon nudges me inside and stands in the doorway, the light from the hallway casting her long shadow on the wall behind my bed.

  “Don’t count on visiting hours anytime soon,” she says.

  Without retorting, I let her feel her moment of victory before she closes the door.

  Because I know three things she doesn’t. I know that Evan understood the message I gave him right there in front of her. I know that Deb found something in the linen closet near her room.

  And I know I have the keycard to get in.

  23

  * * *

  I DON’T HAVE A CLOCK in my room, but it’s not hard to tell when the shift change takes place at night. The diligent squeaking of shoes during the daytime gives way to stuttering, sporadic footsteps that pass the threshold of my door much less frequently. The monotony of this place might threaten to dull my senses if not for my new plan—conceived thanks to Deb’s help.

  I wait for what feels like decades until the stumbling of lazy feet squeaks past my door at what I estimate to be thirty-minute intervals. Except for once—when I feigned sleep—nobody has bothered to check on me since the Pigeon left. As I expect, I hear dragging feet stop before my door and a lock slip from its place. The door sighs open, and the light from the hallway seeps through the sheet I’ve used to cover my face and head. After a brief pause, the door closes, shutting out the light.

  I wait for the footsteps to fade around the corner, then launch out of bed and drag my pillow beneath my sheets, balling the tail of the fitted sheet underneath it and curving it into the rough shape of a sleeping Oakside detainee.

  Slipping Deb’s pilfered keycard from my sock, I pass it through the reader and watch as a green light above the door handle flashes three times before releasing the lock with a tiny ping.

  I crack the door and look to my left, then my right, then my left again before I inch into the hallway. Heading toward the shower room, I stop myself, take another deep breath, then peer around that corner, finding the hallway beyond empty.

  I duck into the corridor and hurry on tiptoe toward the showers. Around the corner on my right is the linen closet—the same room from which Pucker-Mouth pulled a new set of scrubs for me the day I spilled orange juice all over myself. It’s directly across from Deb’s bedroom, and I have a feeling they’ll be checking on her pretty frequently tonight. And I know why that might be the case. The peanut M&M’s mean she had a session with Dr. Keller, which means they might have found out about whatever it was she was going to tell me today. Still, after the risk she took trying to tell me her secret, there’s no way I’m going to let her discovery be in vain. This might be our only shot at getting both of us out of here.

  I inch my head around the corner, and duck just in time to catch a glimpse of a tight topknot lean from Deb’s doorway. I hold my breath, knowing there’s no chance I’ll make it around the next corner, let alone back to my room, before the Pigeon sees me fleeing. I strain my ears and listen for the squeaking of rubber soles, but as each lub of my heart pounds against my chest, I hear nothing to indicate the Pigeon’s movement.

  At last, the footsteps head down the hallway in the opposite direction and fade away. I stealthily peek around the corner again, and after ensuring it’s clear, I move on the balls of my feet toward the linen closet. I glance at Deb’s door and fight the urge to check in on her first. I know I might only get one shot at this, and I need to stick to the plan. I swipe the card through its reader, but my movement is jerky, and a red light followed by a buzzing scolds me that I’ve done it wrong. I hold my breath and look over my shoulder at a thankfully empty hallway. I slide the keycard slower, steadying it with both hands. This time I’m rewarded with a flickering green light. I push the handle down and disappear behind the door, letting it settle closed behind me as I lean against it to catch the breath I forgot I’d been holding.

  “Okay, Deb. I’m here,” I whisper to the room. “Now tell me what you found.”

  I thought my room was small, but this closet is only about seven square feet in size, and with the shelving, there is barely enough room for me to turn around. Cracks of light from the hallway seep in around the door frame. I quickly spot the blue stacks of scrubs. The opposite wall has similar sets, only these are mint green.

  For the other patients. The real patients. The ones being neglected at the expense of Dr. Keller’s obsession and his orderlies’ allegiance to him. I think back to what Deb told me about her excursion to the other side of Oakside, and about the woman in the overcrowded and under-visited room. More than ever, I want to shut this place down. But none of that’s going to happen while Deb and I are trapped here. Even if Evan understood my message, and even if he’s able to come through, that’s only half of the plan. The other half will be up to me when the time comes.

  I scan the room with what I hope are fresh eyes, terrified to turn on a light for fear of it shining underneath the door. Instead, I wait for my eyes to adjust to the dark and imagine I’m Deb on a similar mission just a night earlier.

  On the wall opposite me is a heavy-looking wire shelf filled floor to ceiling with towels and blankets, each embroidered with the Oakside insignia, just like the blanket Evan and I found in the old house in Jerome.

  I follow the shelf to the ceiling, finding nothing out of the ordinary. Then I trace the stacks of blankets to the gray linoleum floor. It practically yawns at its own boredom. As I peer a little closer at the floor, I think I see a groove in the seam of the linoleum. I stand over it and quickly find a perpendicular seam joining its corner, then another at the end of that seam. The last side of the roughly two-foot-by-two-foot-square in the floor is a crease in the linoleum.

  I walk all around the square on the floor, bending to trace my fingers in the grooves. I feel a tiny breeze of air from the cracks, and my heart thuds behind my ribs. I press my fingers into the cracks, trying to pull the edge toward me, but it won’t budge. I push from the same place, but the floor will not give. I stand in the center of the square on the floor, but nothing moves, not the floor and not me.

  I stand outside of the square of linoleum and frown at it. Then, for lack of trying everything else, I run the keycard along the edge of each side of the square. And when I get to the edge closest to my feet, I see a faint green circle illuminate from beneath the floor, and a muffled click tells me I’ve succeeded. The floor pops up, a lip of the square slanting upward toward me, and a dusty wooden staircase illuminates itself below me.

  “A basement?” I question.

  I’m no architect, but I know enough about Arizona buildings to know that it’s not common to have a basement here. Some of the newer houses have them, but that’s only because housing development companies can charge more for a house with a basement. Typically, the clay-laden ground is too hard to dig that deeply. This already feels wrong.

  “A secret basement. What else are you hiding, Dr. Keller?”

  I take one more breath before lowering myself into the stairwell and closing the trapdoor behind me.

  The wooden stairs creek under my weight, and I clamber quickly to the bottom, eager to make the noise stop. What I find ahead leaves me far from comforted.

  I’ve only seen a mausoleum once in my life, but once was enough. It was right after my grandmother’s funeral, and I was maybe four years old. The image of that place is seared into my memory like a scar. I recall an endless row of little doors leading to the resting places of so many people, all for someone’s mother or brother or uncle—or sister.

  The entire place had been made of concrete, floor to ceiling, except for those little doors. So everything had echoed. My shoes w
ith their squeaking patent leather, my mom’s heels with their click-click-clicking as she took her long, glamorous strides. Nell with her rubber soles that chirped in time with her tiny sobs, knowing that she’d never see Nana again.

  Everything was amplified in that place, and sound pinged from one end of the mausoleum to the other. That is, until the sound approached one of those doors. Every time we passed by one of them, sound seemed to disintegrate. I always got a chill thinking about that later. It was as if the doors, and whatever was behind them, had somehow swallowed the sound.

  Oakside’s secret basement looks just like that mausoleum.

  The walls and floor are concrete. The only non-concrete part of the whole basement seems to be the doors and the stairs to each tiny storage room—and those are made of rotting wood. Little black numerals, like house addresses, are nailed to the tops of the doors, each number indicating a range of years. Oakside’s lifespan is noted in five-year increments beginning with 1955 all the way up to the present day. The door at the end of the corridor is labeled with the most recent years.

  A groaning sound above me snaps my attention from the door.

  A giant pipe runs the length of the low ceiling, painted white like the ceiling and the walls down here. Only they’re not really white anymore, not after years of grime and decay.

  I thought Oakside was a hole. Its basement makes the rest of the facility look like a palace. I am quickly regretting descending those stairs. Dust covers every surface. More to the point, it covers the floor, and on that floor are exactly zero sets of footprints. If Deb made it to the basement, she would have left a mark of some sort, which leads me to believe that when she said she didn’t get very far, she meant she got as far as discovering the door, maybe the stairwell, but that’s it. I suddenly feel more alone than ever.