The Institute

by Stephen King

  “He’s all right, situation under control!” Hadad bellowed. “Go back to your tables! He’s fine!”

  The kids drew away, silent now, watching. Luke leaned over to Helen and spoke in a low voice. “I don’t think he’s breathing.”

  “Maybe he is and maybe he isn’t,” Helen said, “but look at that one.” She pointed to the twin who had been driven to the wall. Luke saw that the little girl’s eyes were glazed and her head looked all crooked on her neck. Blood was running down one of her cheeks and dripping onto the shoulder of her dress.

  “Wake up!” the other twin was shouting, and began to shake her. Silverware flew from the tables in a storm; kids and caretakers ducked. “Wake up, Harry didn’t mean to hurt you, wake up, WAKE UP!”

  “Which one is which?” Luke asked Helen, but it was Avery who replied, and in that same eerily calm voice.

  “The screamy one throwing the silverware is Gerda. The dead one is Greta.”

  “She’s not dead,” Helen said in a shocked voice. “She can’t be.”

  Knives, forks, and spoons rose to the ceiling (I could never do anything like that, Luke thought) and then fell with a clatter.

  “She is, though,” Avery said matter-of-factly. “So is Harry.” He stood up, holding one of Helen’s hands and one of Luke’s. “I liked Harry even if he did push me down. I’m not hungry anymore.” He looked from one to the other. “And neither are you guys.”

  The three of them left unnoticed, giving the screaming twin and her dead sister a wide berth. Dr. Evans came striding up the hall from the elevator, looking harried and put out. Probably he was eating his dinner, Luke thought.

  Behind them, Carlos was calling, “Everyone’s fine, you guys! Settle down and finish your dinner, everyone’s just fine!”

  “The dots killed him,” Avery said. “Dr. Hendricks and Dr. Evans never should have showed him the dots even if he was a pink. Maybe his BDNF was still too high. Or maybe it was something else, like a allergy.”

  “What’s BDNF?” Helen asked.

  “I don’t know. I only know that if kids have a really high one, they shouldn’t get the big shots until Back Half.”

  “What about you?” Helen asked, turning to Luke.

  Luke shook his head. Kalisha mentioned it once, and he had heard the initials bandied about on a couple of his wandering expeditions. He’d thought about googling BDNF, but was wary it might set off an alarm.

  “You’ve never had them, have you?” Luke asked Avery. “The big shots? The special tests?”

  “No. But I will. In Back Half.” He looked at Luke solemnly. “Dr. Evans might get in trouble for what he did to Harry. I hope he does. I’m scared to death of the lights. And the big shots. The powerful shots.”

  “Me too,” Helen said. “The shots I’ve gotten already are bad enough.”

  Luke thought of telling Helen and Avery about the shot that had made his throat close up, or the two that had made him vomit (seeing those goddamned dots each time he heaved), but it seemed like pretty small beans compared to what had just happened to Harry.

  “Make way, you guys,” Joe said.

  They stood against the wall near the poster saying I CHOOSE TO BE HAPPY. Joe and Hadad passed them with Harry Cross’s body. Carlos had the little girl with the broken neck. It lolled back and forth over his arm, her hair hanging down. Luke, Helen, and Avery watched them until they got into the elevator, and Luke found himself wondering if the morgue was on E-Level or F.

  “She looked like a doll,” Luke heard himself say. “She looked like her own doll.”

  Avery, whose eerie, sybilline calm had actually been shock, began to cry.

  “I’m going to my room,” Helen said. She patted Luke on the shoulder and kissed Avery on the cheek. “See you guys tomorrow.”

  Only they didn’t. The blue caretakers came for her in the night and they saw her no more.

  6

  Avery urinated, brushed his teeth, dressed in the pj’s he now kept in Luke’s room, and got into Luke’s bed. Luke did his own bathroom business, got in with the Avester, and turned out the light. He put his forehead against Avery’s and whispered, “I have to get out of here.”

  How?

  Not a spoken word but one that briefly lit up in his mind and then faded away. Luke was getting a little better at catching these thoughts now, but he could only do it when Avery was close, and sometimes still couldn’t do it at all. The dots—what Avery said were the Stasi Lights—had given him some TP, but not much. Just like his TK had never been much. His IQ might be over the moon, but in terms of psychic ability, he was a dope. I could use some more, he thought, and one of his grandfather’s old sayings occurred to him: wish in one hand, shit in the other, see which one fills up first.

  “I don’t know,” Luke said. What he did know was that he had been here a long time—longer than Helen, and she was gone. They would come for him soon.

  7

  In the middle of the night, Avery shook Luke out of a dream about Greta Wilcox—Greta lying against the wall with her head all wrong on her neck. This was not a dream he was sorry to leave. The Avester was huddled up against him, all knees and sharp elbows, shivering like a dog caught in a thunderstorm. Luke turned on the bedside lamp. Avery’s eyes were swimming with tears.

  “What’s wrong?” Luke asked. “Bad dream?”

  “No. They woke me up.”

  “Who?” Luke looked around, but the room was empty and the door was shut.

  “Sha. And Iris.”

  “You can hear Iris as well as Kalisha?” This was new.

  “I couldn’t before, but . . . they had the movies, then they had the dots, then they had the sparkler, then they had their group hug with their heads together, I told you about that—”

  “Yes.”

  “Usually it’s better afterward, the headaches go away for awhile, but Iris’s came back as soon as the hug was over and it was so bad she started screaming and wouldn’t stop.” Avery’s voice rose beyond its usual treble, wavering in a way that made Luke feel cold all over. “ ‘My head, my head, it’s splitting open, oh my poor head, make it stop, somebody make it st—’ ”

  Luke gave Avery a hard shake. “Lower your voice. They might be listening.”

  Avery took several deep breaths. “I wish you could hear me inside your head, like Sha. I could tell you everything then. Telling out loud is hard for me.”

  “Try.”

  “Sha and Nicky tried to comfort her, but they couldn’t. She scratched at Sha and tried to punch Nicky. Then Dr. Hendricks came—he was still in his pajamas—and he called for the red guys. They were going to take Iris away.”

  “To the back half of Back Half?”

  “I think so. But then she started to get better.”

  “Maybe they gave her a painkiller. Or a sedative.”

  “I don’t think so. I think she just got better. Maybe Kalisha helped her?”

  “Don’t ask me,” Luke said. “How would I know?”

  But Avery wasn’t listening. “There’s a way to help, maybe. A way they can . . .” He trailed off. Luke thought he was going back to sleep. Then Avery stirred and said, “There’s something really bad over there.”

  “It’s all bad over there,” Luke said. “The movies, the shots, the dots . . . all bad.”

  “Yeah, but it’s something else. Something worse. Like . . . I dunno . . .”

  Luke put his forehead against Avery’s and listened as hard as he could. What he picked up was the sound of an airplane passing far overhead. “A sound? Kind of a droning sound?”

  “Yes! But not like an airplane. More like a hive of bees. It’s the hum. I think it comes from the back half of Back Half.”

  Avery shifted in the bed. In the light of the lamp, he no longer looked like a child; he looked like a worried old man. “The headaches get worse and worse and last longer and longer, because they won’t stop making them look at the dots . . . you know, the lights . . . and they won’t stop giving
them the shots and making them watch the movies.”

  “And the sparkler,” Luke said. “They have to look at that, because it’s the trigger.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Nothing. Go to sleep.”

  “I don’t think I can.”

  “Try.”

  Luke put his arms around Avery, and looked up at the ceiling. He was thinking of a bluesy old song his mother sometimes used to sing: I was yours from the start, you took my heart. You got the best, so what the hell, come on, baby, take the rest.

  Luke was increasingly sure that was exactly what they were there for: To have the best taken away. They were weaponized here, and used there until they were emptied out. Then they went to the back half of Back Half, where they joined the drone . . . whatever that was.

  Things like that don’t happen, he told himself. Except people would say things like the Institute didn’t happen, either, certainly not in America, and if they did, word would get out because you couldn’t keep anything a secret these days; everyone blabbed. Yet here he was. Here they were. The thought of Harry Cross seizing and foaming at the mouth on the cafeteria floor was awful, the sight of that harmless little girl with her head on crooked and her glazed eyes staring at nothing was worse, but nothing he could think of was as terrible as minds subjected to constant assault until they finally became part of a hive drone. According to the Avester that had almost happened to Iris tonight, and it would soon happen to Nicky, heartthrob of all the girls, and wisecracking George.

  And Kalisha.

  Luke finally slept. When he woke, breakfast was long over and he was alone in the bed. Luke ran down the hall and burst into Avery’s room, sure of what he would find, but the Avester’s posters were still on the walls and his G.I. Joes were still on the bureau, this morning in a skirmish line.

  Luke breathed a sigh of relief, then cringed when he was slapped across the back of the head. He turned and saw Winona (last name: Briggs). “Put on some clothes, young man. I’m not interested in seeing any male in his undies unless he’s at least twenty-two and buffed out. You’re not either one.”

  She waited for him to get going. Luke gave her the finger (okay, so he held it hidden against his chest instead of flashing it, but it still felt good) and returned to his room to dress. Far down the hall, where it met the next corridor, he saw a Dandux laundry basket. It could have belonged to Jolene or one of the other housekeepers who had appeared to help deal with the current influx of “guests,” but he knew it was Maureen’s. He could feel her. She was back.

  8

  When he saw her fifteen minutes later, Luke thought, This woman is sicker than ever.

  She was cleaning out the twins’ room, taking down the posters of Disney princes and princesses and putting them carefully in a cardboard box. The little Gs’ beds had already been stripped, the sheets piled in Maureen’s basket with the other dirty laundry she had collected.

  “Where’s Gerda?” Luke asked. He also wondered where Greta and Harry were, not to mention any others who might have died as a result of their bullshit experiments. Was there perhaps a crematorium somewhere in this hole of hell? Maybe way down on F-Level? If so, it must have state-of-the-art filters, or he would have smelled the smoke of burning children.

  “Ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies. Get out of here, boy, and go about your business.” Her voice was brisk and dry, dismissive, but all that was show. Even low-grade telepathy could be useful.

  Luke got an apple from the bowl of fruit in the caff, and a pack of Round-Ups (SMOKE JUST LIKE DADDY) from one of the vending machines. The pack of candy cigarettes made him miss Kalisha, but it also made him feel close to her. He peeked out at the playground, where eight or ten kids were using the equipment—a full house, compared to when Luke himself had come in. Avery was sitting on one of the pads surrounding the trampoline, his head on his chest, his eyes closed, fast asleep. Luke wasn’t surprised. Little shit had had a tough night.

  Someone thumped his shoulder, hard but not in an unfriendly way. Luke turned and saw Stevie Whipple—one of the new kids. “Man, that was bad last night,” Stevie said. “You know, the big redhead and that little girl.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “Then this morning those guys in the red unis came and took that punk-rock girl to Back Half.”

  Luke looked at Stevie in silent dismay. “Helen?”

  “Yeah, her. This place sucks,” Stevie said, staring out at the playground. “I wish I had, like, jet-boots. I’d be gone so fast it’d make your head spin.”

  “Jet-boots and a bomb,” Luke said.

  “Huh?”

  “Bomb the motherfucker, then fly away.”

  Stevie considered this, his moon face going slack, then laughed. “That’s good. Yeah, bomb it flat and then jet-boot the hell outta here. Hey, you ain’t got an extra token, do you? I get hungry this time of day and I ain’t much on apples. I’m more of a Twix man. Or Funyuns. Funyuns are good.”

  Luke, who’d gotten many tokens while burnishing his good-boy image, gave Stevie Whipple three and told him to knock himself out.

  9

  Remembering the first time he’d set eyes on Kalisha, and perhaps to commemorate the occasion, Luke went inside, sat down next to the ice machine, and put one of the candy cigarettes in his mouth. He was on his second Round-Up when Maureen came trundling along with her basket, now filled with fresh sheets and pillowcases.

  “How’s your back?” Luke asked her.

  “Worse than ever.”

  “Sorry. That sucks.”

  “I got my pills. They help.” She leaned over and grasped her shins, which put her face near Luke’s.

  He whispered, “They took my friend Kalisha. Nicky and George. Helen, just today.” Most of his friends were gone. And who had become the Institute’s long-timer? Why, nobody but Luke Ellis.

  “I know.” She was also whispering. “I been in Back Half. We can’t keep meeting here and talking, Luke. They’ll get suspicious.”

  This seemed to make sense, but there was something odd about it, just the same. Like Joe and Hadad, Maureen talked to the kids all the time, and gave them tokens when she had them to give. And weren’t there other places, dead zones, where the audio surveillance didn’t work? Certainly Kalisha had thought so.

  Maureen stood up and stretched, bracing her hands against the small of her back. She spoke in a normal voice now. “Are you just going to sit there all day?”

  Luke sucked in the candy cigarette currently dangling from his lower lip, crunched it up, and got to his feet.

  “Wait, here’s a token.” She pulled it from the pocket of her dress and handed it to him. “Use it for something tasty.”

  Luke ambled back to his room and sprawled on his bed. He curled up and unfolded the tight square of note-paper she had given him along with the token. Maureen’s hand was shaky and old-fashioned, but that was only part of the reason it was hard to read. The writing was small. She had packed the whole sheet from side to side, top to bottom, all of one side and part of the other. It made Luke think of something Mr. Sirois had said in English class, about Ernest Hemingway’s best short stories: They are miracles of compression. That was true of this communique. How many drafts had it taken her to boil down what she had to tell him to these essentials, written on one small piece of paper? He admired her brevity even as he began to understand what Maureen had been doing. What she was.

  Luke, You have to get rid of this Note after you read it. It is like God sent you to me as a Last Chance to atone for some of the Wrongs I have done. I talked to Leah Fink in Burlington. Everything you said was True and everything is going to be All Right w/ the money I owe. Not so All Right w/ me, as my back pain is what I feared. BUT now that the $$$ I put away is safe, I “cashed out.” There is a way to get it to my Son, so he can go to College. He will never know it came from me & that is the way I want it. I owe you so much!! Luke you have to get out of here. You will go to Back Half soon. You are a
“pink” and when they stop testing, you might only have 3 days. I have something to give you and much Important Things to tell you but dont know how, only Ice Machine is safe & we have been there Too Much. I dont care for me but dont want you to lose your Only Chance. I wish I hadnt done what I have done or had never seen this Place. I was thinking of the child I gave up but that is no Excuse. Too late now. I wish our Talk didnt have to be at Ice Machine but may have to risk it. PLEASE get rid of this note Luke and BE CAREFUL, not for me, my life will be over soon, but for you. THANK YOU FOR HELPING ME. Maureen A.

  So Maureen was a snitch, listening to kids in places that were supposed to be safe, then running to Sigsby (or Stackhouse) with little bits of info given to her in whispers. She might not be the only one, either; the two friendly caretakers, Joe and Hadad, might also be snitching. In June, Luke would have hated her for this, but now it was July, and he was much older.

  He went into the bathroom and dropped Maureen’s note into the john when he lowered his pants, just as he’d done with Kalisha’s. That seemed like a hundred years ago.

  10

  That afternoon, Stevie Whipple got up a game of dodgeball. Most of the kids played, but Luke declined. He went to the games cabinet for the chessboard (in memory of Nicky) and replayed what many considered the best game ever, Yakov Estrin versus Hans Berliner, Copenhagen, 1965. Forty-two moves, a classic. He went back and forth, white-black, white-black, white-black, his memory doing the work while most of his mind remained on Maureen’s note.

  He hated the thought of Maureen snitching, but understood her reasons. There were other people here with at least some shreds of decency left, but working in a place like this destroyed your moral compass. They were damned, whether they knew it or not. Maureen might be, too. The only thing that mattered now was whether or not she really knew a way he might be able to get out of here. To do that she needed to give him information without arousing the suspicions of Mrs. Sigsby and that guy Stackhouse (first name: Trevor). There was also the corollary question of whether or not she could be trusted. Luke thought she could. Not just because he had helped her in her time of need, but because the note had a desperate quality, the feel of a woman who had decided to bet all her chips on one turn of the wheel. Besides, what choice did he have?