by Mark Alpert
“They commit suicide?”
“Indeed. But that’s not the worst of it.” Gower tipped back his tankard and finished off his beer. But his intoxication had ebbed. Now he looked grim and sober. “Our oldest women are able to shoulder the burden of the centuries because they dedicate their lives to a higher purpose. Lily is a perfect example of this. She works tirelessly to benefit Haven and to steer the outside world toward a better future. But some women fail to muster that dedication. And then terrible things can happen.”
“What do you mean?”
Gower looked down at the table for several seconds, grimacing. Then he turned to Conroy, who was joylessly devouring a lemon tart. “Sir, may I escort the paramour to the privy? Both of us need to relieve ourselves.”
Conroy seemed annoyed at the interruption. He scowled and gave a dismissive wave. “Aye, go ahead.”
Gower stood up and gripped John’s elbow. “Come. I wish to show you something.”
He took John to Haven’s deepest corner. After leaving the mess hall, they followed a path to the far end of the cavern, where a sulfurous spring flowed out of the rocky ground near the geothermal plant. Warm, greenish water swirled in a bubbling pool and flowed into crevices in the cavern’s jagged wall. Carved into the wall near the crevices was an entrance to a tunnel, about ten feet wide and eight feet high. Gower pointed at it. “We’re just in time,” he said. “The visiting hours are almost over.”
John peered into the tunnel. The entrance was dimly lit and the corridor beyond looked deserted. “Visiting hours? Is this a hospital?”
“Aye, it’s a hospital. But it’s not our primary medical facility.” Gower furrowed his brow, searching for the right words. “This hospital is for special cases only.”
They stepped into the tunnel. Its floor was paved with big granite blocks, their surfaces worn smooth and glossy, and the walls were decorated with intricate stone carvings of bears and wolves and deer. John was amazed by their beauty. “This place looks old,” he noted. “Older than the rest of Haven.”
Gower nodded. “When the Furies started dwelling down here, they carved their first underground homes out of the cavern’s many tunnels and burrows. It was only later that they built the Pyramid and the other structures on the cavern’s floor.”
After about ten yards the tunnel curved to the right, leading to a large hushed antechamber with dark stone walls. On the far side of the room were twenty wooden doors, arranged in ten side-by-side pairs. In each pair, the door on the left was marked with the word VIEWING and the door on the right with the word PATIENT. A petite woman in a severe black dress sat behind an antique desk in the middle of the antechamber, guarding access to all the doors. She stared at John for a few seconds, her expression a mix of curiosity and disdain. Then she looked at Gower. Her face, though young and pretty, was as severe as her dress.
“Good evening.” Her voice was frosty. “It’s been a while, Gower. I haven’t seen you in weeks.”
Gower’s face reddened. He lowered his head, looking sheepish. “I apologize, Constance. My duties with the Guardsmen have kept me away.”
“I’m afraid you can’t visit Octavia now. It’s almost bedtime and I don’t want to risk upsetting her at this hour. But you can view her if you wish.” Constance pointed at John but kept her eyes on Gower. “This is Lily’s paramour, is it not?”
John wasn’t surprised by the question. Haven was the size of a small town, so news traveled quickly here. And everyone noticed an unfamiliar face.
“Aye, he’s under my watch,” Gower replied. This was technically true, although Conroy was probably wondering by now why they were spending so much time in the bathroom.
“May I ask why you’ve brought the outsider with you?”
Gower shifted his weight from foot to foot, clearly uncomfortable. “It’s part of his education in our ways. He must see all of Haven, from top to bottom. Can he join me in the viewing room?”
Constance frowned. “She’s your grandmother. Do you truly want him to see her?”
Gower nodded but didn’t say anything. Constance kept them waiting for a few more seconds. Then she stood up and led them toward the pair of doors directly behind her desk. She opened the left door, the one marked VIEWING. “I’ll give you five minutes. I need to collect the remains of her dinner before turning out the lights. Octavia hasn’t been eating well lately.”
She held the door open as Gower and John filed into the room. Then she shut it, plunging them into near-darkness. The room was smaller than John expected. It was about the size of a walk-in closet, only eight feet long and four feet wide. It was also empty. There weren’t even any chairs. The wall on the left was bare, but the one on the right had a large picture window with tinted glass. After a couple of seconds of bewilderment, John realized it was a one-way mirror. This cramped space was like a viewing room at a police station, a place where cops could watch an interrogation or a lineup of suspects without being observed themselves. But when John looked through the tinted glass he saw a padded cell. That, he realized, was the PATIENT room.
He didn’t see the patient at first. The room had a low bed, unmade, and on the mattress were two pillows and a heap of tangled sheets and blankets. Near the foot of the bed, a tablecloth was spread across the padded floor. The patient’s dinner was on the tablecloth, but there were no plates or silverware. Three slices of buttered toast, a sectioned orange, and several small pieces of hamburger meat lay on a washable place mat at the center of the tablecloth. There were also two paper cups, one filled with milk and the other with water. But the meal appeared to be untouched. Octavia, wherever she was, hadn’t eaten a bite.
Then John saw the heap of blankets and sheets move across the bed, disturbed by something stirring underneath them. The tangled bedding slid to the side, exposing a tall pale woman in a blue nightgown, lying on her back. She was solidly built, with broad shoulders and wide hips, but her face was like a child’s. Her eyes were closed and her bright red hair was long and tousled. She murmured in her sleep, and the sound was amplified by a pair of loudspeakers hanging on the wall above the one-way mirror.
John was startled but managed to stay silent. He turned to Gower and gave him a questioning look, pointing first at the meal on the floor and then at the woman on the bed.
“Don’t worry,” Gower said. “You can talk here. This room is soundproofed. She can’t hear us, but we can hear her through the speakers.”
“That’s your grandmother?”
“Aye. My mother was born in Germany almost six hundred years ago, but Grandmother Octavia is much older. In fact, she’s the oldest woman in Haven.”
“I though Elizabeth was the oldest. Isn’t that why she’s the Chief Elder?”
“Nay, my grandmother is a thousand years older. Octavia served on the Council of Elders for three centuries, but after the Burning Times she had to relinquish her seat.” Gower frowned. “The massacres were too great a shock for her. She lost all of her daughters except for Claudia, my mother.”
“And what—”
Before John could pose the question, the sound of someone knocking on the door boomed out of the loudspeakers. Then he heard the voice of Constance the nurse. “Octavia? I’m coming in.”
The tall woman awoke instantly. She leaped out of bed and backed up against the padded wall, moving as far away from the door as possible. Her hands were shaking. “Nay!” she screamed. “Stay out!”
The door opened and Constance stepped into the room. Except now the petite nurse wore a white surgical mask over her face. “Calm yourself, dear. It’s just me.”
“Murderer! Murderer!” Octavia turned her head left and right, frantically looking for an exit.
“Look at me, please.” Constance raised her hands above her head. “I bear no weapons. And I’m wearing the mask, as you requested. It’s impossible for me to contaminate you.”
“Go away, I beg thee! Come no closer!”
Lowering her hands, Constance pointed a
t the untouched meal on the floor. “You know you can’t go on like this. If you want to live, you have to eat.”
Octavia went into a crouch, sliding down to the floor. Then she buried her face in her hands and started to weep. “Oh, I’m dying, I’m dying.” Her voice was lower now, muffled. “You’re trying to poison me. You want me dead.”
“Please, dear, listen to reason. Don’t you remember what I did when I delivered your dinner? I ate a piece of your meat and a section of your orange. Now do I look poisoned to you?”
“You want me dead. You want me dead.”
The poor woman cried softly. She curled her body into a tight ball and shook with sobs. She repeated “You want me dead” several more times, and then she started babbling something John couldn’t make out. After a while he realized she was speaking a foreign language. He couldn’t understand the words, but their sound was familiar.
Constance let out a sigh. She knelt on the padded floor and began cleaning up the untouched dinner.
Gower turned to John. Seeing his grandmother in this state had clearly upset him, but he kept his voice steady. “Octavia went mad a century ago. Her fear of death grew so strong, it warped her mind.”
John was confused. “Why is she afraid? She’s going to stay young forever.”
“Aye, but she can still die in an accident. The chance of that happening in any year is less than one in a thousand, but because Octavia has lived for more than two thousand years, she fears that the odds have turned against her. So she never leaves her room, never handles anything sharp. And she constantly worries about poison.”
“And you say she’s been like this for a hundred years?”
“Sometimes she’s a little better, and oftentimes she’s worse. She refuses to eat until she makes herself sick. Then the nurses have to sedate her and feed her intravenously. This happens month after month, in a nightmarish cycle. And Octavia isn’t the only one who suffers from this malady. There are nine other women in this hospital who have similar afflictions. Most of them are over the age of three hundred, but the madness can strike women as young as a hundred and fifty.”
By this point Constance had finished cleaning up. She looked again at Octavia, still curled up on the floor. Then she left the room.
At the same time, John took a step away from the one-way mirror. He was anxious to get out of there. “I’m sorry about your grandmother,” he told Gower. “And I see your point. I wouldn’t want to live like that.”
“Nor I.” Gower let out a long whoosh of breath and turned toward the door. “Eternal youth can all too easily become eternal suffering.”
As they headed out of the room, John could still hear Octavia babbling. It suddenly occurred to him why her foreign words sounded familiar. John had heard them before, in South Philly of all places. On the street corners where the aging wiseguys bullshitted with each other in their native tongue. “Is she speaking Italian?” he asked.
Gower shook his head. “Nay, not Italian. But your guess is close. She’s speaking her first language, Latin.”
“Latin?”
“She was born during the reign of Octavius, the first Roman emperor. That’s who she was named after.”
Then Gower opened the door and they left the viewing room.
On their way back to the mess hall John spotted Archibald, the other young guardsman who’d escorted him through the woods to Haven. He was striding across the cavern’s floor in the opposite direction, with a backpack slung over his shoulder. Gower called out to him, but Archibald didn’t stop. He turned away from them and took a different path, heading for the geothermal plant.
Conroy was furious by the time they returned to the dining room. Gower invented a rather complicated excuse, saying that one of the toilets in the bathroom had overflowed, forcing him to take John to his quarters so they could clean their soiled shoes, but Conroy didn’t want to hear it. He took custody of John and immediately escorted him back to his luxurious prison cell. When Conroy opened the door to the room, though, he froze in the doorway, his hand on the knob. Sitting on the freshly made feather bed was Elder Margaret Fury. She sat on the edge of the mattress with her hands in her lap and the folds of her crimson gown carefully draped over her legs. She looked regal, as if she were posing for an official portrait.
“Milady!” Conroy exclaimed. “What are you doing here?”
There was no reaction on Margaret’s pale, plump face. She sat absolutely still. “I need to have a private talk with Lily’s paramour. Could you please stand outside the door until we’re finished?”
The Adam’s apple in Conroy’s throat bobbed up and down. He was clearly flustered, but he couldn’t find any reason to protest. “Aye, milady,” he muttered. “Please call for me if you require my help.” He ushered John into the room, then retreated as gracefully as he could, shutting the door as he left.
Margaret relaxed a bit. She took a deep breath, and her bosom heaved within the bodice of her gown. “Come closer, John. I can barely see you over there.”
John stepped toward the bed, stopping about a yard away. He needed to be careful. This was one of the three women who held his fate in their hands. “What do you want to talk about?”
“How was your first day in Haven? Did Lily take you to see Cordelia?”
He nodded. “Yeah, it was interesting. Like a history lesson.”
“Our sister Delia is like a faucet. Most of the time she’s closed tight and nothing comes out of her. But if she deigns to open up, ’tis like a deluge.” Margaret looked up at him and smiled, but it was a cunning smile, full of strategy. “And what of the laboratories? Did Lily take you to see them, too?”
“Just her own lab. Molecular genetics, I think it was called.”
“I don’t know if you realize it, but that was a rare privilege. Lily has become intensely secretive about her work. She’s banished all her assistants from her laboratory and put a lock on the door for good measure.” She grimaced for an instant, then smiled again. “I assume she explained her research to you? The development of the catalyst that will produce Fountain protein from fetal tissue?”
John’s guard went up. He had to be especially careful now. “Yeah, she talked about that stuff, but I’m not big on science. I didn’t really get it.”
Margaret raised an eyebrow. Her smile hardened. “Let’s not play games with each other, John. You’re a smart man, and I think you know how fraught our situation is. This is the most serious threat our family has faced since coming to America. So I won’t tolerate any lies.”
“Whoa, hold on.” John held out his hands like a traffic cop. “First of all, I’m not lying. Second, I—”
“Did you know that the guardsmen on our farm received a visit today from the Federal Bureau of Investigation? A special agent named Michael Larson showed them your photograph. Our guardsmen denied any knowledge of you, of course, but the agent is sure to come back. I suspect that Sullivan is whispering in his ear. He’s used similar tactics in the past few months, encouraging the local constables to pursue our Rangers and guardsmen.”
John took a step backward. This was disturbing news. “Why are they looking for me? Because of the ferryboat?”
She nodded. “Aye, that incident has become the chief topic of the state’s newspapers. This investigation puts us in a difficult position. The federal agents are already outside our fence, watching as much of the farm as they can. We want them to leave, but we can’t simply hand you over to the FBI. Once you’re in their custody, you’ll tell them everything you know about us. So we have only one reasonable option, which is to kill you and place your corpse so far from Haven that no one will connect the two. It’s the only way we can avoid further scrutiny.”
He clenched his hands. She was threatening him. “So why haven’t you killed me yet? I’m sure Conroy would be happy to do the job.”
“Oh, it’s definitely under consideration. But my sister Elizabeth and I are prudent leaders. Before we take any irreversible steps, we nee
d to determine if you could be useful to us in other ways. That’s why I came to see you tonight.”
“And is that why you’re asking about Ariel’s research? You want me to spy on her?”
“Now that Lily knows the formula for the catalyst, it’s her duty to share it with the council. But she has refused to do so. Because she leads our research efforts she feels entitled to keep this information from us. Elizabeth and I have tried to reason with her since she returned to Haven yesterday, but Cordelia has taken Lily’s side, and the girl has supporters among the researchers and Rangers.” Margaret frowned. “So we’ve been forced to consider other measures.”
John studied her carefully. She was hiding something, no doubt about it. “Why do you want the formula so badly?”
Her frown deepened. A pair of vertical lines appeared above the bridge of her nose. “I’m not going to explain our reasons to you, paramour. All you need to know is that your life hangs in the balance. Elizabeth and I control the council. We can overrule Cordelia and order your execution.”
“Do you want the formula so you can hand it over to Sullivan?” He mentioned this possibility only because he couldn’t think of anything else. “Are you going to surrender to him?”
“Surrender?” Margaret’s voice fell so low he could barely hear it.
“Yeah, maybe you’ve decided to give in to his demands. Maybe you think working with him is less dangerous than fighting him.”
Margaret slowly rose from the bed. Wincing, she limped toward John and pointed a trembling finger at his face. “That bastard just killed two of my sons. You saw it happen, you saw his men slaughter Hal and Richard. Do you think I could ever work with such a man?”
“I don’t—”
“He murdered one of my daughters as well. Three of my girls served in the Rangers, in the Transport squadron that flies our researchers to the tropics. Six months ago Sullivan’s men ambushed their plane at the St. Ignace airfield. They fired their carbines at the aircraft, then rode off on their motorcycles. My Veronica was unhurt, but the Riflemen wounded my Gwendolyn. And they shot my Gilda in the heart.”