She advanced again and stopped not two feet away and tilted her head to one side, studying him like Lilly did, the same way Karen did. The corners of her mouth turned down and she said, “You’re scared. Why are you scared?”
It didn’t matter what she looked like, Peter realized. In his mind’s confusion of a dream, this girl was his daughter, and it had been so long. No matter what Peter thought of her, he couldn’t hurt her any longer. She believed she was Lilly, and there was no harm in playing along.
Peter said, “I miss you.”
“But I’m right here.”
“In a dream, yes. But when I wake up, you’ll be gone.”
Her smile returned again. “I’m not gone, silly. You have to find me.”
Inexplicably, tears pushed on the backs of Peter’s eyes, and he suddenly found it impossible to swallow. “Where? Where do I look?”
She reached for his hands and held them. Her touch was the touch of his daughter. “I’ll pray for Jesus to help you.”
“I need it,” Peter said. “I need his help.”
“Mommy and I will be okay.”
“How do you know? How can you be so sure?”
She let go and cupped his face in her hands. As much as Peter didn’t want to cry in front of her, he couldn’t help but let a stray tear slip from his eye.
“Jesus will take care of us, Daddy. Don’t worry, okay?”
But Jesus hadn’t taken care of them yet. Jesus seemed nowhere to be found.
She studied his eyes, looking past them and into his soul. “Don’t think that, Daddy. It’s not true.”
She’d read his mind. She’d seen past his exterior armor and looked right into the hurricane that engulfed his heart. As if someone had run an ice cube down Peter’s spine, he shivered.
“But he hasn’t helped you.” Peter couldn’t believe he was verbalizing his deepest struggle to this eight-year-old.
She frowned again. “But he has taken care of us. He hasn’t left me alone, not for one second.”
More tears pushed from behind Peter’s eyes and found their way out, cascading down his cheeks.
“Trust him, Daddy. Do you trust him?”
Peter hadn’t. He’d given up on trusting God, trusting Jesus. But now it seemed different. This child, this imposter of his daughter, had strangely given him hope. She’d begun the process of renewing the faith he once had, the faith that had survived multiple brainwashings or scrubbings or whatever Nichols wanted to call them. They could take away his old mind, his old memories, his old life, but they couldn’t take away the underlying core of who he was. That much survived.
It wasn’t a knock-’em-over, tingle-and-break-into-laughter experience. It was as subtle and natural as a trickle of springwater from a rock, and as deep and real as the water vein from which it flowed.
He was ready to trust again. He was ready to embrace the faith he’d once had and the faith that remained. He was convinced it was the only way he’d find the real Lilly and Karen. Peter nodded. “Yes. I trust him. I’m ready.”
The girl broke into a wide smile, her eyes bending into crescents. She even giggled a little. “Good. You need to start with the Bible in my room.”
“I didn’t see a Bible in there.”
“It’s on my dresser, my Precious Moments Bible.”
“There wasn’t anything there but your watch.”
“Go look again with your new eyes.”
Peter stood and entered the room again. And there on the dresser was Lilly’s little pink leather-bound Bible. He lifted it and balanced the weight of it in his hands. As he shifted it to the other hand, the book fell open, and the pages parted to the same passage he’d read the last two times in the Bible he’d found in the other rooms.
He traced the words while he read in the gospel of John. “I am the door. If anyone enters by Me, he will be saved, and will go in and out and find pasture.”
Peter closed the book and placed it back on the dresser. It was the passage he’d read before but couldn’t remember.
That last conversation he’d had with Audrey Lewis walked through his mind.
“I think it means your subconscious mind is keeping something from you.”
“So what do I have to do?”
“Find the key.”
She’d made it sound so easy when Peter thought it would be impossible to find the key. The door would remain locked for the rest of his life and he’d spend the rest of his sleeping nights wrestling with it and the rest of his waking days wondering what secrets it protected.
But now he knew it. The Bible. The verse. “I am the door.” It was the key. Or more specifically, Jesus was the key.
And it had happened just like Amy said it would at the Oceanview. A trigger. This girl and her faith. Faith was the trigger.
Peter left the bedroom and stood in the hallway. The girl was now gone, the hallway left empty. All that stood before him and the door was ten feet of flooring and a mountain of faith. He needed to stop trusting in himself; that’s what Karen would tell him. Stop trusting his skills and ability to fight out of every situation. Ultimately it had gotten him nowhere. He needed to let go of the reins he held so tightly and give them to God. He needed to admit he couldn’t do this on his own, to stop striving and just surrender.
Then, from the first floor of the house came a terrible banging noise, like someone taking a sledgehammer to the very foundation of the home with an intent to destroy it and bring the entire structure down.
Peter fought the ache in his bones and rolled to his back, opened his eyes. The dream was over; he was awake. The door to his room was open about six inches, and light, beautiful light, poured in and colored the concrete floor a pale gray. He squinted as it opened the rest of the way. Before him stood the backlit silhouette of a woman.
The woman stood in the open doorway, hands hanging at her sides.
Peter righted himself and pushed back so he was seated against the wall. He could tell by the woman’s figure that it wasn’t Karen. Too small and thin. She wore a pantsuit and lab coat, and her hair was pulled back off her face in a bun.
“How are you, Peter?”
He recognized the voice. Ambling. She was going to take him away and experiment on him now. Poke him, prod him, maybe torture him. He knew how it worked. They’d break him down to nothing, then rebuild him into the man they wanted him to be. Again. Into the soldier they wanted him to be. Again. After all that had transpired, they still weren’t done with him. How much could one mind handle before it suffered too much tampering and shattered like a crystal vase?
She opened the door wider, and Peter shielded his eyes from the light.
“How do I look?” he asked.
“Like you need a shower, a shave, some clean clothes. How do you feel?”
“Like I need a shower and a shave. Definitely some clean clothes.”
“Would you like a hot meal too?”
“What are you serving?”
“Whatever you want.”
“Fast food? I could really go for a greasy burger and fries.”
Ambling turned to leave. When she spoke, he could hear the smile in her voice. “We can arrange that.”
She exited the room, and three men dressed in gray scrubs entered. Orderlies of some sort. They lifted Peter from the floor and escorted him into a hallway. It appeared they were back in the bunker under Centralia. Same concrete, same doors lining the walls.
The men took Peter to a bathroom, handed him a towel and change of clothes, and shut the door without saying a word. The bathroom was small but not cramped. It consisted of a toilet, sink, and shower stall with a frosted-glass door. Tile lined the floor and walls; the ceiling was concrete. Everything was white and clinical.
Peter undressed and stood before the mirror. He hadn’t lost as much weight as he thought he had, nor had he lost much muscle mass. After getting a few meals in him, he should regain his strength quickly.
The hot water energized him as it washe
d away the grime that coated his skin. The shower was already supplied with a bar of soap and a small travel-size bottle of shampoo. Peter lathered his hair and stuck his head under the nozzle, letting the water wash the bubbles over his shoulders and chest and down his back.
From outside the shower, a woman’s voice said his name.
Peter rinsed the soap from his face and wiped the water from his eyes. Through the steamy, frosted glass he could see the figure of a woman. He assumed it was Ambling again.
“What do you want with me?” Peter said.
The woman said nothing but stepped closer to the shower stall, and Peter instinctively stepped back and covered himself.
“What are you doing?” he said.
The woman did not respond but neither did she move.
Finally she said, “Why did you come here, Peter?”
Despite the hot water hitting him in the chest and abdomen, despite the clouds of steam billowing within the stall, Peter broke out in chills. It wasn’t Ambling at all. It was Karen. His wife. But how?
Karen put one hand, fingers splayed, on the frosted-glass door and said, “You did this. Don’t you remember?”
Frozen with his back against the wall, Peter opened his mouth, but nothing came out. He tried to form words, but his throat produced no sound. He tried to lift his hand, but he couldn’t.
Karen didn’t move, didn’t open the door. She remained motionless with her hand resting on the glass. “Only you can make this all right again,” she said. “You need to let them change you, this time for good. Then we can be together. You. Me. Lilly.”
It sounded like Karen, but it wasn’t her. It couldn’t be. Karen would never want him to change. She’d never go along with Nichols’s scrubbing and imprinting.
“No.”
“You must, Peter. For us.”
Anger took over him, flooded his blood and made it boil. They had no right to do this to him.
“I won’t. I can’t.” If he gave in to the process, he might forget Karen and Lilly for good. As far as he would be concerned, they would never have existed. He couldn’t allow that to happen. He couldn’t live without them, didn’t want to.
Peter forced himself to move. He lifted his arm and practically threw it at the door, slid it open.
But there was no Karen. She’d been a mirage. Or a hallucination.
They were gassing him again, like in the school gymnasium, causing him to see things that weren’t there, to hear voices that didn’t exist. They were toying with his mind, disassembling it memory by memory.
Peter shut off the shower and stood in the stall, his skin crawling, dripping water, his heart pounding. The chill had intensified, and now he shivered as if he were standing naked in the middle of Antarctica. He slid the shower door open the rest of the way and suddenly felt very dizzy. The shower’s tiled floor moved beneath him; the walls waved. His legs grew weak, wobbled; he was standing on stilts of rubber.
Peter reached for the towel and dropped to his hands and knees, half in the shower, half out. The floor spun faster and faster until he thought he’d faint.
The bathroom door opened. Peter’s mind was muddled, could barely make sense of what was happening. Men entered, grabbed his wrists and ankles. They loomed over him like demons, their eyes hollow sockets, their mouths gaping chasms. A strange hissing sound emanated from their mouths.
Peter was dragged along the floor, the room still turning circles around him. As he passed the sink, he saw Lilly there—her old self, the way he remembered her—standing in a white shirt and pink jeans, her hair in pigtails. She held a teddy bear, the one Karen’s parents had given her for her sixth birthday.
“Daddy,” she said, her voice soft and urgent, “listen to them. Do what they tell you to do. For me and Mommy.”
Peter tried to speak, tried to tell her he loved her and that he’d rescue her, but his throat seized as if concrete had been poured down it.
The men continued to drag him as Lilly faded from his view and the room around him grew darker. He tried to fight it, to keep his wits about him, but resistance was futile, and soon everything went dark.
Peter felt as though he were floating on a cushion of air, and he would have believed it too if not for the annoying squeak of wheels in need of oil. The ceiling passed by slowly, concrete, lights, and air vents. His head still in a fog, his brain seemed stuck in one gear, and any attempt to comprehend the situation caused an awful grinding in his ears.
He attempted to lift his arms, to sit up, but his wrists were secured. His ankles too. He watched the bland wall slide by. How long was this corridor?
Peter tried to lift his head, but it weighed too much; he could only roll it from side to side.
He rolled his head to the left and this time saw Lilly standing there. She seemed to float alongside the gurney. Peter’s eyes had difficulty focusing on her, but he could vaguely make out the downward turn of her mouth, the sadness in her eyes. Once more he tried to speak to her, to tell her he’d make it all right. He wanted to tell her that he trusted Jesus, that he’d listened to her and Mommy and surrendered and had faith that all would be okay, regardless of the outcome. But his tongue felt like it was three sizes too large for his mouth and he’d lost all control of it; he could only produce garbled words, incoherent jumbles of sounds and syllables.
Lilly put her finger to her mouth, silencing him, and said, “Do what they tell you to do, Daddy. You must go along with them.”
Peter shook his head. He wouldn’t. She didn’t understand, poor kid. They’d brainwashed her, and probably Karen too. He couldn’t let them steal everything from him. He shut his eyes to refocus, but when he opened them, Lilly was gone. Peter turned his head to the right, but she wasn’t there either.
He tried to say her name, to call to her, but all that came out was a mess of slurred letters. Peter strained against the straps, but it was futile.
The gurney turned right. A man’s voice spoke, but Peter couldn’t make out what he said. A few more feet and the gurney slowed. Above him a fluorescent bulb hummed. A door opened and the gurney was pushed through the open doorway and into a dimly lit room.
Peter shut his heavy eyes as the gurney was pushed across the room. When he opened them again, he noticed a large circular LED operating room light suspended above him. Somebody across the room spoke and the light flipped on, blinding him. He shut his eyes and again fought the restraints at his ankles and wrists. A warm hand rested on his forehead. Peter opened his eyes and found Karen standing over him, smiling. But when she spoke, it was not with Karen’s voice but rather Dr. Ambling’s.
“Don’t struggle, Peter,” she said. “It’s okay. We’re going to give you something to relax you.”
Peter shook his head, tried to tell them he didn’t want anything, didn’t need anything, but his tongue didn’t work and his lips felt swollen and clumsy.
Ambling disappeared, replaced by a man wearing a surgical mask and scrubs. His eyes smiled at Peter. “You’ll just feel a pinch.”
Again Peter shook his head.
The prick came, and suddenly Lilly was there in the room with him, by his side. Only it was the new Lilly, the girl from the bunker. She lifted her little hand and rested it on his arm. Her touch was so soft and warm. “Trust him, Daddy. Do you trust him?”
Her eyes were urgent, and the tightness around her lips and jaw changed the shape of her face.
“Daddy, do you trust him?”
Peter knew whom the girl spoke of, and it wasn’t Nichols or the man in scrubs. He nodded.
She smiled. “Good. Then trust him. You’ll need to . . .”
But before she could finish, the light above him faded and the room grew dark. A severe weight pushed down on Peter until he thought he’d suffocate. Finally light was overcome with darkness and everything faded away.
Peter awoke with his eyes still closed. At first he didn’t know where he was and imagined himself back in his home in his bed, the light of the sun filtering
through the blinds to awaken him. But the bed on which he lay was hard and cold, not at all like his bed at home.
He tried to focus and remember where he was, but his mind swam in a murky soup, images coming and going, ebbing and flowing. Lilly was there, smiling at him, her hands extended as if she were begging him to come to her, to rescue her. Karen was there too, her eyes pleading with him. She mouthed words, but there was no sound. Then Amy appeared, urging him to come to her. Her face showed panic, fright. Gunshots rang out, sharp and distinct, a staccato of them, accompanied by flashes of light and explosions. Outside of this convoluted collage of images, he heard the soft, indistinct warble of two men’s voices in conversation and behind them a gentle clinking, like the sound of small screws being dropped into a metal pan.
It came to him then. He was in some kind of operating room buried deep in the bunker beneath Centralia. As his mind cleared, Peter remembered more of what had taken place. The dark room, the shower, the hallucinogen. They had strapped him to the gurney and wheeled him beneath a bright light. He’d seen Karen and Lilly, but they were false images, like a Pepper’s ghost on a flimsy glass pane.
He brought his mind back around to the room, the gurney, the light overhead, and the clinking of metal. Were they planning surgery?
One of the men in the room said something and the other laughed. Peter knew he had only one chance at this. Apparently they thought he was still unconscious, still under the effects of whatever sedative they had given him.
Seconds passed and with each tick of the clock, Peter’s mind cleared more. He rolled his right arm palm up, then palm down, and did not feel the restraints around his wrist. They’d unsecured him, perhaps to transfer him to an operating table, then not bothered to reapply the restraints, thinking he was no threat while he was safely unconscious.
Soft footsteps approached and Peter held still. He could hear breathing so close it seemed to be only inches away.
Peter had to act now. He opened his eyes while simultaneously sitting up. The man, a twentysomething dressed in a lab coat, stepped back and dropped the instrument he had in his hand. He couldn’t have appeared more surprised if Peter had been dead and suddenly sprang to life.
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