Thea looked up from her coffee in shock. The search party was actually happening? She seriously considered hugging Harriet.
‘You know, everyone thinks you’ve lost it.’ Harriet glanced around to check who was listening. Thea reconsidered the hugging. ‘This whole face in the window thing – really? You seemed so much more stable than that. I have to say, I’m a little disappointed.’
How to explain it: the mistrust that was creeping in like rust over old metal, so strong she could feel the tang of it in her mouth?
‘I saw it. Him, her, whoever it was. It’s at the monastery. I want to go with them.’
‘What?’
‘I want to go with the search party.’
Harriet leant back and crossed her legs, tweaking her cat’s-eye glasses a little further down her nose so she could peer over them. Again, Thea tried to guess her age. She was one of those women who always looked around forty until a mannerism or slight tilt of the head gave them away.
‘I’m afraid I think you’re seeing monsters where there are only shadows, Thea; I really do. I’ve been with this company for a fair few years now and I can truly say that I don’t know where I would be without them. It’s not just a job. It’s a way of life. Staff here are valued, cared about. They are looked after. A company like that is not the wolf at the door you think it is …’ Thea opened her mouth, but Harriet held out her hand, palm up.
She pressed her lips together and smoothed at her hair, glancing around at the tables closest to them and then up at the walkway, like Delores could still be there, hanging from her ankles like a bat, listening in.
She sighed. ‘But … but … if that’s what you want. I’ll do my best. I don’t see the harm in it.’
Harriet had not been in that hospital room with Delores. She had not seen the way the woman had really only been interested in Thea’s answer, not Rosie or her injuries, or how she’d got them.
‘Do you think perhaps you have some trust issues?’ Harriet continued to stare over her glasses.
‘What?’
‘Well, your file. You’re twenty-seven. Father not a part of your life, no real relationships, yet you’re actually quite a good-looking young woman, under that fringe. The only significant relationship you have is with your mother, and she’s a conspiracy theorist—’
‘She’s not!’ Thea thought for a minute. ‘She’s … retired …’
Something was worrying her, but it wasn’t anything to do with trust issues. Over the past week as everyone around her had had their sleep gently massaged by Phase Two of the technology, allowing them to gain blissful extra hours of sleep – Thea hadn’t.
Slept.
At all.
With a suddenness that unnerved her, she had gone from luxuriating in her nearly three hours of sleep only to have it snatched away. No sleep at all, for night after night after night. Her fingernails were sore from trying to prise the discs away from her temples. They hadn’t budged. It was more likely she’d lose a fingernail before she got one of them to move.
Her mind kept trying to sing the same tune, a tra-la-la of ‘everything’s fine, everything’s fine’. But underneath that was another deeper melody, a discordant chord.
They didn’t need her permission to start the tests. The little bloody discs were already on her head and they could start experimenting on her whenever they wanted, even if she was no longer part of the trial.
A sleepless soldier.
By now, her eyes should have felt like Velcro and her brain should have been a claggy porridge of neurons. But this was the truly terrifying part:
She felt fine.
Delores’s voice floated back to her. ‘Think of sleep as malleable, like plasticine, and Morpheus gently rolling and massaging it into the smallest ball it could be. It’s still plasticine, hmm? It’s just been squashed together. We would mould your sleep into the smallest ball possible – and you wouldn’t even notice.’
Thea’s brain was polished and buffed to a high shine. She felt better than she had ever felt before: alive, alert, awake.
Too awake.
Chapter 21
She shouldn’t have been there.
It was late. But the beep of the machine was strangely soothing, and tomorrow she’d be with the search party and probably wouldn’t be able to visit.
She did what she always did lately: she put the pack of chocolate buttons Rory smuggled for her on the bed by Rosie’s hand, as if she could wake up, reach out and take one any time she chose.
And she talked.
‘… so everyone seems to be getting a great night’s sleep and I just stay awake, except I don’t feel like a zombie the next day. I feel great, which I shouldn’t because who should feel great after nights and nights of being awake? So that makes me think maybe they’re trialling the Sleepless Elite thing on me regardless. Except that makes me sound paranoid, doesn’t it? At least I’m getting through all the books I’d been wanting to read …’
She popped a chocolate button into her mouth and watched Rosie’s hand. It didn’t twitch.
‘We all miss you.’ Her throat swelled around the chocolate and she blinked back tears. ‘I miss you. I—’
That was when the screaming began.
Thea jolted upright. It wasn’t the sound of someone screaming in fear, or an excited squeal – this was rage bundled and bound into one voice box, a pure howl of fury so intense it sounded like it could tear the person’s throat in two.
Thea ran to the door of Rosie’s room. There were other doorways in this corridor of the building, doors that Thea hadn’t given much thought to. But what if they were all little hospital rooms like Rosie’s?
And, more importantly, why would you have so many?
She kept to one side and peered through the glass window into the corridor beyond. There were a group of people not far from her, but she wouldn’t have to worry about being seen. They were far too focused on the man being held between them.
Thea had seen evangelical healings on television, the way the afflicted would shake and judder under the priest’s touch while the priest shouted something like: ‘Satan! Be gone!’ It always ended with the person cured and floppy, sagging gratefully into the arms of their family.
The man in the corridor flailed and jerked as if demon-possessed but no one near him was going to bother laying hands on his head. They were too busy trying to secure his arms and feet as he kicked and twisted and strained, all the while screaming in that terrible way. There were no words in what he yelled over and over again, or rather, if there had been they’d become so badly mangled together they could no longer be understood.
They shuffled with him as a group – a many-legged monster making its halting way along the corridor – and Thea shrank back as they passed her door, glancing at Rosie.
Another face swam into her memory: a pale blob in an arched window.
Had they found the person in the monastery?
She carefully opened the door and tiptoed into the corridor. All she had to do was follow the screaming – so she did. It brought her to a door not too far away from Rosie’s, with a similar square pane of a window.
They had got the man closer to the bed but that was as far as he was going to let them. Thea managed to get a proper look at his face and realized with a jolt that it was Richard from her sleep therapy group, tortoise-Richard with his bald head, sad voice and sheepish smile. There was no smile now. Richard’s voice was beginning to sound hoarse and ragged, but he continued to wrestle the others holding him, jerking his body so hard Thea feared one of his joints would pop.
Then his rolling, wide eyes caught hers. Thea froze. But she needn’t have feared – his eyes may have been looking at her but what they were seeing was something else, something that made him cringe suddenly, his gaze never leaving her, the screaming turning wetly to a wild keening. He stilled.
He stood, chest heaving, limbs slack, all fight gone.
One of the men holding him must have been lulled
into a false sense of security and loosened his grip as he tried to edge him towards the bed. It was all the chance Richard needed. With a roar that made the tendons in his neck bulge Richard wrenched one arm free with a strength that belied his skinny frame, grabbing the nearest thing to hand.
A chair.
Fast and hard, he shoved the chair at the man nearest him who tried to defend himself by holding out an arm as protection. Thea was pretty certain she saw that arm bend in a very unnatural way. And then it was chaos for a few seconds. Richard reared and bucked as the others tried to hold him, while in a corner another man looked as if he was preparing a syringe.
Just before the syringe punctured his arm and the rest of the men pinned him down, Richard turned his head again, looking at Thea, and this time he was Richard once more, the one she’d sat in a therapy room with and watched nod off in a lecture hall.
For a second she saw the horror dawn in his eyes.
An arm shot out of the nearby door as Thea hurried past on her way back to Rosie and, without giving her any time to react, pulled her into the room. She yelped.
It was dark.
‘Shh!’
‘Rory?’
‘Shh!’
Thea lowered her voice to a whisper. ‘What are you doing?’
Outside the closed door, voices floated past them. Thea felt like a small fish in the coral as the sharks swam past. She could feel her heart thudding in her throat and all she could think about was Richard and his crazed eyes.
The voices receded. She was getting used to the dark now though and could make out shelving to one side of the room. There were the shapes of mops, brooms and buckets in the corner, but what she was most aware of was just how close she was to Rory. Their noses were nearly touching. He smelled of coffee and something woody, his aftershave maybe, or the soap he used.
‘What’s happened to Richard?’ she asked.
‘Huh?’
‘Richard? I just saw him. He was … I guess he was struggling, or … or really angry, maybe? And there were some guys holding him down and then they sedated him.’
‘What? Look, I don’t know anything about that and we don’t have much time – I like you, right? And I feel kinda responsible for you being here because I approved your form.’
Her brain had snagged on him saying he liked her. In school, when she’d been a teenager, you went to the boiler room to make out, appearing ten minutes later looking a bit flushed, adjusting your jumper. She was suddenly fifteen again, too close in the dark with a boy, feeling like her hands and feet and lips and, well, everything about her was just too big, too clumsy, too awkward.
She moved her foot and it hit something in the dark, a something that clattered noisily to the floor.
They both froze.
Rory put his hand on her shoulder and she could just about see that he had put his finger to his lips.
They waited.
Nobody burst in demanding to know why two grown people were hiding in a broom closet.
Rory’s shoulders relaxed. ‘I thought it was just a sleep trial.’
He’d moved his hand from her shoulder but had now started gripping the tops of both her arms, like she might run away from him before he could finish.
‘What do you mean? It is a sleep trial …’
He shoved his face closer to her, his beard tickling her chin.
‘I … heard some stuff … from the other technicians. There’s something else going on. The data we’re collecting from you, how you sleep, when you dream, what you dream, all of that is being uploaded to another server. I don’t know where. And they’re really interested in REM sleep. Incredibly interested. Phase One and Two are just a cover; it’s Phase Three that is important and it’s something to do with your dreams. I don’t know what. They told you that you could be your best you, right, in Phase Three? That they’d fix you. Smoking, lose weight, whatever. Well that’s just a lie. I’ve heard them talk. They don’t care about fixing you. There’s something else they want.’
It was a lot for Thea to take in, in the dark, with her leg pressed up against a vacuum cleaner.
‘That might be down to me,’ Thea had to admit.
‘Huh?’ Rory’s grip tightened.
‘Delores offered me a deal. Apparently, I’m one of a really small percentage of people who can function on a small amount of sleep. Like two or three hours. For long periods of time. She wants to pay me thousands of pounds to see if they can make me completely sleepless.’
Rory exhaled so sharply it sounded like he’d been punched in the stomach. ‘Don’t do it.’
‘I was—’
‘Just don’t! Don’t fuck about with REM sleep. That’s your fucking brain! Are you crazy?’
He actually shook her a little, an angry parent telling off their child.
‘I wasn’t going to!’ she hissed. ‘I’ve told Delores that I’m leaving as soon as I can. With Rosie.’
‘Good. That’s good.’ He nodded to himself.
Thea flailed about a little in the dark but managed to grasp his arm and took it in what she hoped was a reassuring manner. ‘They’re going to search the monastery. I’m going with them.’
For a moment there was just the dark and the sound of breathing. Thea felt Rory’s warm hand cover hers and the heat went all the way to her face, but in the gloom there was no way Rory could have seen that.
‘You do believe me, don’t you?’
Rory’s voice, when he spoke, was gruff. ‘Yeah, I believe you. So be careful, okay?’
Chapter 22
There were monasteries that were flouncy, adorned debutantes, showing off on the ballroom floor with their spiderweb arches, delicate carvings and high curved windows. This monastery was one of the grim-faced old chaperones stuck in the corner, sucking its teeth at the frivolity before it.
The entrance was a simple gothic arch of stone with a thick oak double door.
‘We’ll do a sweep of the ground floor first.’ The chief of the security team was called Len, a no-nonsense, stocky man in his fifties. He had been unfailingly polite, but Thea got the distinct impression that he thought this was as much a waste of time as Harriet did. ‘Best to stay with me. The floors in these old places can be lethal.’
The sky had started to darken and bruise, turning a Hallowe’en green at the skyline as fresh snow built up.
‘We’ll have to make this quick,’ Len had said. ‘We don’t want to be caught in that.’
Based on what Thea had told them, they had decided to skip the main nave and chapel and head towards the two-storeyed living quarters, where the windows looked out over the path the three of them had taken about a week ago.
‘They could be long gone now,’ Ethan muttered to her.
Thea was glad she’d pushed for him to accompany them. It had been a last-minute idea, one she had been surprised to find had been allowed.
‘Really? He can come too?’ she had said to Harriet.
‘I pulled some strings,’ Harriet had replied, pushing her glasses higher up her nose. ‘And Rory, your sleep technician, he put in a good word. In my opinion, if it gets this foolishness sorted out quickly, you can take the whole Centre with you.’
Despite it being mid-morning, the inside of the monastery was a wet cold that, when breathed in, would grow like mould on the bones and stiffen the fingers.
‘Mind your step, miss.’ Len helped Thea over a pile of fallen rubble.
Her mind was still stuck in what she had seen yesterday in the hospital room: tortoise-Richard and his rage, that wild-eyed glare as he had struggled and then the realization at the end when he’d locked gazes with her. What had happened? What had the trial done to him?
They hurried through the echoing main nave and Thea only caught a glimpse of empty pews, broken glass and a ceiling so high it was lost in the gloom. Once, in this place, people had lit candles and prayed. There had been warmth and devotion; but also in this place there had been abuse and unhappiness: dark corners whe
re darker things could be hidden.
They moved on.
The monks’ living quarters resembled an abandoned council office. The monastery had been active until the late 1980s and so the living quarters hadn’t been able to escape a safety door and carpet tile renovation. A corridor stretched out before them with doors on the one side leading to each monk’s room. Next to Thea was an old noticeboard, the sort that was covered by sliding Perspex that locked with a key. There was a lone notice left, reminding everyone of the fire evacuation route and a cluster of pins huddled in one corner, ready and waiting to never be used again. A fluorescent strip light hung at a drunken angle just above their heads.
As the security team went first, opening doors and flashing torchlight around, Ethan and Thea followed.
‘How’s Rosie?’ Ethan asked.
The carpet squelched under Thea’s feet and, when she touched it, the plaster on the wall felt springy and alive.
‘They say she’s doing well. There doesn’t seem to be any damage to her brain, at least, and her other injuries are healing.’
Still the machine beeped, still Rosie had not moved.
‘So? What’s Phase Two like?’ Thea whispered to Ethan.
‘Well, it’s like … sleep.’ He peered in through an open door. ‘I slept for the whole night. No nightmares, nothing. There was some wave music stuff at the start, or whales, or something.’
Thea stared into one of the rooms. A plant grew in through the window, its narrow leaves like fingers reaching up. The bed was still there but the slats were broken and jagged and black mould darkened the walls. It was a bare, miserable box. Maybe the monk who had lived here had been jolly and well-liked, maybe he’d told jokes to the other monks and believed in a just and fair God. Maybe, though, he had been cruel and twisted out of shape, maddened by the silence, thinking a loving God would forgive him no matter what he did.
Thea couldn’t get the tremor out of her voice: ‘Ethan, I didn’t sleep. Again. And I don’t feel terrible for it; in fact, I feel fine.’ She paused. ‘I can’t help thinking how Delores could just start testing on me whether I said I was leaving or not.’
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