If She Wakes

by Michael Koryta

  “You think I don’t know that? I already called her. The sister is a law-school student but apparently believes she’s already passed the bar and been appointed district attorney. I’m glad it’s you and not me who gets the treat of meeting her in person.”

  “I’m not wasting a day in Boston just to explain what I’m doing.”

  “Like hell you’re not. Billable hours! Abby, do you have any idea how much I can soak that college for? If the family wants to see you at the hospital, you go to the friggin’ hospital. You can show her the phones. That won’t be a waste of time. And you can take the Challenger!”

  His enthusiasm made Abby close her eyes. “I’m good with the Chrysler, thanks.”

  “Aw, c’mon, Abs.” Sorrowful now. “I bought the damned thing.”

  “Nobody told you to.”

  “Just drive it, would you? Get a taste again. See what it does for you.”

  “I’ll think about it,” Abby said, and then she hung up.

  What Hank wanted her driving was a Dodge Challenger Hellcat with 707 horsepower growling under a black-on-red hood. He’d bought it for well under value after it was repossessed by a friend of his who sold cars in New Hampshire. Because Hank still believed Abby craved speed, he’d purchased the Challenger and offered it to her as a temporary “company car.”

  It could do zero to sixty in under four seconds, was outfitted with Pirelli racing tires, and was generally everything one could want in a modern American muscle car.

  Abby hadn’t had it over sixty miles an hour yet.

  On a couple of occasions, Abby pretended that she’d put the car through its paces on the back roads and been duly impressed. One part of that wasn’t a lie—she did keep it on the back roads. That was because she could avoid the anxiety of driving in traffic and at higher speeds, though, not so she could test those beautiful Pirellis on a double-S curve.

  Hank wasn’t wrong. Abby should have been driving it. Exposure therapy. Stare the fear down, in small doses.

  Soon, she told herself.

  Any day now.

  She pocketed the phone and walked toward her Chrysler 300, a pleasant if somewhat staid sedan. Nothing threatening about it. Not like the Challenger Hellcat.

  As she crossed the road, her right ankle throbbed, a souvenir from an early crack-up at the Oxford Plains Speedway in western Maine. She looked down and watched the way her hiking shoes flexed across the top as she walked sideways across the steep slope. The leather uppers pulled right, toward the river, while the rubber soles fought them and tugged left, biting into the pavement.

  It would have rolled, she thought. That van would have rolled.

  9

  When she was a child, Tara was terrified of a house at the end of the road: 1804 London Street. It was a once-grand Victorian built by a family who’d made a small fortune in the days when Cleveland had been a manufacturing boomtown, money later tied up in a bitter feud among the siblings who’d inherited it upon their mother’s death. When Tara first saw the house, it had been vacant for at least ten years, the beautiful wood trim rotting beneath peeling paint, the stonework around the gardens and the patio lost to weeds and untamed hedges. For the older kids in the neighborhood, it inspired ghost stories and fevered claims of a woman in white who appeared in the attic window. They would run onto the porch and knock on the door, just like the children in Tara’s favorite book, To Kill a Mockingbird, and it was probably this association that gave her the bravery to finally join in the fun.

  Boo Radley’s home had held no terrors. Boo was simply misunderstood, and because all Tara wanted to do in life was be Scout Finch and because she liked to imagine her late father had been like Atticus Finch, she carried out a summer of replication, leaving notes and small treasures tucked in trees and under eaves on the property. However, because this was not a fictional southern town in the 1930s but a Cleveland suburb in the early 2000s, her notes were not replaced with intricate handmade delights. Instead, someone who saw her leaving the notes responded by filling her favorite hidey-hole with condom wrappers.

  She stopped trying to re-create her Scout-and-Boo fantasy after that.

  But still, she didn’t fear the house as she once had. That was the power of imagination, the power of the mind—she’d taken ownership of the place, trading scary stories for warm ones, and with her fantasy vision, she erased the fear. The kids who mocked her might be able to replace her charm bracelets with condom wrappers, but they couldn’t replace her new vision of the once-frightening abandoned house.

  In her thirteenth summer, she used that power of imagination to win twenty dollars. That summer, when Mom was doing better and Shannon was distracted by the acquisition of her driver’s license, a neighborhood boy named Jaylen dared Tara to go into the house alone and appear in a window on each floor, including the turret window of the supposed woman in white. If she did, he said, he’d give her twenty dollars and something she pretended she wanted nothing to do with: a kiss.

  “Just the money, creep,” she’d told him, but he was tall and handsome and had impossibly beautiful brown eyes and played on the basketball team, and, highly appealing to Tara, he told the most creative of the dumb scary stories about 1804 London Street. He was also black, and to Tara this seemed both exotic and undeniably Scout Finch–approved. If there was anything not to like about Jaylen, Tara hadn’t yet discovered it.

  He’d forced the front door open with a screwdriver, and then they’d both run away, sure there was an alarm, and hid behind a tree up the street. A few minutes went by and nothing happened, but he told her to wait awhile longer.

  “It’s probably a silent alarm, like they have in banks,” Jaylen said, and Tara found that very wise.

  No police came, though, and eventually Jaylen decided that the silent alarm must have been deactivated, probably because they weren’t paying the bill, just like nobody paid to keep the lawn mowed. The house was fair game, and the dare was still on.

  “You don’t have to,” he said when they reached the porch. His voice was soft and serious, and Tara realized that now that it had progressed from talk to possibility, he thought it was a bad idea and wanted out, the classic game of chicken that had gone too far. Facing the cracked porch steps and the tall weeds and the filthy windows with crude phrases written in the dust, Tara felt a surge of fear rise up, but she fought it down. She was Scout Finch, after all, and she could not only play with the boys but beat them at their own games. And take their money.

  And, maybe, get a kiss.

  “I’ll wave to you from the windows,” she said, and she pushed through the door and into the musty foyer. Stairs rose to the left, ascending into shadows, and in front of her a wide hallway led to what had to be the living room. To the right was a formal parlor or sitting room, old-fashioned chairs positioned around a china hutch that was filled with blue-and-white dishes and crystal glasses. In the center of the room was a puddle, and above it the ceiling sagged around a massive water stain.

  The floorboards creaked like trees in a windstorm, but they held, and she reached the first window, looked outside, and saw Jaylen staring apprehensively up at the house. He appeared gravely concerned, more scared than Tara, and this gave her confidence. She grinned at him and waved. Relieved, he waved back, and then hollered that she could come out.

  “You don’t need to do ’em all! You win! Come back out!”

  He wants that kiss, she thought.

  Her confidence grew, and she shouted back that she was going to do them all, and then she walked confidently to the stairs.

  The problem was the lack of light. A lot of the windows were shuttered and those that weren’t were covered with years of filth, so only the dimmest light filtered in, and since she didn’t know the house, each step into the darkness was a journey into unfamiliar territory. That built confusion, and confusion fed fear.

  She was no longer smiling when she reached the second-floor window, and if Jaylen had yelled at her to come down again, she might ha
ve listened. But by now he seemed resigned to her determination not to quit, so he just waved back, silent and seeming very far away.

  It took her some time to find the turret window. She was moving too fast, and she took wrong turns, and with each wrong turn, she felt her panic escalate. She was breathing raggedly and she was sweating even though it was cool in the house, and there was a terrible smell coming from behind one of the closed doors, and it took all of her imagination and willpower to fend off the images of a rotting corpse. She stopped, took a deep breath, and said, “Pass the damn ham, please,” a Scout Finch quote that delighted her endlessly, particularly when she used it in situations where it made no sense to anyone else.

  The line was a reminder of the power of imagination. There was no ghost in 1804 London Street, nothing worse in here than the lingering smell of old cigar smoke, which Tara hated because it reminded her of Mom’s cigarette days. The house was as harmless as Boo Radley’s home in Maycomb, Alabama, and she was as brave as Scout Finch.

  She walked on down the hall through the darkness. When she finally found the turret window, she saw Jaylen pacing the yard nervously, and she had to rap on the glass with her knuckles to get his attention.

  This time, instead of waving at her, he beckoned urgently, the message clear: Get out of there!

  She was ready to go. More than ready; she’d held the panic off for as long as she could, but now the dark and the smells and all those images of what might lurk behind each closed door were piling up, gleefully crowding the space in her mind, a race to see which one would break her.

  She was concentrating on staying calm and watching where she put her feet, sure that there would be rusty nails or a piece of broken glass or an ax matted with hair and blood—Stop that, Tara, stop that!—and in the intensity of her focus, she completely overshot the main staircase and found herself on an unfamiliar one, tighter and steeper.

  For a second, she hesitated, considering going back. Then her hand brushed a cobweb and that made her give a little cry and a jerk, and the steps creaked ominously underfoot, and now she was running, but she ran down, following instinct—the front door was below her, so down was the right direction.

  She’d never been in a house with two staircases, and so the idea that it might not lead to the same place as the main stairs never occurred to her. Even when she reached a landing and the staircase bent in an unexpected direction, she trusted it. She had to go down to get out, and down she went, rushing and gasping for breath and feeling her way along the wall with her hand because it was nearly full dark here, and she couldn’t see anything beyond the next step.

  When she arrived in the cold room that smelled of damp stone, she realized her mistake. She’d bypassed everything and gone straight from the third floor to the cellar. Something rustled in the darkness to her right, and she scampered away and smacked into the wall, then ran right into a cobweb. She screamed, tearing at the sticky threads with both hands. She was no longer Scout Finch; she was Tara Beckley, known as Twitch to her sister, and she was earning the nickname now.

  She backed up; her foot skidded on something wet and slick, and then the rustling sound came again, and she whirled and shouted.

  That was when she saw daylight.

  There was only a faint line of it—it looked as if someone had drawn it with yellow chalk on the dark stone wall—but it was there. She stared at it, gasping and crying, and thought about her options. She could run back the way she’d come and hope to find her way out, or she could cross the darkness and trust that light, however faint.

  She trusted the light.

  She fell twice crossing the cellar, banging her shin painfully into something hard and metal and then scraping her forearm on a rusted pipe that seemed to be a floor support, but she made it to the other side, and there she saw that the daylight was no illusion. There was a door here. Two of them, actually, heavy steel doors that might once have met squarely in the center but no longer did, offering just enough of a gap to let the light filter through.

  She found the handles and pushed, then pulled. Rust flaked off and bit into her palms, and the doors grated over the rough concrete floor, a menacing, grinding sound like the time Shannon had broken the garbage disposal by filling it with Mom’s pill bottles. Her hands ached and her shoulders throbbed, but the space between the doors widened slightly, more daylight flooded in, and she felt warm air on her face, and though there was no way she could slip through and escape, she thought the gap was wide enough that she might at least be heard.

  She put her face close to the door and shouted for Jaylen over and over.

  No one came. She could hear birds and the faint sound of a passing car, but no one answered her.

  I’m trapped, she thought. I will be here forever, somehow I found a staircase that no one else will find, they can search the whole house but they will never find me because the staircase won’t be there, it was a trap, and I—

  “Damn it, Tara, what the hell were you thinking?”

  Her sister’s voice came through the doors. Then Shannon’s face was in the two-inch gap Tara had opened between the monstrous old doors, and she was staring at Tara with anger and concern.

  “Are you okay?” Shannon said. “Are you hurt?”

  Tara sniffled out that no, she wasn’t hurt, and yes, she was probably okay, she was just scared and she wanted out.

  “I’ll get you out,” Shannon said. “Let me get your dumb boyfriend. I think he’s scared of me.”

  With the help of an aluminum baseball bat, Jaylen and Shannon were able to pry the doors far enough apart for Tara to wedge herself through and back to freedom. She was covered in cobwebs and dirt and her shin and arm were bleeding, but she was safe again.

  Shannon hauled her home, lecturing her the whole way; Jaylen said good-bye and started to offer Tara a whispered apology but Shannon shot him a look, which accelerated his exit. Once the sisters got back, Shannon told their mother that the car was making a weird noise, which drew her out of the house and into the driveway and let Tara sneak in the back and get herself cleaned up before Mom saw any evidence of her bloody adventure. When she got off the pills, Mom always wanted to play the good-mother role, but by then Shannon had claimed it. Discipline was handled by big sister, period. The same with protection.

  Apparently, Shannon thought the scare had been enough for Tara, because she let it drop after extracting a promise from her: never again would she enter that house.

  Two days later, Jaylen approached Tara cautiously in the yard, glanced left and right, then said, “Your sister isn’t here, is she?” When Shannon’s absence was confirmed, Tara finally got the twenty dollars and the kiss. A few of the latter, in fact. It turned into a good summer, one of the better ones of Tara’s childhood, and she kept her promise to Shannon. She’d never entered 1804 London Street again.

  Until now.

  She was locked in again, and she didn’t know the way out, and all around her was fear and shadow. She was on the dark staircase that she hadn’t anticipated, hadn’t even known existed, and this time she didn’t have the option of turning around and going back the way she’d come.

  Propped up in her hospital bed, tubes running up her nose and down her throat, machines humming at her side, and her family sitting around her with no idea where she was, Tara realized that her worst fear from the cellar of 1804 had come true. She was trapped, and they would never find her.

  This time, there was no thin line of light for her to chase through the blackness.

  10

  The neurologist’s name was Dr. Pine. His house in Marblehead was everything a prestigious New England doctor’s home should be—three stories painted an appropriately coastal gray-blue with gleaming white trim and plenty of windows, exquisite brickwork on the driveway and sidewalks, massive brass light fixtures styled to look like old gas lamps. Lisa Boone waited an hour before he finally arrived, pulling up to the house in an equally appropriate Range Rover. He parked in the garage and put
the overhead door down behind him, so Boone walked up the brick path that ran to the door on the side of the garage and waited for him to emerge. When he saw her, he stopped short, startled, and took a step back before determining that she posed no threat—an attractive white woman, thank goodness, no danger here.

  “May I help you?” he said. His voice was deeper than his stature would suggest.

  “Probably not,” Boone said, “but I have to try.”

  “Pardon?”

  “You have a patient named Tara Beckley. I need to speak with you about her.”

  He frowned and studied her, wary now.

  “I can’t talk about my patients,” he said, “and I’m curious why you’re at my home.”

  “Because the United States government needs you to understand that your patient might have been a casualty of—and, if she lives, potentially a witness to—an execution killing.”

  His jaw didn’t quite drop. His mouth parted and then closed. He took a breath, then gave a little shake of his head and a half laugh. “I expect to encounter new things every day,” he said, “but this one is really something. What branch of the U.S. government needs me to understand this?”

  “May we go inside, Doctor?”

  “What branch?”

  “Department of Energy.” She smiled. “Surprised you twice, didn’t I?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Come on in.”

  She followed him up the back steps and into a kitchen with thick wooden counters and a massive center island. He pulled a stool up to the island, offered one to her, then unbuttoned his cuffs and rolled up his shirtsleeves slowly and precisely. He seemed to be moving methodically to gather his thoughts, and Boone was pleased by his demeanor. She’d expected a flood of questions, but what she needed was someone who could listen.