The Hawley Book of the Dead

by Chrysler Szarlan

  “Can you think of better camouflage? There’s an opening. It’s hard to see, but at the same time, you could drive a truck through it. You’ll find it. I’ll be here when you come out. You won’t have to wait long. They do most of their work at night, just like Leon told me. I was up here last night and from Eve’s stall window, I could see them. They come and go till sunrise. It should be fine, with you disappeared and all.”

  I prayed it would be fine. I couldn’t back out now. “What exactly am I looking for?”

  “We don’t know. Not really. Anything that might be a clue to what happens down there, what they’re working on.”

  I sucked in a breath. “All right. Here goes.” I started toward the manure pile. Before I turned the corner, I glanced back. I could see Maggie petting Eve’s nose. I knew that she could no longer see me. No one could.

  When I got to the lower level of the barn, I stepped under a low tree limb, and there it was. A wide opening beneath the barn, hidden by trees and the manure pile. I ducked into it. There was no light at all, so I felt my way along a cement wall. The wall went down and kept going down. Soon enough, the entrance was just a moonlit gap as big as my fist. I crept slowly, and in another minute felt the wire mesh of a gate. I pressed against the wall and waited.

  It seemed like forever. I slid down the damp wall, rested my elbows on my knees and tried to be patient. I hoped no one would come. I hoped it was all made up, only another one of the many legends that flourished around campus, only another tall tale. Just as I was drifting into a doze, I saw the pinpoint of a flashlight at the tunnel entrance. I jerked to my feet. The light danced and bobbed, and a man walked up to the gate. He shone the flashlight at a panel, swiped a card, the gate opened, and he went through. I stepped behind him, my heart thudding, glad I’d worn my Adidas, like silence on my feet. The man paused just inside the gate, looked around. I was only inches from him. He could have stepped on me. But people trust their eyes more than their other senses, and he saw nothing when he swung the flashlight beam. So he went on, with me padding softly after him.

  Only a dozen steps and he came to a door with another panel, where he swiped his card again. When the door opened, a blaze of light hit me. Blinded, I almost didn’t make it in, but I managed to squeeze through as the door swung shut. The man continued down a hallway lined with windows. People sat at desks and typed, or drank coffee, or were busy looking through file drawers. Maggie was right: It was just like the administration buildings aboveground. Everyone was dressed casually, in jeans and sweaters. I didn’t see any lab coats.

  I decided to keep following my guy. He’d taken off a trench coat, draped it over one arm, and I could see that, unlike the others, he was wearing a suit. Maybe he was more senior, would go deeper into the labyrinth. He strode down another hallway, then into an office that was identical to all the others I’d seen. Another suited man was there. He was sitting at a desk but had his feet up, reading a Tom Clancy paperback. He only gave a lazy wave when my guy entered. I hung in the doorway and listened.

  “Hey, Lupo. What’s goin’ down?”

  My guy, Lupo, answered, “Dunno, Andy. Another quiet night with the lab rats?”

  “Yeah. Guess so.”

  “Boss been in?”

  “Yeah. He’s somewhere. In some big-shot meeting.” Andy rose from his chair, cracked his knuckles, yawned. “S’pose I’ll head out. Busy day tomorrow.”

  “You back here?”

  “Nah, detail in town the next few days. Glad to be done with the graveyard shift for a while. Boring as hell. And it gives me the heebie-jeebies. I’d rather be tailing the kids. Who the hell knows what they’re doing down here? Could blow us all up.”

  “Yeah. You never know,” Lupo agreed. “Me, I’m happy not knowing. Your problem is you read too much. Those books put ideas in your head.”

  “Maybe you’re right.” Andy stuck the book in a drawer, hitched up his pants, and saluted Lupo, who planted himself in the chair, took up a file from the desktop.

  “Anything else in the hopper?”

  “Same old.” Andy smoothed his rumpled jacket. Then he lifted something out of the desk drawer. “Good one,” he told Lupo as he snicked the gun into a holster under his arm.

  “Yeah. You, too.”

  I stepped aside for Andy and took a shaky breath, concentrating hard on staying unseen. The gun made me break out in a sweat. The guys in the suits must be FBI. Or something. The men in black, Maggie had called them. Whoever they were, getting shot was not on my agenda. But I hadn’t really found anything out, except that these guys were serious about whatever secrets they were protecting, even if they had no idea what the secrets were. Figuring I’d get nowhere hanging around Lupo at his desk, I walked to the end of the hall, turned a corner, and went back to the area where the non-suits were working. I hoped they didn’t have guns.

  I wandered around gaping at all the desk jockeys. I tried to read their work over their shoulders, but what I read didn’t make any sense to me, only graphs and numbers.

  Then I saw the flash of a lab coat. I followed the coat to another hallway. The lab coat was worn by an older woman with graying hair in a ponytail that swung as she walked. She was heading for a green door that said LEVEL 6 CLEARANCE. I caught right up to her, so close I could hear her rubber-soled shoes squelch softly on the linoleum floor. She swiped her card; I whisked in after her.

  It was like another world behind that door, although I still can’t describe what I saw there with any precision. The room was vast. It seemed as if there was no end to it. There were more men and women in lab coats, working at stations with microscopes and petri dishes. There were big tanks and vats filled with who knew what. Wires and pipes ran every which way above and around me. Compressors thunked and whooshed. I slunk around for a while, watching one scientist and then another work. But I realized soon enough that even if I watched and listened all night I hadn’t the knowledge to interpret what was happening. All I really knew was that something big was going on. At that moment, though, I was more bored than frightened. Maybe I was just too young to understand the potential consequences of what I was seeing, and the corresponding price I would pay if I were caught spying.

  Eventually I decided I’d had enough for one night, and was heading for the door to wait for the next opening, when my eye caught movement in a recessed corner. Two scientists—a man and a woman—were standing before a glass wall, looking into a small room. One held something like a television remote. I looked in. The narrow room was even more brightly lit than the lab. It held only a chair, with a man sitting in it. The chair was made of wooden four-by-fours, dwarfing the man, who seemed caught in the web of rubber tubing he was struggling against. His bare arms and legs were bound with it, and the skin that showed looked red and raw from his struggles to free himself. He was leaping and jerking, as far as the tubing would allow.

  A scream burned in my throat but I choked it back. I stood frozen, as captive as the man I couldn’t drag my eyes from. His face was covered with a black cloth, but I could see the metal cap on his head, and the singed white hair and scorch marks on his scalp. The black cloth across his face moved like a curtain in a powerful wind, sucked into the hole that must have been his mouth, then blown out again by what could only be screams. But there was no sound outside the glass window. That was almost the worst of it. The soundless screams of the electrified man, who seemed unable to get away, even by dying. Minutes must have ticked by, while the scientist with the remote pushed the button for more electric current, and still the man did not die. Just screamed and screamed in that awful silent way.

  Then one of the scientists turned suddenly and walked right into me—walked into my disappeared self. She fell on the floor at my feet. Somehow I had the sense not to reach to help her up, but I must have lost control and reappeared for an instant.

  She saw me and screamed. Like I was worse than the frightful experiment being conducted in that glass room.

  “Dr. Harmon
? Are you okay?” Men and women in white coats swirled around me while I concentrated on disappearing again, and staying that way.

  “She … she … There’s a girl!” Dr. Harmon pointed to where I’d been, but I was invisible again. I tried to calm my ragged breathing while I waited for someone to open the door so I could slip out, escape.

  “Call Security! Call the boss! There’s a student in here!”

  “Where?”

  “I saw her, too!” another white coat called. “She has to be here somewhere.”

  Drumming feet sounded outside the door, and then pounding. One of the scientists had the presence of mind to swipe his key card to open the door. I rushed out into a cluster of men wearing suits, Lupo and three or four others. Men with guns. I slammed into one with the full force of my weight before I could stop. I caromed off him and ran, but then he was after me. I had no idea whether I was disappeared or not—I was too frightened. I looked back, and his eyes bored into me. Bluest of eyes, ice blue. A big man, but graceful. He leapt, and caught me. Panicked, I fought like a fish on a hook, and like a hooked fish would have stayed caught, but Lupo tripped and fell into the man with the ice eyes, toppling him. I felt his hands on me slipping. I gave one heave and I was away, running as hard as I could, safe in my invisibility again.

  I ran, didn’t look back until I was past Lupo’s office, at the door to the outside. There were alarms going off, people running everywhere, but I pressed myself against the wall and waited, focused on quieting my hammering heart. What had I gotten myself into? I stayed frozen, terrified to risk another run-in. There must have been a lockdown. No one came near the door for more than an hour. It was hard to stay invisible all that time, and to keep from going further into that parallel world I always sensed floating near me whenever I disappeared. I was afraid of being found out, but I was more fearful of the absolute cipher that world held. So I kept it up, balancing just out of sight. It was well after midnight when a whistling office worker finally keyed the door, and I tore out.

  When I reached the barn, breathless, Maggie sprang to her feet. “Where the hell were—”

  I clamped my hand over her mouth. “Shhh! Don’t talk! Come on!”

  I made her run all the way back to her apartment. She brewed tea that I gulped down, not minding that it scalded me. I told her all of it—the offices, the lab, the men with guns. And the horrible man in the chair, whose face I never saw. Who I might identify by only one thing. The tattoo of a thick blue snake winding around his wrist and up his arm. From that day on, for years after, that blue snake would twist through my dreams, a recurring nightmare.

  “Shit,” Maggie whispered when I was done telling, slumped with fatigue and the aftereffects of terror. “What are we going to do now?”

  I had no answer for her.

  About a month later, just before the summer, I felt something alter in Maggie. She changed in some indefinable way. We didn’t see each other much, only met off campus, away from Amherst, and she didn’t seem to be as present when we did. Her eyes were constantly shifting, as if she were looking for someone. She got quiet and moody. Then one morning, she called me in a panic.

  “Reve, you’ve got to come. You’ve got to get me out of here!”

  I heard traffic noises through the phone. “Where are you? What’s wrong?”

  “I’m at the Sunoco station on Pleasant. But I can’t stay here.”

  “What happened? Maggie—”

  “Please, Reve, just come. I’ll wait for you at Classé. If I’m not there, I’ll be outside Barsies. If I’m not there … I don’t know.” Her voice was edgy, pleading. That, more than anything, terrified me.

  “I’ll come right now.”

  “Borrow someone else’s car. Is Lisa on campus? Take hers.”

  “But—”

  “Reve, damn it, just do it! Please. Really, don’t take your truck, or your parents’ car.”

  Her panic was contagious, compelling. “Wait for me,” I said.

  I screeched up to Classé Café, leapt out of Lisa’s monster Impala, and tripped. A man in a white shirt with a camera around his neck caught me.

  “Whoa, there. Where you going so fast?” One of the FBI guys, I was sure. Maybe he’d even been in the tunnels. I had kept away from Amherst since that night—was scared stiff I’d be recognized, although I still thought the only one who’d gotten a good clear look at me was the man with the ice eyes, and this was not him.

  I pulled away, said, “Thanks” over my shoulder, and ran into the crowded café. Maggie was nowhere to be seen. I checked the bathroom, then ran back to the car. Camera man was gone.

  I drove to Barselotti’s. Just as I pulled up to the curb, Maggie threw the door open, jumped in, and snapped, “Drive, just drive, until I figure this out.”

  “Mom said to bring you home.”

  “No. Not there. They can’t find out where you live.”

  “Shit. What happened?”

  “I’ll tell you everything, Reve. I promise. Just drive around. Drive somewhere there’s traffic.”

  I took Route 9 toward Northampton. We drove past the malls and the bucolic farms, and Maggie told her story.

  “Right after you went down in the tunnels, I started feeling like someone was following me. I didn’t tell you, I didn’t want to scare you. I don’t know, at first I thought it was just me being paranoid. But I was nervous about them, FBI, DOD, whoever they are. Eli’s Freedom of Information Act files were broken into last month. Then stuff started happening to me.”

  “What kind of stuff?” My mouth was dry. I felt feverish. Maybe I was entrenched in a nightmare, unable to wake up.

  “First, I started thinking … no, knowing, I was being followed. Then I was in the Campus Center, writing in my journal. I left it on the chair and went to get some water from the fountain, which was, like, three feet away. When I went back, it was gone.”

  “Are you sure it didn’t just fall?”

  “Unless it fell into some black hole, yeah, I’m sure. I looked all around for it. And if somebody wanted to steal something, my whole backpack was right there, with my wallet and everything. I swear my back was turned for all of five seconds.”

  I took a deep breath, tried to be rational, tried to stop my hands from trembling on the steering wheel. “Okay, so what if somebody did take it? Maybe some hoser just needed paper.”

  “That’s not the only thing. Last night I went to the gym. When I got back my apartment was torn up. I’m scared, Reve. You should be scared.”

  I almost slammed into the car in front of me. “Oh, shit! Did you write anything about the underground lab?”

  “That’s the weird part. There was nothing much in the journal. Just stuff about my little life. Classes and parties and rallies. You know. I would never put anything in writing about what you saw. Or that either of us were there at all.”

  “Maybe they were looking for information about other people. Maybe Eli.”

  “What do I know about him, more than anybody else? It’s not like he’s my boyfriend or anything. No, they’re suddenly all hot on me, for some reason. Maybe there was something in Eli’s files. I changed everybody’s names in my journal, too, just in case.”

  “What? Why? What made you do that, if you weren’t writing anything much? Were you writing in code, too?” It was all starting to seem too much like a James Bond movie.

  Maggie glared at me. “Stop the car. I’ll get out.”

  “Don’t be stupid!”

  I could feel her gaze burning my face. “All right. Turn around. Let’s go back.”

  “Why?”

  “Just go to the center of town and park this beast. There’s something you need to see.”

  We walked around the Amherst common, down Main Street. Every now and then, Maggie would give an almost imperceptible nod, whisper, “There.” I’d look and see a conservatively dressed man or woman, always alone. But they all had the same look, as if the emotion had been squeezed out, made them pale and nond
escript. I couldn’t ID one two minutes after I’d seen them, they looked so generic. And there were lots of them. They were like a swarm. Even after the tunnels, I had no idea there would be so many.

  “Maybe they had a sale on white shirts and dark ties at Sears.”

  Maggie laughed for the first time that day. I tried to keep it going. “Maybe they’re Mormons,” I suggested.

  “Well, that I could believe, except that lady over there has a camera and is taking pictures of us.” And there she was, less than ten feet away, a pinched woman with no-color hair holding a camera up to her face, pointing it at us. I whipped around to see if she could be taking a photo of something else. There was only the street, with blowing paper and telephone wires. A shiver of foreboding ran through me, chilling me on that warm day. I heard the shutter click and didn’t stop to think. I started walking toward the woman, but she turned and walked briskly away. “Ma’am?” I called. She walked faster. I ran. “Ma’am!” I called louder. She didn’t turn. When I caught her by a white sleeve, she had to face me. Her lips twitched, as if she was trying to remember how to smile. “Yes?”

  “You took a photo of me and my friend. Why?”

  She managed to push the corners of her lips further up her face. “Why would I do that, dear? I don’t know you.”

  “Then what did you photograph?”

  “I’ve been to the Emily Dickinson house. So interesting.”

  “I mean now, just a minute ago.”

  She shook her head. “I haven’t taken a photograph since I left the tour. I’m sorry, but you’re mistaken.”

  A jolt of terror rocked me. It took all the control I had not to disappear. Here I was, on a perfect spring day, in the middle of a public place I knew well, talking with a mild-looking woman who almost certainly had no intention of hurting me, at least in any physical way. But I felt my certainty about everything I thought I knew spiral away. Maybe she was right. Maybe I was crazy. I turned to Maggie for confirmation, but she was tying her sneaker, looking down so I couldn’t see her face. I turned back and the woman was gone. I looked up and down the street. The relief I felt made me dizzy.