by Leah Bobet
Inside stinks: dry air and sour and something that makes my nose tingle sharp. Hallways twist from a sweep of common area into the dark, and in front of us a great wood staircase crawls upward, beckoning and dirty, to two windows blocked up with boards.
This is what they saw, I tell myself to steady my feet as we tiptoe slow inside. This is what they saw when the Whitecoats brought them in. I gather up a split board from the floor, test its weight. Not a good brand — not wrapped and made ready — but dry. Dry enough to burn shadows out of our way home.
We creep through the entrance hall under a ceiling lofted high on beams solid like the roofs of train tunnels; solid in a way that tells you they were held and hammered in place back when they didn’t build things to fall down. Something stirs atop one, flutters —
I shout before I think.
There’s no chance to reach matches, call fire. Between one breath and the next, the beams are full of birds: pigeon-fat and startled, fleeing into the dark. Their wingbeats blur and crackle like a thousand trains hitting a thousand rails, echo loud enough to bring out tears.
“I thought it was shadows,” I whisper when Jack looks down at me, my nose still itchy and miserable, and this time his hand pats my shoulder and brushes away.
Whisper holds up a hand, wait, ready for anything, but nothing comes for us down the wide wood steps. The board snugs tight to my hand, sends splinter-roots deep between the lines of my palm, and the building sighs. Whisper lets out a slow, slow breath.
“We roust them out, then,” she says to herself, and tilts her head back to the eaves.
Her whisper is just a murmur at first, mumble-lipped, slow, but the great high ceiling captures it and takes it traveling: Come come my friends my lonely friends who held my hand my head —
Ghosts, I realize. She’s calling her ghosts to lead the way.
The tunnel-beams rustle: birds coming back in, creeping back to their safe-built nests. Come come down and bring me news I’ve missed you long and long. My hand aches; I shift the brand to the other, not as strong and not as sure, and wring the hurt one to shake off pain.
When she breaks off it’s like cold water to the skull.
“Whisper?” Jack says.
Whisper is pale in the bad, comforting light. “There’s no ghosts.”
The quiet gets deeper, falls different. What do you mean, no ghosts? I don’t ask.
“They wouldn’t go unless something went bad,” she says, hands in her skirts now, old-lady skirts that still look Freak even after her lecture about dressing clean and Passing good.
“They don’t … move on?” Jack asks.
“No.” She sounds small. Scared like a little girl and that’s enough to make me scared, because even when Atticus died and the shadows came into Safe, Whisper led us free without leaking fear into her step.
“We’ll walk careful then,” Jack says, and takes her by the hand. Whisper startles: It’s his naked hand, full of shocks and sparks. Even in the dim I can see his markings, the ends of latticed snowflake scars. “Up the stairs?”
Whisper’s hand closes around his. “No. Down,” she says, and circles the staircase, runs fingers over the walls until they close on a handle smudged and rusted the same color as the staircase. “They’ll nest down where it’s dark.”
Beyond the door it’s darker still. The building breathes out up plain grey stairs. Cold, and must. Abandoned things.
The smell of shadows.
No ghosts, I tell myself, a calming hand on my back and a thrill of terror both, and follow Jack and Whisper down the stairs.
At the bottom the bird-smell fades down into dust and death and earth, the smell of the Cold Pipes where nothing flows and nothing lives. The door clangs shut behind us and then the quiet is absolute, dust tickling at my ankles like monstrous, long-fingered hands.
“Teller,” Jack murmurs, “strike a match.”
My brand’s already down between my knees, my free hand on the sandpaper.
The tunnel shows grey under light; grey under the wash of fire that blinds me as it catches and flares. Light fixtures stretch long-legged along the narrow grey ceiling, low as any tunnel. One full wall is panes of glass, webbed with wire, dirty and empty and cracked. They reflect the light, reflect everything oily-bright.
“No shadows,” Jack says, near-disappointed, and keeps walking.
Clump clump clump go our steps on the hard grey concrete floor. Clump clump hiss the walls whisper back as we bunch together, moving fast, tied to the circle of light given out by my one quick-dying match. Jack’s sweating; gritted teeth and clenched-tight hands and a mumble that sounds awfully like a swear. “Faster,” he says, and we go on tunnel-blind, sweating through our Passing clothes, and let him hurry us up two steep flights of cold grey stairs.
We tumble out into a room torn up so long ago that the dust’s wrapped arms ’round the chaos, given it a warm blanket, and made it a home to settle down. It’s ripped mattresses, ripped wallpaper; everything ruined and tattered and bent. The smell of shadow-must is gone. The building’s silent as tunnels.
“They’re not here,” I whisper, then risk a noise, clear my throat. “Maybe they went out,” which just sticks me thinking of all the things shadows might do gone roaming.
“There’s been people here, though,” Jack says, and points down into the dust to a lighter dust, thin rips and darns in the blanket of the floor. Footprints. He’s winded, a puff of air hiding out behind every word. I lick my lips and don’t talk for a minute ’til the stitch in my belly stops complaining.
“Bea said it was a squat,” I say.
Jack knows what a squat is. And it’s nothing good, because he pulls a twisted metal bar from a pile of hospital beds heaped in a corner and hefts it in his gloved left hand. “I didn’t hear no one,” he murmurs, grave like Whisper to her absent ghosts.
We pass a glance between us. Dead, his eyes say. I shiver.
“Walk careful,” is all Jack says.
We walk careful.
We go through the washrooms, red-cracked-tiled with their green basins stained and scummed with sour water. We go through the dormitories; we know them by the stacks of beds, the ripped drawings hanging on the walls, fluttering by one good corner and bleached too naked to see. The offices Whisper ducks away from, veering to the far side of the plaster-dusted hallways so I have to veer with her or lose the line. She’s moving funny: hands opening and closing on her skirts like they’re looking for matches. She’s got no ghosts, I remember, and though I always knew she’s so little I grew past her by my eleventh birthday, I see her in reach and speed and strength now, how much she doesn’t have; how much she’s gone quiet and old.
“Where are we?” I ask her, voice pitched quiet as I can.
“Activity room,” she says, cold and choked-up. “They kept clay and crayons, and the clay never got fired into nothing, just mushed up and put back in the bin….”
I might have known it; there’s wax tucked in the cracks between floorboards, little smooth blobs that catch slanted bits of daylight far away. A half-burned stack of cards huddles in an ashy trash can in the corner, wrapped with dirty blankets and guarded by a solemn duty of bottles and cans. I squint, not wanting to put my face near the smell of fire though it’s months dead at the very least, and snatch a card out. It’s lined, hatched; filled with numbers. Charts, I remember Atticus mentioning. Charts where they kept your medication numbers, the measure of everything that made you Freak.
“Jack,” I call, and wave it careful between thumb and forefinger.
“Bingo,” Jack says, looking over my shoulder. I fish another out. “No, the game. They’re game cards.”
“Oh.” Its flakes cling against my skin even after I drop it. Ashy, and still damp. Unclean.
My foot catches in the blankets when I stand: They’re dirty, worn, old. Good for brands. “Watch my back,” I say, like it needs saying, and tear one apart into long, tattered strips. I knot them tight ’round the end of my
brand, layers worth, each so rotten the knots barely hold. The cloth won’t burn long, if it needs to burn, but it’ll burn truer than wood.
Jack turns when I’m done, hefts his crowbar thoughtful. “This smells wrong. The people-marks are too new.”
“What’re you thinking now?” Whisper says, harsh in a way that tells me without asking just whose idea it was to sneak into Lakeshore Psychiatric.
He jogs the bar hand to hand. “Where’s the hardest place to reach in here? Where’d they be able to defend best?”
“Isolation,” she says, suddenly fumbling.
Isolation.
Jack flashes me one of his dark-wise lightning looks, you better watch out, and takes Whisper by the elbow like an old-fashioned gentleman. He leans down to her ear like he’s asking to dance. “Come on. You show me where.”
The hallway to Isolation don’t have footprints. We make ’em as we shuffle forward in the dust, long smearing things to hide the size of our shoes. The windows are blown out all through, cracked and spattered somewhere in the browning grass below. The sunlight comes in dim and bloody.
Whisper puts her hand almost to a blue window frame, halfway between the steps and any room that’s got a door for opening. Her face is years and years away. “Where we climbed,” she says, fingers hovering. “We went out here. They moved General Population after that.” She chuckles, and there’s nothing funny in it.
I glance at it, passing by: two stories down to the ground, drowned in weeds. “How’d you land clean?”
“Ghosts caught us.” Her voice is muffled. I don’t look into the cracked glass for even a glimpse of her face.
Jack sticks with Whisper until we get to the double-metal door and stop. “Here,” she says, and draws her arm from Jack’s, shoves her hands in her pocketed skirt like she’s slow freezing. Ariel I’d comfort — and Ariel’s safe I remind myself firm to stop the sudden ache — but Whisper, like this, I’m scared to touch.
Jack studies the door, its double-thick glass window all seamed and spidered with cracks. “Keypad lock,” he says brief, and grins mean and tight. He taps his metal bar just so on the scuffed box beside the doorknob, and it shudders with sparks.
The door clicks open slow.
First we hear nothing. Not even wind. The walls are concrete, and the floor despite its cracked-up tiles and colors is concrete beneath, and an empty counter runs along the right side of the doorway into the dark that’s a hardship again now that my eyes are all ruined with sunlight. There aren’t no windows in Isolation.
The thick cell doors hang open at broken-neck angles, row upon row upon row.
I strike a match and nudge it between the twists and wrappings of my brand until it catches. When I hold it high, Isolation is grey too, and there’s no crayon-dust, no crushed-up cans, no ashes. Isolation is empty as a scoured pipe.
Jack pads forward to the nearest cell and pushes it open with one gloved fist. The room inside is smaller than my own little house, nothing but a bed stuck to the wall and a fancy metal bucket for a toilet, the edge of a wall for pacing. He squats down in the center, poking through mouse shit and nothings with the end of his wicked crowbar. “Keep going, Teller,” he says grim.
I move out to the second door. Toe it open with one foot.
The fourth cell still has a mattress, and I lift it away with my bouncing right shoe, checking careful for shadows like I’d do for bugs back home. Nothing ’gainst the wall, nothing behind the mattress —
Except when it moves, bleeding stuffing and smell, there’s a rustle beneath like pigeon wings.
I lean in careful, making sure it’s not the sound of something that’ll bite. Nudge the mattress off its shelf. Dead center, pressed like a flower between the stained old mattress and rusty springs, is a file.
It’s ripped and dark-stained and falling apart, nibbled at the edges by time and bad deeds. I ground the brand clumsy between two springs, open it careful and flip through. It’s notes and notes, written in a neat hand — Whitecoat hand — covering each side of the paper. I spread it on the mattress and press nose to paper to read.
Malignant osteosarcoma, it says. Phantom limb syndrome. Post-traumatic stress. Farther down: experimental treatment to halt rejection of prosthetic limb.
Whitecoat words. Words that twist. But I know enough to read the Tale they’re twisting. I know that Tale back and front, carved onto my good front door as well as my hands and my heart, because nobody else ever heard it told true and I repeated it every night before bed for a full month afterward to guard it ’gainst forgetting.
I gather the file up careful, touching the soft yellow paper only on the edges, where there’s no words for my sweaty fingertips to stain. Take it out into the ward.
There’s a flicker of something behind me; a change in the dark. I turn with my brand out, knees bent, ready, but the air lies flat, still.
Just the firelight moving, I tell myself, and walk in my own footprints back to Whisper.
She’s sitting slumped on the tall counter, her legs dangling loose like a kid’s. “Look at this,” I say, and she sits up. Her eyes are red and much too big, a trembling big that makes me want to look away. I hold the file out. Maybe she’s just teary from dust. Maybe it’s a sneeze.
Jack intercepts it with one thick hand, peeks over clumsy fingers at the worn-down paper beneath. It’s not a minute before he gives up on the bad light and the long Whitecoat words and passes it to Whisper. “Corner’s?”
“This ain’t Corner’s.” My hand’s shaking. The touch of the paper’s like a touch of stain; it stays on your skin long after you’ve put it down, stays your own trouble forever.
“No,” Whisper says, and the skin around her lips is a very sickly white. “It’s Atticus.”
That’s why we’re not ready when the shadows come.
Narasimha’s child, they don’t say. Nor: Teller, nor Matthew in their hiss-echo voices that mix and muddle ’round corners like a river ’round a silty block. They pour out of the cell I could have sworn was dead empty with hands outstretched, blacking out the floor tiles and smudging away the doors. By the time Whisper’s up on her feet they’re on top of us, wailing, snarling: Give him BACK —
“Fuck!” Jack spits, hoarse and furious, and for a second I’m back there again in the ruin of Sanctuary Night, legs and eyes burning as Jack calls out fire and the Pactbridge down. I put my brand high, in a fighter’s grip. “Keep back,” I hiss at the shadows, hands trembling. My heart beats like the stamp of shadow-feet, shaking my chest down to pieces.
They ran from me before, I tell myself for courage. They ran from my words and my fire.
But they’re nothing at all like running now: They hiss back at us, furious; send Whisper fleeing back through the hard double doors. And I can’t tell if it’s the light or if their chests are thicker, their necks rounder, their black teeth surer and less jaggedy broken. Don’t you don’t you touch touch touch — they rustle through creased lips, my fire lighting every line, and then they leap.
I’m ready for the first hit. I’m ready for the second, the thin-veined black fist swinging a breath from my belly while a wide-open mouth howls wild. But there’s a shadow in every corner niche wall cranny and there’s only goddamned one of me, and the third takes me right in the nose.
Light explodes behind my eyes. I stumble back, blink them clear, and I’ve barely time to bury my torch through the shadow’s too-fat chest before the pain in my nose turns to chill. It’s cold like my first night Above; cold that nearly burns. Shadow-touch, I think as the cold seeps down my cheekbones, my mouth. It tastes like fear and endless dragging time, a flicker of peas-medication-roast beef, and none of those are things I know, things I’ve ever had up against my tongue.
My brand falters. I open my mouth, close it. Lick my lips, numb.
“Give him back,” comes out of my mouth, weak and whispery, and the shadows all around me, about me, in me, raise their heads and howl their horrible grief.
I
drop the fire. I drop the fire and my hands go to my lips. The brand hits with a soft whump of dust rising.
“Teller!” Jack shouts, and scoops up the brand. He whirls it with his bad hand like a man gone berserk. “Back,” he orders, breathing like a furnace run hot too long. “Behind me, now!”
I scramble back, stumble ’til I’m through the double-metal doors into the hallway, where Whisper’s hugging the file to her chest like Ariel with her scuffed black book. My fingers bend stiff, strange, at the sight of it. They flex, and I swear I didn’t make them move.
I yank the other hand off my mouth fast, but it’s too late: The chill’s slipped into my hands from clamped-down lips. The chill moves my hands toward that creased brown paper, fills them with a terrible urge to grab: cardboard, paper, living flesh —
Oh no no no.
“Don’t touch him,” slips out, and this time I don’t mind it because I can’t talk for myself, can’t warn, and Whisper and Jack need to stay as far back from me as they can.
“Teller!” Whisper cries, big-eyed and short-armed and easy to snap in two. I snatch my hands away just before she takes them, shake my head as fast as I can.
“S’got my tongue,” I manage before the cold comes back in, wails give him back give him BACK through my own fumbling lips in a voice I halfway know and never wanted to. The cold roots in deeper, down my jaw, through my chin. I feel the first touch of shadow-fingers along my cold-scraped neck.
Oh god it’ll touch my heart.
I think about Ariel’s hands on my back, rough and numb through the scales under Bea’s old grey blanket. I’m glad she never saw this happen.
Whisper bats my hand away and puts rough little fingers on my lips, her eyes narrow and hard. “Come out coax out get free go clean —”
“Whis, back up —” Jack shouts from the doorway. The cold won’t let me turn my neck. It won’t let me see what’s happening to him.
“Come out I draw you out —” Whisper goes, and eye-glinting, puts her other hand on Atticus’s old browned-out file.
Something inside me moves. My throat twitches like a backward swallow.